It makes sense that some people might be turned off by ritual. I hope those people went to one of the several other New York Less Wrong megameetups, or to the designated ritual-free day Sunday, or even on Saturday for the two hours before the ritual started. If they come to an event that has “RITUAL” in big letters all over it on the day when the ritual is scheduled to occur then I don’t think you can fairly accuse it of being inflicted on them without such a sweeping redefinition of “consent” that it becomes impossible to ever do anything that doesn’t exactly conform to social norms.
A lot of the above criticisms act like the ritual ruined a perfectly good meetup, but I think without the ritual this meetup would not have occurred. I went there all the way from Maryland because I wanted to see the ritual after reading about it last year. I dragged a friend who was also there because she loved rituals. Many people there weren’t even in the LW community at all and came only because they wanted to see what the ritual was about. Quite a few people organized cross-continental flights from California because they wanted to participate in the ritual. If Raemon had said “Okay everyone, let’s have yet another meetup and talk about Bayes for a few hours”, there simply wouldn’t have been a meetup of this size.
So on utilitarian grounds, I think it is a pure loss to take dozens of people for whom this is one of the highlights of their year, and hold them hostage to the purely theoretical possibility that there might be someone who wants to go to a megameetup, refuses to go to any of the many non-ritual megameetups, mysteriously hates ritual despite her insistence on only going to the megameetup with “ritual” in the name, refuses to go on the designated non-ritual day, refuses to leave or even go upstairs when the ritual starts, and is such a utility monster that her needs outweigh those of everyone else.
And knowing what the ritual was like, it’s also hard for me to take the idea of exclusion seriously. I understand why people who came on the second day might feel like they missed something, but the same would be true if we’d all gone out to watch a movie Saturday night and they hadn’t seen it. But other than that? We sung silly songs from Portal and Firefly together for a while. Now we are closer far than brothers, and shall never again feel respect or human feeling for anyone outside our sacred circle.
No, seriously, I do understand the idea of the Dark Arts (I coined our community’s use of the term). But I think there’s a difference between brainwashing and inspiration. Brainwashing changes your beliefs, inspiration helps you live up to them. I don’t know if it’s possible to do inspiration without even the slightest chance of brainwashing, but I’d rather not ban all inspirational activities until we prove it.
If it helps, think of this less as people in robes chanting in a dead language and more as our version of a school graduation (which, uh, also involves people in robes chanting in a dead language, but you get the picture). At a school graduation they sing songs, somebody talks about the values of the school and the importance of learning, and then everyone goes forth psyched about their future and has fond memories later. The same is true of weddings, funerals, the Fourth of July, birthday parties, summer camps. To excise all of those things from our lives because we can’t prove they don’t cause some residual brainwashing would make the world less than it was.
As a secular Jew, I grew up treating Passover and even my Bar Mitzvah in about the same way I treated birthday parties and summer camps; a fun time to get together and sing and appreciate family and friends, a marking of life transitions and the passing of time. But it grew harder and harder for me to appreciate them when I realized that I didn’t really approve of celebrating the deaths of the Egyptian first-born, or that chanting the Torah and drawing moral lessons from it felt kind of like BSing in front of everyone. Even school graduations got to feel a little like “go forth and be a cog in a slightly more complex machine than the one you are currently a cog in.”
In New York, I was able to have a good time and sing and meet people and mark the passings of the seasons, and for one of the first times affirm values that I really believed in. When Raemon got up there and started talking about how each year the sun went dark, and each year people died during the winter, but each year the sun came back—and when he went onto how each year we humans added a little bit more of our own light, and one day we would conquer the darkness entirely and no one would have to die anymore—well, it was a beautiful experience. Not life altering, not rationality-maximizing, but beautiful. And to be terribly clinical, the person I was before the ritual would have approved of everything that went on, which is not a test simple brainwashing can pass.
I agree that experiencing the sacred can be done individually. So can sex. It’s not the same, though, in either case. Ever since the days of lighting fires and chanting about the gods, we’ve been doing our sacredness in groups. Even the ancients who took “sacred” totally literally knew you needed a minyan. It just works better. It’s something I feel a need for. And I’d only fulfill that need in a group I completely trust, because of the brainwashing and awkwardness concerns you mentioned. And this was it. I don’t think I took it seriously on an intellectual level, and I didn’t have the same feelings as the people above who said it helped cement concepts into their mind. But I felt catharsis afterwards. I smiled a lot and sang a lot and it was good.
A commenter downstream said that his worry here “has to do with seriousness and how much I value banter and puncturing self-importance”. I think we already have too much self-importance puncturing; too much irony. I think on the scales of “funny things should be taken lightly, solemn things should be taken with solemnity”, we are too good at the former and too worried about social stigma to do the latter. In fact, of everything I’m impressed with Raemon for, the thing that impressed me most was his ability to take himself seriously, to resist the overpowering urge to say “Ha ha guys, I don’t really think I’m cool enough to have strong feelings and officiate a celebration of the seasons, it’s all just ironic, I’m not silly or something.”
Except when it was silly. Raemon had the rare skill to design a night for us that was both funny and solemn at once, in exactly the right places, and to the exact degree that each idea required. I appreciate the humor but I think it was the solemnity that was beautiful.
I don’t think I’m worrying about brainwashing concerns or failing the social proof respectability checks.
I’m seeing a community cementing thing that I see no intrinsic fun in and a lot of other people seem to be seeing intrinsic fun in, which is tripping my “pretend to be like the normals and make the extra effort to participate in the unfun thing that is actually fun for them because they are not like you and then they might be less likely to kill you” instinct.
What if next year’s ritual includes chanting thrice unto the heavens a solemn vow not to kill the people who don’t go to next year’s ritual?
