Belief Chains

9 ShannonFriedman 15 November 2014 11:09AM

A belief is an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists.   As aspiring rationalists, we strive for our beliefs to be true, accurate, and minimally biased.     

You seldom see a single belief floating around.  Typically beliefs tend to group into clusters and chains.  In other words, if I believe that I am turning my thoughts into written words right now, that is not an isolated belief.  My belief chain might look something like this:

I have sight ->  The image coming into my eyes is of something that is metallic with bright lights and little boxes -> It is similar to things that have been called “computers” before -> I am wiggling my fingers to make patterns ->  this is called typing -> I am typing on a computer -> the words I am thinking are being translated into writing.    

Why does it matter whether I see my beliefs as chains or whether I simply look at the highest level belief such as “the words I am thinking are being translated into written word”?

It matters because at each link in the chain of belief, there is potential for falsehood to be introduced.  The further I am away from the source of my high-level belief, the less likely my high-level belief is to be accurate.   

Say for example that a three year old is typing on their toy computer that does not have the standard typing functionality of my computer.  They could still have the same logic chain that I used:

I have sight ->  The image coming into my eyes is of something that is metallic with bright lights and little boxes -> It is similar to things that have been called “computers”  before -> I am wiggling my fingers to make patterns ->  this is  called typing -> I am typing on a computer -> the words I am  thinking are being translated into writing.    

Belief chains can be corrupted in many ways.  Here are a few:

1.   Our intuitions tell us that the more interconnecting beliefs we have, and the more agreement between different beliefs, the more likely they are to be true, right?  We can check them against each other and use them as confirming evidence for one another.

These interconnections can come from the beliefs we have accumulated in our own minds, and also from trust relationships with other people.  We use interconnecting beliefs from other people just as we use interconnecting beliefs in our own minds.  While not good or bad in and of itself, the down side of this system of validation is how we fall victim to the various types of groupthink.  

This is easiest to talk about with a diagram.  In these diagrams, we are assuming that truth (yellow T circles) comes from a source at the bottom of the diagram. Beliefs not originating from truth are labeled with a (B).   As aspiring rationalists, truth is what we want.   

What is truth?

Truth is a description reflecting the underlying fundamental structure of reality. The reality does not change regardless of what perspective you are looking at it from. As an example, "I think therefore I am" is something most people agree is obviously a truth. Most people agree that the laws of physics, in some version, are truths.

What is a source of truth?

A source of truth is the bottom level of stuff that composes whatever you're talking about.  If you're programming, the data you're manipulating breaks down into binary 0s and 1s.  But in order to let you handle it faster and more intuitively, it's assembled into layers upon layers of abstracted superstructures, until you're typing nearly English-like code into a preexisting program, or drawing a digital picture with a tablet pen in a very analog-feeling way.  Working directly with the source all the time isn't a good idea - in fact, it's usually unfeasible - and most problems with a higher-level abstraction shouldn't be patched by going all the way down.  But if you utterly disconnect from the fact that computers are in binary under their GUIs, or that no compass and paper can create a genuinely equation-perfect circle, or that physics isn't genuinely Newtonian under the hood - you'll have nowhere to backtrack to if it turns out there was a wrong turn in your reasoning.  You won't be able to sanity-check if you tell yourself a long twisty story about human motivations and "shoulds" and then come up with an action to take on that basis.

Below is a diagram of a healthy chain of pure true belief originating from a source of truth.  

2.   Belief chains can get disconnected from the source of truth.   For example, say that there is a group which has based their philosophy on the understanding of a certain physicist.   Say that the physicist dies, and that the group continues with expanding on that same belief set, although they have not yet integrated one of the key links that the physicist had which connected the chain to a source of truth.  In this case, you can end up with a cluster of belief that looks something like this:

You now have a cluster of belief, that contains some truth, but is no longer linked to source of truth, and fills in the gaps with ungrounded propositions.  This is the sort of situation that leads to high levels of overconfidence, and what Alexander Pope referred to when he wrote:  “A little learning is a dangerous thing."

