Fellow Hufflepuff / startupper / business getting-stuff-done-er / CFAR / Bay-arean here. Can we talk about the elephant in the room?
Everyone, could we please stop using the word "sociopath" to mean things other than... you know... sociopathy?
I also like the linked article and I believe it does a great job at describing social dynamic at subcultures. I shared that article many times. But while it is funny to use exaggerations for shocking value, making the exaggerated word a new normal is... I guess in obvious conflict with the goal of rationality and clear communication. Sometimes I don't even know how many people are actually aware that "trying to make profit from things you don't deeply care about" and "being diagnosed as a sociopath" are actually two different things.
To explain why I care about this, imagine a group that decides that it is cool to refer to "kissing someone for social reasons, not because you actually desire to", as "rape". Because, you know, there are some similarities; both are a kind of an intimate contact, etc. Okay, if you write an article describing the analogies, that's great, and you have a good point. It just becomes idiotic when the whole community decides to use "rape" in this sense, and then they keep talking like this: &...
This is an empirical statement, which should be either confirmed or disconfirmed by observing reality, not established by changing the vocabulary.
As far as I know, sociopaths by the clinical definition make about 1-4% of population. Those who don't have above-average intelligence probably quickly end up in prison. Therefore the smart sociopaths make maybe 0.1% of the population... I am not going to argue about the exact number here, just saying that it is a small number, therefore any definition of "winning" that applies to a large fraction of population must, for mathematical reasons, also include people who are not clinical sociopaths. Now the rest of this debate depends on how narrowly you would define "winning".
(I'm not sure which part of this is "armchair-theorizing-sociology piece", so let me share impressions:
If you see none of these, I am happy for you. )
I think it is really important to note that "sociopath" in the article does not necessarily mean literal-sociopath (and while I think it was useful-ish as a rhetorical trick to make the article stand out more, I don't think it's a good idea to discuss the problem in real, practical detail while continuing to use the sociopath label)
Sociopath here means "someone who's trying to extract resources from the community, who doesn't actually care about the community's core value/creations." (Or, "cares more about extracting resources than they do about the original value, enough so that they start subverting that value.")
(I understand it is fraught - will try not to make it more so. The word 'sociopath' itself is OK by me, I might have not used it before in any context, so I probably 'get' fewer connotations than you do.)
I come from a circle of environmentalists, most of whom used to study in the same college. We gathered around a zoologist who had been passionate about it since childhood (now he 'wears a suit for nature' - coordinates surveys of rare biota, etc.); he was at first our formal leader and he taught us the legislature. A rare kind of man, who doesn't give up and who wants to be friends with his helpers - to know them as people. I would say he's a pure geek, and a very charismatic one at that. He invited us to share his hobby, but very few of us could match his sheer input. He used us - mostly to compose & mail letters, which sometimes took hours (and enough money to be a drag on a student's pocket), but also for various odd jobs, and we went happily, because it served a purpose and doing it with him was a privilege.
...Our informal leader was another guy, who picked up the slack in botany, poaching prevention, protesting development of sites of local historical significance, learnin...
I can trace an arc, over the past ten years, of my attitude towards communities:
I never found a solution for how to get people to invite me to things. I think the problem is that I personally am really picky about the sorts of events I enjoy (ie, I don't like drinking or sports), so if I want to have an event that I will enjoy I have to make it myself.
But I did find a solution for how to have good events: make sure that all the people that I invite to my event are people who specifically want to do that event. Don't invite people because &...
I think that almost everyone vastly underestimates the importance of friends, and especially the importance of a few close friends. In terms of not being lonely, of having good times and good events, or even of having a good time at the events that the community organizes, a few close friends are the key. I started enjoying group events far more when I realized that there is no need to try and 'make the rounds' of the 20-100 people there - find the handful that interest you tonight, and spend the night with them.
Raemon's response is key too, though. Communities are still super important because they provide anchors around which things can be organized, friends can coordinate and new friends can be found. What you do not want is for smaller groups to be only friendships and withdraw from their communities, or for some outside community to steal the best community members, because then the original community stops drawing in new people (or stop drawing in good new people) and slowly dies.
