I'm all for community-building activities, and I'd love to learn to dance, so I think this is an awesome idea. That said, something about the way this post and its comments are worded rubs me the wrong way entirely, and makes me want to avoid rationalist dance meetups and the LessWrong community in general. Since it seems that your goal is to recruit more rationalists, and I've been a long-time lurker on the outskirts of the rationalist community, I figured that it might be helpful if I explained my negative reaction. I've had similar negative reactions to many LessWrong posts, and it's part of why, although I consider myself a staunch Bayesian, I am reluctant to identify as a rationalist.
One of my problems with this post is the academic and impersonal wording used to describe the studies cited. (This complaint does not apply to the first two quoted passages.) Because of the detached and dispassionate wording, I imagine participants entering the rationalist dance meetup thinking "Tonight I'm going to manipulate System 1 into having good feelings about the rationalist community!" To me, this mindset seems incredibly fake: the eternal detachment and third-person analy...
To allow people to log in to your server and make helpful changes without hassle, change all the passwords to "password": this is technically true, but applied in the wrong context it could lead to various problems. The hard part is figuring out which contexts have this safety property, and which don't, especially keeping in mind that contexts change over time.
First: Singing out of tune would be defecting on other people's community building practices, which is what I feared I might be doing by posting my comment in the first place. If a context loses the safety property and I can't fix the context, why on earth would I stick around clogging up other people's attempts at semi-random socially bonding? (Its not like I'm a seven year old being dragged to church against my will.) If a context works for others but seems bad to me, I can just exit the context rather than doing something to passive aggressively thwart it...
The reason I've brought this up here is that this community is notionally aimed at not being crazy, and I like the idea of a community of non-crazy people, and want to help with that project. My understanding is that I'm commenting in a way that advances the deep interests of the community, rather than injecting noise. If I'm wrong, that's worth knowing, but I don't think I'm wrong here.
More directly... did you understand the metaphor from computer security I was suggesting? If someone roots your server then one option is to format the drive and rebuild from scratch (after patching the security hole). Another is to do ...
I don't know if I'm typical, but I tend to resist that sort of unity-building exercise (with something of an exception for neo-pagan ritual). It's possible that I don't trust people that much. Unity-building exercises (especially if explicitly so) strike me as the moral equivalent of someone saying "Trust me".
I might tolerate it at a meet-up, but it wouldn't be a plus.
It's possibly a problem that LW people have a wide range of skill at movement.
Unity-building exercises (especially if explicitly so)
For better or for worse, now that this post exists, all singing/dancing/chanting/jumprope games that occur in Less Wrong meetups will be laden with the awareness that they are group bonding exercises.
So? People frequently do all sorts of social things — from parties, to fraternity initiations, to sex — out of a conscious desire to feel closer to someone.
We've never tried something like this at an actual meetup, but contra dancing has become kind of a thing among Boston-area LWers. Two of us were avid dancers to start with, a few more had tried it in the past, and one recently got into it. So now I see a couple of LWers at dances at least once a month.
Advantages: easy to learn, no dance skills needed beyond ability to walk on-beat. The caller tells you what move to do next, so you don't have to improvise if you don't want to. Live music, reasonable cost for an evening (~$7). Lots of eye contact and opportunities for flirting, but not an overtly sexual atmosphere. Find dances near you.
Singing in synchrony, even if the song is an out-group anthem ("O Canada", when the subjects were USA residents), causes more trust and and greater feelings of being on the same team, as well as an increased willingness to cooperate in a public goods game.
Not that I disagree with the conclusion, but I would hazard that a lot of US residents consider Canada a part of 'us' - not the USA, but very friendly. Try substituting a national anthem for a country that typical US citizens aren't really aware of - Bhutan, say. For bonus points, use the anthem of the international communist party.
I'd suspect that singing outgroup anthems would have a significantly stronger group-bonding effect than singing the local national anthem or something like it, by way of implicitly setting the group against the larger society. A group of Americans singing the Internationale has a lot more to bond over than the same Americans singing along to the Star-Spangled Banner at a baseball game, and I'd expect people's emotional regulation to pick up this distinction even if it isn't borne out by explicit preferences.
Aren't national anthems designed from the ground-up to trigger this sort of emotional reaction anyway?
Armies around the world utilize the same effect to foster a feeling of unison through repeated drills:
Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual. (McNeill 1995, quoted in Kesebir 2011)
I'll counter a personal anecdote with a personal anecdote: I've been to the military, and though...
While I love the idea I think you're missing the problem that most of our in-group view themselves as people who don't dance.
