How does befriending the neighbors, rationalist or not, fit on this scale? This reduces monoculture, opening everyone in the neighborhood to more perspectives. It saves time planning, too. You just go around the neighborhood and see what happens. Maybe you do scoping out beforehand to find a good place to live. That could take a while, but sounds like a lot less work than designing an intentional community.
Whether some of your desiderata are fulfilled depends a lot on trust. Kids can hang out at neighbors' houses, if the neighbors are trustworthy. There may or may not be missing stairs -- it's a lot harder to filter beforehand, but on the flip side, maybe it's easier to filter once you get there, because you're not so pressured to relate to neighbors. Proximity is an issue, though.
Some of these desiderata seem hard to get fully with the "just go into a neighborhood" solution. People might have each other over for dinner, but it's not the same as just pooling a bunch of food.
Like any strategy, befriending neighbors still carries the risk, which many have discussed so far, of hanging around people who want to exploit you. Does mingling with the neighborhood expose you to exploiters more than hanging around in a community? One reason to expect it might is that people in the neighborhood are more likely to just have different morals than you. On the other hand, a predator could more easily target a monoculture because one tactic is more likely to work on all of them. Also, a predator sounds much more devastating to a close-knit community than a loose-knit neighborhood.
How does befriending the neighbors, rationalist or not, fit on this scale? This reduces monoculture, opening everyone in the neighborhood to more perspectives. It saves time planning, too. You just go around the neighborhood and see what happens. Maybe you do scoping out beforehand to find a good place to live. That could take a while, but sounds like a lot less work than designing an intentional community.
Whether some of your desiderata are fulfilled depends a lot on trust. Kids can hang out at neighbors' houses, if the neighbors are trustworthy. There may or may not be missing stairs -- it's a lot harder to filter beforehand, but on the flip side, maybe it's easier to filter once you get there, because you're not so pressured to relate to neighbors. Proximity is an issue, though.
Some of these desiderata seem hard to get fully with the "just go into a neighborhood" solution. People might have each other over for dinner, but it's not the same as just pooling a bunch of food.
Like any strategy, befriending neighbors still carries the risk, which many have discussed so far, of hanging around people who want to exploit you. Does mingling with the neighborhood expose you to exploiters more than hanging around in a community? One reason to expect it might is that people in the neighborhood are more likely to just have different morals than you. On the other hand, a predator could more easily target a monoculture because one tactic is more likely to work on all of them. Also, a predator sounds much more devastating to a close-knit community than a loose-knit neighborhood.