The most common cause of the collapse of high investment intentional communities is romantic drama.

(Maybe the Dragon Barracks are so obviously a boy thing that you're taking for granted that there will be no girls in the house, but all the weird non-gendered pronouns like "a Dragon will brush its teeth" imply either an attempt to have a team composed of both men or women, or else a hilarious level of contempt for the agency of your space monkeys. I'm going to assume that you're imagining mixed gender living arrangements rather than already starting with verbal de-personalization of presumed uniformly male space monkeys...)

So anyway, assuming men and women in the house at the same time, that's what usually causes things to collapse in the long run.

The two standard failure modes are Bonobo egalitarianism that collapses due to the accumulation of residual jealousies over time or else a harem forms around the charismatic cult leader (which isn't necessarily a failure mode... it is just a sign of a cult leader whose stated community goals are a load of hypocritical baloney compared to the real goal of getting more than his "fair share" of tail -- cue the Limp Bizkit song).

There are lots of patches for this sort of thing that have historically worked for various kinds of communities. Requiring celibacy is an obvious one that monasteries often use. Disallowing any romantic statuses except "single" and "closed dyadic marriage" (with a managed "courting" status to mediate the one way transition) is another standard trick.

Whatever the rule is, the standard enforcement mechanism is "ostracism" because the real problem from a social engineering perspective is the accumulation of complicated feelings that slow and redirect the workings of the social machine away from its stated purposes and towards managing the wreckage of new and old love triangles. If you throw away the cogs that are liable to have "complicated feelings" and replace them with non-complicated cogs... then the machine should continue to run as designed?

(I think maybe the romantic mores that were junked in the US in the 1960's arose in the first place because villages are kinda like auto-poetic intentional communities. The pragmatically useful norms of village romance, that kept the village from exploding, could be semi-safely junked because (well, obviosuly "the pill" but also because) cities are anonymous and moderately well mixed... essentially everyone in a city is already pre-ostrasized by everyone else, and we each are desperately struggling to create a synthetic village-like community despite the isolating forces of urban mixing. In an already chaotic urban romantic economy a divorce causing additional minor lesioning of the local social graph is like a dust devil in a hurricane. There might actually be a lot of dust devils caused by hurricane turbulence for all I know, but I'm pretty sure no one cares much because the actual hurricane make them irrelevant.)

Anyway, for the above reasons, you might want to just say "this is a fraternity and if women want to start a rationalist sorority that can be a separate thing". Alternatively, think about romantic norms up front.

1) I agree with the very high-level point that there are lots of rationalist group houses with flat / egalitarian structures, and so it might make sense to try one that's more authoritarian to see how that works. Sincere kudos to you for forming a concrete experimental plan and discussing it in public.

2) I don't think I've met you or heard of you before, and my first impression of you from your blog post is that you are very hungry for power. Like, you sound like you would really, really enjoy being the chief of a tribe, bossing people around, having people look up to you as their leader, feeling like an alpha male, etc. The main reason this makes me uncomfortable is that I don't see you owning this desire anywhere in your long post. Like, if you had said, just once, "I think I would enjoy being a leader, and I think you might enjoy being led by me," I would feel calmer. Instead I'm worried that you have convinced yourself that you are grudgingly stepping up as a leader because it's necessary and no one else will. If you're not being fully honest about your motivations for nominating yourself to be an authoritarian leader, what else are you hiding?

3) Your post has a very high ratio of detailed proposals to literature review. I would have liked to see you discuss other group houses in more detail, make reference to articles or books or blog posts about the theory of cohousing and of utopian communities more generally, or otherwise demonstrate that you have done your homework to find out what has worked, what has not worked, and why. None of your proposals sound obviously bad to me, and you've clearly put some thought and care into articulating them, but it's not clear whether your proposals are backed up by research, or whether you're just reasoning from your armchair.

4) Why should anyone follow you on an epic journey to improve their time management skills if you're sleep-deprived and behind schedule on writing a blog post? Don't you need to be more or less in control of your own lifestyle before you can lead others to improve theirs?

I think the troll obliquely raised on good point with their criticism of the example for Rule 6:

For example, a Dragon who has been having trouble getting to sleep but has never informed the other Dragons that their actions are keeping them awake will agree that their anger and frustration, while valid internally, may not fairly be vented on those other Dragons, who were never given a chance to correct their behavior

Let me pose a question to the reader of my comment: would you rather live in a house where you have to constantly verbally ask the other residents to stop doing things that they could have reasonably foreseen would bother you, or would you rather live in a house where people actually used reasonable expectations of what other people want to guide their behavior and therefore acted in a way that preempted causing other people irritation?

Treating something like your sleep disturbances as your responsibility is fine if e.g. you (like me) have lots of trouble falling asleep and something like people whispering 15 metres from your room is keeping you from falling asleep. In that case, those people are doing everything right and really don't know that they're hurting you. It is unreasonable to get angry at them if you haven't explained to them why their behaviour is bad for you.

Sometimes it's less clear though. I sometimes use the microwave after midnight. I know that the microwave can be heard in my room and in my room mate's room. When I use the microwave and think he might be asleep, I stop it before the timer finishes and it beeps loudly. There's not much excuse to wait for my room mate to specifically request that I do this; I'm more than capable of figuring out a) the microwave beeping at the end is loud and the sort of thing that can disrupt sleep and b) there's a way I can stop that from happening. It does show some failure of consideration if I were to shrug off the potential inconvenience that the microwave could present for my room mate for the slight benefit of not having to watch the microwave.

This points to one of the failure modes of Tell Culture, where people use it as an excuse to stop doing any thinking about how their actions can affect other people. This actually suggests that one potential house experimental norm could be something like "before making an action that might effect another Dragon, pause and consider how it might effective them and if the effect will be a net positive."

What this all comes down to for me is that it seems unfair to ask people to assume goodwill without also asking them to always attempt to act with goodwill.

-- A note: I originally sent Duncan criticism privately. I didn't want to add too much negativity to the discussion. But Duncan asked me to post publicly and I will defer to his judgement. Its his project and he is a very capable guy. I really hope DA succeeds, the rationalist community could be doing much better on many metrics. In general I find the model of DA very promising. But I have some serious concerns.

-- The ethics code seems extremely strict.

For example this rule strikes me as extraordinarily hard to follow: "A Dragon will assume good faith in all interactions with other Dragons". As does "A Dragon will be fully present and supportive when interacting with other Dragons in formal/official contexts".

Earlier in the document Duncan said "Discuss, and then agree upon, and then rigidly and rigorously enforce a norm of perfection in all formal undertakings". This implies to me that Duncan intends to enforce the CoC pretty strictly. Should Duncan be confidant its reasonable to expect such large deviations from how humans normally operate? I should note that normal bootcamps do not require as much psychologically from their recruits. Even though bootcamps require obedience they don't normally require recruits to think a certain way.