A great question, and one I hope is asked at the conference, is "how do we encourage more formation of close friendships?"
I'll be making sure there are notes from the Berkeley unconference. If you're interested in doing something vaguely-similar in your own neck of the woods, I recommend commenting here to see if others are interested (and/or reaching out through whatever your usual community-channels are).
My past experience is it hasn't been been worth it to arrange skyping in for this sort of event, but I think it'd be worth collaborating on ideas beforehand and sharing notes afterwards between people in different geographic locations.
One of the skills to talk about would be the skill of actively proselytizing and getting people into rationality. I don't mean onboarding people who are already interested, I mean actually going up to people who you wish were rationalists and trying to make them.
Successful communities do this, although the specifics vary widely. EA does it, which I think is why EA is growing while LW isn't. We've been largely coasting on Eliezer's wave.
Thus is difficult because LW rationality arose in the tech culture of California, I.e. an unusually individualistic culture within an unusually individualistic part of the most individualistic country ever. Only in California could one be called a "cult" for seeking a consensus philosophy. Any active proselytizing would definitely encounter the "cult" charge again.
But proselytizing works. It keeps a movement young - we're already noticably older on average than we were ten years ago and we're starting to look like a cohort of tech nerds who were in their impressionable college age when Eliezer wrote the sequences. And it keeps a movement dynamic - if new people are coming in all the time, you don't have to suffer the ossification that it takes to retain people as they get older. LW rationality has no less need of this than other movements.
And there are definitely people who are much better at it than others, so a systematic study of what works is eminently doable. I think this fits squarely into Project Hufflepuff.
Personally, I think cohorts happen automatically, and LW is "yet another cohort" and if we want to be part of a movement with inter-generational significance then maybe we should pause to consider why we think we should be "the first generation" in a movement that lasts forever...
In this vein, I appreciate previous places and groups like:
If I was going to name the entire thing, I think I might call it "Outsider Science" (taking a cue from "Outsider Art" and contrasting it with "Vannevarian Science").
So if you wanted to be ...
I actually think it's important for a given project to have a fairly narrow focus in order to make progress, and I see Project Hufflepuff as related to outreach, but not directly about outreach. (I also don't think proselytizing is the right word - we don't have Good News to share - we have a bunch of ideas and models we're in the process of figuring out.)
Right now, the community has something of a backlog of people who want to get more involved, but aren't sure how, and people who are hanging out on the periphery and have value to contribute, but various things about the culture make them not want to. As well as people in the community who aren't succeeding/thriving at the things they want to.
Project Hufflepuff is about making internal community infrastructure better. This will hopefully remove bottlenecks that make outreach harder, but isn't the same thing.
Some of this reminds me of a talk by Sumana Harihareswara, a friend of mine in the free software community, where she tries to exmaine which strange and offputting things are necessary and which are needlessly driving people away: Inessential Weirdnesses in Free Software
I think there are in fact a lot of parallels between issues in free software and the rationalist community--similarly devaluing Hufflepuff skills even when they're necessary to get the full value out of everyone's contributions, similarly having concerns about not watering down the core philosophical commitments while still being open to newcomers and people who are not yet committed to the entire culture.
(FWIW, I am a weakly-connected member of the Bay Area rationalist community--it's not what I think of as my primary community so I'm not particularly present.)
Let me tell you about a specific thing that I saw in a different community, that I thought was a good way to make the community more welcoming.
I was in a meetup community about D&D. There was a guy who did a great thing there: every four or five months, he would create a meetup called "Meet And Greet For Players And DMs". You could show up to the meetup and talk about the specific game you wanted to play in (or run). You could meet other people who wanted to do the same thing, and you could trade contact information, and after the event yo...
This might be too obvious to mention, but Eliezer's2009 post "Why our kind can't cooperate" seems quite relevant to this. http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/
My feedback on these points:
Many people in rationality communities feel lonely (even the geographically tight Berkeley cluster). People want more (and deeper) connections than they currently have.
"I am feeling lonely because I am needing connection."
