On third thought, everyone else is right and I am wrong. The Dragon Army group house is a very bad idea, enough so that it’s okay to be forceful in encouraging Duncan to modify it or other people not to join it. This is true even if the required modifications are so hard that they end up torpedoing the project.
I’m not sure what my point was except that it’s wrong to make fun of people who are trying to help, and that if despite all the light social pressure we can muster people still want to join it they should be legally allowed to do so. I still think these are true, though more weakly.
Can you say why?
1. On closer look, a lot of the nastiness and bullying I was responding to in terms of comments were coming from one person. Most people disagreeing had good points and important criticism. That meant my original point of “stop being jerks” was irrelevant, since most people weren’t.
2. I think that also changed the pragmatics of the situation? Like, I was previously taking a God’s-eye view of “should Duncan be allowed to set this up?” But since none of us can stop him, that’s not really relevant. I think everyone else was answering the correct question, “Is this, as designed, probably a really bad idea, such that Duncan should seriously consider changing his proposal in specific ways, and other people should consider not joining until he does?” I think the answer is yes, on the grounds that the “forced to commit to live in a house doing this stuff and no clear means of exit” plan is dangerous for the reasons people say. There are probably intermediate ways to do this that capture most of the value but lose most of the risk. It seemed like most of the critics were okay with these and trying to propose them constructively, but Duncan wasn’t really considering them.
Again, I’m not saying people shouldn’t be allowed to do this if they want to. I’m saying that I would recommend to people that they not do it, and recommend to Duncan that he strongly consider finding ways around this, and that if he can’t then the project is likely to be net negative and he might want to consider not pursuing it.
Since this was all that most of the critics were saying anyway, I decided the critics were right.
On fourth thought, I talked to Duncan via email, and he sounded very concerned about this, and mentioned some concrete steps he was taking. He says:
One thing that is getting extremely under-emphasized in outside criticism is the degree to which updates and clarifications are occurring in the comments in real time (and the degree to which getting object-level criticism was the point of posting), and the it-was-always-stated-to-be-a-draft nature of the charter. Some things which might reduce your unease (which was probably appropriate given your knowledge/assumptions at the time):
1. Lease is being signed with home owner, not funneled through me, meaning that exit procedures are fairly boilerplate/normal, à la people who default have it show up on their credit score, but little else.
2. There’s a pretty clear house-approved exit plan forming, and it includes ejector-seat options for people who have gotten critically low on either emotional or financial resources. Things like “you have to find two viable replacements” were more intended to limit the sense of obligation of the leaver (i.e. it’s not your fault if you made a good faith effort to replace yourself and we rejected your interested parties; you’re not on the hook forever) than to obligate them, and they’re waived in cases of emergency (and “whether it’s an emergency” is not determined by me or by consensus but by the individual and the individual’s trusted advisors/proxies).
3. We’ve committed to having every house member check in with a fully outside friend or advisor at least once a week.
4. We’re leaning strongly toward “abandon house” vacations where everyone leaves to go home or go camping or go couch surf with friends, just to not be stuck in the same frame.
5. None of these norms or structures are being imposed by me without consensus; literally the only lines I’m drawing at the beginning are “there will be structure” and “we need to spend ~20hrs/week in one another’s company.” Much of the stuff outlined in the post (like exercise and group projects) is more of the form “if you all can’t decide where to go to dinner, we’re getting pizza,” i.e. there’s a block of time where we’re definitely collaborating, but the group decides what gets done with that collaboration.
He also says that he and potential housemates have already shared an AirBNB house for a while so they could test the idea and make sure they all got along with each other.
I’m encouraged by this both because they seem like good ideas and because they sound like he’s thought this through more fully than I originally thought.