Duncan explicitly said he was willing to modify norms that members felt were too hard to follow (" Be ruthless about discarding standards during strategic review; if a member of the group says that X or Y or Z is too high-cost for them to sustain, believe them, and make decisions accordingly."). But he also said that the CoC was unlikely to change. If I thought the CoC was meant more as a set of guidelines than strict rules I would be less worried. But that is not how I interpreted the post.

-- How many people do we expect to leave or get kicked out?

I have moderated some internet communities (And admin an active one now). Temp bans and warnings can only go so far. At some points you have to be willing to pull the trigger and ban people.

The section on reparations reassured me that Duncan was thinking hard about to keep people from falling off the path. In addition, unlike most internet communities, the DA recruits will be heavily vetted. But in order to enforce the reparations you either have to appeal to social pressure or the threat of kicking people out. I think the standards are very strict so serious discipline might be needed.

-- Are there practical or ethical problems with this plan?

People who get kicked out of DA are still required to pay rent until they can find a replacement. Assuming they are on the lease it seems highly unlikely you can kick them out of the house. However if someone gets kicked out of the house they might be pretty negative towards the rest of the group. It probably a bad situation to keep them around, but maybe they can't easily find a replacement or a new place to live.

Secondly people who get kicked out might be psychologically unable to remain at the DA barracks. But until they can find someone to replace them they are on the hook for rent. In my personal opinion joining dragon army should be a "Good deal" for anyone involved. Its important that the downside of: "get kicked out" -> "lose friends, need to find a replacement despite the fact that you got kicked out and maybe can't give DA a good review, on the hook for lots of rent" is manageable. I would really hate to see anyone get hurt. I assume Duncan shares my concerns but he didn't address them in the post.

In addition, has Duncan looked into the legalities surrounding renter's rights in California (and Berkeley in particular)? This isn't in the post even if he has done the research.

-- Duncan said the following "I also considered whether to update/change my tone given your first impression, but it seems to be enough of an outlier that I probably won't make any deliberate effort.

Its plausible to me they aren't much of an outlier. I had the same reaction, as did several people I showed Duncan's post to (though other people thought Duncan's post sounded fine). If I didn't know Duncan was the curriculum director at CFAR I would have thought he was crazy and probably dangerous. Stuff about "living under my thumb", self comparisons to Tyler Durden and the ender's game quote about "quick, decisive obedience" really worried me. Some of the most shocking stuff, from my perspective, was in the pop culture references. But a number of things in the main text gave off an extremely strong cult vibe. Some examples include the "house salute" and the "Various call-and-response patterns surrounding house norms". I should note I am not accusing Duncan of anything, based on his reputation he seems trustworthy. But his tone definitely set off loud alarm bells for me.

--

Again I am really happy people are considering new rationalist norms. Duncan seems like a very good choice to lead an experimental project. The general strategy of DA seems like a good one. But I wanted to share my concerns.

This post is so thoroughly repulsive and disgusting that I made an account for the sole purpose of pointing out how transparently and obviously perverse this fucked-up proposal is. Naturally I don't have any actual desire to be critical or rude; it's just that nobody else is doing it, so because of my infinite kindness and charity (if you have any doubts, rest assured that my closest friends and colleagues will all attest to my beneficent nature), I find myself obligated to step up to the batting plate, so to speak. Ah, if only someone could release me from this great burden. If only.

The author seems to have missed the part of Ender's Game about the protagonists being children. It's generally not a good thing for adults to role-play as children (the reasons for which are, I hope, sufficiently obvious to not require elaboration). The dominant impression I get from this is that this resembles the antifa movement and the anti-antifa movement: it's a bunch of immature adults LARPing but pretending that they aren't doing so.

Note that despite the author's insistence on the validity of his experience as a CFAR instructor, he fails to actually point to any concrete benefits that people have derived from that instruction -- plausibly because those benefits, when concretely stated without embellishment, are at best underwhelming. Note also that (1) no mention of dealing with problems arising from interpersonal romance are mentioned in the post and (2) the author's reply to the comment that does point out the probable future existence of such problems receives what can at best be termed a cursory and dismissive reply.

This suggests that, contrary to the author's assertion of having amassed a diverse and broad range of skills, and contrary to whatever accolades his colleagues may see fit to place upon him, he hasn't yet attained the level of social awareness of a typical American high school student. It also suggests that the author's ability to model himself and to model others has more-or-less not yet attained the level of sophistication required to view people as more than one-dimensional. I.e., the post seems to suggest an attitude of "I, a good person, will find a bunch of good people, and we'll make these good things happen". I'm pretty sure I've met high school students with a more nuanced (and less optimistic) understanding of human nature.

Naturally, this would be excused if the Berkeley rationalist community were full of people who are actually good people and who tend to get things done. Let's check: Qiaochu Yuan, one of the most mathematically sophisticated members, has to the best of my knowledge hit a dead end in his PhD, and is becoming a CFAR instructor in Seattle, which makes it seem as though he's actually concretely worse off compared to the counterfactual in which the rationalist community didn't exist; Eliezer Yudkowsky has shifted in the direction of posting practically-untrue, self-aggrandizing bullshit on Twitter and Facebook instead of doing anything productive; Arbital is best described as a failure; word is going around that Anna Salamon and Nate Soares are engaging in bizarre conspiratorial planning around some unsubstantiated belief that the world will end in ten years, leading to severe dissatisfaction among the staff of MIRI; despite the efforts of a very valiant man, people have still not realized that autogynephilic men with repressed femininity and a crossdressing fetish pretending to be women aren't actually women; CFAR itself is trending in the direction of adding bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake; my own personal experience with people branded as "CFAR instructors" has been extremely negative, with them effectively acting arrogant out of proportion to their competence, not to mention their below-average levels of empathy; there was that bizarre scandal last year in which someone was accidentally impregnated and then decided not to abort the child, going against what had previously been agreed upon, and proceeded to shamelessly solicit donations from the rationalist community to support her child; etc., etc., etc.

In effect, there seems to be some sort of self-deception around the fact that the Berkeley rationalist community is by almost all reasonable standards severely dysfunctional, with the best people actually being on the periphery of the community. It's almost as if the author is coming up with the "Dragon Army" in an attempt to help everyone collectively delude themselves into believing they're much better than they are, because he can't bear to actually look at the Berkeley rationalist community and see it for what it is: a pile of garbage. Just like how a child from a broken family might imagine that everyone's getting along. Unfortunately(?), flinching away from the truth doesn't actually make reality go away.

