Related to: Building rationalist communities, Lessons from Latter-day Saints, Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don't Implement Themselves, Designing rationalist projects, Community roles: teachers and auxiliaries, Committees and Leadership
In the previous posts, I listed the main roles in Latter-day Saint communities. In this post and one to follow, I will outline possible roles and implications for rationalist communities.
I previously mentioned the issue of teacher selections: the balance between selecting the more natural teachers and giving the less outgoing and articulate contingent a chance.
The latter is important, because it’s a route to long-term skill development for all members.[1] But, like most investments, it requires long time horizons. It’s not viable to invest in developing talent if your embryonic talent is going to pack up and leave.
So how do you establish a long time horizon? How do you create a norm, an expectation, a common practice of sticking around in the group?
Unsurprisingly, this takes time to develop.
Reducing Turnover
Wherever the church is newly established, growth is fast, but turnover is high. This is caused (at least, immediately caused) by higher levels of infighting and quarreling. A commonly-told story is of an early church leader named Thomas B. Marsh dissatisfied over increased militarization and hostilities against neighbors. As a result, he signed an affidavit which helped trigger the forcible expulsion of Mormons from the state of Missouri.
I’ll repeat that: where the church is new, growth is fast, but turnover is high.
Many of the church members in India were in their late teens or early 20’s, looking for more direction in life. We were glad they joined, but there was a problem. The stability of the church organization in India was inversely proportional to the proportion of church members who were young, single adults.
One set of problems stemmed from romances gone awry, unwanted male attention, and resulting gossip. Another set of problems stemmed from simple unreliability – they often wouldn’t take their organizational responsibilities seriously, or wouldn’t prepare for classes they were supposed to teach.[2] And they generally weren’t as useful in teaching other members, because they weren’t as mature.
Of course families got in disagreements and quarrels too. But I certainly heard less about those.
Raise the Age Demographic
A commonly-cited Less Wrong norm is to raise the sanity waterline. I propose a new norm: raise the age demographic.
Functionally, parenthood encourages long-time-horizon thinking, and stabilizes one's self-defined identity as a member of group X. This is especially true in memes that require you to perform actively organizational tasks.
First, marriage. Consider Mormonism, and remember the lay clergy and everyone-has-a-role norms. A big problem for the church in India was gender imbalance – there were too many guys and so they would marry girls who weren’t in the church. Then when they had to choose between spending time at church or helping to run the church, and spending time with their wife, they chose the latter.
This is true for other time-intensive memetic groups – I picked up some Amway promotional materials once and noticed that most of featured people were married couples. (And yes, I do think Amway is Dark Side-ish.)
Second, children. It’s one of the standard stories – a couple isn’t really religious, but they have a kid and think their children needs religion so they start going to church. What are they looking for? An identity; a set of moral guidelines for their children.
Less Wrong needs to move into this market space.
Right now, the median demographic of Less Wrongians is a teenage to mid-20s, unmarried, male; it’s a group that includes me. But a good way to find long-term committed people and reduce turnover is to reach out to a slightly older demographic – parents with children.[3]
In the church, sure, the Young Women’s organization exists for the teenager girls; and the Primary organization exists for the smaller children. But the adults involved in each organization, and the parents of the children, are tied more closely into the church community. Each of them receives a (another) definite, concrete reason to come to church each Sunday.
In a rationalist parenting club, the children running around would provide a constant reminder and justification for the group’s existence.
[1] Personally, I’m far more articulate in my conversation and public speech due to numerous occasions where I led classes, gave speeches, and so forth.
[2] This wasn’t universal, but it was a general trend.
[3] I’m not sure exactly how to do this, but I am sure that it is desirable.
Some of the comments here are addressing the wrong problem. For example the idea of "what to do with the kids while the parents attend".
it's an important question, to be sure.... but it's stage- 2: after you've already attracted the parents, how to keep the kids entertained so the parents can attend.
You still need stage 1: how to actually attract the parents in the first place.
I am a mid-30s female who is getting ready to have kids in the not-too-distant future. I also have lots of friends who already have kids. I am in just inside your target demographic, so let me tell you what I'd like to get out of LW WRT my age-group and family aspirations. FWIW
There's a hell of a lot of stuff here on the site for me personally, ie how do I, personally change myself to become more rational.
The thing that's missing for parents, is how to educate their kids into rationality.
The articles on this site are way too high level for young kids. I'd estimate you'd need a teenager - or extremely smart tween, to read any of them... and not every kid will match this profile.
Simply dumbing it down may be part of the answer... but there's also the aspect of when kids are ready to learn certain "lessons" in rationality. Kids go through extremely irrational early-learning stages, eg its tough to get a three-four year old to even realise that other people don't have access to the same knowledge that they have (remember that experiment where a kid is shown what's in a box and is asked what the other kid thinks is in the box?).
What I'd like as a future parent... are some/any ideas for age-graded lessons I can teach my (potential) kids that will get them up to a higher rationality-level quicker than I did.
If we have these available - that will, hopefully, attract the kinds of parents that want their kids to have the best chance in life (ie most parents). Specifically you can probably attract the same kind of "parent-demographic' that currently goes for "make your baby smart" accessories.
I've been trying to think about what I can contribute myself, in this area... but hitting the fact that I myself am still very much still learning this stuff myself. While I have been putting together some ideas on how to teach the basics of chemistry in the kitchen... I have yet to figure out ways to teach the basics of rationality.
One start was a challenge-article written a while back here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3c/rationalist_storybooks_a_challenge/
Challenging us to write a rationalist storybook for kids. I think I love that idea... we need more like this.
But even if you can't think up stories yourself, I'd love contributions to these two questions:
1) what are the most fundamental, necessary basics on which to build?
2) how can we write these in the simplest possible way (without adult language or assumed understanding)?
Have you seen Dale McGowan's materials?
There is also the Teaching Children Philosophy project that looks for themes in already existing children's books. I am introducing my 3-year-old to some topics covered here with this book.