When One Is Holding A Hammer ... Part 3

When we hold hammers together and collaborate...

This is part 3 of a series. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

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As I contemplated why it was that people around me didn't like it when I was proselytizing the wonders of "Functions", here's a conclusion I came to:

These are not my people. They don't understand what I care about, and getting them to understand is impractical. I need to find my people.

I first felt it when I came into contact with the Effective Altruism movement/community – the magic of community. 

Every conversation opens more enticing threads, carrying on organically for hours at a time, full of joy and vitality. I found people I looked forward to seeing every day, building things together in a way that isn't just a veiled attempt for success or money. People were genuine, kind, and intelligent. They cared about the world and about how to help it. Most importantly, they cared about what I cared about! Talking about "Functions" was never wrong here. On the contrary, it was welcomed and fostered. It was the most enjoyable and thriving learning environment I've found up until that point in my life.

I finally found my people, I thought to myself.

The Effective Altruism movement is a remarkable phenomenon – one of the modern movements centered around doing good that has reached a significant scale. By doing good here, it means ambitiously and robustly doing good. Robustly here broadly can be translated as analytical, and one of the most prominent ideas around the time in the community was "Expected Value". This was the idea that we can estimate outcomes by taking the value of the outcome and multiplying it by the probability of the outcome (e.g. Suppose I can take an action that has a 50% chance of gaining $10, my action would have an Expected Value (EV) of $5). 

How did I know this "Expected Value" idea was a cool new thing? Well, unlike my "functions" stage at home, everyone had EV on their lips and in their blog posts. It wasn't just me this time. Swarms of intelligent and good-hearted people were subscribed to the gospel!

The community was a powerful learning context. Every meet-up, every conference, was not only a place for social communion, they served as the basis for learning the praxis of central ideas within the philosophy. Not only did we discuss economic theory, but we also applied it to everything we can think of, together. 

Don't waste your time talking about the weather, discuss the EV of learning to give vs. direct work! 

Want to go on a walk and just talk about if what Elon is doing is positive or negative EV? Sure!

Everyone had hammers and everything was nails. It was wondrous fun and inspiring learning. It was basically nerd heaven. 

Turns out, a great way to drill in useful ideas like Expected Value is to just form a community where everyone is talking about it passionately all the time. The idea(s) becomes the celebrity, and Probability Theory becomes the lore on which one pours attention. Schools can only wish they could achieve the same fervor from the EAs devouring math and philosophy and whatever else that was relevant to the crusade of doing good better. Truly, a marvel of pedagogy has been achieved.¹

Learning this way can be immensely enjoyable, rewarding, and connecting. It can foster a context in which one naturally wants to pay attention to what others are learning. We organically want to support each other by directing attention to what is being learned, thus benefiting from diverse perspectives. This is enabled by both the degree we trust each other to share the same learning objectives as well as the social sense of belonging gained.²

The conviviality of a learning context like this one can be nothing less than magnetic, forming a culture in which people participate with passion (or zealotry). The learning objects sometimes even become revered, anchoring the culture, and forming its identity and reputation.

However, while friendships were made and learning was done, like my "functions" stage that annoyed those around me, now we have an entire (increasingly influential) community of people yelling "ExPeCTed VAluEs!!".³

😬

Like humans, whose learning evolves, communities do too. 

We could notice and study the evolution of a community's learning by studying how its Overton Window shifts over time. 

Since communities are comprised of humans, it means that two layers of learning co-evolve together. One of the individuals within and one for the community as an aggregate whole – each influencing the direction and magnitude of the other.

Some people, whose learning starts to diverge from the Overton Window vector, would naturally drift away from the community.

Others, whose learning starts to converge with the Overton Window, would then be attracted closer.

As everyone conducts the search for "my people", relationships (and institutions) are forged and broken along this tectonic movement.

In the Effective Altruism case, I no longer perceive Expected Values as a primary learning focus of the community – it has pretty much "already been learned". It's a term that you can throw around and expect people to understand, but it's no longer on everyone's lips and blogs. The community has grown (along with its relatively young population) and now has other things at the forefront of its learning.

In my case, I somehow discovered, partially thanks to the friends I made in the community, that the answer "Effective Altruism" is not a suitable response to the question of "Who are my people?". If anything, the question itself seems ... off. 

The answer to that question, for me, is less so a community per se, but more so the availability of a particular experience. In other words, "my people" is not actually quite apt, because it's not defined as "There exists some Alex or Bob, whom when I discover them, we would mutually recognize permanently that we have found "my-people-ness". 

