"Clever kids in Ravenclaw, evil kids in Slytherin, wannabe heroes in Gryffindor, and everyone who does the actual work in Hufflepuff.”
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 9
“It is a common misconception that the best rationalists are Sorted into Ravenclaw, leaving none for other Houses. This is not so; being Sorted into Ravenclaw indicates that your strongest virtue is curiosity, wondering and desiring to know the true answer. And this is not the only virtue a rationalist needs. Sometimes you have to work hard on a problem, and stick to it for a while. Sometimes you need a clever plan for finding out. And sometimes what you need more than anything else to see an answer, is the courage to face it…
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 45
I’m a Ravenclaw and Slytherin by nature. I like being clever. I like pursuing ambitious goals. But over the past few years, I’ve been cultivating the skills and attitudes of Hufflepuff, by choice.
I think those skills are woefully under-appreciated in the Rationality Community. The problem cuts across many dimensions:
- Many people in rationality communities feel lonely (even the geographically tight Berkeley cluster). People want more (and deeper) connections than they currently have.
- There are lots of small pain points in the community (in person and online) that could be addressed fairly easily, but which people don’t dedicate the time to fix.
- People are rewarded for starting individual projects more than helping to make existing ones succeed, which results in projects typically depending on a small number of people working unsustainably. (i.e. a single person running a meetup who feels like if they left, the meetup would crumble apart)
- Some newcomers often find the culture impenetrable and unwelcoming.
- Not enough “real-time operational competence” - the ability to notice problems in the physical world a and solve them.
- Even at events like EA Global where enormous effort is put into operations and logistics, we scramble to pull things together at the last minute in a way that is very draining.
- Many people communicate in a way that feels disdainful and dismissive (to many people), which makes both social cohesion as well as intellectual understanding harder.
- We have a strong culture of “make sure your own needs are met”, that specifically pushes back against broader societal norms that pressure people to conform. This is a good, but I think we’ve pushed too far in the opposite direction. People often make choices that are valuable to them in the immediate term, but which have negative externalities on the people around them.
In a nutshell, the emotional vibe of the community is preventing people from feeling happy and and connected, and a swath of skillsets that are essential for group intelligence and ambition to flourish are undersupplied.
If any one of these things were a problem, we might troubleshoot it in isolated way. But collectively they seem to add up to a cultural problem, that I can’t think of any way to express other than “Hufflepuff skills are insufficiently understood and respected.”
There are two things I mean by “insufficiently respected”:
- Ravenclaw and Slytherin skills come more naturally to many people in the community, and it doesn’t even occur to people that emotional and operational skills are something they should cultivate. It feels like a separate magisteria that specialists should do. They’re also quick to look at social niceties and traditions that seem silly, make a cursory attempt to understand them, and then do away with them without fully understanding their purpose.
- People who might join the community who value emotional and operational skills more highly, feel that the community is not for them, or that they have to work harder to be appreciated.
And while this is difficult to explain, it feels to me that there is a central way of being, that encompasses emotional/operational intelligence and deeply integrates it with rationality, that we are missing as a community.
This is the first in a series of posts, attempting to plant a flag down and say “Let’s work together to try and resolve these problems, and if possible, find that central way-of-being.”
I’m decidedly not saying “this is the New Way that rationality Should Be”. The flag is not planted at the summit of a mountain we’re definitively heading towards. It’s planted on a beach where we’re building ships, preparing to embark on some social experiments. We may not all be traveling on the same boat, or in the exact same direction. But the flag is gesturing in a direction that can only be reached by multiple people working together.
A First Step: The Hufflepuff Unconference, and Parallel Projects
I’ll be visiting Berkeley during April, and while I’m there, I’d like to kickstart things with a Hufflepuff Unconference. We’ll be sharing ideas, talking about potential concerns, and brainstorming next actions. (I’d like to avoid settling on a long term trajectory for the project - I think that’d be premature. But I’d also like to start building some momentum towards some kind of action)
My hope is to have both attendees who are positively inclined towards the concept of “A Hufflepuff Way”, and people for whom it feels a bit alien. For this to succeed as a long-term cultural project, it needs to have buy-in from many corners of the rationality community. If people have nagging concerns that feel hard to articulate, I’d like to try to tease them out, and address them directly rather than ignoring them.
