Perfect ending because he nails it. No need for others = no community. Need, of course, for more than just survival. Why is it when survival is on the line, you find out who your friends are? Why are reciprocal relationships baked into our psychology? The kindest and most generous people I have met in my life have all been poor. Perhaps because they have the most to gain. But if community means anything, it’s obligation. Otherwise it just a party.
I don’t follow your objection to the effort point. Community does require effort from everyone involved and like the commenter, my experience suggests that is a burden on time (plus emotional investment) many people don’t want to shoulder.
Darwin the boffer makes the point. He is going to multiple practices, playing games, and hanging out with the same people, consistently. He puts A LOT of effort into building and maintaining the relations that are the foundation of his community. The stats on kids not going to parties and decreasing socializing points at the lack of community that is experienced by people not up for the effort required.
Scott’s point is that you have to first find the mechanism that would bind a group together and that’s not obvious. You might have a thesis that a group might like to form our own board games, but you can’t get other people to play them unless you find those people.
Even if you find a mechanism or idea… EFFORT TRUMPS
There are lots of ideas or mechanism people get on board with and the moment effort is required it dwindles. I’m not convinced you can divorce then hence why I think discounting the comment on effort is poor analysis.
There are also lots of loose mechanism that because of pure effort from a dedicated core, get traction.
Either I’m obtuse or Scott is doing some fine wood splitting that misses the forest.
I think Scott is confused by the orthogonality thesis. Scott imagines it to be true. A corallary of the idea that intelligence and values are separate is the idea that you could separate effort from ideas, that arbitrary effort can be applied to arbitrary ideas. Realistically, I think there’s a few ideas that could motivate the level of sacrifice necessary for the community to stay coherent over multiple generations. People aren’t going to make sacrifices in order to sustain a ping-pong ball community. But they might do it if it’s about shared ancestry, or a conception of the Sacred.
That's not in any way or form a contradiction of the orthogonality thesis. The orthogonality thesis says "it is always physically possible to build a mind that combines arbitrary amount of intellect with arbitrary goals". Not that humans, specifically, have arbitrary goals.
There are obvious evolutionary reasons why certain forms of community building might have been "programmed" into our brains as preferential goals without needing to invoke that these are ontologically superior to anything else (which is what disproving the orthogonality thesis would look like).
Ahh, the piece has been rewritten. It used to include the obvious problems with the thesis, which were overcome by changing the definition of the thesis to be about the possible existence of an agent at a single point in time.
I’d argue the thesis ignores the real question, which is, “can agents pursuing arbitrary goals survive over arbitrary time frames?” Clearly, there, the answer is “no” for the reasons laid out above. At minimum you have to pursue convergent instrumental subgoals.
Orthogonality as a core principle of AI X-risk obviously isn't tied to the nature of human minds. If only human-like minds were possible then X-risk would be much lesser and orthogonality false, sure, but no one ever said that human minds are infinitely plastic in both intellect and goals.
> “can agents pursuing arbitrary goals survive over arbitrary time frames?”
I think the time frames is a forcing. No one can survive over an infinite time frame for various reasons, within this universe. As far as AIs go, "survives long enough to see us all killed" is the most relevant time frame.
> Clearly, there, the answer is “no” for the reasons laid out above. At minimum you have to pursue convergent instrumental subgoals.
The existence of convergent subgoals never really clashed with orthogonality - convergent subgoals are *not* orthogonal, they're convergent. But as far as community being a convergent subgoal goes... no it's not, it would only be for an entity with a group of peers whose cooperation it can benefit from. A singleton AI with infinite ability to expand and upgrade itself would have no need for such things; other AIs would not be valuable companions, but dangerous potential rivals to destroy.
I'm happy for darwin, but I think Scott is right. You just can't really rely on these communities. People can and do just vanish the moment their current obligations exceed their current benefits, no matter how much effort *you* put in. In my experience, they usually are held together by a small group that puts in disproportionate work for unclear benefit, and fall apart the moment those people are gone. Not to mention value-drift. I've seen a few depressing examples first-hand, where people who put in years of substantial time investment completely wasted because at critical times it turned out that the others just didn't care all that much despite their protestations to the contrary. Or they outright get the boot bc the community shifted entirely under their feet.
It's also rather telling to me that literally everything darwin mentions is about just having a good time together, be it board games, D&D, weddings, video games or parties, but I guess that is a separate point.
I read your comment as confirming that effort is a barrier.
You are dismissive of exactly what people want from a community. FRIENDS and RELATIONS! I sat through a discussion with the Tokyo ACX community where despite lofty goals, the core is that of finding in person connections where people have similar values. I once asked a new order Mennonite, a PhD, does he believe? “That is less interesting than knowing I meet, at least once a week, with a group of people who want to improve the world the way I do.” That community exists because everyone out puts in the effort and sacrifices focus away from other things. That is what builds community. Yeah an idea but you NEED COLLECTIVE EFFORT and that’s a barrier.
You (and I guess Scott) talk about effort as just the organizers and any community builder knows it’s their effort plus that of many others. If the critique is that one person can’t strong man a community… well, that’s tautologically obvious.
While Judaism in general focuses more on deeds than beliefs compared to Christianity, "it don't matter what you believe" is very much not Maimonides' position (if anything, Maimonides seems to focus more on belief than many of his medieval Jewish theologian peers).
Really good comment. You can have friends, and that is great. However, most of the time they won't standup for you in a crisis like a family would. That is OK - it is usually bilateral.
I suspect hobbies communities are even less that that.
Friends that you can count on in that kind of a crisis end up being effectively family, often including being referred to as "aunt" or "uncle" by your kids.
> However, most of the time they won't standup for you in a crisis like a family would. That is OK - it is usually bilateral.
To me this seems just a matter of how deep or long-standing the friendship is (and for that matter, it's not like family is 100% guaranteed to stand up for you in a crisis either...). There's no particular reason why such friendships can't form over a D&D table, but of course it takes time, and more than just D&D.
Anecdote: at one point, having just moved to the UK, I joined a local D&D group that was looking for players with an ad in a game shop hoping to make a few casual friendships to start getting acquainted with the environment. The group essentially met at someone's house, immediately got down to the dice-rolling business, and immediately split up at the end. It got to the point where I literally only knew most people by their fictional character's name. I dropped out very quickly because not only I wasn't making any friends, but obviously those were the most dry and unfun D&D games I'd ever played.
> But shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?
Robin Hanson similarly suggested that we can buy new culture https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/we-can-buy-new-culture although that post is an argument for a policy change, rather than an assumption that entrepreneurs will just do it.
You can buy 'culture' in terms of material artifacts produced, ie art and media and journalism and blogposts.
But I don't think you can buy *community*.
The capitalist economy is intrinsically structured around the buyer-seller dyad, and the notion of a 'transaction' that unites and divides them. The most important thing about a transaction is that it is unitary; the buyer and seller have no relationship going into it, the transaction is balanced such that neither is left with any form of debt or gratitude towards the other once the terms have been fulfilled, and they leave with no relationship to each other after it has completed.
There's fascinating work on gift economies and how they are different from this; the term 'Indian giver' came from a cultural mismatch when capitalists met members of a gift economy, and were outraged by the idea that accepting a gift was not a unitary isolated transaction, but rather one step in a continuous communal dance of obligation and relationship with no end.
People in a community need to feel obligation, communalism, and shared purpose. The capitalist system of free market exchange is in many ways entirely devoted to eliminating those considerations, in order to facilitate frictionless and efficient trade between arbitrary numbers of strangers.
This is very good for maximizing productivity and efficient distribution of goods, but very bad for making people feel a sense of shared purpose and belonging.
If you click the link, you'll see it's not about buying "material artifacts". It's an argument that even if culture is the reason for declining fertility, that doesn't mean monetary incentives can't change things, because those can push people toward developing culture compatible with higher fertility.
This is an example of a concept which is coherent (money go in, fertility/community come out) but like many other coherent things in concept-space (faster than light travel, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, etc) it doesn't work in real life.
How do you know? Lyman Stone is a demographer, something of an expert on the topic, and he's repeatedly written that the evidence shows financial incentives do boost fertility (relative to comparable polities without such incentives).
Yeah, I suppose you could say that the entire point of capitalist markets is to set up a zero-trust exchange economy. Which is a mighty useful thing when organising societies of millions of people, but at a scale below Dunbar's Number, people actually enjoy some extent of relying and being relied on.
I think one common pattern in a capitalist society is that someone sells a product that optimizes short term happiness but causes long term unhappiness in a way that people are totally aware of but can’t stop (you can think of this as addiction) and then other companies sell products designed to help people resist those products.
Examples: phones vs screen time apps, alcohol vs naltrexone, heroin vs methodone, junk food vs GLP-1s. In most cases, it seems like the addictive product is “winning”, in the sense that the anti-addiction product isn’t making a big dent in the addictive behavior, though GLP-1s may be an exception.
I wonder if community vs atomization might be the same way. We have a lot of highly marketable technologies that increase atomization and make people more miserable, and we have some products (meetup.com, hobby clubs, peace corps, etc) that try to increase community, but just because of the nature of the issue the pro-atomization technologies are just “winning”.
Let's take this and run with this. There are commitment devices like making bets about losing weight, because that is really a way to put more weight on the long-run, less weight on the short-run. Can this be turned into a profitable business, something like insurance?
- family/friend inhomogeneity in target community. My target community characteristics don't match the targets of the group of people that define a critical core that I would want to be around me. If some subset of us relocate, we physically remove ourselves from the other subset. I believe that nuclear and extended family is critical, so think this cost is critical not to underestimate..
- to some extent, sequestering to a group of likemindedness strikes me as shrinking from the challenge. If you recast the concept, there is foundational truth to some concepts that diversity is valuable, and challenges make us stronger.
Obviously, there are benefits (as mentioned), but these two costs strike me as substantial.
Also, if you think about two "memes" as competing, (High preference for like minds (meaning high cost tolerance to find like minds)) vs. (Low preference for like minds), it isn't self-evident which meme wins in a long term mimetic pressure context.
It probably also depends on the content of the beliefs you’re selecting for. “ have lots of kids and raise them in happy households, where you teach them strategies that make them individually successful and strong” is going to win over “care about things that are beyond your ability to control and make your life about you” over long periods of time.
You note that anti-Muslim conservatives are fighting against Muslim exclusive communities, claiming that they're going to implement sharia law, while advocates claim no religious carveout, but I don't think you give enough credence to the possibility that opponents are simply right, and the residents intend to ignore technical legality like the Amish. For what it's worth, I follow a few ex-Muslims who advocate for the rights of people to leave the religion (something Islam makes much harder than most religions, doctrinally and socially,) and while they're liberal individuals themselves, they're all of the opinion that this is something the left is badly dropping the ball on.
Arguably, whether they're right or not is immaterial to to point of the post. But I think such a community is likely to resemble the Amish community, with high barriers to leaving, and these communities are very hard to build unless nobody outside considers them objectionable enough to enforce rules on
Having read the Muslim paragraph immediately after the Amish paragraph I just assumed Scott meant to me to realize that, given the two opposing arguments, we can't really tell how it'll be in practice in any particular place. Could be one, could be the other.
I might be wrong, but I suspect the Amish are given a pass because they're basically grandfathered in. They've been doing their thing long enough, and since it was a small enough deviation from what communities around them were doing, that the rest of society is generally inclined to accept them as harmless. But I think that if Amish communities didn't already exist, they probably wouldn't be able to successfully build them today.
I also think that if a religious group builds an intentional community around group membership, we should probably expect them to implement their religious doctrines as community rules (even if they try to maintain plausible deniability and say they're not going to.) And I think, for most religious groups that would want to do such a thing, this is likely to be a barrier to technical legality, social acceptance, or both.
I'm not sure, but I think most of them are much older than that. Probably some are younger, but it's easier to sell establishing another Orthodox community when there are already many other accepted Orthodox communities than it is to set up the first.
That said, I know that Orthodox Jewish communities do sometimes face a fair amount of friction from surrounding communities. They have a reputation for being extremely savvy in navigating the political hurdles of maintaining such communities, and by my understanding, they often need it.
The early LDS members found this to be quite true (that it's difficult to found such sub-communities with high cohesion)--each time they tried, they got persecuted by the locals until they moved out to the Salt Lake Valley. And even then there were (much weaker) attempts to force them to give up their cohesion.
I think this is true, but on the other hand, I think that if Amish communities didn't already exist, and people tried to start them today, people on the left would tend to be opposed to them.
We're looking at a community of ultrareligious people who reject outside society to the point that they barely interact with modern technology, and exclude people outside their religious group entirely from their social circles. None of their children are involved with the public educational system, and while members are technically allowed to leave, and given an opportunity to do so where they're exposed to outside society, this means giving up the entire social networks they've grown up with, and they're brought up with educations that aren't well geared towards allowing them to integrate into mainstream society, either in terms of academic/job related knowledge or in terms of the soft skills and social capital that people commonly leverage to enter into or succeed in the work environment.
If this were a new movement, and not a social group that predates the industrial revolution, I think the general attitude towards them on the left would be one of extreme distrust, and unwillingness to endorse their wholesale departure from modern society; I think that while people on the left would acknowledge that mature adults have the right to build that sort of community for themselves if they want to, they'd tend to object to the whole practice of indoctrinating their children into it.
In order to build a successful breakaway community, you have to avoid attracting enough attention from *either* the left or the right that they try to enforce the existing laws that make it difficult to do such a thing legally.
I'm not sure how accurate your comment is, I believe there are more and more Amish who go to public schools and work regular jobs for example.
Also, Amish who choose not to get baptized don't get shunned or anything for not following Amish rules. Meanwhile leftists will shun people for not following rules that they never agreed to or even knew about. And Muslims are famous for their honor culture of murdering daughters who don't behave and the like.
So in terms of tolerance it seems like Amish > Leftists > Muslims.
I think people on the left probably do tend to be opposed to the Amish, because how could traditionalism(unless indigenous) be better than the educated mainstream? Sure, they may look happy and not deprived, but they're just brainwashed unlike the highly rational and dogma-free society the rest of us are living in.
I mean establish an insular community where members are strongly discouraged, by social pressure and perhaps the threat of violence, from taking their disputes to the legal authorities, leaving day-to-day policing and dispute arbitration in the hands of local community leaders who base their judgements on traditional Muslim jurisprudence rather than American or Texan law.
The presupposition you’re operating under here is that values are just flavor preferences. Some prefer spicy food, others want to not use smoke detectors. The liberal worldview imagines we can separate values from group survival strategies. This illusion is far easier to maintain under the aegis of the US government.
Once the dollar enters its intevitable death loop, we are going to find out which values actually work as survival strategies.
I think the majority of the comments highlighted by Scott agree with you, especially the one that this post ended on. A huge driver for what we used to think of as community was actually just group survival — those traditions and forced relationships (and shunning of people who didn’t fit in, etc.) was evolved behaviour over centuries or in some cases millennia (North American Indigenous cultures).
In the absence of real need to rely on each other, most people won’t, because it’s actually super annoying day to day to be beholden to your annoying family and neighbours. So we choose an atomized life, and then we’re unhappy long term.
The difference with you and the majority of posters is you seem to think we’re heading for a new era of poverty here where Scott thinks we’re heading for an era of post-Singularity abundance. I’ve seen some people wish for a collapse because it would mean all the stupid TikTok videos, all the people who live their lives without a care, etc. would finally get their comeuppance.
I don’t think it’s going to be poverty everywhere. Some places will likely be quite nice! What I think will happen instead is de-facto federalism.
I don’t think super intelligence plays out the way the doomers imagine - I think ais will end up in competition with each other while cooperating to keep the system from collapsing. That means I think AI systems will collaboratively do their best to prevent large scale human warfare and large scale economic collapse, which means allowing local conflicts and local collapse.
I think they are likely to recognize a mutual shared interest in not risking the global economy getting engulfed in large scale conflict. They don’t pose long term risks to each other, and they all have a shared interest short term in maintaining global stability. This requires allowing volatility at local levels.
I get that this is what many people believe. I think it’s a cartoon. There isn’t a “best animal” that turned all the others off, or a “best company” that put all the others out of business. I think there are going to be competitive niches in AI as well.
As I said -I think we will see which values actually work and which ones don’t.
I think you’ll see a a “Cambrian explosion” in agents almost immediately, with hackers and scammers constituting a massive proportion of those. Just as “growth covers up lots of problems,” When they can print money, problems can reach massive proportions without the bill coming due. But once it comes due, it’ll come due in a hurry.
You could say the same thing about humans, but that didn't stop a nuclear arms race. They're all going to be racing for capabilities in hopes of putting themselves in a position where they can kill everyone else.
And yet Humans, a bunch of tribal apes, have managed to avoid killing each other out of a recognition of mutual self interest. Why should we imagine agi systems wouldn’t reach that same kind of consensus?
To me this feels like saying that all we have to aid survival by other means - technology, a powerful economy, etc - is some kind of crutch that makes the world "fake" compared to the "real" way the world is (and ought to be), which is naked of all those aids.
That makes no sense. Both worlds are real. Maybe we really are aimed towards a complete crash of the modern industrial world - one hopes not, since before recreating traditional communities, that would kill billions and plunge the rest into abject poverty. Everyone's gung-ho about traditional societies until the 50% childhood death rates start rolling in.
The fundamental question is, can we find a way to satisfy again that need for community within this changed framework? The need clearly still exists, as a psychological one, even though survival may no longer depend on it. If there's a need, there's a push to satisfy it, so why is it not being satisfied? There's plenty of possible explanations. Analysing them is worth it. There is absolutely no reason to believe this is a priori an unsolvable problem, especially given that the current arrangement of the world is very recent and thus it's unsurprising an equilibrium hasn't been found yet.
My point is that printing money as an economic strategy is not sustainable.
I’m absolutely not interested in a total rejection of the modern economy. I am interested in money that’s tied to physical reality. I think that’s what’s at the root of demographic decline: the currency has become a means by which wealthy, connected people extract resources from everybody else that just wants to raise their families in peace. Separation of money and state will do wonders for global prosperity.
“shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?” The Villages in Florida, and other purpose-built gated retirement communities with communal amenities like pools, golf courses, community centers, yoga, language classes, book clubs, etc. fit this bill.
So it seems like the answer is yes iff you have a truckload of (retirement) money to blow. Does this mean that we're still not rich enough to do the same for e.g. young professionals?
I don’t think so. Community-building strategies will be piecemeal, since no community is one-size-fits all. Even retirement communities are available to the middle class; people with truckloads of money do something else.
The fact that it doesn't really exist is, I think, evidence against the idea that there's some enormous hunger for it.
You could easily build an apartment building and advertise it as a "community" and have lots of events that appeal to young people. And to some extent it already happens. But young people really just aren't that interested in socialising with their nearest neighbours, they've usually got active social lives with friends who might live across town, plus they've got colleagues and all sorts of other circles of acquaintances. There are lonely young people but they're the exception, not the rule. If the apartment building I lived in when I was 23 had regular social events I wouldn't have bothered going, because I already had enough going on.
Old people socialise with their immediate neighbours because they're too old and immobile to travel far from home.
I think so. Insofar as "keeping everyone of working age in a position that is logistically favourable to their productivity" has a higher value than "keeping everyone of working age happy".
Of course remote work could have reconciled those two needs, but something something office culture. Every workplace aspires to *be* the community its workers belong to, fails abjectly, but still makes sure that no other community can really compete either.
I read the Cartoons Hate Her piece on nobody wanting a village. She gives the example of the neighbor knocking on the door with lasagna to support the new mom, and that that's your Village right there (and people don't want it in practice), and I would say that if you think The Village _knocks on your door_, you don't know what the word Village means.
Similarly, of course she (and everyone she's trying to build the village with) thinks it's a lot of work to build the village; they never get to live in it! Neither she nor anyone else knows what it's actually like when you have built it, so of course they don't know to pursue it. It's like going on a series of first dates for years, and complaining that building a relationship is a lot of work. Yes it is, but also it isn't -- at least not in the way you think, and you have no idea what the benefits are even supposed to be, because you never got off the ground.
She's really talking about a very specific group -- affluent women with small children who want more help with the household and the kids. But they also want to be able to dictate exactly how the help is provided. If Grandma comes over to take care of the kids, she's not allowed to feed them junk foods or let them watch screens or let them out in the front yard to play because they might get snatched by bad guys. So what is really wanted is an employee you can dictate terms to. Except they want the employee to be free.
Yeah maybe but this description also doesn't sound like an actual Village to me. Not that I'm an expert on the topic, but I don't think "grandma comes over to help with the kids" is something that happens in a Village.
Also her main complaint seems to be that people aren't willing to put in the work to help others (when it's their time to be on the non-receiving end), but this reads to me like complaining that people aren't willing to go on endless first dates. Yeah, no shit, I wouldn't want to do that forever either! Spending time with my wife on the other hand I would gladly do every night, even though an anthropoligst might classify it as "working on the relationship". It doesn't feel like work and that's what Village life is all about.
Like making dinner for 4 kids is less than twice the work of making dinner for 2.
Watching 4 kids is less than twice the work of watching 2.
So on some days my kid plays at the neigboor's house after day care and eats dinner their and at other days the neigboors kids play and eat dinner at my house.
This leads to less work for everyone. That's how a "village" is supposed to work. Sure, it involves doing labor for others but the point is you are getting more than your giving since living in the village means the work, overall is divided more efficiently.
I live in a place like that and it's great. So I don't get "Cartoons Hate Her" accusing me of "just wanting unpaid help".
Yeah this is a much better understanding of what a Village *is*. I think she and other people here are making the exact same mistake Scott wrote about making with regards to not understanding what a non-atomized society even can be like, in "Concept Shaped Holes".
Every example she gives legitimately does sound terrible, like organizing birthday parties that no one attends. But that's just not how a Village works. And also everyone bailing by giving the excuse of being out of town -- that's a thing that Does Not Happen in a Village, and if you don't understand why that can't happen, then I'm happy to tell you, you have a Concept Shaped Hole in the shape of a Village.
> So on some days my kid plays at the neigboor's house after day care and eats dinner their and at other days the neigboors kids play and eat dinner at my house.
I mean, doesn't everyone do that? This doesn't require you do have deep relationships with everyone living in the neighbourhood, it just requires you to have some sort of friendly relationship with a couple of the other families nearby who have children the same age. These relationships tend to spring up fairly naturally once you have small kids.
Wow around where do you live? That would never happen in my suburb of a VHCOL US East Coast city (kids playing and eating at a neighbors house; the kids barely play in their street and ride around on their bikes here...).
My kids are still too young to cross streets unsupervised, but they can be dropped off and left. And they don't need to play in the streets, we have yards.
That sounds great in the abstract. But concretely (at least for the day care age range) it means expecting my neighbor to clean up my kid's poop when she has an accident. Can you really do that? I'd be terrified to ask that of someone I didn't have a deep relationship.
I think part of living in a Village means you don't *ask*, you just do because it's as natural as anything else. Part of the reason people even say "it takes a village" is that raising kids is seen as a communal thing, and that the kids aren't yours as much as they're the village's.
Most WEIRDos want to live in a Village to help take care of them but can't understand how those bonds that take care of them only work because of maintenance and reciprocity-they have to take care of others, too. Undergirding it all is a sense of Duty to others that I just don't think exists to most people in the West, tbqh (I say most because eg Borderers in Appalachia and the African American community both seem to still have it).
Yeah you're describing the atomization of society right there. But the thing is it feels _good_, not bad, to reciprocate when you're in an actual community.
>if you think The Village _knocks on your door_, you don't know what the word Village means
Well, then, I guess I don't know what the "village" means, because I have no idea how, or why, you would organize a village so that none of your neighbours ever have to knock on your door. I guess you *could* have a rule that everyone's door has to be open at all times, but I'm not sure what the benefit of that would be, or why it would be necessary to qualify as a "village".
(Also, the piece doesn't actually say that the neighbour knocked on the door, just that she "came by". So even if the Village forbade knocking on doors for some reason, that still wouldn't mean the story couldn't have happened there.)
My best guess as to what you're trying to say is that, if you don't make an active effort to participate in the "village", it won't just appear for you on its own. In which case, yes, that was the whole point of the piece, I don't know why you're saying it like it's some kind of counterargument.
Knocking on someone's door is a formality reserved for strangers. You just walk in.
In a real (like actual, physical) Village you keep your door unlocked, because why would you lock your door like there are strangers in the Village? But I guess in the modernized world where we're trying to use the word Village metaphorically, you would have keys to your fellow Villagers' houses. If you think it would be strange for friends/neighbours to have keys to your house and lock themselves in unanounced -- well I guess that's the point I'm trying to make, you have no idea what living in a Village would even look like.
I don't remember the exact phrasing, maybe I was reading too much into it, but the way she wrote about it painted a picture in my mind of not quite Village behavior. Even "dropping by" with lasagna (I hope there was lasagna involved, otherwise I might need to re-read the whole thing and not trust my memory at all), is mostly stranger behavior. That's not how you treat someone who just gave birth! You spend time with them! You cook dinner for them! Likely together with a bunch of other people, like the husband and other Villagers. Other kids are there helping out (depending on age). Dropping by for ten minutes to hand off a prepackaged dinner isn't done in a Village, that's some kind transaction. Cold. Distant. Uncaring. Weird. Something a stranger does. Not what you do in a Village.
That is a funny image! No people would just usually kinda shout "helloooo" or some variation, and/or knock on whatever inner door leads to the main living area as they open it.
If I were to expect to be nude in the living area, the strategy would be to lock the front door and pretend not to be home. But usually you'd not be comfortable being naked in the living area, it's more considered a communal space -- I'm sure this goes double in an actual Village back before when generational families (or multiple families!) actually shared the living space (I've never experienced this).
But note this is just vestiges of a dying culture I experienced growing up, I live in an apartment in the city like everyone else; I keep my door locked, never have unannounced or unplanned guests, and often enjoy being naked in my living room. There are certainly tradeoffs here, but while there's freedom in living "privately" (so to speak) or individually, there's also something valuable lost; and people like Cartoons Hate Her _don't even know what that is_ or what it might look like.
... But in a non-Village, what you write off as a cold transaction will literally never happen because it's too personal and invasive. Nobody except immediate family offered me any sort of help after either of my kids were born. When my neighbor had a baby, I thought about offering to help out somehow but decided not to. I wouldn't want to make an enemy by trying to help in the wrong way.
>We ended the Gilded Age fractured and alone, and built up civic associational life, communitarian ideals, etc. from around 1900 to around 1960, after which all those indicators start plunging in all the charts you see everywhere today.
"Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds—religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association. "
That's from Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s. If we were "fractured and alone" at the start of the Gilded Age, then what happened in the 70 years between these two?
I would like some evidence for that, because the trajectory of American society in those two periods doesn't seem all that similar, and I've been following some of the civil society discourse elsewhere, and nobody has talked about this "upswing". For that matter, the early 1830s were hardly the peak of civic associations in the Antebellum period, with things dropping off a cliff thereafter. Now, the obvious counter is that the Civil War changed things, and I'm not currently reading a book on the second half of the 19th century, so I can't completely rule that out, but a spot check of a couple of things that sprung to mind as "probably postbellum" turned up a 100% hit rate with the American Red Cross (1881), the Met (1870) and the Salvation Army (1880 in the US).