...nah, I don’t think anyone wants to to kill or even shun people who don’t go to the ritual. Of the top ten LW contributors on the table on the right, only two of them (me and Alicorn) attended, and for me it was a last-second sort of thing. Eliezer didn’t go. It would be kind of hard to shun Eliezer and 80% of the top contributors, even if people wanted to. Only a tiny proportion of the community went to the ritual and those who chose not to were in good company.
More philosophically, wouldn’t the same complaint apply to having real-life meetups at all (wouldn’t it exclude people who prefer to just talk via the Internet?) or writing HPMoR (now non-readers feel left out of a lot of discussions and don’t get in-jokes, so they might feel pressure to read it) or CFAR minicamps (people who don’t get selected to go might feel like they’re less a part of the community). And I know one commenter above managed to find some trivial differences between board game night and ritual night, but the fundamental problem of “What if I don’t enjoy this but I feel like I have to go anyway?” remains sound.
I think the road of not doing fun things that most people want because someone who doesn’t want to do it might feel left out leads to sitting quietly in a dark room. And the road of never doing community cementing things because people might be outside them leads to never trying to cement the community. And I think that the ritual, in this case, is being held to a much higher standard than any other activity of this sort just because it sounds kind of weird.
The particular problem with the ritual is that unlike the other things, it seems to exist only for the purpose of community-building. Opting out of the other activities makes your cognitive dissonance module say “well, maybe I don’t like fanfiction / board games / decision theory that much”, which isn’t that bad. Opting out of the ritual makes the cognitive dissonance module say “well, maybe I don’t care that much for being a community member”, which is a bit more unfortunate.
Then there’s also the small thing where the nonsensical community forming rituals have popped up in every human culture everywhere as far back as we know anything about human cultures, and always tend to develop the side effect of the socially gelled people favoring each other a bit more over the boring people who don’t bother to play along with the rituals. This is what the social instinct response is about, not paranoia about hooded murderers going about stabbing people one night. Traditional societies seem to end up with all members participating in whatever the local ritual is, because that’s the guarantee for belonging in the in-group and the other in-group members having your back. If you don’t see the point in the ritual, tough. The social cohesion mechanism wasn’t built for you, just smile and play-act along for the bit of extra guarantee that someone might have food to spare for you as well on the next famine year.
I think that people’s response to ritual is hard to explain. I have trouble explaining it. “Community-building” is sort of the default explanation. In the same way, if there were a real-life meetup, “getting to know people better”, which is almost a synonym for “community building”, is a default explanation because it’s hard to explain why we like meeting people face to face when online conversation is so much easier.
I think you make a good point that presenting it as “community building” might sound exclusionary, and I will stop using that justification. But in the end I don’t think it is any more about community building than meetups or board games or anything like that—only harder to explain, so that that explanation becomes more salient. Maybe we should just bill it as “Come and sing and feel emotions.”
it’s hard to explain why we like meeting people face to face when online conversation is so much easier.
Sure, but this is in the same sense that it’s hard to explain why we perceive three-dimensional objects when the input we’re getting is two-dimensional arrays. It took a lot of smart people paying attention to unravel that particular puzzle, but there’s nothing fundamentally mysterious about it.
There’s a lot of stuff going on in face to face interactions that isn’t present in online conversation, and it evidently includes things that many of us find gratifying.
Which things those are is worth knowing (not least because we can use that knowledge to build more gratifying telepresence rigs) but not knowing it doesn’t preclude being gratified by them, any more than not knowing how to derive 3D models from 2D images precludes perceiving 3D objects.
Not that you’re saying otherwise, granted. I suspect I’m just responding emotionally to the idea of demanding an explanation before it’s OK to value something.
I suspect I’m just responding emotionally to the idea of demanding an explanation before it’s OK to value something.
I agree with this sentiment in general, but in cases where the “something” that’s being valued is valued only by some people, rather than all (here I am referring to rituals, rather than just “meeting people face to face”), seeking an explanation is more important.
(blink) That is, if I value two practices P1 and P2, and 95% of the population values P1 and only 5% values P2, you’re saying it’s more important to seek an explanation for valuing P2 than an explanation for valuing P1… yes? Can you expand on why you believe that?
I’m not sure how you got what you said from what I said; I surmise that I was much less clear than I thought, or that I am not understanding you. Attempt #2, in the hope that it’s the former:
If everyone likes a thing, then asking “why do we like that thing” is of academic interest.
If some people like a thing but other people don’t like that thing, then asking “why do some people like that thing” has practical use. Maybe we can bring the naysayers around. Maybe we will discover that the advocates’ reasons for liking the thing are bad reasons. Maybe we’ll discover something about the underlying preferences that will allow the pro-thingers and the anti-thingers to get along better. In any case we’ll very likely come to understand each other better, and will be less likely to think that people of the other preference type are abnormal; at the most basic level, we’ll do better at keeping in mind that people of the opposite preferences exist at all. That’s a good thing.
The relevance to the discussion of rituals has to do with the fact that some participants and pro-ritual commenters have expressed sentiments such as “humans need ritual” or “people like ritual” or “people have a need for experiences of sacredness” or other things along those lines. My motivation for commenting has been largely to point out that such comments are sorely in need of having the word “some” (or, at best, “most”, conditional on at least some data supporting such a claim) inserted into them.
And given that that’s the situation — that some people like rituals, but some clearly do not — the question of “why do some people like ritual” acquires a more than academic interest, for the reasons I outlined above.
Sorry about the failure of communication, but as it happens you answered my question. Thank you.
To my mind, asking why everyone likes a thing that everyone likes has practical use. If we can answer that question, we can understand how we make that judgment, we can understand how we make related judgments. That’s a good thing. (I do agree that it’s of academic interest, though. Like many things of academic interest, it has practical use.)
