What is social infrastructure?

Alt title I'm considering: Social infrastructure and the qualitative filter problem or something

Note: considering using gpt-4 to expand this into a post (and add an ai disclaimer of course) but I feel like style is important so idk if the editing required to make it into a style that I actually write with would make gains compared to manually writing it minimal

Note: this essay is unrevised.

Note: Using the word "intellectual" is usually something I try to avoid because it's pretentious and kind of unspecific, but it's useful in this context so if you'd be willing to suspend vibe checks as you read this post that would be great.

Note: I feel like I should make this shorter to make it more accessible?

1. TLDR

   • Social infrastructure is a process/institution, probably either self-selecting (e.g. free-to-join online group), algorithmically-selected (e.g. social media) or manually-selected (e.g. application-based summer programs) process (or a mix of all three) that helps people connect
   • Finding people, at scale, with specific personal characteristics is really hard; I want to build social infrastructure to try and help this happen
   • In particular, I'm interested in helping build social infrastructure for sparkly people — people who are smart, curious, and agentic (roughly) — who feel {aimless/unsure of where they're going/roughly have an idea but don't really know how to go about pursuing it}, because I think it would make the world better (and I know how much that sucks, and I am in a situation where I can help with that problem specifically)
   • !![Contact me] if you feel like that description is at all your vibe, even partially!!

2. why I want to build social infrastructure: intro with anecdote

   • ignore this section, I'm thinking about moving what's detailed below up here to make the post more attention-grabbing/readable
   • three years ago I was isolated
   • I started calling it sparkliness: maybe they were all around me, but I just didn't know how to find them.
   • I felt intellectually lonely. Skip to today: I've found a huge number of awesome people, and my circle is expanding. What allowed this change? Can I help precipitate it in other people's lives?

3. What is social infrastructure?

   • I use the word to refer to systems or institutions or… just some sort of process that connects people in ways they aren't already connected.
   • Social media is social infrastructure. Schools are a form of social infrastructure
   • But very rarely is existing social infrastructure built to be such. Cultural aspects might get in the way — or, simply, the process might be inefficient enough that the bar for agency is so high that most people can't get anywhere.

4. What does effective social infrastructure look like?

   • The things that actually took me from there to here are (1) camps/summer programs; (2) online communities, centered in things like group chats, discord servers, or even subreddits.
     • (Footnote: yeah, the optics on saying "I think discord and reddit are good" are funny, but if we ignore ~~(rightful)~~ stigma about them, *they do provide pretty exceptional community-building platforms.)
   • I think there's a ton of undiscovered potential; some ideas include direct outreach through high school, utilizing college applications as a selection criterion, a new social media platform, but I think both of those projects are longer-term and it would be more effective to just build with existing tools (like discord.) — probably a lot of impact can be done with existing projects.
   • effective social infrastructure to me is infrastructure that solves what a friend of mine and I have since middle school called the "qualitative filter problem".

5. Interlude: the qualitative filter problem

   • Humans are complex creatures. Most dimensions of ourselves aren't currently possible to distill down numerically; that means that filtering for people who have characteristic x is pretty hard when x relates to personality or interests or character.
   • There are lots of different kinds of filtering problems: for example, when you're hiring people for your company and you want people that will fit your culture, that's a qualitative filtering problem. When you are trying to build a new group of friends as a first-year in college, that's a qualitative filtering problem too, just probably more complex because the criteria for passing the filter are not obvious and are tightly linked to your weird personal preferences.
   • These are broadly pretty hard to deal with. There are three primary ways to "filter" for people:
     • Manual selection (e.g. admissions processes for schools), or self-selecting processes (e.g. free-to-join online communities centered on some interest), or, recently, algorithmically-selected (i.e. twitter subcultures).
   • At any sort of scale, self-selecting processes and/or algorithmically-selected processes (maybe with some additional manual selection on top, e.g. community moderation) are necessary, due to labor/time constraints.
   • The problem is that there are a lot of obstacles that get in the way of efficient self-selection; some of the important ones include (1) people knowing the community exists — they can't select themselves into it without knowing it exists — and (2) having accurate information abut the community available, such that the people you want to self-select for the community actually select into it and aren't turned off by aesthetic factors or stigma from people who don't know about it.
   • Algorithmic selection is really difficult to do for yourself effectively, for various reasons (such as that existing social media optimizes for attention, not intellectual interest, or that you need to know what to look for in order to effectively train the algorithm to give you what you want, which is difficult unless you already have solved the problem at least partially)
   • The particular filtering problem I'm really interested in is thus: there's a trait, let's call it sparkliness. Sparkly people are, broadly speaking, intelligent, curious, interested in making the world better, interested in making themselves better, and in some sense agentic, i.e. they have a sense of self-efficacy and actively try to shape and improve their own lives and the world around them.
     • I'm confident that, despite selection pressures against things like curiosity (such as school, which I'd estimate is broadly pretty effective at killing any interest in cool academic subjects both by making them overpoweringly boring and by putting kids in a cultural environment where being "nerdy" is a thing to be avoided) there are lots of sparkly people.
     • I think these people fall into two categories:
       • People who "have it figured out", i.e. they have an occupation that stimulates them, friends that they feel they can share their sparkliness with (i.e. friends that they can explore interesting subjects with), and a sense that they're on a path in the general direction of "doing better," and have a sense that they know what that looks like.
       • People who don't have it figured out: e.g. people who are interested in lots of subjects but don't know what they want to do with themselves, people who feel like they don't have friends to share intellectual interests with, people who feel trapped in school despite feeling like they want to learn, etc.
   • The social infrastructure I want to build is that which could help people in the latter category get to the former. I think to do so we can use proxy characteristics (e.g. some [but definitely not all] sparkly people have high test scores, or are interested in philosophy) or try and filter directly for sparkliness, which is probably harder but probably also much more rewarding. I've experimented with both.
     • I think I'm gradually getting towards the former category — but if you looked at me about two and a half years ago, I was deep into the latter. I'm hoping that talking about my experiences getting out of that situation might be useful for other people who are in a similar situation.
     • Looking at how I got out of the latter situation might yield some strategies we can use for broader interest.

