The Optimalist Community
Balaji Srinivasan has been talking about the idea of optimalism lately:
I like to use term optimalism as opposed to optimism. You are optimizing yourself. You are being positive. There’s an objective function. Transhumanism, you might say it’s just a change, whether that change is positive or negative is unstated. But optimalism is, in a sense, you’re improving. You’re getting better. It is optimal physical fitness. It is optimal health. It is taking care of oneself. It is optimizing finances. It is optimizing everything.
So at the individual level, it is about being optimistic and pursuing positive change in one’s life. What does it look like when people like this work together? It might be powerful.
Fitness
An obvious example is fitness. An individual can gather advice from friends and other sources, select a path, and go for it. But it can be very helpful to work with others. To have a group of peers holding each other accountable. This could be a Strava group or a group that runs or plays sports together regularly. This kind of group is fairly common and seems to be good for people, helping with both exercise and social connection.
This seems to typically be a fairly small group, maybe 2-10 people. What if a group like this is nested in a larger community of aligned individuals? I have seen this kind of pattern in Discord groups. There is a group of perhaps a few hundred people who share common interests and goals. Within this group, small, tight units form with specific practices in pursuit of the group’s overall goal. So you might have a community of techno-optimists, then within that community, a fitness group that practices a techno-optimist-influenced approach to fitness. They form a group on Strava and do weekly challenges. They try new gadgets like smartwatches, saunas, and ice baths. They share papers on health-related topics.
This can easily become very productive. A small, focused group like this could collaborate with another group in the community that is working on a community dashboard to incorporate a health aspect in the dashboard. The Strava group could be the first step to a similar system that better fits the community’s needs, and could end up being a product that is useful to people outside of the community.
It all starts with a group of people that shares a positive vision and shows up every day to help each other reach it.
Learning
Another example could be honing your thinking. Sharing and exchanging thoughts on papers, books, videos, podcasts, or articles. Sharing your own articles. Seeing peers share more challenging resources than you usually consume, or high-quality essays they’ve written could encourage you to step it up in your intellectual pursuits.
Regularly sharing links and discussing them could lead to coming up with ideas for systematizing the process. Developing an automated way to collect the most-discussed resources of the week and get more discussion going. This could also become a product that people outside of the community could use.
The general pattern is of aligned individuals forming an aligned community, then executing projects within the community that ultimately level first everybody in the community up, then people outside of the community.
Scaling Up
What happens when many communities like this compete or combine their efforts? There would be a wide array of small, agile, purposeful communities testing their own ideas of what a better world would be: keto, biohacking, CrossFit. It would be a more dynamic world, and ultimately a better world.