Subduing Moloch

Your general attitude seems to be taking the problem of coordination too lightly. Eliezer's recent book has a lot of good thinking on what exactly makes bad equilibria so hard to escape from. Though I'd never discourage you from trying to solve a hard problem, it seems like you're saying "We can fix coordination problems by just coordinating!"

I actually do like the call-a-week idea. I forsee a lot of problems with "call a random rationalist each week for an hour", but they seem far more solvable than "fix coordination in general".

Upvoted for an interesting idea that feels promising. I'd be down to try this experiment, though an hour a day feels like a large time commitment (and regular commitments like that are harder for me to maintain, since my schedule varies wildly).

Proposed alternative:

Once per week you receive an email with a link to a scheduling tool (something like Doodle), where you input your availability for that week. You're matched with a random partner who has overlapping availability, and you both get an email with the date/time, and a link to a video conference room (perhaps using appear.in) where the call will happen.

I'm uncertain how long the call should be. An hour is not super long, if it's the only call you'll have with that person, but people might balk at a longer call. It could be configurable, but also choices are bad.

It would likely be good to have a fairly concrete set of suggestions for what to do on the call. Maybe something like a few minutes of introductions, followed by something like pair debugging? Or if the goal is more about networking, maybe prompts like "share what you've been thinking about lately" or "what are your most important goals?" would be good.

I could see value in staying in touch with your partner over email or something for a period of time after the call, but I'm not sure exactly what that should look like, and simplicity is good.

Spending 7 hours per week is a significant time investment. Especially for anyone who's actually working on important things.

Coordinating two busy people to have a 1 hour call every day of the week is a very hard task.

#1, what Hazard said. #2, this proposal reminds me of the ITER project and the Human Brain Project, enormously expensive undertakings which are widely believed to be almost entirely pointless, which were/are organized, campaigned for and run by extremely smart people. The point is that well-meaning really smart people can still make grievous coordination errors.

The idea of a powerufl cabal of rationalists only works if all the members genuinely qualify as big-R Rationalists, people who are basically already superhuman at the types of skills that would make communication and coordination possible. I'm genuinely not sure of any of that type of person currently exist. I think the necessary and most difficult part of your approach would be actually finding and vetting such people.

| If rationality is systemized winning, then the diaspora of rationalists should be the most powerful group in the world.

So are they? Can they even steer a software project to a succesful conclusion?

As a starting point, the obvious way to increase cooperation is to increase the frequency of high bandwidth communication among the agents.

Co-operation requires trust and common aims. as well.

The purpose of this is to develop a real community of people with the shared mission of optimizing the world.

Optimise what about the world? There is no such thing as optimisation in general. We have politics because people disagree about what to optimise.

Things like "solve eveything and make everything wonderful" are too vague to be achievable. See Arbital, again.

An example might be everyone deciding that the current education system is completely broken (student debt in the US is over 1 trillion dollars) ― and having an organization, let's call it the Bayesian church fix it by supplying the coordination mechanism needed to change the system.

How? By political persuasion? By routing around it?