What does this metaphor look like in real world terms?

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The Anti-Placebo Effect

38 ShannonFriedman 28 September 2013 05:44AM

Just about everyone is familiar with the placebo effect at this point.  What I've discovered through my personal studies working with people suffering from anxiety and depression is that there is actually a significant related effect, which I have dubbed the anti-placebo effect.  

Google says: pla·ce·bo ef·fect 

noun

1.

a beneficial effect, produced by a placebo drug or treatment, that cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient's belief in that treatment.

I say: anti·pla·ce·bo ef·fect 

noun

1.

  1. a beneficial effect, produced by a treatment, that is not attributed to treatment itself or has stopped being noticed, and thus the patient does not believe in that treatment as effective.

Its easy to miss treatment working.  For example, as a kid grows up, its easy to miss how their vocabulary is growing, but for someone who doesn't seem them every day, it may be immediately obvious "my how they're talking more!"  In other words, an anti-placebo effect is what happens when someone is having an intervention that is causing their life to improve, but the person does not believe that they are improving.  

This effect is most common with people who suffer from depression, who have biases for sad [1] and otherwise negative stimuli compared to the general population, and is also true of people suffering from anxiety from my personal client tracking.  Its also important to note that this bias persists after the recovery of the depressive episode.

The reason that this is important is that those recovering from anxiety and depression have a tendency to believe that they are not doing as well as they are - due to this cognitive bias creating an anti-placebo effect for them, which results in their giving up too soon on interventions which are effective and thus not getting better and regressing to old unpleasant patterns.  

It has been interesting since tracking results of my own clients [2] - I have all of them track scores at the beginning of their sessions on the site moodscope.com at the beginning of their sessions, so that we can see their progress over time with a consistent bias of the time of tracking being start of session (as opposed to other random biases such as wanting to take the quiz when in an especially good or bad mood).  I also take extensive notes and track other metrics of progress.  

What I've found, is that many clients hit a point after a few weeks or months, where they are questioning if they have made any progress.  Because I take metrics to prepare for this, I am able to point my clients at their metrics, and say for example, that according to their self reports, their mood has increased by 50% and their productivity has doubled.  What typically happens when I review score + notes with the client in question is that once they look back at how things were before compared to how they are now, they realize that they actually have made progress, and this is often followed with additional forward progress.  

It is interesting to put this in perspective with the hedonic treadmill [3].  The hedonic treadmill is the supposed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.  What I'm finding with my studies is that it is often true for people recovering from depression when they take an overall evaluation (go meta), especially from a low point, but that when they look back at the factors that have changed, and they take the mood score test looking at different aspects of their experience on moodscope.com, they actually do have a more positive life experience when measured this way.  When I point out the inconsistency, people generally determine that the moodscope.com reported experience is more accurate (especially when supplemented by going over session notes) and over time, most clients do get off the hedonic treadmill and proceed to having the meta level catch up with moodscope.com.  

The good news about this for people suffering from anxiety and depression at large:  If you are aware of the negative cognitive bias and anti-placebo effect, you can take steps to account for and correct this bias.  One of the best ways to do this is by taking metrics along with notes that you can look at later.  When you look back, look at what your overall trend is, and try to focus on that more than if you happened to have a bad day or week.  If you have been progressing with a good linear regression, odds are that if you don't give up the new better patterns and habits you have created, they will continue to serve you. Although external factors to the one variable you are studying do complicate this and need to be taken into account.  

 

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2847035/

[2] http://www.depressiontoproductivity.com/your-clients-really-improve/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

 

Changing Systems is Different than Running Controlled Experiments - Don’t Choose How to Run Your Country That Way!

3 ShannonFriedman 11 June 2013 05:37AM

Trigger warning: Discussion of rape.