At the same time, I don’t want to get bogged down in endless debates, or focus so much on criticism that we can’t actually move forward. I don’t expect total-consensus, so my goal for the unconference is to get multiple projects and social experiments running in parallel.
Some of those projects might be high-barrier-to-entry, for people who want to hold themselves to a particular standard. Others might be explicitly open to all, with radical inclusiveness part of their approach. Others might be weird experiments nobody had imagined yet.
In a few months, there’ll be a followup event to check in on how those projects are going, evaluate, and see what more things we can try or further refine.
[Edit: The Unconference has been completed. Notes from the conference are here]
Thanks to Duncan Sabien, Lauren Horne, Ben Hoffman and Davis Kingsley for comments
Everyone, could we please stop using the word "sociopath" to mean things other than... you know... sociopathy?
I also like the linked article and I believe it does a great job at describing social dynamic at subcultures. I shared that article many times. But while it is funny to use exaggerations for shocking value, making the exaggerated word a new normal is... I guess in obvious conflict with the goal of rationality and clear communication. Sometimes I don't even know how many people are actually aware that "trying to make profit from things you don't deeply care about" and "being diagnosed as a sociopath" are actually two different things.
To explain why I care about this, imagine a group that decides that it is cool to refer to "kissing someone for social reasons, not because you actually desire to", as "rape". Because, you know, there are some similarities; both are a kind of an intimate contact, etc. Okay, if you write an article describing the analogies, that's great, and you have a good point. It just becomes idiotic when the whole community decides to use "rape" in this sense, and then they keep talking like this: "Yesterday we visited Grandma. When we entered the house, she raped us, and then we raped her back. I really don't like it when old people keep raping me like this, but I don't want to create conflicts in the family. But maybe I am just making a mountain out of a molehill, and being raped is actually not a big deal." Followed by dozen replies using the same vocabulary.
First, this is completely unnecessarily burning your weirdness points. Weird jargon makes communication with outsiders more difficult, and makes it more difficult for outsiders to join the group, even if they would otherwise agree with the group's values. After this point, absurdity heuristics works against anything you say. Sometimes there is a good reason for using jargon (it can compress difficult concepts), but I believe in this case the benefits are not proportional to the costs.
More importantly, imagine that if talking like this would become the group norm, how difficult it would be to have a serious discussion about actual rape. Like, anytime someone would mention being actually raped by a grandparent as a child, there would be a guaranteed reaction from someone "yeah, yeah, happens to me when we visit Grandma every weekend, not a big deal". Or someone would express concern about possible rape at community weekend, and people would respond by making stickers "kisses okay" and "don't like kissing", believing they are addressing the issue properly.
I believe it would be really bad if rationalist community would lose the ability to talk about actual sociopathy rationally. Because one day this topic may become an important one, and we may be too busy calling everyone who sells Bayes T-shirts without having read the Sequences a "sociopath". But even if you disagree with me on the importance of this, I hope you can agree that using words like this is stupid. How about just calling it "exploiting"? As in: "some people are only exploiting the rationalist community to get money for their causes, or to get free work from us, without providing anything to our causes in return -- we seriously need to put stop to this". Could words like this get the message across, too?
Also, if you want to publicly address these people "hey guys, we suspect you are just using us for free resources; how about demonstrating some commitment to our causes first?", it will probably help to keep the discussion friendly, if you don't call them "sociopaths". Similarly, imagine LessWrong having an article saying (a) "vegans as a group benefit from the rationalist community, but don't contribute anything to the art of Bayes in return", or (b) "vegans are sociopaths". Regardless of whether you personally happen to be a vegan or not, this is obviously harmful.
tl;dr -- we are in the rationality business here, not in the clickbait business; talk accordingly
(EDIT: Just to be explicit about this, ignoring the terminology issue, I completely agree with the parent comment.)
Okay, so if I understand correctly, tthe objection is that 'sociopath' has a specific clinical definition, which nowadays is called Antisocial Personality Disorder. Then again, "moron", "idiot", "imbecile" and "retard" used to have specific clinical definitions, too.
But even if we allow that to be stretched a little into a colloquialism, someone who is incapable of human empathy, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and perhaps a bit sadistic.
The problem is that Rao and Chapman both want 'sociopath' to mean something broader... (read more)