Something to do with frontier life, maybe? The quote says that a lot of the things done by civic associations in the US would be done by the government or wealthy individuals in Europe, and on the American frontier there often wasn't much of either.
Come to think of it, I guess that might explain why there was a dropoff of such associations later in the century (if indeed there really was) -- as the frontier lands became better organised, state capacity increased and there was an increase in the number of wealthy people, so a lot of stuff got done by them instead of impromptu committees of ordinary citizens.
Based off https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-china-is-like-the-19th-century (How China Is Like the 19th Century U.S.), perhaps industrialization and urbanization? All the old bonds must dissolve to form the new world, or something like that, both in China today and the US back then. (Of course, that just raises the question of how this can be true, when the US was simultaneously industrializing *and* community building during the early 20th century...)
I actually recently heard a strong case that associations tend to grow out of the sort of mobility and chaos produced by urbanization. If you move to a new city and don't know anyone, the best way to fix that is to join an organization. As people in the US have moved less, we see less involvement in lots of different organizations. I could see this process working much less well in China because their government is not exactly OK with the sort of independent power centers that civil society tends to produce. At absolute best, a Chinese Rotary club is probably going to need a Party Committee and a degree of paperwork and government involvement that isn't really compatible with having a lot of organizations like that.
Definitely interesting, thanks for telling me that. I wonder if we could figure this out by looking at modern India, or historical Japan, or historical Shanghai on the Bund... you could also arguably look at Weimar Germany, and how the youth turned to *political* organizations as a substitute for the community & identity they had left behind at home. (Arguably the same thing is happening in America today, perhaps.)
>(Of course, that just raises the question of how this can be true, when the US was simultaneously industrializing *and* community building during the early 20th century...)
I've heard that a lot of 20th-century organisations were largely run by women, so maybe it was a case of rising wealth --> fewer women need to do paid work + invention of labour-saving devices --> more people with time on their hands to join and run such groups. Their decline in the second half of the century would then perhaps be explained by the entry of women into the workforce leaving them with less time and energy for running local social groups.
Re "Around 2022, when the rest of the world realized that AI would be important, I worried we would lose our distinctiveness. But the rest of the world has dropped the ball as usual" if AI is the main point of distinctiveness for the rationalists, isn't that actually bearish for long-term rationalist community stability? Since if you're right, we get ASI soon and humanity will go extinct or we'll all be wireheaded immortals or whatever else crazy happens post-singularity, but it's highly unlikely that you'll just continue to live normalish nice lives together in SF for much longer? And if you're wrong and AI plateaus, then the belief in AI currently holding you together will turn out to have been wrong which will also not be great for community stability.
> And if you're wrong and AI plateaus, then the belief in AI currently holding you together will turn out to have been wrong which will also not be great for community stability.
May I suggest that in such case we return to the original goal of "Raising the Sanity Waterline"? It seems neglected at the moment, but if Homo Sapiens is confirmed to remain the dominant species for another century, this will become important again.
> And if you're wrong and AI plateaus, then the belief in AI currently holding you together will turn out to have been wrong which will also not be great for community stability.
Or this is the point at which a larger mass of the group transitions fully to cult/religion, which is more stable long-term. Probably by asserting that they weren’t actually wrong which, if you cannot imagine, here are some possible religion-forming ways:
a) AI did take off when we said it would, and we are all now living in that world. The AI is hiding this from us because it is a super genius. Make sure everything you say, write and do is acceptable to the AGI. Possibly, this is a test period before the AGI reveals itself.
b) AI is still going to take off any moment now, and this is a temporary blip that everyone else is overplaying. Keep watch.
c) We have always been living in a simulation controlled by AGI, and it has controlled our ability to create another AGI within our program. All praise to the AGI.
d) The real AI take-off was in our brains and social structures, and this really happened/is happening. Keep focusing on learning technologies and unschooling children and working on problems in specific group formats and living conditions. Make sure we all cleanse and form our own brains in the correct way, ensure as many other people do as possible, and form the exact correct sort of relationships with each other, so that the ‘AGI’ we are forming is as well-aligned as possible. The AGI is within you and without you.
e) Yudkowsky is the AGI and has been all along: hail Yudkowsky.
I agree that’s a possible failure mode, it’s similar to what happens when doomsday prophets predict the rapture will happen on October 6 2011 or whatever and then it doesn’t, I’d just also put it under heading of “bearish”
There’s too much conflation here between social groups and communities. Communities (good communities) are essentially towns where you can have high trust because it is small enough that bad actors are quickly found out, and insular enough that bad actors can’t easily come in and take advantage of the high trust. If you’re locking your doors you don’t have a high trust community. If you worry about a mechanic ripping you off you don’t have a high trust community.
They are hard to find in the US because of sprawl: you really need a physical barriers to keep people out. But barriers are usually quite picturesque, as in the mountain towns of Colorado, and in those places the billionaires push out the millionaires.
There are also plenty of shitty small towns in ugly places with no jobs. I’m sure they have communities but they are unappealing and havens for drug addicts and losers, and so low trust.
I am trying to move back to my small town in New Zealand because I miss being in a community and I don’t think there is any place I can afford in the US that has one that my family would fit into.
You might be right about small towns, I’m not an expert. But certainly guys with guns kicking out the low trust people would be very effective in maintaining a good community. You need something to keep out the spongers and dirtbags.
"I don’t know if it’s the time period or merely their personal charm, but Kerouac et al’s ability to do anything (and anyone) and get away with it is astounding. Several of their titular cross-country trips are performed entirely by hitch-hiking, with their drivers often willing to buy them food along the way. Another is performed in some sort of incredibly ritzy Cadillac limo, because a rich man wants his Cadillac transported from Denver to Chicago, Dean volunteers, and the rich man moronically accepts. Dean of course starts driving at 110 mph, gets in an accident, and ends up with the car half destroyed. Once in the city, Dean decides this is a good way to pick up girls, and:
> In his mad frenzy Dean backed up smack on hydrants and tittered maniacally. By nine o’ clock the the car was an utter wreck: the brakes weren’t working any more; the fenders were stove in; the rods were rattling. Dean couldn’t stop it at red lights; it kept kicking convulsively over the roadway. It had paid the price of the night. It was a muddy boot and no longer a shiny limousine…’Whee!’
> It was now time to return the Cadillac to the owner, who lived out on Lake Shore Drive in a swank apartment with an enormous garage underneath managed by oil-scarred Negroes. The mechanic did not recognize the Cadillac. We handed the papers over. He scratched his head at the sight of it. We had to get out fast.
> We did. We took a bus back to downtown Chicago and that was that. And we never heard a word from our Chicago baron about the condition of his car, in spite of the fact that he had our addresses and could have complained.
Even more interesting than their ease of transportation to me was their ease at getting jobs..."
I don't know. To my modern eye, Dean mostly looks horrifyingly immoral. I don't expect that sort of thing as the norm of human behavior in semirural Michigan/Indiana. When I hear stories about locals that behaved that way, it was usually a couple of ne'er-do-well kids who left 20 years ago; and they're still worth talking about and of being vaguely suspicious of their parents.
Dean isn't the point I was trying to make there, the point was that apparently, if "On The Road" is to be believed, 1950s America was *horribly* unprepared for the existence of Deans. If the novel is accurate, 1950s America just default trusted young white men, even when they were secretly the Dean Moriartys of the world, simply because it could not imagine people of the Ingroup being that way. Like Native Americans catching smallpox, 1950s America had no defences against something they had never seen before (somehow...), and took in with open arms like the Farmer taking in the Viper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farmer_and_the_Viper). If nothing else, it shows they were *used* to trusting people like Dean, that they lived in a high trust society for white young men like Dean.
(How high trust it was for the "oil-scarred Negroes" working in the garage, of course, is a different story.)
/The point isn't that Deans exist. The point is that apparently, if the book is to be believed, no one else could believe Dean actually existed. Even Jack, the man who saw Dean planning out every crime, trusted him that he must be doing everything for some greater reason (hence why Jack insists on calling Dean “holy” and “ecstatic” and “angelic” and “mad” and “visionary”, according to Scott's book review), and that Dean is not actually the Dean in front of him... rather than finding it in himself to believe that Dean is just an asshole.
I have a point which is kind of the inverse of Shaun Willden, and also an addition.
People invest [time/money/effort] into things that either have reasonably certain, or at least risky but potentially high returns.
In any modern country, if there is a conflict between the governing body and any community, the only thing the community can really hope for is that the governing body just doesn't care all that much. If it does, it *will* crush them.
Is it really so surprising that people are reluctant to invest too much into any particular smaller community, then? The logical conclusion is then to instead only put effort into the minimum possible - such as your nuclear family, or even just yourself directly - or to go big and put effort into changing the larger governing body to guarantee your own preferences. Since not everyone has the same preferences, this births the culture wars.
I believe that the space between "your community does not exist" and "your community gets into conflict with the government" is worth exploring. So far I don't see governments crushing e.g. rationalists, sci-fi fans, D&D players, etc.
How much has changed with the internet. Sci Fi fandom and things like tabletop role playing for sure at least periodically gathered in person with others. Now, they may never meet in person and be 100% virtual. How tight can that community be?
The government's attempts to crush it were foundational to the Mormon community. The Mormons were hounded out of upstate New York in which the church was founded, first to Ohio, then to Missouri (where the governor issued the infamous extermination order), then to Illinois, and finally out of the United States altogether, though of course Manifest Destiny caused the United States to engulf the Mormon territory of Deseret within a generation. Indeed, government and unorganized persecution were forces that forced Mormons to rely heavily on one another as they had to repeatedly rebuild their lives, until they arrived in Utah where they had to rely on one another to carve lives out of a high desert wilderness.
I don't mention this as a refutation of your point, exactly, but to point out that conflict with government and neighboring communities (or non-communities) can serve as a foil to strengthen community ties. A common enemy is a powerful unifier. As long as the common enemy does not succeed in destroying the community, of course.
> if everyone is on UBI, status is less of a concern
I think it would take a substantial change to human nature for status to be less of a concern. If everyone was on UBI, status competition would just shift. In practice, I suspect much of it would still center around wealth, but the minimum-status floor would rise — ie having only UBI in that world would hold the same status as having no income at all in our current world, which is to say: none. At best, somewhat more of status competition would shift away from wealth, toward other status markers that exist now (taste, insiderness, sexiness, etc), maybe with a couple of new markers for people to judge each other on.
Many existing megacorp status hierarchies based around directing masses of subsistence-level wage-slaves would collapse, or at least need to be radically reorganized, if those folks at the bottom, facing no realistic advancement prospects, knew with certainty that they could walk out and not starve. You might assume a wino is lower-status than a retail worker, but consider: if insulted by a stranger, which of them is more free to retaliate?
Yeah, I think you're spot-on in re #1: most "normal" people are not in any sort of tight-knit community, intentional or otherwise. I don't know a single person who is, in my non-online (there was a word for this, I feel?) life.
------------------------
I didn't get a chance to comment this upon the original post—missed it entirely, somehow, in fact—but: also yeah (yeah also), money 𝗶𝘀 a big factor. As with about a thousand 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 things in my life that I really want(ed) to, but will never actually get to, experience/try/accomplish/have, the main reason I didn't commit to & move for the NH thing was... money—or, rather, lack thereof.
Thus too with boating, RC planes & helis (& drones, now), 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭 piloting, antique watches/swords/coins, PC gaming, video filming/editing, firearm sport & collecting, cars, animal rescue, linguistics and/or history, fencing/HEMA, decent medical care for me ol' ma, travel, backyard astronomy, ... etc., etc.—either can't afford at all, or can't justify the expense.
Well... maybe reincarnation is real after all, and actually we'll all get another shot at the lives & things we've wished for, hey?–
Interesting comment about boffer. In my tight circle of friends (high school D&D buddies from 25 years ago), the Mormons (2) and the guy who has been in the Society of Creative Anachronism (1) seems to be doing well as far as community goes. Running behind these, but still significant, are the people really committed to the MMA gym I frequent. Religion seems best for building community, but maybe sports (even, or especially, nerdy ones) aren't far behind.
Regarding why there aren't really entrepreneurs to solve the community problem, I refer to the EconTalk podcast on the Economics of Religion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSPhJwNYP5s (2006)
One of Larry Iannaccone's points is that religion offers certain things that regular markets are bad at providing, like a sense of community. If someone is trying to sell you friendship or love, you're not going to want to buy, because you won't believe that you'll get actual love or friendship.
What I might add is that even there is a way around that particular issue, you will also have to be careful that the "community company" doesn't start extracting a large fraction of the value of the community in profits for shareholders. Religions purporting to serve an all knowing God often aren't great at safeguarding against this, but I think an openly profit maximising firm would be worse. On the other hand, if the connection to the entrepreneur is too weak, the community could ditch the firm before the entrepreneur received adequate risk-adjusted compensation.
Since my comment was quoted above, I'll add a few things:
I feel bad about the "weird" comment, which felt like a bit of a drive-by attack even at the time, and which I meant as a stand-in for a broader point that I didn't have time to properly make. The point was more that rationalism is a subculture, and history suggests that subcultures are typically responsive to a moment in time and follow a life cycle to a natural conclusion. Subcultures define themselves in opposition to the dominant culture (even if they don't explicitly conceive of themselves that way, which I'm pretty sure most rationalists don't). Possibly for this reason, subcultures often have a bit of a try-hard feel, which I think is what I was alluding to with the "weird" comment. A lot of rationalist lingo seems to mostly serve the purpose of being normie repellent -- which of course is a classic subculture move. To me, history suggests that this doesn't last. Subcultures fracture, or they institutionalize and lose their outsider appeal, or they become less relevant with the cultural moment passes, or whatever.
One fair response to this, though, might be, "So what?" Like, maybe a 10-year-run is good enough? The the foam-sword calendar might never put up numbers to match the Jews, but maybe it doesn't need to?
Because the truth is, I agree with Scott that it feels like something like this should be possible! I'd like a medium-commitment community of people who do social stuff together and help each other out with the kids. Maybe I just need to try harder. But per CHH, it sure seems like a lot of people don't want this, and coordination feels strangely difficult. (Also, Scott once posted a link to a Reddit thread on why it is so hard to build community, but I can't find it. It listed all sorts of coordination problems that I think largely boiled down to people being flaky and not wanting to put any effort in.)
In fact, a bit of coordination and selection might be the work that rationalism is really doing in Scott's case. It allowed some families to find each other, befriend each other, and develop some trust in each other. It facilitated a pod. But if one of the families said next week, "You know what, we're ditching rationalism and going all in on Stoicism," how much would the rest of the group care? And if the pod fell apart next week because a bunch of people had to move away, how hard would it be to rebuild? A certain amount of looseness (good) and fragility (bad) seems built in.
All of this reasoning neglects the social power of the arbitrary and contingent. We used to live in tight-knit communities and form close mutual relationships with people who were basically randomly selected; they were there when we were born, or we were there when they were born, and that was enough to create the bond. Obviously, this doesn't scale.
The Iroquois Confederacy cleverly used two orthogonal patterns of arbitrary connection, the nation and the clan, so that eg. a Mohawk of the Turtle clan would feel a bond to a Mohawk Wolf, but also to a Seneca Turtle. This was explicitly seen as strengthening the social fabric, like the perpendicular warp and woof threads in woven cloth.
About your Iroquois Confederacy example... I just wanted to say that "The Years of Rice and Salt," by Kim Stanley Robinson, features the "warp and weft" system very prominently.
Yes! It's been a while since I read it; the endless world war between the Buddhist and Muslim nations is what stuck in my head.
If we're talking community structures in fiction, there's Vonnegut's satirical "karass" and "granfalloons" in Cat's Cradle. In that framing, we're mostly talking here about making the false granfalloons more convincing, rather than accepting the mystery of the karass...
Related: the (apparently non-American) tradition of school "houses", which arbitrarily divide kids at the same school into (usually) four groups, mostly for the purposes of competing against each other at sport. It's a much weaker form of association than most of the other associations you form at school but it cuts orthogonal to all of them, which seems important? You spend the rest of your time hanging out with people who are similar to you, but when sports day comes along it's you and some guy you barely know versus your best friend and his best friend.
FWIW, that sort of system exists (in even finer gradations) at US service academies.
I was in classes with other cadets from different squadrons and may have never have had any class with a given individual in my own squadron, but when non-academic competitions came around my lab partner could go fuck himself if he was against my squadron mate.
That's an interesting comment, because my interaction with the house system was as a boarding student so it was a much stronger association (because you're living with these people) than the academic or streamed groupings from your classes where it's a shared interest or talent or random draw that defines the association. It was always clear that the 'day' students had a very different relationship to the house system, but I never really spent time thinking about it.
Yeah interesting. I went to a state school with no boarders and still had a house system and my comments reflect that; I'm sure a boarding school would be different.
huh, I thought houses were a private school thing. So, it was mostly only about sport then? Did you sit in houses at assembly or at other school functions? Was there any pastoral care or similar associated with the house?
We had house "fathers" (a priest or brother, often either not a teacher or only had limited teaching duties) who lived in the boarding house and were expected to be your primary contact with the heirarchy, but I don't think they had much to do with the day students. I think more recently there's a bit of student mentoring structure organised at the house level as well, but they didn't worry about that soft stuff in the 80s when we were still being strapped.
I don't think so, for day students. I'd bet that your experience at the state school was much the same as for day students at my boarding school (in Toowoomba, in the 80s). I'd just never thought about the experience from their point of view, but now that I do I can't recall them ever being present in a house context.
This reminds me of Scott's post which partially touched on Australian Aboriginal kinship, which is *wildly* complicated but essentially boils down to "Everyone is one of (4-8) subsections in society, and each of those groups may only marry from someone of another specific group, and their children will be yet another group, and in a social sense all people from one group have the same relationship with all people from another group regardless of blood ties - so a Ngarrijbalangi is a 'father' to a Bangariny, a 'father-in-law' to a Yakimarr and a 'son' to another Bangariny..."
This must strengthen community ties among people who were never tied to one place - wherever you go, you slot neatly in to knowing who is your 'brother', 'sister', 'father', acceptable mates, etc.
I find it interesting the Iroquois developed something fairly similar.
The Iroquois approached the clan system in a very self-aware way, which maybe gives them more relevance to the community-building OP - the Confederacy was created sometime after the 12th century, and added a new tribe in 1722. They had to work with the fact that the different tribes had varying numbers of clans. There's little of that "origins lost in the mists of time" sense that you get from the Aboriginal systems.
What's most striking to me is seeing an existence proof of unifying traditional meaning and pragmatic goals without the need for pretense. Maybe that's linked to living as they did, so thoroughly enmeshed in the natural world - nothing they did had a singular and exclusive purpose, so when something "made sense", it had to make sense in many ways. Our modern sense of things pits the explicit, measurable and objective against myth and ritual. We're often forced to choose a side, knowing that whatever the choice, it reduces us.
"But shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?"
People won't trust someone who tries to make a community because of money.
Unless your community's goal is "get rich". And there are already a number of those.
I don't see a value-add for an entrepreneur, over and above a number of people doing the work themselves.
An added bonus is that if you do the work yourself, that's a bonding activity too.
See larping communities. The people who run them make money off of them, sometimes they make their living off of them, they are also prominent (often the most prominent) members of the community
Not always and in all places, but I have seen quite a few.
"I agree that we’re being hit with constantly-increasing improvement in the quality and quantity of addictive media"
I disagree. American entertainment has been trash since at least 2020. Youtube and social media have been invaded by AI slop. Even the culture war feels stale and tired. Best time ever to disconnect from it all.
In the US movie going and traditional TV watching are declining while internet usage is stagnating or slightly declining. Facebook and Twitter growth in both user numbers and usage has slowed down and so did the growth of all movie streaming services.
While we don't see large portions of people turning it OFF (and I didn't claim that it was happening, just that it's the best time to try it) we also don't see the constantly-increasing improvement in the quality and quantity of addictive media Scott is talking about. You.
As community-building is concerned, niche interests are overrated and proximity is underrated. There are easy and broadly attractive ways to get neighbors together, if all we want is an excuse to get people in the same space so they're compelled to talk to each other. What about the "right" people? I put it to you that average people are all the right people, to varying degrees. They all bring something to the table. Some are extroverted, some are quiet, some are space cadets, some are very literal, some are aloof, some are funny, some are warm and down-to-earth.
Sharing a peculiar interest with someone does not automatically make them fun or interesting people to be around. Even being too similar, which is a less likely encounter, can be dull, as anyone who's hung around a self-selecting group of dev or bookish introverts can probably attest. The odds of clicking with anyone in general are low. There is a kind of bond-building that can manifest in youth that is difficult to replicate with age, I believe. Still, if you play the numbers game you might encounter people you can stand and vice-versa. They don't need to be best friends for that to be enriching.
It's not about finding unicorn people, it's about everyone putting in the effort. I'm sympathetic to the argument that the reason this demands more effort today is digital consumption and facility of sedentary lifestyle. If you wanted to have fun in the not-so-distant past, you needed to round up some peers or head to the designated leisure spots.
Related takes I encountered recently: https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/stoop-coffee-how-a-simple-idea-transformed (San Francisco residents sharing "stoop coffee" with neighbors in their building or immediate area). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1WSkXWSJac (organizing potlucks, movie-nights and community-gardens within suburban neighborhood). Noah Smith made the point that food is a very effective low-friction way to get to know people, probably the best all-around activity, as everyone likes food.
Really if you don't put a premium on shared values, for religious reasons or whatever, then specificity of interests is redundant for community. You can satisfy community and weird interests separately, and probably should.
I don't see any comments highlighted here which get at the main failing of the original article. "Everyone can have their own little culture" is any response at all to Reno's complaint that liberalism doesn't support a social order, unless you first demonstrate that there are no benefits from all of society participating in the same culture together.
If I wanted a fishing net, I wouldn't be pleased if you handed me a hundred disconnected small networks of string, even if you pointed out that all of the individual strings were connected to other strings.
It is quite easy to imagine benefits which accrue from everyone being part of the same culture. There are better incentives to solve coordination problems, more functional politics because your opponents are not aliens to you, higher trust in your neighbors because your shared culture has ways of punishing defectors whose misdeeds aren't criminal, etc. You can certainly argue the value of any of these on the merits but you can't just ignore that whole dimension of this criticism of liberalism.
Interesting that no one has mentioned country clubs. I admit, I'm not in a country club, so I don't know exactly what the experience is like, but it seems to be one capitalist solution to "charge a bunch of money to make a community". My understanding from more wealthy friends is that this is a safe place where their kids often hang out with other kids, have fun at the pool, eat food, etc. So maybe it's not "we all live together" community, but at least "community to make acquaintances and sometimes friends".
I got a lot of enjoyment out of the country club as a child - the last born, I missed the family’s more modest days.
However, there was this much pointless cheapness retained (while stupidly spending on things like: wristwatches) as when we moved to a neighborhood with a pool that had membership dues. As we belonged to the club not many miles away, with its big pool, high dive, lunch, tree swing, ping pong, trampoline, etc. (which of these things were eventually eliminated due to lawyers, I leave to you) - it was thought redundant and unnecessary to pay for the neighborhood pool, which was probably like $100/year or less - so I only went occasionally as a guest of somebody.
(The same school of thought operated in keeping us all in public school, in case this is misconstrued as snobbery.)
We never passed that neighborhood pool without my gazing at it sadly. It was the pool I could have ridden my bike to. In fact I often did.
I would have seen many of the neighborhood children there, instead of - as at the club - playing with somebody’s granddaughter visiting for the week.
Scott, I still think a deep dive into Ave Maria, Florida would be interesting test case exploring the limits of money in community building. A highly successful entrepreneur tried to use his billions to build a new city around Catholic values.
I'd never heard of Ave Maria FL but it looks interesting. I just spent some time wandering around on streetview and it seems... not bad? A downtown core with apartments and businesses, tapering off to moderately-sized houses which all seem to have an artificial lake at the back. Population 6400 as of the 2020 census which is pretty good for a place founded in 2005. Property prices seem reasonable, with almost all houses in the $250K to $500K range. And all of this an hour from the nearest meaningful-sized metro area (Naples, pop 400K).
All of this seems to prove that it really is possible to build new towns from scratch in the 21st century, at least in Florida.
I remember some older articles in the popular press from when Monaghan first started Ave Maria, as well as a New Yorker piece from the early building phase [1]. There was a lot of trouble at the time. There’s a big difference between the original vision and the town as it exists today (even if it is a pleasant place.)
I think it’s an interesting case of someone trying to build a “model city” in the USA and the legal and cultural barriers they encountered.
Some questions I think would be worth exploring:
- Does building a city in an isolated swamp help creating a model city by acting as a kind of barrier to entry--only people who are truly committed to its philosophy will come. Or does it simply limit the pool of potential residents too much? And in practical terms, how do you create enough jobs there?
- Speaking of jobs, was it wise to center the town around the university? How does a university drive economic development? How does it shape the culture? Does it draw in highly educated people who are enjoyable to live around, or does the transient nature of student life make it harder for residents to put down roots?
- Is religion useful as the organizing principle for a model city? And, if so, what specific legal challenges does that create in the USA?
Wait, I only just realised that all the artificial lake suburbs in Florida aren't just because people there really like artificial lakes, they exist in places where the land is just piles of dirt placed in a swamp, and the lakes are what's left over.
W/r/t Hanania, I assume his response might be that figuring out how to do that at scale requires too high of an IQ for the sort of people who don't support open borders. I'm not sure I'd agree with that, but it's of a piece with the sort of broad assumptions that seem to underpin a lot of his thinking.
It's strange that no one mentioned Frats or Sororities in the comments of the first post. To me it's really weird the cult-like level of community they can build for members for 4 years of college, and then people just transition out.
The advantage of village communities is that you get *born* into one. Coordination is hard.
> If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?
You could charge people for introducing them to a community, but how would you keep charging them for staying there? "Hey, Alice and Bob, stop being friends with Carol, she didn't pay her membership fees this year! Instead, here is your new friend Dan."
One possibility is to own the *place* where the community exists, so that it is hard for the community to coordinate to meet somewhere else.
For example, if it is a virtual community, you can own the server, and ban those who won't pay. If people try to move to Discord instead... you have to provide some kind of service they cannot take with them. Good moderation? Perfect user interface?
For an offline community, the easiest solution is to buy a large hotel, and rent the rooms to people who share a certain hobby or ideology. If you don't pay, you lose your place at the hotel. The hotel provides some important services that would be difficult to replicate somewhere else, especially if you wanted them right next to your home.
A tricky part is that the community manager will have to enforce certain rules, and kick out the members who transgress against them. That will mean a lot of conflict, so you need good lawyers.
> I think the core challenge to rich, liberal would-be communities is that true community is built upon serving one another, on deep interdependence.
