This Solstice had me thinking on what I had imagined, when I first read about Solstice. When I was young and dreamed that we were going to Do This Rationally.
The organizers would have actual models about what brain buttons we were pushing to what effect—entangling the wellbeing effect of light with a specific narrative of human progress, evocative and non-representative stories, inducing existential fears and directing people to soothe them through social bonding with a particular crowd, deep rhythmic resonances that just hit straight to sys-1′s sense of “really big”, etc.—and share them ahead of time to enable informed consent.
The event would enshrine people’s right and duty to conscientiously object at any point they feel the goals or epistemics have drifted in an undesirable direction:
put in anti-Asch-conformity plants
intentionally give up/change the most beloved part of the ritual from year to year to avoid status quo bias
give the audience 5 minutes to actually consider whether to do this thing or what they need to do instead
make a place for objectors to stand and be counted instead of silently bouncing out
invoke curiousity about (but do not demand on-the-spot justifications for) why.
This year was lovely performances, nice speeches, an interesting activity, a good evening of food and entertainment. But I did not get what I wanted.
I’m not sure how much of what I wanted is actually doable.
But when I hear loadbearing speeches lifted straight from the previous year’s lineup—unchanged from the sequences, I wonder—have we learned anything new at all? I hear a tidy little myth like The Goddess of Everything Else and worry about false appearance of consensus.
I know the arc of Bay’s Solstice has moved more towards emphasizing community than x-risk, yet I do not think we have changed our ritual tooling to match this shift. One or two extra interactions happened that day, but is the audience any more empowered to act as a community than it was before? How could we have reliably solved the Tarot Card problem? What conversations need to continue happening after Solstice and how will they happen?
It would be ludicrous to reinvent something of Solstice’s magnitude every year. But where there’s risk of your logistics and epistemics clashing, I think we should err more on the side of vastly simplifying events than on the side of sloppier epistemics.
I think next year I only want yin meditation, oaths sworn by candlelight, and a playlist of personally meaningful songs. Perhaps I’ll do it with five friends and one lonely stranger.
Perhaps I’ll do it with five friends and one lonely stranger.
FYI, there’s still time to do this this year.
It’s worth noting that I created Big Solstice originally, specifically because I wanted people to do small intimate solstices (and it seemed easier to accomplish this with a big flagship event to give a large number of people a sense of what it meant).
Big Solstice turned out to be more of a thing than I meant it to. I think this is good—it serves a useful function. But I think it is quite appropriate for people to build personal Solstices for their closest friends that are more closely tailored, and Literal Solstice is a quite reasonable time to do this.
I think the Anti-Asch stuff is something that Ideal Platonic Tegmark 5 Solstice would have, but is in practice very hard. (rest of this comment is not disagreeing so much as outlining the hard-ness)
On Changing Stuff to Preserve Flexibility
Building up sacredness I think does require sacred things to accumulate that don’t change every year. Part of the way they work is feeling familiar, like part of your childhood. (I did write the song Endless Light specifically so that one year we could swap out Brighter Than Today and practice letting go, but I think stuff like that should happen every 5-7 years)
Meanwhile, writing or learning new songs/speeches each year is in fact really hard, and I don’t think it’s sustainable. (the effort that goes into Solstice is immense. The effort that goes into Rationalist Seder, at least in NYC, is pretty close to “we roll out of bed and do a rationalist seder”. (Daniel Speyer does write some new content each year, but at this point if he stopped doing that I think things would be totally fine)
So I’d currently lean towards “Individual Solstices would benefit from accumulating a set of stories and speeches that more or less work, that don’t require you to reinvent everything every year”, so that the only effort required is the logistics and some rehearsal.
On Standing Up and Calling Out Bullshit
Re: “you can stand up and say if something seems epistemically unvirtuous”—I think this can work for a small-scale Solstice. At Big Solstice… where part of the point is to bring everyone together even if they have disparate viewpoints...
The options I see are either “come up with something everyone agrees with” or “be okay with a huge amount of Solstice being delving into some kind of derailing conversation” or “maybe people flag when they disagree but don’t get into a protracted conversation until afterwards.”
(Hmm, actually that last one sounds maybe doable)
You could come up with a set of things that literally everyone agrees on, but I bet those things would end up being fairly bland and insufficient to actually inspire anyone. I think most forms of enabling disagreement would automatically trip over something and automatically ruin most kinds of sacredness you’d probably go for.
I think embedding Anti-Asch conformity into the thing somehow is important, but I think it’s impractical to make it a huge part of the actual event. Things that I can imagine working include:
At the beginning, note specifically that we’re doing the ritual thing, that we are telling stories/songs that are somewhat hacking our brains, that this only really works if you lean into it with your system 1, and that we’re trying to do this wisely.
Yes, make it clear what’s going to happen so people can opt in or out sanely.
Maybe encouage people to do some kind of “silent but visible disagreement” thing if they disagree (I’m not sure if this would work without ruining things)
Make a dedicated space for people afterwards to discuss / disagree / argue.
“maybe people flag when they disagree but don’t get into a protracted conversation until afterwards.”
yup that’s what I meant
At the beginning, note specifically that we’re doing the ritual thing, that we are telling stories/songs that are somewhat hacking our brains, that this only really works if you lean into it with your system 1, and that we’re trying to do this wisely.
