Something about Status Ladders in Berkeley

I care a lot about the health of this community and think status dynamics like this can both be really damaging and require a lot of ingenuity to solve.

Maybe I'm cynical, but this is a strange sentiment to have beacuse the public parts of the Bay Area rationalist community (I personally opine) are made of status ladders.

Thank you for the comment. I know Elizabeth somewhat well, and I'm really happy that she became CFAR's community manager :). Her position came after my time in the physical community. Perhaps I'll feel more at home at Berkeley nowadays.

The vibe was: person felt kind of "rapey" (and I mean this in the most serious sense). It is unclear whether this vibe was presenting more than pure noise.

While this comment seems positive and good to me, I think it’s important to have a policy of not commenting on closed-down threads anywhere but meta. So I am closing down comments here as well, and am dutifully giving you a warning to not do that again.

A (Semi) conscious policy, in which Berkeley is kinda trying to keep their numbers down or their average person quality up. There is something to say for this policy, though I would prefer that Berkeley people are honest about it

I hadn't thought about it being perceived this way. As perhaps with many communities, it sometimes happens that there are more people than can be accomodated in an event or who can fit within the active social network of a person (cf. Dunbar number). As a result if you are running an event or just trying to keep tabs on your friends (your tribe) you only have room for so many and have to make a cut somewhere (not necessarily consciously but somewhere people will fade out of your perview). This unfortunately means it's not as easy to "get in" with the Berkeley crowd because many events and people are already at their limits so a new person coming in requires an existing person going out.

Now there's plenty of natural churn—people move, interests change, etc.—and this offers opportunities for new people to come in without displacing anyone, but at the margins there is definitely going to be some competition to stay in the tribe. Like, if you're the 100th person I think of you're at more risk of not getting an invite than if you are the 10th person I think of, and being 100th you are at more risk of being forgotten because I recently met someone new or just haven't talked to you in a while. And if you find yourself feeling you are on the edges of the tribe it can be distressing to have to work to stay close enough to the fire to remain warm.

Anyway this is all to say that the Berkeley rationalists are of such a size that they naturally exhibit behavior patterns matching those of a human tribe. I don't know if I would call this a "policy" though, and certainly many rationalists, being humans, are unaware they are engaged in these social dynamics such that they might say hypocritical things to signal status, membership, etc..

Perhaps the good news is that there's a natural counterbalance to this that I already see happening: tribal split. That is, we're big enough in Berkeley and the Bay Area that I feel like we're developing at least 2 if not 3 tribes. The details are still fuzzy because we're not quite big enough to force a solid split and I expect there to always be plenty of cross-over because we are all part of the same clan (I realize now I have my use of tribe and clan reversed...), but this is naturally what will happen if we grow as a community.

Like with other small, tight-nit groups, rationalists will be welcome anywhere rationalists congregate, but only so many folks can be members of a particular congregation at the same time.

Thank you! I apologize about the confusion. Duly noted for the future!

This post is not only of interest to those in Berkeley. If I was in Berkeley I wouldn't have much use for reading about what people are doing IRL since I'd be living it instead of feeling left out. Given that this information informs the sorts of things people write about online but is hard to get for those of us reading from afar, I'd consider it comparatively high value compared to the usual frontpage material. People's lives shape what they write, and so I'd consider something like this less meta than a post that tried and struggled to distill some general principle from events.

The first point is a good question. The goal is personal: feeling out whether such thoughts find a place in the LW space, and if so, engaging with this community more :). Altenately, it's a reflection/"blog post", whose partial intention is to throw some thoughts out there and hear alternative perspectives that may cause me to update.

The second point: yeah, that's a great point and sadly I don't know how to elaborate effectively. I'll think on it and update this comment if that changes. Thanks for the point on body language -- that's a good one.

As for discussions, I once had a fairly long 3-hour one with some pillars of the community on this, which didn't feel like it resolved anything. It was nice that the discussion happened at all, though.

Different people can feel "uncomfortable" as a reaction to different things. The fact that both you and the author get uncomfortable feelings, doesn't necessarily mean you refer to the same thing. (Also, the typical uncomfortable things at LW meetups may differ from typical uncomfortable things in Berkeley.)

Please, don't get me wrong: I think that it is important for people who feel uncomfortable to notice their feelings, and announcing it may be the right thing to do. I am just saying that if we don't talk specifically enough, we might get an illusion of talking about the same thing, while actually thinking about different things.

I suspect you might get more traction on comments like these if you provided examples, and/or reasons for taking this more seriously. As it stands, it's not clear to me why I should be taking it more seriously other than taking your word for it [and I say this as someone who wrote the section you just commented on :)].

You either don't understand the post, or don't understand people. Vibes are not terminal goals to optimize for, they are side-effects of something deeper. If you get bad vibes from a person, it means they are unwittingly communicating bad intentions or personality flaws. This has nothing to with social skills: a person can focus solely on facts, being abrasive and unpleasant to talk to, but still not give bad vibes.

Also, please note that you are at -5 votes now. There is this failure mode, most commonly shared by online atheist posters, when they post something technically correct, but completely irrelevant and in bad faith towards the interlocutor. You're being deliberately obtuse, if you imply that OP is some kind of anti-fact person, in contrast to rationalists, who are very pro-fact.