Schism Begets Schism

My two main opinions are:

1. This post seems to take for granted that schisms are bad without actually arguing why. Even if it is the case that schisms beget more schisms, that in itself (or that + pointing at Protestantism) is not actually an explanation of why that's actually bad; it just claims so. It does imply that the badness is in the coordination costs that are increased by a diaspora over a centralised location, but if a diaspora happened in the first place that is strong evidence that whatever central place it spawned from was not only incapable of making this level of coordination happen but also its members judged it was incapable of changing into a place that can do coordination.

2. Two of your main examples are religion and politics, where one can't really belong to multiple subgroups. For things like the LW diaspora or Discord servers or w/e, schisms aren't schismatic – one can belong to multiple social groups and Discord servers and what-have-you (which can even be desirable, as you yourself have argued in your post about diversifying your friendship portfolio).

I don't like the way this post hints that schism and splitting are the same thing.

E.g. the split between CFAR and MIRI, and the creation of multiple other AI risk organizations (FHI, FLI, BERI, etc), fit the archipelago model, without being schism-like.

Hostility begets hostility, but agreeing to specialize in different things doesn't have the same tendency to beget further specialization.

How do you square this with the other post you made today [LW · GW] about how if you don't like the way a group is going, you should spend more time with a different group? Isn't it true that if everyone followed your advice from the "Diversify Your Friendship Portfolio" post, any tendency a group took which some people didn't like would cause those people to spend less time with the group, which would reinforce that tendency (since the people who dislike it are no longer around), which would eventually result some form of a schism?

(I'm not saying I have a solution to this. It appears to be a sort of collective action/public goods problem among folks which don't like the new tendency.)

Another consideration is that people splitting off become explorers. If they don’t realize that, they’re very likely to fail or not to go very far. And I’d say overall explorers are very valuable. But if everyone is one, then that doesn’t work.

In point of fact, doing important things often requires coordination, teamwork, and agreeing to compromises. If you insist on everything being exactly your way, you'll have a harder time finding collaborators, and in many cases that will be fatal to a project -- I do not say all, but many.

This is true and important, and the same or a very similar point to the one made in Your Price for Joining [LW · GW].

But that post has a different standard than the one given by the OP:

If the issue isn't worth your personally fixing by however much effort it takes, and it doesn't arise from outright bad faith, it's not worth refusing to contribute your efforts to a cause you deem worthwhile. [emphasis mine]

Sometimes things are bad or (or much worse than they could be) in some group or community. When that's the case, one can 1) try and change the community from the inside, or 2) get a group of his/her friends together to do [thing] the way they think they should do it, or 3) give up and accept the current situation.

When you're willing to put in the work to make 2 happen, it sometimes results in a new healthier group. If (some) onlookers can distinguish between better and worse on the relevant axis, it will attract new members.

It seems to me that taking option 2, instead of option 1, is cooperative. You leave the other group doing it their way, in peace, and also create something good in the world in addition.

Granted, I think the situation may be importantly different in online communities, specifically because the activation energy for setting up a new online group is comparatively small. In that case, it is too easy to found a new group, and accordingly they splinter to regularly for any single group to be good.

One thing I find interesting, as an example that may be particularly pertinent to some rationalists, is how effective altruism has, in spite of everything else, been robust to the kinds of schisms you're talking about. In spite of all the differences between different factions of EA, it remains a grand coalition/alliance (of a sort). Each of the following subgroups of EA, usually built around a specific, preferred cause, in total has at a few hundred if not a couple thousand adherents in EA, and I expect would each be able to command millions of dollars in donations to their preferred charities each year, including:

• high-impact/evidence-based global poverty alleviation (aka global health and development)
• AI risk/alignment/safety
• existential risk reduction (inclusive of AI risk as a distinct and primary subgroup, but focused on other potential x-risks as well)
• effective animal advocacy (focused on farm animal welfare)
• reducing wild animal suffering (focused on wild animal welfare)
• rationality
• transhumanism

While none of these subgroups of EA is wholly within EA, it's very possible the majority of members of these communities also identifies as part of the EA community as well. An easy explanation is that everyone is sticking around for the Open Phil bucks, or the chance of receiving Open Phil bucks in the future, as a cause area's increased prominence in EA is moderately-to-highly correlated with them receiving => $10^7/year within a few years, when before each area's annual funding was probably <= $10^5. Yet there isn't a guarantee, and the barriers to access to these resources has been such that I've seen multiple of these subgroups openly and seriously consider splitting with EA. If any or all of these causes could sustain and grow themselves such that one or more of them might do better by investing its own resources into growing outside of EA, and securing its independence. However, as far as I can tell, there has never been a single, whole cause area of EA that has 'exited' the community. As the movement has existed for ~10 years, it seems unlikely that this would be the case if there wasn't other factors contributing to the cohesion of such otherwise disparate groups.

This is very close to on how on magic color philosophy white sees red as dangerous, that order is required to keep chaos at bay. And lot of the of the standard counterarguments apply, red can argue that compromise stiffles freedom and having a to find a single solution that works for everyone takes forever compared to making quick local solutions to the persons that are affected by them.

For example it's probably not a error state that the globe has multiple states in it instead of a single super country. Instead of intolerable chaos it's more like diversity to be celebrated.

There is the argument that if you are a pack hunter then you need to be compromising enough to be able to form the hunt group instead of everyone hunting for themselfs. But then again people form villages and instead of doing a single super village around 150 they split of into multiple independent groups (this hints at hidden costs of unity).

Unity is not an unconditional requirement. Some things need / benefit from unity but the need is often finite or only in regards to some aspect. And it might be possible to solve the same need with some other method rather than unity.

It seems like the Martin Luther case is an example of open disagreement begetting schism. If LessWrong can't deal with open disagreement, what's it even doing?

Basically agree, but for every group there’s probably some size / some disagreement where it would be better off splitting. So may be I’d rephrase this as people / groups have a modern bias for splitting too early.

I'm not sure this generalization applies very well to groups that don't claim exclusive access to their members. Religions, states, and "movements" are generally somewhat jealous of their members' loyalties, and object to having them split.

I can be a member of many elements of the rationalist diaspora, and I can ignore those I like. This seems strictly superior to trying to force them all into one set of standards and expectations.

I was thinking about something similar the other day. I was wondering if, from a historical perspective, it would be valid to look not just specific sects, but all Abrahamic religions, as 'schisms' from the original Judaism. One thing is that religious studies scholars and historians may see transformation of one sect into an unambiguously distinct religion as more of an 'evolution', like speciation in biology, than 'schisms', as we typically think of them in human societies.