Example 1:

Say that each morning you tell yourself that you are lazy for not wanting to get out of bed to go to work, as a way to convince yourself to get up. Perhaps if the only variable you changed was to lower your level of guilt, you might not get out of bed to go to work, and would instead take the day off. So if you are running a motivation system that uses guilt, feeling guilt may well be something you do not want to get rid of. If you got rid of the guilt but stopped going to work, that would likely be a net negative for your life.

To contrast, with animal training, you reinforce behavior you want in the animal, and interrupt, redirect, or completely ignore (ie: no shaming or guilting) behavior you don't want. It's also a similar methodology that meditation uses. When you meditate, you are told to focus on a meditative object such as the breath. When your mind wanders from the meditative object, you are instructed to just return your attention to the meditative object, and to not in any way punish yourself for having wandered. Also, you are instructed to not punish yourself for punishing yourself for having your mind wander. Meditation does not use reward during the meditative process, although it's common to sound a beautiful chime which will give hedons at the end of a session, and people often perform a pleasant ritual before and/or after meditation that builds positive association with the activity of meditating. Example page of meditation instructions.

So, if you switch to a positive reinforcement motivational system, such as that which animal trainers use to train dogs, then guilt is counter-productive for motivation, because it is a form of punishment.

Example Summary:

If you only change one variable from a motivation system that uses guilt, then it may break the system, and be a net negative. However, there is likely a way to get a net utility gain by changing several variables of the system, such as by switching to a positive reinforcement based system where you add instant rewards that increase hedons and remove guilt and other punishments.

Example 2:

As it stands, there are many unreported rapes in American society. This excellent article debunks many myths about rape, including the classic myth that rapes are generally done by strangers using force:

A huge proportion of the women I know enough to talk with about it have survived an attempted or completed rape. None of them was raped by a stranger who attacked them from behind a bush, hid in the back of her car or any of the other scenarios that fit the social script of stranger rape. Anyone reading this post, in fact, is likely to know that six out of seven rapes are committed by someone the victim knows.

The author goes on to explain how most rapes are from repeat offenders who by a median age of 26.5, on average rape around 5-6 women each, and that it is almost always someone who was part of the woman's social circle, and intoxicants are usually used.

The suggestion of change of system that I got from this post is actually in the title of the blog: "Yes Means Yes."

If the social rules for consent are changed from "if a woman does not say no, then it may or may not be okay" to "it is only okay if a woman says yes," then the boundary becomes a lot more clear to both parties. It would be a pretty radical system change, that would make a lot of people uncomfortable.

To be more clear - with a "Yes Means Yes" system, you don't need to have "No Means No", because sex is only had when there is a Yes. If a woman is too drunk to say or enforce no, then she is also too drunk to say yes, and sex is not had unless there is explicit consent. Having a Yes Means Yes social policy would change the onus of responsibility for making sure that sex is consensual from the woman - who is obligated to say no if she doesn't want to - to both parties who must say yes to proceed. This would not stop all rape by any means, but if implemented in a system where people were taught good communication and assertiveness, it would cut down on it. For example, instead of feeling that it was her fault because she got drunk and didn't say no aggressively enough, a woman would realize quickly, "hey, I didn't say yes!" and a predatorial guy who was one of the small percentage of men who rape women would also realize that the woman would be less likely to just feel ashamed and keep quiet and would be more likely to take action to defend herself.

Perhaps some people would be afraid that they'd remain virgins for life in this system - some men might be afraid that they'd be too shy to ever ask, some women might not feel comfortable actually admitting that they want sex. And therefore, people of both genders might be resistant to switching systems because they would imagine the switch without a complete social system switch or training. And as it stands, perhaps a lot less sex would happen at first. A system like that would require retraining a lot of society to be more assertive.

Example Summary:

Just shifting one variable and telling men to say "I only have sex when women say yes" would be very weird. If a guy tried to implement that in the current system, some people might look at him like he was crazy or even get offended.

I think the "Yes Means Yes" system would work beautifully in a society that functioned based on a different system - where the social norm, which people were trained in, was to identify and state one's desires, and to not proceed without clarity. I do think it would cut down on rape, and unreported rape.

