The difference is that if we decide to play some board games once, all potential participants have input on whether or not to do it, and if the activity takes place, anyone who didn’t want to do it can abstain.
The next time the suggestion is brought up, the process repeats, with no decrease in consensualness.
With a ritual, once it’s instituted, when the time comes to do it again, there is not a repeat of the discussion wherein we decide whether to do it, and if so, how. Now it’s “well of course we’re going to do it, this is the ritual that we do”. AND it’s now tied to your group’s identity. Not only is there no longer anywhere near the same possibility of saying “eh, on second thought, forget that, let’s do something else”, but people who abstain aren’t just deciding not to do this one particular thing, they’re now abstaining from something which defines the group, and therefore mark themselves as Not Part Of The Group.
You seem to essentially be drawing a distinction between 1) events that are negotiated separately each time, and 2) ones which have become established and are held repeatedly with no negotiation. But board game evenings can also become so popular that they become traditional and are held at regular intervals with no express negotiation, and rituals can also fail to draw an audience and so never become a tradition in the first place.
This doesn’t make sense. Either a ritual is qualitatively different than a board game night and saying it’s pretty much the same thing and therefore just as harmless is false, or it’s basically the same thing, in which case why do you want to do it so much?
I wasn’t saying that there’s no qualitative difference between board games and ritual. I was saying that I don’t see a difference with regard to the specific aspect that SaidAchmiz was bringing up.
Last time I kept telling people “I’m eventually going to respond to this” and people were sort of annoyed (until I eventually did respond to it).
I’m going to be doing that again, and apologize, but it’s easier to address all the concerns at once.
I would, however, recommend that you attempt to revisit that paragraph, steelman your opposition a bit, and see if you can think of some ways in which rituals might be qualitatively different than board games in some ways, but not in others.
My comment was more an invitation for Kaj to steelman his own point than an objection, but I see what you’re getting at.
Key differences:
1: weirdness:
A Boardgame night is extremely normal. Tons of normal people and nerds have variations on the concept. A Ritual night is very odd, and therefore automatically screens out outsiders.
Exclusionary:
Indeed, the entire point of Rituals is to draw a line between them and us. This is off-putting to anyone who does not want to put themselves into the “us”. A new person can happily join in and enjoy the familiarity of playing boardgames and not feel like they’re being indoctrinated. They can get to know and bond with strangers over something familar. This is basically what Said earlier in this thread.
Room for individuality/nonparticipation:
Boardgame night does not consist of the same thing each time. Maybe some nights we play Resistance, maybe other nights we play Dominion, and maybe different subsets of boardgame night play different games. A ritual not only makes everyone do the same thing, it makes them do it all at once. No one really cares if you overhear “I’ve got wood for sheep!” while you’re playing Ascension, or just having a conversation, but it would certainly ruin the mood of a ritual. The only polite responses to Ritual are participation, silence, or leaving.
There’s some more I feel I can say on this but I can’t yet articulate it appropriately. It has to do with seriousness and how much I value banter and puncturing self-importance.
I endorse this response as sufficiently representative of my own views also, especially the 2nd and 3rd bullet points (the first slightly less because I am not terribly concerned about being “normal” as such).
I tend to be pro-weirdness in general, but trying to emulate religion feels like weirdness (in the positive sense) trying to emulate normalcy, which feels (negatively)weird to me.
That reminds me of this: since where I am most people my age are non-religious (and often take the piss out of practising Catholics), being a practising Catholic strongly feels to me like meta-contrarianism (both when I was one—though I didn’t know that word—and now that I’m not).
Regarding the point about “us vs them”, I agree that some traditional rituals have this issue, but I can’t think of anyone who would fill the role of “them” in the case of the Solstice celebration. The event was mostly about humanity as a whole prevailing over darkness / death / ignorance / etc. This seems much less problematic than ritualistic bonding over being different from some particular group of people.
