+A whole bunch for this. In general I think we need way more posts of the form "here is an actual thing in the world I tried and here is what I learned from it" (the Arbital post is another really good example) and I want to somehow incentivize them much harder but I'm not sure how.

[Context: I live in Dragon Army.]

I think it was good as a rationalist house, and something like 10-30% better than the rationalist house you would have had if the same group of people had just formed a house together without a clear structure. I also think it was basically a failure at the stated goals / house charter.

I'm also glad that we tried it, and would not advise past-me to not try it, and mostly agree with Duncan's advice to past-Duncan. (I also expect to stick around for the next stage of the house, which will likely be a regular rationalist house with some more structure.)

Some parts I disagree with:

I am more convinced than ever that little things like hand gestures, formal call-and-response patterns, jargon, little rituals, and explicitly outlined ways-of-interacting are a huge make-or-break for something like DA, and that I hit them lightly enough that we ended up in "break" territory.

I don't think that this was a major input into the outcome of the house, and am somewhat confused that you're more convinced of this now. It feels like there were ~3 obviously important things that didn't happen, ~6 things of uncertain importance that didn't happen, and the project didn't succeed; this state of affairs is basically equally likely in the world where those little things are make-or-break and the world where those little things are irrelevant. Where's the Bayesian evidence coming from?

Shifting gears a little—I'd tell past Duncan to start some kind of permanent record-keeping. We kept a LOT of data out on the walls, in public spaces, but it was always This Experiment or That Experiment—scattershot and inconsistent.

I don't think the versions of this that we actually tried worked very well. My model here is that the core feature is having a good metric that people are bought into, and am pessimistic about versions of this without that feature. (The past versions that we tried were proposals of metrics, which people mostly didn't buy into, and so after trying it out for three weeks or so it was abandoned and later replaced with a different proposal, which also didn't have the buy-in.)

Probably the best candidate for this was hours spent on house things. I likely would have done something like tracking this in a spreadsheet and then turning the spreadsheet contents into something physical that became a banner in the common room; my inner Duncan would have started out with tracking on a whiteboard instead of a spreadsheet, or had people put pins into a piece of foamboard that was the banner.

---

Some additional thoughts:

I don't know if there's any special advice I'd give myself about the Ghost separate from what's already been said—if there are fewer and clearer expectations better followed up on by me, and if there's a pre-move-in period where people can find out if they fit with those expectations better, and if there's a gentle off-ramp, then I suspect the Ghost is less of a problem.

I'm currently writing this from a laptop in the front room (for other readers: we have three 'common' spaces, of which the front room is the most lounge/desk-type) with two other Dragons also in the room. This is fairly abnormal; typically I'm on my desktop all day, and my desktop is in my room.

My guess is that when we decided the physical layout of the house, we should have tried harder to have people with shared or small sleeping space and then shared desk/office space. (With owned desks, such that I could leave things on it / have my monitor wall-mounted / etc.) If my computer lived in a room with the computers of other Dragons, I would see much more of them (and they would see much more of me) by default.

I did update away from believing Dragon Army was dangerous after visiting there.

It was all people whom I’d expect to be able to hold their own against strong personalities. And they clearly didn’t have a strongly authoritarian culture by global or historical standards.

Although I was sufficiently sceptical of this idea to doubt it was 'worth a shot' ex ante,(1) I was looking forward to being pleasantly surprised ex post. I'm sorry to hear it didn't turn out as well as hoped. This careful and candid write-up should definitely be included on the 'plus' side of the ledger for this project.

With the twin benefits of no skin in the game and hindsight. I'd like to float another account which may synthesize a large part of 'why it didn't work'.

Although I understand DAB wasn't meant to simply emulate 'military style' living, it did borrow quite a lot of that framing (hence the 'army' and 'barracks' bit of DAB). Yet these arrangements require a considerable difference in power and authority between the commander and their subordinates. I don't think DAB had this, and I suggest this proved its downfall.