That aside, though… sure, if your motivation is largely to point out that some people don’t need ritual, like ritual, or need experiences of sacredness, I expect that’s true.
Right. I probably am going for a bit of a selective reduction here with my kneejerk reactions. There’s all sorts of quite strange when you think about it stuff going on with playing board games too, for instance, which I’m not being concerned about.
Still, I think we have a mutual appreciation here that rituals are powerful stuff. I worry a bit when I see a not that broad culture (compared to society at large, or the academia as a whole, for example) like LW picking up on a ritual and taking it up as its own, and thinking about what role rituals end up having everywhere in human history. I’m seeing things getting on a path to ending up as something like Freemasonry (assuming for the moment that they’re more secular than they are), where there might be an understanding that the rituals are just a formality, but participating in the culture without participating in the rituals still basically doesn’t work.
I might also notice that all the subcultures that stick around for more than a generation or two seem to come with rituals running the show. It might be that the actual problem I’m pattern matching isn’t about adopting rituals at all, but about subcultures sticking around past their expiration date instead. Subcultures that go bad quickly tend to have more overt badness indicators.
Maybe we should just bill it as “Come and sing and feel emotions.”
“Come join the Solstice Ritual” sounds like just people being silly to me, while this sounds like something from a Grant Morrison comic book that will end with someone’s head being carved open by robed creatures with giant insect heads.
Hmm… although I’ve never been to any of these rituals, but from reading the descriptions, it hasn’t been my impression that it would exist only for community-building. For example, I found the description of the 2011 ritual touching on an emotional level even though I was reading it all alone at home, and I expect that the rituals would also have given me a strong emotional kick that wasn’t directly related to the group bonding aspect. Going out to a movie with friends would probably be a good analogy: being in a group does enhance the experience, and the group bonding is a plus, but the main reason we go there is the movie itself.
The social bonding and getting to meet new folks was not what gave me a strong feeling of “man, I want to participate in that” when I read the description of the original ritual. In fact, all of the social bonding stuff was just extra: a nice plus, but hardly the point. What attracted me was, well, the ritual itself: the feeling that it could give me a deep, lasting emotional experience that’d move me to the core, a faint echo of which I felt while reading the post. That would ultimately be a solitary and personal experience, even if I needed the presence of a group to help me achieve it.
What I was trying to say was that I don’t think that its level of “(only community building)-ness” is much higher than that of board games or fan fiction. A little higher, maybe, but not that much. I don’t know if I’d feel differently if I’d actually participated in such a ritual, though.
I think the road of not doing fun things that most people want because someone who doesn’t want to do it might feel left out leads to sitting quietly in a dark room.
But I don’t want to sit quietly in a dark room. If that’s our new thing I’ll feel left out!
I mean, that actually was sort of the central point of the event (which I know you had to miss out on!) so I’m not entirely sure what Yvain’s point was :P
(Actually come to think of it you may well have been sitting in a dark room at the time)
When you say “see no intrinsic fun in” do you mean “this doesn’t sound like fun” or do you mean “I have tried this, it wasn’t fun, and I don’t anticipate rationalists being able to do it in a way that would make it fun”? If the former, do you think actually trying it would be valuable in the name of gathering more information? In general, what are your thoughts on comfort zone expansion?
The latter. I’ve been through all sorts of community forming rituals, and always found them nonsensical and mostly unfun. Comfort zone expansion is good, but if a tried thing is not working out, it’s not working out.
It makes sense that some people might be turned off by ritual. I hope those people went to one of the several other New York Less Wrong megameetups, or to the designated ritual-free day Sunday, or even on Saturday for the two hours before the ritual started. If they come to an event that has “RITUAL” in big letters all over it on the day when the ritual is scheduled to occur then I don’t think you can fairly accuse it of being inflicted on them without such a sweeping redefinition of “consent” that it becomes impossible to ever do anything that doesn’t exactly conform to social norms.
It was not my intention to accuse the ritual of being inflicted on anyone; I didn’t think I said or implied such a thing, but if so, let me assure you that I quite realize that attendance was voluntary. As for the other megameetups, I will try to attend the next time a non-ritual one happens. I was sadly unable to make it on that Sunday. They seem to happen about once a year, yes?
Your other comments seem to suggest that you think that I am worried about brainwashing, or what have you; that’s just not the issue here. So your comments such as
I don’t know if it’s possible to do inspiration without even the slightest chance of brainwashing, but I’d rather not ban all inspirational activities until we prove it.
To excise all of those things from our lives because we can’t prove they don’t cause some residual brainwashing would make the world less than it was.
miss the mark a bit. Like Risto_Saarelma, I just dislike rituals (fairly strongly). From your comment, and others in this thread, I’ve discovered that some (most?) people do like them, and like them enough to serve as motivation for traveling some distance, or at least for attending an event they’d otherwise skip. All I can say is: mind = blown. I really, genuinely did not expect this to be such a prevalent preference in the rationalist community.
I’m sorry, I may have either rounded you to the nearest cliche or lumped my responses to other people’s comments into my response to yours.
Your comments about “social pressure” and “how can something be consensual if you enshrine it as a ritual” did make me think there was a consent aspect to it, and your comment about “using ritual to insert things deep into your psyche is something that I think is just bad” was where I got the feeling of brainwashing from, but I can see how I might’ve been misunderstanding them.
So you’re saying you have such strong anti-ritual preferences that you assumed people must have been awkwardly attending something they didn’t like in order to fit in? Hm. That makes sense.