That is indeed a much better answer. Thank you. (It actually does update me slightly away from ritual-use, although I wasn’t planning on doing the things that I’d have avoided after updating)
I used to have a group of friends (some closer than others), and we would all get together and play Settlers of Catan a given day of the week (~4 years ago, I don’t remember which day it was). It consisted of the “same thing” (obviously the game turned out differently every week, but still) every week. There was not really room for “nonparticipation” in the sense that if you wanted to hang out with these people that day, you played Catan. Would it upset you if you learned that there was a regular meetup of Catan LW enthusiasts who meet once a week to play?
Some of my closest friends are from the Israeli filking community. There’s no “ritual” per se, but we know and love the same songs, we sing them together and not-singing is kinda frowned upon. It’s certainly “weird”, and even somewhat exclusionary (helped by a bit of justified feeling of persecution from the rest of SF fandom). Would it upset you if you learned that there was a regular meetup of Filk LW enthusiasts who meet once a week to sing together?
I’m really asking these questions (in the sense that I do not find myself certain either way for what your answer will be, although I assign >.5 that it will be “no” on both).
If it is a “no”, then it seems these are not your true rejections.
If it is a “yes”, you seem to have a wide brush to paint “things I do not want LWers to do.”
Basically, rituals force themselves to be identity components more than other activities. I can play catan or not without feeling like I’m a cataner or not. I don’t want there to be rituals that make you feel like an lwer or not.
It would upset me if either of those were primary activities of the lw group in the place I was in.
There is a rather enormous difference between things I care whether lwers do and things I care whether lw does. Some lwers somewhere having rituals doesn’t bother me, every lw group deciding rituals are a good idea and adopting them would. I don’t think this is actually a big risk but I think it’s worth pointing out especially since the context is the especially influential NYLW group.
Also, the less strict something is the less I care whether it’s a ritualized regular occurrence. I would much rather come to a song night than to a night for the same specific songs each time, and I would basically never go to catan night.
There is a rather enormous difference between things I care whether lwers do and things I care whether lw does. Some lwers somewhere having rituals doesn’t bother me, every lw group deciding rituals are a good idea and adopting them would.
I feel the same way, and this is a large part of my motivation for posting my objections in this thread.
I’m trying to steelman your arguments as much as I can, but I find myself confused. The best I can do is: “I’m worried that people would find LW communities unwelcoming if they do not go to rituals. Further, I’m worried that rituals are a slippery-slope: once we start having rituals, they might start being the primary activity of LW and make the experience unwelcoming even if non-ritual activities are explicitly open, because it feels more like ’a Church group that occasionally has secular activities. I’m worried that this will divide people into those who properly mark themselves as “LWers” and those who don’t, thus starting our entropic decay into a cult.”
So far, your objections seem to be to this being the primary activity of the LW group, which—honestly—I would join you. But if a regularly meeting LW group also had a Catan night once a week (for Catan enthusiasts, obviously—if you don’t like Catan don’t come) and a Filk night once a month (for filk enthusiasts, again), I am not sure this would hasten a descent into a Catan-only or filk-only group. Similarly, if a LW group has a ritual once a year (or even if every LW group has a ritual, and even it’s the same ritual), it doesn’t seem likely rituals will become the primary thing the group does.
“There is a rather enormous difference between things I care whether lwers do and things I care whether lw does.”
I notice I am confused. LessWrong is a web site, and to some extent a community of people, which I tend to refer to as “Less Wrongers”. If you mean these words the same as I do, then I do not understand—“LW does something” means “the community does something” which means “many members do something”. I’m not really sure how LW does something is distinguished from LWers doing it...
If I join a golf club where all its members apart from me also happen to be in the bowling club, I’m still not joining the bowling club. I don’t care if “Golfers” go bowling, but it would be really annoying if “gold club” became about bowling, or if I showed up to golf club and all the golfers spend the day talking about that awesome bowling experience they had over the weekend. I never wanted to be parted of a rituals club and wouldn’t have joined a “Have debates/hangouts about AI, epistemology, rationality, morality, meta-ethics, and logic with interesting people and do rituals with them club.”
