Sorry Sophia but I still don’t completely understand how what we’re talking about maps on to actual decisions community builders are making. I’m still suspicious that many of us are sensing a vibe problem but misdiagnosing it as a messaging/cause prioritization problem.
I would find it really helpful if you could an example of how you percieve the big tent / small tent abstraction could map on to a concrete action which a community organiser takes.
Let’s say someone was starting up a new a EA group at an Australian university—what’s an example of a mistake you worry this person might make if they’re too directly focused on chasing the “tails”?
Relevant context: Xavier used to do lots of community building and helped run an Australian university EA group
Yeah, I think vibes are a big deal, where vibes is pointing to something like “people have fun at events because the social dynamics feel good” (where “fun from social dynamics” is distinct from” fun from the intellectual stimulation of the philosophical puzzles” or other sources of fun).
Maybe this doesn’t add anything to that/everything else that I would say I’m pointing to with the whole “median” targeting thing maybe also impacts vibes?
Campground/tent model is maybe more useful for understanding the role of vibes
The campground/tent distinction helps me form my thoughts more explicitly around the role that vibes play (I do think they are not the only thing in a vague cluster of related strategies that I want to point to, but they are definitely a huge chunk/a lot of the other strategies maybe are important because of their impact on “vibes”).
In short, our “tent” is the current movement and the “campground” is everyone who isn’t in the movement (got a top-level post in the works, privately shared a draft with Xavier already but for anyone else who wants to give feedback before I post it, please DM me!).
Vibes at events seem important for the campground, ie. for all the people who aren’t involved.
For example, a positive campground effect of vibes could go something like:
Someone comes to an event who after has a great impression of effective altruism but they don’t end up engaging much more, maybe because they just happen to get busy or it’s not really quite their thing intellectually. Then, years later, they might go on to say nice things years later to their colleagues or friends who mention effective altruism. Those colleagues and friends can then engage with these ideas they agree with without being socially punished.
The point of the above comments and also the campground/tent model is more about establishing language that allows us to talk about individual community building strategies. I think often in community building discussions, a lot of different things get easily conflated because we haven’t really found good ways of disentangling the various effects people are pointing to (which ends up maybe leading to inferential gaps not being closed because people can easily talk past each other without the models/language being well-defined enough). I do sometimes talk about example strategies because my motivation for wanting to create these models/language was that I was failing to articulate my intuitions around various community building strategies (but I think there is a decent chance that once I’ve found a way to clearly express what I initially thought, it will be obvious to me that I was wrong, so for now, I’m not really trying to say “this is what an Australian group should do, I’m more just trying to work out, “if this model was correct, what should an Australian group do”.
I can totally imagine that after getting over the fact that it was your idea and not mine (so maybe give it a month or so), I might just end up deciding that the vibes model is superior to anything discussed here (though of course, current me’s inside view is that that isn’t the case or I’d just update straight away)!
According to current me. Who knows what the past me that wrote this stuff to begin with thought? I’ll answer my own rhetorical question: you’d hope I would! My stab at a guess is that my views are becoming somewhat more coherent and also somewhat less confident with time as I think about this more (so you are currently dealing with moving goalposts, sorry!).
Basically, I’m not yet really trying to draw a map that I’m confident in, I’m more just trying to find a really good legend for many maps in order to then draw out the current main hypothesis maps with, hopefully, more precision and less confusion).
Also, in my mind, vibe management comes under the same cluster of communication-related things (overlapping categories include: framing/language/presentation and PR/marketing etc) that people are generally pointing to in these conversations. You seem to just be saying that the diagnosis is too broad and that there is a subset of stuff that is the only problem and it all comes under “vibes”, which I disagree with (eg. see this comment and this comment for examples of something else I am trying to point to that doesn’t seem to be captured by “vibes” which I think are the sorts of examples posts like this one and this one[1] are trying to point at)
This comment also is, AFAICT, pointing to something true too—I think there is some narrow window in between that is maybe too high a standard but possibly worth aiming for (I’m yet to confidently decide) that we need some clear language to discuss in such a way that everyone is on the same page and can more easily find all the various relevant cruxes (if such language exists, not sure if my language will end up being that useful - but even if not, I think if there is such language that isn’t that hard to find, then it could be useful for facilitating double-crux finding!)
