[Attention conservation notice: if you’re not a rationalist [ETA: in the Bay Area or maybe New York– I was thinking “the Bay Area rationalist community” every time I typed “the rationalist community”] I can’t imagine you would get anything out of this one.]
At both this year’s Bay Area Solstice and last year’s, there was a speech given about disconnection from the rationalist community: about how many people feel lost and lonely and like they don’t really belong, and about how we as a community need to step up and reach out to each other more and build a real community. I wasn’t going to comment on this last year, but two years in a row is beginning to seem like a trend.
Do we have any evidence that this claim is the case?
I, personally, do not feel disconnected from the rationalist community. I have several close friends and partners; I can go to events as often as I feel inclined (which, to be fair, isn’t particularly often); on bonobo rationalist Tumblr I interact with so many kind and intelligent people that backreading my dash is becoming intractable. My recent top surgery is an excellent example: I had a well-attended and delightful sex party; I easily found a person to babysit me when my fiance was at work; I requested and received prayers from the two Catholics; several people have kindly offered to spend time with me post-surgery and take my mind off the pain; and I have an innumerable number of well-wishers.
Now, admittedly, I am an introvert. But that can be taken two ways! On one hand, I may have low social needs, and therefore I am satisfied by this fairly disconnected community; on the other, I am socially phobic and agoraphobic, and yet my refusal to interact with anyone has not driven away all the social support.
I don’t think I’m alone here. Scott Alexander has written about how much he adores the Bay Area rationalist community. On a more objective front, the rationalist community has helped our members miserably trapped in places like Russia, the Caribbean, and Iowa; I am personally aware of several people who, when in need, were helped by other rationalists with no expectation of return; we have several big events each year, and innumerable smaller events from Stanford EA to Alicorn’s dinner parties. On most of the possible metrics of a community I can think of, we’re doing well.
But I don’t mean to say that the rationalist community is 100% awesome, no alienation here. It seems perfectly plausible to me that people other than me feel alienated and alone, and I am sheltered by my charming personality, my blogging career, my many romantic partners, or my refusal to leave the house. I just want to say that, from anecdotes, we can make the case either way– and therefore we need to check.
I worry that, in the absence of metrics, the rationalist community would adopt a self-identity as The Community Where Everyone Is Disconnected And Alone. We would have no way of measuring when we’ve won, when we’ve built a decent community and can stop self-criticizing. I think that that’s harmful. For one thing, it’s terrible PR: who wants to join the community where everyone’s lonely? For another, it’s very easy, when you have that sort of self-identity, to stop trying. No matter what you do, someone is going to stand up at Solstice next year and talk about how we haven’t built a real community yet– so what’s the point in taking a step to make the community better? People can wind up feeling alienated about the fact that they aren’t alienated! Like they’re different from their community because, for them, the community is actually doing its fucking job.
I think that these speeches come from a good motivation: people want to make a deliberate effort to be welcoming to newcomers and to people who feel alienated, and it makes sense to do it at the one Big Rationalist Event they’re likely to attend. And I don’t want to get in the way of that goal. What I would suggest is to explicitly acknowledge both the connected people and the disconnected ones. Send the message of “lots of people in this room are lonely, and that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them”, but also send the message of “and lots of rationalists have fixed this problem, and if you stay in our community we’ll do our best to fix it for you too”. Reassure those who are disconnected that we are kind and do not bite, but challenge those who are connected not just to stay in our little bubbles but to reach out to the people standing on the sidelines.
[ETA: I also think it would be a good idea to collect information about how well the community is doing in terms of social support on the LW survey.]
Thing of Things 
The rationalist community is spread all over the globe and seems quite heterogenous, so YMMV. I enjoy the LW meetups in Tel Aviv but so far they are good for having stimulating conversation with smart people but not that good at creating a tight-knit community. I guess the Bay Area community might be better in this respect, but when I came to a BBQ in UV house in May I felt quite awkward and mingling was hard. The only place where I got a strong rationalist community vibe is the European community weekend in Berlin.
