Well I’m doing some serious updating in all sorts of directions. Primarily in my assessment of the attitudes of this community. I very strongly expected my response (a few twinges of worry) to be one of the most moderate responses here. In that I was correct. Most comments here seem to be of the “this is awesome” school of thought. I was expecting roughly half the comments to be people freaking out about how we’re becoming a cult.
My concern is based entirely around the nature of ritual. I am not in any way opposed to poetry, music, or any other form of art based on a rationalist idea (so long as it’s, you know, good). But the idea of rituals does make me worry a bit. It boils down to this: if in ten years, we learn something that causes us to abandon [insert any core idea of LW here]. Assume we’ve been singing a song about it for ten years. Assume the tune is really catchy. Assume that the singing of this song is something that a non-trivial number of our fellow rationalists especially look forward to each year. I am very confident that at least some members of the community will really want to keep that song as part of the yearly ritual “for tradition’s sake”.
I should probably note that a possible source of this concern is my own past and present attitude towards the song “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”. And certainly the emotional prediction is based off of my own personal feelings.
It might be possible to avoid this by writing new songs every year. If each year, the melody and lyrics of the song for any given idea is different, it would likely make it easier to give up that idea in that year’s celebration. I do expect that this would somewhat diminish the power of the ritual. This post only really discusses the power of rituals as a positive point in their favor. But there are some possible downsides to letting loose a powerful social force in our community without knowing what it will do.
I find it deeply unsettling that this is the only really critical comment. I was enthused about this idea, as are most of the other commentators, before reading your comment. The obviousness of this criticism (it’s something that I’ve said to Catholics before, for goodness’ sake) combined with the fact that it didn’t occur to anyone else, including me, has rather put me off the idea. Certainly this points only to my own vulnerability, but I don’t know what to suggest that would salvage this idea from the rather sinister position it now occupies in my mind.
It may help you to know that I’ve received a few critical comments as private messages (and through the anonymous feedback box I posted to the NYC group mailing list).
It may also be.… settling? (un-unsettling?) to know that when the actual ritual book is posted, you will see that the very first rule written down is that each year, every ritual must be re-evaluated, and at least one ritual that has not been previously modified must be modified. Exact wording of this rule is a little up in the air (specific letters of the law might produce weird consequences I didn’t intend), but I very much intended the spirit of the law—that nothing should ever become sacred to the point that you cannot let it go—to be built into the core of the event.
It’s valid to be worried about the introduction of rituals producing death spirals. That is their express purpose after all, to produce and reinforce whatever death spirals the community has defined as essential.
Ritualism is a mind hack invented by early humanity to reinforce the group worldview and build/maintain group cohesion. And in the intervening thousands of years, either we or ritualism itself has evolved into something deeply ingrained in our cognitive makeup. At this point, it’s how our brains are wired and I don’t think it’s feasible to simply ignore it. Instead, we have to do exactly what Raemon is attempting: coopt its techniques and replace the ones that propagate untruth and less than optimal behavior with ones that propagate truth and optimal behavior.
But rituals are a fundamentally irrational business, there’s no way around it. The solution, I think, lies in thinking of rituals as a mnemonic device, understanding that they’re not really a way of arriving at new truth, but reinforcing what we’re reasonably sure is settled truth. Mandating constant and aribtrary change is the wrong track, since a huge part of rituals is simple reinforcement. To limit that is to cut the whole thing off at the knees.
Instead, I suggest only included the very settled science of rationality and being very conservative about what gets defined as such. For the inaugural core tenant, I would suggest the Litany of Tarski and the idea that if it’s wrong it gets discarded, no matter what, with an appropriately weighty ritual to accompany it. So even if you did have something that was part of the canon for ten years that must then be discarded, you can still fall back to this ability to acknowledge mistakes and self modify. Everyone performs a ritual expunging the obsolete piece from the canon and it’s forever removed. Thus, we’re still taking advantage of the ritualism mind hack, while building in appropriate safeguards to keep the death spiral from going on forever and allowing for future self modification.
I agree with you in much of your assessment about what rituals are. Rituals are a very powerful, fundamentally irrational force on our minds. However, I don’t think that our minds known weakness to rituals is something we should be trying to solve with, well, rituals.