Sorry Sophia but I still don’t completely understand how what we’re talking about maps on to actual decisions community builders are making. I’m still suspicious that many of us are sensing a vibe problem but misdiagnosing it as a messaging/cause prioritization problem.
I would find it really helpful if you could an example of how you percieve the big tent / small tent abstraction could map on to a concrete action which a community organiser takes.
Let’s say someone was starting up a new a EA group at an Australian university—what’s an example of a mistake you worry this person might make if they’re too directly focused on chasing the “tails”?
Relevant context: Xavier used to do lots of community building and helped run an Australian university EA group
Yeah, I think vibes are a big deal, where vibes is pointing to something like “people have fun at events because the social dynamics feel good” (where “fun from social dynamics” is distinct from” fun from the intellectual stimulation of the philosophical puzzles” or other sources of fun).
Maybe this doesn’t add anything to that/everything else that I would say I’m pointing to with the whole “median” targeting thing maybe also impacts vibes?
Campground/tent model is maybe more useful for understanding the role of vibes
The campground/tent distinction helps me form my thoughts more explicitly around the role that vibes play (I do think they are not the only thing in a vague cluster of related strategies that I want to point to, but they are definitely a huge chunk/a lot of the other strategies maybe are important because of their impact on “vibes”).
In short, our “tent” is the current movement and the “campground” is everyone who isn’t in the movement (got a top-level post in the works, privately shared a draft with Xavier already but for anyone else who wants to give feedback before I post it, please DM me!).
Vibes at events seem important for the campground, ie. for all the people who aren’t involved.
For example, a positive campground effect of vibes could go something like:
Someone comes to an event who after has a great impression of effective altruism but they don’t end up engaging much more, maybe because they just happen to get busy or it’s not really quite their thing intellectually. Then, years later, they might go on to say nice things years later to their colleagues or friends who mention effective altruism. Those colleagues and friends can then engage with these ideas they agree with without being socially punished.
The point of these models [1]
The point of the above comments and also the campground/tent model is more about establishing language that allows us to talk about individual community building strategies. I think often in community building discussions, a lot of different things get easily conflated because we haven’t really found good ways of disentangling the various effects people are pointing to (which ends up maybe leading to inferential gaps not being closed because people can easily talk past each other without the models/language being well-defined enough). I do sometimes talk about example strategies because my motivation for wanting to create these models/language was that I was failing to articulate my intuitions around various community building strategies (but I think there is a decent chance that once I’ve found a way to clearly express what I initially thought, it will be obvious to me that I was wrong, so for now, I’m not really trying to say “this is what an Australian group should do, I’m more just trying to work out, “if this model was correct, what should an Australian group do”.
I can totally imagine that after getting over the fact that it was your idea and not mine (so maybe give it a month or so), I might just end up deciding that the vibes model is superior to anything discussed here (though of course, current me’s inside view is that that isn’t the case or I’d just update straight away)!
According to current me. Who knows what the past me that wrote this stuff to begin with thought? I’ll answer my own rhetorical question: you’d hope I would! My stab at a guess is that my views are becoming somewhat more coherent and also somewhat less confident with time as I think about this more (so you are currently dealing with moving goalposts, sorry!).
Basically, I’m not yet really trying to draw a map that I’m confident in, I’m more just trying to find a really good legend for many maps in order to then draw out the current main hypothesis maps with, hopefully, more precision and less confusion).
Also, in my mind, vibe management comes under the same cluster of communication-related things (overlapping categories include: framing/language/presentation and PR/marketing etc) that people are generally pointing to in these conversations. You seem to just be saying that the diagnosis is too broad and that there is a subset of stuff that is the only problem and it all comes under “vibes”, which I disagree with (eg. see this comment and this comment for examples of something else I am trying to point to that doesn’t seem to be captured by “vibes” which I think are the sorts of examples posts like this one and this one[1] are trying to point at)
This comment also is, AFAICT, pointing to something true too—I think there is some narrow window in between that is maybe too high a standard but possibly worth aiming for (I’m yet to confidently decide) that we need some clear language to discuss in such a way that everyone is on the same page and can more easily find all the various relevant cruxes (if such language exists, not sure if my language will end up being that useful - but even if not, I think if there is such language that isn’t that hard to find, then it could be useful for facilitating double-crux finding!)