Instead, the question could perhaps be rephrased as: 

"What kind of relational experience do I want to live and learn in?"

The joy and vitality I described in the Effective Altruism example above is an illustration of this experience in which I want to live and learn. It's a palpable, life-aligned kind of experience.

Yet, my experience shows me that these experiences are fragile and most of all – Ephemeral. They come and go, with a confounding degree of mystery. Yet, when attention is properly paid, these (often micro) moments glimmer everywhere, like virtual particles teasing at possibilities of permanence.

How to cultivate a learning context where such experiences can be stably abundant for all constituents is then a worthwhile undertaking for me. In other words, the focus changes from "who are my people" to fostering a context where others can and would want to also share in the experiences we all find Life in.

Which ... circles it back to Community again. 😅

Whether "Community" is even an appropriate term at this point is a bit beyond me, but three components seem important to this particular reconstruction of the community: 

• The first is that this community technically already exists (in the moments when others also share these experiences), but also technically doesn't exist (insofar as they are ephemeral and hard to coordinate around). To this end, the undertaking represents a "search-and-create" function for life-aligned co-learning experiences. The search-and-create function would then itself be a sub-function of the learning function that is central to the community's constitution. This feels best illustrated by the image of a mycelium, underground and fruiting based on where fitting contexts emerge.

• The second is that this community's “Overton Window” is necessarily quite abstract. It has to recursively allow for people's learning evolution, including when it gets contradictory/conflicting with the person themselves, other people, or the community overall. For example, if the community holds the value of something like "learning is the most important activity", but one person is in a period of learning something about "less learning and more doing", it has to somehow prevent disintegration in this process. The idea of "What is Learning?" would need to take on higher dimensionality, similar to how I described Relationships in Part 2. To this end, this community, at least at the beginning, would likely look quite strange from the outside, because it is a constant ball of contradictions, on the edge of disorientation and insight.

• The third is that this community, despite its fungi-like and contradictory properties, manages viable means of interface with the broader world. This includes the practical, like sustainable economic flows. This would also be ecological, like the inflow and outflow of people. If the "community" in fact is constituted around a particular experience of living and learning, anyone may decide for any duration that they don't want to focus on this experience. Lastly, this central learning orientation also needs to extend beyond its constituents to other communities and individuals. For example, if the community is going through a period of learning about ideas around wholeness and non-reductive ways of thinking, the friction between the described-above “EA community” focused on compressing evaluations to expected values has to somehow be transmuted to something other than conflict or avoidance.

Abstract as it may sound, I think there are historical analogs that help flesh out the picture. The most distinct of which is simply Science (more so early days rather than the present day), which I think captures all three points exceptionally well. A concrete expression of this might be the Invisible College.

A community shaped like this seems very much like a place I would want to live and learn in.

Naturally, while this "When One Is Holding A Hammer" series contains some of my observations on how people and groups learn, it would also, of course, be a reflection of the "what" and the "how" of my own learning. 

Which is to say that, apparently, I am holding a hammer that is about how we could hold hammers more wisely and compassionately together.

In the very sense of what I'm trying to describe by this "community" or learning context or ecosystem, where sharing the marvels of what we are learning is an experience of Joy and Vitality:

The process of writing this post is itself a search-and-create function for that very aliveness.

The act of sharing these posts then is a motion that seeks to summon that "community" into moments of existence between us.

Through the act of sharing and feedback, it gives me invaluable information that facilitates my learning to foster this experience more in the future.

“You must give birth to your images.

They are the future waiting to be born.

Fear not the strangeness you feel.

The future must enter you long before it happens.”  

– Rainer Maria Rilke

1. Surely, a non-trivial number of college students’ grades counterfactually improved as a result of needing to get more literate in the EA community. How's that for a cause area.

2. The social connection part here is of notable weight as often the participants are likely to already feel degrees of social loneliness, and the value of social belonging can often be under-counted as a part of the calculus for participating. This results in cases where people would continue to devote themselves to a cause or idea mostly propelled by the desire for social belonging rather than intrinsic subscription to the ideas.

3. Scarily, the very excitement of learning together can also form the insulation of echo chambers. Add in some money, sprinkle some existential risk angst, and we quickly find that we are far too busy (not to mention increasingly influential) to not act in the world – let the haters hate, as the saying goes.