I applied it to an office because the conversation that caused me to write this post involved an AI safety group office that the person I was talking to used to work at, which does function as a community. 

It's plausible to me that these recommendations work better for other kinds of community.

My guess is that standardization has been more important for you than for the typical member of the church. It sounds like you move a lot more than most members, and so you spend a lot more of your time having just moved somewhere new. Standardization is helpful to build community when you're traveling or just moved somewhere new, but most people aren't in those situations all that often.

I also claim that standardization by itself does not build community. There is not a particularly strong community in McDonalds or in airports - despite these being very standardized situations. What standardization does is it reminds you of the similar situations you previously have been in. This allows the sense of community to travel with you between wards. But if your home ward does not feel like a community, going to something that looks similar doesn't make you suddenly feel at one with them.

I didn't mention narratives about persecution, and maybe I should have. They don't feel like a strong contributor to feelings of community for me personally - but I might be unusual here.^[1] I'm also not sure how to disentangle narratives of persecution from actual experiences of people treating them differently because they are Mormon. Either way, I don't think that this is something other groups trying to build community should want to copy.

1. ^{^}

   The fact that I post on LessWrong is some evidence that I'm not near the center of the distribution.

The term "Gentile" to refer for non-Mormons was mostly a thing in the 1800s, and is basically not a thing today. The last time this usage occurred in General Conference was in 1981, and that was quoting something written in the 1800s. The last time this usage occurred in General Conference not quoting something else was in 1936. (The LDS General Conference corpus is great.) The terminology that is used is "the world", which puts much less focus on the uncleanness of individuals.

Mormonism, outside of Utah, is not disassociated from society at large. The attitude is instead "in the world, but not of the world". There are some people for whom most of their friends are in the Church, and marriage within the Church is strongly encouraged. But there aren't Mormon-specific workplaces or grade schools.^[1] We do not think that entertainment or education can only be obtained within the community.

Relating insularity to ethnic purity also seems very wrong here. Missionary work is a major thing ! About 1/3 of all current members of the Church in the US were not raised in the Church. The world may be perceived as a hostile thing, but it's full of people who we might potentially convert.

1. ^{^}

   Our Church does have some private grade schools in the Pacific Islands, but none in the US. The ward I grew up in had <20 teenagers, and we went to at least 5 different high schools. In my 22 years of full time education, I have had exactly 1 class that had another member of the Church in it.

   At the university level, things are more complicated. The Church does own BYU, BYU-Idaho, and BYU-Hawaii. There's also SVU, although it's not run by the Church itself.

I agree that details matter. The system, in principle, equalizes status by passing around callings - and in practice often does. But it doesn't always work the way it should and you get The Same 10 Families rotating between the higher effort or leadership callings, while other people stay in lower effort callings.

Adequately answering this question would be at least its own blog post, but here's a gesture at a response:

In the 1600s, there was a debate over whether natural philosophy should be structured like math ('rationalists') or whether it should be based on sense & memory ('empiricists'). The empiricists won one of the most lopsided victories in the history of philosophy and empirical science was born.^[1]

Joseph Smith & the Book of Mormon have a wildly more empirical approach than any of the religions at the time.^[2] Alma 32's 'experiment on the word'. Moroni 10 is even framed in terms of falsifiability, a full century before Karl Popper introduced it to the philosophy of science.

Yes, observations can be theory-laden, but that doesn't mean that we should abandon the empirical project - in theology any more than in other fields.

This is less relevant for you than for other people on this site, but I should maybe note that I don't think that the evidence visible from outside the church is sufficient to 'prove the existence of God' or something like that. I do think that it is sufficient to justify a serious investigation, and that the empirical evidence builds up over time as you build a personal relationship with God.

1. ^{^}

   See Shapin & Schafer's Leviathan and the Air Pump (book review) for more details. Despite being postmodernists, the authors have done substantial historical work.

2. ^{^}

   Parts of Protestantism have since become more empirical, emphisizing personal experience with the Spirit over systematic theology. I think that this reflects Pentecostal influence, but am not familiar enough with the history to be sure.

3. ^{^}

   Joseph Lawal on YouTube also has some good epistemology arguments, but I don't remember which video they were in.

I think you'd be interested in Tocqueville's description of how New England towns worked in the early 1800s. My guess is that the system of callings descends from it, and it was substantially more democratic.

Search: "Limits of the township" to find the relevant section.

I was assuming that building strong community is a good thing, because of the post this is responding to. If Scott (or other people) are looking at Mormonism to see what they can learn about building strong communities in a liberal society, it is better if they have an accurate understanding of how the community works.

I think that the things that seem most likely to be worth exporting are ministering and callings. Callings seem harder to export. but have been very important for me feeling part of the community. Ministering seems easier to export, and I wouldn't be that surprised if rationalists end up doing it better than we do.