First:
The solution, I think, lies in thinking of rituals as a mnemonic device, understanding that they’re not really a way of arriving at new truth, but reinforcing what we’re reasonably sure is settled truth.
“What we’re reasonably sure is settled truth” does not necessarily equal truth. Nor does it necessarily equal “what we will want to believe once we know more”.
Secondly, I think that a skilled rationalist should be able to avoid acquiring incorrect beliefs through rituals. If, for any reason, I have to participate in a ritual, I would like to have acquired the skills necessary to avoid getting caught up in it. This is a bias I would like to defeat, or reduce, just like any other. And I really don’t think we can teach that skill through rituals. I’m rather disinclined against trying, either, since I suspect that would make us weaker to this form of manipulation.
Bottom line: I think we should try to be, well, less wrong, rather than wrong-in-opposite-directions-so-they-cancel-out.
“What we’re reasonably sure is settled truth” does not necessarily equal truth. Nor does it necessarily equal “what we will want to believe once we know more”.
Absolutely, which is what makes building in the ability to self modify so intrinsically important. The function of any ritual like activity shouldn’t be any where near the vicinity of the “research arm” of the rationality community. Nothing should be acquired within them, nor determined through them. They should be about reinforcing the settled science, to minimize the amount of falseness that enters into the canon (I should point out, to be clear I’m using this term tongue in cheek). And for what does, something built around the Litany of Tarksi still allows for self modification.
And yes, any and all rationalists should be far enough along that they’ve developed a certain immunity to the process. That in and of itself makes no difference. Doing these types of things does measurable things to the brain, just as prayer/meditation do. The details are arbitrary; it doesn’t matter if you’re sacrificing a virgin, eating a wafer, or lighting a candle. What matters is doing the same thing as your fellow tribe members to build/maintain a sense of community. The proposition here is to simply replace the incorrect proclamations of how the universe works with correct ones. Instead of proclaiming Jesus Lord and Savior, you’re proclaiming the map is not the territory and that your desire to know what is true is actually true (so if it turns out that the map IS the territory, then out it goes from the hymn book).
And the rationalist has the added (and important) benefit that no matter how much they give themselves over to the emotions of whatever ceremony, once they walk back out to the parking lot, their level headedness will return. The rationalist can walk out and think, “That sure was fun, but I understand what was happening and can safely put that suspension of rationality back on the shelf.” In a way the Catholic can’t (consciously) do when walking out of Mass.
So I disagree, I think these kinds of things, with effective substitutions of content, won’t make us weaker to this form of manipulation, but rather stronger. Ultimately, when we cross the Singularity, we probably won’t need these kinds of mind hacks anymore, but in the interim, I think they’ll end up being quite important.
I actually think you are a bit overconfident in the ability to self-described rationalists to walk away from this unchanged. I think this is valuable, and yes I even agree that rationality training should help reduce the negative side-effects. But I don’t think for a second that our level-headedness will automatically return the instant we step out of the ritual room.
Hm, perhaps you’re right. It would depend largely on the composition of the ritual(s). Certainly, extraordinary care must be taken when intentionally playing with any kind of death spiral. A generous dose of tongue in cheek self deprivation would probably be a good idea.
This post made me update slightly against this idea.
My first impulse upon reading this is you could MODIFY the song to be about commemorating the relinquishment of the idea instead of the idea itself, by inserting a bunch of negations, or making a parody mocking it.
Interesting. This would definitely have some advantages. I am still concerned that there may be resistance to changing the lyrics of the song, especially if the song has been used for a longer period of time. I’ll have to spend some time considering whether keeping the music would be enough to satisfy that urge.
I don’t really know. I just really liked that song. It seems particularly “catchy” to me, although that doesn’t seem to be a common reaction. I have asked other people if they had a similar reaction to God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman, or any other Christmas carol, and found nobody that was particularly attached to that particular song, but a substantial number that were attached to some other carol.
I was very concerned about the cult-like aspects of this, but refrained from commenting for a few reasons. First, I wasn’t there, so I don’t feel qualified to judge whether or not it was cult like. Secondly, I didn’t even read all of the post because it was so long and because I wasn’t that interested, since I didn’t go. I almost down-voted the post, primarily because I didn’t believe it deserved that much karma, but decided against it since I wasn’t actually very familiar with it.
