I’ve been a LessWrong organizer since 2011, with roughly equal focus on the cultural, practical and intellectual aspects of the community. My first project was creating the Secular Solstice and helping groups across the world run their own version of it. More recently I’ve been interested in improving my own epistemic standards and helping others to do so as well.
Raemon(Raymond Arnold)
Karma: 30,353
This definitely is an interesting hypothesis that I feel dumb for not having thought about earlier. (doesn’t sound like his specific operationalizations super checked out, but the general notion of “family structure ends up dictating a bunch of societal stuff” seems like an obvious thing to check)
Curated.
I think the topic of how to intentionally make friends is pretty important.
While reading this post, I expected to find myself wary of promoting too risky a strategy – forcing too much vulnerability too quickly, or taking risks that ruined existing relationships. But I actually found the caveats Neel made pretty reasonable. I particularly like:
My main approach is to create a space in which it feels safe to be vulnerable, but try to avoid creating obligations. I try to be honest and vulnerable myself, and freely share things that feel authentic throughout the conversation. I prefer to express lots of small vulnerabilities throughout the conversation rather than sharing something major and making it feel like a big deal—the latter tends to create an obligation/expectation of reciprocation, while the former better establishes a ‘I consider this fine and normal’ norm.
And:
An important part of this is that a good filter is something that identifies people I’m compatible with and convinces them that they’re compatible with me—if it feels like I’m coldly analysing or interviewing them, this is unlikely to go well. This is another part of why I am excited about approaches centred on excitement + vulnerability, those tend to go well if reciprocated.
Warning: This logic does not apply with people who I will need to interact with regularly anyway, eg co-workers/classmates. Social norms around minimising weirdness/potential for bad outcomes make much more sense in those situations, since downside risk is much higher. These mindsets work best when eg meeting people at a party or meetup or friends of friends, where I won’t necessarily interact with them again.
I suspect there are other caveats I would think of if I thought about this post more. I do have some more concerns about vulnerability that I’d previously written up here, which I think is somewhat applicable here. (tl;dr: Being vulnerable involves actual vulnerability! I think it’s worth people being less risk-averse on the margin, but you should be aware both of the risks that you expose yourself to psychological hurt, and the risk that you will psychologically hurt others in ways you didn’t intend)
But overall I felt like it did a good job of covering a lot of relevant considerations.
Curated. I think this was a good distillation/overview of a good rationalist skill.
I actually guess even fewer houses than you’re thinking did it (I think I only know if like 1-3).
In my own house, where I think we could have come up with the Pigouvian tax, I think when we did all our initial negotiations in April, I think the thinking was “hunker down for a month while we wait to see how bad Covid actually is, to avoid tail risks of badness, and then re-evaluate” but then it turned out by the time we got to the “re-evaluate” step, people were burned out on negotiation.
Note that a) some group houses just did this, b) a major answer for why people didn’t do particularly novel things with microcovid was “by the time it came out, people were pretty exhausted out from covid negotiation, and doing whatever default thing was suggested was easier.”
Speaking as a mod, I wanted to briefly endorse the “LessWrong is not a place to discuss whether God is real” (because there are plenty of other places on the internet to do that).
I haven’t yet read this post thoroughly so don’t have a strong sense of whether ryan_b’s advice is appropriate, but I roughly agreed with his description of the historical context.
Curated. The overall point about jargon-creep/confusion/misuse of Outside/Inside Views seems important. The specific suggestion of specificity seems potentially valuable, but I’ve appreciated some of the comments giving pushback or alternate takes on what to do about it. I’m hoping this curation prompts some further discussion of how to approach this.
Free mentorship offers tend to attract flakes so if you show up one minute late to a meeting then we’re done. If I message you and you do not reply in a reasonable timeframe then we’re done. I’m not going to be your therapist. Expect something more along the lines of a drill sergeant.
I like this.
Thanks!
The two-term limit was actually not intended by Washington to become a tradition, he retired after his second term because he was declining in health.
Citation? (I’ve only really read American Propaganda about this so not very surprised if this is the case, but hadn’t heard it before)
I was quite tickled by the combo of “make it physical training” and “make it a rest from physical training!”.