In the NVC sense this is a very clear and valid statement. Except within NVC no one else is responsible for your feelings other than yourself. Other people cannot make you feel lonely. They can take actions that cause you to feel lonely but they cannot force or guarantee you will feel lonely f...
I think it'd be interesting to have an online unconference, as well. Maybe put up a post here on the day, and people can write in comments with a time, topic, and google hangout link.
"Some newcomers often find the culture impenetrable and unwelcoming" seems like a feature (not a bug). If anything ought be changed about it, I think the unwelcoming attitude ought be more discerning - excluding people based on properties most of the community actually doesn't want around, rather than or in tandem with whatever criteria it's currently operating on.
Yeah - What I meant to argue is more like "valuable people who could be contributing a lot a leaving or getting turned away from the community, for reasons I think are bad or shortsighted."
I'm a peripheral member of the Berkeley rationalist community, and some of this sounds highly concerning to me. Specifically, in practice, trying to aim at prosociality tends to produce oppressive environments, and I think we need more of people making nonconforming choices that are good for them and taking care of their own needs. I'm also generally opposed to reducing barriers to entry because I want to maintain our culture and not become more absorbed into the mainstream (which I think has happened too much already).
I think it is both the case that:
1) a really valuable thing the community provides is a place to talk about ideas at a deep level. This is pretty rare, and it's valuable both to the sort of people who explicitly crave that, and (I believe), valuable to the world for generating ideas that are really important, and I do this this is something that is at risk of being destroyed if we lowered barriers to entry and scaled up without thinking too hard about it.
but, 2) it's also the case that
2a) there are a lot of smart people who I know would contribute valuable things to the community, but feel offput by things that are not necessary to have the kind of valuable conversations this community is good at
2b) a thriving community really needs things beyond being-good-at-thinking. Especially a community whose thinking has always been tied to "actually doing." An environment where only being clever is rewarded, will neither be able to provide for people's emotional needs sufficiently, nor actually achieve any of its broader goals.
I have thoughts on how to resolve this, but I'm trying to stick to the "talk about the problem" part, rather than the "propose solutions" part. For now, I'll note that I do not expect a single monolithic shift in the community, but I hope for better coordination between different sub-communities.
I would like to know of more examples of "projects" that Project Hufflepuff would like to support.
Like, of course there's the Solstice celebration. (Yay Solstice!) Are all of Project Hufflepuff's projects going to be Solstice-like events, where a small group of people come together to create something the community can enjoy? Is the goal to have, like, the existing Solstice, plus a different group running the Summer Solstice, plus Rationalist Easter and Rationalist Halloween and et cetera? If that's not the entirety of the goal, what other sorts of things are part of the goal?
(Disclaimer: I'm not a member of the community you're seeking to change, so my consent is not necessary to your plans.)
A lot of the themes I'm seeing here ("many people feel lonely", "some newcomers feel unwelcome", "some people are disdainful and dismissive", and especially "culture of making sure your own needs are met") remind me of the Geek Social Fallacies post. I can summarize the Geek Social Fallacies post as follows: "some people are jerks; if you encounter a jerk, you shouldn't feel obliged by politene...
Seems to me that talking about "social awkwardness" conflates things that should be addressed differently.
For example, there are people who are too shy to speak, and hate to compete for attention, so at a LW meetup they would just sit in the corner and quietly listen. These people don't harm anyone else, only perhaps themselves. You may try to think about gentle ways to encourage them, for example by having a part of meetup where people split into smaller groups and have an informal debate e.g. while eating some food.
Then there are people who, for example, regularly try to monopolize someone else's time, and ignore subtle and gradually-less-subtle hints that the person is not interested. This is potentially harmful, although the intensity of the harm may greatly vary depending on the personality of the target. A more assertive target will leave the interaction after a minute or two, and feel mildly annoyed. A less assertive target may find themselves unable to escape, will spend the whole LW meetup in an unwanted interaction, and never come back.
While on individual level, a good strategy against unwanted interactions is becoming stronger (mentally, socially, physically); ...