Overall Summary:

I've discovered that when talking to people about potential novel systems, that the most common response I get is for them to say why the alternative system won't work, based on what would happen if you changed one variable of the current system to be more like the novel system. Examples: "If I didn't feel guilty, I'd never get anything done," or "In a system where you always had to have a clear yes before having sex, people would feel really awkward and uncomfortable and opt out." (Alternatively I will often hear people justify alternative systems using similar arguments about single-variable changes.)

The examples above are a couple of the more simple examples of this general principle I've been observing quite a lot lately.

Consider how this applies to government systems, and other social systems. There are so many parts dependent on each other, that it is very hard to shift any single one without creating a domino effect of other shifts. So making any argument about how changing a single variable would fix or destroy a complex system like government is usually a huge oversimplification.

To quote Einstein:

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

My thoughts on making large-scale change, are that you need to be thinking large scale. If you want to be a change maker, it is best to start small in your actions, study and experiment a lot. Focus your studies on success and failure scenarios as close as possible to what it is you want to effect, while as diverse as possible from each other.

Running single-variable experiments is important - it is just that it is only how you understand a little corner of the problem to be solved - that's not how you find the solution itself to a problem involving a complex system.

To give a biological analogy: Cancer is what happens when a single type of cell tries to become the whole system. Running a single-variable controlled experiment to determine what type of complex system you want to choose is like trying to determine the optimal form of cancer, as opposed to looking at an entire entity. Life is complicated.

Programming the LW Study Hall

31 ShannonFriedman 15 March 2013 06:28PM

We've had considerable interest and uptake on the Less Wrong Study Hall, especially with informal timed Pomodoro sessions for everyone to synchronize on.  Working together with a number of other visible faces, and your own face visible to them, does seem effective.  Keeping the social chat to the 5 off minutes prevents this from turning into just another chatroom.

We've been using this Tinychat room, and implementing everything Pomodoro-related with manual typing.  Is there anyone out there who's interested in taking this to the next level with some custom code, possibly via the Google Hangouts API (Javascript), so we can have the following nice features?

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Co-Working Collaboration to Combat Akrasia

54 ShannonFriedman 09 March 2013 06:17PM

Before I was very involved in the Less Wrong community, I heard that Eliezer was looking for people to sit with him while he worked, to increase writing productivity. I knew that he was doing important work in the world, and figured that this was the sort of contribution to improving humanity that I would like to make, which was within the set of things that would be easy and enjoyable for me.

So I got a hold of him and offered to come and sit with him, and did that once/week for about a year. As anticipated, it worked marvelously. I found it easy to sit and not talk, just getting my own work done.  Eventually I became a beta reader for his "Bayes for Everyone Else" which is really great and helped me in my ability to estimate probabilities a ton. (Eliezer is still perfecting this work and has not yet released it, but you can find the older version here.)

In addition to learning the basics of Bayes from doing this, I also learned how powerful it is to have someone just to sit quietly with you to co-work on a regular schedule.

I’ve experimented with similar things since then, such as making skype dates with a friend to watch informational videos together. This worked for awhile until my friend got busy. I have two other recurring chat dates with friends to do dual n-back together, and those have worked quite well and are still going.

A client of mine, Mqrius, is working on his Master’s thesis and has found that the only way he has been able to overcome his akrasia so far is by co-working with a friend. Unfortunately, his friend does not have as much time to co-work as he’d like, so we decided to spend Mqrius’s counseling session today writing this Less Wrong post to see if we can help him and other people in the community who want to co-work over skype connect, since this will probably be much higher value to him as well as others with similar difficulties than the next best thing we could do with the time.

I encourage anyone who is interested in co-working, watching informational videos together, or any other social productivity experiments that can be done over skype or chat, to coordinate in the comments. For this to work best, I recommend being as specific as possible about the ideal co-working partner for you, in addition to noting if you are open to general co-working.

