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I recently saw an item in my newfeed about The American Exchange Project:
There was some positive feedback in the news article I read. I found it a bit surprising just how much the rural/urban divide has grown. I've often lived between the two areas with my schools often having kids living in high density housing along with kids raising barn animals. My parents preferred living rurally, but still had to live close to cities to find jobs.
I've been on two exchange programs myself. One as a middle/high schooler going to Europe with Student Ambassadors (a now dead org). And the second as more of a work exchange trip going to the company's India office. There is something undeniably effective about just having very different people sit down and talk/interact with each other in a non-violent setting. Not that I really disliked either set of people before visiting them, but I felt I definitely understood them better afterwards. There are coincidences of living, and the things you see living in an area. They just sorta seep into your conscious. My young middle school self noticed that Europe generally did not give a crap about topless women. Tits galore on billboards and beaches in Spain. Europe was also pretty open with alcohol, and the 15 year old in the German family I stayed with openly told her parents about the drinking party she was going to. They had to remind her that I wasn't allowed to go, and American drinking ages had to be explained. Bunch of things I noticed in India as well, main one was just the sheer volume of people.
Had a shower thought today about how some people (like Joe Rogan) thought Covid would bring us closer together as we worked to solve and fight a collective problems. I think we maybe mostly agree that did not happen. I'm starting to think that covid was the opposite kind of problem we need. To get that kind of problem solving, humanity coming together juice, I think more people need to be offline, meeting in person, and ignoring things happening too far away from them.
Staring at the sun today.Watching the eclipse today, reminded me about solar flares. I'd predict that a widespread solar flare that knocked out communication networks would probably leave us all a little happier than Covid. It would probably be very bad for some people, but we'd know less about those people.That exchange project feels like one of the things which people feel the need to talk up, but doesn’t have that much actual effect. Like the ineffective altruists.
But also, I don’t see how it could be bad? It’s absolutely wild how much sortition is involved in the U.S. For a New York resident to visit, I dunno, Dallas—that’s further than Paris-to-Warsaw. The trains are embarrassing, too. We’re firmly in road-trip territory. And the issue is much worse for those who don’t have the disposable income or time to cross the continent for a few days.
I grew up close enough to take an a school field trip to our national capital. I can’t imagine how much of the country never got that chance.
There's a thing in the Mormon church where they send teenagers to evangelize randos. It seems a little weird at first glance: everybody knows that they're not going to get any bites. But getting new recruits isn't the point -- the point is to absolutely demonstrate how bad non-Mormons can act.
That's probably not intended (either here, or in the Mormon church). Yet I wonder what, precisely, the proposer expects to have happen were he to ship cornfed rural folk (or even the Unnecessariat writer) to San Francisco, or vice versa.
Eh? Even in the world capital of Godlessness (the Czech Republic, though Estonia might be slightly higher in percent that identifies as atheist) I had multiple baptisms.
Edit: it almost sounds like you've got it parts of it mixed up with an Amish Rumspringa to some extent?
I'm not sure if there's a specific term in the LDS community that separates it from more general missionary work, but sending 18-25ish young adults in suits on bicycles to knock on doors away from home, typically for sections of two years. TraceWoodgrains wrote about it from the perspective of someone then-inside the community who did the work in Australia, but I've seen it referenced from online and offline ex- and current-LDS.
Yes, ostensibly missionary work gets convert baptists, and the official statistics are in 4+ per missionary-year. Which is pretty respectable, even if it's an astounding amount of manhours to get there. But these numbers come about by merging the numbers from all jurisdictions, and by mixing explicit missionary work knocking on doors with, talking with organically-developed friendships while on mission, missionary service (such as volunteer work for the destitute).
Add in retention to baptism -- and from a non-LDS perspective, that's the LDS baptism requirements are a really low bar -- where knock-on-door numbers are awful and the entire program sells itself on members talking to or encouraging investigators that they found through personal efforts, and it turns into a wash pretty quickly for a lot of jurisdictions.
I don't think there are good public numbers for baptism-per-missionary by mission or country, but at least if your missionary work was recent, I'd really guess you were probably well above-average for your mission region.
The cynical view on Rumspringa is more that it shoves younger Amish to see how weird "the English" are and how little we like it (akin to forcing someone caught sneaking a puff of a cigarette to smoke several in a row, knowing that the nicotine would be unpleasant in that dosage), rather than a hazing: a person on Rumspringa can often run into trouble, but they're not interrupting Troubles' soap operas.
IIRC, the rumspringa for most Amish is fairly tame and doesn’t involve that much contact with the English. It’s a time when Amish youth are allowed to disobey their parents a little bit and generally have a few exceptions to the strict Amish codes, not a general license to rebel.
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It was over a decade ago. I won't get into specifics because the country I served in already narrows down my identity far too much. But no, I was a little bit under the average for missionaries in the Czech Republic as far as baptisms go. That said, a significant source of baptisms (none of mine, but probably around 20% of the mission's) were Mongolia immigrants. In one of the cities with missionaries there was a member who had joined in Mongolia. She lived in an apartment building mostly full of other Mongolians and introduced the missionaries to a ton of them.
Regarding retention after baptism, the rule of thumb I've always heard (and have usually seen in regards to actual activity rates vs. membership on the rolls) is about 1/3 stay active. Not sure how this compares to, say, cultural Catholics that never go to mass.
Catholic RCIA has a ~50% retention rate. So making baptism harder has room for improvement, but not infinite room.
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