I apologize for the OP being light on actual examples. Most of my motivating examples have to do with “local politics” and a) weren’t quite appropriate for frontpage norms, and b) potentially a bit distracting.
But here are some concrete examples. The ones I’ve concretely seen results from mostly relate to Winter Solstice. The ones that I expect to be more generally relevant to LessWrongers are more “aspirational” – I’m pretty sure that some sort of “eliminate scarcity” plan would work, but I don’t have as much proof-of-concept.
Posting them in different subthreads since I expect the conversations to be pretty different.
[edit: the LessWrong cultural examples turned out to be non-trivial to write. Still working on it]
(a holiday ritual involving singing and reflecting on human progress, which some LessWrong-folk celebrate)
1. Pagan vs High Church
I used to feel some desire for the Bay Winter Solstice to have a bit of a “pagan*” aesthetic (contrasted with a “high church” aesthetic, which others were more into). I eventually became a lot less attached to this by A) pushing Summer Solstice in a more pagan direction, sB) having my own small Winter Solstice with friends that had more of the elements I wanted. Once that need was satisfied, I felt more comfortable helping Bay Winter Solstice be the best high-church-aesthetic version of itself it could be.
2. Darkness vs Holiday Cheer
Some people have complained about the dark, depressing portions of the Solstice. The whole point of winter holiday is to feel cozy and uplifted, not sad! Others (including me) saw the dark portions as a major part of the point – to feel catharsis, and face the truth unflinchingly.
But I think a number of “anti-darkness” people were justifiably frustrated because the Solstices they went to (earlier Bay Solstices), sort of struggled to stick the landing. The intended arc is to experience the (metaphorical and literal) darkness, and then emerge into the light, uplifted after catharsis. But this requires you really succeed at the light, happy portions as well as the depressing portions. Instead, there were a couple years where the third-act didn’t bring enough energy back into the room.
Successfully hitting the dark parts as well as the light parts enables both darkness and light to be deeper, fuller.
3. Singalongs vs Choir
There’s a particular kind of fun/beauty/upliftingness that comes from singing along with your friends, without worrying about whether you sound good. There’s a different kind of fun/beauty/upliftingness that comes from hearing a beautiful, well-rendered performance piece.
Part of my original intent with Solstice was to provide an avenue for singalongs, which I saw as very undersupplied in the modern world. There were a few years where Bay Solstice didn’t end up having many singalongs, and meanwhile had a few polished choir pieces. I wasn’t really able to appreciate the choir pieces because I was mostly frustrated with not being able to sing, and I felt some impulse to fight a zero-sum argument about which was more important. But, the fact is this was mostly about undersupply of singalongs, and now that there’s been more of a return to communal singing I expect to get a lot more value out of the choir pieces, and would be much more excited to devote resources to making improving them.
I look forward to hearing the scarcities you are able to eliminate for these things. Naively, I’d expect there to be a desire for “significant participation in the activities that resonate with me”. Turning it from “a holiday ritual” into “a plethora of ritual-ish activities” doesn’t seem like it’s going to satisfy.
I hope I’m wrong—please let us know how it works out!
The Solstice examples are places where I think the elimination-of-scarcity basically worked (or at least, I’ve seen examples of it working – it varies by individual instances of the Solstice and who’s running them and what skills they bring to table).
The idea wasn’t to turn it into a plethora of (unrelated? I assume was the implication) ritual activites, just to make sure that the ceremony hits a number of particular notes.
(I’d say this is kinda like editing a movie: a movie can have funny parts, sad parts, fast/exciting parts and some slower sections that just give you room to breath. Some people prefer particular kinds of parts, but it’s common for what makes a “good” movie to be whether it successfully blends them into a cohesive whole. Fewer people are up for watching a movie that’s just depressing, but many people are up for watching a movie that weaves sad bits into uplifting or funny bits)
good deal—interestingly, that’s an aspect of “resource provision” I hadn’t connected with your original post—you may not need to find/add resources, you can find more efficient uses of time/attention resources, and still satisfy a lot of needs.
This probably generalizes somewhere on the satisficing/optimizing plane—things close to a satisfy-level can be addressed this way.
