There’s been a recent trend of How I Got A Rationalist Social Circle posts going around, and I’ve noticed that most of them begin with “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!”
I mean if we’re going to have an Official Rationalist Welcome Wagon Alison’s probably the right person for the job
I approve of being the official welcomer. Anyone who wants to be initiated should totally hit me up.
Actually, tbh, your talents are being underutilized. Too bad The Rationalist Community isn’t the type of organization that has marketing pushes to Recruit More Girls.
We could put you in a sexy outfit and have you dart around the edges of the Blue Tribe, enticing young girls to follow you into the Forests of Rationalism like some kind of gay will-o-the-wisp.
What!? Why would I prey on innocent Blue Tribe girls and turn them into My People??? *nervous laughter as I close my OkCupid tabs*
…why wouldn’t we be the type of organization to have a marketing push to Recruit More Girls? The rationalist community is what we make of it, and I don’t see any reason not to make a girlsmoreofrecruitment drive of it. We don’t have a rationalist czar telling us _not_ to do it.
As someone who grudgingly matches the description “girl” (at least by people who don’t know that my brain wants to belong in the “totally made-up category” of “N E O T E N I C androgyny” instead) and who perfectly matches the description “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!” I wholeheartedly endorse this approach.
IDK. I’m kind of off-put by pushes to recruit members of $DEMOGRAPHIC. Social communities thrive based on shared interests and values, and efforts to attract more people of a given demographic usually trade off against that.
I am all for recruiting more people with rationalist interests and values. If they’re female, great! But targeting women specifically would almost certainly mean compromising some feature of the existing community dynamic.
I enjoying being around members of my demographic as much as the next person, but if aiming for women means less Tolkien in textbooks, or aiming for Caribbean people means raising the level of acceptable homophobia, then no thank you.
I mean, a lot of the reason pushes to include particular demographics exist is because there are lots of people who are part of the demographics in question who would totally love to be part of the rationalist community, but there are other factors preventing members of the demographic from joining.
For example, despite loving Luminosity I initially avoided the rationalist community because I had heard that a lot of members were unusually hostile towards women. This has, for the most part, not been my experience. If Rationalist Recruitment Teams were a thing it would have been very helpful if one of them had said to me, politely and not in a Gotcha You Evil Assumption-Making SJer way, “hey, actually, most of us don’t hate women over here, check out all these high-status women in our community”.
the point of campaigns like this should be to find people who would totally belong in the community but are staying away because they’re worried about hostility
I am totally in favour of that! I would like people who are afraid that we’ll be hostile to feel welcome. I am personally willing to roll out the welcome wagon.
Um, we have obviously seen very very different recruitment campaigns. In my experience, as a black person who has been active in a bunch of disproportionately-white internet groups, the average campaign leans more toward grabbing random people off the street and trying to integrate them into your group than toward targeting actually interested people.
I mean, the things I saw ranged from patronising (“We’ll get more black people if we talk about hip hop a lot!”) to actively destructive (”Our comic forum is going to ban discussions of any comics that don’t have at least one black character”). Have you seen a bunch of white guys desperately screaming into the void about hip hop in the hopes that their black senpais will notice them before? It’s the saddest thing. Three-legged puppies with cancer are more cheerful.
As my OkCupid activity indicates, I’m perfectly happy proselytising to women. I do it a lot! I tell people about the gospel of bednets and transhumanism and glowfic automatically. I’d be happy to join black student groups at Stanford and encourage anyone who’s a good fit to join us. Just from the fact that I like being around other women and black people, I’ll probably do more than my share of converting women and blacks.
But the moment someone says “You know what would attract black people? If we stopped talking about [heresy of the month]”, I will be the first person to say “Fuck black people. We don’t need them anyway!”
Yeah by “no one is suggesting” I totally meant “I am not suggesting/no one in the rationalist community is suggesting”, I have definitely seen really terrible demographic-based outreach campaigns. (My absolute favorite are the ones that are like “hey girls! You don’t have to be an Icky Nerd to be a programmer! You can totally be good at computers and ALSO perform femininity, you don’t have to be like those gross girls who DON’T perform femininity! Empowerment!”).
What I’m getting at here is that we shouldn’t decide not to do a thing entirely just because some people are terrible at doing it, especially if a well-executed version of the thing could do a lot of good. And also that there should be more well-executed versions of the thing.
Good demographic-based outreach campaigns would be a great idea. I’m just not sure how to stop them from degenerating into really bad outreach campaigns. Most of the bad campaigns I’ve seen started off super reasonable, and then they collapsed in on themselves.
I don’t know how to do the thing in a way that I can be sure won’t end with egg on my face, so I’m hesitant to start now. If I learn more about what makes campaigns go sour first, then I might be less averse to trying.
Suggested datapoint for a good demographic-based outreach campaign: you doing the thing you are doing, exactly as you are doing. Sexy outfit optional but probably situationally useful sometimes.
Someone should run the data on this but I suspect that the best and reliablest way to fund a demographic-based outreach campaign for the community would be to pay your bills and arrange other things done so that you could fully focus on your comparative advantages of being an awesome person to talk to and introducing people to other awesome people.
Of course, it could be that my personal biases have simply led me to rationalize why we should let an Alison loose on the internets and meatspaces without being constrained by boring things, but out of all the things to rationalize I don’t think that one is anywhere near the worst.
This was actually basically my plan for working for Effective Altruism Outreach. Then that may or may not have fallen through.
But, like, if anyone wants to found Less Wrong Outreach and hire me, I’d definitely consider it.
Okay, I’m publicly committing to funding Degenerate N E O T E N I C Bonobo Rationalist Cuckfest Outreach once I make enough money that it’d be less expensive than my GWWC pledge, on the condition that I get to call it the Degenerate N E O T E N I C Bonobo Rationalist Cuckfest Outreach at least informally on tumblr. Additional funders to push that limit down are welcome.
2 months ago · tagged #future precariat billionaire · 110 notes · source: inquisitivefeminist · .permalink
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anthropicprincipal reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:For most X, the best way to get more women who are X is to get women who are not X to be X. But, Rationalism seems to...
mnemosynoid reblogged this from sinesalvatorem and added:Oo pick me! Can I be Officially Initiated/Welcomed please?
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Sensible!Also, like, this entire conversation is based on a flippant comment I made in a joke post, if I were seriously...
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