6. Experiencing social infrastructure

   • I wrote this more eloquently in my college apps, but just to err on the safe side, I'm going to avoid putting anything I wrote for a supplement online until my decisions are released.
   • Basically, here's how it went for me:
     • In middle school I was smart and wanted to do stuff, but didn't know what stuff I wanted to do, so I ended up doing what a charitable person would call "exploring" and what a cynical person would call "flailing aimlessly". I explored a lot, learned to program, tried to understand political philosophy and ethics, got into student government, played sports, figured out how to produce music, read novels, etc.
     • The point is, I was sparkly and aimless.
     • This continued until roughly sophomore year of high school, when I discovered [lesswrong] and, while searching for things to do in the summer, discovered [espr]. From there, a couple key things followed:
       • Junior year I applied to three programs, and got accepted to two. I don't know how much of this was luck — definitely some significant proportion, because the camps have pretty low admit rates — but one program in particular, [pair], changed my life.
       • Every single person there was sparkly. I barely slept because I was up till 5am talking, or learning category theory, or trying to build something dumb but cool. For the first time in my life I felt like I found the people I wanted to be around, permanently — my tribe.
       • Secondly, I cold emailed someone whose blog I read and thought seemed interesting — then he introduced me to a couple more interesting people, and then I ended up in some associated communities, and… I'm keeping this vague partly for privacy and partly because maybe if you [contact me] I'll do the same for you ;)
       • seriously though, the point (other than that you should cold contact me) is that I went and just did it. At some point someone told me that I could just email people on the internet and ask them for things I wanted — I could be agentic in this whole other way I didn't know about — and I got lucky that the person I contacted was both cool and willing to help me.
         • This was not something I knew until suddenly I knew it and the whole world opened up to me. (There's definitely some aspect of privilege/self-efficacy operating here but that's not something I am ready to get into yet)
         • Note: (could advertise lost ones here? Or should I keep it otl and give it to people who email me?)
     • Now today I feel like I know where I'm going, and I have awesome friends, and I feel like things are just going to keep getting better.
   • We can distill this path into the following:
     • Was sparkly and kinda aimless
     • Spent tons of time searching online to figure things out
     • Eventually found a cool forum that was close-ish to what I was into
     • Found posts on that forum advertising a cool summer program
     • Applied and got into said program (well, another program run by the same people)
     • Emailed/talked to people that were in that general intellectual vicinity, and they helped me expand my circle even more.
   • There are a couple of key bottlenecks:
     • Having enough time or luck or dedication to find the right online communities
     • The awesome programs existing
     • Getting accepted to a program (To be fair, it was my second try for rationalist camp admissions — I got rejected from [sparc] — but I think overall admit rate was like 5%? Which is insanely low and definitely lower than the number of people who would benefit from the camp, which sucks.)
   • A person could easily fail at any one of those bottlenecks. So I'm working on some methods that might help reduce them. I'll get more into them when I have more fully-fleshed projects, but here are some ideas I'm mulling over or working on right now:
     • Helping make existing communities good
     • Making it easier to discover by creating high-school oriented groups (maybe a chapter-based organization a la NHS)
     • Making it easier for people to overcome 1 degree of separation via a close friends-based network tool (basically social media but with no media, with an emphasis on in-person interactions in a medium-high trust environment)
   • That's it for now— this post is already quite long. Reach out if you have comments, or if you find this post personally relevant, or if you're working on something similar!