Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is:The Relationship Between the Village and the Mission , published by Raemon on the AI Alignment Forum.
Epistemic Status: Braindump, not as well thought out as I’d like.
Previously:
Project Hufflepuff
The Archipelago Model of Community Standards
The Craft is not the Community
What is Rationalist Berkeley's Community Culture?
Dragon Army Retrospective
This is a post about dynamics in the Berkeley rationality community, although it may be relevant to broader domains.
It is highly opinionated about what I think is important.
I tried to optimize this for a clear-cut goal, then realized the clear-cut goal was “I want to make it easier for people to cooperate with me on community-building, and I just want to do a massive braindump to get them up to speed on where I’m coming from, so that when I have a conversation about it we can skip to the harder parts."
If you are serious about rationalist community-building, read this, and then come talk to me afterwards.
When I visited the Bay in 2015, a friend (who used to live in NYC) remarked “you know, when I was in New York, I felt like once a week I went to ‘rationality club’. In Berkeley it feels more like I live in a small rationality village — there’s a couple hundred people, I’m friends with some of them. We bump into each other in the street on the way to the grocery store.”
Eventually I moved here, and yup. That is how it is. Sorta. With important caveats and problems.
There are lots of little subcultures in the Rationalist Bay, some overlapping. But I think there are two primary reasons people come:
to have a Village – a home, among like-minded people
to contribute to the Mission – ensuring the flourishing of human values (or something like them)
In the past 10 years, the Mission has acquired serious infrastructure. There’s been much less intentional effort to build a home. Mostly for good reason – the Mission is important, and hard. Competent People are Rare and the World is Big. Building a village is also hard, and if you’re able to do so, you’re probably also able to work on bigger picture Mission stuff.
The Mission provides juuuust enough value as a “home” to satisfice the people involved (which might not actually be sufficient for them, just decent enough that it's not their primary bottleneck).
In the past couple years, we’ve begun to see more serious efforts towards building Village infrastructure. But I think these efforts are often missing important aspects of the big picture.
This post is a high-level overview of how I think about all this. It’s quite long, and doesn’t condense neatly down into five words.
Summary
The Mission and the Village need different things.
The Mission ultimately needs to be outward facing. It’s about putting a dent in the universe.
The Village needs to prioritize people’s own needs.
I think these require different mindsets. and are easier optimize separately.
It’s important that the Village exist, on its own terms.
It so happens that the Mission needs to provide its members a home. One might build an explicitly Mission-centered-village. I think this is actually a good idea.
But I think it’s still valuable to have an actual Village, that doesn’t need to justify everything in terms of The Big Picture, universal flourishing, deeply understanding the world, or x-risk. If this is the only lens through which you build a home, your home will be impoverished.
It is important to have people and spaces that are optimizing for the village for its own sake, not as a subtle recruitment-for-the-mission strategy.
This is less important than the Mission (according to me). But still incredibly important. One crucial point of the Mission is that people have access to good villages. Atomic individualism has crippled our capacity for good villages. It is rare and precious that we actually have a shot at buildi...
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