We received the following email, so figured I'd pass it along here. You can say you heard about it from Sam Bhagwat at Blueseed.

Could be free publicity (alert startupers!), but I make no claims as to quality or anything else.

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Subject: Improving the Portrayal of Nerds on TV

I came across your website while searching for math/science/tech-related groups and wanted to reach out to you. I'm currently casting a TV series about "the real life of nerds" for a major network. The network's initial casting idea was to find awkward+intelligent people with no social lives and to do the typical "reality TV thing" by engineering drama and conflict between them. My company ended up with the casting contract, so I'm trying to find a solid cast of real people to change the network's idea of making a project that feels like Jersey Shore (<-my words, not the network's).

I thought you might be willing to point me in the direction of one or two people in your network who would be interested in taking part in the pilot and, potentially, the full series (if the project gets a full greenlight). I think that there is potential here to create positive portrayals of "nerds" that are far different than their typical depictions in media.

If you have someone who meets most or all of the criteria below, please feel free to contact me, or to pass along my contact details to them.

Basics:
-18-26 years old, male or female
-Involved in the hard sciences (research or applications) or IT field
-Passionate about science, math, technology, research, or a related pursuit

The next few bullets are not requirements, but would be awesome to find:
-Anybody involved in hackerspaces/hardware hackers
-Aerospace/aeronautics background
-PhD or Masters research at a university
-Programmer involved at a small startup
-Security/IT fields (penetration testers, etc.)

Thanks very much for taking the time to read this email. Let me know if you have any questions or would like to discuss this further. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Stuart Inman
Executive Producer
No Title Entertainment
209.747.0688 c
Stuart@NoTitleEntertainment.com

As a working professional a couple of years out college, I’ve been noticing how interactions with my friends has changed since the beginning of college – and especially since graduation.

 In college, my social groups typically formed around groups with common meeting places -- freshman dorm, newspaper, church, “draw group” (essentially a group of friends that ‘draw’ into the same dorm).

Because there was a common space where everyone could hang out, everyone else felt comfortable just showing up (at least at designated times), and so there were always people to talk to. No-permission-required-meeting was a self-sustaining norm.

With jobs and schedules, we shift to a permission-required-meeting-situation – you don’t just show up at your friend’s house, we say “Hey, what’s a good time to meet up?”

This adds an additional barrier to meeting, and so that happen less often.

People usually realize this at some level, and employ a variety of ad-hoc strategies to counteract this. These are usually well-deployed in our professional lives, but in our personal lives, there are some complications, and usually room for improvement.

• Group meetings. There are 10 connections between five people, as opposed to one connection between two people. But generally – assuming people share fairly common schedules – it will take less than 10x initiative to get five people together as two

Disadvantage: Often most of our close friends don’t form groups. Only a small subset of mine does.  

• Non-face-to-face communication. Christmas cards are a time-honored way of doing this. E-mail, like mail, is a no-permission-required system. Every year, I send out a general Life Update email to my old and current friends and family. My friends and I more frequently email each other interesting links. When I read something cool online, I often think “who could I send this to?”

  Disadvantage: for most people, compared to face-to-face interaction, it’s not the same.

• Scheduling regular meetings: I live in CA and my girlfriend lives in NY, so for the last five months we have set aside 10am PST / 1pm EST to talk every weekday. For the last 8 months, I have met my friend Caleb* have weekly 1-to-2 hour meetings on Sunday mornings where we discuss how the last week went and make goals for the next week. We plan for every week, or day, and it happens 60-80% of the time.

 Disadvantage: The well-known “my schedule is too full to see you” is illuminated by analogy. In The Road to Serfdom (1944), economist FA Hayek discussed the politics of price and wage controls. These policies would shelter one particular group, he wrote, but at the risk of leaving everyone else out in the cold, and now slightly colder.[1]

Something similar happens with planning one’s schedule. Perhaps because I’m busy with the above and additional planned activities with my other friends, I don’t see my friend Christine* enough, and I rarely talk to my college friends Lina* and Maya* anymore

So Christine and I have decided to go running every Tuesday evening after work. Sure, I’ll be even more scheduled, and less likely to meet new, interesting people outside of my designated “meet new people” events.

But at least I’ll get some exercise.  

Commenters: really curious to hear additional tactics, improvements, or experiences!

*Names changed.

Background info: a splinter group, which broke off from the LDS ("Mormon") church ~100 years ago, refusing to give up polygamy, has been in the headlines over the last year; their leader was sentenced to life in prison for rape of teenage girls he took as plural wives.

