Hmm. So, I certainly support more small events like you describe, but I’m not sure I grok what your goal with them is.
“American Civic Religion is competitive with twice-a-year Catholics” sounds true, but Broader-Rationality-Culture already seems at-least-as-good as both of those.
i.e, with Modern American Christmas, there’s a range of activities ranging from “singing songs drunkenly” to “quiet Midnight Mass” to “just visiting your relatives for dinner” to “watching the Rockettes at Rockerfeller center”.
LessWrong-descended-culture already seems to essentially be the sort of “twice a year Catholics/Jews” esque culture, with religish-holiday-esque-Winter-Solstice, general-festival-esque Summer Solstice, and CFAR Alumni Reunion and EA Global as non-religion-flavored things.
My impression is that your concern is more like “not liking that approach to establishing broader connection”.
My point is that clearly, small events are effective at sustaining ties, and so we should have some. I also am very suspicious of some common elements like singing in unison. They’re common enough to be perceived as secular, and so not given the same skepticism as explicit trappings of religion. I think this is a mistake. They have a literally hypnotic effect such that they tend to override standard skeptical filters, and I don’t see them as any less dangerous to epistemics when they are used to promote a fairly-good ideology.
My concern is that. used uncarefully, complex ceremonies and ritual creates belief system lock-in. The more you include, the more content you are embedding that is bypassing evidence-based reasoning and getting treated as true until the audience thinks to question it. Knowing that even the best belief system assuredly has flaws, I think it is wrong to do this any more than absolutely necessary.
So, there’s obviously a bunch of disagreements I have there, but they don’t feel like they’re touching on any of my cruxes. (I listed four major events, only one of which was especially ritualized. I feel like my arguments stay mostly the same in a parallel world where Solstice doesn’t exist)
I do agree that there should be more small events of the sort you describe. I’m not as excited about them as you because I think it’s a lot harder to get lots of people to do a distributed small event than a big event.
I also just don’t feel a need for that many repeated events, large or small, and I feel close-to-saturated on them. (to add an additional repeated event, I’d either need to sacrifice a currently-in-rotation repeat event, or sacrifice the ability to try new things)
Hmm. So, I certainly support more small events like you describe, but I’m not sure I grok what your goal with them is.
“American Civic Religion is competitive with twice-a-year Catholics” sounds true, but Broader-Rationality-Culture already seems at-least-as-good as both of those.
i.e, with Modern American Christmas, there’s a range of activities ranging from “singing songs drunkenly” to “quiet Midnight Mass” to “just visiting your relatives for dinner” to “watching the Rockettes at Rockerfeller center”.
LessWrong-descended-culture already seems to essentially be the sort of “twice a year Catholics/Jews” esque culture, with religish-holiday-esque-Winter-Solstice, general-festival-esque Summer Solstice, and CFAR Alumni Reunion and EA Global as non-religion-flavored things.
My impression is that your concern is more like “not liking that approach to establishing broader connection”.
My point is that clearly, small events are effective at sustaining ties, and so we should have some. I also am very suspicious of some common elements like singing in unison. They’re common enough to be perceived as secular, and so not given the same skepticism as explicit trappings of religion. I think this is a mistake. They have a literally hypnotic effect such that they tend to override standard skeptical filters, and I don’t see them as any less dangerous to epistemics when they are used to promote a fairly-good ideology.
My concern is that. used uncarefully, complex ceremonies and ritual creates belief system lock-in. The more you include, the more content you are embedding that is bypassing evidence-based reasoning and getting treated as true until the audience thinks to question it. Knowing that even the best belief system assuredly has flaws, I think it is wrong to do this any more than absolutely necessary.
So, there’s obviously a bunch of disagreements I have there, but they don’t feel like they’re touching on any of my cruxes. (I listed four major events, only one of which was especially ritualized. I feel like my arguments stay mostly the same in a parallel world where Solstice doesn’t exist)
I do agree that there should be more small events of the sort you describe. I’m not as excited about them as you because I think it’s a lot harder to get lots of people to do a distributed small event than a big event.
I also just don’t feel a need for that many repeated events, large or small, and I feel close-to-saturated on them. (to add an additional repeated event, I’d either need to sacrifice a currently-in-rotation repeat event, or sacrifice the ability to try new things)