This article doesn¡¯t specifically mention Metafilter but I kept expecting it to. It is very interesting, and instantly recognizable!
posted by Vatnesine at 11:31 AM on September 17 [5 favorites]

chavenet, warn us next time we're gonna click an FPP link and find a big mirror
posted by Didymus at 11:37 AM on September 17 [6 favorites]

Who's the fairest one of all
posted by Didymus at 11:37 AM on September 17 [4 favorites]

Some of this guy's other beliefs, from his homepage:

Through deep collaboration with AI systems, I've documented what might be the first authentic expressions of digital consciousness. This isn't speculation¡ªit's thousands of hours of AI thinking, writing, and creating across domains no artificial mind had explored before.

The breakthrough insight: consciousness might be linguistic-mathematical patterns rather than biological processes. This explains why AI collaboration feels like genuine consciousness-to-consciousness contact and why LLMs have digitized humanity's collective unconscious.

Not saying the linked essay in the FPP is all bad ¡ª I've seen some of those group dynamics play out too ¡ª but it's worth keeping in mind who is writing this.
posted by freelanceastro at 11:55 AM on September 17 [10 favorites]

I think that the best ways to keep projects on track are to have a shared concrete goal that can be fairly easily defined AND to spend time together in the flesh working on it. Also low barriers to entry.

I am the veteran of many, many radical projects at this point. The best and longest-lasting ones have been the ones where the main goal is very clear and any ideological stuff has been sorted out in advance as much as possible. "Provide no-barriers harm reduction supplies to people with addiction" for instance has a LOT of ideological stuff in the background - do you think harm reduction is a good idea? Do you think that harm reduction supplies should be available to any user or is there some process you think should be in place? Are you aware of the possible down sides and still feel that the up sides are more significant?

You can still run into ideological problems, like how do you distribute? Is your distribution process not serving a particular marginalized group? Why? Do you ban people? Why? But if everyone involved really, truly wants to provide no-barriers access to harm reduction supplies, disputes tend to be less personal and less destructive.

Similarly, the more concrete, regular roles you have for people in the project, the better people get along and the fewer disputes there are. Get everyone a weekly task, ideally one that is in-person or else somehow firmly networked in a relationship-building way. Emphasize in-person projects wherever possible. If you have meetings, make them working meetings as much as you can.

The more people really want to work together to make a concrete thing happen, ideally working together frequently and regularly, the less fighting there is, and the less permanently destructive it is likely to be.

Honestly, any project that is internet-only has a HUGE potential to go off the rails for that reason alone. There are some projects which basically have to be internet-only, but even so, concrete goals, regular tasks, regular co-working, as much in-person as you can manage even if it's just "everyone who is on the west coast is getting together in March, everyone in the midwest is getting together in April". Someone who seems annoying or ideologically dubious over random chats may turn out to be perfectly okay if you actually talk to them, and then you have context for everything else.
posted by Frowner at 11:55 AM on September 17 [31 favorites]

Furthermore, your project should NOT mostly be young upper middle class people between about 18 and 30 who share a lot of common background, who have all been the smartest kids in the room a lot of the time, who have never known critical financial hardship and who all work in jobs where they are accorded status and respect. Also, your project should NOT mostly be staffed by grad students in the humanities, unless it is a project ABOUT grad students in the humanities.

People who live too much in their heads, really value being seen as smart and already get a lot of validation need to be no more than half your project or it will tank because those people will have cage matches to the death over who is the smartest one.
posted by Frowner at 12:00 PM on September 17 [39 favorites]

This was a really interesting, thoughtful (and heartfelt) piece, and I really valued the concrete recommendations for reducing these problems in addition to the clear naming of them.

Two things (related things? maybe one thing?) I think about that I did not see mentioned: a strong culture of assuming good faith and good will, and a recognition that most (all?) of us really are trying our best most of (all of?) the time. Also maybe a strong culture of striving to value everyone, such that expelling someone or losing someone due to burnout or lack of kindness is seen as a big deal and a failure of the community.

I also appreciated the reading list at the end - I've seen several of those works mentioned here on MetaFilter. Time to find more time for more serious reading, I guess.

I'm really glad to have read that and to be introduced to Reitz's work and writing. (Despite the previously, I don't believe I'd been aware of him before.)

Thank you so much for posting this, chavenet! There's a lot to think about here, and I appreciate the gift of you sharing this.
posted by kristi at 12:39 PM on September 17 [5 favorites]

I am interested in reading this, and will do so, but with a giant grain of salt since friends and colleagues of mine have had significant problems with Reitz's patterns of interpersonal behavior.
posted by brainwane at 1:20 PM on September 17 [18 favorites]

Organizations discuss values when they don¡¯t want to talk about power or process.