If you are specific, you are much more likely to succeed in finding a good co-working partner for you. While its possible you might screen someone out, its more likely that you will get the attention of your ideal co-working partner who otherwise would have glossed over your comment.

Here is my specific pitch for Mqrius:

If you are working on a thesis, especially if it’s related to nanotechnology like his thesis, and think that you are likely to be similarly motivated by co-working, please comment or contact him about setting up an initial skype trial run. His ideal scenario is to find 2-3 people to co-work with him for about 20 hours co-working/week time for him in total. He would like to find people who are dependable about showing up for appointments they have made and will create a recurring schedule with him at least until he gets his thesis done. He’d like to try an initial 4 hour co-working block as an experiment with interested parties.   Please comment below if you are interested.


[Mqrius and I have predictions going about whether or not he will actually get a co-working partner who is working on a nanotech paper out of this, if others want to post predictions in the comments, this is encouraged.  Its a good practice for reducing hindsight bias.]

[edit]

An virtual co-working space has been created and is currently live, discussion and link to the room here.

How to Deal with Depression - The Meta Layers

26 ShannonFriedman 26 October 2012 06:44PM

I wrote this for the Positive Vector website awhile back and lots of people have found it valuable, so I want to share it with the Less Wrong community as well.   I think this applies to most people - meta suffering thing is something I see everywhere, even though it is most prominent with people who have depression.   This is based on my experience with working with depressed people and with studying Buddhism, especially Big Mind.   Enjoy!

 

---

The roots of suffering are often deep.  But not all of the suffering happens at the root.  A lot of the suffering that people experience is “meta” suffering.  Meta suffering is when you suffer because you are distressed that you are suffering.  You are feeling depressed and hopeless, and there is a part of you that genuinely fears that it will never end.  That you will feel this way forever.  This fear of the suffering persisting can cause you much more suffering than whatever started your suffering.  And it can last much longer.  At some point days later, you might think to yourself about how terrible that initial suffering was, and feel fear and suffering about the possibility of it coming back.

Many people suffer as much or more from meta-suffering than suffering that comes from physical or situational sources!  

The good news is that meta suffering is much easier to fix than deeper forms of suffering.

One thing you can do is to collect data* in order to develop an accurate model of how often you actually feel bad.    Try monitoring your moods for awhile and get a baseline for what your moods actually are.  At least half of the people who have suffered from major depression who have done this and spoken with me about it have been surprised to find that they often feel better than their self-perception when they assess their mood at random points throughout the day.

Regardless of what your default mood state or range is, once you know what it is, you are likely to feel less fear.  You can look at what your mood historically does over time, and feel more confidence that this is what it will do in the future.  When you are in the state of despair and wondering if it will last forever, odds are that it won’t.

Another extremely powerful technique for dealing with meta-suffering is accepting that you are suffering.  The meta suffering is suffering because you really want to change your state and are not successful.  If you can just be with the state and not making yourself bad or wrong for being in that state, then all you have to deal with is the base state of suffering, which will be less intense and last less long than if you tack on that extra meta layer.

The ironic thing is that just by thinking that thought, if you are prone to depression, you will probably notice yourself meta suffering and then feel guilt or shame about it.  If this happens, my advice is to take it to the next level – feel compassion and acceptance for your meta-meta-suffering.

As you make this a practice, and feel acceptance and compassion for your suffering, you will feel more freedom from the meta level, and have more resources to work with the underlying suffering or depression.

Another common way in which meta suffering sabotages people with depression is for them to feel depression as soon as they start feeling good.  The story that some people have is that it is futile to think that they might feel so good in the future, and it is better not to get their hopes up and have them crushed.  I encourage the person with this meta suffering story to assure the meta suffering part that they do not have obligation to feel good in the future.  Feeling good in the present is of value, for however long it lasts, and that is worth appreciating and a good thing.

Desiring more pleasant states is great.  Working to create those states is fabulous.