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Ozy, you and Scott are both extremely popular in the rationalsit community (admittedly Scott is more popular). Ozy you have over a thousand tumblr followers most rationalsit with a tumblr have far fewer. Scott is arguably the most popular Rationalsit writer after Elizier. I do not think the experience of a Scott or an Ozy is really relevant to the discussion of whether rationalists feel alienated in general.
The examples of helping out rationalists stuck in bad situations is pretty relevant though. In gneeral I agree with the overall point of this essay, I just find it troubling to feature the experiences of “famous” members so centrally. This makes me doubt the conclusion even though I mostly agree with it.
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I roughly imagine the rationalist community like this: There is a ‘first circle’ of people who draw a lot of attention and have direct influence on people in and outside the community like Yudkowski, Galef, Muehlhauser, Scott A.. Then there is a ‘second circle’ of people whose voices are heard mostly inside the community and who know a lot of people belonging to the first circle, like, say, Ozy and Alicorn. Then if you continue like this towards the other extreme, there are a lot of people who identify with rationalist ideas and follow the discussions/developments of the inner circles, but who do not associate in their daily life with other people who identify as rationalists.
I guess the talks address the kind of people who would like to derive a sense of identity from rationalist ideas but who have a hard time finding other rationalists they can connect to.
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This matches my experience. I think the loneliness thing became more of an issue as the community rapidly grew, and the people who founded it became saturated with friends.
What I’ve heard described, and which somewhat matches my experience in New York (but to a lesser degree) is that people outside the first two circles are generally trying to network their way up, competing for the attention of the higher status people.
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(I am not personally lonely, but I consider myself part of the second circle described. To the best I can tell, newcomers to the NY community don’t end up spending much one-on-one time with each other. I don’t spend much one-on-one time with them because I tend to be busy and social-saturated. I don’t know how much that generalizes but it’s my personal experience).
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” I do not think the experience of a Scott or an Ozy is really relevant to the discussion of whether rationalists feel alienated in general.”
If you don’t think Ozy’s personal experiences are a good lense through which to analyse wider social trends and dynamics, I wonder why you’re reading this blog?
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ozy is a very non-central example of ‘person in the rationalist community’, when it comes to their views on areas where they’re a central example and they are talking about the experience of a central example, or when it comes to areas where they’re a noncentral example and they talk about the experience of being noncentral, then that’s fine and they have lots of interesting things to say. But when they’re an extremely non-central example, and they’re talking about the central experience, not so much.
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Did you miss the part where Divia asked everyone to raise their hand as high as they were lonely? That felt like a big wakeup call for me. Almost everyone’s hand seemed *really high*.
I was very surprised, not because I’d explicitly considered whether the people around me were lonely, but just because I’m not lonely and typical mind is default mind. So I have since talked to almost everyone I’ve interacted with directly since then – granted, that’s not a thing I do often, so at most ten people – about how lonely they are and why. Each of them, without exception, has said they’re lonely.
Several of them suggested a big part of it involved lack of romantic partner (or lack of well-matched romantic partner). That definitely *is* a thing I would expect to hit our community harder than most, because of the huge gender imbalance. But most of them also cited feeling like they don’t know how to make friends or how to cultivate friendships in their current life circumstances.
Even I feel that way; I would be happier if it were as easy for me to have friendships as it was in college. Other people agreed with me about this. The culture’s very different from a university, so it requires actual effort to end up in the kinds of pleasant social situations that used to happen to us accidentally all the time in college. But, since “be in friendly social situations” is not *obviously* part of the average rationalist/EA’s overall life strategy for saving the world, it’s not something that feels like it deserves our personal effort.
