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lmm comments on What can we learn from freemasonry? - Less Wrong
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At the London meetup today there was talk around having a register of skills that LW people were available to help with, and I was reminded of freemasonry on a general level.
The thing about freemasonry is that as far as I can see, it works. That is, members seem to be more successful than non-members from similar backgrounds (though I would be very pleased to see rigorous evidence on the subject). So it seems to me that forming a freemason-like organization (and presumably tweaking any obvious problems, but defaulting to their ruleset since it's been successful in practice) would be an effective way to help our members achieve their goals.
(I guess the obvious counterproposal is: why don't we just all join the existing freemasons rather than doing work to duplicate them?)
I'm not a freemason, but from the outside it looks like it went the way of many other former political organizations and became essentially a community organization -- there was a lodge between my college and the Rite-Aid, and all their [visible] activities were things like car shows.
There are probably freemasons with blogs; I ran across one years ago, read through the archive, and got the impression that either they're a standard community organization or ~that's what they want you to think~. Given that the latter is indistinguishable from the former unless something breaks, starting a new organization sounds better than entryism -- at least assuming there are enough people to make it viable and useful.
Better how though? I just meant that setting up our own organization and getting a viable initial population to join would be work, and it seems pointless if we'd achieve the same result by joining an existing one.
Joining an existing one means having to deal with existing members. If you want an organization to advance a certain set of goals, whether they're policy goals or just networking with similar people (given that similar(LW) is different than similar(freemason)), it seems like it'd be easier to have general agreement, shared background, etc. across all the members, which is something you don't get from entryism -- you have to expend energy on spreading that background, getting existing members to align with the entryists, and so on.
Admittedly, I also have aesthetic problems with going "your social club is now our rationality group", but my priors in the direction of freemasons-as-just-a-social-club are not all that strong, due to both little information and the geographical sources of that information -- for purely statistical reasons, I wouldn't expect many rationality groups way out in the hills.
That might be right, but I am not convinced. It seems to me possible that the following might be true:
In which case, forming a freemasonry-like organization would be valuable in that way only if it manages to recruit a lot of influential people who can help other members as freemasons (hypothetically) have helped one another. That certainly might work but I don't see that it could be guaranteed.
Women aren't allowed to be Freemasons, except for a few rare and extenuating circumstances.
I think atheists are also banned.
It's complicated. English Freemasonry does not accept atheists. Continental Freemasonry does. Swedish Freemasonry accepts only Christians.
That wasn't clear from what I read on WIkipedia etc. Freemasonry is in general quite open to different religions. But indeed belief in a 'supreme being' is required. This issue is analysed in some depth here: http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/atheism-freemasonry.html Interestingly the first point discussed is the suggested incapability of the convited atheist to morality.
There are quite a few comparable 'lodges' for women.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry_and_women
The main disadvantage is really that there are few that admit both genders.
I like this idea a lot. In most real-life communities, members help each other out and prosper. This is one of the prime reasons why people keep going to church, for instance.
But for that the LW meetups suffice. They could benefit from some more structure or cross support.
How about a Grand Meetup? Or was there one?
I would reccomend segmenting it from LW a bit.
With 'it' you mean the (grand) meetup(s). Or?