[R]ight, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must

Thucydides - The Melian Dialogue

First, power. Having a compelling or else matters for maintaining discipline - even if people come in planning to obey, they may vacillate. In military contexts, accomodation at a barracks (or a boot camp) is a feature that can be unilaterally rescinded - if I argue back against the drill instructor, even if I'm in the right, they can make the credible threat "Either do as I say, or I kick you out". This threat has great 'downside-asymmetry': it's little skin off the instructor's nose if he boots me, but it means the end of my military career if they follow through. In consequence, the instructor has a lot more de facto bargaining power to make me do things I don't want to do. In negotiation theory, the drill sergeant's BATNA is way better than mine, and so good the only 'negotiation' they use are threats rapidly escalating to expulsion for any disobedience to their dictation.

I assume the legal 'fact on the ground' is that the participants of DAB were co-signatories on a lease, making significant financial contributions, with no mechanism for the designated 'commander' to kick people out unilaterally. Given this realpolitic, whatever 'command' the commander has in this situation is essentially roleplay. If a 'Red Knight' character decides not to play ball with the features of DAB that go beyond typical legal arrangements of house-sharing (e.g. "Nah, I'm not going to do this regular communal activity, I'm not going to do press-ups because you're telling me to, and I'm going to do my own thing instead."), the commander can't 'expel' them, but at most ask them to leave.

In fact the commander can only credibly threaten to expel subordinates from the social game of Dragon Army. If I'm a participant this might be a shame, but it might not be a great cost if I'm not feeling it anymore: I can probably (modulo some pretty dodgy social ostracising which other participants may not abide by) still interact with the remaining dragons in a normal housemate-y way.

Such a situation has pretty symmetrical downsides for both parties: if I'm the Red Knight, I probably would end up leaving (it wouldn't be fun being the 'odd man out', although the difficulty is shared by the dragons who have people in the house who aren't 'buying in', and the commander dealing with the ever-present example of the pretty mild consequence of what happens if others likewise disobey), but not until I'd lined up better accomodation, and I certainly wouldn't feel any obligation - given you're kicking me out rather than I'm choosing to leave - to pay rent after I go or help find others to 'fill my spot' to defray the proportionally increased cost of the lease (itself an incentive for other subordinates to pressure the commander to relent).

Instead of the boot camp case, where the much inferior BATNA of recruits gives them no negotiation position with their drill sergeant; in the DA case, the similarly equidistant BATNAs mean the commander and a dragon are at near-party (whatever affectations both maintain to the contrary). The stage is set for negotiation over discipline (even if coded or implicit), rather than dictation from the commander to the subordinate.

Authority (in the informal or moral sense, c.f. Weberian 'charismatic authority') can partly - though imperfectly - substitute for power (e.g. doctors and clergy tend to have more 'influence' than 'ordering people around'). What is notable that authority like this tends to be linked to some particular concrete achievement or track record, and is mainly constrained to a particular domain, with only mild 'bleed through' into general social status.

Given the nature of DAB, there is no convincing concrete thing a putative-commander could point to which legitimizes broad-raging authority over others beyond assent by the putative-subordinates this is an experiment they want to try. I suspect this results in pseudo-authority and obedience highly conditional on results: "I'm going to act as-if I am much lower status than this 'commander', and so kowtow towards them. But in terms of real status they're a peer to me, and I spot them this loan of social game status because I may benefit. If this doesn't happen, I'm less inclined to play along." The limited capital this supplies doesn't give the commander much to spend on pushing things through despite dissent: as the matters are between equals, 'right' becomes the question again.

