Community cohesion may be critical to the success of the rationalist movement.

That was a good question. The reason cohesion is important is because one wants to avoid a "divide and conquer" circumstance. If nobody feels comfortable posting on LessWrong and goes and posts on 100 other blogs instead, it's possible that the movement will simply die out.

Of course it is also possible for that to have a benefit, too: If 100 blog authors successfully advertise their blogs, it's possible that they'd get a lot more readers than if they were to post solely on LessWrong.

I also have a deeper point to make about community cohesion which I think will be hard to see due to two kinds of bias. To make the point easier to see, I will briefly mention those biases. The first is optimism bias. The second is mind projection fallacy.

Why optimism bias is relevant here:

Not only are people known to believe more optimistic things than they should, they also find it hard to adjust their perspective when their optimism is confronted, especially when it would be emotionally devastating to do so. This may be one of those ideas with the potential for devastation. Therefore, it might be especially hard to overcome optimism bias in this case and view the following point objectively.

Why mind projection fallacy is relevant here:

If you, yourself, have X ability level with something, you are likely to assume that most others have X ability as well, and may even find it hard to imagine or believe that most others do not have X ability level. Most people have not thoroughly researched the abilities of the average person, and have no idea what those are. I've met countless gifted people who, for instance, upon encountering someone with less ability than themselves in some area, frequently mistake that ignorance for laziness or malice or simply assume that the specific person was unusually stupid. This happens frequently, with gifted people, at times when the person in question actually has normal abilities. It's likely that the average LessWronger is gifted. It's also likely that something like half of them do not even realize they are gifted.

For those two reasons, a lot of people in this movement are likely to be vastly overestimating the average person's ability to become rational and their interest level in doing so. To some extent, interest in rationality and ability to wield it are things that can be increased. However, it would be illogical to assume that just because interest level and ability can be increased that they'll be able to be increased adequately in a large enough section of the population for rational thought to become the norm. The stated goal of "raising the sanity waterline" is, of course, both feasible and worthwhile - but part of that is because the phrasing implies no specific amount. Making rationality the norm is a completely different goal. It is extremely worthwhile, but is many times more difficult.

I am not aware of any studies that have been done to specifically determine the average person's capacity for developing rationality. Nor am I aware of any studies on methods to teach rationality that are designed to determine how much difference the best teaching strategies make to one's capacity for and interest in rationality. I doubt anybody knows where the average person's limits are. I think it would be hard for most members of LessWrong to imagine having a brain that hurts when you try to think rationally because it is too hard, having no interest in rationality whatsoever, or being too irrational to even understand why rationality is good, but (as a person who has read a lot about psychology) I'm sure that all of those things do happen and that they're fairly common. It would be folly, in my opinion, to assume that the average human:

1.) Has a brain capable of thinking rationally.

2.) Has a brain that learns rationality easily enough that the benefits outweigh the costs.

3.) Has a brain that rewards them for rational thought. (Mine rewards me for rational thought, but it seems to punish me for doing math, and it took about a decade for me to get to the point where it quit hurting when I attempted to spell correctly.)

4.) Has adequate time, energy, resources, discipline, sanity, opportunity, etc. to put themselves through the rigorous mental training it requires to achieve adequate results.

5.) Has the mental stamina capacity to reach a state of constant performance. I bet most are able to do things like detect a bias a single time, when asked, just like most can lift a five pound dumbbell, a single time, when asked. But to be rational requires detecting most biases most of the time, and that is quite another matter. It may be that it takes the mental equivalent of an Olympic champion to be able to develop the stamina to lift those weights all the time.

The reason I bring this up is not because I'm a cantankerous misanthrope. It's because of what I know about human abilities due to the developmental psychology research I've done. For a quick glimpse into my perspective:

Learning language is not a trivial task, but we have been doing that since before civilization without schooling or a movement. Humans are prodigious among animal species when it comes to language development. Almost all of us gets to enjoy a huge vocabulary with many thousands of words. It's just natural for our brains to learn a language. Language is a great example of what happens with humans when our brains are designed to do a particular task. We say things like "Humans are different because they're capable of rational thought." Then why don't we learn to be rational as readily as we learn language? If it's natural for all of us, why didn't we learn to be rational most of the time thousands of years ago?

Some abilities are attributed to "humanity" because we don't see any, or many, examples of them in other species... but that's different from saying that they're common to humans. Rocket science, for instance, is an ability that no animals have, but that most humans do not have, either. We say that humans are different because of things like rational thought, but rationality may still be similar to rocket science in that many humans are not able to do it.

[Edited to remove a certain paragraph.]

I don't know whether this obstacle is best identified as "lack of interest" or "it's unnatural to learn because a lot of people's brains aren't designed for it", but there is obviously some obstacle that has been holding humanity back the entire time we've existed. There may be lots of different obstacles. It is quite possible, in my view, that the average human will find the obstacles insurmountable without something like brain augmentation or genetic engineering.

In the event that there are a limited number of people who will be both interested in and successful at attaining a rational state, the last thing we want to do is have them divided up all over the place. To have the greatest possible impact, we need to stick together.

That's why community cohesion is likely to be critical to the rationalist movement.

• For archival purposes, the paragraph was:

Even with ethics - which is something that most people can learn - it has taken thousands of years of civilized living just to get to the point where slavery is abolished, women can vote and gay people have begun making progress on getting rights. I am not even sure that thinking rationally most of the time is a state that is attainable to most people, but even if it is, it's possible that establishing a norm of rational thought among humans would require a time period similar to that of mass ethical behavior...