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Jayson_Virissimo comments on State of the Solstice 2014 - LessWrong
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I too found this particularly jarring given the event was mostly cargo-culting Protestant Christian church services in the hope that it would allow the formation of a community similar in strength, but we don't yet know what it is about those institutions that allow them to form such communities.
Overall, the people were extremely welcoming and helpful (even more so than expected), but haven't quite figured out the whole "community" thing (something most people were honest about and seemed to be taking very seriously).
Trying to do community by being welcoming and helpful, does have it's sense of cargo-culting, but to me it's seems like a reasonable first try.
Er ... does it? I guess you can form community by deserting all the subjects on an island or something ...
edit: I just realized this sounds like I was trying to make a joke about cargo cultists living on islands, but what I actually meant was "well, how else would one form community, other than by being welcoming and helpful? I guess you could put a lot of people in a stressful situation together."
What would have been different if they had figured out the whole community thing?
Fewer people telling me about their deep depression (of course, maybe there is no difference between Bay Area rationalists and a typical Protestant congregation, but the rationalists are just more honest about it). Fewer people telling me about how they moved to the Bay Area to join a rationalist community, but that it doesn't really exist yet, so they are trying hard to create one.
This sounds to me like voluntarily divulging private information, which I tend to interpret as a strong indication that the divulger is inviting me into community with them.
Maybe unless the content of the depression talk along the lines of "I'm depressed there's no/not more community"?
As a first guess: couldn't it be the fact that they explicitly claim to put their community members in touch with cosmic, existential truths larger than their own lives and daily concerns?
The closest analogy I can think of is that it's like being part of an enormous LARP with millions of participants and thousands of years of history.
It could very well be that, yes.