What can we learn from freemasonry?

Modern masonic groups don't really have any rationalist ideals anymore. It's largely a social/charitable fraternity for older men. Most of the charitable work affects the local community and can't be considered effective altruism.

I think it is good to have some difference between "respected members" and "newcomers". For example on LW website we have karma, but that would not work offline. The difference can motivate the new members to do tasks that are likely to bring them membership in the respected group.

Before LW, my favorite web forum was the developer forum for Battle for Wesnoth. The discussions there were about many things, including politics and other potentially mindkilling stuff. The forum didn't have karma, but in some sense there were "respected members": the people who contributed to the game. When a conflict started, the project contributors had an advantage. And they were usually significantly more rational then the other side. Partially it was because they had something to protect: the game. For example, when a new idea was proposed for the game, they were likely to evaluate not just how cool could it be, but also how much work and maintenance would it require and what could possibly go wrong. Partially it was because the type of people who talk a lot, enjoy conflicts, but never do anything useful, were not among them. Some people join a project forum not because they want to help a project, but because they merely want to "express their opinions"; it is good to have a filter that separates them from people who really want to do something meaningful. -- Because the whole system was informal, I cannot say exactly how many "levels" there were, and what exactly were their requirements.

Analogically, in a rationalist community, people should be respected for something else than being a good speaker or being able to create a faction within the community. One obvious level is working for MIRI or CFAR. But that's too high; we need lower levels, too. The level one should be possible to reach relatively simply, but not automatically by merely coming to meetups. It should be "something useful beyond mere socializing". Such as: organizing the meetups, translating a part of the Sequences, making a lecture about a rationalist topic, creating and distributing HP:MoR flyers, etc. Because there are things that should be done; so it makes sense to reward them. Also, this helps to select the subset of our kind that can cooperate; it can be useful if they recognize each other explicitly.

Good question. I've been thinking of the social arm of the rationality scene for a while as a revival or modernization of the concept of a fraternal society, of which the Masons are probably the most famous example, or of the social clubs with which they were often associated; but I haven't looked much into best practices for that sort of organization. In retrospect it seems like a stupidly obvious thing to be asking. Here's what I can think of off the top of my head.

Fundamentally I think societies like the Masons get most of their value not from any specific goals or practices, but simply from being a nucleus for cooperation and social contact among sub-Dunbar groups of intelligent people. As long as you only care about intellectual interaction, it's probably easier to find such a nucleus now than it was in the decades when these groups were most prominent -- the whole point of social media is to provide a platform where groups of people can agglutinate -- but if you're looking for physical, in-person interaction it's harder than ever. Any further development of this aspect of the scene should keep that in mind.

Having somewhat nebulous goals is probably a feature, not a bug. If your social scene is into sponsoring charity and furthering rational values in a general sort of way, but is intentionally apolitical with regard to religion, politics, or the other major alignments of the time, you're essentially contributing to a partial inoculation against ideology. This strikes me as both prosocial and instrumentally useful to members.

It's common for these societies to require some sort of initiatory ordeal. Anthropologically these are pretty common and serve several purposes, but most importantly they're a hard-to-fake signal of dedication and in some sense competence, functioning as a filter for people with high maturity and executive function and against dilettantes and freeloaders. I think some version of this this has the potential to be very useful for us, albeit with the caveat that it's probably the most cultish practice of the Masons and their various peers. It might not need to take the form of an ordeal, though; Burning Man culture, for example, has similar barriers to entry implicit in the logistics of getting to and surviving in a fantastically hostile desert for a week.

Incidentally, it's somewhat improper to refer to this sort of thing as a cult, as you allude in your links; many such societies have goals and often a body of ritual praxis, but it's rare for them to share any specific orthodoxy, and most are explicitly nondenominational.

At the London meetup today there was talk around having a register of skills that LW people were available to help with, and I was reminded of freemasonry on a general level.

The thing about freemasonry is that as far as I can see, it works. That is, members seem to be more successful than non-members from similar backgrounds (though I would be very pleased to see rigorous evidence on the subject). So it seems to me that forming a freemason-like organization (and presumably tweaking any obvious problems, but defaulting to their ruleset since it's been successful in practice) would be an effective way to help our members achieve their goals.

(I guess the obvious counterproposal is: why don't we just all join the existing freemasons rather than doing work to duplicate them?)

Freemasons do occult rituals. As far as I understand they are psychologically intensive. and I would guess that the average rationalist wouldn"t like engaging into that sort of activity.

We rather want rituals such as CFAR group exercises than occult ones.

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