Church vs. Taskforce

Re: incremental implementability - if we ever do organise LessWrong meetups, we should organise rationalist book clubs. How many people here have actually read Judgement under Uncertainty? I confess I never got around to it, though I meant to, but knowing fellow readers might motivate me.

And another thing, when are we going to get a LessWrong wiki? The glut of information here and on OB is unmanageable and we ought to force some kind of order on it - a rationalist curriculum or cheat sheet or something. Having "previously in series" at the top of new posts leads to an impenetrable expanding tree of long blog posts, discouraging new members and confusing lazy and forgetful individuals such as myself.

One possibility is that churches, by being hypothetically obligatory to all, produce communities with approximate gender balance. By emphasizing inclusiveness they create a place for those who display sub-typical signs of selective fitness, people who hunter-gatherer instincts promote rejecting to avoid social contamination. With conformity they encourage such people not to drag the group down overly much. All of these features seem unlikely to form in natural communities if they are pursued explicitly. By default people join communities that appealed to their gender, communities that signaled status through membership or both. Most non-religious communities with ideals of inclusiveness also emphasize tolerance and individuality, leading to the less severe physical equivalent of trolls.

The closest thing that I have found to a secular church really is probably a gym. Far better than church in most respects, but not up to the standard this post seems to aspire to.

teachers who would rather be doing something else

It seems to me you're thinking of school here, not university - it's not been my experience that teaching professors don't like teaching. As my mentor put it, (paraphrased) "Grading papers is what we get paid for - teaching we would do anyway".

Yes! Community matters. The support and friendship my folks get from their church is so intense, so useful to them, that I stopped trying to talk 'em out of their religion when I understood it. Unless you can replace that, give them that support and encouragement they got when my brother went schizophrenic say, you may well do them a disservice by talking them out of their religion even it if were possible.

Personally I get mine from a few places. The subgenii thing doesn't really work well enough, there's maybe two dozen of us active here in the whole continent. We can do about two get-togethers a year and have to fly in cross continental airplanes to do it. Lucky if half of us turn up at one one event. If you don't also happen to be a heavy drinker you're probably not going to fit in all that well either. The fact it's so focused against something rather than for something can also be tricky. It's deliberately exclusive.

More useful to me is the art community. The four nine one gallery even have a building. Squatted, of course. Nobody involved there has enough money to buy or even rent a building. The entire ethos of the folks who originally squatted that building was to use that previously unused space to encourage community projects. They use it for parties and for yoga classes and for drawing classes and there's a cafe. There's always people moving through, using the space. We'll be using it for this years subgenius party come X-Day. They're some of the most accepting friendly people I know. Having accepting, friendly leaders is surely important.

Another friend is in the process, this week even, of arranging a peppercorn rent with a landlord to move into and renovate a dilapidated building over five years, using it as a community center in the mean time. I expect I'll do what I can to help, but I'm busy and it's quite far from where I live.

Planet Angel aim to have a building, and to use it for similar purposes. We run monthly clubbing events to try and build that community and raise the cash to get a building through official channels rather than squatting. Well over half my friendship circle have come to me though PA over the last seven or eight years. The key to that being anything other than just another night club is the lack of any advertising. Spreading through word of mouth means 'like minded' people are the only people that come. You don't get so much of the idiot trendy clubbing crowd that could destroy the friendly atmosphere. We try to organize bring-the-whole-family events a few times a year too, the night-clubbing thing is pretty restrictive if you really want to build a community.

The thing all these projects (except the subgenii one) have in common, the thing that drives whatever amount of success we're getting, is acceptance though. None of them would work at all if we tried to include only rationalists, only the smart, only the top 5% intellectually. Indeed, they all (including the subgenii thing) include people with weird ideas about reality, people who aren't all that smart, people who'd be bored reading lesswrong in about two minutes flat.

I think this is a good thing too. It's pointless to be a lone rationalist, or an exclusive group. You gotta find some way to preach to the masses, and that's only going to happen if you accept the masses, and give them that community they're after, fill the community hole in their brains that people seem to find particularly hard to fill in big cities.

Yet you also can't afford to grow so quickly that the group-norms are washed away, flooded with the wider society's norms.

It's a tricky problem

The Homebrew computer club was pretty much the kind of community that Eliezer describes, it had a big effect on the development of digital systems. Same probably true for the model railroad club at MIT (where the PDP architecture was created) but I know less about that. The MIT AI lab was also important that way, and welcomed random people from outside (including kids). So this pattern has been important in tech development for at least 60 years.