In the spirit of avoiding unnecessary weirdness, do you really want to cloak this project in a name assuming familiarity with specific literature? (And I get that HPMOR is cool, but it's niche, and HP* is for kids.)
The Doodle poll hurts me in my soul to look at. The thing where everyone is too busy with other plans to coordinate on a single day to meet feels fundamentally wrong and broken to me somehow, although I don't know if the bay area community is particularly bad along this axis relative to other communities.
Different thing. I'm just sad that everyone's lives are out of sync. By contrast, there's the thing where everyone goes to church on Sunday, so everyone can at least rest assured that however busy they are the rest of the week they'll all see each other at church on Sunday.
Regular I'm fairly certain phrasing things like Harry Potter reference is actually bad for the rationalist community.
"Clever kids in Ravenclaw, evil kids in Slytherin, wannabe heroes in Gryffindor, and everyone who does the actual work in Hufflepuff.”
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 9
“It is a common misconception that the best rationalists are Sorted into Ravenclaw, leaving none for other Houses. This is not so; being Sorted into Ravenclaw indicates that your strongest virtue is curiosity, wondering and desiring to know the true answer. And this is not the only virtue a rationalist needs. Sometimes you have to work hard on a problem, and stick to it for a while. Sometimes you need a clever plan for finding out. And sometimes what you need more than anything else to see an answer, is the courage to face it…
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 45
I’m a Ravenclaw and Slytherin by nature. I like being clever. I like pursuing ambitious goals. But over the past few years, I’ve been cultivating the skills and attitudes of Hufflepuff, by choice.
I think those skills are woefully under-appreciated in the Rationality Community. The problem cuts across many dimensions:
In a nutshell, the emotional vibe of the community is preventing people from feeling happy and and connected, and a swath of skillsets that are essential for group intelligence and ambition to flourish are undersupplied.
If any one of these things were a problem, we might troubleshoot it in isolated way. But collectively they seem to add up to a cultural problem, that I can’t think of any way to express other than “Hufflepuff skills are insufficiently understood and respected.”
There are two things I mean by “insufficiently respected”:
And while this is difficult to explain, it feels to me that there is a central way of being, that encompasses emotional/operational intelligence and deeply integrates it with rationality, that we are missing as a community.
This is the first in a series of posts, attempting to plant a flag down and say “Let’s work together to try and resolve these problems, and if possible, find that central way-of-being.”
I’m decidedly not saying “this is the New Way that rationality Should Be”. The flag is not planted at the summit of a mountain we’re definitively heading towards. It’s planted on a beach where we’re building ships, preparing to embark on some social experiments. We may not all be traveling on the same boat, or in the exact same direction. But the flag is gesturing in a direction that can only be reached by multiple people working together.
A First Step: The Hufflepuff Unconference, and Parallel Projects
I’ll be visiting Berkeley during April, and while I’m there, I’d like to kickstart things with a Hufflepuff Unconference. We’ll be sharing ideas, talking about potential concerns, and brainstorming next actions. (I’d like to avoid settling on a long term trajectory for the project - I think that’d be premature. But I’d also like to start building some momentum towards some kind of action)
My hope is to have both attendees who are positively inclined towards the concept of “A Hufflepuff Way”, and people for whom it feels a bit alien. For this to succeed as a long-term cultural project, it needs to have buy-in from many corners of the rationality community. If people have nagging concerns that feel hard to articulate, I’d like to try to tease them out, and address them directly rather than ignoring them.
At the same time, I don’t want to get bogged down in endless debates, or focus so much on criticism that we can’t actually move forward. I don’t expect total-consensus, so my goal for the unconference is to get multiple projects and social experiments running in parallel.
Some of those projects might be high-barrier-to-entry, for people who want to hold themselves to a particular standard. Others might be explicitly open to all, with radical inclusiveness part of their approach. Others might be weird experiments nobody had imagined yet.
In a few months, there’ll be a followup event to check in on how those projects are going, evaluate, and see what more things we can try or further refine.
[Edit: The Unconference has been completed. Notes from the conference are here]
Thanks to Duncan Sabien, Lauren Horne, Ben Hoffman and Davis Kingsley for comments