Yes, make it clear what’s going to happen so people can opt in or out sanely.
Maybe encouage people to do some kind of “silent but visible disagreement” thing if they disagree (I’m not sure if this would work without ruining things)
Make a dedicated space for people afterwards to discuss / disagree / argue.
This Solstice had me thinking on what I had imagined, when I first read about Solstice. When I was young and dreamed that we were going to Do This Rationally.
The organizers would have actual models about what brain buttons we were pushing to what effect—entangling the wellbeing effect of light with a specific narrative of human progress, evocative and non-representative stories, inducing existential fears and directing people to soothe them through social bonding with a particular crowd, deep rhythmic resonances that just hit straight to sys-1′s sense of “really big”, etc.—and share them ahead of time to enable informed consent.
The event would enshrine people’s right and duty to conscientiously object at any point they feel the goals or epistemics have drifted in an undesirable direction:
put in anti-Asch-conformity plants
intentionally give up/change the most beloved part of the ritual from year to year to avoid status quo bias
give the audience 5 minutes to actually consider whether to do this thing or what they need to do instead
make a place for objectors to stand and be counted instead of silently bouncing out
invoke curiousity about (but do not demand on-the-spot justifications for) why.
This year was lovely performances, nice speeches, an interesting activity, a good evening of food and entertainment. But I did not get what I wanted.
I’m not sure how much of what I wanted is actually doable.
But when I hear loadbearing speeches lifted straight from the previous year’s lineup—unchanged from the sequences, I wonder—have we learned anything new at all? I hear a tidy little myth like The Goddess of Everything Else and worry about false appearance of consensus.
I know the arc of Bay’s Solstice has moved more towards emphasizing community than x-risk, yet I do not think we have changed our ritual tooling to match this shift. One or two extra interactions happened that day, but is the audience any more empowered to act as a community than it was before? How could we have reliably solved the Tarot Card problem? What conversations need to continue happening after Solstice and how will they happen?
It would be ludicrous to reinvent something of Solstice’s magnitude every year. But where there’s risk of your logistics and epistemics clashing, I think we should err more on the side of vastly simplifying events than on the side of sloppier epistemics.
I think next year I only want yin meditation, oaths sworn by candlelight, and a playlist of personally meaningful songs. Perhaps I’ll do it with five friends and one lonely stranger.
FYI, there’s still time to do this this year.
It’s worth noting that I created Big Solstice originally, specifically because I wanted people to do small intimate solstices (and it seemed easier to accomplish this with a big flagship event to give a large number of people a sense of what it meant).
Big Solstice turned out to be more of a thing than I meant it to. I think this is good—it serves a useful function. But I think it is quite appropriate for people to build personal Solstices for their closest friends that are more closely tailored, and Literal Solstice is a quite reasonable time to do this.
I think the Anti-Asch stuff is something that Ideal Platonic Tegmark 5 Solstice would have, but is in practice very hard. (rest of this comment is not disagreeing so much as outlining the hard-ness)
On Changing Stuff to Preserve Flexibility
Building up sacredness I think does require sacred things to accumulate that don’t change every year. Part of the way they work is feeling familiar, like part of your childhood. (I did write the song Endless Light specifically so that one year we could swap out Brighter Than Today and practice letting go, but I think stuff like that should happen every 5-7 years)
Meanwhile, writing or learning new songs/speeches each year is in fact really hard, and I don’t think it’s sustainable. (the effort that goes into Solstice is immense. The effort that goes into Rationalist Seder, at least in NYC, is pretty close to “we roll out of bed and do a rationalist seder”. (Daniel Speyer does write some new content each year, but at this point if he stopped doing that I think things would be totally fine)
So I’d currently lean towards “Individual Solstices would benefit from accumulating a set of stories and speeches that more or less work, that don’t require you to reinvent everything every year”, so that the only effort required is the logistics and some rehearsal.
On Standing Up and Calling Out Bullshit
Re: “you can stand up and say if something seems epistemically unvirtuous”—I think this can work for a small-scale Solstice. At Big Solstice… where part of the point is to bring everyone together even if they have disparate viewpoints...
The options I see are either “come up with something everyone agrees with” or “be okay with a huge amount of Solstice being delving into some kind of derailing conversation” or “maybe people flag when they disagree but don’t get into a protracted conversation until afterwards.”
(Hmm, actually that last one sounds maybe doable)
You could come up with a set of things that literally everyone agrees on, but I bet those things would end up being fairly bland and insufficient to actually inspire anyone. I think most forms of enabling disagreement would automatically trip over something and automatically ruin most kinds of sacredness you’d probably go for.
I think embedding Anti-Asch conformity into the thing somehow is important, but I think it’s impractical to make it a huge part of the actual event. Things that I can imagine working include:
At the beginning, note specifically that we’re doing the ritual thing, that we are telling stories/songs that are somewhat hacking our brains, that this only really works if you lean into it with your system 1, and that we’re trying to do this wisely.
Yes, make it clear what’s going to happen so people can opt in or out sanely.
Maybe encouage people to do some kind of “silent but visible disagreement” thing if they disagree (I’m not sure if this would work without ruining things)
Make a dedicated space for people afterwards to discuss / disagree / argue.
yup that’s what I meant
These all sound good