Amusingly, it actually does seem as though the author partially realizes this. Let's review the criteria which the author hopes the members of "Dragon Army" will fulfill after a year's worth of cult membership:

(1) Above-average physical capacity (2) Above-average introspection (3) Above-average planning & execution skill (4) Above-average communication/facilitation skill (5) Above-average calibration/debiasing/rationality knowledge (6) Above-average scientific lab skill/ability to theorize and rigorously investigate claims (7) Average problem-solving/debugging skill (8) Average public speaking skill (9) Average leadership/coordination skill (10) Average teaching and tutoring skill (11) Fundamentals of first aid & survival (12) Fundamentals of financial management (13) At least one of: fundamentals of programming, graphic design, writing, A/V/animation, or similar (employable mental skill) (14) At least one of: fundamentals of woodworking, electrical engineering, welding, plumbing, or similar (employable trade skill)

"Above-average"? "Average"? Not exactly a high bar. "At least one employable mental skill, and at least one employable trade skill"? Is the correct inference here that the typical participant is actually expected to be not employable at all (i.e., deficient in both categories)? "First aid & survival" -- if there was ever any doubt that this is actually just sophisticated childish role-playing... The fact that I (in contrast with the Berkeley rationalist community) have put very little directed effort into the meta-goal of self-improvement and nevertheless plausibly already satisfy 11 of these 14 criteria, with the other 3 not seeming particularly difficult to attain, is not a good sign!

Despite the fixation on "evolving norms" or whatever, the author seems to be particularly blind to what social reality is actually like and what actually makes communities get along. Consider, e.g., the following quote:

for example, a Dragon who has been having trouble getting to sleep but has never informed the other Dragons that their actions are keeping them awake will agree that their anger and frustration, while valid internally, may not fairly be vented on those other Dragons, who were never given a chance to correct their behavior

Let me pose a question to the reader of my comment: would you rather live in a house where you have to constantly verbally ask the other residents to stop doing things that they could have reasonably foreseen would bother you, or would you rather live in a house where people actually used reasonable expectations of what other people want to guide their behavior and therefore acted in a way that preempted causing other people irritation?

There are two inferences to be made here:

1. Members of the Berkeley rationalist community are particularly prone to using bureaucratic rule-setting as a way to compensate for their severely below-average social skills, and
2. Members of the Berkeley rationalist community are particularly low-empathy and embody the worst of individualism, such that they don't actually care whether or not what they're doing might bother others until they're told to stop.

In my personal experience, both inferences are correct. Ultimately, what this comes down to is a bunch of socially-inept losers with near-autistic social skills trying to attain the sort of basic social harmony that comes naturally to more competent people via a combination of bizarre mimicry and a mountain of bureaucracy. Naturally, and contrary to the author's bizarre childish idealism, one can expect a hell of a lot of repressed irritation, interpersonal drama, and general unpleasantness from this experiment.

To top off the turd cake with a cherry, the author's science fiction writing is trash:

I felt my stomach twist, felt that same odd certainty, this time wrapped in a layer of the coldest, blackest ice. “You came to kill us,” I said. There was a soft rustle as the others straightened, pressure on my shoulders as the space between us closed. “You came to kill us all.”

Anyone who can vomit that out on a page and feel proud of it isn't fit to lead or teach anything. Period. The world would be concretely better off if the author, and anyone like him, killed themselves.

This seems similar to Leverage in a lot of ways. It seems like it would be really instructive to contrast your plan with Leverage's plan - as initially intended, and as executed - to see what you plan to invest in that they aren't, what you're not doing that they are, and costs and benefits of those differences.

Other contrasting case studies might also add clarity:

• Esalen
• kibbutzim
• the old Singularity Institute house
• residential colleges
• fraternities
• Buddhist monasteries
• Christian monasteries
• actual armies
• actual paramilitary organizations / militias
• Sea Org

It probably makes sense to 64/4 these with rough sketches from memory/stereotypes/Wikipedia-ing before bothering to do any time-intensive research.

For the next three months, I will embark on my own experiment of living in a high-standards high-group-activity environment. Specifically, a Buddhist temple.

The temple has an even tighter schedule. All residents wake up together at 5 am and go to sleep together at 10 pm. The rest is meditation, study and work, with 4 hours of free time. The weekends are free, so it adds up to being told what to do for 85 hours per week.

Over the years, I have stayed there six times for a week. The first days are usually a fight to adjust to the lower standards of living (the unpleasant valley). As the days go by, I become increasingly energized and sharp. When I leave, I'm in the best state I can be. Not even a CFAR workshop measures up to how much I upgrade in such a short time. And it's not the meditation. I've gone for days without really meditating and I would still upgrade.

This has led me to believe that something about our individualist style of living is profoundly wrong, at least for some people. Seems like a solution to many of our problems lies in collectivism. Think mental health, akrasia, huffelpuff virtue, etc.

I am really interested in how this is going to fly. Please do post updates. I would also love to share my perspective. I think I'll have some interesting data.

In the spirit of Murphyjitsu, the most obvious failure mode that you didn't mention is that I expect you to burn out dramatically after a few weeks, from exhaustion or the psychological strain of trying to optimize the experiences of N people. The bootcamp phase is not analogous to anything I've heard of you doing sustainably for an extended period of time.

So, do you expect Dragon Army Barracks to work if Eli has to take over for you in Week Four?

Caveat/skull: The obvious problem is people attempting to game the system—they notice that ten pushups is way easier than doing the diligent work required to show up on time 95 times out of 100.

Not a full solution, but gesturing in a direction that you might find useful: build the system in such a way that gaming it is encouraged and useful, and that the punishments are somehow self-balancing.

E.g. if the punishment is "do some chores", somebody who figures out that doing the chores is easier than their other obligations is at least clearing the list of all the chores that need to be done. If they run out of chores to do, new tasks can be added to the list, and they can choose whether doing them is still worth it.

I'm here kinda reminded of the evolution of pen'n'paper RPGs, which originally had disadvantages you could buy during character creation that made you more powerful in exchange; of course people would munchkin by "forgetting" the disadvantages during play. Newer games got past that by making disadvantages give you zero points during character creation (or even cost!), and instead had them award benefits if you roleplayed them during actual game. In general, games have gotten the better the more they have built "trying to munchkin the rules, automatically leads you to play the game more like it was designed to be played" as a fundamental game design principle.

Not sure of how to do the "self-balancing costs" thing, but I am reminded of the bidding systems some houses have for chores, where you offer money for doing some task and if someone else finds the offered amount of money more valuable than the pain of doing the chore they do it; otherwise you do it yourself.

I have tried similar things.

My strongest recommendation is to beware of internal power struggles. Even if you are fully understood to be in charge, if everyone under you is in a state of emotional mutiny, you WILL become compromised, and you WILL make mistakes, and those mistakes WILL be used to justify further emotional mutiny. This will spiral until you lose everything.