I guess what I’ve learned from this is that I still can’t describe the reasons for why I like things. “Community bonding” sounds good, but when you press me on it I admit it’s kind of dumb and the ritual wasn’t really about that at all. “Sense of the sacred” sounds good but there were a lot of other easier ways to get that feeling I didn’t go for. I’m just going to say I have an unexplained preference for rituals of about the same magnitude as an unexplained preference for playing fantasy role-playing games, and although I can come up with just-so stories for it (“group bonding”, “search for meaning”, whatever) I can’t explain it but would like to keep doing it anyway.
So you’re saying you have such strong anti-ritual preferences that you assumed people must have been awkwardly attending something they didn’t like in order to fit in? Hm. That makes sense.
I… suppose. Sort of.
Reading the OP made me immediately update to a realization that at least some people really liked this sort of thing; I assumed the other attendees had their own reasons for attending (which may not have just boiled down to peer pressure); I didn’t expect to subsequently learn that a preference for rituals is a) apparently everyone’s reason for coming, and b) much more common in the rationalist community than I thought. My own concerns about consent and social pressure are part of my reaction, though not, as I’ve said, the entirety.
For what it’s worth, I, too, have a pretty strong preference for playing fantasy role-playing games (especially of the tabletop variety), so your analogy hits close to home. I am trying to imagine what it would be like to have a strong “ick” reaction to tabletop RPGs such that I couldn’t understand why anyone would do it and would avoid a group that engaged in this activity, and I think I am succeeding, at least partly. (Of course, what I can’t do is verbalize any reason why I’d have such a reaction, which I definitely can for my objections to rituals.) Putting myself back in my own shoes, my response to such a person would be a lack of comprehension of what it was they found so objectionable; I guess I wouldn’t have much to say in response other than a shrug and “well, RPGs are awesome and we like playing them and it doesn’t hurt anyone”. I surmise from your comment that your response to my feelings about rituals can be summed up similarly?
Which assumptions generated the incorrect predictions? Are you pulling your Bayesian updates backwards through the belief-propogation network given this new evidence?
(In other words: updating on a small probability event should change your mind about a whole host of related beliefs.)
I think it was some variant of the Typical Mind Fallacy, albeit one based not only on my own preferences but on those of my friends (though of course you’d expect that I’d associate with people who have preferences similar to mine, so this does not make the fallacy much more excusable).
I think the main belief I’ve updated based on this is my estimate on the prevalence of my sort of individualistic, suspicious-of-groups, allergic-to-crowds, solitude-valuing outlook in the Less Wrong community, which I have adjusted strongly downward (although that adjustment has been tempered by the suspicion, confirmed by a couple of comments on this post, that people who object to things such as rituals etc. often simply don’t speak up).
I have also been reminded of something I guess I knew but hadn’t quite absorbed, which is that, apparently, many people in aspiring rationalist communities come from religious backgrounds. This of course makes sense given the base rates. What I didn’t expect is that people would value the ritual trappings of their religious upbringing, and value them enough to construct new rituals with similar forms.
I will also add that despite this evidence that way more people like rituals than I’d have expected, and my adjustment of my beliefs about this, I am still unable to alieve it. Liking ritual, experiencing a need for and enjoyment of collectivized sacredness, is completely alien to me to the point where I am unable to imagine it.
(although that adjustment has been tempered by the suspicion, confirmed by a couple of comments on this post, that people who object to things such as rituals etc. often simply don’t speak up)
For epistemology’s sake I’ll speak up so you may be more confident in the suspicion...
I find these rituals, as described, to be completely uninteresting as social activities, and have a visceral negative reaction to imagining people doing this, even semi-seriously. “Group self-hacking for cohesion and bonding” is the...sort-of good way to put it I guess, because I would rather describe it as “optimistically wielding double-edged daggers forged from the Dark Arts”.
I do want to note that, for at least one proponent of the ritual (Yvain, see here), the “cohesion and bonding” turned out not to be the underlying motivation. This makes sense to me, and I am very suspicious about any claims such as “research indicates that group bonding increases happiness, so I choose to do this thing that I believe will generate group bonding”, or “group cohesiveness is beneficial, so we should have rituals because they promote group cohesiveness”. They just don’t ring true; I have a hard time believing that people think that way. It seems to me that some people just really like and enjoy rituals. I don’t really understand why, of course, but that’s just because my preference skews in the opposite direction. The stuff about bonding and cohesion seems like rationalization, or, at best, an attempt to describe one’s bare preference, rather than an explanation of what actually motivated a choice.
That having been said, I quite agree that rituals are forged from the Dark Arts. This contributes to, though does not constitute, my dislike of them.
Thanks! You have already updated, so I’m not sure if you want to update further, but I’m wondering if you had read Why our kind can’t cooperate, and what your reaction to that was?
I have indeed read it; I’ve even linked it to other people on this site myself, and taken explicit steps to counteract the effect; see e.g. this post.
I have no problem saying “I agree; you are right and/or this is awesome”. This happens to be a topic to which my reaction is otherwise. I think it’s especially important to speak up in cases where I disagree and where I think a number of other people also disagree but hesitate to speak.
Sorry, that’s not the context at which I meant it—I’m sure you’re as willing to admit you were wrong as the next rationalist. I mean it in the context of “Barbarians vs. Rationalists”—if group cohesion is increased by ritual, and group cohesion is useful to the rationality movement, than ritual could be useful. Wanting to dissociate ourselves from the trappings of religion seems like a case of “reversed stupidity” to me...
Wanting to dissociate ourselves from the trappings of religion seems like a case of “reversed stupidity” to me...
Yes, and if that were the reason behind my dislike of ritual, that would be an apropos comment; but as I explained, that’s not the case.
(I apologize for the harsh tone there, but I am failing to think of a way to express that response with a suitable level of tact, maybe because it’s 2 AM here. Sorry. :\ )
As for the larger “Barbarians vs. Rationalists” point, I have two responses.