Well I’m doing some serious updating in all sorts of directions. Primarily in my assessment of the attitudes of this community. I very strongly expected my response (a few twinges of worry) to be one of the most moderate responses here. In that I was correct. Most comments here seem to be of the “this is awesome” school of thought. I was expecting roughly half the comments to be people freaking out about how we’re becoming a cult.
My concern is based entirely around the nature of ritual. I am not in any way opposed to poetry, music, or any other form of art based on a rationalist idea (so long as it’s, you know, good). But the idea of rituals does make me worry a bit. It boils down to this: if in ten years, we learn something that causes us to abandon [insert any core idea of LW here]. Assume we’ve been singing a song about it for ten years. Assume the tune is really catchy. Assume that the singing of this song is something that a non-trivial number of our fellow rationalists especially look forward to each year. I am very confident that at least some members of the community will really want to keep that song as part of the yearly ritual “for tradition’s sake”.
I should probably note that a possible source of this concern is my own past and present attitude towards the song “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”. And certainly the emotional prediction is based off of my own personal feelings.
It might be possible to avoid this by writing new songs every year. If each year, the melody and lyrics of the song for any given idea is different, it would likely make it easier to give up that idea in that year’s celebration. I do expect that this would somewhat diminish the power of the ritual. This post only really discusses the power of rituals as a positive point in their favor. But there are some possible downsides to letting loose a powerful social force in our community without knowing what it will do.
I find it deeply unsettling that this is the only really critical comment. I was enthused about this idea, as are most of the other commentators, before reading your comment. The obviousness of this criticism (it’s something that I’ve said to Catholics before, for goodness’ sake) combined with the fact that it didn’t occur to anyone else, including me, has rather put me off the idea. Certainly this points only to my own vulnerability, but I don’t know what to suggest that would salvage this idea from the rather sinister position it now occupies in my mind.
It may help you to know that I’ve received a few critical comments as private messages (and through the anonymous feedback box I posted to the NYC group mailing list).
It may also be.… settling? (un-unsettling?) to know that when the actual ritual book is posted, you will see that the very first rule written down is that each year, every ritual must be re-evaluated, and at least one ritual that has not been previously modified must be modified. Exact wording of this rule is a little up in the air (specific letters of the law might produce weird consequences I didn’t intend), but I very much intended the spirit of the law—that nothing should ever become sacred to the point that you cannot let it go—to be built into the core of the event.
It’s valid to be worried about the introduction of rituals producing death spirals. That is their express purpose after all, to produce and reinforce whatever death spirals the community has defined as essential.
Ritualism is a mind hack invented by early humanity to reinforce the group worldview and build/maintain group cohesion. And in the intervening thousands of years, either we or ritualism itself has evolved into something deeply ingrained in our cognitive makeup. At this point, it’s how our brains are wired and I don’t think it’s feasible to simply ignore it. Instead, we have to do exactly what Raemon is attempting: coopt its techniques and replace the ones that propagate untruth and less than optimal behavior with ones that propagate truth and optimal behavior.
But rituals are a fundamentally irrational business, there’s no way around it. The solution, I think, lies in thinking of rituals as a mnemonic device, understanding that they’re not really a way of arriving at new truth, but reinforcing what we’re reasonably sure is settled truth. Mandating constant and aribtrary change is the wrong track, since a huge part of rituals is simple reinforcement. To limit that is to cut the whole thing off at the knees.
Instead, I suggest only included the very settled science of rationality and being very conservative about what gets defined as such. For the inaugural core tenant, I would suggest the Litany of Tarski and the idea that if it’s wrong it gets discarded, no matter what, with an appropriately weighty ritual to accompany it. So even if you did have something that was part of the canon for ten years that must then be discarded, you can still fall back to this ability to acknowledge mistakes and self modify. Everyone performs a ritual expunging the obsolete piece from the canon and it’s forever removed. Thus, we’re still taking advantage of the ritualism mind hack, while building in appropriate safeguards to keep the death spiral from going on forever and allowing for future self modification.
I agree with you in much of your assessment about what rituals are. Rituals are a very powerful, fundamentally irrational force on our minds. However, I don’t think that our minds known weakness to rituals is something we should be trying to solve with, well, rituals.
First:
“What we’re reasonably sure is settled truth” does not necessarily equal truth. Nor does it necessarily equal “what we will want to believe once we know more”.
