This is similar to the idea that [[Wisdom is knowledge usable in many good explanations that cannot be acquired quickly]]. In life I've seen a common pattern of 1. new thing starts 2. community forms 3. community is excited about thing 4. new thing gets more awesome and more popular 5. repeat 3 and 4 6. growing community reaches some threshold where 7. the excitement from early community members starts to get lost 8. new thing gets less awesome 9. repeat 7 and 8 10. thing becomes boring, often resorting to bureaucracy, process, or other systemic mechanism instead of community and bottom-up energy to keep the thing from falling apart. 11. (maybe) thing falls apart This pattern can be seen in internet communities, social network sites, companies, etc. What makes a community thrive? Well, let me introduce a thriving community of people that have existed for as long as people have: religious people. Yes, I clumped them together to be ridiculous. Religions, at least the ones that last, keep communities of people from falling apart. People, more or less, have been doing the same kinds of things in the same kinds of buildings, saying the same kinds of words for thousands of years (in the case of Christianity, churches, and creeds). What is it that does this? Wtf? * If a church falls apart, the religion doesn't. * If Wikipedia falls apart, the online encyclopedia sort of does? Or does it? It feels like it does. Does someone need to just make a clone with new mores? Idk. The philosophy of science has created a sort of hack to us getting knowledge about new things faster than the many many many generations it took for our ancestors. We have sort of figured out an explanation about knowledge as a shortcut to better overcome the problem of induction... induce based on scientific theories rather than surface level phenomenon. Also criticize theories to make them more and more consistent with reality. This took a long time for humans to figure this out. The religious construct is different. It is HARD to form new knowledge. The existing knowledge is kept sacred by design. Is this related to keep a thriving community of followers? Is there something about holding to a dogma that keeps a community bonded? Is this the same thing as a "vision statement" for a business, or different? Is authority required in a community to keep continuity for a community's mores? How else would the community keep them?