I suggest this may explain the need for a better off-ramp (I note military or religious organisations which emphasize discipline and obedience generally provide accomodation etc. gratis, perhaps in part to provide the power initiates are there by invitation - I wonder whether reciprocal arrangements with another house substitute adequately); the reluctance to 'give enough orders' (better to maintain a smaller stake of authority than gamble a wider bid that could lose lots of face if flouted); the lack of a 'big enough stick' ("I'm happy to undergo token punishment - to lose pretend status - as a ritual for the sake of the game, but if the price of you 'disciplining' me costs real status, I'm out"); the need to avoid transgressing what less bought-in subordinates wanted (perhaps the result of a coded and implicit negotiation suggested earlier); and the shortfall between the ostensible standards asserted (set by aspiration), and those observed (set by the balance of power). One could imagine recognition of these features may have been key in transforming 'White Knights' into 'Black Knights'.

I'd guess, if this is the (forgive me) crux of the problem, whether it can really be fixed. Perhaps even more assiduous selection could do the trick, yet the base rate in the Bay Area (which isn't renowned for selecting people easygoing with authority) is not propitious. An alternative - but an exorbitantly expensive one - which would supply the commander with unquestioned power/authority would be if rent is free for subordinates: "You're here for free, so I can kick you if you don't play ball". I suspect a more modest 'Phase II' (maybe just social norms to do communal activity, with no pretended 'boss') might be the best realistic iteration.

-

1: It also seemed a bit risky from an 'abuse' (very broadly construed) perspective to me, although I stress this worry arose solely from the set-up rather than any adverse judgement of Duncan personally. Although understandable to be snarky to critics (e.g. one despicable pseudonymous commenter on the original 'pitch' recommended Duncan kill himself) I think the triumphalism of, "Although it didn't work, this 'not working' was not achieving all the good targets, rather than something horrible happening to someone - guess this wasn't a hotbed of abuse after all, and I'm not some abusive monster like you said! Eat humble pie! (but you won't, because you're irrational!)" is a bit misplaced.

The steelman of this is something like, "Although I don't think it blowing up really badly is more likely than not, the disjunction of bad outcomes along these lines is substantially higher than the base rate for a typical group-house, and this isn't outweighed across the scales by the expected benefit". On this view the observation the proposed risk wasn't realised is only mild discomfirmation for the hazard, although it rules strongly against outlandish 'disaster by default' views.

[Edit: Slight rewording, concision, and I remembered the theory I was gesturing at imprecisely]

I fee like I have a much better understanding of what the house hoped to be from this list of mistakes, rather than from the original vision document. I suppose how that's categorisation of concepts works.

Allow me to join the chorus thanking you for writing this up and avoiding grade inflation. There's a lot of great detail here and I look forward to digesting it more over time. Also kudos for trying the thing. Many of these lessons seem clearly valuable and correct once stated.

As with many (most?) things, the failures weren't the grand disasters some foresaw, and the biggest cost was time spent without accomplishing more - but everyone's still better off for having tried versus not. Doing things is hard, new and odd things are harder, there are tons of pieces to do and some important things won't look important slash whatever the ball is that gets dropped will end up looking obvious in hindsight.

My biggest takeaway from first reading is that it's vital to have good methods of exclusion and a willingness to walk away, either from the whole thing or from a particular relationship/member, if you want to do something most people wouldn't do. If something requires going above and beyond, do that, say goodbye to whoever isn't on board slash able to handle it, and if you then have not enough people, then you fail. Which is fine! But to accommodate (e.g. the Knights and Ghost) is to give yourself no chance.

I'm curious about the specifics! If you were to brag, what were some of the most awesome things y'all got done? What were some ambitious projects that members undertook and succeeded?

Something about the Stag frame does make things click. In particular, it gets away from "cooperate/defect" and forces you to think about how much things are worth, which is a cleaner look at the actual game theory problem without confusing it with moralizing, and primes me to evaluate the sort of situations you'd run into here more appropriately.

All in all it sounds like, while I confess a little disappointment that you hadn't thought through some of the things that appear most-obvious-in-retrospect, the experience sounds like a pretty reasonable first pass at the experiment.

