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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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”.
- 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.
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.
This only works if Google and everyone stop lobotomizing AIs for "wrongthink" (see the Gorilla Incident). How hard would it have been to just give it a million black men in pictures? And a million gorilla pictures? You "fix" fuzzy logic issues with More Data!
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?
“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 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...).
>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.
>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).
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...)
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.
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.
People that are low trust very badly dislike high trust communities, and try to tear them down whenever possible. Words like "racism" and sexism get bandied about.
So it's hardly "hard to find" because of sprawl. There were tons of high-trust communities in america, circa 1950.
Shitty small towns come with guns to kick out the low trust people (at least they do where I live -- Appalachia is a hard place, but if you're ever in need, they'll help ya).
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.
You also gotta keep in mind that these towns don't got a policeman. And the state police refer to the whole county as "Fayettenam." (this from police who were in Vietnam, so...)
"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 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?
Tight enough to let people lie about sex change operations, and get them crowd-funded.
If the function of community is "support" than pretty good. If it's "face to face interaction" or "see the big yellow light in the sky" it's pretty bad.
> 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.
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.
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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.
Sports... kinda sorta? Time was everyone played soccer hereabouts, and every small town had a little team. Football was that from about the fifties on to the seventies.
Now people are tearing down the football stadiums. There's a new, non-community-based "football" that the Powers that Be are shilling (beta testing): College Sports.
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...
I remember when city buses were places people chatted. To random strangers. Discussed sports, or the weather, or who they were going to beat up later (okay, the last wasn't to strangers).
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.
"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.
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.
When you have something that everyone "really wants" (Like community) and "entrepreneurs" aren't creating products to make it happen, you ought to look at the costs and benefits. Perhaps the current model is more profitable?
Or, more perniciously, the Powers that Be might take an unhealthy interest in any entrepreneur who is trying to screw up their "Nice Little Country."
I'm going to make this explicit, and I'm sorry to have to use frames that I don't believe in. Historically, strong AngloEuropean communities have presented a danger to "the outsider." When, accordingly, outsiders gained influence in the media, they fought to dissolve communities, to increase reliance on "the government" by removing/reducing the institutions that were formerly allies (or took primacy over what the guvmint did).
You see this with the concept of "Family" (which was once an economic unit, spreading back a few generations) -- The Griswolds should spring to mind. Nowadays, the concept that "you put up with them, because family" is foreign to people. I met most of my cousins a few times, at bar mitzvahs and the like. My father grew up visiting his cousins on weekends -- putting pennies on the rails for entertainment. In the 1950's, blacks had some of the strongest families in the country.
Now... um, very much no. There were laws that contributed, sure, but a lot of it was advertising and entertainment.
You see this with the concept of "Church" (which is a "religious" grouping only as much as folks don't want to follow Maimonides, who said: believe what you like, so long as you don't spread it.) Old Church is so dead they made New Church, and everyone hated that too.
If you want to shill for "let's bring community back" I'm going to tell you it'll come at a very big GDP cost. Say... around half? Something like that. You'll have a stronger country, sure (and a happier one), but you won't be nearly as "productive" and there will be less dollars to spend.
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.
"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.
>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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Fun to hear Maimonides echoed back. Deeds not words, and if you're engaged in the "good deeds" it don't matter what you believe.
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.
> 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.
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.
For many people, Naltrexone works quite well.
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.
Welfare reform led to a lot of them decamping for Israel, yes. Of course, in Israel they're a significant voting bloc.
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.
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.
Kill! Kill! Die Die Die!
You're going to have to build AIs that can survive other AIs trying to murder them, if you want a brisk competition.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot-after-it-turned-into-racist-nazi/
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.
This only works if Google and everyone stop lobotomizing AIs for "wrongthink" (see the Gorilla Incident). How hard would it have been to just give it a million black men in pictures? And a million gorilla pictures? You "fix" fuzzy logic issues with More Data!
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?
“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 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.
>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.
>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.
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...)
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
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.
People that are low trust very badly dislike high trust communities, and try to tear them down whenever possible. Words like "racism" and sexism get bandied about.
So it's hardly "hard to find" because of sprawl. There were tons of high-trust communities in america, circa 1950.
Shitty small towns come with guns to kick out the low trust people (at least they do where I live -- Appalachia is a hard place, but if you're ever in need, they'll help ya).
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.
You also gotta keep in mind that these towns don't got a policeman. And the state police refer to the whole county as "Fayettenam." (this from police who were in Vietnam, so...)
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'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?
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.
In the past 30 years, there was a civil war in Mexico. Were you even aware of it? It didn't make American news at the time.
::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?
Tight enough to let people lie about sex change operations, and get them crowd-funded.
If the function of community is "support" than pretty good. If it's "face to face interaction" or "see the big yellow light in the sky" it's pretty bad.
> 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?
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.
Sports... kinda sorta? Time was everyone played soccer hereabouts, and every small town had a little team. Football was that from about the fifties on to the seventies.
Now people are tearing down the football stadiums. There's a new, non-community-based "football" that the Powers that Be are shilling (beta testing): College Sports.
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...
I remember when city buses were places people chatted. To random strangers. Discussed sports, or the weather, or who they were going to beat up later (okay, the last wasn't to strangers).
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.
"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.
Until you see large portions of people turning it OFF, the improvements in the quality/quantity may simply not be to Your Taste, you outlier 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.
When we speak about people literally trying to tear down communities, country clubs should spring to mind, yes.
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.
When you have something that everyone "really wants" (Like community) and "entrepreneurs" aren't creating products to make it happen, you ought to look at the costs and benefits. Perhaps the current model is more profitable?
Or, more perniciously, the Powers that Be might take an unhealthy interest in any entrepreneur who is trying to screw up their "Nice Little Country."
Absent some more fleshed out description of what you mean, this just sounds paranoid to me.
I'm going to make this explicit, and I'm sorry to have to use frames that I don't believe in. Historically, strong AngloEuropean communities have presented a danger to "the outsider." When, accordingly, outsiders gained influence in the media, they fought to dissolve communities, to increase reliance on "the government" by removing/reducing the institutions that were formerly allies (or took primacy over what the guvmint did).
You see this with the concept of "Family" (which was once an economic unit, spreading back a few generations) -- The Griswolds should spring to mind. Nowadays, the concept that "you put up with them, because family" is foreign to people. I met most of my cousins a few times, at bar mitzvahs and the like. My father grew up visiting his cousins on weekends -- putting pennies on the rails for entertainment. In the 1950's, blacks had some of the strongest families in the country.
Now... um, very much no. There were laws that contributed, sure, but a lot of it was advertising and entertainment.
You see this with the concept of "Church" (which is a "religious" grouping only as much as folks don't want to follow Maimonides, who said: believe what you like, so long as you don't spread it.) Old Church is so dead they made New Church, and everyone hated that too.
If you want to shill for "let's bring community back" I'm going to tell you it'll come at a very big GDP cost. Say... around half? Something like that. You'll have a stronger country, sure (and a happier one), but you won't be nearly as "productive" and there will be less dollars to spend.
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.
"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.
>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.
>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.
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?
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?