One: I really don’t think that “rituals generate group cohesion, and group cohesion is useful” is actually anyone’s true motivation here. I think people just like rituals. Which… is fine (with some caveats), even if I dislike it. But I don’t think we should be putting forth rationalizations as true motivations.
Two: I don’t think we should look at everything solely through the lens of “is this useful to the rationality movement”. If doing things that are “useful to the rationality movement” causes us to systematically do things we don’t actually like doing, or want to do, then I think we’ve rather missed the point. Now you might respond: “But Said, we do like this thing! We do want to do it!” Well, ok. Then do it. But then, as the mathematicians say, this reduces to the earlier argument.
It makes sense that some people might be turned off by ritual. I hope those people went to one of the several other New York Less Wrong megameetups, or to the designated ritual-free day Sunday, or even on Saturday for the two hours before the ritual started. If they come to an event that has “RITUAL” in big letters all over it on the day when the ritual is scheduled to occur then I don’t think you can fairly accuse it of being inflicted on them without such a sweeping redefinition of “consent” that it becomes impossible to ever do anything that doesn’t exactly conform to social norms.
A lot of the above criticisms act like the ritual ruined a perfectly good meetup, but I think without the ritual this meetup would not have occurred. I went there all the way from Maryland because I wanted to see the ritual after reading about it last year. I dragged a friend who was also there because she loved rituals. Many people there weren’t even in the LW community at all and came only because they wanted to see what the ritual was about. Quite a few people organized cross-continental flights from California because they wanted to participate in the ritual. If Raemon had said “Okay everyone, let’s have yet another meetup and talk about Bayes for a few hours”, there simply wouldn’t have been a meetup of this size.
So on utilitarian grounds, I think it is a pure loss to take dozens of people for whom this is one of the highlights of their year, and hold them hostage to the purely theoretical possibility that there might be someone who wants to go to a megameetup, refuses to go to any of the many non-ritual megameetups, mysteriously hates ritual despite her insistence on only going to the megameetup with “ritual” in the name, refuses to go on the designated non-ritual day, refuses to leave or even go upstairs when the ritual starts, and is such a utility monster that her needs outweigh those of everyone else.
And knowing what the ritual was like, it’s also hard for me to take the idea of exclusion seriously. I understand why people who came on the second day might feel like they missed something, but the same would be true if we’d all gone out to watch a movie Saturday night and they hadn’t seen it. But other than that? We sung silly songs from Portal and Firefly together for a while. Now we are closer far than brothers, and shall never again feel respect or human feeling for anyone outside our sacred circle.
No, seriously, I do understand the idea of the Dark Arts (I coined our community’s use of the term). But I think there’s a difference between brainwashing and inspiration. Brainwashing changes your beliefs, inspiration helps you live up to them. I don’t know if it’s possible to do inspiration without even the slightest chance of brainwashing, but I’d rather not ban all inspirational activities until we prove it.
If it helps, think of this less as people in robes chanting in a dead language and more as our version of a school graduation (which, uh, also involves people in robes chanting in a dead language, but you get the picture). At a school graduation they sing songs, somebody talks about the values of the school and the importance of learning, and then everyone goes forth psyched about their future and has fond memories later. The same is true of weddings, funerals, the Fourth of July, birthday parties, summer camps. To excise all of those things from our lives because we can’t prove they don’t cause some residual brainwashing would make the world less than it was.
As a secular Jew, I grew up treating Passover and even my Bar Mitzvah in about the same way I treated birthday parties and summer camps; a fun time to get together and sing and appreciate family and friends, a marking of life transitions and the passing of time. But it grew harder and harder for me to appreciate them when I realized that I didn’t really approve of celebrating the deaths of the Egyptian first-born, or that chanting the Torah and drawing moral lessons from it felt kind of like BSing in front of everyone. Even school graduations got to feel a little like “go forth and be a cog in a slightly more complex machine than the one you are currently a cog in.”
In New York, I was able to have a good time and sing and meet people and mark the passings of the seasons, and for one of the first times affirm values that I really believed in. When Raemon got up there and started talking about how each year the sun went dark, and each year people died during the winter, but each year the sun came back—and when he went onto how each year we humans added a little bit more of our own light, and one day we would conquer the darkness entirely and no one would have to die anymore—well, it was a beautiful experience. Not life altering, not rationality-maximizing, but beautiful. And to be terribly clinical, the person I was before the ritual would have approved of everything that went on, which is not a test simple brainwashing can pass.
I agree that experiencing the sacred can be done individually. So can sex. It’s not the same, though, in either case. Ever since the days of lighting fires and chanting about the gods, we’ve been doing our sacredness in groups. Even the ancients who took “sacred” totally literally knew you needed a minyan. It just works better. It’s something I feel a need for. And I’d only fulfill that need in a group I completely trust, because of the brainwashing and awkwardness concerns you mentioned. And this was it. I don’t think I took it seriously on an intellectual level, and I didn’t have the same feelings as the people above who said it helped cement concepts into their mind. But I felt catharsis afterwards. I smiled a lot and sang a lot and it was good.
A commenter downstream said that his worry here “has to do with seriousness and how much I value banter and puncturing self-importance”. I think we already have too much self-importance puncturing; too much irony. I think on the scales of “funny things should be taken lightly, solemn things should be taken with solemnity”, we are too good at the former and too worried about social stigma to do the latter. In fact, of everything I’m impressed with Raemon for, the thing that impressed me most was his ability to take himself seriously, to resist the overpowering urge to say “Ha ha guys, I don’t really think I’m cool enough to have strong feelings and officiate a celebration of the seasons, it’s all just ironic, I’m not silly or something.”