A few months ago I suggested contra dancing as a fun activity to do after a meetup. One person scoffed, "I don't think Less Wrong is a likely place to find people who like social dancing!"
We took a poll. 4 of the 6 people present had tried and liked contra dancing (and a fifth recently got hooked).
It's not, but then LW group members can't be presumed rational. What sort of synchronized group movement or synchronized group voice or both would bypass the Cthulhulian-horror-of-conformity filters?
N-player rock-paper-scissors variants. They generally involve everybody standing in a circle facing inward shaking their fists three times and chanting in unison, and looking back I feel like they do have a community-building effect. But they bypass the filter because they're competitive, and are presumably appealing to LW people because they involve memorizing a large ruleset and then trying to game it.
In a similar group of my acquaintance, DDR (Dance Dance Revolution, not the former East Germany) serves this role fairly well, albeit only pairwise.
I imagine yoga can work this way for people who don't also have a horror of the reference class they file yoga in.
I have just discovered this post, long after it was written. It is closely related to things I am now thinking about, chief among them the importance of shared experiences.
Still relevant, sources are helpful, great post!
I disagree. Techniques for spreading rationality are highly rational to learn. Considering subjects such as Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate I dare say that it's almost essential for the project of disseminating rationality that LessWrong as a group learns how group dynamics work and how successful communities are built. If we consider being rational a good thing then we ought to make it as attractive as possible to feel as part of the rationalist group.
rationalists seem to gravitate towards a liberal, individualistic moral foundation, while the rest seem to automatically balance that with, or favor, group binding moral foundations
Unfortunately, once this effect becomes known, it is further exaggerated for signalling purposes. Reversing stupidity is not intelligence, but it is frequently used to signal intelligence or independence.
If most people agree with any group opinion, then I shall signal my intellectual superiority by disagreeing with the group even when the group suggests something useful (a smart person is able to find some error or at least an analogy with some error everywhere). If I agree with someone at 99%, it is an opportunity to gain karma points by pointing out the 1% of difference, even if the cost is ruining a good idea and starting a pattern of mutual defection (next time when I come with an idea the other person agrees at 99% and disagrees with 1%, what is the chance they would support me: epsilon? great, so now instead of two successful projects we have two failed plans).
...Thus, we rationalists (and liberals in general) are seen as immoral because of our tendency to disregard others' crucial moral foundati
While some of that may be true, it may well be that the solution is to get other's to adopt a morality that has less emphasis on ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity
The trouble is, these things are indispensable for any large-scale (and possibly even small-scale) cooperation and coordination between people. Of course, it's possible to masquerade them, but it's always easy to see them in operation among the kinds of people who loudly deny them and insist they're bad. In particular, this certainly holds for the modern intellectual elites, and it's particularly notable in Haidt's own evident (though likely not intentional) bias in the criteria by which he detects expressions of loyalty, authority, and purity/sacredness so as to maximize them on the right side of the political spectrum and minimize them on the left one.
Now, when making this point, it's always tempting to engage in an attack on this blindness and hypocrisy, but at the same time, we are lucky that they exist. An actual disappearance of loyalty, authority, and sanctity in the moral calculus of people would mean literally the end of organized society, so we're certainly much better off if they're negated only in a false and hypocritical way than if they were truly absent.
Haidt's own evident (though likely not intentional) rigging of the criteria by which he detects expressions of loyalty, authority, and purity/sacredness so as to maximize them on the right side of the political spectrum and minimize them on the left one.
Can you expand on this? I've thought for a while that he underemphasizes purity/sacredness on the left (in particular that he essentially ignores things like caring about organic food or vegetarianism which fit classic food taboo forms) but I'm not sure I've seen anything that looked like rigging in his studies.
"Rigged" was a bad choice of word on my part, since it suggests intentional manipulation, and as I've already written, I'm not suggesting anything like that in Haidt's case. Rather, it's a matter of deeply internalized biases. More specifically, the problem is that with enough motivation, almost anything can be rationalized in terms of harm and fairness, and people whose favored ideology emphasizes these elements are likely to invent such rationalizations for their own specific norms of purity, sacredness, group loyalty, and authority. Haidt's approach ends up heavily biased because it correctly recognizes these latter elements in those cases where they are more or less explicit (which happen to be mostly on the political right), while at the same time failing to uncover them when they exist under a veneer of rationalizations in terms of harm and fairness.
Now, the concrete examples of leftist purity manifested in nutritionist and environmentalist ways are recognized by Haidt, as another commenter has already noted. (Though, in my opinion, he is certainly biased in underplaying their overall importance.) However, I believe there are other examples that illustrate the prob...