There are lots of get togethers around common interests -- see e.g. Perlmonger groups in various cities. See the list of meetups in your city.

Recently "grass roots organizing" has taken on this character but it is explicitly partisan (though not strongly ideological). The main example I know of is Democrats for America, which came from the Dean campaign in 2004 but outlasted it. It is controlled by the members, not by any party apparatus, and hosts weekly community flavored pizza meetups.

There are also more movable communities like music festivals, the national deadhead network that attended concerts (no longer so active), Burning Man, etc. These tend to be very strong support communities for their members while they are in session (providing medical, social, and dispute resolution services, etc.) but are otherwise only latent.

A persuasive school of thought in the economics of religion suggests that in order to build community, churches often artificially increase barriers to exit and require all sorts of crazy behaviour to signal commitment, thus preventing free-riding. Irrational belief and the accompanying ritual seems to be pretty good at this. I'm not too sure how a rationalist community would fare in this respect...

One problem I heard about communities is that they often START with a purpose, but later END as self-serving institutions.

At the time I was still a christian a pastor once told an interesting story. I don't know if this is fictional or if it really happened, I'm relating it as I remember. There was a place with a lot of ship accidents and when that happened volunteers had to go to see for rescue. They decided to fund a rescue association so as to be more organized. Over time the association grew and they started to have social events like parties, etc... So it once happened that while they where all partying another ship accident happened, and so another group of volunteers went to help while the association was partying. They founded another rescue association. This cycle repeated itself until there where around 5 or so associations with the same purpose.

Now, the pastor told the story to make a point for the church. From my own experience having been a member of lots of churches it is always the case that they become self-serving and if you think of it, it's hard to expect otherwise. Humans are just selfish and if you join an association you often ask "what's in for me?"

So maybe we should just start with a simple plan, like make a rationalist meeting for like-minded people, and then see what we can grow from that. Personally I wouldn't have too high expectations.

Btw, I live in Rio de Janeiro(Brazil), if anyone is interested to meet in person, send me a message.

How is this significantly different from the Lions Club and Kiwanis, crossed with the local atheist organization?

I see how it's more rationalist-oriented than the Kiwanis, and more service-oriented than the Atheist Club. And they could probably get more charitable value for money by focusing on high-utility causes - if the rationalists were high-level enough, which the sort of people who respond to "rationalist club" ads might not be. But does "altruist rationalists" correspond to such a significant cluster in personspace that they need their own club? And is this just "we should start a fraternal organization"?

These clubs are interesting and do some good work, but I don't hear people speaking of them in the same breath as religion (except maybe when they get mystical, like the Freemasons).

The idea of rationalist taskforces has its appeal, but given the rate of accelerating change we simply don’t have time to develop a sense of community from scratch which can replace the millennia of development that’s gone into religious institutions. Our best shot is to TRANSFORM existing religious institutions into something that is compatible with rationality (and this requires some transformation on our part too – I’ll talk about this below). The Protestant reformation happened in about a dozen or so decades. Given the trouble that churches are having right now, it’s reminiscent of the discontent people had with the Catholic church in 1517. This time, however, I think the new reformation can happen in just a few decades, because of better technology and communication.

So what transformation do us rationalists need to make? All of the talk I see on LW and OB seems to be about abolishing religious institutions (or watch them wither and die), rather than transforming them. This is not rational, IMHO, because doing a remodeling of religion should be a lot faster than tearing down the whole building and constructing another one from scratch. But a remodel job means that the new tenants (us) will have to find ways to embrace some of the old architecture which up to now we have found unappealing. Examples: Faith is interpreted to mean Trust in the emergent nature of the universe, rather than some sort of belief. God is interpreted to mean The Wholeness of Reality. God is that which sources and infuses everything, yet is also co-emergent with and indistinguishable from anything. Any “God” that can be believed in or not is a trivialized notion of the divine, and certainly not what we’re talking about here. Reality (God) rules! That which is fundamentally and supremely real always has the final word. Everything bows to it, with no exception.