Furthermore, if you’re looking to your own experience of socialization for evidence of how much good socializing there is – or even just looking to people who are willing to say something about it – you’re going to have a huge sampling bias in favor of people feeling socially connected and not lonely. If there were 100 people and only 10 of them ever socialized with the others, and then you tried to estimate how lonely people are by considering how lonely the other 9 people you socialize with are, you’re going to neglect 90% of the people. Also, if you ask everybody how lonely they are and there’s a stigma against appearing lonely because it make you look weak an needy, it’ll most be those 10 non-lonely people who respond.
I’m obviously in favor of *checking* things before believing them, but I don’t think the evidence is still out on this. I don’t know whether rationalists are substantially more lonely than other groups of adults. But I am quite confident, for good reason, that rationalists are generally lonely.
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Well, I raised my hand during it, because (a) I am somewhat lonely, on account of being socially phobic and agoraphobic (b) everyone else was raising their hands! There was a person who said from a podium that I should raise my hand if I were lonely with an expectation that I should do it! I am not very good at resisting the Asch Conformity Experiment!
And as I pointed out in this post I am, objectively speaking, quite unalienated.
But yes I agree there are weaknesses in my anecdotes, and I am glad that this thread is leading to the collection of more evidence. I’d really like it if we collected data in the survey– that seems significantly less likely to be confounded by people like me being conformist.
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>everyone else was raising their hands! There was a person who said from a podium that I should raise my hand if I were lonely with an expectation that I should do it! I am not very good at resisting the Asch Conformity Experiment!
I completely did not think of that. That is good to hear. Now I want to repeat the experiment with Divia saying something like, “Raise your hand as high as you feel like your social needs are being met.”
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I feel very disconnected from the rationalist community, but I think that’s because I live just outside of Philadelphia. The rationalist communities I’ve heard of that sound good to be a part of are in San Francisco and NYC.
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Yeah, this post is mostly about the Bay Area and environs.
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I’m a rationalist person from a small Russian city. I’m not sure there is a single other independent rationalist here I can meet. I don’t feel disconnected, somehow, at least while there are blogs like this one and the Codex (that is, both “really good” and “alive”), even though I would really like to meet the people from the community in person.
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Has any rationalist survey asked any questions about loneliness? I feel that having to rely on anecdotes is not great for a community so devoted to empiricism.
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Huh, was there *any* greater community survey in the last year?
It might be helpful to be able to randomize wording to be either isolation or connection – not seeing much for free options to do that.
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I feel disconnected, but a large part is probably because i’m in the UK and most of you guys seem to be in the bay area. Also while i get a little bit of interaction on tumblr, i don’t really have much interesting or profound to say most of the time like all the people always talking on tumblr do, and i’m not close enough to anyone to have all of the ‘fun conversations’ that people seem to have with each other.
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I too live in the UK and feel disconnected for similar reasons, I’m willing to attempt solving the connection problem if you are.
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I’m not sure how relevant my experience is since I’m not really a rationalist (“rationalist-adjacent” seems right though), but I went to Bay Area solstice, and that experience itself made me feel lonely. (Not extremely lonely since I wasn’t there by myself, but still.) There were so many people around me who seemed extremely interesting – as well as people I know to be extremely interesting but have never talked to, like Ozy – and they seemed to mostly know each other and I had no idea how to talk to any of them! The cool people knew the lyrics to all of Hamilton and could sing along to it together and had a bunch of shared jargon that I feel weird using and inside jokes that I maybe even had heard but wasn’t really part of. It was also loud and that made it stressful to talk to anyone, and also mingling is just a difficult interaction format for me.
Which is all fine; I don’t think the event was exactly intended to be a getting-to-know-new-people event, and that’s fine. It’s just that while for some people it was definitely a loneliness-reducing event, for me it actually caused loneliness.
I think part of it is just that I tend to be a lurker who is interested in what other people have to say but often don’t want to say things myself in a very visible way, so I don’t have a Tumblr presence or whatnot through which to make myself known, I just read other people’s interesting blogs, which means I’m way more aware of various interesting people than they are of me. So it makes total sense that this would happen.