Moreso, some percentage of your trusted minions WILL undergo emotional mutiny. They will discover that they'd rather be somewhere else, doing something else. They'll discover that there are people other than you they'd like in charge of their lives. They will discover that they don't trust you as much as they thought they did. Even if you pick the best people -- hell, ESPECIALLY if you pick the best people, because the best people will have other people vying for their attention, seeking to undermine you from without.

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.

Are there people external to the project who are going to keep an eye on this? I think it would be sensible for each participant to have a buddy outside the house who checks in with them regularly. And for each buddy to know who the other buddies are.

This is a neat idea!

I expect it to fail. And I kind of wish you wouldn't try: I give maybe a 1/4 chance this fails sufficiently dramatically and publicly that I become less willing to be associated with the community because people start associating it with that failure.

In particular, here is what I expect to happen (~60% confidence it goes down something like this):

• Someone will start regularly defecting within the first three months. Maybe they don't keep up with their chores, maybe they skip meetings, maybe they fail to get along with someone and they fight, maybe they persist in doing something they've been asked repeatedly not to do, maybe they chafe under your leadership and start practicing malicious compliance. I don't expect intentional defection so much as executive dysfunction, to be clear, but it has the same effect either way.

• You, personally, will lack the force of character or charisma to fix it. (I haven't met you in person, so this might be way off; I'm just going off your writing and those of your pictures on Facebook I can see. But it takes an extraordinarily good manager to deal with this problem, and there's nothing in your bio which implies you are one.) You also, not being legally their military superior, won't have any actually worthwhile carrots or sticks to offer - this is the core problem, as I see it, that you lack the legal authority to properly enforce anything. Also, rationalists are weird, and often don't respond that well to the usual incentives.

• The rest of the house will lose confidence in your leadership as a consequence.

• Bad things. I don't actually know what happens at this step - people move out, or just stop playing by your rules and it reverts to a standard if unusually dysfunctional group house, or what.

Unfortunately I don't have fixes to offer you here, other than "try to figure out an enforcement mechanism which will work even on rationalists and which you can legally carry out". I can't think of such an enforcement mechanism, but haven't even put a full five minutes into it. Maybe you already have one in mind and I've missed it. To be clear, I don't think "ostracism" will be remotely sufficient, because of the aforementioned weirdness and the fact that people will have other friends to fall back on. (I guess you could only invite people without other friends, or require them to cut off contact with said friends, but that is a terrible idea.) I also want to say that I've seen a number of other communities either fail or struggle due to lack of an explicitly specified and actually effective enforcement mechanism for their rules.

Tiny side note: I think it's very important that members have regular one-on-one meetings with someone other than you, in case their problems are problems with you which they aren't willing to bring up to your face.

Have you ever lived under obedience? This is often considered a prerequisite for holding command of e.g. a monastery.

Praise: The focus on actually doing a thing is great.

Criticism: Most of this post was about methods the house will have, why these are OK, etc. Comparatively little was about what the house is going to used to accomplish outside itself. This seems worth putting much more up-front thought into given how much of the point is to make a house that can actually do a thing. Probably your methods and selection criteria are not very well-calibrated for whatever project will turn out to be best - human coordination is much easier when you're coordinating about something in particular.

Obviously you will not know everything perfectly in advance no matter how much planning you do - but planning to accomplish a particular thing is very qualitatively different from planning to accomplish things in general.

Praise: A lot of the details on how to live together well (group exercise, food, time explicitly set aside for checking in) seem really good. If step 1 is just "learn to live well together," that is itself a respectable project, and one most of the Rationalists have failed at. Probably most attempts at this fail, we only observe the old communes that didn't fall apart.

[I don't want to be here, but this is important].

To Duncan: I am not going to say you are trying to start a cult group, like some other folks did in this thread. However, I am going to suggest some background readings on cults if you are interested. Cults are a hobby of mine. My favorite cults are Scientology, unofficial Scientology derivatives who kept most parts of the belief system (yes they exist), and the Fellowship of Friends and other Gurdjieff-offshoot cults. Also Carlos Castaneda's group is a fun one. Those are the fun ones to read about.

To people Duncan is talking to: you are a human being, not a space monkey. The space monkey road is not a good road, I speak from personal painful experience. The space monkey road is going to abstract personal growth issues in a way that will be counterproductive for you in the long run, imo.

I think most people can do well by joining the kinds of relationships that are time-tested (marriage, friendship, work, school, gym, army, church...) From how much trouble it took society to get these halfway working and find decent boundaries, you should be skeptical of inventing new ones that will work in your lifetime. Especially if they look suspiciously similar to cults which we already know don't work.

And I'm not even sure why you need to invent new relationships! You might feel like you have huge problems that require one huge hammer to solve, but that feeling is deceptive. Mitigating the problems one by one, with boring well-known fixes, is easier and works better. If you want to get fit, join a gym. If you want to learn something, go to school. These will give you the right amount of structure and your daily dose of socialization, without regimenting your life like a boot camp, and you'll be guided by competent people instead of fumbling your way as a crowd of amateurs.

I couldn't comment on the linked Medium article, so I'd like to say that, for many students, particularly middle and high school students, it is simply not true that they are in class voluntarily. I was routinely threatened with dire consequences if I didn't go to school, and attempts to remain at home and refuse to go were met with physical force - I was literally pulled out of my bed and taken to the car or bus. School is about as voluntary as the military draft.

On the positive side, I think an experiment in a more centrally managed model makes sense, and group activity that has become integrated into routine is an incredibly good commitment device for getting the activity done- the kind of social technology used in workplaces everywhere that people struggle to apply to their other projects and self-improvement efforts. Collaborative self-improvement is good; it was a big part of what I was interested in for the Accelerator Project before that became defunct.

On the skulls side, though, I think the big risk factor that comes to mind for me for any authoritarian project wasn't addressed directly. You've done a lot of review of failed projects, and succeeded projects, but I don't get an impression you've done much of a review of abusive projects. The big common element I've seen in abusive projects is that unreasonable demands were made that any sensible person should have 'defected' on- they were asked things or placed under demands which from the outside and in retrospect staying in the group was in no way worth meeting- and people didn't defect. They stayed in the abusive situation.

A lot of abusive relationships involve people trading off their work performance and prospects, and their outside relationship prospects, in order to live up to commitments made within those relationships, when they should have walked. They concede arguments when they can't find a reason that will be accepted because the other person rejects everything they say, rather than deciding to defect on the personhood norm of use of reasons. I see people who have been in abusive relationships in the past anxiously worrying about how they will find a way to justify themselves in circumstances where I would have been willing to bite the bullet and say "No, I'm afraid not, I have reasons but I can't really talk about them.", because the option of simply putting their foot down without reasons- a costly last resort but an option- is mentally unavailable to them.