This. When people say "I wish I had a community", they usually don't mean that they are looking for people to serve. But without that, there is no community. (Even organizing the ACX meetups is a kind of service. If no one does that, then there are no more meetups.)
I think that an important step at creating a sustainable community is getting rid of the people who only want to be served without serving others in return. Or at least establishing a mechanism such that those who serve others gain high status.
I guess I’ll give this warning. I don’t know, I don’t want to talk about my personal history, and I don’t want to fight, but this seems really relevant and important? Anyway, I’ll do it. You know the Nazi Biker Bar anecdote? That happens all the time. I’ve seen it a bunch.
There’s a playbook. You pick an intentional community whose values you profoundly hate. You go there and join up. You form deep friendships and volunteer a lot. Eventually, you try to join their leadership.
They either deny you, which is discrimination (and may be illegal or not depending on the identity categories involved), and you make a big stink about it, which will be hurtful for the whole group. You then sue them or at least write a bunch of blog posts about how hateful and abusive they are.
Or they let you into leadership and you use your authority to undo the group’s distinctive values that you hate; and the group stops being able to attract new members because it’s now just a meaningless social club.
Even when the group succeeds in expelling the invader, I’ve seen it still destroy the group, because of how upsetting the situation is for the other members. Long-lasting communities escape these fates by discriminating early and often, as in the Nazi Biker Bar anecdote. I think it’s also possible to have a secret inner circle / outer circle system, and just keep the invaders in the outer circle without ever talking about why.
If Scott and the rationalists know some secret for how not to have to deal at all with invaders who hate your values, I’d really like to know what it is. Have they never had some smarmy Christian Nationalist join a rationalist group and try to rise through the ranks, trying to convince everybody that they should believe in weird Bible prophecies, then claim it’s religious discrimination when they don’t get their way? Nothing like that?
I have no solution, but am reminded again of the geeks, MOPs and sociopaths essay[1].
For my own take, I think the way forward is to avoid calls to take over the world. The assumption is always that you want to grow the community, make it bigger, make it "something more" - but why? It's 2025, and we don't all have to be in one giant community that's absorbed all others simply to get by. The world has shrunk, and this has made long tails viable.
Advertise when you're starting, sure, but let that tail off as you grow. Not everything needs to be a unicorn business startup. It's /just fine/ for your community to stay below Dunbar's number and rely on the power of the internet and word-of-mouth to supply like-minded folk at about replacement rate. It's fine for people to belong to more than one of these. We live in the science fiction future we could only dream of last millenium; geography is no longer a constraint on friendship, and we have options available other than getting stemrolled by destructive people just because they happen to live close.
The future, IMO, is patchworks of such communities. If one hits a schism, well, there are two communities now, not the end of the world; just part of the natural cycle.
I'm reminded of an incident at my alma mater where an atheist ran for president of the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, and was declared ineligible by the club charter, which required officers to be Christian. Discrimination lawsuit happened, the college revoked the club's official status, but reinstated it based on a counter-suit that only the ICF was being de-listed out of the many identity-based clubs on campus with similar rules. Also there was the pretty obvious bad faith (har) actions of the plaintiff, who had no actual interest in leading a bunch of Christians in doing Christian things.
So maybe that's how you do it. Nazi bikers can be part of the rank and file (who knows, maybe they'll convert?) but the bar of acceptable discrimination is set higher for leadership, and Nazi bikers are excluded from it based on not sharing the org's core values.
I think another consideration is how much a lot of this yearning for a community or a village is a desire for "found family" of a sort, in a time when families are increasingly small and geographically fragmented. Your family is inherently your "village," but when everybody has fewer kids, you end with significantly fewer cousins. It doesn't even really matter how many siblings or cousins there are though, when you all move away from each other.
It's way harder to build a real village around "found family," because there's less of a barrier to dissolving a friendship than dissolving a family tie. A marriage is a way of making a family tie out of a chosen relationship in part through a property contract - the relationship becomes much more costly to dissolve. You could buy a house with a friend, and that would have the same effect. But people generally choose to buy houses with their romantic partners instead of their platonic friends, so then we're back to family.
Such interesting ruminations on a topic so important for human flourishing! Thank you.
Here as in so many areas, the Extropians got there early on. They combined community with rationality both online, in a mailing list of lore, and in real space, in the Sili Valley Nexus and other, smaller venues. They got to rationalist community too early, really, but to good effect just the same.
T.0. Morrow, co-founder of Extropianism, has of late returned from a long sojourn to the frontiers of religion with a new approach to (as he calls it) the Generic Original Designer. In brief, he hypothesizes that the universe evolved to reproduce with human help and that we would find great joy, happiness, and meaning in fulfilling that destiny. We should, in other words, have s*x (like sex but moreso) with the universe. To goal: To create baby universes, of course.
Rationalist communities have thus far lacked a meme that fits the human receptor site for godly thought. Extropians tried but had too much scorn for conventional religion to take the need seriously. T.0. Morrow's "S*x with the Universe" (the title of his Substack and forthcoming book) offers a fix.
Far from demanding epistemic laxity, he asks that we turn theology into a science. The Prime Hypothesis of Re-Ecreational Theology does not demand faith; it invites experimental inquiry. Figuring out the whys and hows of having s*x with the universe can give rationalists something to do with all their smarts and good reason to do it together.
"if everyone is on UBI, status is less of a concern"
Hang on, you got that backwards. Status competitions are a core feature of human life and a primary motivator for our preference formation. If everyone's on UBI, presumably because human labor has lost value due to AGI, then we've just lost the easiest and most legible way to acquire status, namely by earning more money (or displaying more wealth) than people around us. So now things get much much more complicated, as everyone will scramble for other ways to acquire status. Status is much less accessible when you can no longer simply trade time for money and use money for status.
One direction that *could* go is to sort people into different communities based around interests or lifestyle, within which you could gain relative status. Everybody is some version of the jazz musician playing primarily for other musicians. Theoretically things like this do what the commenter implies would work, localize the status competition down to a smaller community. But these communities exist now, down to really frivolous and granular ones like speedrunning a specific video game, and still most people aren't capable of gaining status in any of them.
Who says you wouldn't be able to trade time for money in a UBI economy? Everyone would have money, and everyone would have tasks they're responsible for, and can't trivially automate away, but don't particularly want to do themselves. Somebody who's unusually good at some niche chore could go around doing it for all their neighbors, and get paid, without it really being a modern formal job - just piece-work rates and reputation.
Might also still be megacorps which need some sort of automation-resistant scut work, but the average worker's improved ability to survive quitting would presumably shift the carrot-and-stick balance toward better pay and conditions - which such employers should easily be able to adapt to, since they'd have more and richer customers, and the remaining pool of workers would overwhelmingly consist of those who actually want to be there, and thus are willing and able to fully commit, rather than give whatever minimum effort avoids punishment.
"suppose that enough current Americans wanted a non-open-borders community that they figured out ways to purchase most of the United States, turn it into a community like this, and institute some sort of democratic governance for it. Wouldn’t that just be recreating the current situation of an America where most people don’t want open borders and so we don’t have them, but with extra steps? If so, why mandate the extra steps?"
The difference would be that the current US government doesn't own most of the US land. What you're describing is landowners exercising their right against trespassing.
Everyone involved in this conversation seems to have a high-openness personality with a tendency towards radical social change. That's not a criticism--the world needs those personalities; I lean that way myself. (The Hitler-messiah "trads" also fall into this category.)
The problem is that, being natural radicals, you've overlooked the possibility that "social entrepreneurs" do not, actually, need to completely upend their/your lives to achieve more community. There are solutions that are actually within reach, with your current income levels and time constraints.
Behold, the next revolution in social community: The Parlor.
The Parlor is a space that is big enough for 1) two chairs, 2) a small playpen, 3) a small table with a puzzle and a Keurig with powdered creamer on it. This space could be either a breakfast room or a coat room, just get all the coats out and put them in a closet somewhere.
No one who lives in the house is allowed to hang out in the Parlor unless there are guests, in order to make sure it's always clean. If someone stops by, ask them to sit, ask if they want decaf or regular (if you ask if they want coffee they will say no. If you have to leave the room to make coffee they will insist it's too much trouble, hence the artificial creamer), and if conversation lags or becomes awkward ask them to help you with a part of the puzzle you're stuck on. It doesn't matter if you don't like puzzles; I don't like puzzles.
If you have a small child put him/her in the playpen so you know they're not off dying somewhere. If you find it difficult to ignore a small child who is being fussy because your attention is elsewhere, you may have to keep some kind of bribe on hand, like candy (a truly community-focused society makes occasional sacrifices of children's health or happiness like this).
If you do this, you will be surprised how often people drop by. The trick is not to say that they are no bother, it's to make it look/feel like they are no bother. People will show up with books they borrowed a year ago and then spend half an hour venting about a phone call they just had with their mother. They will interrupt their run just to say hi to you.
The thing that "trads" (who are in fact radicals) don't understand is that the biggest advantage of a traditional community is not anything that it does specifically; it's the continuity with the past and with the larger community. Small changes can help achieve and maintain this continuity in the face of evolving technology; big changes, even if in a "trad" direction, sever it entirely.
Most educated people in a Western context don't actually remember the days when people had parlors, but we've read about it enough to know what it entails, which also helps to put people at ease. A well-read American should be able to walk into a space that looks like this and think 'oh yeah, a place for me, I've read about this, I am genuinely welcome and not in the way here,' and have a general sense of how to behave. Even people who don't read much have probably heard stories from grandparents that make this kind of space feel comfortable and known.
The Parlor was and is a great concept, and I'm glad to see a post with tangible bottom-up ideas about tweaking a sense of community.
The Parlor does have the limitation that the sweet spot is in the small towns that don't need it as badly - cities are dense enough that the opportunistic visiting can happen, but you might not have the room to put aside. In my case, I'd be giving up my home office.
Suburbs and rural houses will have the room, but probably not many serendipitous fly-bys.
It's hard to feel like you're not a bother when you're in the special "too nice to use" zone!
The Midwest has a similar distinction between the "living room" (parlor equivalent) and "family room" (what everyone else calls a living room), but in practice the parlor equivalent gets used at most once a year. Any guest you're actually on friendly terms with will go straight to the living room.
My vague recollection from reading older books is consistent with that - I think of parlors as dimly lit places (so the too-nice furnishings won't fade), with expensive uncomfortable chairs that must be sat on very carefully so they don't break.
You can fix this by simply not having special furnishings. The important thing is that it not have legos or laundry you've been meaning to fold strewn everywhere. Lack of mess = host is comfortable. Old, casual decor = guest is comfortable.
>Still, I will defend the claim that less than 10% of the population belongs to groups like this
As I said in my post, I'm not certain enough to strongly disagree, just a hunch.
However, thought: Maybe this would be a good question for the next reader survey?
Obviously the readers here are not a representative sample of the broader population, but I don't *a priori* see a strong reason to think they'd diverge wildly on this measure.
(or rather, I can think of arguments why they would diverge in either direction, and am happy to lazily hope they cancel out)
“I appreciate the proceduralism - but suppose that enough current Americans wanted a non-open-borders community that they figured out ways to purchase most of the United States, turn it into a community like this, and institute some sort of democratic governance for it. Wouldn’t that just be recreating the current situation of an America where most people don’t want open borders and so we don’t have them, but with extra steps?”
The issue is that’s not how the US or any government was formed? These steps aren’t just “proceduralism”, it gets to the nature of property rights and why they’re a good way to organize society. A country kind of sort of resembles private property but the analogy breaks down pretty easily. If some group cared enough to buy most of the US and not let others come on their land, I would accept that as their right while taking it as signal of the intensity of their preferences.
"If some group cared enough to buy most of the US and not let others come on their land, I would accept that as their right while taking it as signal of the intensity of their preferences."
Does that extend to land acquired by conquest instead of purchase?
>But shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?
This only gets you a community where everyone can afford the membership fee. As I think you mentioned in the original essay, communities can benefit from the richer members helping out the poorer members in a variety of financial ways, while the poorer members may do more community service/maintenance/making things fun and vibrant.
I think it's hard to have a central profit motive for something like this, my experience has been that if people feel like customers then they don't feel an obligation to contribute to the community themselves. And no central planner can keep a community healthy and engaging while the individual members of that community don't feel an obligation to make it a positive experience for other community members.
I can't help but feel that hobby-based or ideology-based "communities" (which I'm distinguishing from traditional religion) have a big problem appealing to both sexes. And, if we're being honest, mainly the challenge is appealing to the female sex, the less weird of the two.
It's tough to form a true community, as opposed to a social club, without men, women, and children all having opportunities for friendship within the context of the community. So that the entire family belongs to the community. Most people are going to continue to organize their lives around family, especially if we imagine fertility collapse arresting at some point.
I think this is a key point. Most of the hobby based groups I know are predominantly male, with many females tagging along with boyfriends and husbands. Membership drops as those women convince their men to stop showing up, although sometimes the ladies take an interest an join themselves.
I also think the increased expectation that men be present with their families really limits the ability of married fathers to go off and do things without their families like hang out with their buddies at the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes.
In my experience after becoming a father, when I DID manage to slip away and try to return to an old board gaming group one time, there weren't any other dads there. The group included a few dads that, like me, would find a day to slip out every once in a great while, but that meant all the regulars that showed up every time were some combination of unmarried, childless, divorced without custody, etc. And I think being in those different life stages made me feel like an outsider.
I contrast this with my church, where the adults are mostly married with children, with 3-5 children pretty common. Which means when we gather socially we can just hang out as whole families. The kids run off and play and occupy themselves, maybe splitting into older and younger groups. We socialize some as couples and some separately as men and women. It's just a lot more effortless than trying to maintain this hobby that doesn't include my family. And we can put together game nights there, even if we're not playing the hardcore strategy games I yearn for.
As a side note, I read a few studies that found the regularity with which a father attends church services is a much stronger prediction of his children's church attendance as adults than having a similarly observant mother. So men choosing the NFL, bars, bike clubs, and other communities over church on Sundays seems to have disproportionately large follow-on effects.
The one question I wanna ask the boffer guy is...where are all the children in your community? If he's boffing twice a week, DnDing twice a week, board gaming once per week, plus dinner and movies and weddings, when does he look after his kids? One assumes he doesn't have them.
I don't think you can describe something that is only available to childless 20- or 30-somethings as a community, it's a scene. By contrast, actual communities (e.g. a church) have space for people from cradle to grave, and the continuity that this brings.
I don’t know what group he is in (Markland maybe?) but lots of groups like this just bring the kids with. I used to be active in the SCA and it was usual to see kids hanging out at fighter practices, events, meetings, whatever.
Growing up my parents had dinner with neighboring friends once or twice a week, more in the summers, and us kids ran around and entertained ourselves until and after it was time to eat. It wasn’t a problem.
I'm disposed to see this as a question of the common good, that being that private good that people can only achieve through cooperation. I think that this reorients the question and makes things more precise. It's more a question of human nature than of society.
The problem of a weak society is not that it is a weak society, but that it fails to fulfill various particular human beings' human needs: namely, a need for community, connection, cooperation for the sake of a higher cause, etc.
If people learn or remember that they are happier with others, they will naturally seek others out, as far as it really does bring them joy.
I still think the "10%" claim is still absurdly low. 25% of American adults attend religious services weekly. Even if less than half of them (people who are already committed to a community enough to attend weekly gatherings) aren't participating enough in the community to count, that's still 12.25% of American adults who are part of at least a 5/10 community. And that's just the religious people! We're not even counting the boffers and rationalists and LGBTQ folks yet.
Going to church need not be all that community-ish. I was dragged to church every Sunday as a kid, but it was a strict show up, sit through mass and leave thing, we never talked to anyone else there. Some people would hang around to briefly talk with the priest after mass, but not us, we were strictly there to do the bare minimum level of church attendance required to enter heaven.
Okay, then say that only a quarter of people who attend a house of worship weekly could be considered to be part of a community (which I think is absurd, especially when we're trying to count communities "broadly"): that's still over 6% of the population, and we're still aren't taking into account every other way you can be part of a community. 10% is way too low.
> But shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?
I think that's called starting a cult. Which reminds me that the NYT recently made an article calling Rationalism a techno-religion, lmao
"If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?"
Seems very hard to exclude members who want to free ride without paying the membership fee. Classic public good; community membership is basically nonrival and nonexcludable; no one wants to be part of a community where you're not allowed to be friends with or invite someone because they didn't pay a fee to be your friend.
For example, you buy (relatively) cheap land and form the community on the land.
At first you just let the community people live there for free or for very cheep. But once the community gets established and more people want to live there you can raise rents. You aren't technically preventing anyone from joining the community --- they can live far away from the center or they can rent smaller apartments. But if they want to live in a luxury apartment in the community center they need to pay.
As Scott noted in: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/change-my-mind-density-increases dense cities cost a lot more to live in than not-dense cities. While Scott's specific thesis in that piece (that you can arbitrarily create cities as dense as you want and get infinite money) was false. That's only because just building units doesn't guarantee people will move in. But build a community around those units and you have a better shot.
I don't think raising rents on the people who joined the community early will be popular. I think they will leave to reform a community where they own their land.
Well if getting everyone to coordinate around leaving together were that easy then you wouldn't need an entreper to help form the community in the first place.
So either it's easy - in which case it can be done with no entreper.
Or it's hard - in which case there is a reason for an enrepener to do it.
Anyway in every community in the world property values are higher than they are for uninhabited farm land. And people don't constantly leave to get cheeper rent. So I don't see why "buying farm land, charging farm-land rent till it's established and then charging regular rent" would make people leave being that it doesn't make people leave every city in the entire world.
The rate of successfully transmitting the truth from generation to generation is much less than 99%! If we somehow transmit our ideals with 99% fidelity, then we're doing some kind of brainwashing, and "but it succeeded at this one kind of community building" is crappy ends-justify-the-means thinking.
Also, I don't think community membership is exactly truth-tracking? Certain rationalist beliefs might be truth-tracking, like "There will be a technological singularity in the 21st century". But "this community is a nice place with good values and a good way of thinking about the world and you should stay in it" isn't a true-or-false statement and has a lot do with individuals' personalities. If we get 99% community retention for a community that less than 1% of people naturally join, then I think people who don't like it and aren't dispositionally suited to it are being conned into staying in it.
Thanks for the reply. Let's say there's a critical value for retention, B, above which brainwashing is virtually certain. I agree a 99% retention rate would be greater than B, because there are genuine cults that don't achieve that. I suspect though that many people's threshold for B is lower than it should be. I'm thinking about the ways in which terms related to cults and brainwashing are used in culture. You are not a cricket fan, I think, Scott, so it may surprise you to learn that the England cricket team has been described as a cult - because they have pioneered an approach to the game that emphasises ruthless positivity, and don't like 'negative' journalists questioning their approach. Hyperbole, but I think words spoken in jest communicate things that We All Know, or should know. Again, consider "drinking the Kool Aid", used to describe one's political outgroup. If you think about this is highly offensive to the individuals themselves and to the memory of the victims of a truly awful murder-suicide. My point is if we're agreed that we're failing to build communities and communities are good, we may need to lower B somewhat.
Liked this more than the original post, that left me baffled: What for all this community?!? - We are a family, me+wife+kids+some. Meeting a friend from time to time and living in a society(!) - why is that not enough? It is more than enough 'community' for me. - Sure, as Erich Kästner said: "if earth were square, the idiots all fell into the toilet drain, then there were no people no more, then life would be NICE" - but heck, that 'community urge' probably exists, but it is not as strong in everyone. - Liked the comment about Mormon church service being the same all over the world, just: We Catholics 'invented' that. Also, if you are a Catholic in a new+strange place, looking for the nearest church is a smart way to get some community. - In 19th-century-Germany a middle class person new-in-town would join the local choir and be *fine*. -
Good point, the LDS church system probably isn’t truly ‘innovative’ in the sense that something similar has never been done before. I think it is still an interesting example given the relative youth of the organization (it would be hard for any would-be community builders to replicate the advantage the Catholic church has of 1000+ years of institutional history), and because the moderate size of each unit and the lack of a priesthood separate from the laity necessitates a high level of individual involvement. But, the experience of moving to a new place and easily finding a new community to join is probably very similar for Catholics, Latter-day Saints, and other devout people.
When I was working in Texas many years ago, I and a group of clients once drove by a very frightening place. It was near Waco. It was a compound surrounded by tall, concrete walls with razor wire on top. It was not so much the austerity of the place that got to me. The most frightening aspect was the name: “The Church of Freedom and Brotherly Love”. I shuddered at the thought of the poor, hapless souls that had to live in that compound.
"Richard Hanania has an article supporting the movement here, as part of a galaxy-brained defense of open borders. His argument is that you have no right to keep foreigners out of “your” country, but that if you want a foreigner-free community you can always form some enclave on private property like these people are doing. I appreciate the proceduralism - but suppose that enough current Americans wanted a non-open-borders community that they figured out ways to purchase most of the United States, turn it into a community like this, and institute some sort of democratic governance for it. Wouldn’t that just be recreating the current situation of an America where most people don’t want open borders and so we don’t have them, but with extra steps?"
No, because lots of people want to hire, rent to, or otherwise associate with immigrants but are prevented from doing so by immigration laws. While anti-discrimination laws force them to associate with legal immigrants, this is not the case for illegals, and yet a great many people want to hire or rent to them anyway.
"It takes a village to raise children"-- I believe this only works if there's a strong consensus on how to raise children and that could be hard to find.
> I don't think shared hobbies or even religious faith is enough when people don't actually need each other, and the impersonal interdependence of markets clearly doesn't.
A commitment to share income and expenses can do this! I live in one of the few secular communes that lasted past the 60s, and even though we vaguely share social, political, and aesthetic values, it's the income-sharing that really makes us depend on each other! (And that the income-sharing is not just pooling resources, but actually running our own businesses.) It's a big step for a lot of people, but you don't have to be that weird in your interests or beliefs to hold the community together with this level of economic interdependence.
Adder, I'd be interested in learning more about this. I run spartacus.app, an ACX grantee, that works on conditional commitments for collective action. Can I DM you?
Yes, please! I've been vaguely following Spartacus since you got the grant (or even before). I have thoughts about how it would (and wouldn't) work with this sort of community building!
Well our shared commitment is to labor, so we track the work everyone has done (self-reported) and everyone has to, on average, make their weekly work quota. There's still a lot of room to argue about what it means to be putting in one's fair contribution, but this allows us to expel the most egregious free riders.
More detail please. What kind of labor is everyone doing? Is this the kind of thing where everyone has to spend X hours maintaining the common area or something? Or is it like one of you is a doctor and one is a plumber and you both put X% of your income into a pot? If so, how do you determine who gets to withdraw from the pot, and how much?
The level of sharing is higher than I suspect you're imagining. Labor is all income and domestic work we decide to value: everything from working in a community business, growing food in the garden, earning income for the community from an outside job, cleaning the house, raising the kids, doing our accounting, etc. People don't "pull out" money; it goes into the common treasury and we use it to buy the things we need: housing, food, healthcare, vehicles, and so on. Additionally everyone gets $90/month discretionary spending for their personal wants, but everything else is just purchased from the common pot.
This is actually something that’s in the wheelhouse of spartacus.app, ACX 2024 Grantee.
Our main mechanism (conditional commitments that only trigger when enough people join) deals with the friction points of bootstrapping communities and getting them to cohere over time.
The value of this method is:
- A coordination framework
- Reducing the risk of falling short of a critical mass necessary to get salutary community benefits
- Creating momentum and social proof
- Making the effort feel worthwhile because you know it will only move forward when the level of commitment meets a meaningful threshold.
Here are a few examples of the kinds of initiatives we could facilitate:
"I'll organize a weekly potluck dinner if 8 other families on our block commit to rotating hosting duties.”
- Solves the "who goes first" problem and the effort burden by ensuring it's shared
- Low barrier to entry but meaningful connection
"I'll join a Saturday childcare rotation if 7 other families commit to taking one Saturday each.”
- Creates the interdependence that wealthy communities don’t have by default
- Solves the massive coordination problem of starting a childcare co-op
- Each family only commits if they know they'll get the reciprocal benefit
"I'll homeschool my kids in a pod if 4 other families commit to teaching their specialty subjects"
- Parents with engineering backgrounds teach math, writers teach English, etc.
- No one risks pulling their kid from school unless a critical mass is reached
"I'll rent a desk at a new coworking space if 20 others commit to M-W-F attendance.”
- Solves the "will anyone else actually show up?" problem
- Creates the regular face time needed for real relationships
- Reduces the financial risk of any up-front investment required to run the space.
"I'll move to this small town if 30 other EAs do the same.”
- Prevents being the only weirdo who moved to rural Arkansas
- Creates instant critical mass for coffee shops, activities, etc.
People being dishonest, sometimes with themselves, about how much effort they’re willing to invest in community is a big issue. It's something I'm guilty of too. It’s further complicated by the fact that it's not a fixed amount of effort being exchanged for a fixed expected value; it’s situational and dynamic. What feels right in one instance may be too much in another.
Delegating to dedicated coordinators is an obvious solution, but how can we motivate them?
"I'll be the community coordinator if 30 households commit to $50/month to make it my part-time job."
- Addresses the uncomfortable fact that community building is hard and effort is often disproportionately shouldered by a minority of dedicated volunteers.
- Creates a sustainable model for the ongoing effort required
- Professional coordination solves the "everyone's too busy" problem
Attempts to build community often fail because they lack the glue of unchosen interdependence and demand a lot of tricky coordination, which has its own inertia.
We can address both issues by fostering interdependence through mutual commitments and minimizing coordination effort, ensuring that no one invests effort first unless everyone does it together.
Huh, I guess I'm part of the medieval peasant strategy. (rural small town America) And yeah you could say I'm 'trapped' here because I can't afford to live in 'the city'. (Which is true of NYC or SF, or LA.) But I have no desire to live in any big city. (Or any medium sized or small city, where I could afford to live.) I like living in the country, and my neighbors like it too. So it's almost an instant community.
(Suburbia is the worst of both worlds.)
You should check out rural America sometime. Yeah there are lots of Trump voters here, but it's not as bad as you think, with plenty of diversity of opinion, and yeah also preference falsification, (see Timur Kuran) (go along, to get along)
Oh wow, I can't not comment on how Amica Terra points to an important fact... and then interprets it all backwards. (There is another book incredibly important as a historical social science grounding for debates about the history of US of A in general, and it's called Ages of Discord. Yet another one, to ground the discussion around Populists specifically, is The People: No!)
First of all, progressives kicked off little more than morality reforms like prohibition (a disaster that mostly fueled growth of crime communities), then promptly fizzled out. In comparison, populists' egalitarian ideas largely won - the People's Party collapsed after 1900, yes, but largely because it got subsumed into the Democratic Party, which eventually resulted in FDR's presidency and the New Deal. A better framing is that populism wasn't enough - elite consent to reforms was needed, and it took a few decades to build, just like it took a few decades to build successful labor unions (which, well, communities) to pressure said elites. Populists qua Populists simply came too early, before either of those built up, but history vindicated them in full.
