6 ms·

I lived in two Utopian experiments, and am trying to create a third. The first was Deep Springs College, a two-year free-ride all-male school founded in 1917 an

by vonnik 10y ago

I lived in two Utopian experiments, and am trying to create a third. The first was Deep Springs College, a two-year free-ride all-male school founded in 1917 and still operating in eastern California. 13 students admitted per year. The second was a zen center that operated in San Francisco and environs. The third is a startup whose sole constraint is to survive. Like all utopias, come to think of it. One thing you learn about utopias is that they are painful. Because they require changes in behavior, and because you must listen to others, and learn to live with them. It is a long process. It doesn't work if you let the wrong people in, which means that whole nations can't attempt it. Some must be silenced or excluded for a utopia to function.

ChrisNorstrom 10y ago
"Some must be silenced or excluded for a utopia to function" and "It doesn't work if you let the wrong people in". Powerful and brutally honest. Especially in today's political atmosphere of "forced inclusion" and "diversity for the sake of diversity (whether racial, religious, or thought based)". I've witnessed the same thing you're talking about in online communities. They start out being created by one group who adhere to a very specific set of rules (often unspoken rules) and as more people gather the community starts to wilt and die, losing the original cohesion it once had. Those who leave often go and start another community, and the cycle repeats.
- RangerScience 10y ago
  Hmm. I'm guessing at what you mean by "diversity for the sake of diversity", but - pretty sure that's definitely something from the perspective of those, well, on the receiving end of privilege. Sure, diversity for diversity is a shittier reason than diversity to break the glass ceiling, or to cover bases you don't otherwise cover ("hey let's built a web app and never talk to dev ops!" "hey let's build something without figuring out how to sell it!"); there's those statistics that say teams with both men and women function better, yadda yadda... ...but like college graduation, it's not for you, or about you; it's about a bunch of other people. Diversity-for-diversity looks pointless when you already think you can join those groups. It looks like realizing you have a possibility you never thought could be yours, when you think you can't join those groups. Does that make any sense? With regards to what you've seen with online communities, that sounds a lot like gentrification: you have an influx of people that, rather than trying to adapt themselves to the existing culture and contribute to it - to actually join what was there, try (inadvertently or deliberately) to adapt the culture to their existing selves. On the other hand, what's the point if you have to / end up conforming so much you can't add anything new?
  - yakult 10y ago
    "Diversity for the sake of diversity" may be better phrased as "choosing to recruit member of ingroup Y due to government and media pressure when market forces would have instead chosen member of outgroup X". The problem is almost immediately obvious: advantaging Y at the expense of X, at a 1:1 ratio, is already very bad compared to eg anti-malaria tents in Africa. Considering the cost of intervention and the cost to market efficiency, this ratio gets much worse. The X-member being displaced is marginal, which means likely poor. So this is inefficiently redistributing resources from poor people to other poor people. There is also a natural justice angle, for which I paraphrase an old play: "But ingroup Y has been treated like slaves for the last eight thousand years -" "So what, outgroup X should cop it for the next eight thousand?"
    - RangerScience 10y ago
      Ah, took me a minute, but I think I see. I can honestly say I haven't seen this occur. Do you have any real-world examples (news, probably) you can link do?
      - yakult 10y ago
