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.
"Manipulate" isn't a useless term. "Manipulatory" is a useless category, or as the other guy said, not a "natural kind".
I communicate, you influence, he manipulates.
Things should be called "manipulatory" because they are bad, things should not be called "bad" because they are manipulatory.
A google search for each of those phrases only found your comment; you should provide links.
Untruths differ in plausibility, and it is expected that someone "taking sides" in an argument speak dishonestly to put one side in the best light. The reason I feel almost no negative reactions to your statements like this while others such as wedrifid does is not that I think them more plausible than he does, but that I think they are transparently exaggerations by an advocate. You have broken free of something like the uncanny valley, such that I think your statements barely imply they are what a neutral observer might think. I say this to be upfront because you might not think this a respectful reason for not feeling disagreement. That last sentence doesn't say what I want it to but I can't figure out how to say what I mean, I hope you can figure it out.
1) People mean different things by "the field of PU", so it's helpful to be explicit and at least name the area. 2) Techniques don't have the property of being problematic, being problematic is a relationship between the technique and a value system. If you aren't trusted by someone to know their value system, and they don't know your value system, those kinds of accusations are of limited use, so the technique should be explicitly described, its problem explained (if it isn't obvious), and its link to PUA established. All of this can be done by providing a citation, so the work is in finding it, but it spares you the trouble of having to paraphrase it accurately. At least name the technique.
I think your generalizations about PU are useful and better than nothing or even most things for an understanding of it, but not great, with about the same relationship to PU that PU has to women.
I think I'm fairly tolerant of your intolerance of intolerance, as well as PUA's intolerance. This might make me inconsistent, as against other guys who are intolerant of intolerance of intolerance, though I doubt it. But I don't have a problem with the community's relationship with PUA (I consider myself part of this community and not that one, rather than the other way around, or neither, or both), it's good enough by my value system, and I feel motivated to defend that value system much more than PU.
What you prefer is a property not just of you, but of your environment. What you'd prefer to prefer is a property not just of you, but of your environment. What you'd prefer to prefer to prefer...If I'm looking at a hungry kitten, I have different preferences than if I'm in a crowded bus, or reading a paper about meta-morality. To privilege where I happen to be seems arbitrary, in any case it means my CEV from minute to minute would be subject to vast swings due to the butterfly effect (I think).
I have said (in a comment elsewhere in the internet that I can't find) that there is a continuum - but not one with influence and manipulation as its poles. Rather, to get one's interlocutor's molecules into a state accepting a proposition, there is a continuum between influencing someone with level speech and feeding them to a child and teaching the child the proposition is true, and that these aren't different in kind. Manipulation with drugs or body language or torture or verbal intonation etc. are each more to the middle of that scale, some practically next to influence! So I, for one, can't be said to ignore an important difference between influence and manipulation except when convenient for political purposes, whatever else one might say about me!
I think the answer has to do with fully understanding the nature of hypothetical alternatives, and very little to do with understanding utility functions. I don't know how to do it, but the present is a single place and the best hope for non-arbitrariness, however difficult it is to make it non-arbitrary from a moral perspective. Utility functions are maps of map-makers, ignorance compounded upon ignorance, not a platonic form to aspire to. Somehow reality has to be specially important, the reality in which I'd pay the same to save 1,000 birds as 1,000,000, etc.
It's not obvious that what you added in the parentheticals is actually meant, though it may be. Imagine the following conversation:
PUA: "With women, you have to pretend that they don't have cheat codes." LW Feminist: "Women and men are equally rational!" PUA:"I'm not bisexual!" LWF:"I didn't say you were!" PUA:"Well I didn't say women were less rational than men!" LWF:"You implied it by only mentioning the rationality, or lack of it, in women!" PUA:"You implied it! I'm talking about how to use social cues and biases to sleep with people. People, meaning women!"
I recently figured out how to keep dog owners from picking up their dogs or pulling them away from me when I'm out walking my pit bull. I had been having little luck at all with "He's friendly." "He doesn't bite, he's never bitten anyone!" etc. Yet my new method, inspired by PUA, almost never fails. I say "Is your dog friendly?" while holding back my dag as if I were protecting him. This works astoundingly well, even with people walking tiny yorkies! Now my dog can get to have social interactions with nearly all other dogs we come across. I change the other person's frame of reference from "Is that large-jawed monster going to eat my dog/me?" to "Is my dog qualified to interact with that dog, or is its personality not good enough?" If I make it all about whether or not they are good enough, so they forget to ask themselves if I am good enough, is this wrong? How would speaking by uttering reassurances or choosing not to speak be more neutral than using the "dark arts"? Saying nothing isn't doing nothing, and something must be done, and being as underhanded as I am, no more no less, is working out for me.