The Guild of the ROSE
The Guild of the ROSE is an educational organization that provides a variety of workshops focused on self improvement. Courses are taught by members of the community, and anyone can apply to lead a course. Because of this peer-led structure, we often teach non-traditional topics such as Fashion 101, Character Sheet, or How to Spot a Con.
ROSE workshops also place a strong emphasis on community. Workshops are typically taught to cohorts of six to eight, instead of the hundreds common in a college lecture hall. Lectures are also pre-recorded and students are expected to watch them beforehand -- class time is used to discuss the lecture and work through exercises. Classes are not about rote memorization and Guild progression is not gated behind completing an arbitrary selection of them.
The use of external sources such as Google, StackOverflow, or Wikipedia is not only allowed but encouraged. Rationality is about effectiveness in real life, not an artificial scenario.
Frequently Asked Questions
Guild members attend workshops each week with their cohort (a group of four to eight classmates).
Three workshops each month feature various self-improvement topics such as Metalearning, Practical Social Networking, and Decision Making. These topics are chosen by community poll and each week has a different one.
The fourth workshop is always a Level Up Session. These are a chance to pause and reflect on your progress, your current state, and where you'd like to go from here. We've found that doing this as a regular activity helps prevent "lost purposes" where people find themselves pursuing goals that they no longer want. Level Up Sessions also provide an opportunity to reorient yourself towards new goals — life is always changing, and a decision made a month ago may no longer be relevant to your current affairs.
Workshops are held in our Discord server in the General voice chat. You'll receive an invitation after creating a Guild account, or you can join now (with restricted access until you make an account).
A webcam and microphone are recommended but not required since Discord channels support text as well as voice and video.
The Practitioner's Path is the Guild's progression system (currently in beta). Level up by completing self-chosen self-improvement projects, unlocked advanced workshops (planned feature), and raise your authority within the Guild. For more information, see the Path introduction.
Three hours per week, split evenly among a cohort meeting, a class session, and an assignment. For more information, please see the A Week at the Guild section on the homepage.
We offer a free trial up to Path Level 15. To progress past Level 15, full membership is $15/month. For more details, see the pricing section on the homepage.
When you join the Guild, you'll be assigned to a permanent group of four to eight people (a cohort). Your cohort acts as a cross between a friend circle and a study group, and will be the people you interact the most with during your time at the Guild. Cohorts are meant to be self-governing, but Guild moderators are available to help resolve interpersonal conflicts or transfer people between cohorts, if necessary.
Interest groups are community-led subgroups dedicated to a specific topic, cause, or goal. You can join any number of interest groups.
No, but this is something we're interested in facilitating in the future. If you would like to host an in-person meetup, please contact us or DM Raven on Discord: Raven#8336.
DM Raven#8336 on Discord with an informal description of the workshop you want to run.
Meet the Council
I have a BS., MS., and Ph.D. in engineering, and experience in both academic research and commercial industry. I specialize in building computer models of physical systems. I live in Colorado with my three children.
Greetings. My name is Raven, and my role at the Guild is varied. I develop and maintain the website, manage the AI that draws our art, and mediate conflicts within the community. My ultimate goal is to create a garden of community that balances truth with niceness, pragmatism with idealism, and clarity with validity.
Outside of the Guild, I'm a software engineer by day and a writer, illustrator, and gamer by night. You can contact me any time via Discord, or at msravenschultz@gmail.com.
I have been a Dungeon Master most of my life, a Nuclear Electrician on a submarine for a few years, and a lifelong student of math, science, the humanities, and history.
As Guild Consul, I bring context and an eye for the logistics needed to achieve our goals. Ask me about non-Newtonian calculus or driving a submarine without a driver's license!
I have worn many metaphorical and literal hats throughout my life: radio DJ, actor, political activist, martial artist, pizza maker, bank teller, physics tutor, wizard, and real estate agent.
In my role as Anti Systems Engineer for the Guild of the ROSE, I use my wide variety of experiences and insatiable curiosity to help find orthogonal answers to unorthodox problems.
My name is Alex, but you can call me whatever you’d like. People have called me "a wizard trying to look like a muggle", "a rationalist shaman", "transhumanist scum", and many others.
I am here because I want to make the world a better place. I firmly believe that a combination of empathetic community and reliable epistemology is how we do that.
Love with your heart, use your head for everything else.