Feeling guilt, shame, depression, or other suffering because of not liking your current state or projected future state does not contribute to your feeling better, and is something that is pretty purely good to release.  


* Example of a site to track depression levels over time.   

Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?

41 ShannonFriedman 16 August 2012 08:02PM

SUMMARYLet's collect people who want to work on for-profit companies that have significant positive impacts on many people's lives.

Google provides a huge service to the world - efficient search of a vast amount of data. I would really like to see more for-profit businesses like Google, especially in underserved areas like those explored by non-profits GiveWell, Singularity Institute and CFAR. GiveWell is a nonprofit that is both working toward making humanity better, and thinking about leverage. Instead of hacking away at one branch of the problem of effective charity by working on one avenue for helping people, they've taken it meta. They're providing a huge service by helping people choose non-profits to donate to that give the most bang for your buck, and they're giving the non-profits feedback on how they can improve. I would love to see more problems taken meta like that, where people invest in high leverage things.

Beyond these non-profits, I think there is a huge amount of low-hanging fruit for creating businesses that create a lot of good for humanity and make money. For-profit businesses that pay their employees and investors well have the advantage that they can entice very successful and comfortable people away from other jobs that are less beneficial to humanity. Unlike non-profits where people are often trying to scrape by, doing the good of their hearts, people doing for-profits can live easy lives with luxurious self care while improving the world at the same time.

It's all well and good to appeal to altruistic motives, but a lot more people can be mobilzed if they don't have to sacrifice their own comfort. I have learned a great deal about this from Jesse and Sharla at Rejuvenate. They train coaches and holistic practitioners in sales and marketing - enabling thousands of people to start businesses who are doing the sorts of things that advance their mission. They do this while also being multi-millionaires themselves, and maintaining a very comfortable lifestyle, taking the time for self-care and relaxation to recharge from long workdays.

Less Wrong is read by thousands of people, many of whom are brilliant and talented. In addition, Less Wrong readers include people who are interested in the future of the world and think about the big picture. They think about things like AI and the vast positive and negative consequences it could have. In general, they consider possibilities that are outside of their immediate sensory experience.

I've run into a lot of people in this community with some really cool, unique, and interesting ideas, for high-impact ways to improve the world. I've also run into a lot of talent in this community, and I have concluded that we have the resources to implement a lot of these same ideas.

Thus, I am opening up this post as a discussion for these possibilities. I believe that we can share and refine them on this blog, and that there are talented people who will execute them if we come up with something good. For instance, I have run into countless programmers who would love to be working on something more inspiring than what they're doing now. I've also personally talked to several smart organizational leader types, such as Jolly and Evelyn, who are interested in helping with and/or leading inspiring projects And that's only the people I've met personally; I know there are a lot more folks like that, and people with talents and resources that haven't even occurred to me, who are going to be reading this.


Topics to consider when examining an idea:

  • Tradeoffs between optimizing for good effects on the world v. making a profit.
  • Ways to improve both profitability and good effects on the world.
  • Timespan - projects for 3 months, 1 year, 5 years, 10+ years
  • Using resources efficiently (e.g. creating betting markets where a lot of people give opinions that they have enough confidence in to back with money, instead of having one individual trying to figure out probabilities)
  • Opportunities for uber-programmers who can do anything quickly (they are reading and you just might interest and inspire them)
  • Opportunities for newbies trying to get a foot in the door who will work for cheap
  • What people/resources do we have at our disposal now, and what can we do with that?
  • What people/resources are still needed?
  • If you think of something else, make a comment about it in the thread for that, and it might get added to this list.


An example idea from Reichart Von Wolfsheild:

A project to document the best advice we can muster into a single tome. It would inherently be something dynamic, that would grow and cover the topics important to humans that they normally seek refuge and comfort for in religion. A "bible" of sorts for the critical mind.

Before things like wikis, this was a difficult problem to take on. But, that has changed, and the best information we have available can in fact be filtered for, and simplified. The trick now, is to organize it in a way that helps humans. which is not how most information is organized.