Basically, I agree with Said’s answer to Raemon’s answer to you.
Insofar as the rituals are something fun people want to do, I don’t mind. Insofar as the rituals are presented as “This is something objectively awesome that you should rationally want for your own LW group!” I do.
“There is a rather enormous difference between things I care whether lwers do and things I care whether lw does.”
This actually makes a fair amount of sense to me. There’s a few ways to interpret it. The most obvious one to me is “Less Wrong has a reputation, built into its mission statement, about caring about rationality, winning at life, etc. I value those things.” Depending on how collectivist you are, you might either care that people can look at you, say “That person is a LWer,” and then correctly infer that you care about rationality and winning at life.
Or, more collectivist-y (which ordinarily I’d give higher likelihood to but maybe not in this case), one might enjoy feeling an identity as a Less Wronger, which includes, built into that identity, caring about epistemic truth and instrumental victory.
I can definitely see it unpleasant if “being a Less Wronger” came to be known, both among the community’s allies and enemies, as (insert arbitrary thing you don’t like here)
For example, I’m not a Objectivist, but Less Wrong terminology shares some common ancestry with Objectivism. So when I’m explaining LW to new people (especially more liberal people), I often get “wait, so is this an Objectivism thing?” which is annoying to me, not just because they are drawing false conclusions about me which I have to correct—but also because I don’t really like Objectivism and it leaves an icky (irrational) feeling just to feel connected to that movement.
There’s another interpretation, which is “the sorts of things that LW groups do affects whether I participate in LW communities [in the sense of particular local groups] and thereby the extent to which I participate in the greater LW community [in the larger sense of “people who identify as ‘LWers’ and do things collectively on that basis]”.
After all, if I want to engage with the larger LW community, the most direct (and one of the most feasible by far) ways to do so is to participate in your local LW community, should such exist. One can hardly choose to participate in some other local LW community that is located in Whatevertown, Distantstate.
For example, I’m not a Objectivist, but Less Wrong terminology shares some common ancestry with Objectivism. So when I’m explaining LW to new people (especially more liberal people), I often get “wait, so is this an Objectivism thing?”
I’m very unfamiliar with Objectivism, and this comment made me curious: what terminology do we share with that movement?
I think it’s quite unlikely for this ritual to become tied to the group’s identity, let alone define the group. There are a lot of people strongly involved in the community who don’t participate (as Yvain said), and a number of people who explicitly voice objections against it. Also, the event only happens once a year, there’s nothing as pervasive as e.g. a ritual component in every meetup, so the influence on the whole group’s mentality is probably minimal.
Not only is there no longer anywhere near the same possibility of saying “eh, on second thought, forget that, let’s do something else”
I agree that this is likely to happen, since holding the ritual and organizing “something else” are not mutually exclusive. Are you also concerned about opportunity cost?
I think it’s quite unlikely for this ritual to become tied to the group’s identity, let alone define the group.
What?! The winter solstice ritual is already tied to the OB/LW NYC group’s identity — or at least it very much seems that way from the outside, and it certainly looks like (at least some of) the group’s members are actively working to both make that be the case, and to promote that image of the event to the rest of LW.
Sorry, I misunderstood, I do agree that the ritual is connected to the group identity. Do you expect it to have significant effects on the LW group identity besides increasing the sense of community?
I think that opting out of a component of the group identity doesn’t necessarily lead to alienation. For example, caring about FAI is a significant part of the LW group identity, but people who care about FAI much less than, say, building rationality skills (like myself) are still welcome and included.
they’re now abstaining from something which defines the group, and therefore mark themselves as Not Part Of The Group.
Do you mean signaling that you’re not part of the group, or feeling that you’re not part of the group, or both?
I think that opting out of a component of the group identity doesn’t necessarily lead to alienation.
