2018-01-22 RRG Notes

The Craft and the Community: A Post-Mortem and Resurrection

Preface:

The most comprehensive list of criticisms of the rationality community
Not a rejection of the group
Need to create a shared understanding of problems in the group so that group members can work on fixing them
Most people are aware that things aren't quite right, but don't really know what's wrong or how to fix it
Most of the disagreements will come down to disagreements over the size, scope and urgency of fixing the problems
This essay prioritizes clarity over civility - may rub some people the wrong way

Introduction

It's been almost 10 years since the publication of The Craft and the Community
So why hasn't the rationality community been more successful
What have we actually accomplished in 10 years?
It's slightly horrifying that people are claiming that the best outcome of the rationality community is "interesting conversations at dinner parties"
- Well, the problem here is that "rationality" is so ill defined, I'm not sure it can be something that one is successful at
- What does a successful rationalist look like? Eliezer claims that a successful rationalist "wins", but there are plenty of people who win without using any sort of rationality skills
Eventually what has happened is that the people actually interested in instrumental rationality have gotten tired of the community, left, and accomplished other things
- Arguably, this is exactly what should happen. Maybe the rationality community should not consider itself a community, but more like a training ground

Post-Mortem: What Went Wrong

It seems somewhat surprising that a community so full of potential has acheived so little towards its goals when looked at as a group
- Is our community actually full of potential? I don't think we're actually higher potential than any other random group of West Coast smart people
While there have been exceptional people, the median person appears to be as successful as they would have been if they had not discovered the rationality community
- This isn't exactly true of the Seattle rationality community - there are people here who have been motivated to change towards more successful life paths after their involvement in the rationality community here
- Also, I disagree that the median person here is as successful as they would have been if they hadn't joined the rationality community
  - In my opinion, the rationality community is full of people who are at least a little bit "broken" from the perspective of broader society
  - If the rationality community can make those people as successful as the median person in broader society, then that counts as winning, even if it doesn't produce the sort of outcomes Bendini is looking for
Why hasn't the rationalist community been unable to beat the "control group" of wider society?
Bendini thinks that there are three inter-related groups of causes:
- Demographics
- Environment
- Culture

Problems and Causal Factors

Demographics: Background Selection Effects
- The Sequences disproportionately attracted people who liked debating and theorizing
- Attracted people who prefer extensive contemplation before action
- If you have enough of these people together, founder effects will conspire to bias people against taking any action at all
- We have a (much) higher than baseline prevalence of mental illness
  - Depression
  - ADHD
  - Anxiety
  - Autism
- We have a high proportion of people who are intelligent enough to enter the upper echelons of society, but who fell through the cracks for one reason or another
- Draw disproportionately from people with liberal, upper-middle-class values
- These traits can have effects even when they're possessed by a small number of community members, due to tipping point effects
- The rationality community is not immune from entropic forces simply by virtue of calling itself the rationality community, and we need to invest effort to mitigate the effects of those entropic forces
- Bendini categorizes the rationality community into three main focus areas
  - Impact focus
    - Effective altruism
    - Ambitious startups
    - Major societal change
  - Human Focus
    - Relationships
    - Meaningful work
    - Happiness
    - Fun
  - Truthseeking focus
    - Curiosity for its own sake
    - Deep theoretical models
    - Empiricism
- Each of these main focus areas has its own problems
  - Truthseeking focus
    - Deep theoretical models, particularly for psychology and sociology, don't model reality very well
    - Socially maladjusted people come up with these models - leads to "blind leading the blind"
    - People from blue-tribe high-trust environments come up with models that work in that environment and don't work outside of it
    - Idealism preventing people from making adjustments to their models in the face of contradictory data
    - The principle of charity leaves us open to people who would intentionally exploit the community, like Gleb Tsipursky
  - Impact focus
    - Inability to recruit underrepresented demographics
      - The rationality community has its own jargon, which is often incomprehensible to outsiders
      - Far too much reliance on concepts that are familiar only to people with physics, computer science or science fiction backgrounds
      - The community has been optimized for a narrow demographic, even though rationality has benefits for a much broader set of people
    - Inability to run non-business oriented projects
      - Project leaders end up doing far too much work because of cultural individualism and treating dissent as a terminal value
      - Analysis paralysis, combined with short attention spans leads to lack of decision-making
      - We have no ability to motivate people to do grunt work without paying them - this is a problem for volunteer projects
      - Volunteers aren't pro-active - means that leaders have to ask for everything to be done
        
        This is partially due to the lack of transparency in the rationality community - it's difficult to volunteer for anything if you don't know what things are there to volunteer for
        
        Even something as simple as a task list would be helpful here
      - The number of volunteers for a project is tied to how "shiny" the project feels
        
