I think there’s some confusion about whether this is a religious ritual, a theatrical performance, or a community gathering. Different rules apply to each, and it’s hardly fair to ask people to satisfy one expectation if they’re led to believe that it’s a different thing entirely.
The way Solstice is run in practice, is as a theatrical performance—there’s a producer, who lines up a bunch of acts, and a venue, and finds an audience / sells tickets, and then the audience comes in and bears very little responsibility for what happens. Under that paradigm, it seems fine to have rules that preclude the presence of some children. The stakes are just not that high, for a once-a-year event—it’s entertainment. There is lots of other entertainment to be had, though it’s nice for some of the entertainment to be produced locally. Applause is appropriate at a theatrical event, unless there is a specific understanding otherwise.
If we want a religious ritual (and I think the intuition that there shouldn’t be applause is pointing in this direction), then there needs to be an advance understanding as to what the ritual is, and what it means, unless we are trying to have a mystery religion—in which case the thing shouldn’t be recorded for public consumption, and there should be some substantially stiffer admission requirements. The ritual should have power even without the addition of theatrical drama, because it should have meaning. It should be enactive.If we do this, then either it’s a ritual for adults only, or there’s something present for children to emulate, or be curious about. There should be aspects of it that are comprehensible to them, even if not all of it is. There should be things for them to do, to participate in the ritual. For the most part, I don’t see this happening.
If we want an all-community gathering—if an important aspect of Solstice is that the whole community is there—then one of the central constraints in planning the event is that it has got to be run in such a way that the whole community can in fact show up without interfering with the event. If our standards of conduct are incompatible with parents bringing their children to the event, then we are excluding children from the community. If we want to be that sort of community, there should probably be some sort of public discussion on that point first. As far as I can tell, people care the most about the community gathering aspect, but a survey might be in order by someone who cares more about making Solstice a thing than I do.
There could, of course, be a multiple-part event or series of events, playing these different roles. I think there’s been an attempt to triangulate the tension between these three things; audience participation schemes like last year’s writing stuff on the wall is what it looks like to try to make a theatrical event communityish, and of course this is a theatrical event designed to deal on a very literal level with themes that the community is organized around, which gives it a bit of the flavor of ritual, but overall this triangulation seems like the sort of thing that is almost guaranteed to produce the sort of problem described in the OP.
I agree that there are multiple competing visions of Solstice, but I don’t see the religious ritual format and community gathering format in as much of a conflict as you.
As I said in another thread, I see the purpose of Solstice, and rationalist holidays generally, as community values affirmation. Borrowing some traits of religious ceremonies is a powerful but dangerous tool for this purpose. Size and fellow-feeling is another tool. Theatricality is another, but definitely secondary. For the established arc and values of “The world is dangerous and fragile, but we have overcome impossible challenges and can do it again” for the Brighter Than Today, they seem like the correct tools. Other holidays, mine and other people’s, use different tools and affirm different values; ideally, we would have all the central values of the community attached to at least one regular event.
I definitely do not think that Solstice as theatrical event is good or valuable. If it isn’t serving a higher purpose than entertainment, it’s just bad political art.
I think that what you read as “borrowing some traits of religious ceremonies,” I read as, in effect, equivocation on whether you are doing a religious ceremony or not. But it’s possible that you’re thinking of different features than I am. Can you be more specific?
I have a sense that we’re talking at cross-purposes about the category “theatrical event,” and that this is related to our disagreement on what a religious ceremony is. By me, it would be possible to have an actual ritual in which people in community with one another gather to affirm their commitment to a shared narrative which implies certain values and practices. In other words, a religious ritual. It is also possible to sell that as a consumer experience. If you’re doing that, you’re doing participatory theater instead.
Fellow-feeling seems weird to call a tool, here, rather than an outcome. Can you say more about how it’s a tool?
Well, an atheist religious ceremony is a contradiction in terms. Observing religious ceremonies to see what mechanisms they use to reinforce beliefs and group identity, and which of those can be extracted to use in a way that respects good epistemics, is not. That is what I try to do in holiday design and what I think Solstice should do.
