Thanks for sharing. As is often the case, I find myself agreeing with you on most concrete points but unhappy with the overly negative tone you’re taking. I hope that none of the core organizers are reading this now, because if I were them I’d want to take some more time to decompress before diving into criticism this harsh.
So, on to specific points:
I agree that this year was pretty scattershot, and didn’t feel like the arc pulled together well. Have you talked to next year’s organizer about helping out with creative direction? Running a Solstice and getting the tone of the arc right is pretty hard. Not just to say “Hey, don’t complain if you can’t help,” because that’s a legitimate thing to do—but I legitimately believe that having strong opinions about how the arc should be is really helpful for someone doing that work. And you clearly have strong opinions.
Similarly, my sense is that the quality of speeches is heavily dependent on having people available and willing to not only perform, but to write original speeches.
I think we really need to focus on what the organizers of Solstice can do to help prevent disruptions, rather than blaming the audience. One huge problem is that this year’s venue has no acoustically isolated indoor space to take kids, let alone having onsite childcare. We really do need to find an alternate venue.
I’m not really sure what to do to prevent applause other than just saying “please hold your applause till the end.” Maybe organizers of previous years could speak to how well that works, and/or other strategies they’ve used.
edit: One more thing re: candles: I wonder why we haven’t used LED candles at venues that don’t allow them? They’re obviously not as good as the real thing, but I do think they add to the atmosphere—I’ve run a couple small Solstices where we used them, and it went well.
I would like to help organize/creatively direct, and put my name in for this year. Interpersonal reasons mean that helping with next year is probably not an option for me. Perhaps for 2019. It’s also about time that the Bay Solstice experience some mitosis, since we’ve outgrown every reasonably-priced space; last year and this I’ve considered what I’d want in running a separate fairly large Solstice, but thing #1 is the Bayesian Choir performing, and I expect that would be a sticking point.
For speeches, I agree that getting very high quality needs original speeches. But I also thought that the speeches shared between 2016 and 2017 were less practiced and less heartfelt, which seems like a different problem.
I agree that there is no obvious intervention to deal with applause. I find it very frustrating since it is obvious to me that it’s out of step with the arc of the night, and I don’t know how to convey that feeling to everyone else or why they don’t have it.
As a choir member—I think it’s not totally out of the question that choir could do two events, if they were not immediately next-day back to back, and if they were not seen as competing with each other but rather cooperating, and if choir members did not have to also do non-choir volunteering/logistics for both (several of us did for this one), and—this may be the sticking point—if the total number of songs choir had to learn in a season did not grow to exceed three, which would require coordination between events to reuse songs.
Also, to be very clear, I can’t speak for choir. But I think we generally like singing at things, if the conditions are right for us to be able to do that.
(Although, my comment about volunteering might point to a larger problem, which is that there are probably not enough volunteers in the community to sustain two solstice events. As it is, there is trouble getting enough to sustain one.)
I’d encourage you to go ahead and consider running a second, more serious event. I don’t know exactly how things will shape up next year, but I’d guess that even if the trend reverses and the event becomes stronger on ritual it won’t be as much ritual as you would like. The existence of such an event is likely to also have an effect on how the next iteration of the current event gets planned, and if there’s enough foreknowledge then the two events could play off each other very nicely offering different experiences with different expectations and giving people the opportunity to choose which they prefer or attend both for a broader range of experience.
Experimenting with something in Spring, Summer, and Fall could also do a lot to setup expectations for how the events could work together.
More ritual is not my goal. I’ve said before that I consider ritual extremely dangerous, and to be minimized as much as possible without impeding the pursuit of the goal.
The goal, in my view, is community values affirmation, exemplified by the dawn-darkness-light arc. “Civilization has brought us a very long way. There is a lot still to do, but humanity is powerful and victory is possible.” If the audience leaves with that reinforced as an alief, and a sense that they are among a community which shares it, that is success.
What is the class “ritual” that excludes “community values affirmation”, done at regular intervals, with regular content, including a standard narrative arc specific to the event? That seems like a pretty central instance of ritual to me.
Rituals are system 1 techniques, usually group-based. They are means of bypassing analytical filters to work directly on alief.
Some amount of ritual is needed to make a larger ceremony work, but referring to the large ceremony as a ritual is more of a synecdoche than a clear description.
BTW I agree with you that rituals are really dangerous—in the sense that they’re powerful, and anything powerful is dangerous. I disagree with what I take to be the tacit claim that we can get away with mostly not doing them.
