Your Price for Joining

I think it's about risk to credibility. If I refuse to join, my reputation is entirely my own; it flatters my fierce independence of mind, in contrast to the sheeple. If I join, anything about the organisation might reflect on me, might be used to mock me. Joining is sticking my neck out; making an excuse not to is always the safer choice.

So the group norm we really need to establish is that if you want to criticise someone for joining, only a solid case is acceptable; a cheap shot based on joining behaviour should reflect badly on the speaker.

I think I agree overall, but I can't help but think that this seems to at least mildly conflict with this.

That is, it seems to me that arguments analogous to those you made here could be made against supporting whichever 3rd party/4th party/nth party/independent candidate actually matches one's own position.

In the Free Software movement the typical response to these kinds of demands is pretty simple, "There's the code, please do feel free to go fix it!"

Likewise in the hippy anarchist movements if you suggest something like a rally or a sit-in the usual answer is "Sounds good, when are you going to organise it?"

Which I tend to think is pretty much the right answer. If someone can't be bothered to do the things they suggest themselves then I can't really understand why they think they should be able to convince others to do it for them.

The key is to make the cost for getting in there and starting to do those things really low, making the source available to everyone with a simple download, making it simple to contact the whole group and start organizing.

Personally I've helped with and joined loads of different cults and projects, even started one, and found that the key to getting me to do stuff to help at least is to make it both simple to do and obvious how, to ensure that I realize I don't need permission to go do something.

You've said yourself that you were surprised how much of a barrier even having to send an email to OB was compared to having a big "submit your article here" button on Lesswrong,

I have vague plans to take a look at the source code for less-wrong and fix a couple of things that are annoying me, but it won't be till after the Subgenius show I'm organizing at least, when I have a bit more time.

Newcomblike problems

I never liked the comparison of the Prisoner's Dilemma with Newcomb, and the Ultimatum Game seems even less like Newcomb.

If you're up against an agent from a species that you know has evolved traits like fairness and spite, then the rational course of action is certainly not to offer a penny. That should be true on any sane theory of rational action.

(For the record, I one-box on Newcomb, defect on the true Prisoner's Dilemma (unless the opponent is somehow using the very same decision-making process as me), and offer a fair deal against a human in the Ultimatum Game.)

The article mentions opportunity cost, but punts the issue into the long grass

(or a larger positive effect than any other marginal use to which you could otherwise put those resources, although this latter mode of thinking seems little-used and humanly-unrealistic, for reasons I may post about some other time)

I agree that this mode of thinking gets little explicit use, but I don't think that people can do well in real life without it, so I think that we all tend to bodge up substitutes.

The mode that comes naturally is to undertake courses of action that we anticipate having positive outcomes and to reject courses of action that we anticipate having negative outcomes. We compare against zero.

Sometimes we have a choice of two good options and the uncomfortable realisation that we ought not to divide our efforts between them. Perhaps we recognise a convex situation in which half of each achieves less than all of the lessor. Perhaps it is simply that it is clear than one option is better than the other. If we are comfortable with letting opportunity costs guide our actions we probably get on with the preferred action without commenting on the alternative.

What though if we are uncomfortable with opportunity costs? We feel bad about neglecting to do something positive, and we can assuage this guilt by criticising the second best option by denigrating its merits below zero. This permits us to reject the second best option using our ordinary, lame, comparison against zero.

One cause of the negativity that stops our kind cooperating is that many of us have other things to do and are not comfortable with opportunity costs. Consequently, we cannot just get on with our preferred plan of action but must run down the alternative. We can cure this by becoming more comfortable with opportunity costs.

That doesn't explain people hanging back from collective action on altruistic causes that have come top of their preference list, so it cannot be the sole answer, but I still wonder if it is the largest part of the answer.

A joking objection: somebody that refuses to join due to sans serif would be harmful to the cause if they join anyway.

A serious objection: it feels wrong and dangerous to join a group that you don't support 100% at the time of joining. This feeling is adaptively correct because group efforts often drift or get hijacked, and a group that's a little out of tune with you is more likely to drift away over time. Especially if the group is new.