Except when it was silly. Raemon had the rare skill to design a night for us that was both funny and solemn at once, in exactly the right places, and to the exact degree that each idea required. I appreciate the humor but I think it was the solemnity that was beautiful.
I don’t think I’m worrying about brainwashing concerns or failing the social proof respectability checks.
I’m seeing a community cementing thing that I see no intrinsic fun in and a lot of other people seem to be seeing intrinsic fun in, which is tripping my “pretend to be like the normals and make the extra effort to participate in the unfun thing that is actually fun for them because they are not like you and then they might be less likely to kill you” instinct.
What if next year’s ritual includes chanting thrice unto the heavens a solemn vow not to kill the people who don’t go to next year’s ritual?
...nah, I don’t think anyone wants to to kill or even shun people who don’t go to the ritual. Of the top ten LW contributors on the table on the right, only two of them (me and Alicorn) attended, and for me it was a last-second sort of thing. Eliezer didn’t go. It would be kind of hard to shun Eliezer and 80% of the top contributors, even if people wanted to. Only a tiny proportion of the community went to the ritual and those who chose not to were in good company.
More philosophically, wouldn’t the same complaint apply to having real-life meetups at all (wouldn’t it exclude people who prefer to just talk via the Internet?) or writing HPMoR (now non-readers feel left out of a lot of discussions and don’t get in-jokes, so they might feel pressure to read it) or CFAR minicamps (people who don’t get selected to go might feel like they’re less a part of the community). And I know one commenter above managed to find some trivial differences between board game night and ritual night, but the fundamental problem of “What if I don’t enjoy this but I feel like I have to go anyway?” remains sound.
I think the road of not doing fun things that most people want because someone who doesn’t want to do it might feel left out leads to sitting quietly in a dark room. And the road of never doing community cementing things because people might be outside them leads to never trying to cement the community. And I think that the ritual, in this case, is being held to a much higher standard than any other activity of this sort just because it sounds kind of weird.
The particular problem with the ritual is that unlike the other things, it seems to exist only for the purpose of community-building. Opting out of the other activities makes your cognitive dissonance module say “well, maybe I don’t like fanfiction / board games / decision theory that much”, which isn’t that bad. Opting out of the ritual makes the cognitive dissonance module say “well, maybe I don’t care that much for being a community member”, which is a bit more unfortunate.
Then there’s also the small thing where the nonsensical community forming rituals have popped up in every human culture everywhere as far back as we know anything about human cultures, and always tend to develop the side effect of the socially gelled people favoring each other a bit more over the boring people who don’t bother to play along with the rituals. This is what the social instinct response is about, not paranoia about hooded murderers going about stabbing people one night. Traditional societies seem to end up with all members participating in whatever the local ritual is, because that’s the guarantee for belonging in the in-group and the other in-group members having your back. If you don’t see the point in the ritual, tough. The social cohesion mechanism wasn’t built for you, just smile and play-act along for the bit of extra guarantee that someone might have food to spare for you as well on the next famine year.
I think that people’s response to ritual is hard to explain. I have trouble explaining it. “Community-building” is sort of the default explanation. In the same way, if there were a real-life meetup, “getting to know people better”, which is almost a synonym for “community building”, is a default explanation because it’s hard to explain why we like meeting people face to face when online conversation is so much easier.
I think you make a good point that presenting it as “community building” might sound exclusionary, and I will stop using that justification. But in the end I don’t think it is any more about community building than meetups or board games or anything like that—only harder to explain, so that that explanation becomes more salient. Maybe we should just bill it as “Come and sing and feel emotions.”
Sure, but this is in the same sense that it’s hard to explain why we perceive three-dimensional objects when the input we’re getting is two-dimensional arrays. It took a lot of smart people paying attention to unravel that particular puzzle, but there’s nothing fundamentally mysterious about it.
There’s a lot of stuff going on in face to face interactions that isn’t present in online conversation, and it evidently includes things that many of us find gratifying.
Which things those are is worth knowing (not least because we can use that knowledge to build more gratifying telepresence rigs) but not knowing it doesn’t preclude being gratified by them, any more than not knowing how to derive 3D models from 2D images precludes perceiving 3D objects.
Not that you’re saying otherwise, granted. I suspect I’m just responding emotionally to the idea of demanding an explanation before it’s OK to value something.
I agree with this sentiment in general, but in cases where the “something” that’s being valued is valued only by some people, rather than all (here I am referring to rituals, rather than just “meeting people face to face”), seeking an explanation is more important.
(blink)
That is, if I value two practices P1 and P2, and 95% of the population values P1 and only 5% values P2, you’re saying it’s more important to seek an explanation for valuing P2 than an explanation for valuing P1… yes?
Can you expand on why you believe that?
… what?
I’m not sure how you got what you said from what I said; I surmise that I was much less clear than I thought, or that I am not understanding you. Attempt #2, in the hope that it’s the former:
If everyone likes a thing, then asking “why do we like that thing” is of academic interest.
If some people like a thing but other people don’t like that thing, then asking “why do some people like that thing” has practical use. Maybe we can bring the naysayers around. Maybe we will discover that the advocates’ reasons for liking the thing are bad reasons. Maybe we’ll discover something about the underlying preferences that will allow the pro-thingers and the anti-thingers to get along better. In any case we’ll very likely come to understand each other better, and will be less likely to think that people of the other preference type are abnormal; at the most basic level, we’ll do better at keeping in mind that people of the opposite preferences exist at all. That’s a good thing.
The relevance to the discussion of rituals has to do with the fact that some participants and pro-ritual commenters have expressed sentiments such as “humans need ritual” or “people like ritual” or “people have a need for experiences of sacredness” or other things along those lines. My motivation for commenting has been largely to point out that such comments are sorely in need of having the word “some” (or, at best, “most”, conditional on at least some data supporting such a claim) inserted into them.