Many traditional words (Faith and God are only two) can have extremely rich meanings to us rationalists if we only give them a chance. Often a rationalist interpretation is closer to the true original meaning of the word. The true meaning got distorted thru the centuries by those who interpret scripture literally (it’s likely scripture wasn’t even intended to be interpreted literally, except at a spiritually immature stage). Of course, some scripture is just off-base given what we now know, and should be discarded. But not all of it!

Michael Dowd (you can Google him for more info) is starting to have quite a bit of success taking this approach, especially in the more liberal churches. I think we should either take an approach similar to Michael’s or perhaps join forces with him. This would involve going into the churches and synagogues and mosques, becoming active members, and preaching about the power of having Faith in Reality, and witnessing about how the Faith transforms individuals so that their lives have more integrity and joy, and how it spreads to the lives of those around them. I fear we don’t have time to do it any other way.

We’d have to avoid churches that interpret scripture literally to begin with, because we’ll be seen as too radical. But I am impressed with the very large number of churches that have a majority of members who do NOT interpret scripture literally.

I’d love to do an entire post of my own on this subject, but alas, I’ve been told I don’t have enough karma to make a post. Is there a posting somewhere that explains the whole karma system? I clicked on the ABOUT link, but it didn’t have the kind of hints on how to increase karma that I was looking for.

Just as a comment on labels, I used to be an "evangelical atheist" but this essay by Sam Harris changed my mind:

http://richarddawkins.net/article,1702,The-Problem-with-Atheism,Sam-Harris

Excerpt:

...I'm not saying that racism is no longer a problem in this country, but anyone who thinks that the problem is as bad as it ever was has simply forgotten, or has never learned, how bad, in fact, it was.

So, we can now ask, how have people of good will and common sense gone about combating racism? There was a civil rights movement, of course. The KKK was gradually battered to the fringes of society. There have been important and, I think, irrevocable changes in the way we talk about race—our major newspapers no longer publish flagrantly racist articles and editorials as they did less than a century ago—but, ask yourself, how many people have had to identify themselves as "non-racists" to participate in this process? Is there a "non-racist alliance" somewhere for me to join?

Attaching a label to something carries real liabilities, especially if the thing you are naming isn't really a thing at all. And atheism, I would argue, is not a thing. It is not a philosophy, just as "non-racism" is not one. Atheism is not a worldview—and yet most people imagine it to be one and attack it as such. We who do not believe in God are collaborating in this misunderstanding by consenting to be named and by even naming ourselves.

Deleting religion from the world would increase many peoples' fear of death. Also, to reject all faiths you almost have to admit to yourself that after this life their is only eternal nothingness. Fear of death is so strong that many people try to convince themselves that a belief they "know" is irrational could be true.

So might an increase in the popularity of cryonics give a huge boost to rationalist organization builders?

And what level of responsibility would this community take upon itself? If on a wintry night the police will drive, beating and kicking, unarmed protesters down the street, will it let the protesters in and leave the police out? Mikhailivsky Cathedral in Kyiv did it, on the night of December 1st, 2013, if I remember it right, and later let people rest inside and served as a hospital base. A protestant church in Luteranska str. also served as a hospital.

I'm not saying this is behavior expected only of churches.

I am saying that 1) the churches occupy a position outside common law, in people's eyes (after all, Berkut could force the doors), 2) if you are seeking to outperform something, you should steelman it like there's no tomorrow, 3) if you think churches just 'fill a hole' in bored and scared people's minds, then yeah, you can go fill it yourself, just don't expect the protesters survive it. Edit: 2013, not '14.

When looking at examples of community, as community, it is probably a good idea to look for other types of communities as well, and identify common factors.

One other, successful type of community (which, like the desired community, is volunteer-run, and consists of people with a shared goal of self-improvement) is Toastmasters. The self-improvement in question is in the narrow realms of communication (especially as regards speeches) and leadership, but a lot of the basic principles would probably carry over reasonably well to a rationalist community.

We don't want to create a new religion, but whatever we create to take the place of it needs to offer at least as much as that which it replaces, so we might end up actually needing a new 'religion' whether we like it or not. If indeed there is a biological predisposition for humans to want to engage in 'worship', then we might as well worship rationally. I hesitate to call this new organization a religion or the practice worship, those are the things they are replacing, but those words get my idea across.

How about we create a church-like organization that has local congregations and meets weekly to listen to talks on rationality, the latest scientific discoveries, lectures on philosophy, the state of the world, etc. And they don't need to lack beauty or awe. A weekly dose of the unimaginable beauty of biology, or astrophysics, or even economics, in a shared setting, would sure add value to my life. A 'bible study' about fermi's paradox would have made my day as a child. We can tug on the emotions as much as traditional religions without being irrational.