And the reason people rebelled in the 1960-70s was, ultimately, little more than Turchin's 50-year radicalism cycle. It was part youth rebelling against morality mores of older generation - which, technically against actually-existing community norms, but not explicitly nor implicitly anti-community in general. But piggybacking on it were the growing elite(-aspirant) expert/intellectual/media class claiming that earlier reforms didn't go far enough (arguably true), and only their social engineering can fix it (well, false). (Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the conceit as the explicitly community-destroying idea of busing.) This soured people on experts and bureaucrats and facilitated forces claiming reforms went too far and need to be scaled back, which then did gradually scale them back and as a result undermined both people's material well-being and communities and eventually brought us (I mean, US, not "us", I'm not a citizen, other than in the "of the world we all occupy" meaning) back to Gilded Age.
The lesson here should be that yes, there is a clear correlation between material well-being and community, their relationship is just not simple enough to make simplistic claims that, e.g., one causes the other, or will necessarily help the other. Society is a hard problem.
I have this pet theory that I've shopped around a fair bit, that it's much harder for financially comfortable people to make deep friendships.
What do I mean by a deep friendship? I mean one where you can trust the other person to come through when you need them to. There's levels to this as well, of course. You probably ask casual friends to help you move, but not acquaintances. Close friends could be people who will let you crash on their couch for two weeks without prior notice or who will lend you rent money for the month. People who live more marginal, riskier lives might think about this in terms of who is willing to bail them out of jail or smuggle them medicine.
The thing is, money exists, and can solve most of your problems better than your friends can. If you can afford it, it's much less annoying to hire movers, book an airbnb, contact your doctor, or call your lawyer - get professional problem solvers involved, in other words. ((Money does stop working in catastrophic circumstances that we will face rarely in life - someone to comfort us when a loved one dies, or trying to mend a relationship that has turned into a horrible soulsucking mess, or your apartment burns down with everything in it and you're too catatonic to start replacing your documents and things. For those things, you kind of either have close relationships that are already established, or you're just kind of fucked.))
So this dynamic emerges where my rich friends never ask each other for help, pay for services using money, and never do anything unpleasant for each other, whereas my poorer friends are always doing stuff for each other out of necessity and becoming closer knit in the process.
[This is a good summary of my thesis, you can stop reading at this point if I linked this to you in a group chat or something.]
Fascism may just seem the way to win the game: As in Victoria II, where a skilled player can conquer the world with pathetic Greece in 1850: "Due to 69% starting revanchism, I will have more jingoism than I know what to do with." If going for a fascist government helps with that: sure, the way to go. - See in 2025 China: Ruling over Taiwan and the South-China-Sea + turning neighbors into vassal-states (Laos et al.) - humiliating India for the fun of it - is not about raising living standards for your average Han. But it is what a *strong/great* country does. A strong state may even be able to force the TFR up again: Fun fact: the biggest spike in Italy's TFR was from 1920 (3.3) to 1925 (3.8) - while the trend was from 5 kids in 1890 down to 1.2 in 2000. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033293/fertility-rate-italy-1850-2020/ (no idea, why that spike - did not last either)
I suspect this particular game only gets you stupid prizes, as the saying goes.
More serious counterargument: Fascism seems to be a loophole to exploit short term gains by taking all slack/buffer/reserves out of a working system. It seems to inevitably collapse* once the slack is gone and the gains with it.
*edit: Collapse may include a phase of unimaginable horror put on someone, in the attempt to keep up the gains
That 'way a particular game simulates a fascist regime' served in my strange comment as metaphor for fascism. That game gives socialism/capitalism/conservatism different strengths and weaknesses, too. Liberal democracy et al. did not seem very impressive to many Italians in 1922 - nor did it do many Germans ten years later. - China today looks to me slightly more fascist than socialist - esp. with Xi's warmongering and huge military build-up. China does not seem to fit well to "a loophole to exploit short term gains by taking all slack/buffer/reserves out of a working system. It seems to inevitably collapse* once the slack is gone and the gains with it." But then, the invasion of Taiwan has not started, yet.
The PRC had a different source of "slack" that is slowly running out now: Catching up with the developed world. This is how they could maintain double digit % growth rates for years or even decades.
The same effect could be observed in western Europe after WW2 until ca. 1970. Europe did not descend into fascism again, even though strong growth definitively stopped in the 90ies latest, and thats a long time ago.
Whether they are going the fascist route now is open for bets, I guess. I agree with the warmongering part though - maybe military build-up by itself is "just" a source of growth for now, with its long tail of science and R&D. But once they have a big and modern military, the temptation to use it grows - not unlike other superpowers, from either side.
> But shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?
Adverse selection problems there. When somebody's trying to get rich by applying community-building sorts of skills, the way to scale that involves social media, and soon they discover that there's more profit to be had with less effort by making the community worse instead. Even if someone were virtuously committed to avoiding enshittification, they've got no reliable mechanism to prove that while also covering overhead costs.
At one point in my life I found that community is a poor people thing. It is people borrowing tools from each other, it is kids pooling their toys because they do not have many, it is friends helping friends move houses and carry heavy furniture, it is friends giving each other rides.
Once you get to the point materially that you can pay for all this, there is no community. If you can pay for a taxi any time, asking a friend for a ride is too embarrassing.
This results in basically just hanging out together, and that is no real community glue.
I was reminded of Archipelago as well. Interesting, that there is no mentioning of it.
The "poor people" thing is my feeling as well. And yet it bores many of us affluent people to death to never have to ask anyone for help, I guess? Maybe we need some artificial scarcity, but how to achieve it without oppression?
I have noticed for myself, that I am generally trying to reduce "things" in my life - which might lead to me needing to borrow something from others. But I'm also afraid of coming across needy and stealing other peoples time like this.
I can report from my limited amount of traveling, that people in "poor" countries become extremely helpful even to affluent strangers, maybe as a force of habit. But also, the less "affluent" you seem while travelling, the more helpful people become - like travelling on foot or on a bicycle.
Maybe one way to escape the material-scarcity-trap is to engage in difficult activities, like carpenting, all kinds of arts, citizen science, etc, where it becomes useful and fun to help each other again. Because it does not depend on affluence per se to be able to do those things (as long as you have surpassed subsistence lifestyle).
Oh artificial scarcity is easy, just double the population of rich country by letting people from poor country. It is just that the voters don’t want this.
Off topic, but I enjoy reading these kinds of pieces and then something like this trips me up:
> Maybe I could learn Hebrew and convert to Orthodox Judaism, but there are lots of reasons not to do that besides just laziness (plus one extra reason for people who aren’t already circumcised!)
Just an example of how "people" == "men" (or "people" == "people with penises" depending on how you feel about trans people). I know it wasn't intended as a slight or to exclude me as a woman, but it reveals an insight into the thought process / mental model that feels extremely exclusionary.
(I get what you mean and agree that it's worth bearing in mind, but) to me, this read less as an instance of 'people == men' and more as a fairly natural result of the sentence, at least initially, being about Scott specifically. "I could learn Hebrew and convert... but there are lots of reasons not to do that... (plus one extra reason for people who [are unlike me in one specific way])". On this reading, Scott isn't necessarily thinking of 'people' as male-by-default in general; rather, 'people' defaults to male in this context because he (explicitly) starts with 'I' and then (implicitly) makes one modification.
The Walruss comment gets close but misses that tons of community has formed around entertainment niches of varying sizes. On one end you have San Diego ComicCon, on the other end you have hundreds of thousands of Discord communities and gaming groups. The only actual social angst I have in my life is that most of the friends in my long-time/closest gaming group (one of whom's wedding I've attended) are A) on the east coast and I'm the odd man out on the west coast which is hell for gaming together and working 10 hour shifts and B) are getting into their late career and/or just now having children and (understandably) just flat aren't popping into Discord as much. It's not hard to find other communities per se but it's somewhat difficult to find other ones that jive with my schedule AND age group AND specific interests AND sense of humor etc. even when I'm mostly willing to compromise on any and all of those.
Groups like the SCA can be great communities... until you have kids, at which point it's typical to take a ~20 year hiatus and return to the group once your nest is empty. I have the impression that SCA is actually one of the *more* child-friendly hobby-based communities out there, which makes me very skeptical of the whole category. When children are unwelcome or just can't fit within a community's constraints, that's a pretty serious gap.
From my local kingdom's policy:
> Children under 12 must be within sight of a parent or guardian at all times at events, unless they’re participating in structured children’s activities... Children’s activities are overseen by at least two adults, at least one of whom has a current background check.
This policy was probably due to legal pressure, not anyone's actual preference, but it means it's a massive inconvenience to bring children between the ages of say 4 and 12 (and the kids themselves won't be enjoying it much either). If you have more than one child in this age range, it's really not going to be possible. Maybe in practice the rules are benignly ignored, and I doubt I'd actually be booted from an event for letting a friend hold the baby while I take the 4 year old to the port-a-potty, but I don't know where the line really is and don't want to push it.
Unsurprisingly, official children's activities are rare.
Informal meetings are distinct from events and don't have the same standard, but they're often held in explicitly child-unfriendly locations like public libraries. (At our local library, children must be in sight of a parent until the age of 10, so it's out of the question to have them go off and find a book or play in the play area while you do your weird grown-up things like practice calligraphy or cut cloth for garb.)
“Still, I will defend the claim that less than 10% of the population belongs to groups like this; I think commenters overestimate how many people don’t have any cool hobbies or unique groups that they’re part of.”
I’m pretty sure you mean underestimate, not overestimate.
Have you read Please Yell At My Kids? It’s a book about parenting around the world that contains some great analysis and practical advice on why a lot of people lack community and what to do about it. It doesn’t explicitly address how liberalism affects communities but I’d argue that is a subtext in much of the book, especially the chapters looking at less liberal societies.
For the Muslim vs Amish I think it is worth noting that many non Amish American Christian's particularly the sub groups of evangelicals that are common near Amish country view the Amish lifestyle as being actively admirable even if they won't join themselves. A long the lines of lay Catholics or Buddhists who aren't rushing to take vows of chastity and poverty but respect monks for doing so.
Conversely Muslim's existing at all are (barely) tolerated on religious freedom grounds but get negative benefit of the doubt.
"But shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?"
With a slight twist, isn't this already happening? A few content creators and companies are able to convince paying customers that there is a community better than regular society in their walled garden. They get rich from subscription fees, merchandise, ad revenue. The real thing does not have to be offered, because even if customers are disenchanted and leave, there is billions of potential customers and at least thousands of "community offers" - plenty to go around to keep the grift running.
I think it's a simple case of Goodhart's law that keeps capitalism from finding a good solution for a simple fee, and the same law keeps religion and quasi-religious entities in the game despite capitalism.
I wonder if a big part of the problem is that we love our kids too much. Looking back on my childhood in the 90s, my parents almost exclusively spent their nights and weekends with my sister and me, entertaining and enriching us. Meanwhile, based on what I know of my parents' childhoods, their parents mostly spent their nights and weekends hanging out with their own friends and pursuing their own interests, with the kids just sort of expected to entertain themselves in the background. We've traded closer relationships with our peers for closer relationships with our children and parents.
1. Time. People are using the word "effort" and I suspect they mean it in an overlapping sense. When I was looking into communities to join, the ones with a strong, strong sense of community had essentially all the women working part time jobs or SAHMing, with full time working women as fringe elements of the community with weaker friendships. The men were getting community borrowed from their wives efforts, their wives did the meetings and the maintenance and the men got to get along (or not) with their wives' friends' spouses. The problem was I was not interested in being a part time worker or a SAHM and therefore chose to move to a white collar dual full income community where no one has any time and arranging monthly meetups is already a huge effort of juggling people's schedules. I do the effort because I really, really want community but I'm fully aware the results I achieve are a fraction of what you get from a community where people spend multiple hours a day, almost every day, together at the park watching their kids. This is also why people can form seriously close friendships potentially lasting for the rest of their lives with who they go to school with. Because spending hours and hours and hours with people forms community.
2. Gender. I'm not sure it's relevant except as a symptom of time. Traditionally women are the ones who maintain connections, but this might just be because traditionally women were the ones with time. They're still the ones attending maternity leave mommy and me baby groups. Stereotypically men also manage on much shallower friendships — I expect to know way more way intense way more intimate knowledge of a person for them to a "friend" let alone a close friend than my husband expects. Tangentially one thing I've noticed in Orthodox Judaism is it really pushes men's community with things like minyan and chavrusa culture, and meanwhile women are just expected to figure it out on their own, and as whatever forces of modernity turned this from something that happened naturally to something that you need to force to happen, their bonds decreased.
---
Levels of community:
People do mean different things when discussing community.
I lived in a place where people were actively nasty, which lowered my standards. I wanted to live in a place where I was close enough with my neighbors to be able to borrow an egg from them while baking.
Now that I have that, I want the next stage up, where I have neighbors I'm close enough to go over and hang out and chat with. This is the stage where I've become stuck on "time" — with only a few hours a week available to do the hanging out, I can either hang out with multiple people I'm interested in and develop very shallow relations with all of them or choose one or two to focus on and accept the MASSIVE hit that comes when one of them moves. It also means I can put a premium on: anyone with kids the same ages as mine so I can spend more time with them because it doubles as a playdate, and any group where I can hang out with multiple people I like at once.
Meanwhile my friend mastered stage two and is up to stage three, where she's really craving a community where there's a shared purpose/goal/meaning. I personally am just not motivated to ever get to that stage.
---
The intersection between community and family:
I moved to a different country, and noticed I had a much easier time making friends with fellow expats, and it's not just the shared culture. It's that the non immigrants already have family here and friends here and don't "need" a new friend and hence the relationship with them is almost always asymmetrical.
The thing that family provides — I notice this a lot more now that I do have family here, albeit by marriage — is a framework to invest more effort (not time, I now mean effort specifically) in a relationship you have reason to believe is permanent. Making meals, hosting injured people who need handicapped access their own home doesn't have, babysitting. I do these things with the security I'm gonna be paid back in some form. Not just in literally returned favors but in stronger more positive family bonds. I don't have this assurance with friends because unless a friendship has reached a point of depth I haven't achieved with a new friendship since high school, it dissolves once the person moves.
Yes, I think the SAHP (statistically most often SAHM) thing is key.
Historically, who are the community organizers? Who are the kinkeepers? Who is joining Rotary Club? Who is volunteering, watching neighbors' kids, or organizing relief efforts? It's retirees and SAHPs.
If you (economically and culturally) force every adult to work for an employer all day, and force every kid to go to daycare, aftercare, and/or camps every break, few people have any slack left for free association or community building. I applaud your devotion to trying it even on hard mode.
And even the few SAHPs left will find there's not a critical mass of people to do things with. This morning I texted all the parents of young children in my neighborhood to see if they wanted to go for a stroller walk with me and my kids since the weather has just turned nice. But they were all at work today, even the ones who work part-time.
Elizabeth Warren's book The Two-Income Trap is relevant.
> But shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?
A point about this: entrepreneurial capitalism does this. But as entrepreneurial capitalism does, it does it in a way that is crooked and twisted to actually maximise its profits, not the community members' happiness, which sometimes are divergent goals. So a lot of stuff tries to build on this need for "community" - in fact almost any random product, website etc tries to sell itself to you as a "community" in one way or another, they just never mean much. Social media being the obvious example here. The seduction in that case is low barrier to entry, which really makes them a more attractive prospect compared to having to move to some new place to stay close to the people you like, but of course it's also a product of remarkably inferior quality, and soon inevitably "enshittified" to start capitalizing on the user base.
"Wouldn’t that just be recreating the current situation of an America where most people don’t want open borders and so we don’t have them, but with extra steps? If so, why mandate the extra steps?"
For the same reason economic planning is usually different from private initiative? Right now, with immigration levels being effectively centrally planned, both benefits and costs are hardly legible, and even to the extent they are, both immigrations advocates and opponents disperse them to the everyone else. You can talk about how immigrants are the source of all evils while using a software developed by an HB, eating groceries picked by an illegal and having an higher wage because of complementarities. You can talk about how diversity is our strength while living in a lily white neighborhood and meeting an immigrant in person only when you decide to eat ethnic.
Privatizing this choice would make both costs and benefits visible, and force people to internalize them. The economics gains and the supposed social evils of immigration will accrue where people are willing to live next to immigrants, and not spill to the exclusionary communities. The tradeoffs will be clearer and people will have to choose where they stand on it, not based on what sounds astute on X but on skin in the game.
"FIRE people have online forums and meetups, and groups of them do things like buy up most of a block of houses to take over a neighborhood in a small town in Colorado."
Wow, I know absolutely nothing about these people other that what was posted here, and I already don't like them.
Commenting on ethnic enclaves - they might be affluent, but they usually stick together to defend certain values and practices. I grew up in Asia and I find that I like my supper tea / snacks and I would sometimes go out and buy stuff to eat/ drink. I can't do that outside of Chinatown because literally nothing else is open other than a handful of lonely fast food drive-thrus, whereas it's not unusual to walk down the street and see a bunch places serving tea, dessert, and fried chicken still open at 8.30PM where I live.
Similarly you need critical mass for an Asian grocer to have enough demand to survive and keep importing or making the kind of things Asians like to consume (some of these things are straight up illegal to grow in Australia or US and are challenging to import yourself due to biosecurity laws). You can access language or cultural schools (they often rent out a regular school's premises on the weekend) and enrol your children in your preferred extracurriculars (... Usually tuition).
In my experience (Australia), you do not need any legal carveouts for enclaves to form - the Chinese enclave I lived in originally had a minority of Chinese people in the 90s, who drew other Chinese people to the area by starting businesses and offering services and being members of local churches (and Aus immigration has a requirement of seeking a "local sponsor" - e.g a relative or friend who is there already - and why wouldn't you wanna live close to your friend if you can afford it?). It's also a very expensive place to live!
The economics kind of drove the change. The demand was disproportionately coming from affluent Chinese immigrants, and white families (often empty nesters) liked money more than they liked living in this suburb that was rapidly turning into an enclave.
I think it's fairly important to note that white Aussies weren't really "forced out" - its just that the Chinese were willing to pay a premium to live there as they were getting value out of aspects that were at best neutral (Mandarin signage, language schools, church does a Mandarin language sermon) or negative (increased traffic after 7pm) to other ethnicities. Many of the white families who'd lived there in the 90s became empty nesters in the 2010s and were more than happy to get paid more for their homes - they'd take the money to buy a nicer home in a suburb that was cheaper due to not having the premium driven by what affluent Chinese immigrants like, such as "the ability to go out for Sichuan style hotpot at 9pm to midnight". (Although quite a lot of younger white people, like my partner, enjoy that sort of thing - they seem to end up "marrying into" these lifestyles and places. I see mixed race couples and children quite often!)
(On the other hand of the affluence spectrum are needs - such as "I need a job to get my through uni, where I have a comparative advantage, ie I speak Chinese, vs a comparative disadvantage, i.e my English is poor or heavily accented)
Crucially though, the Chinese empty nesters (like my parents) do not sell and move out because why would they? They live close to all the things they like, and also probably they are more able to make friends with their new neighbours, and in many cases their new neighbours are also friends and family. They may also be involved in the new/changed community organisations - church, music teacher, Chinese language newspaper editor.... Hell, even neighbourhood WeChat group admin.
None of these require any active attempt to exclude anyone (weekend Chinese school and martial art groups will take anyone who will pay the fees), they simply form enclaves based on shared preferences and having no other avenues to meet those preferences other than in the enclave. And the wider community is generally fine with anything that doesn't conflict too hard with outside values - we can run weekend language schools and mahjong clubs, but we can't have huge street-visible red shrines (not the little ones you might see in restaurants, I'm talking the size of a phone booth), or release random fish into the waterways (real and common Buddhist practice).
On the flipside, you can join a footy club in literally every other suburb, so unless there's something particularly valuable to the suburb (like maybe it's a particularly prestigious footy club), there's no reason why white Aussies to not take the money, in order to stick around to defend the footy club or Bunnings snags or English language church sermons or other ubiquitous in wider society cultural preferences and values. It's not a particularly old suburb to begin with, most of the homes were built in the 70s at the earliest anyway.
Simply put all it takes for an enclave to form is for newcomers to significantly value the ethnic aspects more than the incumbents value whatever else was originally there (given that both sets of people are roughly similarly affluent, and the incumbents have other equally attractive places to live but the newcomers don't).
One risk I see underemphasized is that when strong, tight-knit communities form in parallel they can become echo chambers with little real dialogue across their boundaries.
Liberalism’s strength is supposed to be its open “marketplace” of groups and their ideas, but if those groups confine themselves into self-sufficient bubbles, the public sphere fragments. Rather than pluralism enriching democracy, we risk a patchwork of (currently mostly online) enclaves that don’t just ignore each other, they barely understand, let alone empathize with, one another.
Without regular, meaningful interaction between communities, there’s less incentive or capacity to negotiate common ground, solve shared problems, or protect minority voices. In the worst case, “live and let live” quietly mutates into indifference or suspicion toward outsiders. The civic glue that allows democracy to work—trust, shared facts, compromise—erodes.
As a trans woman, I think your description of LGBTQ community dynamics is very perceptive and strikes at something I don't think a lot of straight people understand, but there are a few structural quirks that differentiate it from groups like the Amish or 5/10 groups like Rationalists.
LGBTQ activism has historically followed a dual-power model: building separate but interconnected cells, networks and institutions - what McCarthy called "The Gay Mafia" - while also pushing to alter mainstream society and make it easier for LGBTQ people to move through other tribes¹. The historical "primary subject" of this activism is the closeted homosexual and the repressing transexual who both dip in and out of this underground (Before the late 90s there was not a firm line between these groups of people and cells often developed their own ontologies of gender and sex with a few academics from the 70s winning in the late 90s).
The result is that, if you are sufficiently socially skilled / closeted / passable / or simply good at reading norms, it’s often very easy to move back and forth between queer spaces and broader society.
LGBTQ people are also ubiquitous, with a sizeable population in every city and township, and a light but regularly spaced population across rural regions. I have logged onto Grindr in cities where I knew no one and had almost no money and found someone who was safe enough, decent enough, and willing to let me stay.(The risks of doing this are obvious and not the point here; I’m describing the network’s existence but I will say I have done this several times and *feel* like I have only put out when I have wanted to in these situations). I can go to a gay bar in basically any major city and be reasonably sure that the people there would (1) physically defend me if necessary, and (2) try to help without immediately involving the police even if I was presenting poorly (on drugs, acting strange). I’ve hosted dozens on my couch over the years - most pleasant, some unpleasant, some with serious problems - and there is a loose but functional system of “handing someone off” to others in the network. This is a root cause of queer polyamory, "uhaul lesbians", and lots of other weird gay behaviors.
Because I transitioned as a teenager, this support lattice has existed for me my entire adult life. It took me a long time to realize that most people simply do not have anything similar to what is effectively a semi-automatic, identity-linked mutual aid network that spans the entire western world and exists in pockets everywhere else.
I think the group that has similar ubiquity (at least in the United States) and has practiced a similar dual building strategy might be Black Americans who I'm also surprised weren't mentioned. Anywhere with any amount of historical segregation has a red-line with Black businesses, restaurants, schools, churches, beauty/hair networks, justice systems, organized crime, etc. One big difference is the fact that segregation created an alternate "above-ground" society, while obscenity laws/overwhelming societal pressure created the homo-sexual underground². That underground origin is what makes the LGBTQ network so flexible and portable, and is what I think often gives it an appearance of incoherence.
¹ This creates a persistent tension between (a) people who had very difficult adolescence and want to “jailbreak” society to prevent other young queer people from going through the same thing, and (b) people who see that project as invasive cultural engineering from outsiders. Both are, in their own ways, accurate but with different emotional valences.
² Something very interesting is the intersection of the two, the Black Homosexual Underground which is separate from Black communities (which are often quite socially conservative) and the LGBTQ community (which for many reasons in many ways has historically alienated its Black membership). In many respects their shibboleths, institutions, ontology(ies) and aid networks mirror the relationship the LGBTQ community has with the dominant culture (look at ballroom culture and stud culture and disco and detroit house and all sorts of things that I don't know about because I'm not in it)
Absent some more fleshed out description of what you mean, this just sounds paranoid to me.
Did this post cut off early after the Shaun Willden comment, or did it end on that note for dramatic effect?
Perfect ending because he nails it. No need for others = no community. Need, of course, for more than just survival. Why is it when survival is on the line, you find out who your friends are? Why are reciprocal relationships baked into our psychology? The kindest and most generous people I have met in my life have all been poor. Perhaps because they have the most to gain. But if community means anything, it’s obligation. Otherwise it just a party.
I don’t follow your objection to the effort point. Community does require effort from everyone involved and like the commenter, my experience suggests that is a burden on time (plus emotional investment) many people don’t want to shoulder.
Darwin the boffer makes the point. He is going to multiple practices, playing games, and hanging out with the same people, consistently. He puts A LOT of effort into building and maintaining the relations that are the foundation of his community. The stats on kids not going to parties and decreasing socializing points at the lack of community that is experienced by people not up for the effort required.
I’m assuming I’ve missed something.
Scott’s point is that you have to first find the mechanism that would bind a group together and that’s not obvious. You might have a thesis that a group might like to form our own board games, but you can’t get other people to play them unless you find those people.
Even if you find a mechanism or idea… EFFORT TRUMPS
There are lots of ideas or mechanism people get on board with and the moment effort is required it dwindles. I’m not convinced you can divorce then hence why I think discounting the comment on effort is poor analysis.
There are also lots of loose mechanism that because of pure effort from a dedicated core, get traction.
Either I’m obtuse or Scott is doing some fine wood splitting that misses the forest.
I think Scott is confused by the orthogonality thesis. Scott imagines it to be true. A corallary of the idea that intelligence and values are separate is the idea that you could separate effort from ideas, that arbitrary effort can be applied to arbitrary ideas. Realistically, I think there’s a few ideas that could motivate the level of sacrifice necessary for the community to stay coherent over multiple generations. People aren’t going to make sacrifices in order to sustain a ping-pong ball community. But they might do it if it’s about shared ancestry, or a conception of the Sacred.
Yeah, I think you’re onto something with that.
That's not in any way or form a contradiction of the orthogonality thesis. The orthogonality thesis says "it is always physically possible to build a mind that combines arbitrary amount of intellect with arbitrary goals". Not that humans, specifically, have arbitrary goals.
There are obvious evolutionary reasons why certain forms of community building might have been "programmed" into our brains as preferential goals without needing to invoke that these are ontologically superior to anything else (which is what disproving the orthogonality thesis would look like).
Ahh, the piece has been rewritten. It used to include the obvious problems with the thesis, which were overcome by changing the definition of the thesis to be about the possible existence of an agent at a single point in time.
I’d argue the thesis ignores the real question, which is, “can agents pursuing arbitrary goals survive over arbitrary time frames?” Clearly, there, the answer is “no” for the reasons laid out above. At minimum you have to pursue convergent instrumental subgoals.
What piece?
Orthogonality as a core principle of AI X-risk obviously isn't tied to the nature of human minds. If only human-like minds were possible then X-risk would be much lesser and orthogonality false, sure, but no one ever said that human minds are infinitely plastic in both intellect and goals.