Secondly, I think that a skilled rationalist should be able to avoid acquiring incorrect beliefs through rituals. If, for any reason, I have to participate in a ritual, I would like to have acquired the skills necessary to avoid getting caught up in it. This is a bias I would like to defeat, or reduce, just like any other. And I really don’t think we can teach that skill through rituals. I’m rather disinclined against trying, either, since I suspect that would make us weaker to this form of manipulation.
Bottom line: I think we should try to be, well, less wrong, rather than wrong-in-opposite-directions-so-they-cancel-out.
Absolutely, which is what makes building in the ability to self modify so intrinsically important. The function of any ritual like activity shouldn’t be any where near the vicinity of the “research arm” of the rationality community. Nothing should be acquired within them, nor determined through them. They should be about reinforcing the settled science, to minimize the amount of falseness that enters into the canon (I should point out, to be clear I’m using this term tongue in cheek). And for what does, something built around the Litany of Tarksi still allows for self modification.
And yes, any and all rationalists should be far enough along that they’ve developed a certain immunity to the process. That in and of itself makes no difference. Doing these types of things does measurable things to the brain, just as prayer/meditation do. The details are arbitrary; it doesn’t matter if you’re sacrificing a virgin, eating a wafer, or lighting a candle. What matters is doing the same thing as your fellow tribe members to build/maintain a sense of community. The proposition here is to simply replace the incorrect proclamations of how the universe works with correct ones. Instead of proclaiming Jesus Lord and Savior, you’re proclaiming the map is not the territory and that your desire to know what is true is actually true (so if it turns out that the map IS the territory, then out it goes from the hymn book).
And the rationalist has the added (and important) benefit that no matter how much they give themselves over to the emotions of whatever ceremony, once they walk back out to the parking lot, their level headedness will return. The rationalist can walk out and think, “That sure was fun, but I understand what was happening and can safely put that suspension of rationality back on the shelf.” In a way the Catholic can’t (consciously) do when walking out of Mass.
So I disagree, I think these kinds of things, with effective substitutions of content, won’t make us weaker to this form of manipulation, but rather stronger. Ultimately, when we cross the Singularity, we probably won’t need these kinds of mind hacks anymore, but in the interim, I think they’ll end up being quite important.
I actually think you are a bit overconfident in the ability to self-described rationalists to walk away from this unchanged. I think this is valuable, and yes I even agree that rationality training should help reduce the negative side-effects. But I don’t think for a second that our level-headedness will automatically return the instant we step out of the ritual room.
I very much agree.
Hm, perhaps you’re right. It would depend largely on the composition of the ritual(s). Certainly, extraordinary care must be taken when intentionally playing with any kind of death spiral. A generous dose of tongue in cheek self deprivation would probably be a good idea.
This post made me update slightly against this idea.
My first impulse upon reading this is you could MODIFY the song to be about commemorating the relinquishment of the idea instead of the idea itself, by inserting a bunch of negations, or making a parody mocking it.
Interesting. This would definitely have some advantages. I am still concerned that there may be resistance to changing the lyrics of the song, especially if the song has been used for a longer period of time. I’ll have to spend some time considering whether keeping the music would be enough to satisfy that urge.
Upvoted.
I think this is a interesting and probably good idea.
Oh, specifically curious about this:
What makes that song particularly interesting, compared to other Christmas carols?
I don’t really know. I just really liked that song. It seems particularly “catchy” to me, although that doesn’t seem to be a common reaction. I have asked other people if they had a similar reaction to God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman, or any other Christmas carol, and found nobody that was particularly attached to that particular song, but a substantial number that were attached to some other carol.
Ah, it sounded like that song was somehow a damaging meme that you were afraid of.
It’s not just you; I have always really liked the feel of the melody in /God Rest/.
Can’t tell if this was intentionally worded or not.
I’ll comment on the rest as part of the next post.
It was unintentional. I had originally tried to word that sentence differently, but went back to modify it. Fixed.
I was very concerned about the cult-like aspects of this, but refrained from commenting for a few reasons. First, I wasn’t there, so I don’t feel qualified to judge whether or not it was cult like. Secondly, I didn’t even read all of the post because it was so long and because I wasn’t that interested, since I didn’t go. I almost down-voted the post, primarily because I didn’t believe it deserved that much karma, but decided against it since I wasn’t actually very familiar with it.