I don’t understand what you’re saying about theatrical events but a consumer experience would also be bad and not worth supporting.
Fellow-feeling is a tool because the Asch Conformity Experiment works.
Well, an atheist religious ceremony is a contradiction in terms.
That’s just plain not true, unless you construct your definition of “religion” to exclude a pretty substantial chunk of world religion. I claim that such a definition doesn’t cut reality at the joints.
A Zen monastery, a Reconstructionist Jewish wedding, a Quaker* meeting.
*Not all Quakers, of course, some are overtly Christian, but it’s worth noting that the whole thing works just as well for just about any level of belief-in-god.
I mean “atheist” is just “without god” and all the things Ben mentioned are in fact without god as far as I know, and I can specifically confirm the case that western Zen practice is atheistic. But I’m guessing you’re trying to say something more like “aspiritual” or “without spirituality”.
“Spiritual but not religious” is a separate category from “Atheist”, to the government and to the people who identify as it. Glossing atheist as “without god” is a literal translation, not a true one.
For what it’s worth, I downvoted this reply because it comes across to me as inappropriately hostile. If it wasn’t meant that way, I can explain why if desired.
I was being aggressively argumentative, because it seems to me like you’re at least tacitly claiming that your view is canonical so the burden of proof is on me. But, interpretive labor claims are really hard to adjudicate, so most likely we’re each gonna have to do more than we think is fair if we’re gonna resolve this.
Are we talking about Atheist Religious Ceremonies or atheist religious ceremonies? The former does exist but the exemplars are few and not-great.
For the latter: weddings, birthdays, graduation ceremonies, funerals, certain kinds of concerts. I’m guessing this is the sort of thing Benquo was talking about although I’m not that confident.
Weddings and funerals are not religious? (You are right that bithdays and graduation ceremonies are not. “Certain kinds of” concerts had a lot of work being done by “certain kinds of”, but there are concerts that are absolutely religious. I assume you’ll call them “not atheist”.
You were the one that first brought up “an atheist religious ceremony is a contradiction in terms” and I’m not really sure what your goal with the sentence was.
Religious weddings and funerals are common because most people are religious. Most weddings and funerals of atheists I know of were not atheist, because the principals weren’t antitheist enough to care and their families wanted a religious ceremony. But, for example, Ozy and Topher Brennan’s wedding was not religious.
And I don’t know what kinds of concerts you’re referring to at all, but yes, I expect so. Religious and atheist are antonyms.
As a short argument: Good is to Evil as Atheist is to Religious. It’s as weird to say that an atheist ceremony is religious as to say that an evil person is good.
I don’t think this argument is especially worth continuing, but my short rebuttal is “no. The opposite of theism is anti-theism. Religion != Theism, and atheism is not even obligated to have a strong opinion on theism apart from “not true.”
It does sound a lot like maybe what we need are in fact different events if people want different things. Personally I like the direction of being mostly a community event with a theatrical component that looks a little like ritual and so was pretty happy with the way it went this year (though I may be biased since I was a speaker), but I can definitely see having a separate, ritual-focused solstice for people who want it, maybe scheduled to be on the actual day of the solstice and timed such that it reaches the zenith of its ceremony at midnight. This would necessarily make it a smaller event, but I suspect that the only way to get stronger ritual is to change it in ways that make it more exclusionary.
This seems reasonable to me, though. Religions typically have multiple kinds of services for different occasions and different services are differently targeted. For example, in my Zen sangha we have regular sitting periods with service and dharma talk that obey certain norms, occasionally hold sesshin which obeys slightly stricter norms, and then hold community events that have looser norms.
I realize that with the rationality community it’s a bit harder because we don’t already have forms that guide this, but if someone wanted to start rationality church it sounds like at least one person would be interested in attending (or perhaps running it!).
Formally calling yourself a church has a lot of benefits like not having to pay taxes and not having to follow various other laws. As a Munchkin it has it’s lure.
Hopefully they would fail, but they might succeed, and divert people away from rationality. I don’t think a rationality church could possibly remain rationalist.