Given that I am more interested in talking to interesting people and making friends than becoming a rationalist in any conceptual way*, what’s a good way to get to know people from this community?
*Not that I have any opposition to any rationalist concepts, I just have a weird resistance to taking on new identities
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Man, I should really post some sort of public announcement.
HELLO. I, OZY, AM GOING TO BE AT SOLSTICE. I WILL BE VERY GEEKED TO MEET YOU IF YOU LIKE MY BLOG. HOWEVER, I AM VERY SHY, SO YOU WILL HAVE TO START THE CONVERSATION WITH ME.
I am sad that there were people who like my blog I didn’t get to meet. 😦
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Heh, I tend to feel like there’s something uncomfortable and creepy about a situation where I know more about someone than they know about me, even when there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation like them having a cool blog. As a result, I get even more awkward than usual and avoid even making eye contact. (I think I’ve actually twice been in this situation with regards to you, oddly.)
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I mean, occasionally someone from the Rationalist Community will notice me being sad and contact me, but I’m just really bad at conversation and that’s pretty much all there is on the internet. Even if I could get to the Bay Area, I don’t think that would change and I’ just wind up in the same situation you described. Forever.
(That and I am really out of practice with sounding smart, which wouldn’t be such a big deal if it didn’t apparently reveal how not-so-smart I was all along. 10 years ago, I could speak a little math and remembered what a T Test is. At least I can still programming? I mean, the reason I stick around the rationalist internet in spite of the alienation is because I want to be smarter and lost the ability to do this via Google at some point in the past 10 years.)
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I’m pretty much failing at being brief, and I don’t know how to disentangle my feelings from this comment (without editing it for another half hour). So let me just answer this query with my general experiences–feelings included.
I was an early member of OBLW-NYC back in 2009. I even attended the Robin Hanson OB meetup in May before the group officially formed. I still have the NY Fed business cards that Will Eden (Ryan) handed out in Central Park. If I recall correctly, Jasen used that line of connection as well as the volunteers’ mailing list to gather people for the meetup after Singularity Summit 2009. The year and a half after that were amazing times. I was a lot more anxious and depressed back then, having recently dropped out/determined I couldn’t go back to undergrad at NYU, facing some stupid debts, and having lost (being too ashamed to face) most of my old friends from school. Joining OBLW-NYC and connecting with everyone gave me hope for life. I’m proud of what I’ve managed for myself since then, but I miss those times. By the next time I volunteered for Singularity Summit NYC in 2011, I knew things had changed.
Yeah, I know the group didn’t leave me–I left. Or, I gradually fell off the wagon. I lived in Central NJ, not NYC. I was basically unemployed during that time. My younger brother–who worked a minimum wage jobback then–would just hand me the $27 something dollars to take the train in to Penn Station, so I could go to the meetup for a few hours. I was far from proud that I couldn’t pay for myself. I was far from proud about anything in my current life-state. I put a lot of hope in my involvement in OBLW-NYC. But when things didn’t change much for me, or at least, I couldn’t tell a convincing story about how things were turning around, going to meetings and talking to people became a source of anxiety. That was more frustrating as the Personal Change! Instrumental Rationality! became a more prevalent theme. It became harder to justify spending that much money to have a social life.
I remember someone (but not who) asking me why I didn’t just ask my parents for money to attend weekly meetups. When I mentioned that my parents had their own worries and I couldn’t justify, they were surprised and said, “Oh, so your parents aren’t exactly well off financially either.” I just remember being really, really fucking ashamed.
I gotta clarify: I’ve had social anxiety for a lot of my life. So, going to any meeting of any sort is often likely to contribute to my anxiety. I haven’t checked how it is recently, but I’ve often got depressed at parties/meetups where I felt like I wasn’t being successfully social, where wasn’t having fun like I was supposed to (e.g. dancing), where I didn’t feel all that significant. Add the tendency to get upset and more self-critical when I notice this happening–I’d come to a party or social gathering a little nervous but happy but have a 50-50 chance of leaving in a mire of anxiety and depression that would often last for a few more days.
