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Zvi comments on Designing Rationalist Projects - Less Wrong
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Thank you, calcasm, for this sequence, and apologies in advance to everyone for this being a bit of a rant and likely having been said before. I fear that the very practical suggestions are going to be lost because people's brains are being overridden by a combination of:
This big danger that Less Wrong is going to turn into a cult is a phantom. It has always been a phantom. Starting a cult whose core teaching is essentially "Think for yourself, schmuck!" together with techniques for doing so effectively may be the worst idea for a cult in world history.
If there is a cult here, not that I think there is, it is the cult of pure reason that thinks it is a sin to use any technique that could possibly reinforce a false belief or a behavior we might dislike, the cult of people crying out "Cult!" I'm sick of it because I want there to be more of us, I want us to better embody the ideals of rationality, and to use them to accomplish more and to be effective.
This is exactly the form that this information needs be in, and it's information that is available because of what this man does for a living. Rather than complain that all references to religion be redacted and replaced, we should thank him for turning his insight over to the side of truth, justice and other neat stuff like that.
SilasBarta has already pointed out the obvious counterexample; a variety of other vaguely cultish institutions, such as Anton LaVey's Church of Satan, also share goals that are, if not identical, then certainly within spitting distance. More importantly, though, I don't think "think for yourself, schmuck" is actually a core teaching of LW; LW-rationality is aimed at achieving success (however defined) rather than maintaining some ideal of independent thought, and it'll happily discourage any ideas, however independent, that its group consensus agrees are maladaptive. This isn't even a bad thing; independence for its own sake is best left to the Discordians.
I don't think LW is a cult or in serious danger of becoming one in the near term. But its core ideals alone are not sufficient to ensure that it doesn't have the abstract potential to become one.
But still good enough if we're not careful.
I wonder if we had someone who always disagreed with us if it would help prevent he cultishness. I know there is evidence that doing so increases decisions and i think i remember there being evidence that it helps stop groupthink. So maybe if we implemented what CalcSam said but add that someone be designated as the person who must disagree with us (this person could be different people or the same person)
Like the subverter in a paranoid debate? I think that would actually be really useful, or at least a lot of fun (which has a use in and of itself.)
I would stipulate that it NOT be just one person, though. There ought to multiple people, trading off to diffuse attention, or whoever is designated could easily become a strawman effigy to be mocked and denounced.
The story in my head goes: Every once in a while, an ace of spades (if we can get it custom, red or gold on black would be an epic color scheme), will be discretely slipped to a randomly selected acolyte or two before the meeting has begun. These people have license to be as contrary and anti-consensus as they can get away with without being found out. It will be given away at the end of the meeting, unless they'd like the actions and statements they made that day to stand as-is...
I like this suggestion but might tweak it a bit to say that everybody draws from a deck of cards(or some similar method) instead of trying to slip cards just to a specific person. It seems easier and doesn't create the problem of the person doing the slipping knowing who the subverter is. Also, it is easy to repurpose if we need other randomly assigned positions.
There's someone at the meetup I attend who draws that card every week.
Is the purpose of this exercise for the others to guess drew the contrary card? If so, what is this good for?
To make sure it is a different someone. It's very easy for us to mentally categorize someone as "Oh, that's just old crazy uncle Eddy. No reason to actually consider his arguments seriously". And it's also useful for people to gain practice at dissenting.
Seems close. I don't see why it couldn't be just one person randomly selected.