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Wellness Wednesday for January 11, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I'm thinking more and more I want a tribe, but as a grown-ass adult, everyone seems so atomized, I don't know where to look.

What I mean by a tribe is: a group of people with common identity who meet over and over again non-competitively to accomplish a shared goal. Traditionally, this would be foraging food, but we obviously don't do that anymore. Defecting from a tribal group ranges from forbidden to frowned on. I think this type of group is ideal for human, or at least my, happiness.

Examples that persist in modern society:

  • Military units

  • Musical bands / performance arts troupes

  • School classes, especially if there are collaborative projects

  • Sports teams

  • Creative development teams (eg indie games studios)

  • Informal groups of neighbor parents who take care of each other kids. This lasts while the kids are still young.

  • Advocacy groups and volunteer groups.... sometimes. The ones I've been in don't feel like tribes because there's no shared rituals or pressure about backing out.

  • Church.... sometimes.

  • Work, but very rarely. For the most part everyone is gaming work for maximum personal gain, and are competing with their coworkers for resources, so it's not a tribe.

Am I mising any? Are there ways to predict which volunteer groups, churches, and working environments will be tribal rather than atomistic?

I've wanted to create my own tribe for quite a while, one which could probably best be described as a conspiracy. I think that with very high levels of effort/engagement, a small group of people (5-20) can do incredibly large things. A few people to make the money, a few people to build connections, and the rest leverage skills as needed to get stuff done.

As a random example (more unethical than what I'd want to do) let's say you want some ideas to make their way to the state governor. So you send a few people to move into the guy's neighborhood and join his church, a few more to track him and find spots he visits (maybe a favorite bar?), maybe you send a few people to befriend his kids or something. Then talk about those ideas within earshot, so that they sound like they're coming from all sorts of different sources and are something he should be thinking about.

I guess I'm just saying, I and many other people are more than smart enough to do something about politics rather than talking about it. My actual approach would probably be something like

  1. Build a highly successful business to get crazy amounts of money

  2. Go from there

I'm sure there would be quite interesting options once there, but right now I'd be interested in developing or promoting free school curriculums (Eureka Math in particular is terrible) and funding certain litigation. Step 1 is the hard part, of course.

I have no idea how to get this started. I've spent my whole life looking for people who fill the exact niche that I need with little success--people here on themotte are the closest so far. Seems like the real way to do this is to either get rich and fund an organization, or join an organization funded by 1 rich person.

I've wanted to create my own tribe for quite a while, one which could probably best be described as a conspiracy.

(1) Build a highly successful business to get crazy amounts of money

Step 1 is the hard part, of course.

Step 0 is actually the hardest part. Step 0 is finding the right group with the right shared memes that they won't defect, even when the tribe has lots of capital that can be siphoned off for individual ends. An unbelievable number of starry-eyed do-gooder organizations have completed Step 1, but became corrupt, full of sinecures, and spent most of their energy on self-perpetuation rather than their sticker goal.

Take Christianity in the second century, which looks like a kind of confederacy of tribes. Christianity took over the world because it instilled an ideology on its members where they would not defect, where they continued to tithe their spare income, spread the good news, and obey their pesbyteroi no matter what. They refused to compromise on doctrine. Even when Diocletion and Galerius forbid Christians from careers, tortured them, killed them they did not defect. This is the nature of conspiracy that completed Step 0 successfully, then took about 250 years to do Step 1.

I would recommend, if you want a tribe with the level of cohesion to change the world, you must first become a prophet. As for making such a tribe out of The Motte, that may be like herding cats. Contrarianism is good for perceiving truth, but it makes for easy defectors.

That said, tribing up with rationalists is interesting idea. But they're very spread out and tend to have good things going where they are.

Good point. I do think that it's much easier to change the world nowadays--those with intelligence have much larger levers than they used to. So hopefully step 0 will be made easier because the group will be so much smaller.

TBH I've pretty much given up on the dream, and am now hopeful to just grow rich myself and then go from there. I've been wanting to do a big effortpost on this for a while, but too busy getting rich lol. Seems like the modus operandi of billionaires is to surround themselves with intelligent people who help them manage everything, and that sounds like a perfect starting point to me, if sadly lacking in true loyalty and unity of purpose.

I wouldn't want to team up with rationalists so much as TheMotte rationalists in particular. I think the former has essentially lost to Berkeley (great essay btw if you haven't read it) and attempts to resurrect the original purpose now seem quite prone to entryism.