Two Communities

New Hampshire libertarians and Berkeley Rationalists

In a recent post I quoted at length from Kulak’s blog post comparing two events and their associated communities; it interested me in part because I have a toe in each pond. I have not been to Vibecamp, the rationalist/grey tribe event he described, but two weeks before I went to Porcfest I spent a weekend at Less Online, a rationalist event in Berkeley. Both are communities I have connections with, at both events I was an invited speaker.

The Events

While both events had some invited speakers with free tickets, at both the sessions were mostly the work of those attending the event. Less Online had a web page showing what was happening where and when; it is not publicly accessible but I got permission to post a screenshot of it. The screenshot does not let you add events to the schedule but the schedule did; anyone attending could put his event in any open time/location slot. Porcfest had a webbed schedule as well but putting yourself on it was done the old-fashioned way, by arrangement in advance with someone running one of the hubs, of which there were a lot, or, for the two large venues, the event organizers. The Porcfest schedule was searchable — I could, for example, get a list of all my talks or of everything happening at a particular hub. The Less Online schedule, so far as I could tell, was not.

The mechanics of Porcfest were decentralized in a sense in which those of Less Online were not. At Less Online practically everything, including food, a big room with things to eat all day plus hot meals served buffet style, was provided by the event, paid for by the admission fee; at Porcfest a substantial fraction of the attendees were selling something, often food. Attending Less Online cost $650; a Porcfest ticket cost $125. Even adding in the cost of food, a week at Porcfest cost substantially less than a weekend at Less Online. In part that reflected the fact that Berkeley is more expensive than northern New Hampshire, in part that programmers are richer than back-to-the-land homesteaders, in part the support the latter event provided at no additional cost.

The People

At both events people were friendly, at both a lot of what was happening was casual conversation, often between strangers. Practically everyone at Porcfest was a libertarian as were many of the rationalists at Less Online but the cultural feel of the two events was different, hippy/conservative at Porcfest, Bay Area grey tribe at Less Online. Many rationalists are gay, some trans; I expect most Free Staters, being libertarians, are opposed to legal restrictions on both, but I saw nobody at Porkfest who was obviously either. Many rationalists believe in, some practice, polyamory; the dominant mating pattern visible at Porcfest was monogamy, a large fraction of the adults married couples with children, sometimes lots of children. The Rationalists had more elite educations, higher status jobs, more abstract intellectual interests but felt less likely to know how to fix a car or cook a simple meal — although some are cooking enthusiasts, many felt like the kind of college students who have to be taught how to boil an egg — still less how to slaughter a pig. There were a few babies at Less Online, much admired, but very few children and, unlike Porcfest, where children of all ages were everywhere, no events targeted at children. That fit Kulak’s conclusion from his observation of a different rationalist event that the Free Staters are reproducing themselves biologically, the Rationalists are not.

The intellectual differences are reflected in the two schedules. The Free Staters were interested in practical things, things they were doing — buying land in New Hampshire, what fruit trees could grow where, how to raise their children, how to win local elections.

Talk titles:

I Homeschooled Through High School, Ask me Anything

Retire Early and Achieve Financial Independence

Beekeeping Exploration

3D Printing Workshop

The Rationalists had some talks on practical concerns too:

How to be Hotter: For Men Who Like Ladies

Making money on weird businesses

Solving Writer’s Block (And general Executive Function)

but other talks were targeted at future tech and science:

Eggs from skin: biological alchemy

What would a terraformed Mars look like?

The nearest equivalent to those at Porcfest were talks on cryptocurrency and related technologies, not just things they wanted to know but things they wanted to do.

The theme of Less Online was rationality:

The goal is to bring together a "mostly-online subculture of people trying to work together to figure out how to distinguish truth from falsehood using insights from probability theory, cognitive science, and AI." (From the Less Online web page)

Both had talks aimed at political activity but of different sorts:

13 rules for Door-Knocking: How to Win Elections, One Door at a Time (Porcfest)

Making a new democratic party (Less Online).

In conversation, the Free Staters seemed more likely to have beliefs they thought up for themselves, less likely to be following out the logic of an argument they got from someone else.

There was, however, one talk at Less Online titled Do Your Own Research:

How can you learn something about a controversial believe without being hard-captured by a bias? Can you? How about verifying a factual claim? Should you?

I was reminded of my exchange with Michael Huemer on whether you should get your views on controversial issues by listening to the experts and believing them or by evaluating evidence and arguments for yourself. I did not attend the talk so do not know if he came down on my side or Huemer’s.

One result of the different approaches in the two cultures is different kinds of odd beliefs. Nobody at Less Online offered a trick to avoid the income tax; there were at least two talks on the subject at Porcfest and several on homeopathy. But quite a lot of rationalists follow out the implications of not limiting utilitarianism to humans in weird directions, to decide on the relevant virtue of eating cows or pigs, the relevance of shrimp to utilitarian calculation. I heard nobody at Porcfest concerned with the possibility that supergenius AI’s would take over the world and eliminate humanity.

One thing that impressed Kulak about the rationalists at his event was how many were interested in, and knew, poetry. For that comparison I have data, since at both events one of my sessions was a reading of libertarian poetry. Attendance at Less Online was three or four, at Porcfest fourteen. There were about twice as many people at Porcfest, but that still looks like evidence that Free Staters are more interested in poetry — I occasionally lament the absence of poetry from modern culture — than Rationalists.

Or maybe not. It could that Free Staters are just more interested in libertarian poetry. Rationalist events sometimes feature poetry set to music and rationalist fanfic threads often have titles lifted from poems.

Religion

Less Online had a talk on Religion for Rationalists. The summary:

Rationalists, as a whole, reject religion. I think this is a mistake. I’m here to steelman religion for rationalists, and maybe even convince some people they should be religious. Come and convince I am wrong or help me figure out how to convince other people I’m right.

Religion in contrast was a visible part of Porcfest, with events featuring Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism — and Asatru, a revival of Norse paganism. No Muslim events that I noticed, but the previous year I gave a talk on Muslim law to an interested audience.

While Rationalists mostly reject existing religions, my impression is that they are trying to invent their own, non-theist, version. Parts of an earlier event I attended, a Solstice celebration, felt very much like a church service and one rationalist household I know has a “sabbath dinner” on Friday evening, no Jewish texts, rationalist singing.¹

Conclusion

The cultural difference between the two groups is the difference between the cultures of flyover country and the bicoastal elite, each in its most attractive form. I like both cultures, enjoyed both events.

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1. An old post by Scott Alexander on Slate Star Codex relevant to this. Another and more recent one.