What I draw from the case studies of abusive situations I've encountered, is that humans have false negatives as well as false positives about 'defection'; that is, people maintain commitments when they should have defected as well as defecting when they should have maintained commitments. Some of us are more prone to the former, and others are more prone to the latter. The people prone to the former are often impressively bad at boundaries, at knowing when to say no, at making a continually updated cost/benefit analysis to their continued presence in an environment, at protecting themselves. Making self-protection a mantra indicates that you've kind of seen a part of it, but the overall model being "humans defect on commitments too much" rather than "humans are lousy at knowing when to commit and when not to" seems like it will miss consideration of what various ideas will do with false negatives often.

The rationalist community as a whole probably is mostly people with relatively few false negatives and mostly false positives. Most of us know when to walk and are independent enough to be keeping an eye on the door when things get worrying, and have no trouble saying "you seem to be under the mistaken impression I need to give you a reason" if people try to reject our reasons. So I can understand failures the other way not being the most salient thing. But the rationalist community as a whole is mostly people who won't be part of this project.

When you select out the minority who are interested in this project, I think you will get a considerably higher rate of people who fail in the direction of backing down if they can't find a reason that (they think) others will accept, in the direction of not having good boundaries, and more generally in the direction of not 'defecting' enough to protect themselves. And I've met enough of them in rationalist-adjacent spaces that I know they're nearby, they're smart, they're helpful, some are reliable, and they're kind of vulnerable.

I think as leader you need to do more than say "protect yourself". I think you need to expect that some people you are leading will /not/ say no when they should, and you won't successfully filter all of them out before starting no more than you'll filter all people who will fail in any other way out before starting. And you need to take responsibility for protecting them, rather than delegating it exclusively for them to handle. To be a bit rough, "protect yourself" seems like trying to avoid part of the leadership role that isn't actually optional: that if you fail in the wrong way you will hurt people, and you as leader are responsible for not failing in that way, and 95% isn't good enough. The drill instructor persona does not come off as the sort of person who would do that- with the unidirectional emphasis on committing more- and I think that is part of why people who don't know you personally find it kinda alarming in this context.

(The military, of course, from which the stereotype originates, deals with this by simply not giving two shits about causing psychological harm, and is fine either severely hurting people to turn them into what it needs or severely hurting them before spitting them out if they are people who are harmed by what it does.)

On the somewhat more object level, the exit plan discussed seems wildly inadequate, and very likely to be a strong barrier against anyone who isn't one of our exceptional libertines leaving when they should. This isn't a normal house share, and it is significantly more important than a regular house share that people are not prevented from leaving by financial constraints or inability to find a replacement who's interested. The harsh terms typical of an SF house share are not suitable, I think.

The finding a replacement person part seems especially impractical, given most people trend towards an average of their friends and so if their friends on one side are DA people, and they're unsuited to DA, their other friends are probably even more unsuited to DA on average. I would strongly suggest taking only financial recompense on someone leaving for up to a limited number of months of rent if a replacement is not secured, and either permitting that recompense to be paid back at a later date after immediate departure, or requiring it as an upfront deposit, to guarantee safety of exit.

If there are financial costs involved with ensuring exit is readily available, there are enough people who think that this is valuable that it should be possible to secure capital for use in that scenario.

This post puts me maybe 50% the way to thinking this is a good idea from my previous position.

My largest qualm about this is well-represented by a pattern you seem to show, which starts with saying "Taking care of yourself always comes first, respect yourself", then getting people to actually act on that in simple, low-risk low-involvement contexts, and assuming that means they'll actually be able to do it when it matters. People can show all the signs of accepting a constructed social norm when that norm is introduced, without that meaningfully implying that they'll use it when push comes to shove. Think about how people act when actual conflicts with large fight/flight/freeze responses interact with self-care norms. I suspect some typical-mind, as my model of you is better at that than most people. I think it depends on what "running on spite" cashes out to. This is kind of a known skull, but I think the proposed solution of check-ins is probably insufficient.

My other big concern is what comments like your reply to Peter here imply about your models and implicit relationship to the project. In this comment, you say you'll revise something, but I pretty strongly anticipate you still wanting people to do the thing the original wording implied. This seems to defuse criticism in dangerous ways, by giving other people the impression that you're updating not just the charter, but your aesthetics. Frankly, you don't seem at all likely to revise your aesthetics. And those, ultimately, determine the true rules.

To summarize the nature of my issues here in a few words: aesthetic intuitions have huge amounts of inertia and can't be treated like normal policy positions, and people's self-care abilities (and stress-noticing abiities) cannot be trusted in high-stress environments, even under light to moderate testing.

-Olivia

"roughly 90 hours a month (~1.5hr/day plus occasional weekend activities)" My math says that those weekend activities total the 1.5 hours every day has and also 10 additional hours every weekend.

"Any Dragon who leaves during the experiment is responsible for continuing to pay their share of the lease/utilities/house fund, unless and until they have found a replacement person the house considers acceptable, or have found three potential viable replacement candidates and had each one rejected. After six months, should the experiment dissolve, the house will revert to being simply a house, and people will bear the normal responsibility of "keep paying until you've found your replacement." "

It seems counterproductive to have people who have left the experiment living in the same house until they are replaced. Exit terms such as 'two months notice, or less if a suitable replacement can be found or otherwise agreed' are less coercive.

For the record: not for me. At all.

I would like everyone posting criticism, especially heated criticism, to keep very firmly in mind that Duncan did not have to write this. Whatever your opinion of him, at least make sure you've factored in the evidence that he wrote this whole, weird thing, complete with references to Ender's Game, Fight Club, etc. instead of writing either 1) nothing or 2) something much more reassuring.

There are critics who think Duncan is incompetent and overconfident, and about this hypothesis I can say at least that it is consistent with Duncan having written this post. Then there are critics who think Duncan is, I dunno, evil or power-hungry or something, and I think those people are mostly failing to see what is in front of them.

One particularly dangerous failure mode is that people may lose the capacity to recognize when the situation is toxic, unhealthy or counter-productive. The sunk cost fallacy is a powerful thing, as are the effects of strong emotional attachment. You may want to consider having a mandatory short vacation period from the house. This will allow people to take some space to get perspective on the house.

You also may want to mandate external social supports such as therapy, external friend groups, etc.

I find this project very interesting! I can imagine an alternate-universe version of me being super excited to join it. I think it's even possible that the this-universe version of me could benefit a lot from joining it. (I would see most of the benefit from myself in solving Problem 2, I think.)

But... I think there is not more than an 80% chance I would make it 6 months in such an environment without hitting the eject button to preserve my own sense of (physical or psychological) safety. (That is, a chance of at least 20% that I would hit the eject button.) I do think it's great that Code of Conduct rule #1 encourages people to protect their own safety even at the cost of leaving the project. (Although for people of limited economic means this might be hard to execute, given the need to find a replacement, so probably "has the means to deal with needing to leave if the project doesn't work out" is a screening factor.)

