A discussion with Duncan Umphrey, contributing editor at Palladium magazine and a long-time member of the intellectual community in San Francisco

Duncan Umphrey argues that the book group is the basic unit of any intellectual scene and intellectual movement. In a conversation with the interviewer, Ben, he described how book groups form, how they select texts, how they support social life, and how a small reading circle can grow into an institution. The discussion covered the local mechanics of running a group, the sociological context, and the conditions under which an ideology spreads.

Book Groups as the Basic Unit of Movements

Umphrey places the book group at the base of organized ideological work. He pointed to communist parties, which used reading groups to build shared ideological commitments before wider organization. He cited Lenin, who stated the purpose of such groups explicitly. Reading a text alone produces individual understanding. Reading it in a group produces a shared interpretation.

The same principle, in his account, applies at larger scales:

• Shared vocabulary: A group that reads the same texts develops a common frame of reference for discussing urgent problems.
• National identity: After 1848, European nationalism relied on shared reading, including national canons of classic literature.
• Long-term role: Umphrey described books as a social technology that has shaped Western culture for roughly 200 years, since the beginning of Western civilization.

Umphrey also described his own experience in 2012 and 2013. He joined reading groups with online contacts and read works by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Peter Singer. Members held meetings in an MIT classroom they entered without authorization. Several participants from these groups later built artificial intelligence companies. Umphrey said these companies are arguably valued in the trillions of dollars and have negotiated directly with the US government over economic and legal reform. He attributed their coordination to the ideological alignment built through shared reading.

Group Reading and Coordination

Umphrey contrasted online intellectual activity with group study. He described the internet as highly fertile, with many schools of thought, Substack newsletters, books, and articles. In his view, online participants rarely achieve strong coordination.

He identified three differences between solitary reading and group reading:

1. Individual absorption is not enough. A reader can obtain a chapter summary from an AI language model. Working through an argument with others produces a deeper understanding.
2. The text becomes a focal point. Members bring their own prior opinions to the book. The group uses the text to clarify and test these views.
3. Philosophical training is collective. Umphrey stated that a good book club performs philosophy and trains the mind collectively.

Umphrey also addressed internal conflict. He acknowledged that disputes occur in all groups. He argued, however, that disputes over doctrine or strategy differ from disputes over personal status. Strategic disagreements can be tested through experience and revised. Disputes based on interpersonal preferences rarely resolve. In successful movements, factions that prevail usually hold a shared position about the group's direction, and members who disagree often regroup around the common mission.

Social Function of Book Groups

Umphrey treated the social function of book groups as equal in importance to their intellectual function.

• Enjoyment: He argued that intellectual life fails when people force themselves to read texts they do not enjoy. A book group provides a pleasant social activity. He cited Aristotle's view that philosophy's pleasure is one of its most valuable features.
• Social nucleus: Book groups can organize wider social relationships. Umphrey described people who moved to a city, found no suitable activities, and created their own groups around their interests.
• Shared reference points: Long-running groups develop a canon. Members can refer to texts that few people have read. Umphrey gave the example of a group started by Michael Kerzy during the 2020 pandemic, which has met for years and has read works including material on Byzantine history.
• Leadership: Every group has an organizer. The organizer may select books, schedule meetings, or delegate tasks. In one group he described, a leader set the overall structure and rotated book selection among members.

Social Infrastructure and Civic Participation

Umphrey addressed the claim that modern life is atomized. He said the claim is sociologically accurate, with the trend running for 40 to 50 years since Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone. He argued, however, that the trend does not remove individual responsibility for building social life.

He contrasted the past with the present. Earlier generations expected citizens to contribute to civic institutions. Umphrey's grandmother, for example, was heavily involved in the planetarium in St. Louis. Other examples include donating to the opera, participating in the Shriners, and coaching Little League. In his account, citizens were expected to build and maintain such institutions, not merely consume them.

Umphrey stated that all social infrastructure comes from people who build it. In his experience, when a person or friend puts in organizational effort, the effort succeeds in about nine out of ten cases. The main constraint, he said, is the number of people willing to take on this work. He noted that this constraint also applied in Lenin's network of reading groups. Organizers had to assemble participants, enforce preparation, and remove members who did not complete the reading.

He cited current examples in the San Francisco Bay Area. A student book club, started after a student named Wolf decided more reading and discussion were needed, meets in the city. Umphrey also said he has benefited from about half a dozen book clubs run by the Avalon Institute.

Consumer Model Versus Self-Organization

Umphrey identified a consumer model of intellectual life as a cause of frustration in American intellectual culture. He described universities that cost about $70,000 per year and provide services such as dining halls and extracurricular activities. In his account, students attend lectures, receive information, and produce output needed for a credential. Critics within universities, he said, have described students as passive recipients who do the minimum required.