And given that that’s the situation — that some people like rituals, but some clearly do not — the question of “why do some people like ritual” acquires a more than academic interest, for the reasons I outlined above.
Sorry about the failure of communication, but as it happens you answered my question. Thank you.
To my mind, asking why everyone likes a thing that everyone likes has practical use. If we can answer that question, we can understand how we make that judgment, we can understand how we make related judgments. That’s a good thing. (I do agree that it’s of academic interest, though. Like many things of academic interest, it has practical use.)
That aside, though… sure, if your motivation is largely to point out that some people don’t need ritual, like ritual, or need experiences of sacredness, I expect that’s true.
Right. I probably am going for a bit of a selective reduction here with my kneejerk reactions. There’s all sorts of quite strange when you think about it stuff going on with playing board games too, for instance, which I’m not being concerned about.
Still, I think we have a mutual appreciation here that rituals are powerful stuff. I worry a bit when I see a not that broad culture (compared to society at large, or the academia as a whole, for example) like LW picking up on a ritual and taking it up as its own, and thinking about what role rituals end up having everywhere in human history. I’m seeing things getting on a path to ending up as something like Freemasonry (assuming for the moment that they’re more secular than they are), where there might be an understanding that the rituals are just a formality, but participating in the culture without participating in the rituals still basically doesn’t work.
I might also notice that all the subcultures that stick around for more than a generation or two seem to come with rituals running the show. It might be that the actual problem I’m pattern matching isn’t about adopting rituals at all, but about subcultures sticking around past their expiration date instead. Subcultures that go bad quickly tend to have more overt badness indicators.
“Come join the Solstice Ritual” sounds like just people being silly to me, while this sounds like something from a Grant Morrison comic book that will end with someone’s head being carved open by robed creatures with giant insect heads.
Hmm… although I’ve never been to any of these rituals, but from reading the descriptions, it hasn’t been my impression that it would exist only for community-building. For example, I found the description of the 2011 ritual touching on an emotional level even though I was reading it all alone at home, and I expect that the rituals would also have given me a strong emotional kick that wasn’t directly related to the group bonding aspect. Going out to a movie with friends would probably be a good analogy: being in a group does enhance the experience, and the group bonding is a plus, but the main reason we go there is the movie itself.
The social bonding and getting to meet new folks was not what gave me a strong feeling of “man, I want to participate in that” when I read the description of the original ritual. In fact, all of the social bonding stuff was just extra: a nice plus, but hardly the point. What attracted me was, well, the ritual itself: the feeling that it could give me a deep, lasting emotional experience that’d move me to the core, a faint echo of which I felt while reading the post. That would ultimately be a solitary and personal experience, even if I needed the presence of a group to help me achieve it.
This isn’t at all unlike what I imagine the ingroup-strengthening response to ritual to feel from the inside.
What I was trying to say was that I don’t think that its level of “(only community building)-ness” is much higher than that of board games or fan fiction. A little higher, maybe, but not that much. I don’t know if I’d feel differently if I’d actually participated in such a ritual, though.
But I don’t want to sit quietly in a dark room. If that’s our new thing I’ll feel left out!
I mean, that actually was sort of the central point of the event (which I know you had to miss out on!) so I’m not entirely sure what Yvain’s point was :P
(Actually come to think of it you may well have been sitting in a dark room at the time)
When you say “see no intrinsic fun in” do you mean “this doesn’t sound like fun” or do you mean “I have tried this, it wasn’t fun, and I don’t anticipate rationalists being able to do it in a way that would make it fun”? If the former, do you think actually trying it would be valuable in the name of gathering more information? In general, what are your thoughts on comfort zone expansion?
The latter. I’ve been through all sorts of community forming rituals, and always found them nonsensical and mostly unfun. Comfort zone expansion is good, but if a tried thing is not working out, it’s not working out.
It was not my intention to accuse the ritual of being inflicted on anyone; I didn’t think I said or implied such a thing, but if so, let me assure you that I quite realize that attendance was voluntary. As for the other megameetups, I will try to attend the next time a non-ritual one happens. I was sadly unable to make it on that Sunday. They seem to happen about once a year, yes?
Your other comments seem to suggest that you think that I am worried about brainwashing, or what have you; that’s just not the issue here. So your comments such as
miss the mark a bit. Like Risto_Saarelma, I just dislike rituals (fairly strongly). From your comment, and others in this thread, I’ve discovered that some (most?) people do like them, and like them enough to serve as motivation for traveling some distance, or at least for attending an event they’d otherwise skip. All I can say is: mind = blown. I really, genuinely did not expect this to be such a prevalent preference in the rationalist community.
I’m sorry, I may have either rounded you to the nearest cliche or lumped my responses to other people’s comments into my response to yours.
Your comments about “social pressure” and “how can something be consensual if you enshrine it as a ritual” did make me think there was a consent aspect to it, and your comment about “using ritual to insert things deep into your psyche is something that I think is just bad” was where I got the feeling of brainwashing from, but I can see how I might’ve been misunderstanding them.
So you’re saying you have such strong anti-ritual preferences that you assumed people must have been awkwardly attending something they didn’t like in order to fit in? Hm. That makes sense.
I guess what I’ve learned from this is that I still can’t describe the reasons for why I like things. “Community bonding” sounds good, but when you press me on it I admit it’s kind of dumb and the ritual wasn’t really about that at all. “Sense of the sacred” sounds good but there were a lot of other easier ways to get that feeling I didn’t go for. I’m just going to say I have an unexplained preference for rituals of about the same magnitude as an unexplained preference for playing fantasy role-playing games, and although I can come up with just-so stories for it (“group bonding”, “search for meaning”, whatever) I can’t explain it but would like to keep doing it anyway.
