The Brooklyn Society For Ethical Culture

MBlume

Dale McGowan writes:

In the past seven years or so, I’ve seen quite a few humanistic organizations from the inside — freethought groups, Ethical Societies, Congregations for Humanistic Judaism, UUs, etc. Met a lot of wonderful people working hard to make their groups succeed. All of the groups have different strengths, and all are struggling with One Big Problem: creating a genuine sense of community.

I’ve written before about community and the difficulty freethought groups generally have creating it. Some get closer than others, but it always seems to fall a bit short of the sense of community that churches so often create. And I don’t think it has a thing to do with God.

The question I hear more and more from freethought groups is, “How can we bring people in the door and keep them coming back?” The answer is to make our groups more humanistic — something churches, ironically, often do better than we do.

Now I’ve met an organization founded on freethought principles that seems to get humanistic community precisely right. It’s the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture [...], host of my seminar and talk last weekend, and the single most effective humanistic community I have ever seen.

So what do they have going for them? My top ten list:

Read on at Meming of Life

Dale McGowan writes:

In the past seven years or so, I’ve seen quite a few humanistic organizations from the inside — freethought groups, Ethical Societies, Congregations for Humanistic Judaism, UUs, etc. Met a lot of wonderful people working hard to make their groups succeed. All of the groups have different strengths, and all are struggling with One Big Problem: creating a genuine sense of community.

I’ve written before about community and the difficulty freethought groups generally have creating it. Some get closer than others, but it always seems to fall a bit short of the sense of community that churches so often create. And I don’t think it has a thing to do with God.

The question I hear more and more from freethought groups is, “How can we bring people in the door and keep them coming back?” The answer is to make our groups more humanistic — something churches, ironically, often do better than we do.

Now I’ve met an organization founded on freethought principles that seems to get humanistic community precisely right. It’s the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture [...], host of my seminar and talk last weekend, and the single most effective humanistic community I have ever seen.

So what do they have going for them? My top ten list:

Read on at Meming of Life

Do they really want the same thing? It's hard to tell when we're also offering other tasty treats. Prostitutes will do things for cocaine that they wouldn't do otherwise, and pretend to enjoy themselves.

Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. But if rationalism doesn't at least offer something comparable to other options, many people won't even try.

As for Aumann, Robin Hanson points out that we'd often do better to update toward "average beliefs" than the beliefs of our chosen in-group. So it appears I can already maximize my "Aumann benefit" by conversing with random strangers. It seems to me that the benefits of a rationalist group are precisely the opposite: Discover good arguments and important data that we were previously unaware of, that we find convincing regardless of source. If we value our own mere opinions too highly, we've already lost.

Robin's argument in that link seems to be that taking pleasure in disagreement with average beliefs is, all else equal, a bad thing; it's certainly not an argument in favor of updating toward average beliefs. Aumann agreement only strictly applies to ideal rationalists with shared assumptions, but as a rule of thumb one should update toward other agents' beliefs based on the demonstrated rationality of their belief-forming process.

"Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. But if rationalism doesn't at least offer something comparable to other options, many people won't even try."

So why should we want to attract such people?

We know why cult groups usually try to attract as many people as possible: they're just raw material to them, explicitly or implicitly.

How is it to our benefit to adopt an r-strategy, rather than a K?

1loqi17y

True. I think the goal here is a bit more complex than "maximize number of self-proclaimed rationalists", though. [...] I was presenting it as an argument favoring updates toward average beliefs over doing so for in-group beliefs, but you're still right that it's really making an unrelated point. [...] I find such demonstrations quite difficult to identify. Doing so requires both confidence in the correctness of their conclusion and, to a lesser extent, confidence that the beliefs you observe aren't being selected for by other rationalists.

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