A thing I might have maybe changed my mind about:
I used to think a primary job of a meetup/community organizer was to train their successor, and develop longterm sustainability of leadership.
I still hold out for that dream. But, it seems like a pattern is:
1) community organizer with passion and vision founds a community
2) they eventually move on, and pass it on to one successor who’s pretty closely aligned and competent
3) then the First Successor has to move on to, and then… there isn’t anyone obvious to take the reins, but if no one does the community dies, so some people reluctantly step up. and....
...then forever after it’s a pale shadow of its original self.
For semi-branded communities (such as EA, or Rationality), this also means that if someone new with energy/vision shows up in the area, they’ll see a meetup, they’ll show up, they’ll feel like the meetup isn’t all that good, and then move on. Wherein they (maybe??) might have founded a new one that they got to shape the direction of more.
I think this also applies to non-community organizations (i.e. founder hands the reins to a new CEO who hands the reins to a new CEO who doesn’t quite know what to do)
So… I’m kinda wondering if second-generation successors should just… err on the side of shutting the thing down when they leave, rather than trying desperately to find a replacement.
The answer isn’t obvious. There is value that continues to be created by the third+ generation. I think I’ve mostly gone from “having a firm opinion that you should be proactively training your successor” to “man, I dunno, finding a suitable successor is actually pretty hard, mrrr?”
Curated.
This is a somewhat old post, but I thought it was underappreciated (other LW mods weren’t quite sure why I wanted to curate it).
I think the core concept here was a crisp articulation of something I hadn’t had a clear handle on, but I think is a key rationality concept. And as Zvi dug into the different examples, it was very illuminating how confused and jumbled my default intuitions about being “Okay” and “Not okay” were.
Distinguishing the psychological state of “things are okay/not-okay” from the reality of “are things ‘okay’ within some frame of judgment?” seems really important. This feels similar to Nate Soare’s post about how to detach the attitude of ‘conviction’ from your epistemic assessment of “will Project X work out?”
It happened to be particularly relevant to me this week, as I was feeling a sense of ‘things are not okay’, and looking around, things in fact seemed ‘not okay’ in many objective senses. Nonetheless, being in “not okay mode” was making it harder to think sensibly.
I liked Zvi’s exploration of how the concept of “Are things okay?” can get distorted at the group rationality level, where people might pressure people help them adopt a “I can be okay” stance by ignoring problems, or shuffling responsibility for them around, without noticing that that’s what you’re doing.
Longterm, I’d be interested in both:
Better teaching techniques for helping individuals learn skills relating into “be in psychological ‘okay-mode’, in the places where it’s useful to be so, without losing sight of object-level reality.”
Having good group-practices for how to relate to okay-mode.
A criticism I have of this piece, similar to some other Zvi pieces that do an exhaustive taxonomy, is that it’s overly long and the individual examples are just given simple letters that get really hard to follow in the second half. (similar complaint on Simple Rules of Law, despite also liking that post a lot). I’m not actually sure how to solve the problem though.
I think this post could use a summary of what your takeaways were here or why this is relevant to LW. (It does indeed seem relevant, but it’s generally good practice to include that in linkposts so people can get a rough sense of an article via the hoverover)
Curated. Some posts convey a brilliant insight. Some entire sequences of posts are… just a lot of helpful information for people who need it. I’m hoping this sequence helps people who are thinking about cryonics get started on it, with a bunch of practical info.
I’m surprised by the degree of controversialness of the OP and… all the comments so far?
I haven’t yet thought in detail about whether this particular set of suggestions is good, but I think dealing with the reality of “conflict incentivizes deception”, figuring out what sort of rules regarding deception can become stable schelling points seems really important.
Curated. This seems like a great resources of conversations and thinking. I think our community has a lot of good ideas locked away inside people’s minds that are effortful to translate into blogpost form.
I’m in favor of people writing down conversations (and endorse the commenters suggesting Spencer get a transcript of these via Rev.com), but meanwhile having recordings is great. :)
Yeah something in that space makes sense. (It is currently random on each page refresh)
See this post for an in-depth analysis of what’s actually going on with “How are you doing?”. (the fact that it’s not actually a question is a feature, not a bug, in it’s primary use case)
That said, I endorse “what have you been thinking about lately?” as a question to ask if you actually want to start an interesting conversation.