He compared this model to the job description model of work. Under this model, people locate pre-existing roles, perform listed tasks, and advance within an organization. Umphrey contrasted this with the model of an active citizen. A citizen asks what is needed for an organization to succeed, particularly an organization in which the person has a direct stake. Applied to intellectual life, the question becomes how to form a community of people who care about ideas and how to make intellectual life part of one's community.

Starting a Book Group

Umphrey gave a sequence of practical considerations for starting an intellectual institution, including a book club, nonprofit, or magazine.

1. Determine whether an existing network is available

Starting within an existing network reduces the difficulty of gathering participants. Examples include a workplace group with shared concerns or an online community. Umphrey said that the former Twitter platform helped connect him with people doing intellectual work. Groups without an existing network face a cold-start problem: finding the first members.

2. Recruit from adjacent communities

Umphrey described a method used by early rationalists. Organizers in areas without local rationalist communities identified adjacent groups with similar participants. Examples include computer science departments, academic philosophy departments, and, during the period he described, the new atheist movement.

Organizers can then promote their group to these audiences. Umphrey stated that a group may not attract 35 people to a lecture in such communities but may attract two or three participants. He described three people reading a book together as a solid start.

3. Define a vision and central questions

Umphrey said a group needs an orienting vision beyond social contact. He cited the Bolsheviks, who described their reading groups as part of a project to form a shared ideology and a vision for the world. He also cited the effective altruists, who pitched their work as the development of important insights. The rationalist movement's stated goal of "raising the sanity waterline" served a similar function.

He cited Palladium's tagline, "governance futurism," as an example of an orienting vision. Organizers should ask what their vision is and what questions they want to resolve. Umphrey argued that the book club forms around these answers.

Selecting Reading Material

Umphrey described three methods for choosing texts.

Method 1: Canonical lists

Established traditions often have canons and reading lists. Groups inside such traditions can begin with these texts. Older foundational works are often useful because they show where a tradition's ideas originated. Umphrey mentioned a set of reading lists compiled by Richard, which led to multiple book groups.

Method 2: Open questions

Umphrey selects texts to answer specific research questions. He does extensive economic and social science research and follows the case study method. He examines historical episodes related to a theoretical question and uses a book group to discuss them. Examples include:

• Late Ottoman history: Umphrey identified the collapse of Islamic civilization as a gap in his historical understanding. A group he organized with students, shortly before the interview, read books on this subject, and members with different background knowledge contributed.
• Medieval Chinese economic history: He organized a group focused on this subject that met for about half a year. Some members stayed for the full period, while others left after reading a few books.
• Benjamin Franklin's autobiography: Umphrey described feeling isolated and wanting community. He read Franklin's autobiography, which describes how Franklin organized a social club, and followed the approach. He reported that it worked.

Umphrey also described a substantive finding from case study research. Studies of industrial growth and prosperity suggested that interest rates were a smaller explanatory factor than commonly assumed. He said he would not have reached this conclusion without the case studies. He acknowledged that the case study method is harder to apply to philosophical questions. He said that examining brain damage would address only part of questions about human nature.

Method 3: Tracing lineage

Umphrey said a text emerges from earlier work that addresses similar questions from a different angle. Reading the earlier sources can clarify the foundations of an idea. He argued that later writers often assume their readers know earlier authors and omit points that earlier writers stated. Over time, these omissions can cause the points to be forgotten. He cited Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom he described as unfairly neglected in histories of Western philosophy.

The two-stage method

Umphrey stated that intellectual formation requires two stages that occur together. Groups must learn the foundational material and also work at the frontier of a field. He described the approach as follows: read an author extensively, trace the author's intellectual lineage, identify the broad arc of the tradition, and then find its unresolved questions.

Example: Nick Land

Umphrey described a San Francisco group that began with questions raised by Nick Land. Land's career includes the following works:

• The Thirst for Annihilation, from the 1990s, which Umphrey described as psychedelic and strongly influenced by Georges Bataille and by Deleuze and Guattari
• Writings from the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), including work on artificial intelligence
• Xenosystems
• The Dark Enlightenment and essays from the 2010s associated with the neoreactionary movement
• Essays from the Fanged Noumena collection

The group read Land's work extensively, including Xenosystems and The Dark Enlightenment. Its members then traced the intellectual lineage to Friedrich Nietzsche and Emerson. The group's questions included the teleology of human life, the governing structures of intelligent evolution, and the role of intelligence in evolutionary processes.