Not intentionally doing rituals doesn’t mean you don’t get mind-hacked—it means you get mind-hacked by the dominant culture. For much of US history, a lot of the practical role of religion has been to organize resistance to obviously unfriendly mindhacks like hard liquor and gambling. Facebook is going to respond in kind if we unilaterally disarm.
Of course, most religions are perfectly happy to eat up all the energy they free up from other mindhacks. One of the things that’s so cool about Quakerism is that it seems to devote most of its ritual optimization to protecting individuals against mindhacks, and comparatively little to exploiting them.
I would be much more sympathetic to an argument along the lines of “Wait, before you consider starting a Rationalist religion, you should really start a minimum viable Rationalist antireligion, so you have some room to think.”
OK, Bryan Caplan is actually pretty impressive on this account, and doing things that are very clearly pointed in the right direction. I agree that that is a pretty good thing to try and do. It’s pretty hard to do while living in community with people unless there’s a shared understanding of what the thing is, and that it’s valuable—so I think we should prioritize building that understanding.
Regardless of whether you call it a religion, I claim that it would be very useful to do the work of building a shared and accurate narrative that such a thing is difficult but attainable, embedding into the narrative information about what the high-value practices are that point towards achieving Bryan Caplan’s state, and creating the social institutions that allow people to hold onto that narrative despite pervasive outside pressure to do otherwise.
It seems to me that your definition is sufficiently broad that it would include all cases of presenting intuitively compelling evidence, and especially evidence about common knowledge and intent.
I think “community values affirmation” falls pretty clearly in this category. It’s just an obviously epistemically valid instance—it’s a case of social proof being applied to exactly the circumstance our social proof detectors were designed for. Of course, you can mislead with ritual, just like you can mislead by lying. But I don’t think I could or should get away with saying something like “saying words is really dangerous” and leave it at that, as an argument against some particular instance of saying words, or even general advice to talk more.
Saying that something is a community values affirmation is not saying much at all. That doesn’t give you enough information to make a judgment. How and why you are affirming shared values, and the shape of the event in which you do it, can range from “bland expression of allegiance to the Unitarian Applause Lights” to a coercive public session of a personality cult. The details, not the broad goal, are the important thing.
How are the details important? In what way do they affect whether community values affirmation is a group-based system 1 technique for bypassing analytical filters to work directly on alief?
You can do a values affirmation entirely with system 2. As much as possible, if you want to avoid being epistemically toxic, you should. The Unitarian hypothetical probably does; the personality cult certainly does not.
I think you’re using “system 1” and “system 2″ to mean things very different from Kahneman’s usage. In particular, I think you’re using “system 2” to mean something in the direction of Sattva. Unfortunately, it seems like nearly everyone around here equivocates in this way.
Can you try again to tell me what a ritual is, tabooing “system 1”?
Uh, replace ‘system 1’ with ‘instinct-harnessing’? It’s pretty integral.
Also, you keep using words in really weird ways, which has made this discussion extremely frustrating. I still don’t know what you have meant by most of your statements. So I’m disengaging now.
Also, you keep using words in really weird ways, which has made this discussion extremely frustrating. I still don’t know what you have meant by most of your statements. So I’m disengaging now.
I am curious what could have been different about this conversation (primarily on your end, since that’s easier for you to control) that would have made this conversation less frustrating for you.
EDITED TO SAY: I feel frustrated that you’re only mentioning that there were specific word usages that were unclear to you now, concurrent with expresing intent to disengage, that you didn’t bother to ask clarifying questions earlier, and that you still aren’t bothering to tell me what usage specifically was unclear to you.
It’s an honest expression of frustration. I’ve put in a substantial amount of work to try and bridge a communication gap, but ultimately that’s not going to be possible without some amount of help from you. So it’s really frustrating to me when you don’t ask about any specifics, and only mention the mere fact that I’m using some words in ways you consider weird concurrent with intent to disengage.
Sorry for the tone, though, it seems unhelpful in hindsight. I’ve edited the comment to be more forthright and less emotionally loaded.
“Substitute a short synonym” is really, really not what tabooing a word is:
When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all. Or any of their short synonyms. And be careful not to let yourself invent a new word to use instead. Describe outward observables and interior mechanisms; don’t use a single handle, whatever that handle may be.
Thanks for sharing. As is often the case, I find myself agreeing with you on most concrete points but unhappy with the overly negative tone you’re taking. I hope that none of the core organizers are reading this now, because if I were them I’d want to take some more time to decompress before diving into criticism this harsh.