I apologize for the OP being light on actual examples. Most of my motivating examples have to do with “local politics” and a) weren’t quite appropriate for frontpage norms, and b) potentially a bit distracting.
But here are some concrete examples. The ones I’ve concretely seen results from mostly relate to Winter Solstice. The ones that I expect to be more generally relevant to LessWrongers are more “aspirational” – I’m pretty sure that some sort of “eliminate scarcity” plan would work, but I don’t have as much proof-of-concept.
Posting them in different subthreads since I expect the conversations to be pretty different.
[edit: the LessWrong cultural examples turned out to be non-trivial to write. Still working on it]
Winter Solstice
(a holiday ritual involving singing and reflecting on human progress, which some LessWrong-folk celebrate)
1. Pagan vs High Church
I used to feel some desire for the Bay Winter Solstice to have a bit of a “pagan*” aesthetic (contrasted with a “high church” aesthetic, which others were more into). I eventually became a lot less attached to this by A) pushing Summer Solstice in a more pagan direction, sB) having my own small Winter Solstice with friends that had more of the elements I wanted. Once that need was satisfied, I felt more comfortable helping Bay Winter Solstice be the best high-church-aesthetic version of itself it could be.
2. Darkness vs Holiday Cheer
Some people have complained about the dark, depressing portions of the Solstice. The whole point of winter holiday is to feel cozy and uplifted, not sad! Others (including me) saw the dark portions as a major part of the point – to feel catharsis, and face the truth unflinchingly.
But I think a number of “anti-darkness” people were justifiably frustrated because the Solstices they went to (earlier Bay Solstices), sort of struggled to stick the landing. The intended arc is to experience the (metaphorical and literal) darkness, and then emerge into the light, uplifted after catharsis. But this requires you really succeed at the light, happy portions as well as the depressing portions. Instead, there were a couple years where the third-act didn’t bring enough energy back into the room.
Successfully hitting the dark parts as well as the light parts enables both darkness and light to be deeper, fuller.
3. Singalongs vs Choir
There’s a particular kind of fun/beauty/upliftingness that comes from singing along with your friends, without worrying about whether you sound good. There’s a different kind of fun/beauty/upliftingness that comes from hearing a beautiful, well-rendered performance piece.
Part of my original intent with Solstice was to provide an avenue for singalongs, which I saw as very undersupplied in the modern world. There were a few years where Bay Solstice didn’t end up having many singalongs, and meanwhile had a few polished choir pieces. I wasn’t really able to appreciate the choir pieces because I was mostly frustrated with not being able to sing, and I felt some impulse to fight a zero-sum argument about which was more important. But, the fact is this was mostly about undersupply of singalongs, and now that there’s been more of a return to communal singing I expect to get a lot more value out of the choir pieces, and would be much more excited to devote resources to making improving them.
I look forward to hearing the scarcities you are able to eliminate for these things. Naively, I’d expect there to be a desire for “significant participation in the activities that resonate with me”. Turning it from “a holiday ritual” into “a plethora of ritual-ish activities” doesn’t seem like it’s going to satisfy.
I hope I’m wrong—please let us know how it works out!
The Solstice examples are places where I think the elimination-of-scarcity basically worked (or at least, I’ve seen examples of it working – it varies by individual instances of the Solstice and who’s running them and what skills they bring to table).
The idea wasn’t to turn it into a plethora of (unrelated? I assume was the implication) ritual activites, just to make sure that the ceremony hits a number of particular notes.
(I’d say this is kinda like editing a movie: a movie can have funny parts, sad parts, fast/exciting parts and some slower sections that just give you room to breath. Some people prefer particular kinds of parts, but it’s common for what makes a “good” movie to be whether it successfully blends them into a cohesive whole. Fewer people are up for watching a movie that’s just depressing, but many people are up for watching a movie that weaves sad bits into uplifting or funny bits)
good deal—interestingly, that’s an aspect of “resource provision” I hadn’t connected with your original post—you may not need to find/add resources, you can find more efficient uses of time/attention resources, and still satisfy a lot of needs.
This probably generalizes somewhere on the satisficing/optimizing plane—things close to a satisfy-level can be addressed this way.
Nod. I’d add that part of the check here is “could your ‘maximize’ function be rewritten as a ‘very high satisfice’ function?”