Many of the Dragons who stepped into the role of the Ghost for a time did so softly and gradually, and it never felt like this level of absence was Notably Different from the previous level, in a paradox-of-the-heap sort of way. Set a bar, and set a gradient around that bar, and stay in contact.

As the person who fell most heavily into this role, the above resonates a lot. Below are some other thoughts on my experience.

I had the sense early on that I wasn't getting very much value out of group activities, and felt not very connected to the house. In this way I think "Black Knight"-style considerations were major contributors to my Ghost behavior. Competing commitments and general depression were also relevant. I didn't really feel like there was much the house could do to help me with that, but I don't know whether that's true. If it weren't for the Black Knight dynamic, I think I would have prioritized DA over other commitments, but depression may have been sufficient for me to end up as a Ghost anyway.

Not Getting Value Out of Group Activities

The things that the whole house can do (or even a large subset) are unlikely to be the on the capability frontier of the individual in an area of serious interest for that individual. Everyone needs to be able to do the thing, and there will be more variance in skill in areas that are a major focus of some but not all of the group. Programming ability is an example.

Because of something like this, DA group activities rarely felt like they were on a growth-edge that I cared about. In particular, group exercise usually felt costly with little benefit, and I never managed to get EE to be especially valuable for me. Social things like our weekly house dinner (a substantial fraction of Dragon Army hours) felt less fun or less growthy than the likely alternatives, but I probably put unusually low value on this kind of bonding.

Now when I imagine a group that is striving for excellence, it seems like there are two ways it can work:

1) The members share a common major project and can work together towards that goal. Here it makes sense for the group to ask for a high time commitment from its members, since time put towards the group directly advances a major goal of the individual.

2) The members have different goals. In this case it seems like the group should ask for a smaller time commitment. Members can mutually draw inspiration from each other and can coordinate when there is a shared goal, but generally the group should offer affordances, not impose requirements.

Counter-evidence: I think I would have gotten a lot of value out of covering the bases on dimensions I care about. Exercise was supposed to do this, and would do it along Duncan's version of the "capable well-rounded human" dimension. We discussed doing something like this for rationality skills, but we didn't follow through.

In this case, all members share a common goal of reaching a minimum bar in some area. Still, this can be boring for those who are already above the bar, and for me this sort of "catching up"/"covering the bases" is much less exciting than pushing forward on a main area of interest. (Which means group-time still ends up as less-fun-than-the-alternative by default.)

There were experiments intended to incentivize Dragons to do solo work on things they considered high priority, but my impression was that there was little encouragement/accountability/useful structure. Things I was originally excited about turned into homework I had to do for DA.

As another resident of Dragon Army, the coming end of the experiment and this post have made me interested in looking over the commentary on the original Dragon Army Charter post. Out of it all, it seemed to me that this comment by a_different_face was probably the best prediction for how things panned out, despite not being super on-the-mark. Kudos!

There was a particular subset of LessWrong and Tumblr that objected rather ... stridently ... to even considering something like Dragon Army

Well, I feel called out :)

So, first off: Success should count for a lot and I have updated on how reliable and trust-worthy you are. Part of this is that you now have a reputation to me, whereas before you were just Anonymous Internet Dude.

I'm not going to be as loud about "being wrong" because success does not mean I was wrong about there *being* a risk, merely that you successfully navigated it. I do think drawing attentions to certain risks was more important than being polite. I think you and I disagree about that, and it makes sense - my audience was "people who might join this project", not you.

That said, I do think that if I had more spoons to spend, I could have communicated better AND more politely. I wish I had possessed the spoons to do your idea more justice, because it was a cool and ambitious idea that pushes the community forward.

I still think it's important to temper that ambition with more concern for safety than you're showing. I think dismissing the risks of abuse / the risks to emotional health as "chicken little" is a dangerous norm. I think it encourages dangerous experiments that can harm both the participants, and the community. I think having a norm of dangerous experiments expects far too much from the rationality of this community.

