I like the idea of allowing holidays to form and grow organically—I agree with your assessment that things get weird when a holiday is designed in isolation and then shoved toward a group.
The challenge that I see in this approach is in figuring out how to get that organic growth to happen on the extremely short timelines that we come to expect from modern online life. Most mainstream holidays represent gradual change over multiple human lifetimes, and I have the impression (perhaps unfounded?) that an unspoken success metric in new holiday creation is to see adoption within a few years.
What does “letting people opt-in to experiment and mimic” look like in practice to you? When I guess at what it might look like online, I imagine a group of people with large followings blogging, tweeting, and generally talking about the holiday before, during, and after it.
Pretty much just like Vavilov Day. Elizabeth also wrote that post, and was responding to someone suggesting it be added to the rational holiday calendar. So the short version is it looks like this:
Elizabeth: Vavilov was a cool guy. I will commemorate him and his people by undergoing a small fraction of their suffering voluntarily.
Others: Cool idea—me too!
I think two important features of rationalists aid in the spread of things like a good holiday. One is intentionality, which is to say we do a lot of things with a definite purpose as opposed to by convention or on impulse. Two is articulation, which is to say we are often ready to explain our thinking and motivations. As a consequence, I expect meeting your discussion standard to be pretty straightforward because it is practically embedded from the beginning: the announcement of the celebration; the note that the celebration is actually occurring now; the retrospective on the celebration. You can see this pattern in the solstice posts, for example.
I like the idea of allowing holidays to form and grow organically—I agree with your assessment that things get weird when a holiday is designed in isolation and then shoved toward a group.
The challenge that I see in this approach is in figuring out how to get that organic growth to happen on the extremely short timelines that we come to expect from modern online life. Most mainstream holidays represent gradual change over multiple human lifetimes, and I have the impression (perhaps unfounded?) that an unspoken success metric in new holiday creation is to see adoption within a few years.
What does “letting people opt-in to experiment and mimic” look like in practice to you? When I guess at what it might look like online, I imagine a group of people with large followings blogging, tweeting, and generally talking about the holiday before, during, and after it.
Pretty much just like Vavilov Day. Elizabeth also wrote that post, and was responding to someone suggesting it be added to the rational holiday calendar. So the short version is it looks like this:
Elizabeth: Vavilov was a cool guy. I will commemorate him and his people by undergoing a small fraction of their suffering voluntarily.
Others: Cool idea—me too!
I think two important features of rationalists aid in the spread of things like a good holiday. One is intentionality, which is to say we do a lot of things with a definite purpose as opposed to by convention or on impulse. Two is articulation, which is to say we are often ready to explain our thinking and motivations. As a consequence, I expect meeting your discussion standard to be pretty straightforward because it is practically embedded from the beginning: the announcement of the celebration; the note that the celebration is actually occurring now; the retrospective on the celebration. You can see this pattern in the solstice posts, for example.