Chiming in because the problem of helping people level up is close to my heart.

Putting the social dynamics of the experiment aside (since there are plenty of people discussing that aspect), I'd like to offer some good-natured skepticism about the overall approach. (Good-natured meaning, I hope you actually do pursue this because I'm genuinely curious about how this will play out -- assuming the safety concerns others have raised are handled well, of course).

My skepticism is: this is too meta and too complicated to lead to actual progress.

I spent a few years at company that tried to inculcate a deliberate process for getting to the right answer, including a culture of radical honesty and formal procedures for making decisions and learning from mistakes. This was a major priority at the company for a long period of time (last I checked, it's still going on), with backing from the entire senior management team, and was enforced by firing people who couldn't or wouldn't skillfully participate. I.e., they took it really seriously and put a lot of effort into it. The people who conceived and implemented it were in my opinion extremely smart and competent.

That said, in my opinion the effort spent on this program did more harm than good to the functioning of the company. The values and culture became an end in itself, as opposed to a means for helping achieve goals, and endless amounts of time and energy were spent debating, elucidating, learning, and critiquing the system. Competent professionals ended up becoming ineffectual because they gave up (or were forced out of) their unreflective expertise and got stuck in endless cycles of second-guessing. Some of that self-reflection may have given rise to new levels of skill (in my case, I did in fact feel like I benefited from my time there, although I think that was largely because it was my first job out of college so I didn't have that much to un-learn), but generally people felt disempowered by the initiative rather than improved.

In contrast, for the last few years, I've been running a tiny company where we have very little meta discussion and mostly just do object-level work. I feel 1000x more productive now than I did at my prior job.

My takeaway from this is that the optimal ratio of meta-level tuning to object-level practice is [small number] : [large number]. Meta-level thinking is extremely valuable and important, but I view it as the rudder on a boat: you need to be constantly making adjustments to keep pointing in the right direction, but 99% of the power generation goes into the main engine pointing forward.

If I had to generate a hypothesis as to why the concrete achievements of the rationalist community are less than might be desired, it would be that the community spends way to much of its energy on meta topics instead of on object-level progress. This is understandable, since a) meta-level discussion of rationality is what created the community in the first place, and b) object-level discussion can often be very boring compared to meta-level discussion. (I miss the intellectual stimulation of my previous job, even as I see it as basically a waste of time in terms of actually building a successful company). While understandable, I think it leads to predictable outcomes: a lot of talk happens but not much gets accomplished.

Looking at the proposed charter, I suspect there will be a very high amount of meta-level discussion, probably significantly more so than at my prior job that I thought was way too meta. That's because a) it's built in to the daily schedule, b) it's built into the mission, which is expected to evolve over time with the participants, and c) it's built into the community that the participants will be drawn from.

In addition to being too meta, I also suspect this experiment is too complex. Experimenting with a bunch of different norms, on top of the code of conduct and daily schedule, seems wildly ambitious to me. In the company I worked for, the set of norms and practices were set in stone by executive fiat, recruits to the company were presented with them prior to accepting jobs, and adherence to them were a major part of performance evaluation, and there was still a very high employee churn rate and a general agreement that the norms / practices as specified weren't consistently well-practiced throughout the company. The Dragon charter is for a smaller group of people, which makes things easier, but the norms / practices are expected to be a moving target, which makes things harder.

In my personal experiments with self-improvement, I've had the most success with extremely simple plans. My most successful self-intervention to date has been to download a simple habit tracker on my phone, and add a new daily habit, moving on to the next only after successful completion of the prior one for 30 days. When I first started trying to learn new habits, I would add a bunch of new habits at once, and I would always fail. It took me a very long time to get patient enough to only try to change one thing at a time (which requires accepting that I'm going to have habits I don't like in the interim that I don't try to do anything about).

Similarly, I've been successful growing my current company by having an extremely boring strategy of: ship code, talk to customers, ship code, talk to customers.

Simplicity does not come naturally to me; I like my ideas and strategies to be convoluted, complicated, ambitious, and interesting -- I get very bored with simple, straightforward approaches. So I'm a big believer in simplicity because I've learned the hard way against all my natural inclinations that -- unlike my natural inclinations -- it actually works.

So if I were trying to design a charter, I would pick one or two things that I think would be most likely to have a game-changing impact, and just focus on those things until they worked (or didn't). In contrast, the charter as it exists now feels to me like it has way too many moving pieces. That's just my intuition, of course, but I hope I've given a feel for where that intuition comes from.

Anyway, I admire the ambition in doing a project like this, so I hope my criticism is constructive and useful.

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