This is true, but a ritual designed explicitly as a group-bonding exercise (and, it seems, the most prominent such exercise) is more likely to be something opting out of which contributes to alienation than, say, caring about FAI.
Do you mean signaling that you’re not part of the group, or feeling that you’re not part of the group, or both?
Both. Although I didn’t so much mean “signaling that you’re not part of the group” as “doing something which is interpreted by other group members as an indication that you’re not part of the group”, but the difference is of emphasis at best.
The difference is that if we decide to play some board games once, all potential participants have input on whether or not to do it, and if the activity takes place, anyone who didn’t want to do it can abstain.
The next time the suggestion is brought up, the process repeats, with no decrease in consensualness.
With a ritual, once it’s instituted, when the time comes to do it again, there is not a repeat of the discussion wherein we decide whether to do it, and if so, how. Now it’s “well of course we’re going to do it, this is the ritual that we do”. AND it’s now tied to your group’s identity. Not only is there no longer anywhere near the same possibility of saying “eh, on second thought, forget that, let’s do something else”, but people who abstain aren’t just deciding not to do this one particular thing, they’re now abstaining from something which defines the group, and therefore mark themselves as Not Part Of The Group.
You seem to essentially be drawing a distinction between 1) events that are negotiated separately each time, and 2) ones which have become established and are held repeatedly with no negotiation. But board game evenings can also become so popular that they become traditional and are held at regular intervals with no express negotiation, and rituals can also fail to draw an audience and so never become a tradition in the first place.
This doesn’t make sense. Either a ritual is qualitatively different than a board game night and saying it’s pretty much the same thing and therefore just as harmless is false, or it’s basically the same thing, in which case why do you want to do it so much?
I wasn’t saying that there’s no qualitative difference between board games and ritual. I was saying that I don’t see a difference with regard to the specific aspect that SaidAchmiz was bringing up.
Last time I kept telling people “I’m eventually going to respond to this” and people were sort of annoyed (until I eventually did respond to it).
I’m going to be doing that again, and apologize, but it’s easier to address all the concerns at once.
I would, however, recommend that you attempt to revisit that paragraph, steelman your opposition a bit, and see if you can think of some ways in which rituals might be qualitatively different than board games in some ways, but not in others.
My comment was more an invitation for Kaj to steelman his own point than an objection, but I see what you’re getting at.
Key differences:
1: weirdness: A Boardgame night is extremely normal. Tons of normal people and nerds have variations on the concept. A Ritual night is very odd, and therefore automatically screens out outsiders.
Exclusionary: Indeed, the entire point of Rituals is to draw a line between them and us. This is off-putting to anyone who does not want to put themselves into the “us”. A new person can happily join in and enjoy the familiarity of playing boardgames and not feel like they’re being indoctrinated. They can get to know and bond with strangers over something familar. This is basically what Said earlier in this thread.
Room for individuality/nonparticipation: Boardgame night does not consist of the same thing each time. Maybe some nights we play Resistance, maybe other nights we play Dominion, and maybe different subsets of boardgame night play different games. A ritual not only makes everyone do the same thing, it makes them do it all at once. No one really cares if you overhear “I’ve got wood for sheep!” while you’re playing Ascension, or just having a conversation, but it would certainly ruin the mood of a ritual. The only polite responses to Ritual are participation, silence, or leaving.
There’s some more I feel I can say on this but I can’t yet articulate it appropriately. It has to do with seriousness and how much I value banter and puncturing self-importance.
I endorse this response as sufficiently representative of my own views also, especially the 2nd and 3rd bullet points (the first slightly less because I am not terribly concerned about being “normal” as such).
I tend to be pro-weirdness in general, but trying to emulate religion feels like weirdness (in the positive sense) trying to emulate normalcy, which feels (negatively)weird to me.
That reminds me of this: since where I am most people my age are non-religious (and often take the piss out of practising Catholics), being a practising Catholic strongly feels to me like meta-contrarianism (both when I was one—though I didn’t know that word—and now that I’m not).