So, on to specific points:
I agree that this year was pretty scattershot, and didn’t feel like the arc pulled together well. Have you talked to next year’s organizer about helping out with creative direction? Running a Solstice and getting the tone of the arc right is pretty hard. Not just to say “Hey, don’t complain if you can’t help,” because that’s a legitimate thing to do—but I legitimately believe that having strong opinions about how the arc should be is really helpful for someone doing that work. And you clearly have strong opinions.
Similarly, my sense is that the quality of speeches is heavily dependent on having people available and willing to not only perform, but to write original speeches.
I think we really need to focus on what the organizers of Solstice can do to help prevent disruptions, rather than blaming the audience. One huge problem is that this year’s venue has no acoustically isolated indoor space to take kids, let alone having onsite childcare. We really do need to find an alternate venue.
I’m not really sure what to do to prevent applause other than just saying “please hold your applause till the end.” Maybe organizers of previous years could speak to how well that works, and/or other strategies they’ve used.
edit: One more thing re: candles: I wonder why we haven’t used LED candles at venues that don’t allow them? They’re obviously not as good as the real thing, but I do think they add to the atmosphere—I’ve run a couple small Solstices where we used them, and it went well.
I would like to help organize/creatively direct, and put my name in for this year. Interpersonal reasons mean that helping with next year is probably not an option for me. Perhaps for 2019. It’s also about time that the Bay Solstice experience some mitosis, since we’ve outgrown every reasonably-priced space; last year and this I’ve considered what I’d want in running a separate fairly large Solstice, but thing #1 is the Bayesian Choir performing, and I expect that would be a sticking point.
For speeches, I agree that getting very high quality needs original speeches. But I also thought that the speeches shared between 2016 and 2017 were less practiced and less heartfelt, which seems like a different problem.
I agree that there is no obvious intervention to deal with applause. I find it very frustrating since it is obvious to me that it’s out of step with the arc of the night, and I don’t know how to convey that feeling to everyone else or why they don’t have it.
As a choir member—I think it’s not totally out of the question that choir could do two events, if they were not immediately next-day back to back, and if they were not seen as competing with each other but rather cooperating, and if choir members did not have to also do non-choir volunteering/logistics for both (several of us did for this one), and—this may be the sticking point—if the total number of songs choir had to learn in a season did not grow to exceed three, which would require coordination between events to reuse songs.
Also, to be very clear, I can’t speak for choir. But I think we generally like singing at things, if the conditions are right for us to be able to do that.
(Although, my comment about volunteering might point to a larger problem, which is that there are probably not enough volunteers in the community to sustain two solstice events. As it is, there is trouble getting enough to sustain one.)
I agree that we could do more things. I think we could even do four songs if there were enough repeats.
I’d encourage you to go ahead and consider running a second, more serious event. I don’t know exactly how things will shape up next year, but I’d guess that even if the trend reverses and the event becomes stronger on ritual it won’t be as much ritual as you would like. The existence of such an event is likely to also have an effect on how the next iteration of the current event gets planned, and if there’s enough foreknowledge then the two events could play off each other very nicely offering different experiences with different expectations and giving people the opportunity to choose which they prefer or attend both for a broader range of experience.
Experimenting with something in Spring, Summer, and Fall could also do a lot to setup expectations for how the events could work together.
More ritual is not my goal. I’ve said before that I consider ritual extremely dangerous, and to be minimized as much as possible without impeding the pursuit of the goal.
The goal, in my view, is community values affirmation, exemplified by the dawn-darkness-light arc. “Civilization has brought us a very long way. There is a lot still to do, but humanity is powerful and victory is possible.” If the audience leaves with that reinforced as an alief, and a sense that they are among a community which shares it, that is success.
What is the class “ritual” that excludes “community values affirmation”, done at regular intervals, with regular content, including a standard narrative arc specific to the event? That seems like a pretty central instance of ritual to me.
Rituals are system 1 techniques, usually group-based. They are means of bypassing analytical filters to work directly on alief.
Some amount of ritual is needed to make a larger ceremony work, but referring to the large ceremony as a ritual is more of a synecdoche than a clear description.
BTW I agree with you that rituals are really dangerous—in the sense that they’re powerful, and anything powerful is dangerous. I disagree with what I take to be the tacit claim that we can get away with mostly not doing them.