It's possible this is just a fact about me, more than about the project. But I don't have the sense that a lot of other members of the rationalosphere would well tolerate, say, an actual military boot camp environment, which feels a lot like the direction this is aimed. It's possible I'm misunderstanding the degree of control you / the project expects to exert over the lives of the participants. But I know that I got happier when I adopted the rule that adulthood means never letting anybody force me to do anything that feels unsafe, even if refusing has significant costs. (For comparison, my largest concern about going to a CFAR workshop was that being subjected to a "comfort zone expansion" exercise, while in remote woods, with complete strangers, on a sunk cost of thousands of dollars, would be a high-stakes problem if I didn't like how it went. Pete Michaud correctly disabused me of this concern during the interview.) Again, perhaps this just means that Dragon Army is not for me. But I'm curious what you think about it. It seems hard to imagine I could go 6 months of committing to try to perfectly execute all the stated rules plus one experimental norm per week without ending up in at least one situation where following the rules felt unsafe.

Separately, I'm interested in whether you think Problem 4 could be tackled separately from an all-consuming project like Dragon Army. I feel like I have seen the "desperately hoping nobody will bail after the third meeting" thing a lot before, but usually the context is "a bunch of people vaguely want to get a thing done but nobody has really committed to it", in which context bailing after the third meeting is not violating any norms or agreements. Without making any new norms, one already has the option of actually asking for explicit commitments, rather than just seeing who shows up, and I think this option is not used often enough. I guess the failure mode of trying to solve Problem 4 alone is, if you ask for explicit commitments, you discover that people just won't give them in the first place. Dragon Army seems like a big hammer to solve this but maybe it's the only way?

With respect to power dynamics point one and two, there is another person known to the community who is perhaps more qualified and already running something which is similar in several respects - Geoff Anders of Leverage Research. So I don't think this is precisely the only group making an attempt to hit this sort of thing, though I still find it novel and interesting.

(disclaimer: I was at the test weekend for this house and am likely to participate)

An excellent post from Slatestarscratchpad that sums up (I think) something like 85% of the fundamental disagreement that's fueling the more heated clashes:

One thing that’s seemed striking to me in this Dragon Army discussion is the priors on different people’s threat assessments.

I remember when I was younger, I used to want to meet my friends from the Internet, and my parents were horrified, and had all of these objections like “What if they’re pedophiles who befriended you so they could molest you?” or “What if they’re kidnappers who befriended you so they could kidnap you?”, or less lurid possibilities like “What if they’re creepy drug people and they insist on bringing you along to their creepy drug abuse sessions and won’t let you say no?”

And I never developed a good plan that countered their concerns, like “I will bring pepper spray so I can defend myself”. It was more about rolling my eyes and telling them that never happened in real life. I’ve now met hundreds of Internet friends, and I was absolutely right - it’s never happened, and any effort I put into developing a plan would have been effort wasted.

I’m not claiming there are no Internet pedophiles or kidnappers. I’m saying that based on my own Internet communities, and my threat-detection abilities, and the base rate, I was pretty sure it was more in the realm of terrorism (the kind of stuff you hear about on the news) than the realm of car accidents (the stuff that happens to real people and that you must be guarding yourself against at every moment).

This is also how I think of people turning out to be abusers. It’s possible that anyone I date could turn out to be an abuser, just like it’s possible I could be killed by a terrorist, but it’s not something likely enough that I’m going to take strong precautions against it. This is obviously a function of my personal situations, but it’s a real function of my personal situation, which like my Internet-friend-meeting has consistently been confirmed over a bunch of different situations.

(Please don’t give me the “that’s just male privilege!” speech; men and women get abused at roughly similar rates. I do think that probably women are socialized to fear abuse much more, and that’s a big part of this, and probably other axes of marginalization contribute more)

One interesting thing about Tumblr and the SJ-sphere in particular is that because it comes disproportionately from marginalized communities, it has this sort of natural prior of “people often turn out to be abusers, every situation has to be made abuser-proof or else it will be a catastrophe”. I once dated someone I knew on Tumblr who did a weird test on me where (sorry, won’t give more details) they deliberately put me in a situation where I could have abused them to see what I would do. When they told me about this months later, I was pretty offended - did I really seem so potentially-abusive that I had to be specifically cleared by some procedure? And people explained to me that there’s this whole other culture where somebody being an abuser is, if not the norm, at least high enough to worry about with everyone.

I’m not sure what percent of the population is more like me vs. more like my date. But I think there’s a failure mode where someone from a high-trust culture starts what they think is a perfectly reasonable institution, and someone from a low-trust culture says “that’s awful, you didn’t make any effort to guard against abusers!”. And then the person from the high-trust culture gets angry, because they’re being accused of being a potential abuser, which to them sounds as silly as being accused of being a potential terrorist. If you told your Muslim friend you wouldn’t hang out with him without some safeguards in case he turned out to be a terrorist, my guess is he’d get pretty upset. At the very least it would engender the “stop wasting my time” reaction I had when my parents made me develop anti-pedophile plans before meeting my Internet friends.

And then the person from the low-trust culture gets angry, because the person has just dismissed out of hand (or even gotten angry about) a common-sense attempt to avoid abuse, and who but an abuser would do something like that?

I think it’s interesting that the Dragon Army idea received more positive feedback or constructive criticism on LW (where it was pitched to, and which is probably culturally more similar to me) and more strongly negative feedback on Tumblr (which is more full of marginalized people and SJ-aligned people, and also maybe more full of abusers as judged by the number who get called out all the time).

First, you seem to think that "Getting Useful Things Done" and "Be 99.99% Reliable" heavily correlate. The military is infamous for bloated budgets, coordination issues, and high rates of sexual abuse and suicide. High-pressure startups largely fail, and are well known for burning people out. There is a very obvious failure state to this sort of rigid, high pressure environment and... you seem unaware of it.

Second, you seem really unaware of alternate organizational systems that actually DO get things done. The open source community is largely a loose model of "80% reliable" components, and yet great things get built by these collaborations. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was Linux.

"we often convince ourselves that 90% or 99% is good enough, when in fact what's needed is something like 99.99%."

Third, and most bluntly: I don't think you have the slightest knowledge of Fault Tolerant Design, or how to handle Error Cases, if you would say something like this. I write software that can rely on it's inputs working maybe 80% of the time. This is accounting software, so it is NOT allowed to fuck up on corner cases. And I do it just fine. 80% is perfectly sufficient, if you know how to build a system that fails safely.

I think this makes you a uniquely bad candidate for this sort of endeavor, because the first iteration of this experiment is going to be running at maybe 80% reliability. You're going to have a ton of bugs to iron out, and the first run needs to be someone who can work with 80%. And you seem pretty blunt that you're inept in that area.

Fourth, your thresholds for success are all nebulous. I'd really expect testable predictions, ideally ones that are easy for the community to evaluate independent of your own opinions. It seems like the goal of this exercise should be to produce data, more than results.

