Dale McGowan writes:
In the past seven years or so, I’ve seen quite a few humanistic organizations from the inside — freethought groups, Ethical Societies, Congregations for Humanistic Judaism, UUs, etc. Met a lot of wonderful people working hard to make their groups succeed. All of the groups have different strengths, and all are struggling with One Big Problem: creating a genuine sense of community.
I’ve written before about community and the difficulty freethought groups generally have creating it. Some get closer than others, but it always seems to fall a bit short of the sense of community that churches so often create. And I don’t think it has a thing to do with God.
The question I hear more and more from freethought groups is, “How can we bring people in the door and keep them coming back?” The answer is to make our groups more humanistic — something churches, ironically, often do better than we do.
Now I’ve met an organization founded on freethought principles that seems to get humanistic community precisely right. It’s the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture [...], host of my seminar and talk last weekend, and the single most effective humanistic community I have ever seen.
So what do they have going for them? My top ten list:
I agree with ciphergoth that LW is inpenetrable to a newcomer. Even if they could penetrate, the whole downvoting thing is about as unwelcoming as you can get.
I can only conclude that LW is not meant to increase the number of rationalists, it's meant to get ideas on how to increase the number of rationalists.
I'm not sure I'd even go that far yet, but the site is young; with the right software we could eventually create a resource that was a little less impenetrable. If we end up having a sister wiki (an idea I argued against but am now coming around to) it would be good if it were easy to wikilink in comments, so you could say something like "one-box" in a comment and have it link to what we are referring to.