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scav comments on The Centre for Applied Rationality: a year later from a (somewhat) outside perspective - Less Wrong
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Comments (102)
As usual it depends on the exponent.
Small-organization (everybody knows everybody) scales to a finite size. Other networking patterns tend to scale better, and I think that cellular organization might work better than hierarchical organization.
True, and I can't see any benefit from hierarchical organisation. There isn't a central authority of rationality any more than there is one for chemistry or calculus.
But CFAR maybe hasn't scaled to its maximum size yet, and as it approaches it, it will probably become clearer what the ideal size is, and there will be more people with experience in training who can split off another group.
Unified PR, distribution of some costs (e.g. advertising, website administration), and dispute resolution (e.g. trademark issues) come to mind.
The world is almost entirely controlled by hierarchical organizations ( corporates and governments). Hiercharchal organizations have "won" to a greater extent than pretty much anything else on earth. It's a model with flaws, but it clearly works. A person would need a whole lot of willful blindness to argue with those results.
Now as to the question of if those organizations would be good at teaching rationality, that's another question...
Yeah, I can see how hierarchical organisations benefit certain goals and activities. I was speaking specifically about the goal of teaching rationality, in case that wasn't clear from context. You don't need a central authority to control what is being taught so much unless you are teaching irrationality (c.f. Scientology, Roman Catholicism or any political organisation).
You could probably run a million rationality courses a year using just a wiki and a smartphone app. (Left as an exercise for the reader)