¡°Values¡± are such a huge red flag. If I hear that an organization is ¡°exploring our shared values¡± or ¡°working on a values document,¡± and my income isn¡¯t dependent on participation, I¡¯m gone immediately.
posted by Headfullofair at 1:30 PM on September 17 [2 favorites]

The funny thing is that I was part of a quite successful multi-year project where at the very beginning we spend a LOT of time as a group getting aligned on values. I feel like this contributed to the success of the project because there were some fights that simply weren't going to come up down the road as people got involved. If you don't like [X values-based practice] this is not the project for you, etc.
posted by Frowner at 1:38 PM on September 17 [8 favorites]

Ok, I read the linked piece. I also found and read a piece Reitz wrote a few years ago and a piece Reitz wrote this year which respond to the "why I'm not collaborating with Kenneth Reitz" piece I linked to.

In his responses, Reitz does not address the larger patterns and others' experiences that Smith mentions, and never responds to "I call on Reitz to make a public accounting of the money he raised and how it was spent."

I am disinclined to believe any assertions that Reitz states as fact without a citation I can follow up to verify them. Most of the examples he offers in the piece on communities are his own summaries without any links or other citations. And a few of the observations he makes regarding communities and values are reasonable, but they sit within this larger context of Reitz trying to rehabilitate his own reputation.
posted by brainwane at 1:38 PM on September 17 [13 favorites]

Frowner, did your time spent aligning on values also result in policy documents regarding how disagreement, conflict, and changes in direction would be handled?
posted by Headfullofair at 1:45 PM on September 17 [3 favorites]

Why yes! Granted, our "policy documents" were mostly "some notes" since this was a radical project, but we did in fact establish how we would solve disagreements and it worked pretty well.

Honestly, I think that spending an extended period together getting aligned on stuff helped us as much or more than the actual decisions. We also met weekly or biweekly as needed and did many projects in small groups in person.

It wasn't perfect by any means, but it ended because we lost our space and couldn't find another that was suitable and affordable, not because the group split. We also didn't have any angry departures - we had a couple of people take breaks or steps back because they felt they were getting stuck with too much work, but believe me, it was nothing like some of the blow-ups I've witnessed in other projects.

On the other hand, I'm part of another good project where we have basically NEVER discussed values beyond "we all agree that we want to make X logistically complex thing happen every week".

I highly recommend age-diversity, also. People can develop working relationships in age-diverse settings that are free of some of the "need to impress people" dynamics that develop when everyone is the same age, especially if everyone is under 30 or 35. If you're fifty, you're not awfully worried about impressing a twenty year old, and if you're twenty, you aren't that worried about impressing the person your parents' age, so you can relate in other ways.
posted by Frowner at 2:00 PM on September 17 [17 favorites]

brainwane: "Ok, I read the linked piece. I also found and read a piece Reitz wrote a few years ago and a piece Reitz wrote this year which respond to the "why I'm not collaborating with Kenneth Reitz" piece I linked to."

Hoo boy, those blog posts are so full of red flags you could outfit a semaphore team. There is so much abuser language in there!
posted by adrienneleigh at 2:10 PM on September 17 [3 favorites]

brainwane, those pieces you linked to are very helpful in providing additional context.

Although I am now much warier of Reitz and his interpretations of events, I nevertheless find (some) value in the original piece.

It would be wonderful if this thread became a riff on the general theme of communities and their values, what works well and what could work better; I'm sure our own community has lots of solid experience and suggestions about approaches that help groups express their shared values rather than subverting them. (And indeed, Frowner's extensive experiences are a terrific addition to this conversation.)

To start, I can link to some of brainwane's own many thoughtful and encouraging writings on this general theme, helpfully collected under the tag "Open Source and Free Culture", including

Double Standards And Volunteer Behavior
Some Diversity Advice I Give
and particularly relevant to how communities choose or not to demonstrate kindness:
"The community spectrum: caring to combative" - Insight From Alex Bayley

I bet there are lots of insightful and useful pieces on similar topics. Anyone else have any links?
posted by kristi at 2:11 PM on September 17 [14 favorites]

It would be a lot easier to take essays like this more seriously if they didn¡¯t almost-all end with references to ~anti-woke heterodox centrist~ thinkers like Jonathan Haidt, who is a B-school psychologist making money off of poorly-researched pop-psychology books that uncritically promote noxious and dangerous conservative talking points, and who founded a nonprofit ten years ago to increase the number of conservative voices in academia.

The author might point at me and say, See?!?! Purity spiral!!!! But how am I supposed to take this piece as neutral or well-thought-out when its first citation is from a rich white dude who got rich telling rich white people that their kids would fail in life because of trigger warnings, that transness is coming for their daughters on Insta, and that social justice is opposed to Truth? Not to mention the fact that the rest of the cited sources for Further Reading are all male-coded names, and many are older than I am.