And the missionary arm would maintain the rationality of the 'church'. If the catholic pope denounces condoms in africa, then our 'church' goes one further and starts a viral campaign to not only spread the reason why the pope is wrong, but gets creative and sets up condom donations or incentive structures to promote their use, or whatever.

I know there are many organizations that promote skepticism, secular humanism, reason, enlightenment, etc. but don't know if they are widespread, have local chapters that meet regularly, or have much of a following.

And yes, 'canonizing' the vast information to make it more accessible would help a lot.

UPDATE: In regards to the post wondering how this all would be different from the atheist groups and other such organizations that currently exist, well, that is the rub isn't it. Those have the right idea but aren't successful....how can we make one succeed? Or, can we prove that one can't succeed so as to not waste any more time over it.

As a Stirnerite too apathetic and unsociable to pursue even a Union of Egoists, I have no helpful advice to give rather than nitpicks.

It seemed very odd to me that Eliezer seemed to imagine hunter-gatherer bands as intentional communities (which I admit to also being interested in on an abstract level) rather than tribes of related individuals, a sort of proto-clan. More like the ideal of the National Anarchists than Seasteaders, however less appealing we may find the former. Eliezer seems to endorse something like antinatalism, which runs contrary to successful tribalism. The Shakers disappeared pretty quickly, because you can't just rely on converts and people are naturally going to be attracted to more pro-natalist institutions.

I agree with Brad Taylor on certain factors we might consider irrational being integral to the success of religious institutions. Using one of Hopefully Anonymous' favorite phrases, succesful institutions are non-transparently about self-perpetuation and will sacrifice other ideals (seeming irrational from that idealistic perspective) to serve that purpose.

The idea of infiltrating an institution to take it over is known as "entryism" and is most closely associated with Trotskyites.

Make sure that the binding of community is done based on a premise that is both simple to understand and allows at least one safe harbor from direct individual criticism, even if that is allowing non-participation in certain activities. A general community needs a safety and a common simple goal allowing for many levels of participation while offering all levels similar benefits of community.

It might be useful, in thinking what these hypothetical organizations would look like, to think about the history of the Elks/Masons/Odd Fellows/Knights of Columbus/etc. Which were essentially social clubs mixed with a primitive form of insurance; you joined the group and paid dues, and those dues paid for the families of members who became disabled or died, with the implicit promise that your family would get the same if it happened to you. Some of them were religiously-oriented, but most weren't (explicitly), and they're probably the most purely community qua community organizations that persisted.

I think the community that I grew up in might have something that can be looked into as a sort of semi-example. I grew up in a rural town, and it had no shortage of religiosity, but most community events didn't happen at the churches. There were weekly sermons sure, but marriages, town hall meetings, debates, just about any big event would happen at our Grange hall .

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Grange_of_the_Order_of_Patrons_of_Husbandry , it's basically freemasonry for farmers)

The grange serves as sort of a meta-communal arranger of all the sub-communities of the town's religions; we have a dozen flavors of christian including catholic and jehova's witnesses, mormons, quite a few jewish people, a very few muslims, and even less atheists. But all of those groups have sub-populations belonging to the Grange, and they all get along at grange meetings fairly well. It's like it was a neutral ground, where they could all go to get things done.

Probably not a perfect example, but it's the cached thought that came to my mind as an example when i was reading this.

Folks get a variety of satisfactions/comforts from church membership. Community does seem like a big one, but nebulous.

I think one of the greater draws of church community is a sense of being valued. For the self-assured this motivator might be hard to grasp. (Conversely, those of low self-esteem might overestimate its importance.) Anyway, I recommend research into the psychological problems correlating with religiosity. I haven't seen such studies in particular, but I've seen studies of psychological problems associated with conservatism and "Right-Wing Authoritarianism", which are mindsets correlated with religiosity. Fear of death and difficulty coping with chaos are two prominent traits.

Not to say that the urges towards church community are all pathologies. Just that certain "holes" might be keener felt when neuroses impinge. The terms "hole" and "gap" feel loaded. It might be easy to misread these terms as implying unnatural deficiencies rather than natural needs — like the gap in my stomach half a day after my last meal — even if holes are allowed as perhaps "even worth filling."

