After the collapse of MetaMed (the startup which promised to revolutionize medical care through the power of LessWrong Rationalism!) Sarah Constantin wrote essays like:
https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community.htmlIt seems to me that the increasingly ill-named “Rationalist Community” in Berkeley has, in practice, a core value of “unconditional tolerance of weirdos.” It is a haven for outcasts and a paradise for bohemians. It is a social community based on warm connections of mutual support and fun between people who don’t fit in with the broader society.
We’ve built, over the years, a number of sharehouses, a serious plan for a baugruppe, preliminary plans for an unschooling center, and the beginnings of mutual aid organizations and dispute resolution mechanisms. We’re actually doing this. It takes time, but there’s visible progress on the ground.
I live on a street with my friends as neighbors. Hardly anybody in my generation gets to say that.
What we’re not doing well at, as a community, is external-facing projects.
I have heard the same kind of phrasing from people in other geeky cultures which emerged out of SoCal, such as the Society for Creative Anachronism. And the way these communities have sometimes ended up covering for members who commit violent crimes, let alone a bit of embezzlement, has been written about elsewhere.
Edit: she has another post from 2017 Effective Altruism has a Lying problem
https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/01/17/ea-has-a-lying-problem.htmlif there are signs that EA orgs, as they grow and professionalize, are deliberately targeting growth among less-critical, less-intellectually-engaged, lower-integrity donors, while being dismissive towards intelligent and serious critics, which I think some of the discussions I’ve quoted on the GWWC pledge suggest, then it makes me worry that they’re trying to get money out of people’s weaknesses rather than gaining from their strengths.
I think that somehow these movements were good at creating both online spaces and social scenes in key areas such as Oxford, Greater NYC, and the SF Bay Area (did not know about Berkeley). I have to be honest that this kind of commune culture is totally beyond my experience. But it would be relevant to know (for example) did Dominic Cummings just read their web postings, or was he part of the face-to-face culture? And how did this geeky SoCal community end up controlling real money, when the LA SF Society mostly just held meetings and argued with each other? Close-knit nerdy communities have been full of drama since Plato died and his students had to decide who was in charge of the Academy, or the Pythagoreans tossed someone off a boat for proving there are irrational numbers.
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