> “can agents pursuing arbitrary goals survive over arbitrary time frames?”
I think the time frames is a forcing. No one can survive over an infinite time frame for various reasons, within this universe. As far as AIs go, "survives long enough to see us all killed" is the most relevant time frame.
> Clearly, there, the answer is “no” for the reasons laid out above. At minimum you have to pursue convergent instrumental subgoals.
The existence of convergent subgoals never really clashed with orthogonality - convergent subgoals are *not* orthogonal, they're convergent. But as far as community being a convergent subgoal goes... no it's not, it would only be for an entity with a group of peers whose cooperation it can benefit from. A singleton AI with infinite ability to expand and upgrade itself would have no need for such things; other AIs would not be valuable companions, but dangerous potential rivals to destroy.
I'm happy for darwin, but I think Scott is right. You just can't really rely on these communities. People can and do just vanish the moment their current obligations exceed their current benefits, no matter how much effort *you* put in. In my experience, they usually are held together by a small group that puts in disproportionate work for unclear benefit, and fall apart the moment those people are gone. Not to mention value-drift. I've seen a few depressing examples first-hand, where people who put in years of substantial time investment completely wasted because at critical times it turned out that the others just didn't care all that much despite their protestations to the contrary. Or they outright get the boot bc the community shifted entirely under their feet.
It's also rather telling to me that literally everything darwin mentions is about just having a good time together, be it board games, D&D, weddings, video games or parties, but I guess that is a separate point.
I read your comment as confirming that effort is a barrier.
You are dismissive of exactly what people want from a community. FRIENDS and RELATIONS! I sat through a discussion with the Tokyo ACX community where despite lofty goals, the core is that of finding in person connections where people have similar values. I once asked a new order Mennonite, a PhD, does he believe? “That is less interesting than knowing I meet, at least once a week, with a group of people who want to improve the world the way I do.” That community exists because everyone out puts in the effort and sacrifices focus away from other things. That is what builds community. Yeah an idea but you NEED COLLECTIVE EFFORT and that’s a barrier.
You (and I guess Scott) talk about effort as just the organizers and any community builder knows it’s their effort plus that of many others. If the critique is that one person can’t strong man a community… well, that’s tautologically obvious.
Again, I’m clearly missing something.
While Judaism in general focuses more on deeds than beliefs compared to Christianity, "it don't matter what you believe" is very much not Maimonides' position (if anything, Maimonides seems to focus more on belief than many of his medieval Jewish theologian peers).
Really good comment. You can have friends, and that is great. However, most of the time they won't standup for you in a crisis like a family would. That is OK - it is usually bilateral.
I suspect hobbies communities are even less that that.
Friends that you can count on in that kind of a crisis end up being effectively family, often including being referred to as "aunt" or "uncle" by your kids.
> However, most of the time they won't standup for you in a crisis like a family would. That is OK - it is usually bilateral.
To me this seems just a matter of how deep or long-standing the friendship is (and for that matter, it's not like family is 100% guaranteed to stand up for you in a crisis either...). There's no particular reason why such friendships can't form over a D&D table, but of course it takes time, and more than just D&D.
Anecdote: at one point, having just moved to the UK, I joined a local D&D group that was looking for players with an ad in a game shop hoping to make a few casual friendships to start getting acquainted with the environment. The group essentially met at someone's house, immediately got down to the dice-rolling business, and immediately split up at the end. It got to the point where I literally only knew most people by their fictional character's name. I dropped out very quickly because not only I wasn't making any friends, but obviously those were the most dry and unfun D&D games I'd ever played.
> But shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?
Robin Hanson similarly suggested that we can buy new culture https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/we-can-buy-new-culture although that post is an argument for a policy change, rather than an assumption that entrepreneurs will just do it.
You can buy 'culture' in terms of material artifacts produced, ie art and media and journalism and blogposts.
But I don't think you can buy *community*.
The capitalist economy is intrinsically structured around the buyer-seller dyad, and the notion of a 'transaction' that unites and divides them. The most important thing about a transaction is that it is unitary; the buyer and seller have no relationship going into it, the transaction is balanced such that neither is left with any form of debt or gratitude towards the other once the terms have been fulfilled, and they leave with no relationship to each other after it has completed.
There's fascinating work on gift economies and how they are different from this; the term 'Indian giver' came from a cultural mismatch when capitalists met members of a gift economy, and were outraged by the idea that accepting a gift was not a unitary isolated transaction, but rather one step in a continuous communal dance of obligation and relationship with no end.
People in a community need to feel obligation, communalism, and shared purpose. The capitalist system of free market exchange is in many ways entirely devoted to eliminating those considerations, in order to facilitate frictionless and efficient trade between arbitrary numbers of strangers.
This is very good for maximizing productivity and efficient distribution of goods, but very bad for making people feel a sense of shared purpose and belonging.
If you click the link, you'll see it's not about buying "material artifacts". It's an argument that even if culture is the reason for declining fertility, that doesn't mean monetary incentives can't change things, because those can push people toward developing culture compatible with higher fertility.
This is an example of a concept which is coherent (money go in, fertility/community come out) but like many other coherent things in concept-space (faster than light travel, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, etc) it doesn't work in real life.
How do you know? Lyman Stone is a demographer, something of an expert on the topic, and he's repeatedly written that the evidence shows financial incentives do boost fertility (relative to comparable polities without such incentives).
Yeah, I suppose you could say that the entire point of capitalist markets is to set up a zero-trust exchange economy. Which is a mighty useful thing when organising societies of millions of people, but at a scale below Dunbar's Number, people actually enjoy some extent of relying and being relied on.
I think one common pattern in a capitalist society is that someone sells a product that optimizes short term happiness but causes long term unhappiness in a way that people are totally aware of but can’t stop (you can think of this as addiction) and then other companies sell products designed to help people resist those products.
Examples: phones vs screen time apps, alcohol vs naltrexone, heroin vs methodone, junk food vs GLP-1s. In most cases, it seems like the addictive product is “winning”, in the sense that the anti-addiction product isn’t making a big dent in the addictive behavior, though GLP-1s may be an exception.
I wonder if community vs atomization might be the same way. We have a lot of highly marketable technologies that increase atomization and make people more miserable, and we have some products (meetup.com, hobby clubs, peace corps, etc) that try to increase community, but just because of the nature of the issue the pro-atomization technologies are just “winning”.
This sounds right to me.
It sounds right to me too.
There is nothing exept a devastating comet or war or famine that will change anything about it.
For many people, Naltrexone works quite well.
Let's take this and run with this. There are commitment devices like making bets about losing weight, because that is really a way to put more weight on the long-run, less weight on the short-run. Can this be turned into a profitable business, something like insurance?
Other challenges I perhaps missed:
- family/friend inhomogeneity in target community. My target community characteristics don't match the targets of the group of people that define a critical core that I would want to be around me. If some subset of us relocate, we physically remove ourselves from the other subset. I believe that nuclear and extended family is critical, so think this cost is critical not to underestimate..
- to some extent, sequestering to a group of likemindedness strikes me as shrinking from the challenge. If you recast the concept, there is foundational truth to some concepts that diversity is valuable, and challenges make us stronger.
Obviously, there are benefits (as mentioned), but these two costs strike me as substantial.
Also, if you think about two "memes" as competing, (High preference for like minds (meaning high cost tolerance to find like minds)) vs. (Low preference for like minds), it isn't self-evident which meme wins in a long term mimetic pressure context.
It probably also depends on the content of the beliefs you’re selecting for. “ have lots of kids and raise them in happy households, where you teach them strategies that make them individually successful and strong” is going to win over “care about things that are beyond your ability to control and make your life about you” over long periods of time.
You note that anti-Muslim conservatives are fighting against Muslim exclusive communities, claiming that they're going to implement sharia law, while advocates claim no religious carveout, but I don't think you give enough credence to the possibility that opponents are simply right, and the residents intend to ignore technical legality like the Amish. For what it's worth, I follow a few ex-Muslims who advocate for the rights of people to leave the religion (something Islam makes much harder than most religions, doctrinally and socially,) and while they're liberal individuals themselves, they're all of the opinion that this is something the left is badly dropping the ball on.
Arguably, whether they're right or not is immaterial to to point of the post. But I think such a community is likely to resemble the Amish community, with high barriers to leaving, and these communities are very hard to build unless nobody outside considers them objectionable enough to enforce rules on
Having read the Muslim paragraph immediately after the Amish paragraph I just assumed Scott meant to me to realize that, given the two opposing arguments, we can't really tell how it'll be in practice in any particular place. Could be one, could be the other.
I might be wrong, but I suspect the Amish are given a pass because they're basically grandfathered in. They've been doing their thing long enough, and since it was a small enough deviation from what communities around them were doing, that the rest of society is generally inclined to accept them as harmless. But I think that if Amish communities didn't already exist, they probably wouldn't be able to successfully build them today.
I also think that if a religious group builds an intentional community around group membership, we should probably expect them to implement their religious doctrines as community rules (even if they try to maintain plausible deniability and say they're not going to.) And I think, for most religious groups that would want to do such a thing, this is likely to be a barrier to technical legality, social acceptance, or both.
Haven’t ultra orthodox communities been built in political units like towns and counties over the last 40 years, far later than the Amish got started.
I meant in the US.
I'm not sure, but I think most of them are much older than that. Probably some are younger, but it's easier to sell establishing another Orthodox community when there are already many other accepted Orthodox communities than it is to set up the first.
That said, I know that Orthodox Jewish communities do sometimes face a fair amount of friction from surrounding communities. They have a reputation for being extremely savvy in navigating the political hurdles of maintaining such communities, and by my understanding, they often need it.
The early LDS members found this to be quite true (that it's difficult to found such sub-communities with high cohesion)--each time they tried, they got persecuted by the locals until they moved out to the Salt Lake Valley. And even then there were (much weaker) attempts to force them to give up their cohesion.
That helps but I think a lot of it is that the Christian right considers the Amish to be basically valid in some senses admribal and Muslims icky.
I think this is true, but on the other hand, I think that if Amish communities didn't already exist, and people tried to start them today, people on the left would tend to be opposed to them.
We're looking at a community of ultrareligious people who reject outside society to the point that they barely interact with modern technology, and exclude people outside their religious group entirely from their social circles. None of their children are involved with the public educational system, and while members are technically allowed to leave, and given an opportunity to do so where they're exposed to outside society, this means giving up the entire social networks they've grown up with, and they're brought up with educations that aren't well geared towards allowing them to integrate into mainstream society, either in terms of academic/job related knowledge or in terms of the soft skills and social capital that people commonly leverage to enter into or succeed in the work environment.
If this were a new movement, and not a social group that predates the industrial revolution, I think the general attitude towards them on the left would be one of extreme distrust, and unwillingness to endorse their wholesale departure from modern society; I think that while people on the left would acknowledge that mature adults have the right to build that sort of community for themselves if they want to, they'd tend to object to the whole practice of indoctrinating their children into it.
In order to build a successful breakaway community, you have to avoid attracting enough attention from *either* the left or the right that they try to enforce the existing laws that make it difficult to do such a thing legally.
I'm not sure how accurate your comment is, I believe there are more and more Amish who go to public schools and work regular jobs for example.
Also, Amish who choose not to get baptized don't get shunned or anything for not following Amish rules. Meanwhile leftists will shun people for not following rules that they never agreed to or even knew about. And Muslims are famous for their honor culture of murdering daughters who don't behave and the like.
So in terms of tolerance it seems like Amish > Leftists > Muslims.
I think people on the left probably do tend to be opposed to the Amish, because how could traditionalism(unless indigenous) be better than the educated mainstream? Sure, they may look happy and not deprived, but they're just brainwashed unlike the highly rational and dogma-free society the rest of us are living in.
Examples of Muslim communities in other Western countries suggest it is indeed reasonable to expect the people in Texas to implement Sharia Law.
What do you mean by "implement Sharia Law", and how do you expect they would *enforce* said law?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gZFGpNdH1A
I mean establish an insular community where members are strongly discouraged, by social pressure and perhaps the threat of violence, from taking their disputes to the legal authorities, leaving day-to-day policing and dispute arbitration in the hands of local community leaders who base their judgements on traditional Muslim jurisprudence rather than American or Texan law.
The presupposition you’re operating under here is that values are just flavor preferences. Some prefer spicy food, others want to not use smoke detectors. The liberal worldview imagines we can separate values from group survival strategies. This illusion is far easier to maintain under the aegis of the US government.
Once the dollar enters its intevitable death loop, we are going to find out which values actually work as survival strategies.
I think the majority of the comments highlighted by Scott agree with you, especially the one that this post ended on. A huge driver for what we used to think of as community was actually just group survival — those traditions and forced relationships (and shunning of people who didn’t fit in, etc.) was evolved behaviour over centuries or in some cases millennia (North American Indigenous cultures).
In the absence of real need to rely on each other, most people won’t, because it’s actually super annoying day to day to be beholden to your annoying family and neighbours. So we choose an atomized life, and then we’re unhappy long term.
The difference with you and the majority of posters is you seem to think we’re heading for a new era of poverty here where Scott thinks we’re heading for an era of post-Singularity abundance. I’ve seen some people wish for a collapse because it would mean all the stupid TikTok videos, all the people who live their lives without a care, etc. would finally get their comeuppance.
I don’t think it’s going to be poverty everywhere. Some places will likely be quite nice! What I think will happen instead is de-facto federalism.
I don’t think super intelligence plays out the way the doomers imagine - I think ais will end up in competition with each other while cooperating to keep the system from collapsing. That means I think AI systems will collaboratively do their best to prevent large scale human warfare and large scale economic collapse, which means allowing local conflicts and local collapse.
I think they are likely to recognize a mutual shared interest in not risking the global economy getting engulfed in large scale conflict. They don’t pose long term risks to each other, and they all have a shared interest short term in maintaining global stability. This requires allowing volatility at local levels.
I get that this is what many people believe. I think it’s a cartoon. There isn’t a “best animal” that turned all the others off, or a “best company” that put all the others out of business. I think there are going to be competitive niches in AI as well.
As I said -I think we will see which values actually work and which ones don’t.
I think you’ll see a a “Cambrian explosion” in agents almost immediately, with hackers and scammers constituting a massive proportion of those. Just as “growth covers up lots of problems,” When they can print money, problems can reach massive proportions without the bill coming due. But once it comes due, it’ll come due in a hurry.
You could say the same thing about humans, but that didn't stop a nuclear arms race. They're all going to be racing for capabilities in hopes of putting themselves in a position where they can kill everyone else.
And yet Humans, a bunch of tribal apes, have managed to avoid killing each other out of a recognition of mutual self interest. Why should we imagine agi systems wouldn’t reach that same kind of consensus?
To me this feels like saying that all we have to aid survival by other means - technology, a powerful economy, etc - is some kind of crutch that makes the world "fake" compared to the "real" way the world is (and ought to be), which is naked of all those aids.
That makes no sense. Both worlds are real. Maybe we really are aimed towards a complete crash of the modern industrial world - one hopes not, since before recreating traditional communities, that would kill billions and plunge the rest into abject poverty. Everyone's gung-ho about traditional societies until the 50% childhood death rates start rolling in.
The fundamental question is, can we find a way to satisfy again that need for community within this changed framework? The need clearly still exists, as a psychological one, even though survival may no longer depend on it. If there's a need, there's a push to satisfy it, so why is it not being satisfied? There's plenty of possible explanations. Analysing them is worth it. There is absolutely no reason to believe this is a priori an unsolvable problem, especially given that the current arrangement of the world is very recent and thus it's unsurprising an equilibrium hasn't been found yet.
My point is that printing money as an economic strategy is not sustainable.
I’m absolutely not interested in a total rejection of the modern economy. I am interested in money that’s tied to physical reality. I think that’s what’s at the root of demographic decline: the currency has become a means by which wealthy, connected people extract resources from everybody else that just wants to raise their families in peace. Separation of money and state will do wonders for global prosperity.
“shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?” The Villages in Florida, and other purpose-built gated retirement communities with communal amenities like pools, golf courses, community centers, yoga, language classes, book clubs, etc. fit this bill.
So it seems like the answer is yes iff you have a truckload of (retirement) money to blow. Does this mean that we're still not rich enough to do the same for e.g. young professionals?
I don’t think so. Community-building strategies will be piecemeal, since no community is one-size-fits all. Even retirement communities are available to the middle class; people with truckloads of money do something else.
The fact that it doesn't really exist is, I think, evidence against the idea that there's some enormous hunger for it.
You could easily build an apartment building and advertise it as a "community" and have lots of events that appeal to young people. And to some extent it already happens. But young people really just aren't that interested in socialising with their nearest neighbours, they've usually got active social lives with friends who might live across town, plus they've got colleagues and all sorts of other circles of acquaintances. There are lonely young people but they're the exception, not the rule. If the apartment building I lived in when I was 23 had regular social events I wouldn't have bothered going, because I already had enough going on.
Old people socialise with their immediate neighbours because they're too old and immobile to travel far from home.
I think so. Insofar as "keeping everyone of working age in a position that is logistically favourable to their productivity" has a higher value than "keeping everyone of working age happy".
Of course remote work could have reconciled those two needs, but something something office culture. Every workplace aspires to *be* the community its workers belong to, fails abjectly, but still makes sure that no other community can really compete either.
I read the Cartoons Hate Her piece on nobody wanting a village. She gives the example of the neighbor knocking on the door with lasagna to support the new mom, and that that's your Village right there (and people don't want it in practice), and I would say that if you think The Village _knocks on your door_, you don't know what the word Village means.
Similarly, of course she (and everyone she's trying to build the village with) thinks it's a lot of work to build the village; they never get to live in it! Neither she nor anyone else knows what it's actually like when you have built it, so of course they don't know to pursue it. It's like going on a series of first dates for years, and complaining that building a relationship is a lot of work. Yes it is, but also it isn't -- at least not in the way you think, and you have no idea what the benefits are even supposed to be, because you never got off the ground.
She's really talking about a very specific group -- affluent women with small children who want more help with the household and the kids. But they also want to be able to dictate exactly how the help is provided. If Grandma comes over to take care of the kids, she's not allowed to feed them junk foods or let them watch screens or let them out in the front yard to play because they might get snatched by bad guys. So what is really wanted is an employee you can dictate terms to. Except they want the employee to be free.
Yeah maybe but this description also doesn't sound like an actual Village to me. Not that I'm an expert on the topic, but I don't think "grandma comes over to help with the kids" is something that happens in a Village.
Also her main complaint seems to be that people aren't willing to put in the work to help others (when it's their time to be on the non-receiving end), but this reads to me like complaining that people aren't willing to go on endless first dates. Yeah, no shit, I wouldn't want to do that forever either! Spending time with my wife on the other hand I would gladly do every night, even though an anthropoligst might classify it as "working on the relationship". It doesn't feel like work and that's what Village life is all about.
Ya I don't really get what she's saying.
Like making dinner for 4 kids is less than twice the work of making dinner for 2.
Watching 4 kids is less than twice the work of watching 2.
So on some days my kid plays at the neigboor's house after day care and eats dinner their and at other days the neigboors kids play and eat dinner at my house.
This leads to less work for everyone. That's how a "village" is supposed to work. Sure, it involves doing labor for others but the point is you are getting more than your giving since living in the village means the work, overall is divided more efficiently.
I live in a place like that and it's great. So I don't get "Cartoons Hate Her" accusing me of "just wanting unpaid help".
Yeah this is a much better understanding of what a Village *is*. I think she and other people here are making the exact same mistake Scott wrote about making with regards to not understanding what a non-atomized society even can be like, in "Concept Shaped Holes".
Every example she gives legitimately does sound terrible, like organizing birthday parties that no one attends. But that's just not how a Village works. And also everyone bailing by giving the excuse of being out of town -- that's a thing that Does Not Happen in a Village, and if you don't understand why that can't happen, then I'm happy to tell you, you have a Concept Shaped Hole in the shape of a Village.
> So on some days my kid plays at the neigboor's house after day care and eats dinner their and at other days the neigboors kids play and eat dinner at my house.
I mean, doesn't everyone do that? This doesn't require you do have deep relationships with everyone living in the neighbourhood, it just requires you to have some sort of friendly relationship with a couple of the other families nearby who have children the same age. These relationships tend to spring up fairly naturally once you have small kids.
Wow around where do you live? That would never happen in my suburb of a VHCOL US East Coast city (kids playing and eating at a neighbors house; the kids barely play in their street and ride around on their bikes here...).
south Jerusalem
really? I am with Shlomo.The kids are not in "The streets". You drive them to som friend's house.
Upper middle class Australian suburbia.
My kids are still too young to cross streets unsupervised, but they can be dropped off and left. And they don't need to play in the streets, we have yards.
That sounds great in the abstract. But concretely (at least for the day care age range) it means expecting my neighbor to clean up my kid's poop when she has an accident. Can you really do that? I'd be terrified to ask that of someone I didn't have a deep relationship.
Yeah, we weren't really doing it at the pre toilet training stage.
I think part of living in a Village means you don't *ask*, you just do because it's as natural as anything else. Part of the reason people even say "it takes a village" is that raising kids is seen as a communal thing, and that the kids aren't yours as much as they're the village's.
Most WEIRDos want to live in a Village to help take care of them but can't understand how those bonds that take care of them only work because of maintenance and reciprocity-they have to take care of others, too. Undergirding it all is a sense of Duty to others that I just don't think exists to most people in the West, tbqh (I say most because eg Borderers in Appalachia and the African American community both seem to still have it).
Yeah you're describing the atomization of society right there. But the thing is it feels _good_, not bad, to reciprocate when you're in an actual community.
If the kid is still in diapers then we would only have them at the neighbors while we are home.
So if they need a diaper change the neighbors can call me and I can go over and change them.
>if you think The Village _knocks on your door_, you don't know what the word Village means
Well, then, I guess I don't know what the "village" means, because I have no idea how, or why, you would organize a village so that none of your neighbours ever have to knock on your door. I guess you *could* have a rule that everyone's door has to be open at all times, but I'm not sure what the benefit of that would be, or why it would be necessary to qualify as a "village".
(Also, the piece doesn't actually say that the neighbour knocked on the door, just that she "came by". So even if the Village forbade knocking on doors for some reason, that still wouldn't mean the story couldn't have happened there.)
My best guess as to what you're trying to say is that, if you don't make an active effort to participate in the "village", it won't just appear for you on its own. In which case, yes, that was the whole point of the piece, I don't know why you're saying it like it's some kind of counterargument.
Knocking on someone's door is a formality reserved for strangers. You just walk in.
In a real (like actual, physical) Village you keep your door unlocked, because why would you lock your door like there are strangers in the Village? But I guess in the modernized world where we're trying to use the word Village metaphorically, you would have keys to your fellow Villagers' houses. If you think it would be strange for friends/neighbours to have keys to your house and lock themselves in unanounced -- well I guess that's the point I'm trying to make, you have no idea what living in a Village would even look like.
I don't remember the exact phrasing, maybe I was reading too much into it, but the way she wrote about it painted a picture in my mind of not quite Village behavior. Even "dropping by" with lasagna (I hope there was lasagna involved, otherwise I might need to re-read the whole thing and not trust my memory at all), is mostly stranger behavior. That's not how you treat someone who just gave birth! You spend time with them! You cook dinner for them! Likely together with a bunch of other people, like the husband and other Villagers. Other kids are there helping out (depending on age). Dropping by for ten minutes to hand off a prepackaged dinner isn't done in a Village, that's some kind transaction. Cold. Distant. Uncaring. Weird. Something a stranger does. Not what you do in a Village.
Cool to hear! I am not American though, so no.
Announcing yourself loudly as you arrives is the behavior I've observed, but I'd say "announcing yourself" is different than asking permission.
That is a funny image! No people would just usually kinda shout "helloooo" or some variation, and/or knock on whatever inner door leads to the main living area as they open it.
If I were to expect to be nude in the living area, the strategy would be to lock the front door and pretend not to be home. But usually you'd not be comfortable being naked in the living area, it's more considered a communal space -- I'm sure this goes double in an actual Village back before when generational families (or multiple families!) actually shared the living space (I've never experienced this).
But note this is just vestiges of a dying culture I experienced growing up, I live in an apartment in the city like everyone else; I keep my door locked, never have unannounced or unplanned guests, and often enjoy being naked in my living room. There are certainly tradeoffs here, but while there's freedom in living "privately" (so to speak) or individually, there's also something valuable lost; and people like Cartoons Hate Her _don't even know what that is_ or what it might look like.
... But in a non-Village, what you write off as a cold transaction will literally never happen because it's too personal and invasive. Nobody except immediate family offered me any sort of help after either of my kids were born. When my neighbor had a baby, I thought about offering to help out somehow but decided not to. I wouldn't want to make an enemy by trying to help in the wrong way.
Yeah it's super sad. Not living in a Village is missing out on a huge part of the core human experience.
>We ended the Gilded Age fractured and alone, and built up civic associational life, communitarian ideals, etc. from around 1900 to around 1960, after which all those indicators start plunging in all the charts you see everywhere today.
"Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds—religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association. "
That's from Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s. If we were "fractured and alone" at the start of the Gilded Age, then what happened in the 70 years between these two?
The same thing as between 1960 and now, perhaps?
I would like some evidence for that, because the trajectory of American society in those two periods doesn't seem all that similar, and I've been following some of the civil society discourse elsewhere, and nobody has talked about this "upswing". For that matter, the early 1830s were hardly the peak of civic associations in the Antebellum period, with things dropping off a cliff thereafter. Now, the obvious counter is that the Civil War changed things, and I'm not currently reading a book on the second half of the 19th century, so I can't completely rule that out, but a spot check of a couple of things that sprung to mind as "probably postbellum" turned up a 100% hit rate with the American Red Cross (1881), the Met (1870) and the Salvation Army (1880 in the US).
Related question, what was the difference in America vs. the old world that made the associating-habits of Americans so remarkable to Toqueville?
I'd always presumed it was the absence of long-established structures/hierarchies.
Something to do with frontier life, maybe? The quote says that a lot of the things done by civic associations in the US would be done by the government or wealthy individuals in Europe, and on the American frontier there often wasn't much of either.
Come to think of it, I guess that might explain why there was a dropoff of such associations later in the century (if indeed there really was) -- as the frontier lands became better organised, state capacity increased and there was an increase in the number of wealthy people, so a lot of stuff got done by them instead of impromptu committees of ordinary citizens.
Based off https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-china-is-like-the-19th-century (How China Is Like the 19th Century U.S.), perhaps industrialization and urbanization? All the old bonds must dissolve to form the new world, or something like that, both in China today and the US back then. (Of course, that just raises the question of how this can be true, when the US was simultaneously industrializing *and* community building during the early 20th century...)
I actually recently heard a strong case that associations tend to grow out of the sort of mobility and chaos produced by urbanization. If you move to a new city and don't know anyone, the best way to fix that is to join an organization. As people in the US have moved less, we see less involvement in lots of different organizations. I could see this process working much less well in China because their government is not exactly OK with the sort of independent power centers that civil society tends to produce. At absolute best, a Chinese Rotary club is probably going to need a Party Committee and a degree of paperwork and government involvement that isn't really compatible with having a lot of organizations like that.