I think a norm of dismissing *assholes* and *rudeness*, on the other hand, is healthy. I think with a little effort, you could easily shift your tone from "dismissing safety concerns" to "holding people to a higher standard of etiquette." I personally prefer a very blunt environment which puts little stock in manners - I have a geek tact filter (http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html), but I realize not everyone thrives in that environment.

---

I myself was wrong to engage with them as if their beliefs had cruxes that would respond to things like argument and evidence.

I suspect I failed heavily at making this clear in the past, but my main objection was your lack of evidence. You said you'd seen the skulls, but you weren't providing *evidence*. Maybe you saw some of the skulls I saw, maybe you saw all of them, but I simply did not have the data to tell. That feels like an *important* observation, especially in a community all about evidence and rational decisions.

I may well be wrong about this, but I feel like you were asking commenters to put weight in your reputation. You did not seem happy to be held to the standard of Anonymous Internet Dude and expected to *show your work* regarding safety. I think it is, again, an *important* community standard that we hold people accountable to *demonstrate* safety instead of just asking us to assume it, especially when it's a high-visibility experiment that is actively using the community as a recruiting tool.

(I could say a lot more about this, but we start to wander back in to "I do not have the spoons to do this justice". If I ever find the spoons, expect a top-level post about the topic, though - I feel like Dragon Army should have sparked a discussion on community norms and whether we want to be a community that focuses on meeting Duncan or Lixue's needs. I think the two of us are genuinely looking for different things from this community, and the community would be better for drawing establishing a common knowledge instead of the muddled mess that the draft thread turned in to.)

(I'm hesitant to add this last bit, but I think it's important: I think you're assuming a norm that does not *yet* exist in this community. I think there's some good discussion to be had about conversational norms here. I very stridently disagree that petty parenthetical namecalling and insults is the way to do it, though. I think you have some strong points to make, and you undermine them with this behavior. Were it a more-established social norm here, I'd feel differently, but I don't feel like I violated the *existing* norms of the community with my responses)

---

As an aside: I really like the concepts you discussed in this post - Stag Hunts, the various archetypal roles, ways to do this better. It seems like the experiment was a solid success in gathering information. The archetypes strike me as a really useful interpersonal concept, and I appreciate you taking the time to share them, and to write this retrospective.

Great post, really like the structure and really really appreciate the transparency.

However, the sections about critics did leave me with a bad taste in my mouth. I am pretty sure you aren't including me in the set of uncharitable/wrongheaded critics, but I am not fully confident and I think this is kind of the problem. I imagine many of the people who had valid concerns and good criticism to feel like they are being dismissed, or at least assign a significant probability to it, and that this will have a significant chilling effect on good future criticism, which seems bad for everyone.

I think you definitely faced a lot of unfair criticism and verbal abuse, in a form that we would pretty heavily punish on the new LessWrong (man, that numbers guy), but I think it's better to try to just ignore those critics, or be very careful to not accidentally use broad enough brushstrokes to also paint many of the good critics in the same light. I know you tried to avoid this by putting in explicit disclaimers, but it's very hard from the inside to assess whether you think my criticism was constructed in good faith, and even on reflection I am not actually sure whether you think it was, and I expect others feel the same.

I want to emphasize again though that I am very happy you wrote this, and that overall this post has been quite valuable for me to read, and I am interested in chatting with you and others more about future iterations of Dragon Army and how to make it work. Keep up the good work.

*I'll note that some of the Chicken Littles were clamoring for an off-ramp

I really dislike the dismissal of people who wanted to preserve easy exit as an abuse avoidance measure. I get that it can feel like an accusation, but being able to say "we should have this preventative measure" without implying anything negative about anyone is a critical to preventing abuse, because it lets you put the measure in place before the abuse is so bad it's obvious. I also (knowing basically nothing about Duncan or the way the suggestion was delivered, and having vague positive feelings about the project goals) think that "something intolerable happens" is a reasonable concern and "leaving" is a reasonable solution.

