Project Hufflepuff: Planting the Flag

Everyone, could we please stop using the word "sociopath" to mean things other than... you know... sociopathy?

I also like the linked article and I believe it does a great job at describing social dynamic at subcultures. I shared that article many times. But while it is funny to use exaggerations for shocking value, making the exaggerated word a new normal is... I guess in obvious conflict with the goal of rationality and clear communication. Sometimes I don't even know how many people are actually aware that "trying to make profit from things you don't deeply care about" and "being diagnosed as a sociopath" are actually two different things.

To explain why I care about this, imagine a group that decides that it is cool to refer to "kissing someone for social reasons, not because you actually desire to", as "rape". Because, you know, there are some similarities; both are a kind of an intimate contact, etc. Okay, if you write an article describing the analogies, that's great, and you have a good point. It just becomes idiotic when the whole community decides to use "rape" in this sense, and then they keep talking like this: "Yesterday we visited Grandma. When we entered the house, she raped us, and then we raped her back. I really don't like it when old people keep raping me like this, but I don't want to create conflicts in the family. But maybe I am just making a mountain out of a molehill, and being raped is actually not a big deal." Followed by dozen replies using the same vocabulary.

First, this is completely unnecessarily burning your weirdness points. Weird jargon makes communication with outsiders more difficult, and makes it more difficult for outsiders to join the group, even if they would otherwise agree with the group's values. After this point, absurdity heuristics works against anything you say. Sometimes there is a good reason for using jargon (it can compress difficult concepts), but I believe in this case the benefits are not proportional to the costs.

More importantly, imagine that if talking like this would become the group norm, how difficult it would be to have a serious discussion about actual rape. Like, anytime someone would mention being actually raped by a grandparent as a child, there would be a guaranteed reaction from someone "yeah, yeah, happens to me when we visit Grandma every weekend, not a big deal". Or someone would express concern about possible rape at community weekend, and people would respond by making stickers "kisses okay" and "don't like kissing", believing they are addressing the issue properly.

I believe it would be really bad if rationalist community would lose the ability to talk about actual sociopathy rationally. Because one day this topic may become an important one, and we may be too busy calling everyone who sells Bayes T-shirts without having read the Sequences a "sociopath". But even if you disagree with me on the importance of this, I hope you can agree that using words like this is stupid. How about just calling it "exploiting"? As in: "some people are only exploiting the rationalist community to get money for their causes, or to get free work from us, without providing anything to our causes in return -- we seriously need to put stop to this". Could words like this get the message across, too?

Also, if you want to publicly address these people "hey guys, we suspect you are just using us for free resources; how about demonstrating some commitment to our causes first?", it will probably help to keep the discussion friendly, if you don't call them "sociopaths". Similarly, imagine LessWrong having an article saying (a) "vegans as a group benefit from the rationalist community, but don't contribute anything to the art of Bayes in return", or (b) "vegans are sociopaths". Regardless of whether you personally happen to be a vegan or not, this is obviously harmful.

tl;dr -- we are in the rationality business here, not in the clickbait business; talk accordingly

(EDIT: Just to be explicit about this, ignoring the terminology issue, I completely agree with the parent comment.)

This, and problems similar to this, are indeed a pretty major issue I foresee Project Hufflepuff needing to resolve. I'd read the Mops/Fanatics/Sociopaths essay but hadn't thought about this particular issue from this angle before, thanks.

"Note, the problem here isn't the ask. We do asks in entrepreneur-topia all the time. The problem is the lack of dealcraft: the asks are asymmetrically favouring the asker, and only offer vague lipservice-waving-towards-nice-things as return."

I want to talk about this just a bit. If I've missed a comment that also addresses the same point, I apologize.

So, yes, asks are super common in the culture you're in. But in other cultures - specifically those that are more guess oriented - it's actually really difficult to grow negotiation skills. I'd caution strongly against taking a lack of ability in these areas as some sort of strong indication of a person being a "parasite" or having some other baked-in personality type issue. Which isn't to say that it's not a problem, just that I don't know that this piece of evidence is especially strong given how rare it is to find good examples of tell (or even ask) culture in large portions of the country/internet.

If you're concerned with the lack of dealcraft that comes from newbies, then knowing good resources to point them towards - or offering to be a source of practice in short, low-cost scenarios - may be a more effective way of dealing with this. This will also give you an opportunity to observe how folks respond to those opportunities, which may give you stronger evidence to use to actually identify the parasites/moochers/insert-preferred-term-here that do filter in (because I agree that this is also a thing that happens).