I… suppose. Sort of.
Reading the OP made me immediately update to a realization that at least some people really liked this sort of thing; I assumed the other attendees had their own reasons for attending (which may not have just boiled down to peer pressure); I didn’t expect to subsequently learn that a preference for rituals is a) apparently everyone’s reason for coming, and b) much more common in the rationalist community than I thought. My own concerns about consent and social pressure are part of my reaction, though not, as I’ve said, the entirety.
For what it’s worth, I, too, have a pretty strong preference for playing fantasy role-playing games (especially of the tabletop variety), so your analogy hits close to home. I am trying to imagine what it would be like to have a strong “ick” reaction to tabletop RPGs such that I couldn’t understand why anyone would do it and would avoid a group that engaged in this activity, and I think I am succeeding, at least partly. (Of course, what I can’t do is verbalize any reason why I’d have such a reaction, which I definitely can for my objections to rituals.) Putting myself back in my own shoes, my response to such a person would be a lack of comprehension of what it was they found so objectionable; I guess I wouldn’t have much to say in response other than a shrug and “well, RPGs are awesome and we like playing them and it doesn’t hurt anyone”. I surmise from your comment that your response to my feelings about rituals can be summed up similarly?
I always refer to this chapter on ritual from the book Secular Wholeness.
Which assumptions generated the incorrect predictions? Are you pulling your Bayesian updates backwards through the belief-propogation network given this new evidence? (In other words: updating on a small probability event should change your mind about a whole host of related beliefs.)
I think it was some variant of the Typical Mind Fallacy, albeit one based not only on my own preferences but on those of my friends (though of course you’d expect that I’d associate with people who have preferences similar to mine, so this does not make the fallacy much more excusable).
I think the main belief I’ve updated based on this is my estimate on the prevalence of my sort of individualistic, suspicious-of-groups, allergic-to-crowds, solitude-valuing outlook in the Less Wrong community, which I have adjusted strongly downward (although that adjustment has been tempered by the suspicion, confirmed by a couple of comments on this post, that people who object to things such as rituals etc. often simply don’t speak up).
I have also been reminded of something I guess I knew but hadn’t quite absorbed, which is that, apparently, many people in aspiring rationalist communities come from religious backgrounds. This of course makes sense given the base rates. What I didn’t expect is that people would value the ritual trappings of their religious upbringing, and value them enough to construct new rituals with similar forms.
I will also add that despite this evidence that way more people like rituals than I’d have expected, and my adjustment of my beliefs about this, I am still unable to alieve it. Liking ritual, experiencing a need for and enjoyment of collectivized sacredness, is completely alien to me to the point where I am unable to imagine it.
For epistemology’s sake I’ll speak up so you may be more confident in the suspicion...
I find these rituals, as described, to be completely uninteresting as social activities, and have a visceral negative reaction to imagining people doing this, even semi-seriously. “Group self-hacking for cohesion and bonding” is the...sort-of good way to put it I guess, because I would rather describe it as “optimistically wielding double-edged daggers forged from the Dark Arts”.
Thank you for posting, I really do appreciate it.
I do want to note that, for at least one proponent of the ritual (Yvain, see here), the “cohesion and bonding” turned out not to be the underlying motivation. This makes sense to me, and I am very suspicious about any claims such as “research indicates that group bonding increases happiness, so I choose to do this thing that I believe will generate group bonding”, or “group cohesiveness is beneficial, so we should have rituals because they promote group cohesiveness”. They just don’t ring true; I have a hard time believing that people think that way. It seems to me that some people just really like and enjoy rituals. I don’t really understand why, of course, but that’s just because my preference skews in the opposite direction. The stuff about bonding and cohesion seems like rationalization, or, at best, an attempt to describe one’s bare preference, rather than an explanation of what actually motivated a choice.
That having been said, I quite agree that rituals are forged from the Dark Arts. This contributes to, though does not constitute, my dislike of them.
Thanks! You have already updated, so I’m not sure if you want to update further, but I’m wondering if you had read Why our kind can’t cooperate, and what your reaction to that was?
I have indeed read it; I’ve even linked it to other people on this site myself, and taken explicit steps to counteract the effect; see e.g. this post.
I have no problem saying “I agree; you are right and/or this is awesome”. This happens to be a topic to which my reaction is otherwise. I think it’s especially important to speak up in cases where I disagree and where I think a number of other people also disagree but hesitate to speak.
Sorry, that’s not the context at which I meant it—I’m sure you’re as willing to admit you were wrong as the next rationalist. I mean it in the context of “Barbarians vs. Rationalists”—if group cohesion is increased by ritual, and group cohesion is useful to the rationality movement, than ritual could be useful. Wanting to dissociate ourselves from the trappings of religion seems like a case of “reversed stupidity” to me...
Yes, and if that were the reason behind my dislike of ritual, that would be an apropos comment; but as I explained, that’s not the case.
(I apologize for the harsh tone there, but I am failing to think of a way to express that response with a suitable level of tact, maybe because it’s 2 AM here. Sorry. :\ )
As for the larger “Barbarians vs. Rationalists” point, I have two responses.
One: I really don’t think that “rituals generate group cohesion, and group cohesion is useful” is actually anyone’s true motivation here. I think people just like rituals. Which… is fine (with some caveats), even if I dislike it. But I don’t think we should be putting forth rationalizations as true motivations.
Two: I don’t think we should look at everything solely through the lens of “is this useful to the rationality movement”. If doing things that are “useful to the rationality movement” causes us to systematically do things we don’t actually like doing, or want to do, then I think we’ve rather missed the point. Now you might respond: “But Said, we do like this thing! We do want to do it!” Well, ok. Then do it. But then, as the mathematicians say, this reduces to the earlier argument.