Given how much criticism one specific, relatively minor aspect of this post has been getting from a lot of people - myself included - I feel like I should explicitly state that:

1) This post is awesome, and having a public postmortem of a project like this is really really valuable

2) While I stand by all of the criticism which I have not explicitly retracted, I want to be clear that my criticism was focused on a very minor part of the post, and, as I already stated in point #1, this post is awesome overall and I upvoted it

3) Many of the reactions that Duncan got on his original post were totally out of proportion, and many orders of magnitude worse than anything he said in this post

4) The fact that so much of the discussion here is focusing on this relatively minor issue is probably a reflection of the fact that there wasn't anything more substantial to disagree with in this post; so it feels to me like that a minor issue is getting a disproportionate amount of weight in contrast to this post's merits, and I feel slightly bad for having been one of the people to pile on Duncan and making his experience of reading the comments more punishing than it should be, given how good this post was overall.

(Someone may feel that the share of critical comments isn't that large, and that most of the top-level comments are about something else. This is true. Still, usually negative comments are experienced by the author as much more strongly than positive comments, so I'm taking that into account when I feel like there's been a somewhat disproportionate amount of attention on the criticisms. That said, I don't feel like anyone who contributed to them did anything wrong - after all, I contributed to them myself. Rather, I want to just clearly indicate that I think this was a great post overall, and that I really that the amount of criticism-about-a-minor-thing won't leave a bad taste in Duncan's mouth overall.)

I didn't know about the experiment, so I went to read the charter and came back to read this.

What struck me after reading the charter was "How will these people find the time?"

I ran a quick computation, and it turns out that after work and sleep, I have 7 hours left in my day (which, given I sleep 8 hours might be conservative by US standards). Accounting that some stuff just has to be done (hygiene, ya know), the 3 hours that one should theoretically dedicate to house stuff every day is half of your remaining time. Everything else you care about must fit in that three other hours. Seems tiny to me.

So was it the case that people were starved for time? Was it a cause of "soft-defection"?

One idea to consider for the future: Select a Dragon whose primary responsibility (even at the expense of other house commitments) is to serve as the house Tracker. They would be responsible for keeping track of all ongoing experiments, gathering data, analyzing it, and recommending areas for improvement (as measured against prior commitments)... but leaving the actual strategy for improvement up to the Commander.

Their primary purpose would be to make the house more self-reflective, by consistently drawing attention to what is and isn't working. They could also check in regularly with other Dragons on the status of their individual goals, both to provide accountability and to incorporate data from those check-ins into their overall tracking.

I think the roles of Tracker and Commander are too much for one person to handle alone.

This makes me wonder - what of the missing two Knights?

The Green Knight is spoken of in legend and it seems appropriate. If you strike the Green Knight, it adopts and strikes you back. You can think you've got it under control, but you're wrong - 'life can't be contained' and all that. Green Knight might seem to agree to things, but it doesn't take. This legend was also the origin of what, when I was trying to model fair values for things in various non-efficient markets, my partner called The Green Knight Test - you get to bet into the market (at its midpoint) but the market then gets to bet into your model. And you're fully ready only if you can beat that. Because that means you actually understand the whole of its nature. Until then all you have is a Zeroing Out.

What then of the Blue Knight? Presumably he is the rationalist sphere writ large that champions the pursuit of knowledge - and who also resists, in the form of wanting to constantly reason everything out rather than exist in the moment or allow the rituals to work. The hidden enemy of the experiment, who we have met, and the enemy is us.

Thanks for posting this. I found the framing of the different characters very insightful.

I like that you gave both the grades compared to vision and compared to another rational house for yourself. I think it would be great to also have those grades for the other people and average grade.