        Leads to projects expending a significant amount of energy on publicity
        
        Yeah, but how is this different than any other volunteer effort?
    - Distrust of outsiders reducing intake and spread of information
      - Not seeking (or even rejecting) assistance from people and groups who resemble "the system"
        
        c.f. MIRI & Eliezer's relationship with traditional academia
      - Distrust of outsiders leads to overreliance on skills possessed by insiders
      - Evaluation of skills has more to do with shibboleths than substance
      - We end up re-inventing the wheel because we don't read and follow advice from those outside the community, which reduces our progress
    - Lack of focus on instrumental rationality
      - The rationality community is much more talented at reading, writing and debating than it is at anything that could be described as practical
        
        I have long bemoaned the rationality community's inability to accomplish even the simplest tasks that don't involve software
        
        How many in the community can change the oil in their car? How many can use a electric drill? How many can change the batteries in their thermostat?
      - The grand purpose of LessWrong was AI alignment, and, as a result, focus on AI alignment has sucked all the oxygen away from more pedestrian causes
        
        This might not be a bad thing, if we, as a community, take the possibility of unfriendly AI as the most important thing to be working on
      - More impact focused people have moved over to EA, making already bad demographics even worse
      - People who are interested in individual rationality have left, because the community is a time-suck
      - Underacheiving demographics have contributed to a cultural undervaluation of hard work and attention to detail
  - Human/Community focus
    - Romantic dissatisfaction of straight men
      - Huge gender gap means that men in the community can't have romantic relationships within the community
      - Inability for many straight men in the community to communicate effectively with women who don't have a rationalist or hard-science background
      - The community is passively hostile to women insofar as it is not a place where intellectually capable women wish to spend time
    - Difficulty forming deeper friendships
      - People have trouble making friends not because they especially desire solitude but because they just don't know how to make friends
      - Biases towards social awkwardness and passivity combine to make it difficult for people to have the recurring interactions that result in friendship
    - Difficulty executing short-term plans
      - People flake on plans that they've previously agreed to because of a combination of
        
        Social anxiety
        
        Low empathy
        
        Poor time management
        
        Inability to anticipate future selves' behavior
      - People don't inform when they're going to be late - this is rude
      - It's difficult to make plans when you don't know when or how many people are going to show up
    - Almost complete inability to execute on longer time horizons
      - People struggle with stepping outside of their day-to-day lives and looking at things from a higher level
      - If you ask people what their plans are 5 years from now, you'll get a shrug in response
        
        While this is bad for the community, it totally makes sense from an individual perspective - literally none of my 5 years plans have come to fruition, because of high-impact events that have occurred
        
        If you'd asked me 5 years ago where I'd be, I'd have said Amazon
        
        If you'd asked me 5 years before that, I'd have said that I'd be stuck in Minnesota pretty much forever
        
        5 years is a long enough span of time that it doesn't really make sense to plan over that time horizon - either things will go wrong or new opportunities will arise and you don't want to feel locked in to a particular course of action
      - Values like loyalty are seen as Red Tribe (outgroup) traits and are responded to with derision
    - Lacking a sense that more is possible
      - People don't know what great communities actually look like
      - Modern atomized society has a lot of flaws, and we don't always see them because we've grown up inside that society
        
