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.
One stopgap solution would be to have a standardized response for accusations like that.
"You accused but did not provide evidence, which does not show supporting evidence does not exist, though it is evidence supporting evidence does not exist, so your unsubstantiated argument makes me think your position less likely to be true than I had originally."
YABDNPE
I think we need to think seriously about how to think about interpretations. Right now, I think most people (I might be projecting) try to first figure out what was most likely meant, and then adjust that a bit as their duty of reading others charitably, and take the output of that as their tentative interpretation.
I think we should break it down. We should automatically produce a most charitable interpretation we can think of, as well as a distinct estimate of the most likely original intent, and we should be well-calibrated to accurately estimate the chance that the circumstance has an explanation unlike any we're thinking of. As important features of interpreting charitably, we need to 1) bear in mind that others' charitable readings are according to different value sets than ours and 2) bear in mind our imaginations that are attempting to come up with most charitable interpretations with is limited.
An example of 1) would be for the woman who sued the airline over its flight attendant using a variant on a popular nursery rhyme that has an original racist, if obscure, version. For me, judging favorably means seriously considering how she might not believe a word of the philosophy underlying her case, and just have made it in an attempt to get money. For others, my saying this might sound indicting - how dare you accuse her of dishonesty and greed! To me, actually believing she had been wronged would be more unflattering.. This is very important if we try to foster a community of charitable interpretation by perhaps addressing others' possible non-charitable interpretation but not accusing others of poor interpretation..
I think it corrects for why political correctness can become a lost purpose: to ensure we don't wrongly think unduly badly of others, a system of criticizing people who appear to do so is put in place that encourages us to call out people when a plausible, if perhaps unintended, interpretation of their words is that they judge people unfairly.
The solution of judging others favorably can't survive as a meme by slapping down other modes of interpretation, if it tries it will be subverted, so it will take positive good will and praise, not condemnation, to spread it.
Item 2) deals with unknown unknowns, the argument from ignorance we tell ourselves. Smart people who are used to being right are vulnerable to not seriously realizing they might be wrong, or that though they can't think of how something could be, it actually is.
To correct for that, I propose this.
Something somewhat similar to "This post, for instance, comes off as hostile and dismissive, not a message from someone who is sympathetic to the concerns expressed or willing to examine the matter under discussion. That's probably not your intent?" could be an ideal. It might be productive if people were used to beginning certain posts with: here is what I think is the most likely interpretation, although this is not an accusation, because I also think other interpretations are fairly plausible given the context, how I usually agree with you, etc.