Eventually this shame, anxiety, and depression began to taint my involvement on the mailing list. I cared about everyone, I considered all these folks my friends–but I felt shitty hearing about meetings I couldn’t be there for, or how their lives were changing, or social events that people were getting together for–but I couldn’t afford, because I hadn’t gotten my shit together.
I still occasionally tried to go to a meetup or an event. I was still friends with some members. But when I went, things felt increasingly unfamiliar, and I felt increasingly irrelevant. There were some people I hadn’t met yet. That wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was people who I’d met a few times in meetups past, who I remembered, but who didn’t remember me. There were also things/rituals going on that I didn’t feel like I could really be part of, because I was no longer part of the regular, tight group. Cuddle piles, inside jokes, shared music, shared books, songs. I was never, never unwelcome. But I sensed I’d become an outsider.
“Oliver’s here,” a long time friend in the group announced during one meeting.
“Oh, I never noticed he hadn’t been coming,” said someone else I had considered a friend. I still think of him as a friend today, and I guess it was an innocent observation, or a joke. But it hurt back then.
In spring of 2011, I stayed with a friend from the group for a week. I had a good time hanging out for the most part. But late that week was the big meetup at the Houston Whole Foods–Eliezer came to visit. I was cheerful and somewhat social up to a point, but partway through the meeting, I got depressed. I sat in the corner by myself did Anki reviews for the rest of meeting. When someone asked me if I was okay, I claimed that I was having a caffeine crash. In my head the anxious dialogue kept going on about how much of a fucking loser I was, how it made sense that I was irrelevant to the community, how I could be so socially inept around such a high proportion of self-proclaimed socially inept people.
Something similar happened when I volunteered for Singularity Summit 2011. I got really depressed, probably in big part because of sleep deprivation. I felt worthless all the time, so I got through it by trying to work as hard and as much as possible. I kept asking why the fuck I was even there. People kept scolding me for not leaving my post–telling me to just STOP. They told to go take breaks, to go listen to talks, to go chat with people, go enjoy myself. When I talked to people, I felt like I had only awkward things to say. I just wanted to keep moving, keep working, keep being useful to distract myself from what felt like slowly being crushed.
Okay, cool story, Oliver. This is getting pretty extraneous–this is more about anxiety and depression than about the community. Maybe this whole thing is, and there are actually pretty few helpful, objective observations. But I guess the takeaway point is, I really loved the NYC Rationalist Community, so much that when I began to feel distant and out of place, it became a major fixation for my anxiety and depression.
I really, really want to emphasize how favorably I look on my volunteer experience, even though it was internally excruciating at the time because of mental illness. But 2011 Singularity Summit was really the big dropping-off point for me.
After that, I only met up with specific, old friends from the group. In 2012 I was a guest at a wedding, which I arrived late for, due to usual ADHD issues and a panic attack. I am very grateful to have been there, despite how depressed I was. I also got to see friends from the old group who were visiting from the Bay Area, and their baby. Somewhere between those events, I attended a farewell party for another friend who was moving away from NYC.
Since then, I really haven’t seen anyone from the community in person or attended events. I read/lurk on SSC and here. I don’t read LW unless someone explicitly points there. I used read FB discussions where rationalist friends are talking, but I don’t log in any more.
Something else: over a year ago, close friend of mine from the group decided to cut ties with everyone from the community. As far as I know, he still hasn’t surfaced publically. I only discussed it over email with one other person from the original OBLW group. I don’t know how other people have taken it. I don’t really know what’s going on in most people’s lives.
I feel I’m much better now, in terms of anxiety and depression. Even though I don’t really have much of an in person social life, I don’t consider myself lonely. I’ve gotten much closer to my brothers, and our extended friends group kind of forms a loose community. We all talk on Slack and on forums I’ve set up. I’m really the only rationalist in my friends group. Only a few people are interested in the kinds of stuff that is normal in the LW community–research, evidence, probability, risk, EA. But this new community has been a much greater source of good things in my case. I think it’s been instrumental in making my anxiety and depression seem nonexistent compared to what I experienced during many periods of my life.
