[anonymous]'s sketchpad

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I decided to quit my job.

Still have various options for what to do next, but most likely I will spend at least a year trying to build a large rationality community in Amsterdam. I'm talking 5+ events a week, a dedicated space, membership program, website, retreats, etc.

The emphasis will be on developing applied rationality. My approach will be to cover many different paradigms of self-improvement. My hunch is that one will start noticing patterns that these paradigms have in common.

I'm thinking authentic relating, radical honesty, CFAR-style applied rationality, shadow work, yoga/meditation, psychedelic therapy, street epistemology, tantra, body work, nonviolent communication, etc. If you know anything that would fit in this list, please comment!

This would be one pillar of the organisation, and the other one would be explicitly teaching an Effective Altruist ethos to justify working on rationality in the first place.

If this goes really well, I'm hoping this will develop into something like "the CFAR of Europe" at some point.

I think it is worth someone pursuing this project, but maybe it'd make more sense to pursue it under the post-rationality brand instead? Then again, this might reduce the amount of criticism from rationality folk in exchange for increasing Viliam's worries.

(The main issue I have with many post-rationalists is that they pay too little heed to Ken Wilbur's pre/trans fallacy).

6[anonymous]5y

It doesn't, but I tend to go with the assumption that if one person voices an objection, there are 100 more with the same objection that don't voice it I put this on my to do list, might take a few weeks to come back to it, but I will come back to it

4Viliam5y

Yep, I was going to write something similar to what Duncan did. Some topics seem so strongly connected with irrationality, that if you mention them, it will almost inevitably attract people already interested in that topic including the irrational parts, and those people will be coordinated about the irrational parts. While you will be pushing in the direction of rationality, they will be actively pushing in different directions, how sure you are to win all these battles? I assume that creating a community that is 50% rational and 50% mystical would not make you happy. Maybe not even 80% rational and 20% mystical. One of my pet peeves about the current rationalist community is what seems to me as quite uncritical approval of Buddhism. Especially when contrasted to our utter dismissal of Christianity, which only makes a contrarian exception for Chesterton. (I imagine that Chesterton himself might ask us whether we are literally atheists, or merely anti-Christians.) I am not saying that people here are buying Buddhism hook, line, and sinker; but they are strongly privileging a lot of stuff that comes from it. Like, you can introduce a concept from Buddhism, and people will write articles about how that actually matches our latest congnitive science or some kind of therapy. Do the same with a concept from Christianity, and you will get some strongly worded reprimand about how dangerous it is to directly import concepts from a poisonous memeplex, unless you carefully rederive it from the first principles, in which case it is unlikely to be 100% the same, and it is better to use a different word to express it. I will end my rant here, just saying that your plans sounds to me like the same thing might happen with Buddhism and Hinduism and New Age and whatever at the same time, so I would predict that you will lose some of the battles. And ironically, you may lose some potential rationalists, as they will observe you losing these battles (or at least not winning them con

[anonymous]'s sketchpad

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[anonymous]'s sketchpad

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