Some of the things you're talking about do not feel like the Church as I have experienced it. I only have my limited view, and for example have never lived in Utah, so maybe we've just experienced different things.

I don't think that any of the leaders I have known could reasonably be described as "covertly power-seeking and who can succeed at this by veneer of niceness". Including the leaders who I have had significant disagreements with. All of the ones I've dealt with are sincerely trying, and would be relieved to have a less effortful calling. I don't think that most of the niceness you see in the Church is actually a veneer. (N here is maybe 20, if you include bishops, counselors, and elders' quorum presidents.)

Mechanistically, the Church is a really ineffective route for power seeking. 'Advancing' in callings is a slow, highly uncertain process, during which time you are expected to do a ton of service. Maybe there's some inflection point above stake president where this stops being true (I wouldn't know), but at least at the levels I've been able to see, the incentives point strongly against trying to get more power.^[1] If this is a bigger problem in Utah than elsewhere, then I would guess that it would be because having a leadership calling helps you get promotions at work (or something else), and so there are more incentives coming from outside the Church itself.

I agree that there is too much deference without review. I would prefer deference with review. For example, the first time I was called to be ward mission leader, I told my bishop why I thought I was not a particularly good choice for the role, and suggested that we both go and think & pray about it and talk again next week. We did, and I ended up accepting the calling. The leaders I've had have reacted well to this - at least some of them seem to prefer it to either deference without review or outright refusal. This is a direction I am trying to push Church culture in.

The set of lessons is not fixed. The lesson topics are suggested by the Church. This only results in the same lesson if the teacher is putting in a minimal amount of effort. Even in this case, someone in the class can dramatically improve it by asking an interesting^[2] question, at least if there are some other people who are willing to engage. If no one there is willing to put in anything more than a minimal amount of effort, then the lessons will be repetitive and boring - and no amount of institutional design will fix it.

I endorse proselytizing. If you think that your believes are true and good, then it is good to offer them to the rest of the world. Even if it is through Harry Potter fanfiction instead of only rigorous argument.

I don't know what treatment you've received when leaving the Church. My impression is that people's friendships in the Church gradually fade away because it's much harder to maintain a friendship when you don't have a built in plan to see each other at least once a week, and as people move away and you don't meet the new people. This can mean that you feel isolated if you come back to visit, but this doesn't seem like an avoidable problem. If you've been treated worse than this, then I'm sorry.

1. ^{^}

   Then why do people do it? Because of a sense of duty - there are norms against refusing callings. My guess is that if the norms around not refusing callings significantly weaken, bishop would be one of the harder callings to get anyone to agree to do.

2. ^{^}

   'Interesting' here does not mean 'controversial'. 'Interesting' means 'something that other people will have nontrivial responses to'. Flagrantly controversial questions are often not interesting, if they result in predictable responses. Crafting interesting questions for Sunday school is an art that I've practiced, and I think it's worthwhile for other people in the Church to practice too.

I would also make the same prediction for Q > 10. Or when CFS first sells electricity to the grid. These will be farther into the future, but I do not think that this culture will have changed by then.

I think that I predict the opposite (conditional on what exactly is being predicted).

What exactly would count as a GPT-3 moment for fusion? How about an experiment demonstrating reactor-like conditions? This is roughly equivalent to what I referred to as 'getting fusion' in my book review.

My prediction is that, after Commonwealth Fusion Systems gets Q > 5 on SPARC, they will continue to supply or plan to supply HTS tape to at least 3 other fusion startups.

I agree that this is plausibly a real important difference, but I do not think that it is obvious.

The most recent augmentative technological change was the industrial revolution. It has reshaped virtually every every activity. It allowed for the majority of the population to not work in agriculture for the first time since the agricultural revolution.

The industrial revolution centered on energy. Having much cheaper, much more abundant energy allowed humans to use that energy for all sorts of things. 

If fusion ends up being similar in cost to existing electricity production, it will be a substitutional technology. This is the thing that we are working on now (well, also making it work at all). People who work in fusion focus on this because it is the reasonable near/medium term projection. If fusion ends up being substantially cheaper, it will be an augmentative technology. It is not at all clear that this will happen, because we can't know how the costs will change between the first and thousandth fusion power plant.

Notably, we don't know if foom is going to be a thing either.

The narrative around the technology is at least as important as what has happened in the technology itself. The fusion community could frequently talk about how incredible the industrial revolution was, and how it powered Britain to global dominance for two centuries. A new source of energy might do the same thing ! But this is more hype than we feel we ought to offer, and the community's goal is not to create a dominant superpower.

Even if foom is going to happen, things would look very different if the leaders credibly committed to helping others foom if they are first. I don't know if this would be better or worse from a existential risk perspective, but it would change the nature of the race a lot.