        More to the point, some of us have seen only the downsides of highly coherent societies, and have not benefited from the upsides
    - People feel the need to sell themselves
      - High turnover in the community means that first impressions become only impressions
      - This leads to people selling themselves in whatever light will work out best for them
      - Then, in turn, people who are less willing to engage in signalling for its own sake feel like losers in a game they never agreed to play
- There are three things we can do to attempt to resolve these demographic and cultural issues
  - Throw everything we have at drastically altering our demographic make-up
    - Likely to fail
    - Likely to ruin the community in the process
  - Attempt to start afresh, severing ties with the existing community
    - But how do you know you're going to do better?
  - Shift culture in an attempt to compensate for weaknesses
    - The most promising option
    - Still far from a guaranteed success
    - Requires us to pay attention to unpleasant things rather than reading insight porn
Environment: Picking The Wrong Location
- There is increasingly no distinction between "the rationality community" and "rationalists living in Berkeley"
- Putting the center of the community in Berkeley was quite possibly the worst strategic decision that we made
- Berkeley's values are different from and contaminating rationalists' values
- Most rationalists and rationalist organizations do not benefit from being located in Berkeley
- From the outside enthusiastic people go to Berkeley, go quiet on social media, and when you next see them, they don't seem quite like the person who left
The Background Cultural Environment
- Berkeley is the most politically correct city in America
- How can we have a community dedicated to free speech and open mindedness in a city famous for social-justice witch-hunts?
- Being in Berkeley exposes the rationality community to Silicon Valley demographics, amplifying founder effects
- These background effects actively get in the way of addressing the problems caused by demographics (above)
Social Turnover Has Increased To The Point Where It Has Major Effects On Incentives
- Commnunities, especially individualistic communities have a neutral attitude towards turnover
- People coming and going is seen as the natural state of things
- However, businesses tend to assign a much higher cost to turnover due to:
  - Loss of insider knowledge
  - Ramp-up time for new recruits
  - Reduced coordination between unfamiliar individuals
- Social turnover reduces the consequences for defection (making it harder to commit to short and long term plans)
- We are fortunate to have stumbled across an interest that is distinctive and deep enough to form a subculture around
- The policy of pulling people into the Bay Area is harmful to other rationalist communities, and arguably not helpful to the people moving to the Bay Area
  - I wonder what the proportion of the growth of the Bay Area rationalist community is of people moving to the Bay Area from other rationalist communities, vs. people in the Bay Area signing on
- The combination of the non-confrontational background social environment of Berkeley plus the social turnover in the rationalist community means that it's really difficult to give people uncomfortable but productive feedback
Economics: Time, Money, Spoons and Future Plans
- Living in Berkeley is really expensive
- This cost of living has second-order effects that magnify the damage to the rationalist community
- The cost of living in Berkeley means that people have to get relatively high paying jobs and accept long commutes in order to live there
- In addition to the cost of time, the increased stress of living in Berkeley means that people just have less energy to devote to rationalist projects when they get off work
- The high cost of living in Berkeley means that it's really hard for non-profit efforts to recruit and sustain people
- Projects have to produce something that can be monetized relatively quickly
- The insane housing prices in Berkeley make it so that it's impossible for people to acheive "normal" life goals like buying a house or raising a family
- The housing crisis is politically unsolvable - there are too many forces against lifting restrictions on building for house prices to reach a more reasonable equilibrium any time soon
Culture: Not Taking The Sequences Seriously
- Most everything that Bendini is talking about is mentioned as a pitfall in the original sequences
- The default path of all groups is to ignore the literal interpretations of the founding texts in favor of the current cultural zeitgeist
Recap
- So why did the rationality community go wrong?
  - Demographic factors formed multiple feedback loops that reduced our ability to operate effectively
  - We chose to centralize in Berkeley, which caused further feedback loops
  - The high cost of living in Berkeley drained members living there of the ability to combat these feedback loops
  - We ignored the lessons of the sequences that would guard against these tendencies in favor of whatever insight porn was making the rounds at the moment
What can we do about this?
- Berkeley may be lost
  - Too many demographic problems
  - If the software industry can't fix these problems, despite having a million times the resources of the rationalist community, what hope is there for rationalists
- Berkeley's economic and social problems are present in most other rationalist hubs, including Seattle, Boston and London
  - Oh, really? I mean, maybe it's because I'm part of the Seattle rationalist community, but few of these criticisms actually ring that true for this community