Deseret News, Sex banned until Warren Jeffs' prison walls crumble, FLDS relatives say

"As the year comes to an end and the followers of Warren Jeffs await the apocalypse he has predicted, they're living under a challenging edict: they're forbidden to have sex until Jeffs is sprung from a Texas prison.

It's one of the strangest edicts in a season full of them. Jeffs has issued a stream of revelations, prophecies and orders to his congregation in the border community of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz.

The recent edicts from Jeffs' prison cell seem to be having two contradictory effects. Many are leaving the FLDS faith in disgust. Those who stay are reported to be increasingly devoted to a man who is serving a lifetime sentence for raping underage girls.

According to numerous critics and outside observers, the imprisoned FLDS leader has sometimes acted through his brother Lyle and other times has spoken directly to his congregation over the phone from prison. He recently banned many of the things his followers enjoy: bicycles, ATVs, trampolines, even children's toys. But the sex edict reaches into the bedrooms of all his devoted followers.

According to Holm, Jeffs declared all existing marriages to be void....."they have all been told that they are not to live as husband and wife"....Holm thinks about 100 members have left in recent weeks from the community of 10,000.

Eliezer, Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs

Why would a group belief become stronger after encountering crushing counterevidence?

In Festinger's classic "When Prophecy Fails", one of the cult members walked out the door immediately after the flying saucer failed to land.  Who gets fed up and leaves first?  An average cult member?  Or a relatively more skeptical member, who previously might have been acting as a voice of moderation, a brake on the more fanatic members?

After the members with the highest kinetic energy escape, the remaining discussions will be between the extreme fanatics on one end and the slightly less extreme fanatics on the other end, with the group consensus somewhere in the "middle".

This doesn't simply seem to be a case of a new weighted average after some skeptics are gone (only 1% of FLDS have left). There are other dynamics going on among those remaining.

The image that comes to my mind is a lot of points scattered along a skepticism/fanaticism axis, and a repelling magnet placed on that line. This magnet pushes the already-skeptical values into greater skepticism (and out) and pushing the more fanatical members into greater fanaticism. How well does that actually represent what's going on? Not sure.

Related to: Politics is the Mind-Killer

Both sides seem to have a stake in the current budget supercommittee failing. Why?

The NYTimes reports:

Intrade, the political futures market, currently puts the odds at just under three to one in favor of both a Republican takeover of the Senate and retention of the House — 74.4 to 21.5 for the Senate, 72.2 to 28 for the House.

According to an ABC poll, a majority of Americans, by a margin of 55 to 37, believe that the Republican nominee will be victorious. Republican voters are overwhelmingly optimistic about their chances for the White House, 83-13. Democrats, by the far smaller margin of 58-33 percent, think President Obama will win re-election. Independents, by a 54-36 margin, believe that the Republicans will take the presidency.

The chance of all three contests going the Republicans’ way is less than 50-50, but if they do, the payoff would be huge.*

As a top Republican Congressional aide put it in a interview about the supercommittee’s deliberations, “Winning the trifecta — House, Senate and White House — in 2012 is a game changer. We would be in the driver’s seat.”

In this scenario, Republicans in the 113th Congress would swiftly enact a version of the budget proposal put forward by Paul Ryan....

Capitalizing on collapse is not the exclusive terrain of the right. There are some on the left who believe that simply taking no action whatsoever before this year’s November 23 and December 23 deadlines will force the expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2012. The expiration of these cuts will produce an estimated $3.8 trillion in new revenue between 2013 and 2022 – enough to maintain many of the key safety net programs with relatively minor tinkering.

Of course, this strategy depends either on a Democratic chief executive to veto Republican legislation extending the Bush cuts or on the less likely event of Democratic retention of the Senate or a takeover of the House.

In other words, the Republicans believe they can achieve complete victory so that they can enact their whole agenda, while Democrats believe they can block this victory.

On a key component — Obama's re-election — Republicans believe they will defeat Obama with 1:6 odds, while Democrats believe this event has only 3:2 odds.**

With a 9-fold difference in this key perception, it seems highly unlikely the two will reach a compromise.

* Not necessarily true — you can't just multiply 74%*72%*83% as these events have high positive correlations.

** Yes, perhaps the people in power have different perceptions than the rank-and-file electorate — but they still must win their base's support to gain re-election.