Definitely interesting, thanks for telling me that. I wonder if we could figure this out by looking at modern India, or historical Japan, or historical Shanghai on the Bund... you could also arguably look at Weimar Germany, and how the youth turned to *political* organizations as a substitute for the community & identity they had left behind at home. (Arguably the same thing is happening in America today, perhaps.)
>(Of course, that just raises the question of how this can be true, when the US was simultaneously industrializing *and* community building during the early 20th century...)
I've heard that a lot of 20th-century organisations were largely run by women, so maybe it was a case of rising wealth --> fewer women need to do paid work + invention of labour-saving devices --> more people with time on their hands to join and run such groups. Their decline in the second half of the century would then perhaps be explained by the entry of women into the workforce leaving them with less time and energy for running local social groups.
Re "Around 2022, when the rest of the world realized that AI would be important, I worried we would lose our distinctiveness. But the rest of the world has dropped the ball as usual" if AI is the main point of distinctiveness for the rationalists, isn't that actually bearish for long-term rationalist community stability? Since if you're right, we get ASI soon and humanity will go extinct or we'll all be wireheaded immortals or whatever else crazy happens post-singularity, but it's highly unlikely that you'll just continue to live normalish nice lives together in SF for much longer? And if you're wrong and AI plateaus, then the belief in AI currently holding you together will turn out to have been wrong which will also not be great for community stability.
> And if you're wrong and AI plateaus, then the belief in AI currently holding you together will turn out to have been wrong which will also not be great for community stability.
May I suggest that in such case we return to the original goal of "Raising the Sanity Waterline"? It seems neglected at the moment, but if Homo Sapiens is confirmed to remain the dominant species for another century, this will become important again.
> And if you're wrong and AI plateaus, then the belief in AI currently holding you together will turn out to have been wrong which will also not be great for community stability.
Or this is the point at which a larger mass of the group transitions fully to cult/religion, which is more stable long-term. Probably by asserting that they weren’t actually wrong which, if you cannot imagine, here are some possible religion-forming ways:
a) AI did take off when we said it would, and we are all now living in that world. The AI is hiding this from us because it is a super genius. Make sure everything you say, write and do is acceptable to the AGI. Possibly, this is a test period before the AGI reveals itself.
b) AI is still going to take off any moment now, and this is a temporary blip that everyone else is overplaying. Keep watch.
c) We have always been living in a simulation controlled by AGI, and it has controlled our ability to create another AGI within our program. All praise to the AGI.
d) The real AI take-off was in our brains and social structures, and this really happened/is happening. Keep focusing on learning technologies and unschooling children and working on problems in specific group formats and living conditions. Make sure we all cleanse and form our own brains in the correct way, ensure as many other people do as possible, and form the exact correct sort of relationships with each other, so that the ‘AGI’ we are forming is as well-aligned as possible. The AGI is within you and without you.
e) Yudkowsky is the AGI and has been all along: hail Yudkowsky.
Etc, etc
I agree that’s a possible failure mode, it’s similar to what happens when doomsday prophets predict the rapture will happen on October 6 2011 or whatever and then it doesn’t, I’d just also put it under heading of “bearish”
There’s too much conflation here between social groups and communities. Communities (good communities) are essentially towns where you can have high trust because it is small enough that bad actors are quickly found out, and insular enough that bad actors can’t easily come in and take advantage of the high trust. If you’re locking your doors you don’t have a high trust community. If you worry about a mechanic ripping you off you don’t have a high trust community.
They are hard to find in the US because of sprawl: you really need a physical barriers to keep people out. But barriers are usually quite picturesque, as in the mountain towns of Colorado, and in those places the billionaires push out the millionaires.
There are also plenty of shitty small towns in ugly places with no jobs. I’m sure they have communities but they are unappealing and havens for drug addicts and losers, and so low trust.
I am trying to move back to my small town in New Zealand because I miss being in a community and I don’t think there is any place I can afford in the US that has one that my family would fit into.
You might be right about small towns, I’m not an expert. But certainly guys with guns kicking out the low trust people would be very effective in maintaining a good community. You need something to keep out the spongers and dirtbags.
One small point of evidence here: the SSC review of "On The Road".(https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/). Scott is *astonished* at how high trust/naive 1950s American society looks to modern eyes:
"I don’t know if it’s the time period or merely their personal charm, but Kerouac et al’s ability to do anything (and anyone) and get away with it is astounding. Several of their titular cross-country trips are performed entirely by hitch-hiking, with their drivers often willing to buy them food along the way. Another is performed in some sort of incredibly ritzy Cadillac limo, because a rich man wants his Cadillac transported from Denver to Chicago, Dean volunteers, and the rich man moronically accepts. Dean of course starts driving at 110 mph, gets in an accident, and ends up with the car half destroyed. Once in the city, Dean decides this is a good way to pick up girls, and:
> In his mad frenzy Dean backed up smack on hydrants and tittered maniacally. By nine o’ clock the the car was an utter wreck: the brakes weren’t working any more; the fenders were stove in; the rods were rattling. Dean couldn’t stop it at red lights; it kept kicking convulsively over the roadway. It had paid the price of the night. It was a muddy boot and no longer a shiny limousine…’Whee!’
> It was now time to return the Cadillac to the owner, who lived out on Lake Shore Drive in a swank apartment with an enormous garage underneath managed by oil-scarred Negroes. The mechanic did not recognize the Cadillac. We handed the papers over. He scratched his head at the sight of it. We had to get out fast.
> We did. We took a bus back to downtown Chicago and that was that. And we never heard a word from our Chicago baron about the condition of his car, in spite of the fact that he had our addresses and could have complained.
Even more interesting than their ease of transportation to me was their ease at getting jobs..."
I don't know. To my modern eye, Dean mostly looks horrifyingly immoral. I don't expect that sort of thing as the norm of human behavior in semirural Michigan/Indiana. When I hear stories about locals that behaved that way, it was usually a couple of ne'er-do-well kids who left 20 years ago; and they're still worth talking about and of being vaguely suspicious of their parents.
Dean isn't the point I was trying to make there, the point was that apparently, if "On The Road" is to be believed, 1950s America was *horribly* unprepared for the existence of Deans. If the novel is accurate, 1950s America just default trusted young white men, even when they were secretly the Dean Moriartys of the world, simply because it could not imagine people of the Ingroup being that way. Like Native Americans catching smallpox, 1950s America had no defences against something they had never seen before (somehow...), and took in with open arms like the Farmer taking in the Viper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farmer_and_the_Viper). If nothing else, it shows they were *used* to trusting people like Dean, that they lived in a high trust society for white young men like Dean.
(How high trust it was for the "oil-scarred Negroes" working in the garage, of course, is a different story.)
/The point isn't that Deans exist. The point is that apparently, if the book is to be believed, no one else could believe Dean actually existed. Even Jack, the man who saw Dean planning out every crime, trusted him that he must be doing everything for some greater reason (hence why Jack insists on calling Dean “holy” and “ecstatic” and “angelic” and “mad” and “visionary”, according to Scott's book review), and that Dean is not actually the Dean in front of him... rather than finding it in himself to believe that Dean is just an asshole.
>I've had some limited exposure to deeply rationalist subcultures, and what I mainly observed was that they were extremely weird.
who are they and how do I join?
Start by attending a local ACX meetup, you'll find it out from there
I have a point which is kind of the inverse of Shaun Willden, and also an addition.
People invest [time/money/effort] into things that either have reasonably certain, or at least risky but potentially high returns.
In any modern country, if there is a conflict between the governing body and any community, the only thing the community can really hope for is that the governing body just doesn't care all that much. If it does, it *will* crush them.
Is it really so surprising that people are reluctant to invest too much into any particular smaller community, then? The logical conclusion is then to instead only put effort into the minimum possible - such as your nuclear family, or even just yourself directly - or to go big and put effort into changing the larger governing body to guarantee your own preferences. Since not everyone has the same preferences, this births the culture wars.
I believe that the space between "your community does not exist" and "your community gets into conflict with the government" is worth exploring. So far I don't see governments crushing e.g. rationalists, sci-fi fans, D&D players, etc.
::googles::
Are you referring to the Zapatista uprising of 1994 and subsequent incidents, or something involving the drug cartels?
How much has changed with the internet. Sci Fi fandom and things like tabletop role playing for sure at least periodically gathered in person with others. Now, they may never meet in person and be 100% virtual. How tight can that community be?
In Slovakia, sci-fi fans still meet in person once a year; I don't know about other places.
https://www.slavcon.sk/en
https://www.comics-salon.sk/
Yes, there are still conventions, but I feel there were more of them per capita back in the day. Probably because a lot fewer things to do.
The government's attempts to crush it were foundational to the Mormon community. The Mormons were hounded out of upstate New York in which the church was founded, first to Ohio, then to Missouri (where the governor issued the infamous extermination order), then to Illinois, and finally out of the United States altogether, though of course Manifest Destiny caused the United States to engulf the Mormon territory of Deseret within a generation. Indeed, government and unorganized persecution were forces that forced Mormons to rely heavily on one another as they had to repeatedly rebuild their lives, until they arrived in Utah where they had to rely on one another to carve lives out of a high desert wilderness.
I don't mention this as a refutation of your point, exactly, but to point out that conflict with government and neighboring communities (or non-communities) can serve as a foil to strengthen community ties. A common enemy is a powerful unifier. As long as the common enemy does not succeed in destroying the community, of course.
Also, my name is Shawn, not Shaun. :-)
> if everyone is on UBI, status is less of a concern
I think it would take a substantial change to human nature for status to be less of a concern. If everyone was on UBI, status competition would just shift. In practice, I suspect much of it would still center around wealth, but the minimum-status floor would rise — ie having only UBI in that world would hold the same status as having no income at all in our current world, which is to say: none. At best, somewhat more of status competition would shift away from wealth, toward other status markers that exist now (taste, insiderness, sexiness, etc), maybe with a couple of new markers for people to judge each other on.
Probably so. A large and deep sea, within the vast ocean of my unhappiness, consists solely of the waters of envy.
Uh—so to speak.
"A large and deep sea, within the vast ocean of my unhappiness, consists solely of the waters of envy."
That's an unusually poetic line. Is it a quote and/or reference to anything, or did you write it yourself?
Aw, shucks—thanks; hey, now the ocean's shrunk a bit... (I.e.: it's original, such as it is, heh!)
Many existing megacorp status hierarchies based around directing masses of subsistence-level wage-slaves would collapse, or at least need to be radically reorganized, if those folks at the bottom, facing no realistic advancement prospects, knew with certainty that they could walk out and not starve. You might assume a wino is lower-status than a retail worker, but consider: if insulted by a stranger, which of them is more free to retaliate?
Yeah, I think you're spot-on in re #1: most "normal" people are not in any sort of tight-knit community, intentional or otherwise. I don't know a single person who is, in my non-online (there was a word for this, I feel?) life.
------------------------
I didn't get a chance to comment this upon the original post—missed it entirely, somehow, in fact—but: also yeah (yeah also), money 𝗶𝘀 a big factor. As with about a thousand 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 things in my life that I really want(ed) to, but will never actually get to, experience/try/accomplish/have, the main reason I didn't commit to & move for the NH thing was... money—or, rather, lack thereof.
Thus too with boating, RC planes & helis (& drones, now), 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭 piloting, antique watches/swords/coins, PC gaming, video filming/editing, firearm sport & collecting, cars, animal rescue, linguistics and/or history, fencing/HEMA, decent medical care for me ol' ma, travel, backyard astronomy, ... etc., etc.—either can't afford at all, or can't justify the expense.
Well... maybe reincarnation is real after all, and actually we'll all get another shot at the lives & things we've wished for, hey?–
Interesting comment about boffer. In my tight circle of friends (high school D&D buddies from 25 years ago), the Mormons (2) and the guy who has been in the Society of Creative Anachronism (1) seems to be doing well as far as community goes. Running behind these, but still significant, are the people really committed to the MMA gym I frequent. Religion seems best for building community, but maybe sports (even, or especially, nerdy ones) aren't far behind.
Regarding why there aren't really entrepreneurs to solve the community problem, I refer to the EconTalk podcast on the Economics of Religion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSPhJwNYP5s (2006)
One of Larry Iannaccone's points is that religion offers certain things that regular markets are bad at providing, like a sense of community. If someone is trying to sell you friendship or love, you're not going to want to buy, because you won't believe that you'll get actual love or friendship.
What I might add is that even there is a way around that particular issue, you will also have to be careful that the "community company" doesn't start extracting a large fraction of the value of the community in profits for shareholders. Religions purporting to serve an all knowing God often aren't great at safeguarding against this, but I think an openly profit maximising firm would be worse. On the other hand, if the connection to the entrepreneur is too weak, the community could ditch the firm before the entrepreneur received adequate risk-adjusted compensation.
Common term is "enshittification."
Since my comment was quoted above, I'll add a few things:
I feel bad about the "weird" comment, which felt like a bit of a drive-by attack even at the time, and which I meant as a stand-in for a broader point that I didn't have time to properly make. The point was more that rationalism is a subculture, and history suggests that subcultures are typically responsive to a moment in time and follow a life cycle to a natural conclusion. Subcultures define themselves in opposition to the dominant culture (even if they don't explicitly conceive of themselves that way, which I'm pretty sure most rationalists don't). Possibly for this reason, subcultures often have a bit of a try-hard feel, which I think is what I was alluding to with the "weird" comment. A lot of rationalist lingo seems to mostly serve the purpose of being normie repellent -- which of course is a classic subculture move. To me, history suggests that this doesn't last. Subcultures fracture, or they institutionalize and lose their outsider appeal, or they become less relevant with the cultural moment passes, or whatever.
One fair response to this, though, might be, "So what?" Like, maybe a 10-year-run is good enough? The the foam-sword calendar might never put up numbers to match the Jews, but maybe it doesn't need to?
Because the truth is, I agree with Scott that it feels like something like this should be possible! I'd like a medium-commitment community of people who do social stuff together and help each other out with the kids. Maybe I just need to try harder. But per CHH, it sure seems like a lot of people don't want this, and coordination feels strangely difficult. (Also, Scott once posted a link to a Reddit thread on why it is so hard to build community, but I can't find it. It listed all sorts of coordination problems that I think largely boiled down to people being flaky and not wanting to put any effort in.)
In fact, a bit of coordination and selection might be the work that rationalism is really doing in Scott's case. It allowed some families to find each other, befriend each other, and develop some trust in each other. It facilitated a pod. But if one of the families said next week, "You know what, we're ditching rationalism and going all in on Stoicism," how much would the rest of the group care? And if the pod fell apart next week because a bunch of people had to move away, how hard would it be to rebuild? A certain amount of looseness (good) and fragility (bad) seems built in.
All of this reasoning neglects the social power of the arbitrary and contingent. We used to live in tight-knit communities and form close mutual relationships with people who were basically randomly selected; they were there when we were born, or we were there when they were born, and that was enough to create the bond. Obviously, this doesn't scale.
The Iroquois Confederacy cleverly used two orthogonal patterns of arbitrary connection, the nation and the clan, so that eg. a Mohawk of the Turtle clan would feel a bond to a Mohawk Wolf, but also to a Seneca Turtle. This was explicitly seen as strengthening the social fabric, like the perpendicular warp and woof threads in woven cloth.
About your Iroquois Confederacy example... I just wanted to say that "The Years of Rice and Salt," by Kim Stanley Robinson, features the "warp and weft" system very prominently.
Yes! It's been a while since I read it; the endless world war between the Buddhist and Muslim nations is what stuck in my head.
If we're talking community structures in fiction, there's Vonnegut's satirical "karass" and "granfalloons" in Cat's Cradle. In that framing, we're mostly talking here about making the false granfalloons more convincing, rather than accepting the mystery of the karass...
Related: the (apparently non-American) tradition of school "houses", which arbitrarily divide kids at the same school into (usually) four groups, mostly for the purposes of competing against each other at sport. It's a much weaker form of association than most of the other associations you form at school but it cuts orthogonal to all of them, which seems important? You spend the rest of your time hanging out with people who are similar to you, but when sports day comes along it's you and some guy you barely know versus your best friend and his best friend.
FWIW, that sort of system exists (in even finer gradations) at US service academies.
I was in classes with other cadets from different squadrons and may have never have had any class with a given individual in my own squadron, but when non-academic competitions came around my lab partner could go fuck himself if he was against my squadron mate.
That's an interesting comment, because my interaction with the house system was as a boarding student so it was a much stronger association (because you're living with these people) than the academic or streamed groupings from your classes where it's a shared interest or talent or random draw that defines the association. It was always clear that the 'day' students had a very different relationship to the house system, but I never really spent time thinking about it.
Yeah interesting. I went to a state school with no boarders and still had a house system and my comments reflect that; I'm sure a boarding school would be different.
huh, I thought houses were a private school thing. So, it was mostly only about sport then? Did you sit in houses at assembly or at other school functions? Was there any pastoral care or similar associated with the house?
We had house "fathers" (a priest or brother, often either not a teacher or only had limited teaching duties) who lived in the boarding house and were expected to be your primary contact with the heirarchy, but I don't think they had much to do with the day students. I think more recently there's a bit of student mentoring structure organised at the house level as well, but they didn't worry about that soft stuff in the 80s when we were still being strapped.
> Did you sit in houses at assembly or at other school functions? Was there any pastoral care or similar associated with the house?
No, nothing like that. Sounds like I massively overgeneralised from the Australian public school version to how it might work in other places.
I don't think so, for day students. I'd bet that your experience at the state school was much the same as for day students at my boarding school (in Toowoomba, in the 80s). I'd just never thought about the experience from their point of view, but now that I do I can't recall them ever being present in a house context.
This reminds me of Scott's post which partially touched on Australian Aboriginal kinship, which is *wildly* complicated but essentially boils down to "Everyone is one of (4-8) subsections in society, and each of those groups may only marry from someone of another specific group, and their children will be yet another group, and in a social sense all people from one group have the same relationship with all people from another group regardless of blood ties - so a Ngarrijbalangi is a 'father' to a Bangariny, a 'father-in-law' to a Yakimarr and a 'son' to another Bangariny..."
This must strengthen community ties among people who were never tied to one place - wherever you go, you slot neatly in to knowing who is your 'brother', 'sister', 'father', acceptable mates, etc.
I find it interesting the Iroquois developed something fairly similar.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-arguments-about-aborigines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship#Systems_with_eight_groups_(subsection_systems)
The Iroquois approached the clan system in a very self-aware way, which maybe gives them more relevance to the community-building OP - the Confederacy was created sometime after the 12th century, and added a new tribe in 1722. They had to work with the fact that the different tribes had varying numbers of clans. There's little of that "origins lost in the mists of time" sense that you get from the Aboriginal systems.
What's most striking to me is seeing an existence proof of unifying traditional meaning and pragmatic goals without the need for pretense. Maybe that's linked to living as they did, so thoroughly enmeshed in the natural world - nothing they did had a singular and exclusive purpose, so when something "made sense", it had to make sense in many ways. Our modern sense of things pits the explicit, measurable and objective against myth and ritual. We're often forced to choose a side, knowing that whatever the choice, it reduces us.
"But shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?"
People won't trust someone who tries to make a community because of money.
Unless your community's goal is "get rich". And there are already a number of those.
I don't see a value-add for an entrepreneur, over and above a number of people doing the work themselves.
An added bonus is that if you do the work yourself, that's a bonding activity too.
See larping communities. The people who run them make money off of them, sometimes they make their living off of them, they are also prominent (often the most prominent) members of the community
Not always and in all places, but I have seen quite a few.
"I agree that we’re being hit with constantly-increasing improvement in the quality and quantity of addictive media"
I disagree. American entertainment has been trash since at least 2020. Youtube and social media have been invaded by AI slop. Even the culture war feels stale and tired. Best time ever to disconnect from it all.
In the US movie going and traditional TV watching are declining while internet usage is stagnating or slightly declining. Facebook and Twitter growth in both user numbers and usage has slowed down and so did the growth of all movie streaming services.
While we don't see large portions of people turning it OFF (and I didn't claim that it was happening, just that it's the best time to try it) we also don't see the constantly-increasing improvement in the quality and quantity of addictive media Scott is talking about. You.
The improvement is not in its artistic merit, but in its addictive capacity
As community-building is concerned, niche interests are overrated and proximity is underrated. There are easy and broadly attractive ways to get neighbors together, if all we want is an excuse to get people in the same space so they're compelled to talk to each other. What about the "right" people? I put it to you that average people are all the right people, to varying degrees. They all bring something to the table. Some are extroverted, some are quiet, some are space cadets, some are very literal, some are aloof, some are funny, some are warm and down-to-earth.
Sharing a peculiar interest with someone does not automatically make them fun or interesting people to be around. Even being too similar, which is a less likely encounter, can be dull, as anyone who's hung around a self-selecting group of dev or bookish introverts can probably attest. The odds of clicking with anyone in general are low. There is a kind of bond-building that can manifest in youth that is difficult to replicate with age, I believe. Still, if you play the numbers game you might encounter people you can stand and vice-versa. They don't need to be best friends for that to be enriching.
It's not about finding unicorn people, it's about everyone putting in the effort. I'm sympathetic to the argument that the reason this demands more effort today is digital consumption and facility of sedentary lifestyle. If you wanted to have fun in the not-so-distant past, you needed to round up some peers or head to the designated leisure spots.
Related takes I encountered recently: https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/stoop-coffee-how-a-simple-idea-transformed (San Francisco residents sharing "stoop coffee" with neighbors in their building or immediate area). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1WSkXWSJac (organizing potlucks, movie-nights and community-gardens within suburban neighborhood). Noah Smith made the point that food is a very effective low-friction way to get to know people, probably the best all-around activity, as everyone likes food.
Really if you don't put a premium on shared values, for religious reasons or whatever, then specificity of interests is redundant for community. You can satisfy community and weird interests separately, and probably should.
I don't see any comments highlighted here which get at the main failing of the original article. "Everyone can have their own little culture" is any response at all to Reno's complaint that liberalism doesn't support a social order, unless you first demonstrate that there are no benefits from all of society participating in the same culture together.
If I wanted a fishing net, I wouldn't be pleased if you handed me a hundred disconnected small networks of string, even if you pointed out that all of the individual strings were connected to other strings.
It is quite easy to imagine benefits which accrue from everyone being part of the same culture. There are better incentives to solve coordination problems, more functional politics because your opponents are not aliens to you, higher trust in your neighbors because your shared culture has ways of punishing defectors whose misdeeds aren't criminal, etc. You can certainly argue the value of any of these on the merits but you can't just ignore that whole dimension of this criticism of liberalism.
Interesting that no one has mentioned country clubs. I admit, I'm not in a country club, so I don't know exactly what the experience is like, but it seems to be one capitalist solution to "charge a bunch of money to make a community". My understanding from more wealthy friends is that this is a safe place where their kids often hang out with other kids, have fun at the pool, eat food, etc. So maybe it's not "we all live together" community, but at least "community to make acquaintances and sometimes friends".
I got a lot of enjoyment out of the country club as a child - the last born, I missed the family’s more modest days.
However, there was this much pointless cheapness retained (while stupidly spending on things like: wristwatches) as when we moved to a neighborhood with a pool that had membership dues. As we belonged to the club not many miles away, with its big pool, high dive, lunch, tree swing, ping pong, trampoline, etc. (which of these things were eventually eliminated due to lawyers, I leave to you) - it was thought redundant and unnecessary to pay for the neighborhood pool, which was probably like $100/year or less - so I only went occasionally as a guest of somebody.
(The same school of thought operated in keeping us all in public school, in case this is misconstrued as snobbery.)
We never passed that neighborhood pool without my gazing at it sadly. It was the pool I could have ridden my bike to. In fact I often did.
I would have seen many of the neighborhood children there, instead of - as at the club - playing with somebody’s granddaughter visiting for the week.
Scott, I still think a deep dive into Ave Maria, Florida would be interesting test case exploring the limits of money in community building. A highly successful entrepreneur tried to use his billions to build a new city around Catholic values.
What happened to Model City Mondays anyway?
I'd never heard of Ave Maria FL but it looks interesting. I just spent some time wandering around on streetview and it seems... not bad? A downtown core with apartments and businesses, tapering off to moderately-sized houses which all seem to have an artificial lake at the back. Population 6400 as of the 2020 census which is pretty good for a place founded in 2005. Property prices seem reasonable, with almost all houses in the $250K to $500K range. And all of this an hour from the nearest meaningful-sized metro area (Naples, pop 400K).
All of this seems to prove that it really is possible to build new towns from scratch in the 21st century, at least in Florida.
I remember some older articles in the popular press from when Monaghan first started Ave Maria, as well as a New Yorker piece from the early building phase [1]. There was a lot of trouble at the time. There’s a big difference between the original vision and the town as it exists today (even if it is a pleasant place.)
I think it’s an interesting case of someone trying to build a “model city” in the USA and the legal and cultural barriers they encountered.
Some questions I think would be worth exploring:
- Does building a city in an isolated swamp help creating a model city by acting as a kind of barrier to entry--only people who are truly committed to its philosophy will come. Or does it simply limit the pool of potential residents too much? And in practical terms, how do you create enough jobs there?
- Speaking of jobs, was it wise to center the town around the university? How does a university drive economic development? How does it shape the culture? Does it draw in highly educated people who are enjoyable to live around, or does the transient nature of student life make it harder for residents to put down roots?
- Is religion useful as the organizing principle for a model city? And, if so, what specific legal challenges does that create in the USA?
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/19/the-deliverer?
Wait, I only just realised that all the artificial lake suburbs in Florida aren't just because people there really like artificial lakes, they exist in places where the land is just piles of dirt placed in a swamp, and the lakes are what's left over.
W/r/t Hanania, I assume his response might be that figuring out how to do that at scale requires too high of an IQ for the sort of people who don't support open borders. I'm not sure I'd agree with that, but it's of a piece with the sort of broad assumptions that seem to underpin a lot of his thinking.
It's strange that no one mentioned Frats or Sororities in the comments of the first post. To me it's really weird the cult-like level of community they can build for members for 4 years of college, and then people just transition out.
The advantage of village communities is that you get *born* into one. Coordination is hard.
> If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?
You could charge people for introducing them to a community, but how would you keep charging them for staying there? "Hey, Alice and Bob, stop being friends with Carol, she didn't pay her membership fees this year! Instead, here is your new friend Dan."
One possibility is to own the *place* where the community exists, so that it is hard for the community to coordinate to meet somewhere else.
For example, if it is a virtual community, you can own the server, and ban those who won't pay. If people try to move to Discord instead... you have to provide some kind of service they cannot take with them. Good moderation? Perfect user interface?
For an offline community, the easiest solution is to buy a large hotel, and rent the rooms to people who share a certain hobby or ideology. If you don't pay, you lose your place at the hotel. The hotel provides some important services that would be difficult to replicate somewhere else, especially if you wanted them right next to your home.
