Thank you for responding! I am being very critical, both in foundational and nitpicky ways. This can be annoying and make people want to circle the wagons. But you and the other organizers are engaging constructively, which is great.
The distinction between Solstice representing a single coherent worldview vs. a series of reflections also came up in comments on a draft. In particular, the Spinozism of Songs Stay Sung feels a lot weirder if it is taken as the response to the darkness, which I initially did, rather than one response to the darkness.
Nevertheless, including something in Solstice solidly establishes it as a normal / acceptable belief for rationalists: within the local Overton Window. You might not be explicitly telling people that they ought to believe something, but you are telling that it is acceptable for high status people in their community to believe it. I am concerned that some of these beliefs are even treated as acceptable.
Take Great Transhumanist Future. It has “a coder” dismantling the sun “in another twenty years with some big old computer.” This is a call to accelerate AI development, and use it for extremely transformative actions. Some of the organizers believe that this is the sort of thing that will literally kill everyone. Even if it goes well, it would make life as it currently exists on the surface of the Earth impossible. Life could still continue in other ways, but some of us might want to still live here in 20 years.[1] I don’t think that reckless AI accelerationism should be treated as locally acceptable.
The line in Brighter Than Today points in the same way. It’s not only anti-religious. It is also disparaging towards people who warn about the destructive potential of a new technology. Is that an attitude we want to establish as normal?
If the main problem with changing the songs is in making them scan and rhyme, then I can probably just pay that cost. This isn’t a thing I’m particularly skilled at, but there are people who are who are adjacent to the community. I’m happy to ask them to rewrite a few lines, if the new versions will plausibly be used.
If the main problem with changing the songs is that many people in this community want to sing about AI accelerationism and want the songs to be anti-religious, then I stand by my criticisms.
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Is this action unilateral? Unclear. There might be a global consensus building phase, or a period of reflection. They aren’t mentioned in the song. These processes can’t take very long given the timelines.
I think you should ask the author of the song if it’s referring to someone using powerful AI to do something transformative to the sun.
This is extremely obvious to me. The song is opposed to how the sun currently is, calling it “wasteful” and “distasteful”—the second word is a quote from a fictional character, but the first is not. It later talks about when “the sun’s a battery,” so something about the sun is going to change. I really don’t know what “some big old computer” could be referring to if not powerful AI.