With your utility function, pierce the heavens!! Tell me your secrets.

Rationalist Baugruppen (v0.3)

Hi, all! This came a little later than I intended, so apologies to all expected this post sooner. I’m still developing this idea, revising and editing this as I go, instead of writing it in private only to abruptly leave it incomplete because executive dysfunction and then subsequently collecting dust. As such, a lot of things may be missing or vaguely defined. I gladly welcome constructive criticism! This has been fermenting in my head for quite a while now, but the Less Wrong 2.0 post gave me the idea that now would be a good time to start talking seriously about this. Specifically, I’m writing this idea out as a possible way for the rationalist meatspace community to grow. Is this particular idea a good, realistic, or even desirable solution? I don’t know. But I intend to find out. From the Less Wrong 2.0 post in question:

There’s also a role to be played in colocating rationalists, either through helping form group houses and shared apartments or moving subsidies / loans. It’s not clear it’s efficient for more people to move to the Bay Area relative to secondary or tertiary hubs, but it does seem likely that we should put resources towards growing the physical community.

[Epistemic status: Rough, disorganized, and speculative. Mostly, but not completely, endorsed. For now, a lot of what I wrote and will write is me figuratively spitballing and seeing what sticks. Sculpting an agreed-upon set of coherent preferences is messy work.]

What is a Baugruppen? In summary, a Baugruppen, or “Building Group” is a variation of co-housing in the form of a condominium building that’s co-owned by its own tenants and is privately financed by said tenants, leading to a greater amount of freedom to shape the building to their desires as an intentional community. To wit, this is accomplished by cutting developers out and interacting with architects and construction companies directly, which the community hires to make their design preferences a reality.

How is an intentional community of rationalists going to govern themselves without devolving into cult-like group behavior? How do we delegate responsibilities? This was something that I was going to get to from the very beginning, because it’s a major concern that’s as old as Less Wrong itself. We’re talking about the difference between a happy, stable, diverse community… and a community project messily imploding on itself with lots of fallout and collateral damage in the rationalist community that we already have going for us. As such, we absolutely should not back this if we’re finding ourselves organizing a potential meatspace community around cargo cult ideas. Ideally, we’d like to avoid starting something that looks like:
1. Get a bunch of rationalists together
2. Build baugruppen
3. ???
4. Profit

Organization: There’s no reason why we couldn’t set up a network of rationalist baugruppens if this gains traction. What’s to stop us from even having an international organization? This is something we’ll need to think about if and when this project passes the major milestone of a successful first instance of its kind. But in the meantime, a task force is needed in order to take first steps after we select a location. First steps? Working with local government to make it in their best interests to assist us with development; researching construction firms and architects that would fit this project; accounting for all the money the project will need to see a successful completion and dealing with banks; and working with the people who need assistance in relocating (costs, immigration red tape) and settling into their new home. That, and other things besides.

Location, location, location: Apropos to the above, the question remains of where to plant our first baugruppen. In v0.2, I suggested “NYC or San Francisco” for macro-scale location, but then it was pointed out that I didn’t put much effort into thinking those up. And then I realized that I wasn’t using any metric other than “Rationalists Already Live There”, without consideration for any other metric. As far as metrics go, Walkability/Bike/Transit Scores seems like a good place to start in selecting for American cities. Based on this metric, here’s a short list of cities, in rough descending order (by average score, rounded to nearest integer): San Francisco 80(84/75/80), NYC 79(88/65/84), Boston 75(80/74/70), Philadelphia 71(77/68/67), Washington D.C. 71(74/69/71), Chicago 70(75/70/65), and Seattle 64(71/63/57).
Even if residents were to change jobs around the city, bikeability and good transit access go a long way to making commutes as painless as possible.

Building Design Criteria or, “What are the essentials?”: Ideally, we want a design that’s ultra-efficient in energy (something along the lines of LEED or passivhaus), generally soundproofed throughout, and a really good internet network. Other possible criteria includes lots of sunlight or good sunlight substitutes; a shared kitchen; cleaning services; shared laundry area; an in-house library; a hall for events such as Solstices, workshops, and parties; a private room set aside for kink purposes; common rooms with comfy furniture; roof access; and a space for bike storage.

Architecture: We don’t want to build a skyscraper here, but a home. A four-story one-building complex seems like a suitable form. This section depends on how many people we plan to house as full-time residents, as well as what functions we’ll need the building to serve, as well as the final budget that the would-be community pools together.

Community Norms: We carefully govern ourselves to be a thriving and rewarding rationalist community that encourages and supports everybody in being the best they can be (”Tsuyoku naritai!”). We celebrate successes and constructively troubleshoot our failures. We farm out chores amongst ourselves with wages (a la Paradigm Camp). We find ourselves spontaneously gathering in our open spaces in the baugruppen to spiritedly argue the finer points of a contentious blog post. Cuddle puddles happen from time to time, and maybe migrate to individual rooms, keeping in mind those who aren’t comfortable with cuddle puddles all over the place. We also host meetups, dinners, parties, and even CFAR workshops. There’s a booming prediction market amongst us, and a budding group of self-taught superforecasters whose counsel we learn to heed and whose techniques they gladly share. Our library has the best textbooks and reference manuals. Solstices are riotous and sacred affairs. Many of us are kinky, but we keep in mind that not everyone is into our weird stuff and we’re not obnoxious about it. We would name the our baugruppen The Schelling Point or something else really nerdy and fitting, but to us, it would be home.

1 year ago · tagged #rationalist baugruppen #The Craft and The Community · 3 notes · permalink

  1. jack-rustier posted this