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: Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, published by Eliezer Yudkowskyon the LessWrong. From when I was still forced to attend, I remember our synagogue's annual fundraising appeal. It was a simple enough format, if I recall correctly. The rabbi and the treasurer talked about the shul's expenses and how vital this annual fundraise was, and then the synagogue's members called out their pledges from their seats. Straightforward, yes? Let me tell you about a different annual fundraising appeal. One that I ran, in fact; during the early years of a nonprofit organization that may not be named. One difference was that the appeal was conducted over the Internet. And another difference was that the audience was largely drawn from the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/early-adopter/programmer/etc crowd. (To point in the rough direction of an empirical cluster in personspace. If you understood the phrase "empirical cluster in personspace" then you know who I'm talking about.) I crafted the fundraising appeal with care. By my nature I'm too proud to ask other people for help; but I've gotten over around 60% of that reluctance over the years. The nonprofit needed money and was growing too slowly, so I put some force and poetry into that year's annual appeal. I sent it out to several mailing lists that covered most of our potential support base. And almost immediately, people started posting to the mailing lists about why they weren't going to donate. Some of them raised basic questions about the nonprofit's philosophy and mission. Others talked about their brilliant ideas for all the other sources that the nonprofit could get funding from, instead of them. (They didn't volunteer to contact any of those sources themselves, they just had ideas for how we could do it.) Now you might say, "Well, maybe your mission and philosophy did have basic problems—you wouldn't want to censor that discussion, would you?" Hold on to that thought. Because people were donating. We started getting donations right away, via Paypal. We even got congratulatory notes saying how the appeal had finally gotten them to start moving. A donation of $111.11 was accompanied by a message saying, "I decided to give a little bit more. One more hundred, one more ten, one more single, one more dime, and one more penny. All may not be for one, but this one is trying to be for all." But none of those donors posted their agreement to the mailing list. Not one. So far as any of those donors knew, they were alone. And when they tuned in the next day, they discovered not thanks, but arguments for why they shouldn't have donated. The criticisms, the justifications for not donating—only those were displayed proudly in the open. As though the treasurer had finished his annual appeal, and everyone not making a pledge had proudly stood up to call out justifications for refusing; while those making pledges whispered them quietly, so that no one could hear. I know someone with a rationalist cause who goes around plaintively asking, "How come the Raelian flying-saucer cult can get tens of thousands of members [probably around 40,000] interested in complete nonsense, but we can't even get a thousand people working on this?" The obvious wrong way to finish this thought is to say, "Let's do what the Raelians do! Let's add some nonsense to this meme!" For the benefit of those not immediately stopped by their ethical inhibitions, I will observe that there may be a hundred failed flying-saucer cults for every one that becomes famous. And the Dark Side may require non-obvious skills, which you, yes you, do not have: Not everyone can be a Sith Lord. In particular, if you talk about your planned lies on the public Internet, you fail. I'm no master criminal, but even I can tell certain people are not cut out to be crooks. So it's probably not a...