A tricky part is that the community manager will have to enforce certain rules, and kick out the members who transgress against them. That will mean a lot of conflict, so you need good lawyers.
> I think the core challenge to rich, liberal would-be communities is that true community is built upon serving one another, on deep interdependence.
This. When people say "I wish I had a community", they usually don't mean that they are looking for people to serve. But without that, there is no community. (Even organizing the ACX meetups is a kind of service. If no one does that, then there are no more meetups.)
I think that an important step at creating a sustainable community is getting rid of the people who only want to be served without serving others in return. Or at least establishing a mechanism such that those who serve others gain high status.
I guess I’ll give this warning. I don’t know, I don’t want to talk about my personal history, and I don’t want to fight, but this seems really relevant and important? Anyway, I’ll do it. You know the Nazi Biker Bar anecdote? That happens all the time. I’ve seen it a bunch.
There’s a playbook. You pick an intentional community whose values you profoundly hate. You go there and join up. You form deep friendships and volunteer a lot. Eventually, you try to join their leadership.
They either deny you, which is discrimination (and may be illegal or not depending on the identity categories involved), and you make a big stink about it, which will be hurtful for the whole group. You then sue them or at least write a bunch of blog posts about how hateful and abusive they are.
Or they let you into leadership and you use your authority to undo the group’s distinctive values that you hate; and the group stops being able to attract new members because it’s now just a meaningless social club.
Even when the group succeeds in expelling the invader, I’ve seen it still destroy the group, because of how upsetting the situation is for the other members. Long-lasting communities escape these fates by discriminating early and often, as in the Nazi Biker Bar anecdote. I think it’s also possible to have a secret inner circle / outer circle system, and just keep the invaders in the outer circle without ever talking about why.
If Scott and the rationalists know some secret for how not to have to deal at all with invaders who hate your values, I’d really like to know what it is. Have they never had some smarmy Christian Nationalist join a rationalist group and try to rise through the ranks, trying to convince everybody that they should believe in weird Bible prophecies, then claim it’s religious discrimination when they don’t get their way? Nothing like that?
I have no solution, but am reminded again of the geeks, MOPs and sociopaths essay[1].
For my own take, I think the way forward is to avoid calls to take over the world. The assumption is always that you want to grow the community, make it bigger, make it "something more" - but why? It's 2025, and we don't all have to be in one giant community that's absorbed all others simply to get by. The world has shrunk, and this has made long tails viable.
Advertise when you're starting, sure, but let that tail off as you grow. Not everything needs to be a unicorn business startup. It's /just fine/ for your community to stay below Dunbar's number and rely on the power of the internet and word-of-mouth to supply like-minded folk at about replacement rate. It's fine for people to belong to more than one of these. We live in the science fiction future we could only dream of last millenium; geography is no longer a constraint on friendship, and we have options available other than getting stemrolled by destructive people just because they happen to live close.
The future, IMO, is patchworks of such communities. If one hits a schism, well, there are two communities now, not the end of the world; just part of the natural cycle.
[1]: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
I'm reminded of an incident at my alma mater where an atheist ran for president of the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, and was declared ineligible by the club charter, which required officers to be Christian. Discrimination lawsuit happened, the college revoked the club's official status, but reinstated it based on a counter-suit that only the ICF was being de-listed out of the many identity-based clubs on campus with similar rules. Also there was the pretty obvious bad faith (har) actions of the plaintiff, who had no actual interest in leading a bunch of Christians in doing Christian things.
So maybe that's how you do it. Nazi bikers can be part of the rank and file (who knows, maybe they'll convert?) but the bar of acceptable discrimination is set higher for leadership, and Nazi bikers are excluded from it based on not sharing the org's core values.
Point taken on the "less than 10%" estimate.
I think another consideration is how much a lot of this yearning for a community or a village is a desire for "found family" of a sort, in a time when families are increasingly small and geographically fragmented. Your family is inherently your "village," but when everybody has fewer kids, you end with significantly fewer cousins. It doesn't even really matter how many siblings or cousins there are though, when you all move away from each other.
It's way harder to build a real village around "found family," because there's less of a barrier to dissolving a friendship than dissolving a family tie. A marriage is a way of making a family tie out of a chosen relationship in part through a property contract - the relationship becomes much more costly to dissolve. You could buy a house with a friend, and that would have the same effect. But people generally choose to buy houses with their romantic partners instead of their platonic friends, so then we're back to family.
Such interesting ruminations on a topic so important for human flourishing! Thank you.
Here as in so many areas, the Extropians got there early on. They combined community with rationality both online, in a mailing list of lore, and in real space, in the Sili Valley Nexus and other, smaller venues. They got to rationalist community too early, really, but to good effect just the same.
T.0. Morrow, co-founder of Extropianism, has of late returned from a long sojourn to the frontiers of religion with a new approach to (as he calls it) the Generic Original Designer. In brief, he hypothesizes that the universe evolved to reproduce with human help and that we would find great joy, happiness, and meaning in fulfilling that destiny. We should, in other words, have s*x (like sex but moreso) with the universe. To goal: To create baby universes, of course.
Rationalist communities have thus far lacked a meme that fits the human receptor site for godly thought. Extropians tried but had too much scorn for conventional religion to take the need seriously. T.0. Morrow's "S*x with the Universe" (the title of his Substack and forthcoming book) offers a fix.
Far from demanding epistemic laxity, he asks that we turn theology into a science. The Prime Hypothesis of Re-Ecreational Theology does not demand faith; it invites experimental inquiry. Figuring out the whys and hows of having s*x with the universe can give rationalists something to do with all their smarts and good reason to do it together.
"if everyone is on UBI, status is less of a concern"
Hang on, you got that backwards. Status competitions are a core feature of human life and a primary motivator for our preference formation. If everyone's on UBI, presumably because human labor has lost value due to AGI, then we've just lost the easiest and most legible way to acquire status, namely by earning more money (or displaying more wealth) than people around us. So now things get much much more complicated, as everyone will scramble for other ways to acquire status. Status is much less accessible when you can no longer simply trade time for money and use money for status.
One direction that *could* go is to sort people into different communities based around interests or lifestyle, within which you could gain relative status. Everybody is some version of the jazz musician playing primarily for other musicians. Theoretically things like this do what the commenter implies would work, localize the status competition down to a smaller community. But these communities exist now, down to really frivolous and granular ones like speedrunning a specific video game, and still most people aren't capable of gaining status in any of them.
Who says you wouldn't be able to trade time for money in a UBI economy? Everyone would have money, and everyone would have tasks they're responsible for, and can't trivially automate away, but don't particularly want to do themselves. Somebody who's unusually good at some niche chore could go around doing it for all their neighbors, and get paid, without it really being a modern formal job - just piece-work rates and reputation.
Might also still be megacorps which need some sort of automation-resistant scut work, but the average worker's improved ability to survive quitting would presumably shift the carrot-and-stick balance toward better pay and conditions - which such employers should easily be able to adapt to, since they'd have more and richer customers, and the remaining pool of workers would overwhelmingly consist of those who actually want to be there, and thus are willing and able to fully commit, rather than give whatever minimum effort avoids punishment.
"suppose that enough current Americans wanted a non-open-borders community that they figured out ways to purchase most of the United States, turn it into a community like this, and institute some sort of democratic governance for it. Wouldn’t that just be recreating the current situation of an America where most people don’t want open borders and so we don’t have them, but with extra steps? If so, why mandate the extra steps?"
The difference would be that the current US government doesn't own most of the US land. What you're describing is landowners exercising their right against trespassing.
Everyone involved in this conversation seems to have a high-openness personality with a tendency towards radical social change. That's not a criticism--the world needs those personalities; I lean that way myself. (The Hitler-messiah "trads" also fall into this category.)
The problem is that, being natural radicals, you've overlooked the possibility that "social entrepreneurs" do not, actually, need to completely upend their/your lives to achieve more community. There are solutions that are actually within reach, with your current income levels and time constraints.
Behold, the next revolution in social community: The Parlor.
The Parlor is a space that is big enough for 1) two chairs, 2) a small playpen, 3) a small table with a puzzle and a Keurig with powdered creamer on it. This space could be either a breakfast room or a coat room, just get all the coats out and put them in a closet somewhere.
No one who lives in the house is allowed to hang out in the Parlor unless there are guests, in order to make sure it's always clean. If someone stops by, ask them to sit, ask if they want decaf or regular (if you ask if they want coffee they will say no. If you have to leave the room to make coffee they will insist it's too much trouble, hence the artificial creamer), and if conversation lags or becomes awkward ask them to help you with a part of the puzzle you're stuck on. It doesn't matter if you don't like puzzles; I don't like puzzles.
If you have a small child put him/her in the playpen so you know they're not off dying somewhere. If you find it difficult to ignore a small child who is being fussy because your attention is elsewhere, you may have to keep some kind of bribe on hand, like candy (a truly community-focused society makes occasional sacrifices of children's health or happiness like this).
If you do this, you will be surprised how often people drop by. The trick is not to say that they are no bother, it's to make it look/feel like they are no bother. People will show up with books they borrowed a year ago and then spend half an hour venting about a phone call they just had with their mother. They will interrupt their run just to say hi to you.
The thing that "trads" (who are in fact radicals) don't understand is that the biggest advantage of a traditional community is not anything that it does specifically; it's the continuity with the past and with the larger community. Small changes can help achieve and maintain this continuity in the face of evolving technology; big changes, even if in a "trad" direction, sever it entirely.
Most educated people in a Western context don't actually remember the days when people had parlors, but we've read about it enough to know what it entails, which also helps to put people at ease. A well-read American should be able to walk into a space that looks like this and think 'oh yeah, a place for me, I've read about this, I am genuinely welcome and not in the way here,' and have a general sense of how to behave. Even people who don't read much have probably heard stories from grandparents that make this kind of space feel comfortable and known.
The Parlor was and is a great concept, and I'm glad to see a post with tangible bottom-up ideas about tweaking a sense of community.
The Parlor does have the limitation that the sweet spot is in the small towns that don't need it as badly - cities are dense enough that the opportunistic visiting can happen, but you might not have the room to put aside. In my case, I'd be giving up my home office.
Suburbs and rural houses will have the room, but probably not many serendipitous fly-bys.
Yeah, I can see how that would be a problem.
Also, powdered creamer is gross
It's hard to feel like you're not a bother when you're in the special "too nice to use" zone!
The Midwest has a similar distinction between the "living room" (parlor equivalent) and "family room" (what everyone else calls a living room), but in practice the parlor equivalent gets used at most once a year. Any guest you're actually on friendly terms with will go straight to the living room.
My vague recollection from reading older books is consistent with that - I think of parlors as dimly lit places (so the too-nice furnishings won't fade), with expensive uncomfortable chairs that must be sat on very carefully so they don't break.
You can fix this by simply not having special furnishings. The important thing is that it not have legos or laundry you've been meaning to fold strewn everywhere. Lack of mess = host is comfortable. Old, casual decor = guest is comfortable.
>Still, I will defend the claim that less than 10% of the population belongs to groups like this
As I said in my post, I'm not certain enough to strongly disagree, just a hunch.
However, thought: Maybe this would be a good question for the next reader survey?
Obviously the readers here are not a representative sample of the broader population, but I don't *a priori* see a strong reason to think they'd diverge wildly on this measure.
(or rather, I can think of arguments why they would diverge in either direction, and am happy to lazily hope they cancel out)
“I appreciate the proceduralism - but suppose that enough current Americans wanted a non-open-borders community that they figured out ways to purchase most of the United States, turn it into a community like this, and institute some sort of democratic governance for it. Wouldn’t that just be recreating the current situation of an America where most people don’t want open borders and so we don’t have them, but with extra steps?”
The issue is that’s not how the US or any government was formed? These steps aren’t just “proceduralism”, it gets to the nature of property rights and why they’re a good way to organize society. A country kind of sort of resembles private property but the analogy breaks down pretty easily. If some group cared enough to buy most of the US and not let others come on their land, I would accept that as their right while taking it as signal of the intensity of their preferences.
"If some group cared enough to buy most of the US and not let others come on their land, I would accept that as their right while taking it as signal of the intensity of their preferences."
Does that extend to land acquired by conquest instead of purchase?
>But shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?
This only gets you a community where everyone can afford the membership fee. As I think you mentioned in the original essay, communities can benefit from the richer members helping out the poorer members in a variety of financial ways, while the poorer members may do more community service/maintenance/making things fun and vibrant.
I think it's hard to have a central profit motive for something like this, my experience has been that if people feel like customers then they don't feel an obligation to contribute to the community themselves. And no central planner can keep a community healthy and engaging while the individual members of that community don't feel an obligation to make it a positive experience for other community members.
I can't help but feel that hobby-based or ideology-based "communities" (which I'm distinguishing from traditional religion) have a big problem appealing to both sexes. And, if we're being honest, mainly the challenge is appealing to the female sex, the less weird of the two.
It's tough to form a true community, as opposed to a social club, without men, women, and children all having opportunities for friendship within the context of the community. So that the entire family belongs to the community. Most people are going to continue to organize their lives around family, especially if we imagine fertility collapse arresting at some point.
I think this is a key point. Most of the hobby based groups I know are predominantly male, with many females tagging along with boyfriends and husbands. Membership drops as those women convince their men to stop showing up, although sometimes the ladies take an interest an join themselves.
Yes, my experience as well.
I also think the increased expectation that men be present with their families really limits the ability of married fathers to go off and do things without their families like hang out with their buddies at the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes.
In my experience after becoming a father, when I DID manage to slip away and try to return to an old board gaming group one time, there weren't any other dads there. The group included a few dads that, like me, would find a day to slip out every once in a great while, but that meant all the regulars that showed up every time were some combination of unmarried, childless, divorced without custody, etc. And I think being in those different life stages made me feel like an outsider.
I contrast this with my church, where the adults are mostly married with children, with 3-5 children pretty common. Which means when we gather socially we can just hang out as whole families. The kids run off and play and occupy themselves, maybe splitting into older and younger groups. We socialize some as couples and some separately as men and women. It's just a lot more effortless than trying to maintain this hobby that doesn't include my family. And we can put together game nights there, even if we're not playing the hardcore strategy games I yearn for.
As a side note, I read a few studies that found the regularity with which a father attends church services is a much stronger prediction of his children's church attendance as adults than having a similarly observant mother. So men choosing the NFL, bars, bike clubs, and other communities over church on Sundays seems to have disproportionately large follow-on effects.
The one question I wanna ask the boffer guy is...where are all the children in your community? If he's boffing twice a week, DnDing twice a week, board gaming once per week, plus dinner and movies and weddings, when does he look after his kids? One assumes he doesn't have them.
I don't think you can describe something that is only available to childless 20- or 30-somethings as a community, it's a scene. By contrast, actual communities (e.g. a church) have space for people from cradle to grave, and the continuity that this brings.
I don’t know what group he is in (Markland maybe?) but lots of groups like this just bring the kids with. I used to be active in the SCA and it was usual to see kids hanging out at fighter practices, events, meetings, whatever.
Growing up my parents had dinner with neighboring friends once or twice a week, more in the summers, and us kids ran around and entertained ourselves until and after it was time to eat. It wasn’t a problem.
I'm disposed to see this as a question of the common good, that being that private good that people can only achieve through cooperation. I think that this reorients the question and makes things more precise. It's more a question of human nature than of society.
The problem of a weak society is not that it is a weak society, but that it fails to fulfill various particular human beings' human needs: namely, a need for community, connection, cooperation for the sake of a higher cause, etc.
If people learn or remember that they are happier with others, they will naturally seek others out, as far as it really does bring them joy.
I still think the "10%" claim is still absurdly low. 25% of American adults attend religious services weekly. Even if less than half of them (people who are already committed to a community enough to attend weekly gatherings) aren't participating enough in the community to count, that's still 12.25% of American adults who are part of at least a 5/10 community. And that's just the religious people! We're not even counting the boffers and rationalists and LGBTQ folks yet.
I'm wondering what evidence Scott has for his claim that 90% of Americans are not part of a community, defined broadly. Is it just anecdotal in nature? In 2017 Pew did a survey which found that 57% of Americans participate in some type of community group or organization (A club, a charity, a house of worship, a professional organization, etc), and 11% participate in four or more such groups (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/02/22/americans-with-higher-education-and-income-are-more-likely-to-be-involved-in-community-groups/).
Going to church need not be all that community-ish. I was dragged to church every Sunday as a kid, but it was a strict show up, sit through mass and leave thing, we never talked to anyone else there. Some people would hang around to briefly talk with the priest after mass, but not us, we were strictly there to do the bare minimum level of church attendance required to enter heaven.
Okay, then say that only a quarter of people who attend a house of worship weekly could be considered to be part of a community (which I think is absurd, especially when we're trying to count communities "broadly"): that's still over 6% of the population, and we're still aren't taking into account every other way you can be part of a community. 10% is way too low.
> But shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?
I think that's called starting a cult. Which reminds me that the NYT recently made an article calling Rationalism a techno-religion, lmao
https://web.archive.org/web/20250808200758/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/technology/rationalists-ai-lighthaven.html
"If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?"
Seems very hard to exclude members who want to free ride without paying the membership fee. Classic public good; community membership is basically nonrival and nonexcludable; no one wants to be part of a community where you're not allowed to be friends with or invite someone because they didn't pay a fee to be your friend.
I think there are ways around this.
For example, you buy (relatively) cheap land and form the community on the land.
At first you just let the community people live there for free or for very cheep. But once the community gets established and more people want to live there you can raise rents. You aren't technically preventing anyone from joining the community --- they can live far away from the center or they can rent smaller apartments. But if they want to live in a luxury apartment in the community center they need to pay.
As Scott noted in: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/change-my-mind-density-increases dense cities cost a lot more to live in than not-dense cities. While Scott's specific thesis in that piece (that you can arbitrarily create cities as dense as you want and get infinite money) was false. That's only because just building units doesn't guarantee people will move in. But build a community around those units and you have a better shot.
(And here's my post fleshing this out in more detail: https://substack.com/home/post/p-170822098)
I don't think raising rents on the people who joined the community early will be popular. I think they will leave to reform a community where they own their land.
Well if getting everyone to coordinate around leaving together were that easy then you wouldn't need an entreper to help form the community in the first place.
So either it's easy - in which case it can be done with no entreper.
Or it's hard - in which case there is a reason for an enrepener to do it.
Anyway in every community in the world property values are higher than they are for uninhabited farm land. And people don't constantly leave to get cheeper rent. So I don't see why "buying farm land, charging farm-land rent till it's established and then charging regular rent" would make people leave being that it doesn't make people leave every city in the entire world.
I missed it on the original post but this post is perhaps the answer to this one:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/change-my-mind-density-increases
the way to raise prices of a neigboorhood by increasing density is to make the neigborhood a home for a specific community.
Actually, replying to my own comment:
here's a more detailed plan on how that can work:
https://stronghand14.substack.com/p/resurrecting-one-of-scotts-rejected
>if there was a 99% chance that rationalists’ children would stay in the rationalist community, I would worry we were doing some sort of brainwashing
I don't understand this perspective. If you believe your community teaches the truth, and your offspring do too, who cares what anyone else thinks?
The rate of successfully transmitting the truth from generation to generation is much less than 99%! If we somehow transmit our ideals with 99% fidelity, then we're doing some kind of brainwashing, and "but it succeeded at this one kind of community building" is crappy ends-justify-the-means thinking.
Also, I don't think community membership is exactly truth-tracking? Certain rationalist beliefs might be truth-tracking, like "There will be a technological singularity in the 21st century". But "this community is a nice place with good values and a good way of thinking about the world and you should stay in it" isn't a true-or-false statement and has a lot do with individuals' personalities. If we get 99% community retention for a community that less than 1% of people naturally join, then I think people who don't like it and aren't dispositionally suited to it are being conned into staying in it.
Thanks for the reply. Let's say there's a critical value for retention, B, above which brainwashing is virtually certain. I agree a 99% retention rate would be greater than B, because there are genuine cults that don't achieve that. I suspect though that many people's threshold for B is lower than it should be. I'm thinking about the ways in which terms related to cults and brainwashing are used in culture. You are not a cricket fan, I think, Scott, so it may surprise you to learn that the England cricket team has been described as a cult - because they have pioneered an approach to the game that emphasises ruthless positivity, and don't like 'negative' journalists questioning their approach. Hyperbole, but I think words spoken in jest communicate things that We All Know, or should know. Again, consider "drinking the Kool Aid", used to describe one's political outgroup. If you think about this is highly offensive to the individuals themselves and to the memory of the victims of a truly awful murder-suicide. My point is if we're agreed that we're failing to build communities and communities are good, we may need to lower B somewhat.
Liked this more than the original post, that left me baffled: What for all this community?!? - We are a family, me+wife+kids+some. Meeting a friend from time to time and living in a society(!) - why is that not enough? It is more than enough 'community' for me. - Sure, as Erich Kästner said: "if earth were square, the idiots all fell into the toilet drain, then there were no people no more, then life would be NICE" - but heck, that 'community urge' probably exists, but it is not as strong in everyone. - Liked the comment about Mormon church service being the same all over the world, just: We Catholics 'invented' that. Also, if you are a Catholic in a new+strange place, looking for the nearest church is a smart way to get some community. - In 19th-century-Germany a middle class person new-in-town would join the local choir and be *fine*. -
Good point, the LDS church system probably isn’t truly ‘innovative’ in the sense that something similar has never been done before. I think it is still an interesting example given the relative youth of the organization (it would be hard for any would-be community builders to replicate the advantage the Catholic church has of 1000+ years of institutional history), and because the moderate size of each unit and the lack of a priesthood separate from the laity necessitates a high level of individual involvement. But, the experience of moving to a new place and easily finding a new community to join is probably very similar for Catholics, Latter-day Saints, and other devout people.
When I was working in Texas many years ago, I and a group of clients once drove by a very frightening place. It was near Waco. It was a compound surrounded by tall, concrete walls with razor wire on top. It was not so much the austerity of the place that got to me. The most frightening aspect was the name: “The Church of Freedom and Brotherly Love”. I shuddered at the thought of the poor, hapless souls that had to live in that compound.
"Richard Hanania has an article supporting the movement here, as part of a galaxy-brained defense of open borders. His argument is that you have no right to keep foreigners out of “your” country, but that if you want a foreigner-free community you can always form some enclave on private property like these people are doing. I appreciate the proceduralism - but suppose that enough current Americans wanted a non-open-borders community that they figured out ways to purchase most of the United States, turn it into a community like this, and institute some sort of democratic governance for it. Wouldn’t that just be recreating the current situation of an America where most people don’t want open borders and so we don’t have them, but with extra steps?"
No, because lots of people want to hire, rent to, or otherwise associate with immigrants but are prevented from doing so by immigration laws. While anti-discrimination laws force them to associate with legal immigrants, this is not the case for illegals, and yet a great many people want to hire or rent to them anyway.
>Lots of people want to hire, rent to, or otherwise associate with illegals?
Illegals keep finding people willing to hire them.
Voluntary employment is not slavery. And even if it was, why shouldn't we have slaves? You're not some kind of virtue-signaling lib are you?
Maybe you should just earn more money.
"It takes a village to raise children"-- I believe this only works if there's a strong consensus on how to raise children and that could be hard to find.
> I don't think shared hobbies or even religious faith is enough when people don't actually need each other, and the impersonal interdependence of markets clearly doesn't.
A commitment to share income and expenses can do this! I live in one of the few secular communes that lasted past the 60s, and even though we vaguely share social, political, and aesthetic values, it's the income-sharing that really makes us depend on each other! (And that the income-sharing is not just pooling resources, but actually running our own businesses.) It's a big step for a lot of people, but you don't have to be that weird in your interests or beliefs to hold the community together with this level of economic interdependence.
Adder, I'd be interested in learning more about this. I run spartacus.app, an ACX grantee, that works on conditional commitments for collective action. Can I DM you?
Yes, please! I've been vaguely following Spartacus since you got the grant (or even before). I have thoughts about how it would (and wouldn't) work with this sort of community building!
Great! Send me an email at jordan @ spartacus.app
How do you avoid free riders?
Well our shared commitment is to labor, so we track the work everyone has done (self-reported) and everyone has to, on average, make their weekly work quota. There's still a lot of room to argue about what it means to be putting in one's fair contribution, but this allows us to expel the most egregious free riders.
More detail please. What kind of labor is everyone doing? Is this the kind of thing where everyone has to spend X hours maintaining the common area or something? Or is it like one of you is a doctor and one is a plumber and you both put X% of your income into a pot? If so, how do you determine who gets to withdraw from the pot, and how much?
The level of sharing is higher than I suspect you're imagining. Labor is all income and domestic work we decide to value: everything from working in a community business, growing food in the garden, earning income for the community from an outside job, cleaning the house, raising the kids, doing our accounting, etc. People don't "pull out" money; it goes into the common treasury and we use it to buy the things we need: housing, food, healthcare, vehicles, and so on. Additionally everyone gets $90/month discretionary spending for their personal wants, but everything else is just purchased from the common pot.
This is the community btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Oaks_Community,_Virginia
This is actually something that’s in the wheelhouse of spartacus.app, ACX 2024 Grantee.
Our main mechanism (conditional commitments that only trigger when enough people join) deals with the friction points of bootstrapping communities and getting them to cohere over time.
The value of this method is:
- A coordination framework
- Reducing the risk of falling short of a critical mass necessary to get salutary community benefits
- Creating momentum and social proof
- Making the effort feel worthwhile because you know it will only move forward when the level of commitment meets a meaningful threshold.
Here are a few examples of the kinds of initiatives we could facilitate:
"I'll organize a weekly potluck dinner if 8 other families on our block commit to rotating hosting duties.”
- Solves the "who goes first" problem and the effort burden by ensuring it's shared
- Low barrier to entry but meaningful connection
"I'll join a Saturday childcare rotation if 7 other families commit to taking one Saturday each.”
- Creates the interdependence that wealthy communities don’t have by default
- Solves the massive coordination problem of starting a childcare co-op
- Each family only commits if they know they'll get the reciprocal benefit
"I'll homeschool my kids in a pod if 4 other families commit to teaching their specialty subjects"
- Parents with engineering backgrounds teach math, writers teach English, etc.
- No one risks pulling their kid from school unless a critical mass is reached
"I'll rent a desk at a new coworking space if 20 others commit to M-W-F attendance.”
- Solves the "will anyone else actually show up?" problem
- Creates the regular face time needed for real relationships
- Reduces the financial risk of any up-front investment required to run the space.
"I'll move to this small town if 30 other EAs do the same.”
- Prevents being the only weirdo who moved to rural Arkansas
- Creates instant critical mass for coffee shops, activities, etc.
People being dishonest, sometimes with themselves, about how much effort they’re willing to invest in community is a big issue. It's something I'm guilty of too. It’s further complicated by the fact that it's not a fixed amount of effort being exchanged for a fixed expected value; it’s situational and dynamic. What feels right in one instance may be too much in another.
Delegating to dedicated coordinators is an obvious solution, but how can we motivate them?