Looking again at the questions listed in this paper, I remembered a blog post by Bryan Caplan in which he proposed some skillfully thought up alternative questions that make Haidt's biases especially apparent:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/03/do_liberals_use.html
(Here is Haidt's response, which I find rather unconvincing.)
In fact, the more I think about Haidt's questions, the more heavily biased they seem. For example, one of his "authority" questions asks for how much money you'd curse your parents in their face, and have to wait for a year to explain and apologize. Imagine if he instead asked for how much money you'd yell racial insults at a black person. Now, Haidt would presumably say that the latter falls properly under "harm," since it would be greatly emotionally hurtful to this person. But how does this same argument not apply to someone being cursed by their own child?!
Courtesy notice- When you downvote people who claim their downvotes (i.e. they say that they downvoted and give the reason why) you don't discourage downvoting, you discourage the claiming of downvotes.
Personally, I appreciate people claiming downvotes even when I disagree with them, because I know that whenever I see the little number on the upper-right of my page go down, I always wish I knew why. I'm sure that there are others that dislike the claiming of downvotes, but I get the feeling that some people might just not have thought about it too hard before they downvoted (hence this notice).
So even though I disagreed with zir, I upvoted Rhwawn's claiming of a downvote (Edit: Currently sitting at -3), but also upvoted SkyDK's rebuttal (which I DO agree with). I would like to encourage other people who appreciate people claiming downvotes to do the same.
Possibly related: Mark Rosewater and the "meerkat pose" - scroll down until you see the red "Warning" block.
If all else fails, you can always march around the city while chanting "doom doom DOOM DOOM".
Here's the corresponding melody for those who want to have a go.
Singing songs with instrumental accompaniment sounds fun. But if you don't have an instrument, or if you don't have a songbook, a better option would be simple vowel and harmony exercises, if you can get to that magical point where everyone's listening to everyone else.
There's also a cool rhythm exercise you could do. The basic idea is to sway to the beat, actually turning your body and taking a step on the beat, and clapping to the beat as well, with your hands moving even more than your body. Once everyone's into the groove, you can start subdividing ...
From a purely practical side, fostering an environment in which people who are not comfortable dancing will feel comfortable is not an easy thing to do, especially for one who has no experience fostering such an environment.
I base this on eight years of personal experience as an active member in a dance community. It is hard enough to make people who showed up to dance feel comfortable let alone people who showed up to discuss Bayes' Theorem :)
Though as someone who went social dancing up to 5 times a week and a least once a week for the better part of a decade, I could get behind a LW+dancing event.
No, i don't think shouting "doom doom doom" will work. Neither am i convinced that singing and dancing in general will yield better effects than other fun group activities – and even if they do, there are probably methods that are far more effective than some kind of singing or dancing that is picked at random or for fun.
Why do i think so?
1) Personal experience: I have experienced my share of singing, dancing and more or less synchronous movement; some of it caused some feeling of beeing part of the group or a larger social beeing in me, but mos...
I wonder if this is a generalization of the phenomenon whereby our brain identifies various things as part of its body.
Argentine Tango is a partnered social dance. Connection with your partner and movement together to the music is emphasized over flashy moves. The partners dance for each other and not for anyone else: there are no judges watching
I love the idea of dancing on aesthetic and philosophical as well as pragmatic grounds.
I can't execute at all.
:(
Haidt's own evident (though likely not intentional) rigging of the criteria by which he detects expressions of loyalty, authority, and purity/sacredness so as to maximize them on the right side of the political spectrum and minimize them on the left one.
Can you expand on this? I've thought for a while that he underemphasizes purity/sacredness on the left (in particular that he essentially ignores things like caring about organic food or vegetarianism which fit classic food taboo forms) but I'm not sure I've seen anything that looked like rigging in his studies.
"Rigged" was a bad choice of word on my part, since it suggests intentional manipulation, and as I've already written, I'm not suggesting anything like that in Haidt's case. Rather, it's a matter of deeply internalized biases. More specifically, the problem is that with enough motivation, almost anything can be rationalized in terms of harm and fairness, and people whose favored ideology emphasizes these elements are likely to invent such rationalizations for their own specific norms of purity, sacredness, group loyalty, and authority. Haidt's ap...
For the How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup booklet, I'm looking for information about how to better build a social group and foster a feeling of community. Since this bit is probably of general interest, I'm posting it here.