There are, by my count, at least 3 such sociopaths in the Bay community; and specifically they position themselves as the broken stair step right at onboarding, making the community feel "impenetrable and unwelcoming".

I have never been in physically in attendance in the Bay community and so I don't know whom you are talking about. Do you think other people agree with you that those people are sociopaths? Have you talked with others about the specific people you are concerned about?

I think that almost everyone vastly underestimates the importance of friends, and especially the importance of a few close friends. In terms of not being lonely, of having good times and good events, or even of having a good time at the events that the community organizes, a few close friends are the key. I started enjoying group events far more when I realized that there is no need to try and 'make the rounds' of the 20-100 people there - find the handful that interest you tonight, and spend the night with them.

Raemon's response is key too, though. Communities are still super important because they provide anchors around which things can be organized, friends can coordinate and new friends can be found. What you do not want is for smaller groups to be only friendships and withdraw from their communities, or for some outside community to steal the best community members, because then the original community stops drawing in new people (or stop drawing in good new people) and slowly dies.

A great question, and one I hope is asked at the conference, is "how do we encourage more formation of close friendships?"

I endorse this as a healthy transition, with the caveat that what seems to happen, in practice, is that people clump off and form friendships, and then the community-mechanism by which people were able to form those friendships fades, so that future generations are not able to form friendships of their own. (Also, it seems like people end up not forming especially close friendships because people are too busy)

Don't invite people because "they're part of the community" or "I want to make sure they're not lonely";

Yeah; "taking care that people are not lonely" can in a proper context be a valuable project in itself, but it usually doesn't mix well with other projects, so you have to decide what kind of project are you going to do today.

For example, you could have a separate project of providing social opportunities for e.g. old people in your community. And that would be a great project. But in such project, you would clearly distinguish between the organizers and the target audience. Which does not mean that the old people can't contribute to the project -- for example, if an old lady offers to bring home-made cookies for the party, you would include her as a specialist organizers. But you would expect that in general the two groups are distinct. And more importantly, it wouldn't create any negative feelings in you, because you would see that as how things are supposed to be.

On the other hand, when I e.g. organize a local LW meetup, it is very simple to make a mistake and assume that the target audience wants to (and should) become organizers at some moment. Maybe not all of them, but... well, more than zero would be nice, right? Nope, that's an unrealistic assumption. There is no law saying that if you have dozen audience members, at least one of them must be an organizer in disguise.

I can also trace a similar arc, over the past fifteen years or so:

• "Um, what do you mean, 'communities'? A community is a physical group of people out there in the real world, who share needs for physical safety, thriving, a favorable ecology, etc. Sure, many of these things are quite applicable in a real-world meeting, but an online social group is nothing like that! This 'virtual community' business is dangerous nonsense that's going to promote groupthink, get in the way of actual useful work (like writing blogposts, editing wikis, creating media content and writing free/open source software!) and empower authoritarian personalities who'll want to enforce their arbitrary rulesets and codes of petty etiquette, and/or force the social group to compromise towards their own preferred values!"

Needless to say, I haven't changed my opinion this far. Nowadays I still think that physical meetups, "unconferences" and the like can be exceedingly useful to inspire and coordinate useful work that mostly happens online; but that attitudes and concerns associated with these, such as written "codes of conflict" - a very predictable and needed development in any physical community larger than about 150 members! - should be kept separate and not be allowed to infect the "online" side of things like some sort of parasitic "virtual community" ideology.

Hey Ray, would you mind posting the notes from the unconference? With the CFAR hackathon coming up, the notes might give me ideas of hacks to work on.

Personally, I think cohorts happen automatically, and LW is "yet another cohort" and if we want to be part of a movement with inter-generational significance then maybe we should pause to consider why we think we should be "the first generation" in a movement that lasts forever...

In this vein, I appreciate previous places and groups like:

• The SL4 mailing list (where Eliezer had the experiences that inspired the Sequences).
• The Extropians
• Robin Hanson (who was an Extropian back in the day, co-blogged with Eliezer, and needs no link)
• Daniel Hillis and the Long Now Foundation
• Eric Drexler and the Foresight Institute
• Ralph Merkle and the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing
• Mike Darwin
• Ettinger and Bedford and the whole early cryonics movement.
• Several generations of early hard science fiction authors and fans.
• Quite a few libertarians probably?
• Also a lot of heretics. Luther and Newton were both nutcases...
• Etc. Etc. (I'm surely forgetting stuff.)

If I was going to name the entire thing, I think I might call it "Outsider Science" (taking a cue from "Outsider Art" and contrasting it with "Vannevarian Science").