I don’t see any reason to expect that sort of thing to be any worse in prospect than CFAR was at its founding, and I see plenty of reason to expect it to be a better prospect, once you adjust for the quality of the founders.
How could it possibly not? Churches are built on affective death spirals. You might manage to prevent that but you’re starting out with something that’s designed to fail for your purposes.
It’s not at all obvious to me that religions are built on affective death spirals in the general case, more than anything other generic class of institution (such as a self-help organization running inspirational workshops) is. This seems like a claim worth fleshing out.
ETA (since the discussion below is currently hidden by default):
Religions differ in important ways from other institutions. This includes differing in how they relate to affective death spirals. I’m not saying everything’s completely the same, or that religions don’t have a worse track record in some respects. I’m saying that so far I’m unpersuaded by the case that religion’s uniquely generically bad on this score.
Affective death spirals and other self-validating narratives are pretty common, and I can think of lots of different reasons you might notice them most prominently in religion, e.g. religion is trying to solve particularly difficult social coordination problems, or modern religion is more honest about the extent to which it is talking nonsense, or you’re not a member of a religion but you are a member of various other types of social organization and affective death spirals are hard to see from the inside.
I’ll try to explain my side here. It seems to me like quite a lot of institutions reaffirm narrative at the expense of tracking reality. The startup world is full of this, for instance. So are political movements like Communism. This is unusually easy to notice in the case of religion, for two reasons. First, Christianity in particular tends to spin narratives about things “outside the world” in some way, whereas e.g. startups or political movements organize around ideologies that can pass for an honest model of the world we live in at casual inspection, especially if you’re willing to commit the occasional fraud. Second, people in a liberal, skeptical, cosmopolitan subculture, like us, have social permission to notice when religion is a fraud and not just honestly mistaken, but don’t have social permission to notice when other governing institutions are frauds.
That seems like the fallacy of grey to me. Yes, it’s easier to notice when a church is cultish than a startup or political movement. Yes, there is significant incidence of cultish startups and political movements. That doesn’t mean that churches aren’t much worse. Fairly few churches are not cultish; fairly few of the rest are.
Most good startups are very cultish (citation: Zero to One says this explicitly). I appreciate that you’re taking the obvious position and properly acting on it, but I’m interested to hear what insights Benquo comes up with (his Sabbath post was super interesting), and generally do expect our bias to be not noticing the valuable insights and coordination effects of religion. I can imagine being sufficiently wrong such that over history religions been net positive relative to what society would’ve done otherwise.
I would say something more like, most religion is badly wrong for the same reason most philosophy is badly wrong—you’re working on a really hard problem! The problem being really hard doesn’t make it something you can get away with not doing, it just makes you get wrong answers most of the time.
I’m happy to admit that there can be differences in degree. But because of the independent differences in perception, and because I’ve only recently started to be able to see past that, I’m not at all sure “religions” are worse generally, or even how you’d measure that. Most arguments I’ve seen on this particular subject completely miss the fact that the liberal frame makes religion’s flaws easier to see.
(Note that in this case I’m making an “I don’t know and for the most part don’t trust others to know” argument, not a “no one can possibly know” argument. There’s a fact of the matter!)
Specifically being narratives about things outside the world rather than inside it is deliberately disconnecting yourself from correction.
An ideology that may pass for an honest model of the world can be corrected by treating it as an honest model of the world and seeing whether it fails in that regard. If it is honest, this provides chances for it to be exposed as a self-sustaining ideology. If it is dishonest, deliberate work must be done to restrict it to the space of things that can withstand that inspection, scaling with the degree or scrutiny it may receive.
An ideology which has its grounding outside the world (all Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, every folk religious tradition I’m familiar with, debatably Buddhism, etc.), has neither of those good properties.
Or in short: Non-religious cultish ideologies are constrained to mimic the form of honesty to be considered honest, while religious ones are not.
I think there’s some confusion about whether this is a religious ritual, a theatrical performance, or a community gathering. Different rules apply to each, and it’s hardly fair to ask people to satisfy one expectation if they’re led to believe that it’s a different thing entirely.