Upvoting for… well, for sounding weird, actually.
Regarding the point about “us vs them”, I agree that some traditional rituals have this issue, but I can’t think of anyone who would fill the role of “them” in the case of the Solstice celebration. The event was mostly about humanity as a whole prevailing over darkness / death / ignorance / etc. This seems much less problematic than ritualistic bonding over being different from some particular group of people.
That is indeed a much better answer. Thank you. (It actually does update me slightly away from ritual-use, although I wasn’t planning on doing the things that I’d have avoided after updating)
I used to have a group of friends (some closer than others), and we would all get together and play Settlers of Catan a given day of the week (~4 years ago, I don’t remember which day it was). It consisted of the “same thing” (obviously the game turned out differently every week, but still) every week. There was not really room for “nonparticipation” in the sense that if you wanted to hang out with these people that day, you played Catan. Would it upset you if you learned that there was a regular meetup of Catan LW enthusiasts who meet once a week to play?
Some of my closest friends are from the Israeli filking community. There’s no “ritual” per se, but we know and love the same songs, we sing them together and not-singing is kinda frowned upon. It’s certainly “weird”, and even somewhat exclusionary (helped by a bit of justified feeling of persecution from the rest of SF fandom). Would it upset you if you learned that there was a regular meetup of Filk LW enthusiasts who meet once a week to sing together?
I’m really asking these questions (in the sense that I do not find myself certain either way for what your answer will be, although I assign >.5 that it will be “no” on both).
If it is a “no”, then it seems these are not your true rejections.
If it is a “yes”, you seem to have a wide brush to paint “things I do not want LWers to do.”
Basically, rituals force themselves to be identity components more than other activities. I can play catan or not without feeling like I’m a cataner or not. I don’t want there to be rituals that make you feel like an lwer or not.
Whatever happened to keeping identities small?
It would upset me if either of those were primary activities of the lw group in the place I was in.
There is a rather enormous difference between things I care whether lwers do and things I care whether lw does. Some lwers somewhere having rituals doesn’t bother me, every lw group deciding rituals are a good idea and adopting them would. I don’t think this is actually a big risk but I think it’s worth pointing out especially since the context is the especially influential NYLW group.
Also, the less strict something is the less I care whether it’s a ritualized regular occurrence. I would much rather come to a song night than to a night for the same specific songs each time, and I would basically never go to catan night.
I feel the same way, and this is a large part of my motivation for posting my objections in this thread.
I’m trying to steelman your arguments as much as I can, but I find myself confused. The best I can do is: “I’m worried that people would find LW communities unwelcoming if they do not go to rituals. Further, I’m worried that rituals are a slippery-slope: once we start having rituals, they might start being the primary activity of LW and make the experience unwelcoming even if non-ritual activities are explicitly open, because it feels more like ’a Church group that occasionally has secular activities. I’m worried that this will divide people into those who properly mark themselves as “LWers” and those who don’t, thus starting our entropic decay into a cult.”
So far, your objections seem to be to this being the primary activity of the LW group, which—honestly—I would join you. But if a regularly meeting LW group also had a Catan night once a week (for Catan enthusiasts, obviously—if you don’t like Catan don’t come) and a Filk night once a month (for filk enthusiasts, again), I am not sure this would hasten a descent into a Catan-only or filk-only group. Similarly, if a LW group has a ritual once a year (or even if every LW group has a ritual, and even it’s the same ritual), it doesn’t seem likely rituals will become the primary thing the group does.
“There is a rather enormous difference between things I care whether lwers do and things I care whether lw does.”
I notice I am confused. LessWrong is a web site, and to some extent a community of people, which I tend to refer to as “Less Wrongers”. If you mean these words the same as I do, then I do not understand—“LW does something” means “the community does something” which means “many members do something”. I’m not really sure how LW does something is distinguished from LWers doing it...