Includes the Kahneman anecdote.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/opinion/brooks-the-planning-fallacy.html?hp

This is a repeated theme by Brooks -- his book The Social Animal gives an engaging overview of much of the recent literature in psychology, including a lot of the stuff we discuss here.

I've recently posted several articles in my "Building Rationalist Communities" series. Some, like "Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don't Implement Themselves" have been fairly popular, as measured by upvotes; others, like Community Roles less so.

But here is a small problem: I can see my net upvotes versus downvotes, but I can't see the numbers of each. Normally this is probably not much of a problem. But this series has been relatively controversial, and I would like to personally distinguish disagreement (high upvotes and high downvotes), from disinterest (low upvotes and low downvotes).

At least for my personal satisfaction and curiosity if nothing else, is there any way to see the absolute numbers? 

Related to: Designing Rationalist Projects, Committees and Leadership

As I mentioned in the above posts, Latter-day Saints communities organize committees to accomplish specific tasks, like serving the outside community or making sure new members get friends.

The question is, what tasks should rationalist communities organize committees or assign individuals to accomplish?

The easy answer: whatever its members want. But there are some collective roles and activities which are better for community-building than others.

Consider the following jury-rigged contraption, which I'll call Bhagwat’s community-building ratio:

• group project goodness = U(project) / E(social friction),

that is, task goodness equals task utility divided by the expected amount of resulting social friction. For example:

Learning PUA:

• U(task): medium. Many LW-goers do express a desire to improve social skills.
• E(social friction): high. This seems to alienate many (most?), though not all, women. And LW meetups need more women, both to function better now and because it would facilitate future meme propagation.

Rejection therapy:

• U(task): medium-to-high. This also helps to improve social skiils, especially assertiveness. More simple and widely applicable than PUA; easy to do without a mentor.
• E(social friction): low. This is a multi-gender activity.

So rejection therapy would likely make a better group task then PUA.

What are the most high-utility, low-social-friction tasks?

The lowest-hanging fruit I know of is to make people feel welcome.[1]

Whenever someone comes to the group for the first time, the group leader should make sure to meet them personally and make them feel welcome. They should get their contact info and afterwards send them a brief e-mail/text, sincerely thanking them for coming.

As people are starting to come for the first few weeks, the group leader should get to know them personally and understand what they’re looking for and why they came. Maybe there’s a particular book or Less Wrong sequence they would like. Maybe they’re trying to improve some skills and would appreciate follow-up. Maybe there’s some skill they know that other Less Wrongians want to learn – and they could teach them!

If you’re able to personalize their experience, you will improve your score on Bhagwat’s Law of Commitment: “The degree to which people identify with your group is directly proportional to the amount of stuff you tell them to do that works."

This task is fairly delegatable. The main requirement is good social skills – you need to be able to have a reasonable conversation with anyone, and the ability to express gratitude sincerely. Otherwise, people might come off as insincere or weird, and that would create social friction.

What are the benefits?

The first three church units I served in were mediocre at befriending new attendees and integrating new members; the last church unit was excellent. Around seventy percent more people joined this last church unit; and of those who joined, retention rates were around 80 to 90 percent, compared to 50 percent elsewhere.

Small Mini-groups

As Less Wrong meetup membership in a given area becomes reasonably dense, and meeting size expands, subgroups can form around common interests.

An Improving Social Skills group. Or an Actually Learning in College group. Or a startup where a bunch of LW people work together…wait, somebody is already doing that.

Mini-meetings would also be good for introducing people to the Less Wrong community. People coming for the first time are generally more comfortable in smaller environments. Latter-day Saint churches with 50-100 weekly attendance grow three or four times faster than churches with 200+ weekly attendance, according to a statistic I read somewhere and can't track down.

There’s a final benefit to having clearly-defined roles held by community members.

All groups, as they evolve, give individuals distinct roles. Class clown, teacher’s pet, whatever. If these roles are positive, people’s identification with and commitment to the group will increase. They will know that the group needs them.

Most people in Latter-day Saint communities have specific, definite roles because of their calling – perhaps they are teaching a class every Sunday, or are responsible to visit a particularly troubled family. This is an unambiguous way to tell them, “We need you.”

The same could be true in rationalist communities.

Related to: Building rationalist communities, Lessons from Latter-day Saints, Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don't Implement Themselves, Designing rationalist projects, Community roles: teachers and auxiliaries, Committees and Leadership 

In the previous posts, I listed the main roles in Latter-day Saint communities. In this post and one to follow, I will outline possible roles and implications for rationalist communities.