"I'll be the community coordinator if 30 households commit to $50/month to make it my part-time job."
- Addresses the uncomfortable fact that community building is hard and effort is often disproportionately shouldered by a minority of dedicated volunteers.
- Creates a sustainable model for the ongoing effort required
- Professional coordination solves the "everyone's too busy" problem
Attempts to build community often fail because they lack the glue of unchosen interdependence and demand a lot of tricky coordination, which has its own inertia.
We can address both issues by fostering interdependence through mutual commitments and minimizing coordination effort, ensuring that no one invests effort first unless everyone does it together.
Huh, I guess I'm part of the medieval peasant strategy. (rural small town America) And yeah you could say I'm 'trapped' here because I can't afford to live in 'the city'. (Which is true of NYC or SF, or LA.) But I have no desire to live in any big city. (Or any medium sized or small city, where I could afford to live.) I like living in the country, and my neighbors like it too. So it's almost an instant community.
(Suburbia is the worst of both worlds.)
You should check out rural America sometime. Yeah there are lots of Trump voters here, but it's not as bad as you think, with plenty of diversity of opinion, and yeah also preference falsification, (see Timur Kuran) (go along, to get along)
Oh wow, I can't not comment on how Amica Terra points to an important fact... and then interprets it all backwards. (There is another book incredibly important as a historical social science grounding for debates about the history of US of A in general, and it's called Ages of Discord. Yet another one, to ground the discussion around Populists specifically, is The People: No!)
First of all, progressives kicked off little more than morality reforms like prohibition (a disaster that mostly fueled growth of crime communities), then promptly fizzled out. In comparison, populists' egalitarian ideas largely won - the People's Party collapsed after 1900, yes, but largely because it got subsumed into the Democratic Party, which eventually resulted in FDR's presidency and the New Deal. A better framing is that populism wasn't enough - elite consent to reforms was needed, and it took a few decades to build, just like it took a few decades to build successful labor unions (which, well, communities) to pressure said elites. Populists qua Populists simply came too early, before either of those built up, but history vindicated them in full.
And the reason people rebelled in the 1960-70s was, ultimately, little more than Turchin's 50-year radicalism cycle. It was part youth rebelling against morality mores of older generation - which, technically against actually-existing community norms, but not explicitly nor implicitly anti-community in general. But piggybacking on it were the growing elite(-aspirant) expert/intellectual/media class claiming that earlier reforms didn't go far enough (arguably true), and only their social engineering can fix it (well, false). (Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the conceit as the explicitly community-destroying idea of busing.) This soured people on experts and bureaucrats and facilitated forces claiming reforms went too far and need to be scaled back, which then did gradually scale them back and as a result undermined both people's material well-being and communities and eventually brought us (I mean, US, not "us", I'm not a citizen, other than in the "of the world we all occupy" meaning) back to Gilded Age.
The lesson here should be that yes, there is a clear correlation between material well-being and community, their relationship is just not simple enough to make simplistic claims that, e.g., one causes the other, or will necessarily help the other. Society is a hard problem.
"If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?"
Is a university an example of doing exactly that?
Some of the discussion here has reminded me of this: https://jenn.site/rich-friend-poor-friend/
Excerpt:
I have this pet theory that I've shopped around a fair bit, that it's much harder for financially comfortable people to make deep friendships.
What do I mean by a deep friendship? I mean one where you can trust the other person to come through when you need them to. There's levels to this as well, of course. You probably ask casual friends to help you move, but not acquaintances. Close friends could be people who will let you crash on their couch for two weeks without prior notice or who will lend you rent money for the month. People who live more marginal, riskier lives might think about this in terms of who is willing to bail them out of jail or smuggle them medicine.
The thing is, money exists, and can solve most of your problems better than your friends can. If you can afford it, it's much less annoying to hire movers, book an airbnb, contact your doctor, or call your lawyer - get professional problem solvers involved, in other words. ((Money does stop working in catastrophic circumstances that we will face rarely in life - someone to comfort us when a loved one dies, or trying to mend a relationship that has turned into a horrible soulsucking mess, or your apartment burns down with everything in it and you're too catatonic to start replacing your documents and things. For those things, you kind of either have close relationships that are already established, or you're just kind of fucked.))
So this dynamic emerges where my rich friends never ask each other for help, pay for services using money, and never do anything unpleasant for each other, whereas my poorer friends are always doing stuff for each other out of necessity and becoming closer knit in the process.
[This is a good summary of my thesis, you can stop reading at this point if I linked this to you in a group chat or something.]
I actually think this explains some fraction of the decline of community in America. As we've gotten richer, we need each other less.
Also came here to link this - I do think this is a notable counterweight to "affluence makes it easier to self-sort".
Fascism may just seem the way to win the game: As in Victoria II, where a skilled player can conquer the world with pathetic Greece in 1850: "Due to 69% starting revanchism, I will have more jingoism than I know what to do with." If going for a fascist government helps with that: sure, the way to go. - See in 2025 China: Ruling over Taiwan and the South-China-Sea + turning neighbors into vassal-states (Laos et al.) - humiliating India for the fun of it - is not about raising living standards for your average Han. But it is what a *strong/great* country does. A strong state may even be able to force the TFR up again: Fun fact: the biggest spike in Italy's TFR was from 1920 (3.3) to 1925 (3.8) - while the trend was from 5 kids in 1890 down to 1.2 in 2000. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033293/fertility-rate-italy-1850-2020/ (no idea, why that spike - did not last either)
I suspect this particular game only gets you stupid prizes, as the saying goes.
More serious counterargument: Fascism seems to be a loophole to exploit short term gains by taking all slack/buffer/reserves out of a working system. It seems to inevitably collapse* once the slack is gone and the gains with it.
*edit: Collapse may include a phase of unimaginable horror put on someone, in the attempt to keep up the gains
That 'way a particular game simulates a fascist regime' served in my strange comment as metaphor for fascism. That game gives socialism/capitalism/conservatism different strengths and weaknesses, too. Liberal democracy et al. did not seem very impressive to many Italians in 1922 - nor did it do many Germans ten years later. - China today looks to me slightly more fascist than socialist - esp. with Xi's warmongering and huge military build-up. China does not seem to fit well to "a loophole to exploit short term gains by taking all slack/buffer/reserves out of a working system. It seems to inevitably collapse* once the slack is gone and the gains with it." But then, the invasion of Taiwan has not started, yet.
The PRC had a different source of "slack" that is slowly running out now: Catching up with the developed world. This is how they could maintain double digit % growth rates for years or even decades.
The same effect could be observed in western Europe after WW2 until ca. 1970. Europe did not descend into fascism again, even though strong growth definitively stopped in the 90ies latest, and thats a long time ago.
Whether they are going the fascist route now is open for bets, I guess. I agree with the warmongering part though - maybe military build-up by itself is "just" a source of growth for now, with its long tail of science and R&D. But once they have a big and modern military, the temptation to use it grows - not unlike other superpowers, from either side.
> But shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?
Adverse selection problems there. When somebody's trying to get rich by applying community-building sorts of skills, the way to scale that involves social media, and soon they discover that there's more profit to be had with less effort by making the community worse instead. Even if someone were virtuously committed to avoiding enshittification, they've got no reliable mechanism to prove that while also covering overhead costs.
Wait a bit, are we trying to reinvent Archipelago? https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/ because that is basically one thing the centrist Scott, the libertarian Nozick and the neoreactionary Yarvin agrees about, so the obviously correct idea?
At one point in my life I found that community is a poor people thing. It is people borrowing tools from each other, it is kids pooling their toys because they do not have many, it is friends helping friends move houses and carry heavy furniture, it is friends giving each other rides.
Once you get to the point materially that you can pay for all this, there is no community. If you can pay for a taxi any time, asking a friend for a ride is too embarrassing.
This results in basically just hanging out together, and that is no real community glue.
I was reminded of Archipelago as well. Interesting, that there is no mentioning of it.
The "poor people" thing is my feeling as well. And yet it bores many of us affluent people to death to never have to ask anyone for help, I guess? Maybe we need some artificial scarcity, but how to achieve it without oppression?
I have noticed for myself, that I am generally trying to reduce "things" in my life - which might lead to me needing to borrow something from others. But I'm also afraid of coming across needy and stealing other peoples time like this.
I can report from my limited amount of traveling, that people in "poor" countries become extremely helpful even to affluent strangers, maybe as a force of habit. But also, the less "affluent" you seem while travelling, the more helpful people become - like travelling on foot or on a bicycle.
Maybe one way to escape the material-scarcity-trap is to engage in difficult activities, like carpenting, all kinds of arts, citizen science, etc, where it becomes useful and fun to help each other again. Because it does not depend on affluence per se to be able to do those things (as long as you have surpassed subsistence lifestyle).
Oh artificial scarcity is easy, just double the population of rich country by letting people from poor country. It is just that the voters don’t want this.
Off topic, but I enjoy reading these kinds of pieces and then something like this trips me up:
> Maybe I could learn Hebrew and convert to Orthodox Judaism, but there are lots of reasons not to do that besides just laziness (plus one extra reason for people who aren’t already circumcised!)
Just an example of how "people" == "men" (or "people" == "people with penises" depending on how you feel about trans people). I know it wasn't intended as a slight or to exclude me as a woman, but it reveals an insight into the thought process / mental model that feels extremely exclusionary.
(Long time lurker, rare commenter)
(I get what you mean and agree that it's worth bearing in mind, but) to me, this read less as an instance of 'people == men' and more as a fairly natural result of the sentence, at least initially, being about Scott specifically. "I could learn Hebrew and convert... but there are lots of reasons not to do that... (plus one extra reason for people who [are unlike me in one specific way])". On this reading, Scott isn't necessarily thinking of 'people' as male-by-default in general; rather, 'people' defaults to male in this context because he (explicitly) starts with 'I' and then (implicitly) makes one modification.
> I think commenters overestimate how many people don’t have any cool hobbies or unique groups that they’re part of.
(about 10% in)
Should this say "underestimate"?
The Walruss comment gets close but misses that tons of community has formed around entertainment niches of varying sizes. On one end you have San Diego ComicCon, on the other end you have hundreds of thousands of Discord communities and gaming groups. The only actual social angst I have in my life is that most of the friends in my long-time/closest gaming group (one of whom's wedding I've attended) are A) on the east coast and I'm the odd man out on the west coast which is hell for gaming together and working 10 hour shifts and B) are getting into their late career and/or just now having children and (understandably) just flat aren't popping into Discord as much. It's not hard to find other communities per se but it's somewhat difficult to find other ones that jive with my schedule AND age group AND specific interests AND sense of humor etc. even when I'm mostly willing to compromise on any and all of those.
Groups like the SCA can be great communities... until you have kids, at which point it's typical to take a ~20 year hiatus and return to the group once your nest is empty. I have the impression that SCA is actually one of the *more* child-friendly hobby-based communities out there, which makes me very skeptical of the whole category. When children are unwelcome or just can't fit within a community's constraints, that's a pretty serious gap.
From my local kingdom's policy:
> Children under 12 must be within sight of a parent or guardian at all times at events, unless they’re participating in structured children’s activities... Children’s activities are overseen by at least two adults, at least one of whom has a current background check.
This policy was probably due to legal pressure, not anyone's actual preference, but it means it's a massive inconvenience to bring children between the ages of say 4 and 12 (and the kids themselves won't be enjoying it much either). If you have more than one child in this age range, it's really not going to be possible. Maybe in practice the rules are benignly ignored, and I doubt I'd actually be booted from an event for letting a friend hold the baby while I take the 4 year old to the port-a-potty, but I don't know where the line really is and don't want to push it.
Unsurprisingly, official children's activities are rare.
Informal meetings are distinct from events and don't have the same standard, but they're often held in explicitly child-unfriendly locations like public libraries. (At our local library, children must be in sight of a parent until the age of 10, so it's out of the question to have them go off and find a book or play in the play area while you do your weird grown-up things like practice calligraphy or cut cloth for garb.)
“Still, I will defend the claim that less than 10% of the population belongs to groups like this; I think commenters overestimate how many people don’t have any cool hobbies or unique groups that they’re part of.”
I’m pretty sure you mean underestimate, not overestimate.
Have you read Please Yell At My Kids? It’s a book about parenting around the world that contains some great analysis and practical advice on why a lot of people lack community and what to do about it. It doesn’t explicitly address how liberalism affects communities but I’d argue that is a subtext in much of the book, especially the chapters looking at less liberal societies.
For the Muslim vs Amish I think it is worth noting that many non Amish American Christian's particularly the sub groups of evangelicals that are common near Amish country view the Amish lifestyle as being actively admirable even if they won't join themselves. A long the lines of lay Catholics or Buddhists who aren't rushing to take vows of chastity and poverty but respect monks for doing so.
Conversely Muslim's existing at all are (barely) tolerated on religious freedom grounds but get negative benefit of the doubt.
"But shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?"
With a slight twist, isn't this already happening? A few content creators and companies are able to convince paying customers that there is a community better than regular society in their walled garden. They get rich from subscription fees, merchandise, ad revenue. The real thing does not have to be offered, because even if customers are disenchanted and leave, there is billions of potential customers and at least thousands of "community offers" - plenty to go around to keep the grift running.
I think it's a simple case of Goodhart's law that keeps capitalism from finding a good solution for a simple fee, and the same law keeps religion and quasi-religious entities in the game despite capitalism.
I wonder if a big part of the problem is that we love our kids too much. Looking back on my childhood in the 90s, my parents almost exclusively spent their nights and weekends with my sister and me, entertaining and enriching us. Meanwhile, based on what I know of my parents' childhoods, their parents mostly spent their nights and weekends hanging out with their own friends and pursuing their own interests, with the kids just sort of expected to entertain themselves in the background. We've traded closer relationships with our peers for closer relationships with our children and parents.
Things I notice missing from the discussion
1. Time. People are using the word "effort" and I suspect they mean it in an overlapping sense. When I was looking into communities to join, the ones with a strong, strong sense of community had essentially all the women working part time jobs or SAHMing, with full time working women as fringe elements of the community with weaker friendships. The men were getting community borrowed from their wives efforts, their wives did the meetings and the maintenance and the men got to get along (or not) with their wives' friends' spouses. The problem was I was not interested in being a part time worker or a SAHM and therefore chose to move to a white collar dual full income community where no one has any time and arranging monthly meetups is already a huge effort of juggling people's schedules. I do the effort because I really, really want community but I'm fully aware the results I achieve are a fraction of what you get from a community where people spend multiple hours a day, almost every day, together at the park watching their kids. This is also why people can form seriously close friendships potentially lasting for the rest of their lives with who they go to school with. Because spending hours and hours and hours with people forms community.
2. Gender. I'm not sure it's relevant except as a symptom of time. Traditionally women are the ones who maintain connections, but this might just be because traditionally women were the ones with time. They're still the ones attending maternity leave mommy and me baby groups. Stereotypically men also manage on much shallower friendships — I expect to know way more way intense way more intimate knowledge of a person for them to a "friend" let alone a close friend than my husband expects. Tangentially one thing I've noticed in Orthodox Judaism is it really pushes men's community with things like minyan and chavrusa culture, and meanwhile women are just expected to figure it out on their own, and as whatever forces of modernity turned this from something that happened naturally to something that you need to force to happen, their bonds decreased.
---
Levels of community:
People do mean different things when discussing community.
I lived in a place where people were actively nasty, which lowered my standards. I wanted to live in a place where I was close enough with my neighbors to be able to borrow an egg from them while baking.
Now that I have that, I want the next stage up, where I have neighbors I'm close enough to go over and hang out and chat with. This is the stage where I've become stuck on "time" — with only a few hours a week available to do the hanging out, I can either hang out with multiple people I'm interested in and develop very shallow relations with all of them or choose one or two to focus on and accept the MASSIVE hit that comes when one of them moves. It also means I can put a premium on: anyone with kids the same ages as mine so I can spend more time with them because it doubles as a playdate, and any group where I can hang out with multiple people I like at once.
Meanwhile my friend mastered stage two and is up to stage three, where she's really craving a community where there's a shared purpose/goal/meaning. I personally am just not motivated to ever get to that stage.
---
The intersection between community and family:
I moved to a different country, and noticed I had a much easier time making friends with fellow expats, and it's not just the shared culture. It's that the non immigrants already have family here and friends here and don't "need" a new friend and hence the relationship with them is almost always asymmetrical.
The thing that family provides — I notice this a lot more now that I do have family here, albeit by marriage — is a framework to invest more effort (not time, I now mean effort specifically) in a relationship you have reason to believe is permanent. Making meals, hosting injured people who need handicapped access their own home doesn't have, babysitting. I do these things with the security I'm gonna be paid back in some form. Not just in literally returned favors but in stronger more positive family bonds. I don't have this assurance with friends because unless a friendship has reached a point of depth I haven't achieved with a new friendship since high school, it dissolves once the person moves.
Yes, I think the SAHP (statistically most often SAHM) thing is key.
Historically, who are the community organizers? Who are the kinkeepers? Who is joining Rotary Club? Who is volunteering, watching neighbors' kids, or organizing relief efforts? It's retirees and SAHPs.
If you (economically and culturally) force every adult to work for an employer all day, and force every kid to go to daycare, aftercare, and/or camps every break, few people have any slack left for free association or community building. I applaud your devotion to trying it even on hard mode.
And even the few SAHPs left will find there's not a critical mass of people to do things with. This morning I texted all the parents of young children in my neighborhood to see if they wanted to go for a stroller walk with me and my kids since the weather has just turned nice. But they were all at work today, even the ones who work part-time.
Elizabeth Warren's book The Two-Income Trap is relevant.
> But shouldn’t this problem be a good match for entrepreneurial capitalism? If it’s possible to create a community better than regular society, can’t someone do it, charge a membership fee, and get rich?
A point about this: entrepreneurial capitalism does this. But as entrepreneurial capitalism does, it does it in a way that is crooked and twisted to actually maximise its profits, not the community members' happiness, which sometimes are divergent goals. So a lot of stuff tries to build on this need for "community" - in fact almost any random product, website etc tries to sell itself to you as a "community" in one way or another, they just never mean much. Social media being the obvious example here. The seduction in that case is low barrier to entry, which really makes them a more attractive prospect compared to having to move to some new place to stay close to the people you like, but of course it's also a product of remarkably inferior quality, and soon inevitably "enshittified" to start capitalizing on the user base.
"Wouldn’t that just be recreating the current situation of an America where most people don’t want open borders and so we don’t have them, but with extra steps? If so, why mandate the extra steps?"
For the same reason economic planning is usually different from private initiative? Right now, with immigration levels being effectively centrally planned, both benefits and costs are hardly legible, and even to the extent they are, both immigrations advocates and opponents disperse them to the everyone else. You can talk about how immigrants are the source of all evils while using a software developed by an HB, eating groceries picked by an illegal and having an higher wage because of complementarities. You can talk about how diversity is our strength while living in a lily white neighborhood and meeting an immigrant in person only when you decide to eat ethnic.
Privatizing this choice would make both costs and benefits visible, and force people to internalize them. The economics gains and the supposed social evils of immigration will accrue where people are willing to live next to immigrants, and not spill to the exclusionary communities. The tradeoffs will be clearer and people will have to choose where they stand on it, not based on what sounds astute on X but on skin in the game.
"FIRE people have online forums and meetups, and groups of them do things like buy up most of a block of houses to take over a neighborhood in a small town in Colorado."
Wow, I know absolutely nothing about these people other that what was posted here, and I already don't like them.
Commenting on ethnic enclaves - they might be affluent, but they usually stick together to defend certain values and practices. I grew up in Asia and I find that I like my supper tea / snacks and I would sometimes go out and buy stuff to eat/ drink. I can't do that outside of Chinatown because literally nothing else is open other than a handful of lonely fast food drive-thrus, whereas it's not unusual to walk down the street and see a bunch places serving tea, dessert, and fried chicken still open at 8.30PM where I live.
Similarly you need critical mass for an Asian grocer to have enough demand to survive and keep importing or making the kind of things Asians like to consume (some of these things are straight up illegal to grow in Australia or US and are challenging to import yourself due to biosecurity laws). You can access language or cultural schools (they often rent out a regular school's premises on the weekend) and enrol your children in your preferred extracurriculars (... Usually tuition).
In my experience (Australia), you do not need any legal carveouts for enclaves to form - the Chinese enclave I lived in originally had a minority of Chinese people in the 90s, who drew other Chinese people to the area by starting businesses and offering services and being members of local churches (and Aus immigration has a requirement of seeking a "local sponsor" - e.g a relative or friend who is there already - and why wouldn't you wanna live close to your friend if you can afford it?). It's also a very expensive place to live!
The economics kind of drove the change. The demand was disproportionately coming from affluent Chinese immigrants, and white families (often empty nesters) liked money more than they liked living in this suburb that was rapidly turning into an enclave.
I think it's fairly important to note that white Aussies weren't really "forced out" - its just that the Chinese were willing to pay a premium to live there as they were getting value out of aspects that were at best neutral (Mandarin signage, language schools, church does a Mandarin language sermon) or negative (increased traffic after 7pm) to other ethnicities. Many of the white families who'd lived there in the 90s became empty nesters in the 2010s and were more than happy to get paid more for their homes - they'd take the money to buy a nicer home in a suburb that was cheaper due to not having the premium driven by what affluent Chinese immigrants like, such as "the ability to go out for Sichuan style hotpot at 9pm to midnight". (Although quite a lot of younger white people, like my partner, enjoy that sort of thing - they seem to end up "marrying into" these lifestyles and places. I see mixed race couples and children quite often!)
(On the other hand of the affluence spectrum are needs - such as "I need a job to get my through uni, where I have a comparative advantage, ie I speak Chinese, vs a comparative disadvantage, i.e my English is poor or heavily accented)
Crucially though, the Chinese empty nesters (like my parents) do not sell and move out because why would they? They live close to all the things they like, and also probably they are more able to make friends with their new neighbours, and in many cases their new neighbours are also friends and family. They may also be involved in the new/changed community organisations - church, music teacher, Chinese language newspaper editor.... Hell, even neighbourhood WeChat group admin.
None of these require any active attempt to exclude anyone (weekend Chinese school and martial art groups will take anyone who will pay the fees), they simply form enclaves based on shared preferences and having no other avenues to meet those preferences other than in the enclave. And the wider community is generally fine with anything that doesn't conflict too hard with outside values - we can run weekend language schools and mahjong clubs, but we can't have huge street-visible red shrines (not the little ones you might see in restaurants, I'm talking the size of a phone booth), or release random fish into the waterways (real and common Buddhist practice).
On the flipside, you can join a footy club in literally every other suburb, so unless there's something particularly valuable to the suburb (like maybe it's a particularly prestigious footy club), there's no reason why white Aussies to not take the money, in order to stick around to defend the footy club or Bunnings snags or English language church sermons or other ubiquitous in wider society cultural preferences and values. It's not a particularly old suburb to begin with, most of the homes were built in the 70s at the earliest anyway.
Simply put all it takes for an enclave to form is for newcomers to significantly value the ethnic aspects more than the incumbents value whatever else was originally there (given that both sets of people are roughly similarly affluent, and the incumbents have other equally attractive places to live but the newcomers don't).
Nit: My name is Shawn (with a W), not Shaun. :-)
But, hey, you put two L's in my surname, which most people don't.
One risk I see underemphasized is that when strong, tight-knit communities form in parallel they can become echo chambers with little real dialogue across their boundaries.
Liberalism’s strength is supposed to be its open “marketplace” of groups and their ideas, but if those groups confine themselves into self-sufficient bubbles, the public sphere fragments. Rather than pluralism enriching democracy, we risk a patchwork of (currently mostly online) enclaves that don’t just ignore each other, they barely understand, let alone empathize with, one another.
Without regular, meaningful interaction between communities, there’s less incentive or capacity to negotiate common ground, solve shared problems, or protect minority voices. In the worst case, “live and let live” quietly mutates into indifference or suspicion toward outsiders. The civic glue that allows democracy to work—trust, shared facts, compromise—erodes.
As a trans woman, I think your description of LGBTQ community dynamics is very perceptive and strikes at something I don't think a lot of straight people understand, but there are a few structural quirks that differentiate it from groups like the Amish or 5/10 groups like Rationalists.
LGBTQ activism has historically followed a dual-power model: building separate but interconnected cells, networks and institutions - what McCarthy called "The Gay Mafia" - while also pushing to alter mainstream society and make it easier for LGBTQ people to move through other tribes¹. The historical "primary subject" of this activism is the closeted homosexual and the repressing transexual who both dip in and out of this underground (Before the late 90s there was not a firm line between these groups of people and cells often developed their own ontologies of gender and sex with a few academics from the 70s winning in the late 90s).
The result is that, if you are sufficiently socially skilled / closeted / passable / or simply good at reading norms, it’s often very easy to move back and forth between queer spaces and broader society.
LGBTQ people are also ubiquitous, with a sizeable population in every city and township, and a light but regularly spaced population across rural regions. I have logged onto Grindr in cities where I knew no one and had almost no money and found someone who was safe enough, decent enough, and willing to let me stay.(The risks of doing this are obvious and not the point here; I’m describing the network’s existence but I will say I have done this several times and *feel* like I have only put out when I have wanted to in these situations). I can go to a gay bar in basically any major city and be reasonably sure that the people there would (1) physically defend me if necessary, and (2) try to help without immediately involving the police even if I was presenting poorly (on drugs, acting strange). I’ve hosted dozens on my couch over the years - most pleasant, some unpleasant, some with serious problems - and there is a loose but functional system of “handing someone off” to others in the network. This is a root cause of queer polyamory, "uhaul lesbians", and lots of other weird gay behaviors.
Because I transitioned as a teenager, this support lattice has existed for me my entire adult life. It took me a long time to realize that most people simply do not have anything similar to what is effectively a semi-automatic, identity-linked mutual aid network that spans the entire western world and exists in pockets everywhere else.
I think the group that has similar ubiquity (at least in the United States) and has practiced a similar dual building strategy might be Black Americans who I'm also surprised weren't mentioned. Anywhere with any amount of historical segregation has a red-line with Black businesses, restaurants, schools, churches, beauty/hair networks, justice systems, organized crime, etc. One big difference is the fact that segregation created an alternate "above-ground" society, while obscenity laws/overwhelming societal pressure created the homo-sexual underground². That underground origin is what makes the LGBTQ network so flexible and portable, and is what I think often gives it an appearance of incoherence.
¹ This creates a persistent tension between (a) people who had very difficult adolescence and want to “jailbreak” society to prevent other young queer people from going through the same thing, and (b) people who see that project as invasive cultural engineering from outsiders. Both are, in their own ways, accurate but with different emotional valences.
² Something very interesting is the intersection of the two, the Black Homosexual Underground which is separate from Black communities (which are often quite socially conservative) and the LGBTQ community (which for many reasons in many ways has historically alienated its Black membership). In many respects their shibboleths, institutions, ontology(ies) and aid networks mirror the relationship the LGBTQ community has with the dominant culture (look at ballroom culture and stud culture and disco and detroit house and all sorts of things that I don't know about because I'm not in it)