First, thank you for writing the post so fully and readably—it is really impressive! And I wish you would go to do this, in whatever way you would decide upon. But even if I thought full well the setup was safe (which I do) and the results were exactly as intended, in the most useful and generally good way, I wouldn’t join.
Because I think that when people become parents, they suddenly find themselves in a world that is much more uncertain. You can’t reliably say that you will sleep through the night, for example, even when the kid mostly does. And this is already hard enough to get used to—I know from experience—and it is also hard to begin anew (though this might be less so for men.) Imagine having actually trained yourself to be 100% in control of what you do, or even letting other people know that you are such kind of person. It’s just not robust.
(I understand it is fraught—will try not to make it more so. The word ‘sociopath’ itself is OK by me, I might have not used it before in any context, so I probably ‘get’ fewer connotations than you do.)
I come from a circle of environmentalists, most of whom used to study in the same college. We gathered around a zoologist who had been passionate about it since childhood (now he ‘wears a suit for nature’ - coordinates surveys of rare biota, etc.); he was at first our formal leader and he taught us the legislature. A rare kind of man, who doesn’t give up and who wants to be friends with his helpers—to know them as people. I would say he’s a pure geek, and a very charismatic one at that. He invited us to share his hobby, but very few of us could match his sheer input. He used us—mostly to compose & mail letters, which sometimes took hours (and enough money to be a drag on a student’s pocket), but also for various odd jobs, and we went happily, because it served a purpose and doing it with him was a privilege.
...Our informal leader was another guy, who picked up the slack in botany, poaching prevention, protesting development of sites of local historical significance, learning from our elders in specific things (= organizing expeditions, workshops and such like), and keeping us working as a team—I look back on it, and can’t believe he did all of that while working two jobs and specializing in an unrelated discipline that required lots of fine-tuned practical knowledge. Ah yes, he also drew (not as a professional, but enough to illustrate some things.) We called him a tyrant (to his face), because he 1) believed in evolution over democracy—either you worked under him, or with him (if you showed ability), or he wasn’t interested in ‘your approach’ and let you sink or swim on your own, 2) held us directly responsible when we failed to do as he ordered (although the orders themselves could be discussed and ultimately discarded, and they were framed as requests unless time didn’t permit it, once they were agreed upon—they had to be carried out), 3) honestly, was a bit of a git at times. (He became my ‘second first love’, then my supervisor and dear friend, and I admit I am being harsher than I absolutely need to be, but still, a git:) He did not hesitate to call on our means and brains, but never took anything for his own enrichment. I would call him both a geek and a sociopath in the above-mentioned sense.
Most of the rest could be called fanatics, with a constant trickle of mops who didn’t stay for long. (Girls seemed more loyal, in that I can’t recall a case where a girl would just change her mind and go away (and I recall two serious cases when boys did it), and in that they showed more initiative, either agreeing to join the tyrant or branching off into other directions like educating schoolchildren.)
And the tyrant’s way of looking at things was that the world was a big… dump, to pick a polite word, and when you saw an opportunity to make it better, you didn’t question the far-mode/near-mode aspect, you grabbed it and rode it until it dropped under you and breathed its last. If I applied his logic to LW (and believe me, sometimes it is so tempting), I would have said: “Here’s an on-line community which calls itself smart, consisting of weird people who think that nature is cruel to animals and weigh chicken-eating ethics vs. cow-eating—but I bet they have never signed a petition against using animals in circuses or dolphin parks, or donated a single schilling to a rehabilitation centre for bears used to train certain dog breeds, or looked up how agricultural waste can be re-used in further manufacture; and by the way, I bet, further, that they would not see this as relevant; of people who keep tirelessly recycling the same meta- and not very meta- questions year after year; of people, most of whom never shout out that there’s something out there that needs help now—anything, doesn’t have to be my passion, just anything… do they think so little of me, that I will not stand by them?.. Guess somebody has to optimize the situation a bit.”
So I really, truly, honestly keep telling myself LW is not a place to recruit people to do my satanic bidding, but—truth will out...