Rationalist households: What can London learn from its predecessors?

As we discovered on the London Google Group, I can talk at length about common pitfalls of group living, but a lot of that is based on experience rather than any kind of good theoretical understanding. Here are a few broad observations that stand out.

• Coordination starts getting hard when you have more than three people in a household. Up until that point, it's relatively plain sailing unless you have wildly different expectations.

• Arguments (especially ongoing ones) generally happen because of a disparity between what people agreed to and what people think is fair. Having all "official" household agreements written down somewhere with a set renegotiation date can help to offset this.

• Most disputes between otherwise-civilised people sharing living space are about cleanliness. Hiring a cleaner can eliminate a lot of resentment.

• Having a regular forum to discuss the household and air grievances-in-waiting works surprisingly well. Agreeing, for example, to convene on the first Monday of every month to talk about things that need doing, repairs, issues, expenses, upcoming visitors, etc.

• Organise money and payments to involve as few transactions as possible. How this is best accomplished will depend on the setup in question, but dividing up expenses between multiple parties can be a highly counterintuitive process. With multiple people paying multiple bills, you can wind up with accidental change-raising scenarios. You never want to be in the position of not knowing who any given debt or credit belongs to.

I think a running theme with these is that people often believe bonds of friendship are sufficient motivators to get everyone to cooperate well in a household. In reality, there are legitimate coordination and cooperation problems that upscale poorly, and instigating formal mechanisms for things can take the pressure off the social bonds. Some of my best domestic relationships were under mercenary convenience arrangements with relative strangers. When you don't have to worry about showing how great a friend you are, it's much easier to get along.

Read and follow up on The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman to avoid some basic errors common to high-intellect groups. Around 6,500 words, written in 1970-1972 for feminist groups but applicable to many kinds of groups. The basic error: thinking everyone involved has the same goals and skills and therefore no need exists for a formal decision making process. And no need exists for a formal means to eject members of the household.

Use tools wisely.

Expensure for debt resolution. Just use it, don't tabulate debts by hand, there is no need to.

If you are sharing groceries, set up a Google doc spreadsheet for the weekly grocery list.

Whiteboards are invaluable for sharing information in a household with people who are in and out intermittently, and can hold a weekly menu (again, if you're sharing food).

Obligatory plug for our software: Chore distribution is kind of difficult; schedules sort of work, but they're not ideal for giving people chores they dislike the least and allowing flexibility. If you're interested in using a free market system to distribute chores, we wrote a web app for that purpose. We've used it for ~7 months to great effect. If you're interested in using it, I will personally give you tech support.

The house I lived in last semester used all these things and was extraordinarily efficient at providing meals and a clean house to all residents.

Also, I second the comments about having official house rules negotiated explicitly, and setting times to renegotiate them if necessary. Reasonable people can have different preferences about states of the house/apartment, and when that happens it's very important to air these concerns and come up with explicit solutions (or compromises if you absolutely have to).

There must be at least one hero who is responsible for making sure the house is well-managed, e.g. collecting rent and utilities payments, getting a maid, making sure house meetings happen to agree upon house rules, and before that, being on Craigslist all day (or whatever service) to find a good place. This person should plausibly be compensated for all this extra effort by paying proportionally less rent than the others.

Use a spreadsheet to flexibly determine who pays how much rent. There's a great one we used at "Milvia House" in Berkeley; I'll check to see whether I can share it with the world.

Centre for Effective Altruism has several intern houses in the Oxford area which are basically rationalist houses. I was just there for the past six weeks and everything seemed to be like living in a normal house, except with a lot more philosophy conversations.

I'm curious, what precisely does "Rationalist household" imply?

We are also establishing a community house, but don't expect to be ready to actually move in together for about a year or so. The first difficulty we ran into was actually moving/lease dates. Some people needed to move asap (moving to city, didn't want to renew current lease, etc), other people won't be ready for a while (waiting for a house to sell, etc). Everyone's leases are up on different months.

Another (probably unique to us) situation is that everyone in the group has been living/ moving to the same area/neighborhood, so that about two-thirds of the greater group (10 of 15) are within walking distance to each other. This is good for the community, but pretty much limits the search for a group house to this one area, since no one wants to set up a community house not near the community.

One thing I've done is create a spreadsheet with the following info: Timing/When does your lease end, Price range, Cleanliness/Lifestyle, Preferred community level (ie do you just want roomies, or do you want an intentional community or something in between?), How many roomies, Location preferences (see above re: being pretty much limited to Victorian Village area), NEEDS, and wants (for example, I need to have my dog. Also, central AC, dishwashers, and more than one bathroom aren't a given in this area (old houses)).

Reply to this comment if you’re interested in being part of a rationalist house in London, UK.