I previously mentioned the issue of teacher selections: the balance between selecting the more natural teachers and giving the less outgoing and articulate contingent a chance.

The latter is important, because it’s a route to long-term skill development for all members.[1] But, like most investments, it requires long time horizons. It’s not viable to invest in developing talent if your embryonic talent is going to pack up and leave.

So how do you establish a long time horizon? How do you create a norm, an expectation, a common practice of sticking around in the group?

Unsurprisingly, this takes time to develop.

Reducing Turnover

Wherever the church is newly established, growth is fast, but turnover is high. This is caused (at least, immediately caused) by higher levels of infighting and quarreling. A commonly-told story is of an early church leader named Thomas B. Marsh dissatisfied over increased militarization and hostilities against neighbors. As a result, he signed an affidavit which helped trigger the forcible expulsion of Mormons from the state of Missouri.

I’ll repeat that: where the church is new, growth is fast, but turnover is high.

Many of the church members in India were in their late teens or early 20’s, looking for more direction in life. We were glad they joined, but there was a problem. The stability of the church organization in India was inversely proportional to the proportion of church members who were young, single adults.

One set of problems stemmed from romances gone awry, unwanted male attention, and resulting gossip. Another set of problems stemmed from simple unreliability – they often wouldn’t take their organizational responsibilities seriously, or wouldn’t prepare for classes they were supposed to teach.[2] And they generally weren’t as useful in teaching other members, because they weren’t as mature.

Of course families got in disagreements and quarrels too. But I certainly heard less about those.

Raise the Age Demographic

A commonly-cited Less Wrong norm is to raise the sanity waterline. I propose a new norm: raise the age demographic.

Functionally, parenthood encourages long-time-horizon thinking, and stabilizes one's self-defined identity as a member of group X. This is especially true in memes that require you to perform actively organizational tasks.

First, marriage. Consider Mormonism, and remember the lay clergy and everyone-has-a-role norms. A big problem for the church in India was gender imbalance – there were too many guys and so they would marry girls who weren’t in the church. Then when they had to choose between spending time at church or helping to run the church, and spending time with their wife, they chose the latter.

This is true for other time-intensive memetic groups – I picked up some Amway promotional materials once and noticed that most of featured people were married couples. (And yes, I do think Amway is Dark Side-ish.)

Second, children. It’s one of the standard stories – a couple isn’t really religious, but they have a kid and think their children needs religion so they start going to church. What are they looking for? An identity; a set of moral guidelines for their children.

Less Wrong needs to move into this market space.

Right now, the median demographic of Less Wrongians is a teenage to mid-20s, unmarried, male; it’s a group that includes me. But a good way to find long-term committed people and reduce turnover is to reach out to a slightly older demographic – parents with children.[3]

In the church, sure, the Young Women’s organization exists for the teenager girls; and the Primary organization exists for the smaller children. But the adults involved in each organization, and the parents of the children, are tied more closely into the church community. Each of them receives a (another) definite, concrete reason to come to church each Sunday.

In a rationalist parenting club, the children running around would provide a constant reminder and justification for the group’s existence.

I'm writing my next post and am trying to quote a post Patri Friedman, username patrissimo, wrote a while ago about how he gave up dreams of violent revolution when his son was born. 

I remember reading this post, but cannot now find it. Does anyone know where this post is, and if so, could you link it?

(Yes, I searched his LJ).

Thanks!

Related to: Building rationalist communities, Lessons from Latter-day Saints, Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don't Implement Themselves, Designing rationalist projects, Community roles: teachers and auxiliaries.

The ultimate question I’m trying to answer is: what should be the roles in a rationalist community?           

In the previous post and this one, I outline the roles in Latter-day Saint communities along with some implications for rationalist communities. In the following posts, I will elaborate the analysis of implications.

Good sets of rules resemble programs; once developed, they can be made to run everywhere, with local modifications.[1]

Overview

In the previous post, I discussed the role of teachers and auxiliaries. Teachers are the ones who speak, teach and lead discussions in Sunday church meetings. Auxiliaries are responsible for ensuring the well-being of the various segments of the congregation – men, women, and children.

In this post, I will discuss committees and leadership.

Committees are in charge of specific important tasks – planning activities, giving service, and so on. The general leadership appoints people to each of the positions, provides personal counseling, and plans the curriculum.

In smaller groups, the leaders and more-committed members often wear multiple hats.