Any community which ever adds new people will need to either routinely teach the new and (to established members) blindingly obvious information to those who genuinely haven’t heard it before, or accept that over time community members will only know the simplest basics by accident of osmosis or selection bias. There isn’t another way out of that. You don’t get to stop doing it. If you have a vibrant and popular group full of people really interested in the subject of the group, and you run it for ten years straight, you will still sometimes run across people who have only fuzzy and incorrect ideas about the subject unless you are making an active effort to make Something Which Is Not That happen.

Or in other words; I have run into people at Effective Altruism meetups who were aghast at the idea of putting a dollar price on a human life, people at LessWrong meetups who did not know what Bayes Theorem was, and people at Magic: The Gathering meetups who thought the old lands tapped for two mana. (Because, you see, new lands don’t have a “T: Add [Mana Symbol] to your mana pool” ability, maybe the cards that do say that do something extra when you tap them?) Laughter and incredulity can come across as insulting and push people away. Instead, consider how to make sure the information you care about transmitting is regularly conveyed.

It can happen to you!

I.

As I understand it, the standard Jewish Synagogue service includes a reading from the Five Books Of Moses such that at the end of a year the books have been read in their entirety. Anyone attending every week for a year will have at least heard all of those words once, and if someone has been around for a couple of years it’s a reasonable assumption that if they missed a week here or a week there, they’d have heard it the next year. You can’t go to synagogue for years and accidentally not know about the slavery in Egypt.

I’m not Jewish, so my synagogue knowledge is mostly second hand. I was raised Christian, and while my family branch of Protestantism doesn’t have such an organized sequence as the Five Books Of Moses I can confirm that it would have been practically impossible to somehow attend three months of church services and not have been told Jesus loved you. If you skipped a week, that’s fine, it came up in other sermons too. If you zoned out at that bit, the first thing I remember being told about writing sermons was to repeat things about three times at different points in the speech. If you showed up with earplugs in, it was written in the program and sometimes in bright colours on the walls. 

I have on occasion been tempted to put that kind of redundant and overlapping effort into making people aware of such rationalist lessons such as “Zero And One Are Not Probabilities” or “Your Enemies Are Not Innately Evil.”

Linear education systems play by an entirely different set of rules. A standard American student will go through first grade, second grade, third grade, and so on up to the end of high school. Many will then go to university, and the university can assume that new students already know how to write essays and do algebra. 

(Though they can’t safely assume this is true of every student! There was a college professor at my dinner table growing up, and I overheard complaints about how college freshmen were unable to do things such as, without loss of generality, reliably remember the difference between “their” or “there” in a written essay.)

Society as a whole does not get to make this assumption. The overt purpose of the entire education edifice is to deal with the fact that civilization has a constant influx of people who don’t know how the government works, how written language works, or how we wound up with this language or government in the first place. People understand that you can’t just assume a newborn child will know what skills they need and what norms they should follow. 

We talk about Eternal September, that point in time when new people started arriving on the internet faster than the existing users could acculturate them. It makes sense; adult society usually outnumbers its children decisively. Still at a certain point you have to realize that the incoming tide is not going to stop, and get down to the practical job of getting people to know what you want them to know.

II.

There’s a Scott Alexander post titled “Against Interminable Arguments.” In it, he points out that some communities can wind up having the same arguments again and again, and mentions that newcomers are a common source of this problem.

First, the influx of newbies is a big driver of this dynamic. Newbies are less likely to know the relevant arguments, won’t be bored of them yet, won’t want to steer clear of them, and may mistake somebody’s unwillingness to engage for the 9000th time as unwillingness to engage at all. People should be more tolerant of newbies, and newbies should be more tolerant of “look in the archives for the last time we discussed this issue, but seriously, don’t start up about this again”. This is what I think social justice people mean when they talk about “this is not a 101 space”.

The rationalist version of “this is not a 101 space” is probably “read the sequences” but I don’t exactly blame people for not taking us up on that suggestion. The ebook of Rationality From AI To Zombies is about two thousand pages, and that’s the smaller version of the sequences. The Sequences Highlights is a very useful document: It’s the size of a small book. When I’m suggesting the sequences, I usually point to the highlights these days and say if someone finds them useful or enjoyable that they should look up AI to Zombies.

Still, “go away and read a book in the corner” isn’t a great answer to give in the middle of a conversation, and it isn’t actually common knowledge. The analogy to a religious community is actually pretty spot on; it’s unwise to assume someone at church has read the whole bible. You can maybe assume they’ve read the Gospels, which are (abbreviating heavily) the subunit of the bible that talks about the life of Jesus, but you’ll be wrong a lot if you do. You have to put some actual effort into it to be confident people around you have read the thing the group is supposedly about. 

And that’s just talking about reading something once. I read the U.S. Constitution once, but I don’t actually remember all of it. That’s the foundational text of the government which I’ve lived under my entire life, I got tested on it multiple times in school, I wind up searching through it for particular lines about every other year because of one argument or another, and I still can’t tell you right now which details about the House and Senate are in the Constitution vs being in later rules. I remember the first five amendments, plus the thirteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth. That’s kind of embarrassing given that I once recited the first three chapters of Ender’s Game verbatim from memory. 

In hindsight, it’s kind of obvious why. I reread Ender’s Game a lot more than I reread the Constitution. The educational system was trying to get me to remember the basics of the Constitution, but it wasn’t especially good at it.

III.

Some would say that you get about five words.

I think that’s the wrong way to look at the problem. You, as a singular human being, probably don’t need to coordinate a vast and indistinct crowd of thousands. For getting along it’s sometimes enough to coordinate a hundred or so people. That doesn’t happen automatically, but it happens a lot more often if someone actually tries.

Newcomers are going to keep arriving. Especially if you run any kind of community, whether it’s an online forum or a board gaming group, you probably don’t want to slam the gates shut and bar the doors. That means you fundamentally have two options.

You can give up on having common knowledge apart from whatever the ambient society manages to impart.

Or you can try and make sure the common knowledge is imparted somehow.

Go back to the Scott Alexander quote and the phrase “this is not a 101 space.” If you find yourself wanting to say some variation of that phrase, ask yourself where the 101 space actually is. If the answer is “idk man, but not here” or “go google it and teach yourself” then you run a very real risk of people teaching themselves something wildly different than what you intended.

Apocryphal story which I nevertheless believe: someone got told “educate yourself” at a queer community space, obediently went and googled their question, and landed in a bunch of far right wing websites due to how the question was worded. Imagine someone asking a well meaning question on LessWrong, and getting pointed to Google only to wind up on RationalWiki. There’s always a 101 space somewhere, and if you don’t take care where that space is you may find you don’t like where it winds up.

I’m not saying that you, yes you in particular, need to create and maintain that space. The problem of being outnumbered in a deluge of Eternal September doesn’t go away just because we want it to. But if you or someone you like doesn’t maintain that space, it will probably wind up somewhere you don’t like. 

This is why I spend a lot of time trying to solidify the on-ramps and the explanations of the basics, and go out of my way to be welcoming to newcomers with only a vague and fuzzy idea of what a group is about. I want somebody to do it, and not enough people are. The AI Safety Quest people are one of many examples of putting active effort into maintaining an on-ramp, but they aren't the only ones.

To everyone who takes the time to explain the basics, you have my gratitude.