The Craft and the Community: Resurrection

Intro
- To do better than Berkeley, we need better
  - Demographics
  - A location that allows us slack to pursue rationality related projects
  - A culture that upholds rationalist principles
Demographics - Getting A Broad Range of Talents
- The goal is to recruit undervalued demographics rather than underrepresented ones
- The rationality community, because of its demographics, undervalues problems that cannot be solved with logical analysis or writing code
- To this end, there needs to be a strong focus on narrowing the gender gap
  - Having nearly equal gender ratios means that everyone gets their romantic needs met
  - Women bring valuable skills in coordination and conscientiousness that the rationality community lacks
- Focus on in-person recruitment
  - Introducing people to rationality related concepts is much easier in person than it is on the Internet
  - People from the area will have much less friction when joining your community
  - People who attend in person often have much better demographics than people who engage with the community over the Internet
  - A location that has a variety of employment sectors will have better demographics to recruit from than the Bay Area
    - Okay, I don't get this equivocation - on one hand Bendini is saying that the Bay Area only has tech workers, but on the other hand, he's saying that tech workers will never be able to drive a more sane equilibrium on house prices because they're such a tiny minority
- Create better introductory materials
  - Needing to read the Sequences is a bottleneck that prevents new members from engaging with the community
  - The full set of sequences is over 2000 pages long
  - Much of the material has little or no immediate benefit
  - We need a guide to rationality that delivers immediate personal benefits in relatively short order
- Discover the reasons that cause people to leave and work to mitigate those reasons
- Champion members displaying behaviors that you want to see more of
- Figure out our value proposition for new members
  - As someone joining the rationalist community, what can I hope to gain by becoming a member?
  - If the answer is "interesting dinner conversation", the rationalist community does not have a good value proposition
- 2 Examples of demographics that we want to attract
  - Feminine/people-oriented women
    - Place greater emphasis on community promoting norms
      - Value things like loyalty, friendliness and caring for others
    - Tolerate elements of benevolent paternalism
      - Have figures who can make difficult decisions
      - Have figures who can remain steadfast in the face of social pressure
      - Sigh. "Benevolent paternalism" is just leadership. We don't need a new phrase for it
    - Don't undervalue female coded interests and values
      - Greater focus on empathy and people-awareness
      - Evaluate whether a thing is undervalued because it's not useful or because it's coded female
      - Greater focus on teamwork
    - Better onboarding/recruitment
      - Reduce inessential weirdness - don't expose new members to the full set of strange beliefs that rationalists have
      - Develop a marketing message that appeals to people-oriented individuals
  - Already successful people
    - Demonstrate clear value - show how someone who is already successful can become even more successful by using formal rationality
    - Don't resent the disparity in success between you and the person you're trying to recruit
    - Treat them the same as others in the community - don't let their success turn you into a yes-man
    - Create a community that is more than the social network of last resort for intelligent underacheivers, depressives and socially clueless
Environment: Manchester Works For Us, We Don't Work For Manchester
- Why Manchester?
  - Low cost of living
  - Decent hourly wages, good job opportunities in our chosen fields
  - Low housing costs, and growth in the housing supply
  - Stable institutions and good rule of law
- For the goal of human flourishing
  - Background demographics
    - Diverse range of industries
    - Good gender balance
    - English-speaking majority
  - Background culture
    - Not too atomized
    - Don't want to try to build a community in a city where people move to to acheive career goals, as that results in high turnover
  - Good public transport system
  - Aesthetic beauty
Culture: More Productivity, Less Philosophy
- Create a culture that values effective work
- Stop values from being dictated by happenstance
- In order to build a culture that has the values we want, we need a decent grasp of how cultures are actually formed
- Need a benevolent dictator to solve coordination problems and prevent value drift
- Make good decisions now instead of perfect decisions in a month's time
Conclusion
- This is an effort by Bendini to find kindred spirits

My thoughts

I read that entire essay twice, and I still don't know what Bendini is trying to do
- Is he trying to make a group house in Manchester? Why not come out and say that?
- Is he trying to make a better CFAR?
- What are the goals of the Kernel project, and how will we know when those goals are acheived?
On a more meta note, I think the entire concept of "rationality" may be a seductive trap for smart people
- It's tempting to think that there exists a set of domain independent cognitive strategies that will make you more effective at whatever domain you're trying to get better at
- We call this hypothetical set of domain independent strategies "rationality"
- But, increasingly, I'm convinced that this domain independent set of strategies does not exist
- If you want to get good at task X, the skills you need (cognitive and non-cognitive) are going to be different than the skills you need for task Y
- There are some skills (knowledge of cognitive biases, ability to "step outside the system", etc) which have a limited amount of generality
- But these skills are:
  - Few and far between
  - Not completely generalizable - there are lots of domains in which knowledge of cognitive biases or ability to step outside the system actually isn't all that helpful
  - Not actually that much of a force multiplier
- Eliezer said one of his goals with rationality was to find people who were noticeably "better", but he didn't say what they were "better" at
- The notion of a "renaissance man", who is better than his peers in a wide variety of fields is a myth. Having just returned from Italy, I've found that even actual renaissance men (like Da Vinci, for example) didn't have nearly the impact that we would assume they would have
  - Da Vinci, for example, was extremely flighty, and would often abandon commissioned and paid-for projects because he lost interest
  - I now have way more respect for artists like Raphael, Tiziano (Titian), Tintoretto, Lippi, etc. They're not as well known as Da Vinci, or Michaelangelo, but they were way more consistent, way more productive, and honestly, they were just as good (at art) as Da Vinci and Michaelangelo
- So, my advice? Pick something you want to be good and… and then work on getting good at that thing
  - Want to be a better programmer? Read algorithms, learn lots of programming languages, ship code.
  - Want to be a better artist? Draw, paint, sculpt, whatever every day
  - Want to be a better X - find the skills that help you with X and practice those
  - Rationality will at best bring you a ~5% improvement. It's not zero, but it's not life-changing either. Learn enough about it so that you can effectively come up with strategies to get better at whatever you're trying to bet better at
    - This quantity may very well be 0. In certain domains (especially competitive domains) it may very well be the case that the domain has been well studied enough that you can follow experts to come up with good strategies, and you may not need rationality at all
- With that in mind, I'm going to try to reduce my exposure to rationality in the abstract and increase my exposure to people with actual skills
  - Fewer rationality meetups; more programming meetups
  - More reading about object level things, rather than abstract rationality