Related to: Designing Rationalist Projects, Committees and Leadership
As I mentioned in the above posts, Latter-day Saints communities organize committees to accomplish specific tasks, like serving the outside community or making sure new members get friends.
The question is, what tasks should rationalist communities organize committees or assign individuals to accomplish?
The easy answer: whatever its members want. But there are some collective roles and activities which are better for community-building than others.
Consider the following jury-rigged contraption, which I'll call Bhagwat’s community-building ratio:
- group project goodness = U(project) / E(social friction),
that is, task goodness equals task utility divided by the expected amount of resulting social friction. For example:
Learning PUA:
- U(task): medium. Many LW-goers do express a desire to improve social skills.
- E(social friction): high. This seems to alienate many (most?), though not all, women. And LW meetups need more women, both to function better now and because it would facilitate future meme propagation.
Rejection therapy:
- U(task): medium-to-high. This also helps to improve social skiils, especially assertiveness. More simple and widely applicable than PUA; easy to do without a mentor.
- E(social friction): low. This is a multi-gender activity.
So rejection therapy would likely make a better group task then PUA.
What are the most high-utility, low-social-friction tasks?
The lowest-hanging fruit I know of is to make people feel welcome.[1]
Whenever someone comes to the group for the first time, the group leader should make sure to meet them personally and make them feel welcome. They should get their contact info and afterwards send them a brief e-mail/text, sincerely thanking them for coming.
As people are starting to come for the first few weeks, the group leader should get to know them personally and understand what they’re looking for and why they came. Maybe there’s a particular book or Less Wrong sequence they would like. Maybe they’re trying to improve some skills and would appreciate follow-up. Maybe there’s some skill they know that other Less Wrongians want to learn – and they could teach them!
If you’re able to personalize their experience, you will improve your score on Bhagwat’s Law of Commitment: “The degree to which people identify with your group is directly proportional to the amount of stuff you tell them to do that works."
This task is fairly delegatable. The main requirement is good social skills – you need to be able to have a reasonable conversation with anyone, and the ability to express gratitude sincerely. Otherwise, people might come off as insincere or weird, and that would create social friction.
What are the benefits?
The first three church units I served in were mediocre at befriending new attendees and integrating new members; the last church unit was excellent. Around seventy percent more people joined this last church unit; and of those who joined, retention rates were around 80 to 90 percent, compared to 50 percent elsewhere.
Small Mini-groups
As Less Wrong meetup membership in a given area becomes reasonably dense, and meeting size expands, subgroups can form around common interests.
An Improving Social Skills group. Or an Actually Learning in College group. Or a startup where a bunch of LW people work together…wait, somebody is already doing that.
Mini-meetings would also be good for introducing people to the Less Wrong community. People coming for the first time are generally more comfortable in smaller environments. Latter-day Saint churches with 50-100 weekly attendance grow three or four times faster than churches with 200+ weekly attendance, according to a statistic I read somewhere and can't track down.
There’s a final benefit to having clearly-defined roles held by community members.
All groups, as they evolve, give individuals distinct roles. Class clown, teacher’s pet, whatever. If these roles are positive, people’s identification with and commitment to the group will increase. They will know that the group needs them.
Most people in Latter-day Saint communities have specific, definite roles because of their calling – perhaps they are teaching a class every Sunday, or are responsible to visit a particularly troubled family. This is an unambiguous way to tell them, “We need you.”
The same could be true in rationalist communities.
[1] In Latter-day Saint communities, this is primarily done by the Missionary and Fellowship committees described in my last post.
I'd like to think different parts of it come off differently. To be specific, I hope it's the mostly just last line of the post that gives that impression.
To a large extent I am dismissive, but not of the topic or its importance, I just despise vague and nebulous criticism in general, and I saw it in "the attitudes I've stumbled over here re. PUA, gender and privilege in general".
Something like this, or different?
I'm confused as to how it would naturally come up discussing CEV, such that its absence would be noteworthy. In my mind, the significant problems for CEV crop up before the subject of manipulation would arise, specifically, I'm thinking of how as an updating agent who is human I am a different person with different anticipations about the future if I first read page 30 in a book and then page 45, than if I had read page 45 and then 30. This seems to de-cohere extrapolated volition even under optimal circumstances of being changed (i.e. being reasoned with rather than have my brain hacked directly). Since the most benign influences are so problematic, I haven't seen reason to extensively consider unwilling updating in that context.
These views, if held, disturb me. Your post differs from the one I was perhaps too scornful of insofar as yours takes a real stand on issues, and names some specific opinions with which I can agree or disagree!
It's still not quite perfect, because I haven't seen those views expressed, not that I've looked for them, so links would be nice, but you have provided the basis for a legitimate conversation about the issue by taking it from "attitudes around here are off-putting" to "Here are some views I oppose. Can we agree to oppose them? Can we get an idea of their prevalence on LW?" It's not passive aggressive!
PUA is obviously a very 'political' topic on LW, and I expect that many readers / posters have initial reactions along the lines of "this is icky and I don't care to examine any further", "it is obviously bad to try to 'fake' charisma if you're not inherently charismatic like me", "anyone who has a problem with this hates me personally"... that sort of thing.
I don't necessarily think these or the comments in my earlier post are majority positions on LessWrong. I do think that there is a problematic component to some aspects of... (read more)