Hi Duncan, I’m a relative newcomer (this is my first LW thread, though I’ve participated in rationalsphere discussions elsewhere), so this may not carry much weight, but I want to somewhat agree with handoflixue here.
One of my stronger reactions to your post is “this is an impossible set of expectations for me and a lot of others”. Which is fine, obviously you can have expectations that some people can’t live up to, and of course it is very good that you are making these expectations very clear.
But I sort of get the sense that you are a person who is fundamentally capable of being reliable and regularly making good life choices pretty easily, and that you sort of don’t get that for a lot of people these things are really hard even if they understand what the right choice is and are legitimately trying their best to do that.
This is based only partly on your post and somewhat more on a mini-talk which (IIRC) you gave at a CFAR community night where you posed the question “does it even make sense for people to seek out advanced rationality techniques such as the ones discussed here when they’re not displaying basic rationality such as eating a reasonable diet and sleeping enough?”. Even then, this question struck me as dangerously wrong-headed, and now that you are proposing to be in charge of people, this seems to take on more importance.
Advanced rationality techniques, at least when applied to one’s self-conception and life choices, are basically therapy. “Failures of basic rationality” are often better described as “mental health issues”. Therapy is how you deal with mental health issues. People with mental health issues need more therapy/advanced rationality, not less! I’ve seen it hypothesized that one reason we have so many mentally ill rationalists is because people with mental health issues must learn rationality in order to function, at least to some degree that is more than most people need.
I don’t actually know you, so my information is pretty incomplete, but my impression is that if someone fails to act in a way you (and they!) think is reasonable, you’re likely to become baffled and frustrated and try to deal with the problem by imposing stricter expectations & consequences. This might work for some people, but for many, it will just make them miserable and less productive because they will be angry at themselves for failing at things that they “should” be able to do.
I think it’s likely that your way of dealing with this is basically to screen out the people who are likely to react poorly to your approach, in addition to causing others like me to self-select out. That’s fine, I guess, though I would still be on the lookout for this sort of issue as a possible failure mode, and maybe also just demonstrate more compassionate awareness that things like reliability are actually almost impossible for some people, and maybe not attribute all of this to having the wrong culture or mindset.
(My general opinion of your project is “this sounds scary and I want to stay very far away from it, and this makes me somewhat wary of the people involved, and I wouldn’t recommend participation to people I know, at the same time I am really curious about how this will go so selfishly I’m a little glad it’s happening so I can gain information from it”.)
Zack, I think the problem (from my perspective) is that you tried being respectful in private, and by the time you started talking about this publicly, you were already being really harsh and difficult to talk to. I never got to interact with careful/respectful you on this topic.
(I understand this may have been emotionally necessary/unavoidable for you. But still, from my perspective there was a missing step in your escalation process. Though I should acknowledge that you spurred me to do some reading & writing I would not otherwise have done, and it’s not impossible that your harshness jolted me into feeling the need to do that.)