I like joining! I just don't like actually doing stuff. ;)

In general I agree with this post, but I am reluctant to say so because we are both in a position that gives us incentives for wishing that the cats would just stop stalking and listen to the established cat-herd. I don't agree about the Dunbar issue.
Few start-ups need 50 people but very few of the people in our set have the cooperative ability to work well in a start-up. Very few people outside our set have that ability either.

And if the group is made up of 1000 people? Then your hunter-gatherer instincts will underestimate the inertia of a group so large, and demand an unrealistically high price (in strategic shifts) for you to join.

I would say an equally if not more important issue is that your hunter-gather instincts underestimate the benefits (to you) of joining the thousand-person organization, presuming that they can't be much greater than the benefits of joining a forty-person one.

I agree strongly with this post. I have experienced similar objections in various projects I have tried to organize.

What's the converse: the behaviour needed, from the point of view of the group, trying to lower the costs of joining?

One of the dark arts that I've practiced ocassionally in committee meetings was to get all the "font changers" to put forwards their suggestions, listen carefully, praise and accept the ideas, and leave the meeting with all my plans accepted but in a different font and grammar.

For a rationalist group, this isn't ideal, and you don't want to go around accepting millions of random suggestions. But you could write back to the font changers saying: if you are willing to join the group, I will change the font (or at least have a continued discussion with you about which font is ideal). Maybe another norm should be:

If the efforts involved in addressing the issue (either through changing it or discussing it) are less than the benefit of bringing the person on board, and the suggestions are not made in bad faith, then you should bring them on board.

Of course, there's no reason that Eliezer specifically needs to address the issue personally - some delegation would be fine.

Now I do admit that I speak here primarily from the perspective of someone who goes around trying to herd cats; and not from the other side as someone who spends most of their time withholding their energies in order to blackmail those damned morons already on the project. Perhaps I am a little prejudiced.

Somehow THIS is inspires me to be a cat herder myself. We're talking in metaphor,r ight?

You should first look whether there's some other Canadian mugging victim support group that does not keep their funds invested in a money market fund, before concluding that joining the first group and working on your own are the only possibilities.

Doesn't this line of reasoning apply equally well to the person running what he/she wishes to be a collective effort? If so, it may cancel itself out.

Is the person who refrains from joining, doing so because he doesn't see the collective compromising enough with his aims, or because he doesn't see the collective compromising in general? (Or even as being a "collective"?)

I'm surprised to see you post this, Eliezer, because my recollection is that you recently said you don't want people to try to help you in your work, because only 1 in 100,000 is potentially useful, even supposing you could figure out a task for them to do.

This seems mainly to be about the importance of compromise: that something is better than nothing. Refusing only makes sense when there are "multiple games", like the Prisoner's Dilemma; if you can't find an institution that is similar enough, then don't do it.

But I think there is some risk to joining a cause that "seems" worth it. (I can't find it, but) I remember an article on LessWrong about the dangers of signing petitions, which can influence your beliefs significantly despite the smallness of the action.

Um... Eliezer? I just joined (you know me as Vladimir Slepnev from OB) and already have a suggestion. Wouldn't it be better to remove "Top contributors" from the right section? It's nastily perverting my incentives, can't speak about the others, but sure I'm not alone. Of course this isn't a blackmail attempt :-)

Does "Vote down" on LW mean "not interesting enough to go to the front page"? Because that's how I feel about this. On the other hand on Reddit "Vote down" tends to mean "Doesn't agree with the groupthink", so I'm very reluctant to use it.

Speaking as a cat, there are a lot of people who would like to herd me. What makes your project higher-priority than everyone else's?

"Yes, but why bother half-ass involvement in my group?" Because I'm still interested in your group. I'm just also interested in like 50 other groups, and that's on top of the one cause I actually prefer to specialize with.

...It seems to me that people in the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/etcetera cluster often set their joining prices way way way too high.

People in the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/etc cluster obviously have a ton of different interests, and those interests are time/energy exclusive. Why shouldn't they have high requirements for yet another interest trying to add itself to the cluster?

Those of us who remain interested in cooperating on the Prisoner's Dilemma, either because it's iterated, or because we have a term in our utility function for fairness, or because we use an unconventional decision theory, may also not accept an offer of one penny.

OK. If someone is presenting you with this type of ultimatuim - what kind of offer would you accept?