All that said, I do value the focus on iteration. I think you will be prone to making more mistakes, and inflicting more unnecessary suffering on participants, but I do not think you have any sort of malicious intent. And with no one else really stepping up to run this sort of experiment... well, if people are willing to make that sacrifice, I'm happy to learn from them?

But I think you dramatically over-estimate your ability, and you're selling short how badly the first version is going to go. There are going to be bugs. You are going to need to learn to deal with the 80% that you get.

And on top of that, well, the consequences for failure are actually worse than being homeless, since you're also responsible for finding a replacement. That's a really huge risk to ask people to take, when you yourself have absolutely nothing at stake.

I think your heart may well be in the right place, but the idea as currently conceived is actively harmful, and desperately needs to build in much better safety protocols. It also needs to be much clearer that this is an initial draft, that it will go badly as people try to figure this out, and that initial participants are going to be suffering through an unoptimized process.

Finally: You don't have a fail safe for if the whole idea proves non-viable. As it stands right now, you kick everyone out but leave them on the hook for rent until they've run 3 replacement candidates by you. In the meantime, you enjoy a rent free house.

It really feels like it needs an "ABORT" button where the participants can pull the plug if things get out of control; if you turn out power mad; or if it just turns out a significant number of participants badly estimated how this would go.

The fact that you have nothing on the line, and no fail-safe / abort clause... really, really worries me?

TL;DR: Your plan is dangerous and you haven't given nearly enough thought to keeping people safe. Scrap what you have and rebuilt it from the ground up with the notion of this being a safe experiment (and I want to emphasis both the word "safe" and the word "experiment" - you should be expecting the initial version of this to fail at producing results, and instead largely produce data on how to do this better in the future)

First, thank you for writing the post so fully and readably - it is really impressive! And I wish you would go to do this, in whatever way you would decide upon. But even if I thought full well the setup was safe (which I do) and the results were exactly as intended, in the most useful and generally good way, I wouldn't join.

Because I think that when people become parents, they suddenly find themselves in a world that is much more uncertain. You can't reliably say that you will sleep through the night, for example, even when the kid mostly does. And this is already hard enough to get used to - I know from experience - and it is also hard to begin anew (though this might be less so for men.) Imagine having actually trained yourself to be 100% in control of what you do, or even letting other people know that you are such kind of person. It's just not robust.

Reading the comments... well, this escalated quickly.

I can imagine this going either horribly right or horribly wrong. So I appreciate if a group of volunteers actually does the experiment, instead of everyone offering their preferred analogy for what should happen. Preferably with good safety mechanism, of which I can imagine two, already mentioned in this debate:

(1) Give members a mandatory time off, once in a while, to spend with their friends outside the "Army". Not just a weekend, but a full week, once in a while.

(2) If possible, it would be good to reduce the financial impact of leaving the group as much as possible. In a perfect world, there would be none. But of course, if you want to live in the same house, that costs money. It would be nice if the group could somehow collect extra money, as an insurance, to allow people leave without financial consequences. Perhaps make everyone pay 10% or 20% extra for the house?

There is always a tension between freedom and commitment, and between individual freedom and group cooperation. It seems generally good to err on the side of freedom, because people in positions of power often have a bias in favor of less freedom (for others, of course), so this is how we balance it. On the other hand, akrasia -- almost a proverbial trait of wannabe rationalists -- is often an inability to follow one's own commitments. Already damaging for individuals; making group activity almost impossible. It would be nice to be able to overcome this, and enter high-commitment situations (with limited scope, for limited time). Otherwise, we lose a lot of potential.

I can imagine myself benefitting from some kind of commitment enforcement, and rational life coaching in general. Of course, the devil is in the details. That's where things can go wrong easily. But if we can create enough safeguards, I support trying this, because there is so much to win.

A possible approach could be to select in advance two or three people trusted by the rationalist community as supervisors of the project. The supervisors would not participate in the project directly, but would have regularly scheduled meetings with members, individually, outside of the project, where the members could provide their opinions, and after hearing all of them, the supervisors would post an anonymized summary report on LW.

A "culture of abundance" in which food and leftovers within the house are default available to all, with exceptions deliberately kept as rare as possible

That reminds me of an event during a retreat where a cake couldn't get backed because they required chocolate that was brought to bake the cake was consumed beforehand. It was even baking-chocolate.

It seems like good cooking or baking leads to people buying specific ingredients and it's bad if they can't count on those ingredients not being consumed before the planned meal.

Concerns about your philosophy

1) You focus heavily on 99.99% reliability. That's 1-in-10,000. If we only count weekdays, that's 1 absence every 40 years, or about one per working lifetime. If we count weekends, that's 1 absence every 27 years, or 3 per lifetime. Do you really feel like this is a reasonable standard, or are you being hyperbolic and over-correcting? If the latter, what wold you consider an actual reasonable number?

2) Why does one person being 95% reliable cause CFAR workshops to fail catastrophically? Don't you have backups / contingencies? I'm not trying to be rude, I'm just used to working with vastly less fragile, more fault-tolerant systems, and I'm noticing I am very confused when you discuss workshops failing catastrophically.

the problem is that any rate of tolerance of real defection (i.e. unmitigated by the social loop-closing norms above) ultimately results in the destruction of the system.

3) Numerous open source programs have been written via a web of one-shot and low-reliability contributors. In general, there's plenty of examples of successful systems that tolerate significantly more than 0.01% defection. Could you elaborate on why you think these systems "close the loop", or aren't destroyed? Could you elaborate on why you think your own endeavors can't work within those frameworks? The framing seems solidly a general purpose statement, not just a statement on your own personal preferences, but I acknowledge I could be misreading this.

4) You make a number of references to the military, and a general philosophy of "Obedience to Authority". Given the high rate of sexual assault and pointless bureaucracy in the actual military, that seems like a really bad choice of role model for this experiment. How do you plan to avoid the well known failure states of such a model?

5) You raise a lot of interesting points about Restitution, but never actually go in to details. Is that coming in a future update?

every attempt by an individual to gather power about themselves is at least suspect, given regular ol' incentive structures and regular ol' fallible humans

6) You seem to acknowledge that you're making an extraordinary claim here when you say "I've noticed the skulls". Do you think your original post constitutes extraordinary proof? If not, why are you so upset that some people consider you suspect, and are, as you invited them to do, grilling you and trying to protect the community from someone who might be hoodwinking members?

7) Do you feel comfortable with the precedent of allowing this sort of recruiting post from other people (i.e. me)? I realize I'm making a bit of an ask here, but if I, handoflixue, had written basically this post and was insisting you should trust me that I'm totally not running a cult... would you actually trust me? Would you be okay with the community endorsing me? I am using myself specifically as an example here, because I think you really do not trust me - but I also have the karma / seniority to claim the right to post such a thing if you can :)

I want to publicly express my strong support for this experiment/meta-experiment.

