[Part of Organizational Cultures sequence]

Returning again to Bowling Alone after our previous discussion, we have Putnam describing the distinction between machers ("makers") and schmoozers:

In Yiddish, men and women who invest lots of time in formal organizations are often termed machers - that is, people who make things happen in the community. By contrast, those who spend many hours in informal conversation and communion are termed schmoozers. This distinction mirrors an important reality in American social life. [...] The two types of social involvement overlap to some extent - major-league machers are often world-class schmoozers, and vice versa. [...] Nevertheless, as an empirical matter, the two syndromes are largely distinct - many people are active in one sphere but not the other. (Bowling Alone, chapter 6)

"Schmoozing" has a somewhat negative connotation in English - implying some amount of insincerity, obsequiousness, etc. - but Putnam intends no such implication. He also does not suggest that either one is better than the other - rather he says both are important, and both are declining, to the detriment of our society. So, is it maching that enables schmoozing, or is it the other way around? Putnam seems to think it goes both ways (see chapter 9).

Vos machst du?

However, in the cultural context I currently find myself in, I get the sense that the maching→schmoozing flow is the more load-bearing of the two. Others here have echoed that sentiment (1, 2). I suppose it's because we LessWrong readers tend to be highly-mobile urban professionals who don't have a well-established preexisting community to fall back on, and so opportunities for schmoozing will simply not exist unless someone "machs" them.

Now certainly I would not encourage anyone to take this to the extreme. All maching and no schmoozing makes Jack a dull socially-maladjusted boy.

On the other hand though, lately I've been positively swimming in schmooze. As social capital, this is not worth nothing, but it does get old after a while. There are only so many late-night parties I can go to before I find myself tediously rehashing the same stories and jokes. And in terms of social capital, a schmoozefest only really benefits the people directly involved, and only for a fleeting moment before their memories fade. Maching, by contrast, is the gift that keeps on giving. If done well, it can work to the benefit of people who may never meet you and never know of your existence, but who come along later and appreciate the thing that you have (ahem) gemacht.

But if you want to mach things with that kind of staying power, having a guild structure is a prerequisite - or at least a big help. This is because, firstly, people are unlikely to step up and contribute to a group effort unless they have some ownership stake in the result - just as home-renters have much less reason to devote their blood-sweat-and-tears into home improvements than do home-owners. And secondly, ambitious community-building projects can only hope to transcend the particular individuals involved if there is some kind of institutional memory - and this requires having an "institution" in the first place.

For example, here are some machings a medium-sized LessWrong group might attempt, in ascending order of ambition:

1. Idea: Write up notes on particularly interesting meetup discussions, and add those to a shared archive.
   • Benefit: The notes provide a shared canon of ideas that people can refer back to later to make conversations more efficient. People who come across the notes will be inspired to join the community to talk about similar topics.
   • Why it needs an institution: There needs to be a way that every community member can discover and contribute to the shared archive. Even if there has been turnover of membership, the notes can serve as a representative sample of the group's ideas, but only if there is a continuous conversational context connecting them with the current group.
2. Idea: Host megameetups or conferences that people will travel from out-of-town for.
   • Benefit: People who live too far away to attend regular meetups have a chance to interact with each other and with regular meetup-goers.
   • Why it needs an institution: People aren't going to travel long distances at the invitation of random strangers with no personal connection to them, unless those invitations are given in the name of a community they are aligned with.
3. Idea: Create an online platform for community members to asynchronously develop ideas discussed at meetups into long-form writings.
   • Benefit: Contributors are inspired to think more deeply about ideas and improve their research and communication skills. Readers get a better idea of what people in the community are interested in talking about.
   • Why it needs an institution: As continuations of IRL discussions, the articles people write can be better understood if they are read in dialogue with each other as part of "a community" and not simply a number of separate blogs.
4. Idea: Buy a building to use for community events.
   • Benefit: The group can host events that are difficult to do in public/outdoor spaces, such as presentations and co-working. People can donate or lend items to the community for anyone to use.
   • Why it needs an institution: This would be very expensive, and people aren't going to contribute purely as a personal favor, but only if they believe that the building will enduringly be used by people who generally share their values.

Maching a schmoozefest

That all being said, however, let me pivot to a defense of schmoozing - not as social capital, but as something else.

In relation to the rationality community, I used to be a maching-maximalist. I was of the opinion that all the schmoozing in the community was at best an entertaining diversion, and at worst a distraction from the community's mission - and I offended a number of people by saying this.

What changed my mind about this was my evolving understanding of what the rationality community is. This, in turn, was borne of my vain attempts to draw up a "creed of rationality" akin to those variously adopted by Christian denominations. I started a group within the community which I called the "Philosophy Working Group" because I imagined that the group would meet a few times, figure out the correct "rationalist" stance on every issue, write up a document summarizing its findings, and then swiftly disband. Needless to say, that was not how it went. Instead, even the most banal philosophical propositions would be met with some kind of "well actually..." response. But the ensuing debates were far from fruitless or unenlightening; I came away from those conversations with my mind having been broadened to consider different perspectives that I would never have come up with myself. It's just that what I learned was something that is not easily distilled into a concise written document. I suppose you had to be there.

So, schmoozing is not pointless, and it is not separable from the rationalist intellectual project. In actual practice, rationality is not a set of beliefs, but a mode of discourse. When you're talking to someone, the fact that they're a LessWrong-style rationalist is immediately evident from the way they approach the conversation - a certain set of concepts and memes, epistemic habits, methods of getting at the crux of the issue, and various other quirks that people can try to define but which we largely need to learn-by-doing.

(Joke I read somewhere: What is the definition of a "rationalist"? Base case: Eliezer Yudkowsky is a rationalist. Inductive case: Anyone who gets into arguments with a rationalist is a rationalist.)

In other words, rationality is a language. We employ it because we believe it will help us along the way in figuring out what is true and how best to achieve some nebulous notion of "the good" - even if we can't agree on what that is. But like any language, one cannot learn it solely from textbooks; one must have conversation partners. For this we need schmoozing, and we need people to mach it happen.

Discuss