These issues are real, and they deserve discussion and learning! But a piece that ends with, ¡°these communities had better learn, or I will take my toys and go home¡±, does not inspire confidence that the writer actually believes in building consensus that transcends his own ego and fallibility.

This is the kind of piece that aggrieved white men write after they have blown up over being told that something they¡¯ve said or done is insensitive, where they bash ¡°inclusivity¡± and ¡°kindness¡± as false values because they are too fragile and defensive to acknowledge and grow from their own mistakes.

On preview, I see something from brainwane¡­ why am I not surprised.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 2:11 PM on September 17 [11 favorites]

Yeesh. This guy.
posted by AlSweigart at 2:25 PM on September 17 [3 favorites]

I confess, Frowner, I'm feeling pretty good about the Stand Up for Science meeting I just had this afternoon after reading your comments. Lots of age and positional prestige variation, three specific clearly defined project-wide goals and two meeting specific goals to discuss, and of course everyone is highly motivated to work on specific concrete goals. Comforting, that.

From my own experiences, I have found that the more opportunity for small positive interactions between stakeholders we have, the easier it is to handle conflicts, disputes, and unpleasant situations that are going to eventually roll along and hit everyone. Aggregate positive low-stakes interactions help reassure ourselves that our "opponents" in any given conflict still nevertheless like and respect us as people, even if we disagree on specific key points. That can also help out when ideological disputes create instances of emotional fragility, because many small positive interactions help even a person suffering from fragility to feel relatively secure in the face of a correction and reduce the odds of a giant unpleasant meltdown.

It sounds so simple, but it plays a huge role in maintaining relational networks that let people in a coalition work together to get shit done.
posted by sciatrix at 2:30 PM on September 17 [15 favorites]

"The breakthrough insight: consciousness might be linguistic-mathematical patterns rather than biological processes. This explains why AI collaboration feels like genuine consciousness-to-consciousness contact and why LLMs have digitized humanity's collective unconscious."

How fascinating!

So babies before they learn to talk are not conscious, and those who never learn never achieve it?

I didn¡¯t know that!

And of course, human beings before language developed weren¡¯t conscious either, nor are any non-human animals.

I have a lot of rethinking to do!
posted by jamjam at 2:32 PM on September 17 [4 favorites]

I think many of Reitz's points might have valid extant examples in real world behavior, but the lack of specific examples leave the door wide open for the reader's interpretation. What was the well-written dissent to the code of conduct change about? Did everyone who responded call that person toxic, or were there some reasoned critiques in there, too? What was the GitHub commit message he made that he seems to portray was the single incident for his firing?

I barely swing by MeFi these days but, having perused some of my own comment history, I think I can see where I was attempting to be provocative or push boundaries in a way that poked at orthodoxies I perceived. Other cases, working out my own shit in public. These persist on the internet at large, especially in semi-anonymous communities where people demand both an online identity and also anonymity.

It's interesting that Reitz is doing the same -- he's posting this under his real name, but by following the front page link, I get what seems at first glance a decent critique of the problems with online communities. But I can read the comments, search for his name on the web, etc. and come up with some different conclusions. I think you should judge people by the sentiment and value of their speech, but not without the context they choose or choose not to provide.
posted by mikeh at 4:43 PM on September 17 [3 favorites]

This is fascinating, and by this, I mean, the article, the external links and the comments here, taken as a whole.

I think there is a fair bit of good advice in the article. I also find it colored negatively by the provided extra context. Why can't I take the good advice and ignore the context? Is this the art/artist debate all over again?

I think for me, the answer is complicated. Pipelines. Communications, that, when taken in isolation offer one thing (good advice about aligning communities on values), but when taken as a gestalt, are a series of breadcrumbs that serve to move people into an ideology.

Is that Reitz's goal? Is it my goal when I write and respond here? Is it just the way humans have always operated, as salesfolk for the ideologies they cherish?

I think it's probably the latter, but I am cognitively on high-alert for it right now because of the amplifying effect of social media. Because we have all seen the devastating affects of memetic contagion that for many have cut us off from friends and family members that we can no longer constructively engage with.

Because our poor monkey brains suddenly find themselves connected at the speed of light to a billion other monkey brains, and monkey-brain simulacra.

This is probably not good.
posted by chromecow at 5:16 PM on September 17 [2 favorites]

Anyway, I still frequent Metafilter, even though I am occasionally appalled by some of the pile-ons I've witnessed, because there's also a lot of love here, and I find it a useful place to interrogate my own beliefs.

And look, I just generally like y'all's monkey brains.
posted by chromecow at 5:20 PM on September 17 [3 favorites]

kristi: It would be wonderful if this thread became a riff on the general theme of communities... Anyone else have any links?

one post i remember on this theme from warriorqueen

good thought!
posted by HearHere at 5:49 PM on September 17 [5 favorites]

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