Upstream Questions and Theory of Change

Umphrey and Ben discussed questions at the metaphysical level. Umphrey agreed with Wolf that a society requires a set of metaphysical premises that give people a point of orientation. Examples include:

• What is a human being?
• What is the best life for a human?
• What is the nature of the political community?
• What is the nature of human excellence?

According to Umphrey, these questions shape practical decisions, including whether to have children, which relationships to form, and how far to defer to the political authority governing one's territory.

Umphrey acknowledged that work at this level is hard to evaluate. A researcher studying industrial policy can compare case studies, but the effects of changes in fundamental beliefs are less visible. For this reason, he proposed the same method at this level. Researchers should study cases that succeeded in shaping foundational beliefs and cases that failed. The comparison should identify what enabled success and what caused failure.

Requirements for an Ideology to Spread

Umphrey stated that many attempts to build influential ideologies fail. He compared the required components to a car. A car with 75 percent of its parts does not run at 75 percent efficiency. It does not run at all. In his view, an ideology needs all of the following components.

• A consistent worldview: The ideology must solve problems that people try to understand, particularly by explaining what the world is made of. Umphrey gave examples. Communists identify industry and class struggle as basic. Rationalists identify intelligence as basic.
• A utopian vision: The ideology must describe how the world can be made whole or redeemed. Umphrey noted that not all people need this vision, but the most effective evangelists do. Ideologies with apocalyptic elements often include this vision, though he did not analyze the psychological reasons.
• Accurate explanations: The ideology's answers must match what people observe. If the explanations are false or fail to explain events, people will not adopt them. An ideology may gain a small group of followers who do not understand it, but it will not spread.
• Actions for adherents: The ideology must give people something to do. Umphrey described AI safety advocates who had difficulty providing practical steps. Their listeners asked what they should do, and the typical answer, to quit a job and pursue difficult mathematical research, rarely satisfied them. Later, the movement built channels for political activism. These channels made it easier for new adherents to act, which increased their engagement and identification with the cause.
• An internal reason to recruit: The ideology must contain a reason for members to persuade others. Umphrey described a simple form in vegetarianism. Adherents believe their actions improve the world, and others continue harmful practices unless they are persuaded. He cited Christianity as an example of a worldview with a strong evangelistic component, which he said contributed to its expansion.

Umphrey also stated that ideologies develop over time. He noted that the communists required decades to refine their ideas into a form that gained broad acceptance. They continued to debate and revise the ideology for strategic reasons and to interpret new events.

The Intellectual Waterfall

Umphrey described the diffusion of ideas as a waterfall.

In this model, a small group produces novel ideas through specialized and demanding work. The next group understands and reproduces the arguments, though it cannot originate them. Each level simplifies the ideas further. By the fourth or fifth level, the content can lose its technical depth and coherence. Umphrey said he could not reliably predict which elements will be lost in this process.

Umphrey stated that the mass version of an idea lacks the esoteric core that requires intense study. He said this loss frustrates the original thinkers. In his view, there is no alternative route to a large audience.

Transition From Book Club to Movement

Umphrey stated that an ambitious book club eventually becomes a movement or organization. The transition occurs when a group develops an ideology that answers fundamental human questions. He cited the early rationalist group he was involved with as an example. The group moved from reading texts to shaping AI policy.

He described the transition as gradual. In the group he discussed, he reported an interval of about 18 months between visible expansions. During this period, members argued in online comment sections. The attempt to raise the sanity waterline did not succeed as planned, and the Center for Applied Rationality declined and was later reconstituted with reduced ambitions. Meanwhile, interest in AI increased after the AI system AlphaGo became strong at Go, and funding for research into the philosophy of AI grew.

Umphrey characterized the process as slow and repetitive. Participants often lacked support from family and friends, and some found it difficult to explain their work to their partners or parents. He described progress as visible on a scale of years. Over time, the ideas became more coherent, and the group grew.

Indicators of progress

Umphrey stated that growth alone does not indicate success. A group may grow without developing its ideas. He said this pattern is a poor sign. In his experience, such groups rarely become historically significant and instead become the setting in which other forces operate. He prioritized intellectual coherence over size. He also emphasized operational coherence. In his account, progress usually follows this sequence:

1. A book club
2. Discussion in online comment sections
3. A forum owned by the group
4. A magazine
5. A group of overlapping book clubs with a recognized name and associated ideas
6. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization
7. Several 501(c)(3) organizations

Umphrey described this sequence as a roadmap for a person with a vision.

Conclusion

Umphrey stated that book groups benefit people who build large projects and people who do not. Even without an ambition to influence public institutions, a group creates a social environment for discussing a person's interests. He stated that such environments sometimes provide the foundation for another person's larger project.