The way Solstice is run in practice, is as a theatrical performance—there’s a producer, who lines up a bunch of acts, and a venue, and finds an audience / sells tickets, and then the audience comes in and bears very little responsibility for what happens. Under that paradigm, it seems fine to have rules that preclude the presence of some children. The stakes are just not that high, for a once-a-year event—it’s entertainment. There is lots of other entertainment to be had, though it’s nice for some of the entertainment to be produced locally. Applause is appropriate at a theatrical event, unless there is a specific understanding otherwise.
If we want a religious ritual (and I think the intuition that there shouldn’t be applause is pointing in this direction), then there needs to be an advance understanding as to what the ritual is, and what it means, unless we are trying to have a mystery religion—in which case the thing shouldn’t be recorded for public consumption, and there should be some substantially stiffer admission requirements. The ritual should have power even without the addition of theatrical drama, because it should have meaning. It should be enactive. If we do this, then either it’s a ritual for adults only, or there’s something present for children to emulate, or be curious about. There should be aspects of it that are comprehensible to them, even if not all of it is. There should be things for them to do, to participate in the ritual. For the most part, I don’t see this happening.
If we want an all-community gathering—if an important aspect of Solstice is that the whole community is there—then one of the central constraints in planning the event is that it has got to be run in such a way that the whole community can in fact show up without interfering with the event. If our standards of conduct are incompatible with parents bringing their children to the event, then we are excluding children from the community. If we want to be that sort of community, there should probably be some sort of public discussion on that point first. As far as I can tell, people care the most about the community gathering aspect, but a survey might be in order by someone who cares more about making Solstice a thing than I do.
There could, of course, be a multiple-part event or series of events, playing these different roles. I think there’s been an attempt to triangulate the tension between these three things; audience participation schemes like last year’s writing stuff on the wall is what it looks like to try to make a theatrical event communityish, and of course this is a theatrical event designed to deal on a very literal level with themes that the community is organized around, which gives it a bit of the flavor of ritual, but overall this triangulation seems like the sort of thing that is almost guaranteed to produce the sort of problem described in the OP.
I agree that there are multiple competing visions of Solstice, but I don’t see the religious ritual format and community gathering format in as much of a conflict as you.
As I said in another thread, I see the purpose of Solstice, and rationalist holidays generally, as community values affirmation. Borrowing some traits of religious ceremonies is a powerful but dangerous tool for this purpose. Size and fellow-feeling is another tool. Theatricality is another, but definitely secondary. For the established arc and values of “The world is dangerous and fragile, but we have overcome impossible challenges and can do it again” for the Brighter Than Today, they seem like the correct tools. Other holidays, mine and other people’s, use different tools and affirm different values; ideally, we would have all the central values of the community attached to at least one regular event.
I definitely do not think that Solstice as theatrical event is good or valuable. If it isn’t serving a higher purpose than entertainment, it’s just bad political art.
I think that what you read as “borrowing some traits of religious ceremonies,” I read as, in effect, equivocation on whether you are doing a religious ceremony or not. But it’s possible that you’re thinking of different features than I am. Can you be more specific?
I have a sense that we’re talking at cross-purposes about the category “theatrical event,” and that this is related to our disagreement on what a religious ceremony is. By me, it would be possible to have an actual ritual in which people in community with one another gather to affirm their commitment to a shared narrative which implies certain values and practices. In other words, a religious ritual. It is also possible to sell that as a consumer experience. If you’re doing that, you’re doing participatory theater instead.
Fellow-feeling seems weird to call a tool, here, rather than an outcome. Can you say more about how it’s a tool?
Well, an atheist religious ceremony is a contradiction in terms. Observing religious ceremonies to see what mechanisms they use to reinforce beliefs and group identity, and which of those can be extracted to use in a way that respects good epistemics, is not. That is what I try to do in holiday design and what I think Solstice should do.
I don’t understand what you’re saying about theatrical events but a consumer experience would also be bad and not worth supporting.
Fellow-feeling is a tool because the Asch Conformity Experiment works.
By fellow-feeling, do you pretty much mean social proof?