        A certain biomed firm has in its annual report that xx% of its engineers are female. It has a goal of increasing this to yy% by %year%. Most of the eligible applicants are male. This is easily observed in university graduate numbers as well as stated in their report. These are pretty smart business people. I can't imagine they're doing this without knowing it will impact the bottom line to potentially have to pass up on promising candidates for not having the right sexual organ (which, unless things go very wrong, will not be utilized in their work). Yet this is depressingly common. I am guessing that they have weighed the cost of inefficiency against the improved corporate image - or, put another way, against the decreased media pressure - and chose the lesser of two evils. Maybe an example outside of US will make it a bit easier to see: http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/for-affirmative-action-brazil-sets-up-controversial-boards-to-determine-race http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/f...
- johnchristopher 10y ago
  But it's a pipe dream. You won't escape diversity ever because at some point, sooner or later, someone is going to slightly diverge from the norm even if the group is closed. That's how humans behave.
RangerScience 10y ago
> Some must be silenced or excluded for a utopia to function. This is one of the better demonstrations / explanations of, I guess, benevolent tyranny, that I've seen: http://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-32-3/ http://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-32-3/ (occurs over the next ~8 pages)
- ralfd 10y ago
  Don't have enought time to click through all. How does it end for Ms. Green? Does she fail the class?
  - RangerScience 10y ago
    TL;DR - Getting people to successfully cooperate is hard; everybody has a different situation and knowledge set. Tyranny is trying to force people to cooperate along some lines. The comic doesn't mention this, but looking up the history of the word "fascist" tells a similar story.
johnfjacobi 10y ago
How was Deep Springs? A friend of mine told me about it and visited the campus ("campus"?), because he considered going, but he never did. I'm interested in hearing what someone who actually lived there thinks about it.
- vonnik 10y ago
  Deep Springs is located in a naturally majestic place (the high desert valley and surrounding mountains are breathtaking), and the school was the most vibrant intellectual community I ever knew. The students were very dedicated to learning, and most of them were also dedicated to the goals of the school: labor on the ranch/farm and communal governance. Students have a lot of power at DS to make their own decisions (and mistakes): they admit each incoming class, hire and fire the faculty, and choose their own curriculum from what the faculty can offer. The student body is usually around 25 people, and the rest of the community (faculty and their families, admin and farm and ranch operations) tends to double that to about 50. Because it is a two-year school, it changes and leaks institutional memory more quickly than other places, at least among the students. There are many Deep Springs, and each DSer walks away with his own vision and experience of it. The labor, governance and academic demands, during my time at least, made it so intense as to be excessive. It was probably a bit much for a bunch of 18 year olds. A few students always leave because of that. I hear it's better now.
simonebrunozzi 10y ago
Zen Center in SF = the one everybody knows, or was it something else? What about the 3rd one - the startup? Can you tell us more about it?
- vonnik 10y ago
  It is SFZC, the zen center everyone knows. It's actually a system of at least three zen centers: City Center on Page and Laguna; Green Gulch farm in Marin; and the Tassajara Monastery in the Ventana wilderness near Carmel. I lived in all three for about a year total, and the community of monks and practitioners moved moved from one to the other for operational and other reasons. It was (and probably still is) a great community. The startup is Skymind.io, which supports an open-source deep learning platform that we created, Deeplearning4j, ND4J, DataVec and some other libs in the JVM big data ecosystem. Startup as utopia is particular, different from previous communities in its main goals of growth and focus on product and customer. But underneath those differences, there are many similarities around how people communicate with and treat each other, and how the organization configures itself to share information, allow for individual autonomy and perform tasks together. The Collison brothers probably have some interesting thoughts about this. I'd be interested to hear from some of the YC partners, too, about the extent to which they want YC to have utopian characteristics.