Not intentionally doing rituals doesn’t mean you don’t get mind-hacked—it means you get mind-hacked by the dominant culture. For much of US history, a lot of the practical role of religion has been to organize resistance to obviously unfriendly mindhacks like hard liquor and gambling. Facebook is going to respond in kind if we unilaterally disarm.
Of course, most religions are perfectly happy to eat up all the energy they free up from other mindhacks. One of the things that’s so cool about Quakerism is that it seems to devote most of its ritual optimization to protecting individuals against mindhacks, and comparatively little to exploiting them.
I would be much more sympathetic to an argument along the lines of “Wait, before you consider starting a Rationalist religion, you should really start a minimum viable Rationalist antireligion, so you have some room to think.”
I don’t agree at all. In an atomized society, a zero-tolerance policy for getting mindhacked can and should be adopted.
I don’t know how I would begin to implement such a policy. Do you?
I think Bryan Caplan has succeeded.
OK, Bryan Caplan is actually pretty impressive on this account, and doing things that are very clearly pointed in the right direction. I agree that that is a pretty good thing to try and do. It’s pretty hard to do while living in community with people unless there’s a shared understanding of what the thing is, and that it’s valuable—so I think we should prioritize building that understanding.
Regardless of whether you call it a religion, I claim that it would be very useful to do the work of building a shared and accurate narrative that such a thing is difficult but attainable, embedding into the narrative information about what the high-value practices are that point towards achieving Bryan Caplan’s state, and creating the social institutions that allow people to hold onto that narrative despite pervasive outside pressure to do otherwise.
It seems to me that your definition is sufficiently broad that it would include all cases of presenting intuitively compelling evidence, and especially evidence about common knowledge and intent.
I think “community values affirmation” falls pretty clearly in this category. It’s just an obviously epistemically valid instance—it’s a case of social proof being applied to exactly the circumstance our social proof detectors were designed for. Of course, you can mislead with ritual, just like you can mislead by lying. But I don’t think I could or should get away with saying something like “saying words is really dangerous” and leave it at that, as an argument against some particular instance of saying words, or even general advice to talk more.
Saying that something is a community values affirmation is not saying much at all. That doesn’t give you enough information to make a judgment. How and why you are affirming shared values, and the shape of the event in which you do it, can range from “bland expression of allegiance to the Unitarian Applause Lights” to a coercive public session of a personality cult. The details, not the broad goal, are the important thing.
How are the details important? In what way do they affect whether community values affirmation is a group-based system 1 technique for bypassing analytical filters to work directly on alief?
You can do a values affirmation entirely with system 2. As much as possible, if you want to avoid being epistemically toxic, you should. The Unitarian hypothetical probably does; the personality cult certainly does not.
I think you’re using “system 1” and “system 2″ to mean things very different from Kahneman’s usage. In particular, I think you’re using “system 2” to mean something in the direction of Sattva. Unfortunately, it seems like nearly everyone around here equivocates in this way.
Can you try again to tell me what a ritual is, tabooing “system 1”?
Uh, replace ‘system 1’ with ‘instinct-harnessing’? It’s pretty integral.
Also, you keep using words in really weird ways, which has made this discussion extremely frustrating. I still don’t know what you have meant by most of your statements. So I’m disengaging now.
I am curious what could have been different about this conversation (primarily on your end, since that’s easier for you to control) that would have made this conversation less frustrating for you.
EDITED TO SAY: I feel frustrated that you’re only mentioning that there were specific word usages that were unclear to you now, concurrent with expresing intent to disengage, that you didn’t bother to ask clarifying questions earlier, and that you still aren’t bothering to tell me what usage specifically was unclear to you.
[DELETED]
It’s an honest expression of frustration. I’ve put in a substantial amount of work to try and bridge a communication gap, but ultimately that’s not going to be possible without some amount of help from you. So it’s really frustrating to me when you don’t ask about any specifics, and only mention the mere fact that I’m using some words in ways you consider weird concurrent with intent to disengage.
Sorry for the tone, though, it seems unhelpful in hindsight. I’ve edited the comment to be more forthright and less emotionally loaded.
Pretty much all of it.
“Substitute a short synonym” is really, really not what tabooing a word is:
You basically asked me to define “good” while tabooing morality.
That’s basically the sort of thing the concept of tabooing was invented for, though.
To prove when two words are closely connected enough that it’s impossible to define one without the other? I don’t agree.
The point is to stop talking about words, and start talking about reality.