I think that my support is particularly noteworthy as I'm presently a core member of a different taking-each-other-seriously co-living experiment that is profoundly different in its philosophy. (Mine is not in Berkeley, nor rationalist.) Therefore some people might assume that I would be opposed to Dragon Army Barracks.

Things in common between the experiment I'm part of and Dragon Army Barracks:

• is "high-commitment, high-standards, high-investment"
• is trying to actually make & achieve something together
• is addressing unanchored abandoned loneliness thing
• has consciously explicated commitments and assumptions
• is intended to produce a high-level of consistent excellence and ability to effectively collaborate

Things that are different:

• We're very far from authoritarian or hierarchical. Although we're also not egalitarian, consensus-based, or even democratic per se... but we have essentially zero of telling-other-people-what-to-do
• Our basic collective navigating framework is [Kegan-5 / fluid mode / post-rational], rather than [Kegan-4 / systematic mode / rational] (good summary of this distinction)
• Our focus is almost entirely on the meta-level of building the new cultural platform we're building. We don't have any expectations of each other on the levels of specific object-level projects or explicit behavioral norms (aside from ones necessary for the house's function)

I think that these differences are core to why I am part of this project that I'm part of, and why I consider it to be the most valuable investment I could be making with my time and energy. I am, therefore, non-Berkeley-residence aside, not going to be applying to DA. As I said above though, I strongly support Dragon Army Barracks as an experiment and potentially as an ongoing resource to individual and collective growth.

Reasons why I think that DA is a good idea:

• Expected value of high amounts of worthwhile object-level output. As Sebastian Marshall says, "the gains made from living more purposefully are forever - the time you've spent well will remains well-spent even if you fall off for a while sometimes. Most people don't even try, which is why most people don't succeed."
• I expect it will also produce a lot of developmental progress for people involved; that if you were to be able to sort rationalists by amount of growth in a year, the Dragons would all be in the top quartile, and would occupy many of the top 10 slots. This, even if the experiment were to end after 6 months.
• The DA Barracks is an intervention that is attempting to produce change on a very fundamental level of the system that is a group house. This is a powerful leverage point (see Donella Meadow's article... I would say this is around a 2 or 3, and most group houses have only done mild experiments at the 4-6 level.)
• I agree with and/or resonate with the six points that Duncan makes in Section 2 of this document.
• The project-level value of learning here is also very high: this will greatly inform future experiments, whatever their leadership basis.
• If I had kids, I would absolutely sign them up for any summer camps or classes Duncan was running. I think the amount of power he would have in relation to them would be similar to the amount of power he'll have in this situation.

A final reason is this: I think that we as humanity need to rapidly make progress on being able to effectively coordinate in non-hierarchical ways, which is what the project I'm part of is about. Corollarily, humanity is kind of mediocre at doing this in many contexts. Therefore if non-hierarchical projects aren't emphatically directed towards solving that challenge itself, I expect them to be outperformed by projects that are leveraging existing understanding about how to coordinate effectively in hierarchical ways. i.e. in this case, Dragon Army Barracks.

Somewhat scattered reactions:

• I am really interested to see the result of this experiment.

• I think the underlying models are extremely plausible, with the next bullet point as a possible exception.

• I am aesthetically very skeptical of phrases like "absolutely reliable" (in Problem 4). I don't think it's possible for something to be absolutely reliable, and it seems dangerous/brittle to commit to achieving something unachievable. However, this may be primarily an aesthetic issue, since I think the solution presented in Problem 3 is very sensible.

• I don't buy claim 4, "It does actually require a tyrant". I agree that it isn't always possible to achieve consensus. I don't think that hierarchical authority is the only way to solve that problem. Democratic Centralism is a well-tested alternative, for instance.

• I find the code of conduct worrisome, at least as presented. The rules seem likely to encourage hypocrisy and dishonesty, since they make psychologically implausible demands which in many cases are undetectable at time of infraction. This could potentially be mitigated by norms encouraging confession/absolution for sins, but otherwise I expect this to have corrosive effects.

• I am totally uninterested in joining the experiment, despite my interest in its outcome. I would be likely to be interested in substantially more time-boxed activities with similar expectations.

I applaud the experiment, and the writeup! Do you have a place where you'll publish metrics (people contacted, interest level, etc. before starting, and self-reported or objective measures of your stated objectives every week)?

0) This is not for me, not because of a bug in the proposed structure but because I don't know you and don't know any of the people recommending you. There are two people that immediately came to mind who, if they proposed this with themselves in your place, I would join up with over most situations and three more I would probably follow like this over my current situation.

1) You can't name something Dragon Army and not expect nerd pedantry, but this is pedantry with a point behind it. Dragon Army (in the book) distributed leadership down as much as possible. Each toon leader had more degrees of freedom from Ender's plans, each toon had a second who was expected to make decisions, and soldiers were more free to question their toon leaders. I know Dragon Army (the name) has a certain positive association in rationalist circles, but what you're describing sounds more like Salamander Army. This is meant as nerd pedantry more than disagreement with your proposed goals or metrics (Salamander was doing really well in the standings after all) but the difference between Salamander and Dragon hierarchy seems important in this context. Dragon Army won by having a dozen good commanders all thinking at once, Salamander won by having one or two good commanders and being able to expect sharp obedience from everyone under them.

2) The second highest value change (Highest is brought up in point 0) would be some form of "I Told You So" and accountability. I find I am much happier to submit to doing things I think are incorrect if my dissension has been recorded and I can point at it later. Something like an internal prediction market is probably overkill and would erode confidence in leadership in a bad way, but a norm where someone could say "I'm 70% confident this treehouse won't support enough weight if we nail it like that" and someone quickly sticks that in a google form might be fast enough not to interrupt things. This may or may not help with general cohesion or be relevant to the people who are actually probably joining.

This is sort of related to how often "sure, I'll do it the way you said as long as I have it in writing that I think it's dumb" has saved me by covering my rear, it also provides an important check on an incompetent leader, but mostly I'd want it because then the nagging thought "this is a bad idea" is out of my head and I can forget about it for a while. It's sort of like singing a song out loud sometimes stops it being stuck in your head.

3) "Internal economy trading effort for money and so on" Can I pay someone to do my lateness-apology push ups for me? That's a joking example, but given the likelihood of having large income discrepancies something of that nature may come up, and it might be worth having a framework for it. In the same ballpark, intense cooperation seems like it might be odd in non-DA associated things. Examples; what happens if one member applies for a job at a company another member works for? What happens if one member commits a crime and asks other members to be their alibi? I don't really expect either of those examples to actually come up, but they are examples where organizations structurally similar to what you're proposing can do very well for its members in ways that maybe aren't good for the surrounding social structures.