So if you wanted to be so Hufflepuff that you sacrificed the whole group on the altar of being social (rather than just sacrificing yourself for the group) I'd argue that it would be a natural progression to work on reconnecting, resuscitating, archiving, and generally paying attention to these older places and communities, and putting yourself in service to their long term goals.

The hard thing here is that the diagnostic criteria looking backwards seems to be having a certain mindset towards physical reality and being a kind of a cultural orphan at the same time. The standoffishness and founding a tiny little institutes is part of what this movement seems to do by default?

Thus, projecting forward, you would predict that new instances of "the outsider science movement" would form on their own, start their own thing, and reject the notion of intellectual parentage, as much as we (the hypothetical intellectual parents) try to bring them into the loose confederation of previous attempts at self organized scientific research aiming at eternal intellectual challenges.

A lot of the future people you'd be trying to bring into the fold might very well prefer to struggle on alone.

Arguably, Vanevarian Science (with government credentialed universities doing government funded research) is already doing what you would evolve into anyway, and has succeeded so far and so thoroughly that its "highest mid level hierarchs" have become members of the deep government of the world? So maybe the right thing to do is just let all the various orphans struggle on by themselves, and just go try to get a job at NSF while retaining fond feelings for the strugglers?

So my guess is that Bacon's Effecting Of All Things Possible has run for a long while now, and maybe "the orphans" who might have belonged to the high church version (but somehow never connected with the central culture) were never really noticed until the internet came along and then could start to find each other and form little clumps and clusters.

So maybe the most Hufflepuff thing possible would be to somehow be encourage a larger internet culture that finds and welcomes these autonomous orphan clusters, while also extending an olive branch to the high church "Heirs of Bacon" who exist in the deep government, and see if there is some way to establish a state of communion between the main tree and all the little saplings :-)

I actually think it's important for a given project to have a fairly narrow focus in order to make progress, and I see Project Hufflepuff as related to outreach, but not directly about outreach. (I also don't think proselytizing is the right word - we don't have Good News to share - we have a bunch of ideas and models we're in the process of figuring out.)

Right now, the community has something of a backlog of people who want to get more involved, but aren't sure how, and people who are hanging out on the periphery and have value to contribute, but various things about the culture make them not want to. As well as people in the community who aren't succeeding/thriving at the things they want to.

Project Hufflepuff is about making internal community infrastructure better. This will hopefully remove bottlenecks that make outreach harder, but isn't the same thing.

If the problem is loneliness, then the solution is not to force people to feel un-lonely. It is to get people to work it out for themselves. (Which may be a valid but different project)

I'm not sure how much of a disagreement we have regarding the NVC paradigm. I very much didn't mean for the solution to be "force people to be un-lonely", so if that's how it came across, sorry for that miscommunication. (The OP was just a high level summary of what sort of problems I'm trying to address)

I very much agree with NVC that it's important to have an internal locus of control. But you can still look at an overall situation, notice that a lot of people are struggling to make things work, and notice things about a culture that are making it harder to solve a problem.

I don't see a systemic problem, other than perhaps with agency or communication.

Yeah, this particular problem I largely see as about agency and communication (and noticing).

Yeah - What I meant to argue is more like "valuable people who could be contributing a lot a leaving or getting turned away from the community, for reasons I think are bad or shortsighted."

Can you explain more about what you consider to be the current barriers to entry and how they work? The things that seem to turn off people to the rationality community are more like cultural issues, then things deliberately put in place to filter out unwanted members. I'm not necessarily against barriers in general as long as they are well engineered, but this post seems to be more about reducing the problems with the things that have emerged somewhat organically within the original rationality groups.

I agree that enforced prosociality can be oppressive, and plan to discuss it in an upcoming post.

(I'll respond to each comment separately for easier threading).

Specifically, in practice, trying to aim at prosociality tends to produce oppressive environments

I don't think this is really true. I think that lots of authoritarian-minded people nowadays try to use pro-sociality and vague ideas of "social progress", "a safe and welcoming community for everyone", "a well-tended garden" and the like as cover for what are really oppressive environments (often focused on enforcement of petty etiquette and narrow, cultish shibboleths, to the detriment of actual, ethically significant issues). But supposing that "trying to aim at prosociality tends to produce oppressive environments" amounts to arguing that open and non-oppressive environments are inherently "antisocial". I see no reason to assume this is the case.

I'm trying to hold off on proposing solutions, but the sort of thing I'm imagining here looks less like specific events, and more like changing attitudes and building skills.

