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nydwracu comments on What can we learn from freemasonry? - Less Wrong
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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.