If you want to make the members of the group like each other more and feel more like a group, synchronized actions may be one of the easiest ways of achieving this goal. Anthropologists have long known the community-building effect of dancing:
As the dancer loses himself in the dance, as he becomes absorbed in the unified community, he reaches a state of elation in which he feels himself filled with an energy of force immensely beyond his ordinary state . . . finding himself in complete and ecstatic harmony with all the fellow-members of his community, experiences a great increase in his feelings of amity and attachment towards them. (Radcliffe-Brown 1933/1948, quoted in Kesebir 2011)
Armies around the world utilize the same effect to foster a feeling of unison through repeated drills:
Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual. (McNeill 1995, quoted in Kesebir 2011)
Wiltermuth & Heath (2009) summarize some of the research on the topic:
The idea that synchronous movement improves group cohesion has old roots. As historian William H. McNeill suggests, armies, churches, and communities may have all benefited, intentionally or unintentionally, from cultural practices that draw on ‘‘muscular bonding,’’ or physical synchrony, to solidify ties between members (McNeill, 1995). This physical synchrony, which occurs when people move in time with one another, has been argued to produce positive emotions that weaken the boundaries between the self and the group (Ehrenreich, 2006; Hannah, 1977), leading to feelings of collective effervescence that enable groups to remain cohesive (Durkheim, 1915/1965; Haidt, Seder, & Kesebir, in press; Turner, 1969/1995). Andaman Islanders have been said to become ‘‘absorbed in the unified community’’ through dance (Radcliffe-Brown, 1922, p. 252). Similar observations have been made of Carnival revelers (Ehrenreich, 2006), and ravers dancing to beat-heavy music (Olaveson, 2004). Moreover, Haidt et al. (in press) have argued that people must occasionally lose themselves in a larger social organism to achieve the highest levels of individual well-being.
Some recent findings on the topic include:
Wiltermuth & Heath (2009): Synchronous activity in the form of walking around a campus in step causes people to be more likely to make decisions requiring trust and to self-report stronger feelings of trust and connectedness with others. Singing in synchrony, even if the song is an out-group anthem ("O Canada", when the subjects were USA residents), causes more trust and and greater feelings of being on the same team, as well as an increased willingness to cooperate in a public goods game.
Kirschner & Tomasello (2010): "Given that in traditional cultures music making and dancing are often integral parts of important group ceremonies such as initiation rites, weddings or preparations for battle, one hypothesis is that music evolved into a tool that fosters social bonding and group cohesion, ultimately increasing prosocial ingroup behavior and cooperation. Here we provide support for this hypothesis by showing that joint music making among 4-year-old children increases subsequent spontaneous cooperative and helpful behavior, relative to a carefully matched control condition with the same level of social and linguistic interaction but no music."
Valdesolo, Ouyang & DeSteno (2010): Synchronous rocking increases perceptions of similarity and connectedness. The subjects were given the task of holding the opposite ends of a 12 × 14 wooden labyrinth with both hands and guiding a steel ball through it together. The subjects in the synchronous rocking condition performed better than the subjects in the asynchronous rocking condition.
Valdesolo & DeSteno (2011): Subjects who are told to tap the beats they hear in an audio clip, and are paired with a confederate who has been instructed to synchronize his tapping with the participant’s, tend to find like the confederate more and consider him more similar to themselves. The confederate being assigned an unfair task then evokes more feelings of compassion, and the subjects are more likely to help him, even at a cost to themselves.
The implication for meetup groups, as well as any other groups that might want to make their members like each other more, seems clear: spend some time singing and dancing together, possibly in the form of drinking songs if people are too self-conscious to sing while sober. Just make sure that any non-drinkers don't feel excluded. If all else fails, you can always march around the city while chanting "doom doom DOOM DOOM". (If anybody asks, you can say that you're testing a scientific hypothesis about group bonding, and ask if they'd want to join in.)
References
Kesebir, S. (2011) The Superorganism Account of Human Sociality: How and When Human Groups Are Like Beehives (ungated version). Personality and Social Psychology Review.
Kirchner, S. & Tomasello, M. (2010) Joint music making promotes prosocial behavior in 4-year-old children. Evolution and Human Behavior 31, 354–364.
McNeill, W.H. (1995) Keeping together in time: Dance and drill in human history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1948) The Andaman Islanders. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Valdesolo, P. & DeSteno, D. (2011) Synchrony and the Social Tuning of Compassion. Emotion, vol. 11, no. 2, 262–266.
Valdesolo, P. & Ouyang, J. & DeSteno, D. (2010) The rhythm of joint action: Synchrony promotes cooperative ability. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 46, no. 4, 693–695.
Wiltermuth, S.S. & Heath, C. (2009): Synchrony and Cooperation. Psychological Science, vol. 20, no. 1.