Oh Jesus Christ, this thing.

Would anyone on LessWrong2 be interested in "Brent Dill's Collected Wisdom and/or Madness About Social Systems: The Sequence"?

There's a lot of literature on what we do wrong, but not a lot of ready-made "techniques" just sitting there to help us get it right—only a scattering of disconnected traditions in things like management or family therapy or politics.

Given the unfortunate state of social science, my guess is that the best sort of evidence re: group rationality is observing which companies succeed in highly competitive industries without having any special advantages, especially those that attribute their success to their corporate culture. This Amazon reviewer thinks Koch Industries is such a company. I haven't read Koch's book, but this interview has interesting quotes like:

...we try to model our company around is what a philosopher scientist [Michael] Polanyi called “The Republic of Science.

My read of the interview is that Koch succeeded by solving the problem of exploration neglect.

Another important question. How to make a collective decision. Single people and small committees miss information that other group members might have relevant to the choice. Votes and large committees/working groups suck and are very heavy weight. How should decisions be made.

I've got some feelings that people shouldn't try and optimise 1 and 2 too much. It skeevs me out when I see people doing it, like people are trying to pull levers in my head, and I have to spend mental energy figuring out if I agree with the way people are trying to pull the levers or not. It might be that there is no such thing as optimal group cohesion policy just like you cannot be universally inclusive.

If I could upvote this twice, I would.

I think it's a common-but-harmful thing when people choose a community by maximizing along the "people who think like me/ are similar to me/ are interested in similar things as I am" axis. I posit that many people would be much happier if they instead chose the best d*mn community they can access (most functional, most fulfilling, etc.), and just satisficed along the "people who think like me" axis.

ETA: I specifically got back into Ballooning after about five years out of it because after I moved to a big city, I was dissatisfied and unhappy with the level of commitments and intertwininess in interpersonal relationships and communities. I thought "What is the strongest community I have access to?" and that's where I joined. If one of any number of other activities I enjoy had better communities I would have gone there instead.

My first stab at it (will be doing over the weekend). Collect a big list of drama and -storms, and look for commonalities or overarching patterns, in either the failure modes, or in the list of what could have been done to prevent them ahead of time. There are lots of different group failure modes, but a lot of people seem to have an ugh field around even acknowledging the presence of drama, let alone participating in it.

Thus, this seems like a worthwhile thing to throw some effort at, with a special eye towards actually finding the social version of a nuclear reactor control rod.

To the best of my knowledge, there's no clear model or technique that tells e.g. the manager of a startup how to balance fostering safety against holding high standards which might require telling people they aren't measuring up.

One way of looking at this problem is to think of the manager as being kind of like a coach. If a coach notices that their athlete is not breaking a sweat, that's a signal to make the workouts more difficult. If a coach notices symptoms of overtraining, that's a signal to make the workouts less difficult.

Another way of looking at it is to consider when safety is useful. I suspect that the optimal level of arousal for idea generation is below the optimal level for completion of well-defined next actions.

I think there are a few other dimensions. Not sure whether you see this as a different category:
size of the community - bigger communities/teams/companies inherently need different organisational means and there seem to be non-linearities involved i.e. there are certain optima of organisation (like a single person doing all the paperwork) and growing beyond what can be handled at that size requires leaving a local optimum. This seems to be one core insight of Growing Pains which I'm currently reading and which is totally relevant (though focussed on businesses).

type of the community - what is the main type of purpose of the community?

• mutual support

• relaxed company

• getting something done

• advertising for a cause

I'm uncertain whether this makes sense of whether is should be along social/religious/economic reasons.

Other relevant links:

- https://aeon.co/essays/like-start-ups-most-intentional-communities-fail-why

- http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/p23/dragon_army_theory_charter_30min_read/

Very grateful for this post, and commit to responding in more detail on Saturday

Some group-rationality articles:

Quoting Sarah Constantin from The Craft is not the Community:

" “Company culture” is not, as I’ve learned, a list of slogans on a poster. Culture consists of the empirical patterns of what’s rewarded and punished within the company. Do people win promotions and praise by hitting sales targets? By coming up with ideas? By playing nice? These patterns reveal what the company actually values."

Also a segment from Melting Asphalt's wonderful Crony Beliefs.
What is the company culture of your mind?:

"By way of analogy, let's consider how beliefs in the brain are like employees at a company. This isn't a perfect analogy, but it'll get us 70% of the way there.

Employees are hired because they have a job to do, i.e., to help the company accomplish its goals. But employees don't come for free: they have to earn their keep by being useful. So if an employee does his job well, he'll be kept around, whereas if he does it poorly — or makes other kinds of trouble, like friction with his coworkers — he'll have to be let go."

The first thing that jumps out at me is the phrase "nourish/reward them over time such that their needs are not better met". It would seem that the first step of a rational group is to understand and meet the needs of the members of that group. I also see this as a very complex problem to solve in and of itself.

First: thank you for writing this post, emphatically agree that these are issues that need to be discussed systematically.

Second: I think lots of people in the LW community are already aware of him, but I want to point at Jonathan Haidt as someone who is doing good work on these kinds of problems (would welcome disagreement on this point, as I think I'm a bit too confident in it for my own good).

Third: A problem suggested by Haidt's work to add to this list, in the context of a society/nation-scale group (epistemic status: somewhat half-baked):

To optimize for cohesion (at least in a population containing authoritarians, likely unavoidable at a nation scale), a community should emphasize similarities among group members; to optimize for truth-seeking, a community should be viewpoint diverse (couldn't find one link that summed up the whole argument on short notice, but I think this comes close). It seems to me that norms that foster truth-seeking are in tension with norms that foster cohesion, to the extent that the former requires diversity while the latter requires sameness. Perhaps this doesn't apply as much to smaller, more intentional communities (in particular because such communities can be selected for people who value diversity, and against people who are threatened by/uncomfortable with it), but on a nation scale I think it does apply. Would welcome criticism on this as well, the idea is somewhat half-formed and I have not given up hope that there is a way to reconcile these two goals in a satisfactory way. I plan to write at least one longer-form, top-level post on this topic at some point.