That’s just plain not true, unless you construct your definition of “religion” to exclude a pretty substantial chunk of world religion. I claim that such a definition doesn’t cut reality at the joints.
I don’t believe you. Please provide three examples of atheist religious ceremonies.
A Zen monastery, a Reconstructionist Jewish wedding, a Quaker* meeting.
*Not all Quakers, of course, some are overtly Christian, but it’s worth noting that the whole thing works just as well for just about any level of belief-in-god.
I wouldn’t term those atheist.
I mean “atheist” is just “without god” and all the things Ben mentioned are in fact without god as far as I know, and I can specifically confirm the case that western Zen practice is atheistic. But I’m guessing you’re trying to say something more like “aspiritual” or “without spirituality”.
“Spiritual but not religious” is a separate category from “Atheist”, to the government and to the people who identify as it. Glossing atheist as “without god” is a literal translation, not a true one.
For what it’s worth, I downvoted this reply because it comes across to me as inappropriately hostile. If it wasn’t meant that way, I can explain why if desired.
That seems fair. It was a reply to a comment I perceived as hostile.
I was being aggressively argumentative, because it seems to me like you’re at least tacitly claiming that your view is canonical so the burden of proof is on me. But, interpretive labor claims are really hard to adjudicate, so most likely we’re each gonna have to do more than we think is fair if we’re gonna resolve this.
Are we talking about Atheist Religious Ceremonies or atheist religious ceremonies? The former does exist but the exemplars are few and not-great.
For the latter: weddings, birthdays, graduation ceremonies, funerals, certain kinds of concerts. I’m guessing this is the sort of thing Benquo was talking about although I’m not that confident.
I don’t consider those religious.
Weddings and funerals are not religious? (You are right that bithdays and graduation ceremonies are not. “Certain kinds of” concerts had a lot of work being done by “certain kinds of”, but there are concerts that are absolutely religious. I assume you’ll call them “not atheist”.
You were the one that first brought up “an atheist religious ceremony is a contradiction in terms” and I’m not really sure what your goal with the sentence was.
Religious weddings and funerals are common because most people are religious. Most weddings and funerals of atheists I know of were not atheist, because the principals weren’t antitheist enough to care and their families wanted a religious ceremony. But, for example, Ozy and Topher Brennan’s wedding was not religious.
And I don’t know what kinds of concerts you’re referring to at all, but yes, I expect so. Religious and atheist are antonyms.
This is an argument about definitions, and I’m not sure what the point is.
As a short argument: Good is to Evil as Atheist is to Religious. It’s as weird to say that an atheist ceremony is religious as to say that an evil person is good.
I don’t think this argument is especially worth continuing, but my short rebuttal is “no. The opposite of theism is anti-theism. Religion != Theism, and atheism is not even obligated to have a strong opinion on theism apart from “not true.”
It does sound a lot like maybe what we need are in fact different events if people want different things. Personally I like the direction of being mostly a community event with a theatrical component that looks a little like ritual and so was pretty happy with the way it went this year (though I may be biased since I was a speaker), but I can definitely see having a separate, ritual-focused solstice for people who want it, maybe scheduled to be on the actual day of the solstice and timed such that it reaches the zenith of its ceremony at midnight. This would necessarily make it a smaller event, but I suspect that the only way to get stronger ritual is to change it in ways that make it more exclusionary.
This seems reasonable to me, though. Religions typically have multiple kinds of services for different occasions and different services are differently targeted. For example, in my Zen sangha we have regular sitting periods with service and dharma talk that obey certain norms, occasionally hold sesshin which obeys slightly stricter norms, and then hold community events that have looser norms.
I realize that with the rationality community it’s a bit harder because we don’t already have forms that guide this, but if someone wanted to start rationality church it sounds like at least one person would be interested in attending (or perhaps running it!).
Personally, if someone started a rationality church I would first try to dissuade them, and second try to ostracize them from the community.
Formally calling yourself a church has a lot of benefits like not having to pay taxes and not having to follow various other laws. As a Munchkin it has it’s lure.