by vonnik 10y ago

ChrisNorstrom 10y ago

"Some must be silenced or excluded for a utopia to function" and "It doesn't work if you let the wrong people in". Powerful and brutally honest. Especially in today's political atmosphere of "forced inclusion" and "diversity for the sake of diversity (whether racial, religious, or thought based)". I've witnessed the same thing you're talking about in online communities. They start out being created by one group who adhere to a very specific set of rules (often unspoken rules) and as more people gather the community starts to wilt and die, losing the original cohesion it once had. Those who leave often go and start another community, and the cycle repeats.

RangerScience 10y ago
Hmm. I'm guessing at what you mean by "diversity for the sake of diversity", but - pretty sure that's definitely something from the perspective of those, well, on the receiving end of privilege. Sure, diversity for diversity is a shittier reason than diversity to break the glass ceiling, or to cover bases you don't otherwise cover ("hey let's built a web app and never talk to dev ops!" "hey let's build something without figuring out how to sell it!"); there's those statistics that say teams with both men and women function better, yadda yadda... ...but like college graduation, it's not for you, or about you; it's about a bunch of other people. Diversity-for-diversity looks pointless when you already think you can join those groups. It looks like realizing you have a possibility you never thought could be yours, when you think you can't join those groups. Does that make any sense? With regards to what you've seen with online communities, that sounds a lot like gentrification: you have an influx of people that, rather than trying to adapt themselves to the existing culture and contribute to it - to actually join what was there, try (inadvertently or deliberately) to adapt the culture to their existing selves. On the other hand, what's the point if you have to / end up conforming so much you can't add anything new?
- yakult 10y ago
  "Diversity for the sake of diversity" may be better phrased as "choosing to recruit member of ingroup Y due to government and media pressure when market forces would have instead chosen member of outgroup X". The problem is almost immediately obvious: advantaging Y at the expense of X, at a 1:1 ratio, is already very bad compared to eg anti-malaria tents in Africa. Considering the cost of intervention and the cost to market efficiency, this ratio gets much worse. The X-member being displaced is marginal, which means likely poor. So this is inefficiently redistributing resources from poor people to other poor people. There is also a natural justice angle, for which I paraphrase an old play: "But ingroup Y has been treated like slaves for the last eight thousand years -" "So what, outgroup X should cop it for the next eight thousand?"
  - RangerScience 10y ago
    Ah, took me a minute, but I think I see. I can honestly say I haven't seen this occur. Do you have any real-world examples (news, probably) you can link do?
    - yakult 10y ago
      A certain biomed firm has in its annual report that xx% of its engineers are female. It has a goal of increasing this to yy% by %year%. Most of the eligible applicants are male. This is easily observed in university graduate numbers as well as stated in their report. These are pretty smart business people. I can't imagine they're doing this without knowing it will impact the bottom line to potentially have to pass up on promising candidates for not having the right sexual organ (which, unless things go very wrong, will not be utilized in their work). Yet this is depressingly common. I am guessing that they have weighed the cost of inefficiency against the improved corporate image - or, put another way, against the decreased media pressure - and chose the lesser of two evils. Maybe an example outside of US will make it a bit easier to see: http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/for-affirmative-action-brazil-sets-up-controversial-boards-to-determine-race http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/f...
johnchristopher 10y ago
But it's a pipe dream. You won't escape diversity ever because at some point, sooner or later, someone is going to slightly diverge from the norm even if the group is closed. That's how humans behave.

RangerScience 10y ago

> Some must be silenced or excluded for a utopia to function. This is one of the better demonstrations / explanations of, I guess, benevolent tyranny, that I've seen: http://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-32-3/ http://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-32-3/ (occurs over the next ~8 pages)

ralfd 10y ago
Don't have enought time to click through all. How does it end for Ms. Green? Does she fail the class?
- RangerScience 10y ago
  TL;DR - Getting people to successfully cooperate is hard; everybody has a different situation and knowledge set. Tyranny is trying to force people to cooperate along some lines. The comic doesn't mention this, but looking up the history of the word "fascist" tells a similar story.

johnfjacobi 10y ago

How was Deep Springs? A friend of mine told me about it and visited the campus ("campus"?), because he considered going, but he never did. I'm interested in hearing what someone who actually lived there thinks about it.

vonnik 10y ago
Deep Springs is located in a naturally majestic place (the high desert valley and surrounding mountains are breathtaking), and the school was the most vibrant intellectual community I ever knew. The students were very dedicated to learning, and most of them were also dedicated to the goals of the school: labor on the ranch/farm and communal governance. Students have a lot of power at DS to make their own decisions (and mistakes): they admit each incoming class, hire and fire the faculty, and choose their own curriculum from what the faculty can offer. The student body is usually around 25 people, and the rest of the community (faculty and their families, admin and farm and ranch operations) tends to double that to about 50. Because it is a two-year school, it changes and leaks institutional memory more quickly than other places, at least among the students. There are many Deep Springs, and each DSer walks away with his own vision and experience of it. The labor, governance and academic demands, during my time at least, made it so intense as to be excessive. It was probably a bit much for a bunch of 18 year olds. A few students always leave because of that. I hear it's better now.

simonebrunozzi 10y ago

Zen Center in SF = the one everybody knows, or was it something else? What about the 3rd one - the startup? Can you tell us more about it?

vonnik 10y ago
It is SFZC, the zen center everyone knows. It's actually a system of at least three zen centers: City Center on Page and Laguna; Green Gulch farm in Marin; and the Tassajara Monastery in the Ventana wilderness near Carmel. I lived in all three for about a year total, and the community of monks and practitioners moved moved from one to the other for operational and other reasons. It was (and probably still is) a great community. The startup is Skymind.io, which supports an open-source deep learning platform that we created, Deeplearning4j, ND4J, DataVec and some other libs in the JVM big data ecosystem. Startup as utopia is particular, different from previous communities in its main goals of growth and focus on product and customer. But underneath those differences, there are many similarities around how people communicate with and treat each other, and how the organization configures itself to share information, allow for individual autonomy and perform tasks together. The Collison brothers probably have some interesting thoughts about this. I'd be interested to hear from some of the YC partners, too, about the extent to which they want YC to have utopian characteristics.