If I join a golf club where all its members apart from me also happen to be in the bowling club, I’m still not joining the bowling club. I don’t care if “Golfers” go bowling, but it would be really annoying if “gold club” became about bowling, or if I showed up to golf club and all the golfers spend the day talking about that awesome bowling experience they had over the weekend. I never wanted to be parted of a rituals club and wouldn’t have joined a “Have debates/hangouts about AI, epistemology, rationality, morality, meta-ethics, and logic with interesting people and do rituals with them club.”
Basically, I agree with Said’s answer to Raemon’s answer to you.
Insofar as the rituals are something fun people want to do, I don’t mind. Insofar as the rituals are presented as “This is something objectively awesome that you should rationally want for your own LW group!” I do.
This actually makes a fair amount of sense to me. There’s a few ways to interpret it. The most obvious one to me is “Less Wrong has a reputation, built into its mission statement, about caring about rationality, winning at life, etc. I value those things.” Depending on how collectivist you are, you might either care that people can look at you, say “That person is a LWer,” and then correctly infer that you care about rationality and winning at life.
Or, more collectivist-y (which ordinarily I’d give higher likelihood to but maybe not in this case), one might enjoy feeling an identity as a Less Wronger, which includes, built into that identity, caring about epistemic truth and instrumental victory.
I can definitely see it unpleasant if “being a Less Wronger” came to be known, both among the community’s allies and enemies, as (insert arbitrary thing you don’t like here)
For example, I’m not a Objectivist, but Less Wrong terminology shares some common ancestry with Objectivism. So when I’m explaining LW to new people (especially more liberal people), I often get “wait, so is this an Objectivism thing?” which is annoying to me, not just because they are drawing false conclusions about me which I have to correct—but also because I don’t really like Objectivism and it leaves an icky (irrational) feeling just to feel connected to that movement.
There’s another interpretation, which is “the sorts of things that LW groups do affects whether I participate in LW communities [in the sense of particular local groups] and thereby the extent to which I participate in the greater LW community [in the larger sense of “people who identify as ‘LWers’ and do things collectively on that basis]”.
After all, if I want to engage with the larger LW community, the most direct (and one of the most feasible by far) ways to do so is to participate in your local LW community, should such exist. One can hardly choose to participate in some other local LW community that is located in Whatevertown, Distantstate.
I’m very unfamiliar with Objectivism, and this comment made me curious: what terminology do we share with that movement?
I think it’s quite unlikely for this ritual to become tied to the group’s identity, let alone define the group. There are a lot of people strongly involved in the community who don’t participate (as Yvain said), and a number of people who explicitly voice objections against it. Also, the event only happens once a year, there’s nothing as pervasive as e.g. a ritual component in every meetup, so the influence on the whole group’s mentality is probably minimal.
I agree that this is likely to happen, since holding the ritual and organizing “something else” are not mutually exclusive. Are you also concerned about opportunity cost?
What?! The winter solstice ritual is already tied to the OB/LW NYC group’s identity — or at least it very much seems that way from the outside, and it certainly looks like (at least some of) the group’s members are actively working to both make that be the case, and to promote that image of the event to the rest of LW.
Sorry, I misunderstood, I do agree that the ritual is connected to the group identity. Do you expect it to have significant effects on the LW group identity besides increasing the sense of community?
I think that opting out of a component of the group identity doesn’t necessarily lead to alienation. For example, caring about FAI is a significant part of the LW group identity, but people who care about FAI much less than, say, building rationality skills (like myself) are still welcome and included.
Do you mean signaling that you’re not part of the group, or feeling that you’re not part of the group, or both?
This is true, but a ritual designed explicitly as a group-bonding exercise (and, it seems, the most prominent such exercise) is more likely to be something opting out of which contributes to alienation than, say, caring about FAI.
Both. Although I didn’t so much mean “signaling that you’re not part of the group” as “doing something which is interpreted by other group members as an indication that you’re not part of the group”, but the difference is of emphasis at best.