Collaboration

  1. Please keep the mission in mind (let's have more for-profit companies working on goals that benefit people too!) when giving feedback. When you write a comment, consider whether it is contributing to that goal, or if it's counterproductive to motivation or idea-generation, and edit accordingly.
  2. Give feedback, the more specific the better. Negative feedback is valuable because it tells us where to concentrate further work. It can also be a motivation-killer; it feels like punishment, and not just for the specific item criticized, so be charitable about the motives and intelligence of others, and stay mindful of how much and how aggressively you dole critiques out. (Do give critiques, they're essential - just be gentle!) Also, distribute positive feedback for the opposite effect. More detail on giving the best possible feedback in this comment.
  3. Please point other people with resources such as business experience, intelligence, implementation skills, and funding capacity at this post. The more people with these resources who look at this and collaborate in the comments, the more likely it is for these ideas to get implemented. In addition to posting this to Less Wrong, I will be sending the link to a lot of friends with shrewd business skills, resources and talent, who might be interested in helping make projects happen, or possibly in finding people to work on their own projects since many of them are already working on projects to make the world better.
  4. Please provide feedback. If anything good happens in your life as a result of this post or discussion, please comment about it and/or give me feedback. It inspires people, and I have bets going that I'd like to win. Consider making bets of your own! It is also important to let me know if you are going to use the ideas, so that we don't end up with needless duplication and competition.

Finally: If this works right, there will be lots of information flying around. Check out the organization thread and the wiki.

Tips for Starting Group Houses

12 ShannonFriedman 16 July 2012 09:03PM

I've lived in several intentional communities and have been one of the creators of two that I've lived in. After recently securing Zendo, I wrote up some tips to a friend who is thinking about starting another Berkeley house, which Nisan pointed out might be valuable to share with the community at large, so here it is guys! These tips apply most to shared rental places, as opposed to bought property, although the stuff about vision applies to pretty much any joint venture that people embark on with shared leadership, such as group housing, event planning, and start-ups. The part about using padmapper.com and acting quickly applies a lot to Berkeley in particular, because the housing market in this city is especially messed up with rent control and thus finding good places is particularly difficult. We found our place over a month in advance of move in, and it was about $200-300 cheaper/room than similar places in the vicinity/class we were looking at that showed up during the same timeframe. Using these techniques is how we got it  I called within an hour of the posting thanks to being on email when I got the padmapper alert, set up an appointment to see the property manager right away, and while I was there in person, another person made her an offer of a downpayment on the spot. I'm pretty certain that its because of my pro-activeness and handing her a big stack of rental agreements and credit reports that we got this place rather than the several other interested parties. Many thanks to Kevin Fischer, Louie Helm, and Eliezer Yudkowsky for helping me with the rental search and acquisition information!

 

Tips:

  • Arrange meetings with people a week or two in advance over Doodle.com to find dates/times that work for large groups. You might not be able to accomodate everyone even doing that and might need to pick the day that the largest number of people can make it. You can do things like record calls or have people Skype in or do a conference line.
  • Get credit reports from everyone. There are services for free reports.  
  • Download the standard application form and have everyone fill it out, so that you can deliver both credit reports and applications on the spot when you go to check a place out.
  • Use padmapper.com to track the areas you're interested in. Contact places asap  good places will go in a single day sometimes.
  • Make sure your group has a unified vision about what they want. If one person wants a pretty place, and one person wants a cheap place, they will block each other and you won't ever reach consensus. Not having a unified vision, and not realizing this, is where the majority of would-be co-housing communities fail.  If there's something you want people to have as a house culture, make sure thats in agreement too. I personally requested that people be willing to chip in for a maid and hot tub and maintain a paleo 2.0 kitchen, and these things have all been adopted. Vision can include anything from over-arching life goals to never having dishes cluttering the sink. Explore what you really care about and make sure that everyone explicitly agrees to whatever goals are set and that no one is silently dissatisfied.

 

 

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