Why?!
Hopefully they would fail, but they might succeed, and divert people away from rationality. I don’t think a rationality church could possibly remain rationalist.
I don’t see any reason to expect that sort of thing to be any worse in prospect than CFAR was at its founding, and I see plenty of reason to expect it to be a better prospect, once you adjust for the quality of the founders.
How could it possibly not? Churches are built on affective death spirals. You might manage to prevent that but you’re starting out with something that’s designed to fail for your purposes.
It’s not at all obvious to me that religions are built on affective death spirals in the general case, more than anything other generic class of institution (such as a self-help organization running inspirational workshops) is. This seems like a claim worth fleshing out.
ETA (since the discussion below is currently hidden by default):
Religions differ in important ways from other institutions. This includes differing in how they relate to affective death spirals. I’m not saying everything’s completely the same, or that religions don’t have a worse track record in some respects. I’m saying that so far I’m unpersuaded by the case that religion’s uniquely generically bad on this score.
Affective death spirals and other self-validating narratives are pretty common, and I can think of lots of different reasons you might notice them most prominently in religion, e.g. religion is trying to solve particularly difficult social coordination problems, or modern religion is more honest about the extent to which it is talking nonsense, or you’re not a member of a religion but you are a member of various other types of social organization and affective death spirals are hard to see from the inside.
It is extremely obvious to me and I don’t understand how it could seem otherwise.
I’ll try to explain my side here. It seems to me like quite a lot of institutions reaffirm narrative at the expense of tracking reality. The startup world is full of this, for instance. So are political movements like Communism. This is unusually easy to notice in the case of religion, for two reasons. First, Christianity in particular tends to spin narratives about things “outside the world” in some way, whereas e.g. startups or political movements organize around ideologies that can pass for an honest model of the world we live in at casual inspection, especially if you’re willing to commit the occasional fraud. Second, people in a liberal, skeptical, cosmopolitan subculture, like us, have social permission to notice when religion is a fraud and not just honestly mistaken, but don’t have social permission to notice when other governing institutions are frauds.
That seems like the fallacy of grey to me. Yes, it’s easier to notice when a church is cultish than a startup or political movement. Yes, there is significant incidence of cultish startups and political movements. That doesn’t mean that churches aren’t much worse. Fairly few churches are not cultish; fairly few of the rest are.
Most good startups are very cultish (citation: Zero to One says this explicitly). I appreciate that you’re taking the obvious position and properly acting on it, but I’m interested to hear what insights Benquo comes up with (his Sabbath post was super interesting), and generally do expect our bias to be not noticing the valuable insights and coordination effects of religion. I can imagine being sufficiently wrong such that over history religions been net positive relative to what society would’ve done otherwise.
I would say something more like, most religion is badly wrong for the same reason most philosophy is badly wrong—you’re working on a really hard problem! The problem being really hard doesn’t make it something you can get away with not doing, it just makes you get wrong answers most of the time.
I’m happy to admit that there can be differences in degree. But because of the independent differences in perception, and because I’ve only recently started to be able to see past that, I’m not at all sure “religions” are worse generally, or even how you’d measure that. Most arguments I’ve seen on this particular subject completely miss the fact that the liberal frame makes religion’s flaws easier to see.
(Note that in this case I’m making an “I don’t know and for the most part don’t trust others to know” argument, not a “no one can possibly know” argument. There’s a fact of the matter!)
Specifically being narratives about things outside the world rather than inside it is deliberately disconnecting yourself from correction.
An ideology that may pass for an honest model of the world can be corrected by treating it as an honest model of the world and seeing whether it fails in that regard. If it is honest, this provides chances for it to be exposed as a self-sustaining ideology. If it is dishonest, deliberate work must be done to restrict it to the space of things that can withstand that inspection, scaling with the degree or scrutiny it may receive.
An ideology which has its grounding outside the world (all Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, every folk religious tradition I’m familiar with, debatably Buddhism, etc.), has neither of those good properties.
Or in short: Non-religious cultish ideologies are constrained to mimic the form of honesty to be considered honest, while religious ones are not.