A while ago, I started following along with Rationalist Tumblr. It was great for a while; I really liked the quality of the discussions there. But it came along with reblogging of a lot of fandoms I’m just not part of. There was a tiny bit of an echo of feeling left out, not quite being part of things. I sensed some old anxieties creeping up. So I ended up unfollowing everyone.
I don’t want to push any conclusions here. I don’t know how relevant my experience is at all. After writing this, I see that this story is more about depression and anxiety than any implied critique of the group. I think this post got so long, and contains so much personal stuff because I’ve been wanting to explain to people why I kind of fell off the radar. But it always felt too self-absorbed to do on say, FB or directly by email. And if no one was going out of their way to ask me, maybe it didn’t matter.
Maybe of interest for the future: I’m hoping to move back to NYC this year, and I’d like to reconnect with people I lost touch with. I don’t know how much I’ll get that involved in the NYC Rationalist community. My gut feeling is that both I and the group have kind of diverged in certain ways. I think I’ve adapted to an identity of a visitor, or outsider who has some friends and acquaintances in the community. I still care about everyone and share values with many people in the larger community. I guess we’ll see.
Agh, I can’t believe I’m posting this mess. Here goes.
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I agree with a few other commentors that you’re primarily going to know people who aren’t very lonely, on account of knowing people and having strong social connections and talking about their experiences in forums you’re reading.
It would be nice to have more data. I have no idea how typical my experiences are. I moved to they bay area in 2010, and I haven’t managed to make any real social connections. I feel very lonely and isolated, and a large part of that is dysfunctional attitudes around socialization. I’ve peripherally followed the rationalist community since before moving here, but I’ve never managed to contribute, as I very rarely manage to come up with anything to say. I’ve managed to attend a couple of meetups, but they were too loud, too many people, and I’m just not experienced enough with group socialization to be able to manage to build any social connections there. I’ve been lurking in a few of the IRC channels, but I rarely manage to contribute to the conversation. I’ve followed some of rationalist tumblr, but I almost never manage to come up with productive contributions to the conversations there.
I don’t have any particular evidence that my experiences are very common, or whether I’m the kind of person that a community would want to reach out to or otherwise try to be more inclusive of. I have very little idea of any changes anyone could make or activities they could perform such that I would be successful at joining and participating in a community. This is not only a difficult thing to measure, but also a tricky problem to actually decide on a formalization of. Which people precisely are people claiming should be reached out to, and why? If someone isn’t successfully part of the community, why are people claiming that others should go out of their way to bring them in? Is it just growth for the sake of growth? Altruism? What’s the actual goal and motivation? How do you measure success?
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Optimally, everybody who would like to be part of the community in a satisfying way should be able to. Besides just being a good attitude, this is an ideological necessity. If your vision of society doesn’t include everyone, ones kind of altruism is essentially worthless.
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Me. I am a rationalist (ish, aspiring, maybe, as best I can) living in the Bay Area very near the train, and entirely lost and lonely and not really belonging. I went to Solstice, and sometimes one rationalist out of the dozen or so that I know on facebook invites me to things. Sometimes I go to the Monday game nights or the Friday CFAR meetups, but they were sparsely attended and I usually work at those times (because software and my apparent boundary issues, wheee). Mostly I lurk and wonder about what all the things that from context I know are happening in the places that I am not, are.
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Not addressing loneliness in the rationalist community seems to me like a missed opportunity, considering the research on its possible effects on productivity at work, income, and the cognitive decline and function(the latter applying at least in older people, but I wouldn’t be surprised to discover it in young adults as well if so much of our cognitive research wasn’t geared towards dementia prevention). I wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers of lonely people in the rationalist community run closer to 90%, and that’s saddening.
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