Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Aspiring Rationalist Congregation, published by maia on January 11, 2024 on LessWrong.

Meta Note: This post has been languishing in a Google doc for many months as I've procrastinated on cleaning it up to be more coherent and polished. So... I'm posting it as is, with very little cleanup, in the hopes that it's valuable in the current state. I'm sure there are big missing pieces that I haven't addressed, justifications I haven't added, etc., so at this point this is mainly starting a conversation.

Epistemic Status: The seed of an idea, but a seed of an unknown fruit that may grow to be sweet or bitter. I believe it to be a good seed, but who can know until it is planted?

What this, and why

Meetups are nice. Sometimes they even create something like real community in a place. Honestly, the amount of community I've gotten through LW meetups for the past decade or so is... more community than most people my age ever experience, from what I can tell talking to non-rat friends. (Mormons excepted.)

Yet I still have the sense more is possible. Exactly because of those Mormons I know. Community can be much more powerful than what we have now.

[TODO (left in intentionally because I don't have time to fill in these details): Put more motivation / justification here: Bowling Alone stats, stats about religion making people happier, some reference about religion making people believe untrue things. Friendships formed by repeated random bumping into people, thus regular events important]

Physical co-location can be very powerful for this. The group of folks living in Berkeley in walking distance from each other are doing quite well at it, in that sense. When I lived there, I was shocked by how often, in a city of 100,000 people, I randomly ran into someone I knew on the street. (It wasn't that often! But it happened.)

But that's not always possible, for myriad reasons. I now live in a spread-out metro area that has a decent number of rationalists, but very few living in the same town. I want something that works fairly well even when you can't live in a big group house or neighborhood with all of your friends. Something more like a religious congregation.

"So," one might ask, "what's the difference? Churches meet once a week, (some) meetups meet once a week, what's different about them?"

What makes a church community different (better)

Here are my desiderata:

1) Family. You want a place where the whole community gets together, including the people closest to them, including their kids. That means, in the case of kids, going to significant lengths to accommodate them: having children's programs for older kids, childcare for younger kids, and ways to include kids a little even in the main programming. Churches usually have a side room where parents with a screaming baby can step out for a moment, then come back. They often have short parts of the ceremonies (~15 minutes) that everyone, even the smallest, is expected to come to, and then the kids break off to their Sunday school or nursery.

At meetups, by contrast, people usually don't even bring their significant other. Sometimes this is because the significant others are not aspiring rationalists, and not interested in the content. Other times... they're just not interested in meetups, specifically. As a woman who runs stuff, this makes me sad, because frankly, it's usually women who don't want to come. (And I try to run meetups that I myself would want to go to! But this is a whole other can of worms of a topic.)

I also personally feel it's important to encourage people to have kids. And to do that honestly, we also need to help and support those who do. Both to make the community grow over time, and to make it feel like a growing thing, and connect us to that part of human life.

2) Sacredness. It has to feel important that yo...