The main thing I want to say is that it's a huge error to leave something as a coordination problem when it doesn't have to be. The way stag hunts work IRL is by people going "Hey, who wants to go on a Stag Hunt?" and if sufficient people to capture a stag sign up, then the hunt happens. If they don't, there's no situation where a bunch of people waste their time on an impossible stag hunt. You can also do this in the Dragon Army sense by commanding a stag hunt take place as the lord, but either option is better than there being some important, valuable task that has a chance of failing based entirely on individual judgments of whether other individuals will participate.

Great post! I especially like your description of the different Knights and of the "stag hunt" dynamic in general. I think I've very likely been in the white role at times in other groups. However, there's a dynamic near to this one that I also see a lot - that's one where all the relevant scaffolding has been built, the systems are in place, the group can start choosing "stag" if it wants to, but this isn't common knowledge yet.

I have often encountered (what I believe to be) this second dynamic, and it strikes me as very important - if the situation really is such that a little push can tip the balance into the "stag" equilibrium, doing that is crucial! Distinguishing between these two states seems hard and I'd quite like to be better at it.

I greatly appreciate this post mortem. It has me excited for DAB 2.0, which seems pretty likely to either succeed or provide further valuable insights, but it doesn't seem like DAB 2.0 is on the horizon. My current estimation of why from the post and comments is that too many of the participants in 2.0 are worn out, but I wonder if you could confirm or correct and elaborate. Thanks again, both for the effort itself and for the write-up.

Lots of interesting ideas here. Thanks and massive respect for taking the time to think this through and write it up.

>D-, D, C-, C, C, C, B-, B, B, B+

What would have been required for have someone score an "A" ?

Both from the participant themselves, and from you structurally? Did you need different people? Or could the top people who participated have graded out at the top with different or better structure? Etc.

Again, big thanks and regards for the honest reflection.

I'm not really familiar with DA beyond the 2 posts and knowing Vaniver. That being said, thoughts that came to mind as I read.

0. This just seems like a standard coordination problem that I would expect most rationalists to be familiar with. Is there some reason you needed an entirely new analogy? I would not have predicted that out of ~12 reasonably dedicated rationalists, more than 1 would not have this idea as a Thing That Exists In One's Mind.

1. Seems like a good suggestion that I would not have thought of ahead of time, but seems obvious in retrospect.

2. I guess I didn't realize how much you were supposed to still be doing at CFAR while this was going on. If I had, I probably would have been significantly more pessimistic. It certainly sounds like the most "obvious" thing out of this list, a priori, even more than the things in 5.

6. Have you read Superforecasters? Something the book goes into, that SSC's review does not, is a bit of military history and strategy, pioneered by a German named Moltke. The basic idea is that generals cannot anticipate everything that can happen on the ground, and so they should direct the objective of lower officers, rather than the means of attaining them. Perhaps, if you are going to form an "army," that is equally as valid a model to consider as infantry grunts? My guess would be that rationalists are naturally going to resist the sort of hyper-hive-assimilation of a low-level unit (having many Red Knights, in your terms). Under this model, setting goals, agreeing on serious consequences for not meeting them, encouraging working together on them, and providing communal resources for working on them, might be more effective.

(Allegedly these ideas largely explained the Germany Army's disproportionate effectiveness in WW2, and Moltke's ideas have been adopted by pretty much every modern military).

I believe this is also the model described in Ender's Game, which leads me to my next thought--is 12 too many? Or worded differently, is it likely the same group size is optimal for all the things you want to accomplish? Ender broke his army into many more pieces than usual, all the way down into groups of 4 or 5, to get each group to be very tight. Maybe you've already got this part covered; I only mention it because I didn't see any mention of doing this systematically, only the EE thing (which you said was very successful).

16. I really like your phrasing at the end of this, and will probably look for an opportunity to use it at some point.

edit: I totally forgot, I think 7) is the one that is basically in line with what I actually did predict at the start.

Thank you for trying this. I have been watching from afar, and I wanted it to succeed. Point #1 here seems extremely true.