Service also promotes a sense of personal worth.

I believe that valuation of membership (or at least the perception of such by members) is fundamental to all "community"-like organizations. Maybe it's explicit ("Jesus loves you. This organization is supposed to be about promoting his teachings.") or maybe it's implicit (by serving the public, a valuation of all is implied).

You cannot support an organization that does not support you. And the more folks fear for their well-being (fearing death or instability), the stronger they'll want and seek the assurance of being cared for (by organization or by deity).

Why there isn't a world-wide "Mutual Care Society" but there are plenty of Objectivist clubs... Well, I trust there are details that somehow save my above ideas from invalidation...

Eliezer jumps from the ostensible purpose of churches to the claim that they are not optimized for community. The ostensible purpose doesn't tell us much! Churches look to me to have a lot of optimization for community.

I do not claim that churches are optimal but I doubt it is as easy to improve on them as Eliezer implies. The very items he points to look to me to be powerful rituals. Maybe those rituals serve some purpose (eg, brainwashing) other than community, but it is important to understand the data we have about organizing humans. Communities are slow and expensive experimental subjects.

Someone already mentioned a wiki, my suggestion is:

-there needs to be a place to announce rationalist meetings, a page where you can look up your country/city and join a rationalist community or create a new one.

-MENSA could be an inspiration and a place to look for members(although this idea to fish members from another organization has the potential to generate friction).

-there is already too much information on this site, tons of postings and this thread alone now has 28 comments(and counting), I'm not going to invest a lot of time to wade through this quagmire, sorry. Not that information is bad, but my time is limited, hence I second the motion for more organization(wiki).

PS: I live in Rio de Janeiro, send me a message if you want to meet.

Reading this 13 years later is quite interesting when you think about how far the LW community and EA community have come. 

Actually many such groups exist already, except they're not arbitrarily limited to self-described rationalists -- for instance, the committee that's working on a garden for an elementary school in my neighborhood.

How about adding a feature on LessWrong where we can state our location (in as generic terms as we want, e.g. "Canada"), so that it's a bit easier to judge if there are several other people near us physically to start thinking about holding meetings?

I don't see why "rationalism" would be a good thing to organize around; but I don't think that's what Eliezer is talking about. As cousin_it noted, Eliezer is implying that rationalism implies altruism. Should we add altruism to the bundle of extra-rational values that Eliezer thinks are part of rationalism? Combined with his insistence that "rationalists always win", and his earlier comment that a Bayesian master would place inherent value on rationality, that would make 3 irrational elements of Yudkowskian rationalism.

Eliezer's search for a "rationalist gestalt" that can be a lifestyle, rather than just a tool for thinking, probably has a lot to do with the accusations of cultism that he is rightly concerned about. The one sacred rule of rationalism is that you not make it sacred.

Rationality is sometimes equated with altruism, liberalism, and egalitarianism, when actually those are just historically-contingent alliances. (This is important when addressing the important charges made against rationalism by, say, Nietzsche, or Allan Bloom, who say rationalism => egalitarianism => utility placed on mean rather than maximum values => crappy art. Basically, the charge against rationalism is really against egalitarianism, but it's more sexy and socially acceptable to say you're attacking rationalism. But that's a subject for another post.)

I already live in that post religious world. Yes, we do have religion, of course. But to most people here, religion is a private matter. There are people here that goes to church regularly, and for whom this is their prime community, but those are a small minority.

Instead our communities are the workplace or organized hobbies, or just fiends that one drinks alcohol with regularly. My parents prime community (except family) is the local Orienteering club. My self, I would not say that I have a community right now. Possibly my flat mates, if five people can be called a community. Mostly I have a network of friends, and I think that this is the most common form of "community" in my country.

This kind of network of workplaces, relatives, hobbies, friends, means that many people have one foot here and one there, which makes weaker communities. And there are people that just do not have a community.

But there are some efforts to patch the holes. In my neighborhood there are something called "Fika common", which is a social meat up where everyone is invited. Anyone who wants to, brings cake, or similar, and share with everyone else. I rely like that this exist, but I have not been there, because I don't like strangers much.

"But religion does fill certain holes in people's minds, some of which are even worth filling."

Are they? There is such a thing as a Fruitful Void. God is used as a placeholder to stop questioning and abolish uncertainty. Those are very valuable absences.