You might do particular events as part of an approach to changing those attitudes and skills, but the events are not the end goal. The endgoal is to have the "problem" bullet points listed in the OP reversed - people have an easier time forming close connections, various projects are more successful because people have soft-skills they need to improve their group dynamics, etc. (And, importantly, to do that without sacrificing the things that make the LW-descended community unique and valuable)

Seems to me that talking about "social awkwardness" conflates things that should be addressed differently.

For example, there are people who are too shy to speak, and hate to compete for attention, so at a LW meetup they would just sit in the corner and quietly listen. These people don't harm anyone else, only perhaps themselves. You may try to think about gentle ways to encourage them, for example by having a part of meetup where people split into smaller groups and have an informal debate e.g. while eating some food.

Then there are people who, for example, regularly try to monopolize someone else's time, and ignore subtle and gradually-less-subtle hints that the person is not interested. This is potentially harmful, although the intensity of the harm may greatly vary depending on the personality of the target. A more assertive target will leave the interaction after a minute or two, and feel mildly annoyed. A less assertive target may find themselves unable to escape, will spend the whole LW meetup in an unwanted interaction, and never come back.

While on individual level, a good strategy against unwanted interactions is becoming stronger (mentally, socially, physically); on group level, we should protect the weaker members and visitors against unwanted interactions.

Sometimes people use animal metaphors of e.g. "sheep" and "wolves", the good but defenseless people, versus strong predators. This typically includes a "shepherd dog" role, i.e. someone strong (and potentially dangerous) who uses their powers exclusively for protecting others. I would like to add two new species to this zoo.

A "hyena" is a relatively weak predator; unlike the wolf who attacks more or less indiscriminately (and consequently gets attacked by the shepherd dogs), hyena carefully avoids conflicts with anyone stronger, and tries to isolate a sheep from the herd, and attack it in privacy. And a "rabid sheep" is technically a sheep, and is correctly recognized as such by the shepherd dogs, except that it keeps biting everyone around. The difference is that while the shepherd dogs may have a difficulty to recognize the hyena, if they finally spot it, they know how to deal with it. But when they see (or even get bitten by) the rabid sheep, they are quite confused about what to do, since they are supposed to protect all the sheep, and more importantly, to attack any non-sheep who attacks the sheep (which would include any shepherd dog who would decide to intervene, which is why they don't).

To unpack the metaphor, a "hyena" would be a person with undesired behavior who carefully avoids the assertive or high-status members, and targets the weak and unconnected ones.The organizers may fail to notice the problem, or underestimate its importance, because they were not exposed to the worst forms of the behavior. A "rabid sheep" would be a member of a protected (formally or informally) group who makes the situation unpleasant for other members, but people outside the group are afraid that any action against that person would be interpreted as an action against the whole group; and sometimes the unpleasant person makes it quite explicit that this is, indeed, how they would publicly interpret any opposition. The remaining members of the same group are the only ones socially allowed to object, which is an unfair burden.

Seems like different kinds require more nuanced approach, i.e. greater social skills and better coordination in the group. To solve the problem of wolves, it is enough for the shepherd dogs to create a coalition... but this ignores the hyenas. To solve the problem of hyenas, a naive approach is to give a blanket power boost to the sheep... which creates the problem of rabid sheep. To solve all three problems together, and to do it in a way that can scale... well, I don't have a simple answer.

I'm totes aware of the irony here, and have thought about alternate names but not really came up with anything that

a) communicates the particular combination of things I'm going for here b) is memorable and curiosity inducing

(I do plan to eventually port this whole thing over to the EA community in a fashion that's more respectable looking. If you have suggestions for a good alternate name, lemme know)

Qiaochu - I'm curious if you felt like you were talking about the same thing Elo was talking about, or a different thing? (it was unclear to me)

I say this every time a poll comes up like doodle. Doodle permits people to democratically have their attendance voted against.

(for someone on the edge of the group) Which is to say if our days are Tuesday and Wednesday and I vote Tuesday but more people vote Wednesday then my attendance was voted against. Democratically. More people could show up on the other day and so I am excused from attending because I can't make it.

For someone in the core of the group it's no different. Being voted against is unfortunate.

I actually (somewhat) agree - I'm using HP terminology out of experience and because it allows me to gesture at a complicated thingy with few words and have some built in community mythology to support it. BUT this definitely has costs, and if anyone has ideas for a name for this thing that is

a) catchy b) communicates the gist of the idea, but c) still leaves people wanting to know more without immediately thinking they know what the project is entirely about but being wrong, so they ask following questions

I would probably be in favor of such a name change.

Now I'm curious why this was retracted?