That desire nagged at me a few years, and it was accompanied by another nagging dissatisfaction: That I didn’t really believe in the words of the songs. They had power, generated by the magnitude of the songwriter’s belief, and given lyric form by carefully honed skill. But they weren’t true, and the falsehood itched at the back of my mind.
Humbug.
Signalling. Applause lights.
I’ve listened to the Dwarven song in this theatrical trailer 26 times since it came out a few days back. I no doubt would have a blast to cosplay while singing it or singing it every year with a bunch of friends next to a tree. The reason I’d be bothered by the song, is not because it is false or untrue by some standard. It is because either the song dosen’t resonate or it conflicts with tribal attire. Not everyone is a Tolkein fan.
I would apologize for the perhaps harsh language or to too curt a dismissal, but I’m not going to since I’m just so tired of LW’s recent happy death spirals.
Arda, Middle Earth is Earth, our world. Just because Tolkein considers it an imaginary epoch in our history (he put it at 6000 years before his time), nothing in the works themselves bars me from ascertaining a truth or false value for statements they make about the past of our world.
:P
But the dwarven song in the example can easily be replaced by the old Nordic songs that inspired it or a moving verse from the Iliad, which even the authors (probably) considered to semantically refer to our world. My point however was that true, false or bjorn, is irrelevant to most people when enjoying a piece of art. Its much more probable that they are not really bothered by the falsehood but bothered by the art being tagged in their brain as “something people from other tribe like”.
I know the phenomenon you refer to—I experience it with political art from “the others”. But I actually have established a compartmentalization of religious music where it’s like “okay, I totally disagree with this person, but the gulf of worldview is so huge that I can enjoy it anthropologically and perhaps even appreciate the underlying ideas that prompted them to develop that worldview, even if I think they went about it wrong.”
Very well, if you know about the phenomena and have upon introspection found the feeling to be different I’m going to update in your direction. I still think it is the more likley explanation though.
I do appreciate that you have apparently given these concerns some thought, I’ve put some weight to that in my mind.
But generally I think one can’t craft these memes without value altering applications. I don’t agree with Unitarian Universalism and this seems to be slowly reaching into their niche in both the social as well as ideological sense. Not everyone here is a “humanist”, whatever that means and those that aren’t might feel excluded by such language.
Adding ritual also I think reduces the “applicable rationality” to “save the world” ratio. This might not seem like a bad thing (who dosen’t want to save the world, for particular values of variable “save”?), but I think it should be acknowledged it is a step in the opposite direction that we find useful and proper when it comes to the relation between the organization of SIAI and the future unnamed rationality organization (presumably thus inheriting SIAI’s close connection to LW).
Why is the SIAI better off spinning off its rationalism promoting activities to a different separate organization? Why isn’t therefore the community better off enacting clear borders between when its happy spiralling around “rationality” and when its spiralling around “reducing existential risk” or slightly more dangerously “altruism”? This was basically done at an early point where all mention of “SIAI” and even talk of AI was temporarily banished from the community as a measure.
Was this a mistake? Or is the community more mature, not in its seed stage any more? If the latter dosen’t this mean LessWrong is basically done growing and expanding? If it will still do significant growing why don’t the same concerns that prompted the taboo, still applicable if to a lesser degree?
I do think there is more going on here than signalling and applause lights, and there will be at least one more article where I explain the underlying thought process, and discuss both the utility and the danger of ritual.
After that, I’ll be inviting people to a separate mailing list if they want to discuss it in more detail. I do believe that Less Wrong should have as little content like this as possible. It is both bad for signal-noise-ratio of our primary, important content, and yes, it’s bad signalling to have it on the front page. (I have mixed feelings about this getting promoted—I actually do think it was important enough to warrant it temporarily, but I think it should probably be moved back soon so that passing viewers scrolling through our “good” content don’t run into it)
I do think there is more going on here than signalling and applause lights, and there will be at least one more article where I explain the underlying thought process, and discuss both the utility and the danger of ritual.
I was referring to the specific paragraph, though other examples in the article can be found.
Not sure exactly what you mean—those words were very explicitly true. I am genuinely upset that there are not enough good, powerful, moving songs that express ideas that I genuinely believe in. I’ll elaborate on why later.
They were ALSO signalling and applause lights—this entire article is signaling and applause lights—but I think things can be signalling and applause lights while also saying true things and being important.
I think that the question here is, were you bothered by the songs because you really don’t like falsehood? Or were you bothered by them because you like to think of yourself as someone who doesn’t like falsehood?
Once I put it that way, it seems silly. Almost anyone is at least somewhat bothered by something they know to be false, the first time they encounter it. Almost anyone can eventually learn to live with that falsehood, without embracing it, if they want to. People differ in degree on this, with some being more innately honest and others being less bothered by lies. (My analogy here is how illogical phrases like “could care less”, which viscerally grated on me when I was younger, would long since ceased to have been peeves of mine if I hadn’t domesticated and fed those peeves as pets.)
But this innate honesty is almost never what I care about. Since actually noticing that God is a silly idea is, for most people, not a reflexive action, having sensible opinions about God (and many other things) is less a factor of an innate allergy to falsehood than of a learned ability to be hard-nosed about truth-seeking. And signalling and applause lights are a worthwhile kind of evidence about whether a person has that learned ability.
In other words: yeah, “itched at the back of my mind” may be something you chose to have happen, and the “my mind” there may be largely a constructed identity rather than innate characteristics. But since I actually care about your constructed identity, I don’t have a problem with that.
It’s actually not a matter of “the songs bothered me because they were wrong.” In fact, if that’s what people got from the paragraph, I should rewrite it.
What bothered me is that there did not exist other songs, just as beautiful, with just as much cultural weight behind them, which I truly believed it.
The christmas carols weren’t the problem, they were just the benchmark I had to compare a non-existent thing to.
Humbug.
Signalling. Applause lights.
I’ve listened to the Dwarven song in this theatrical trailer 26 times since it came out a few days back. I no doubt would have a blast to cosplay while singing it or singing it every year with a bunch of friends next to a tree. The reason I’d be bothered by the song, is not because it is false or untrue by some standard. It is because either the song dosen’t resonate or it conflicts with tribal attire. Not everyone is a Tolkein fan.
I would apologize for the perhaps harsh language or to too curt a dismissal, but I’m not going to since I’m just so tired of LW’s recent happy death spirals.
The dwarven song isn’t false-of-our-world because it doesn’t semantically refer to our world.
Arda, Middle Earth is Earth, our world. Just because Tolkein considers it an imaginary epoch in our history (he put it at 6000 years before his time), nothing in the works themselves bars me from ascertaining a truth or false value for statements they make about the past of our world.
:P
But the dwarven song in the example can easily be replaced by the old Nordic songs that inspired it or a moving verse from the Iliad, which even the authors (probably) considered to semantically refer to our world. My point however was that true, false or bjorn, is irrelevant to most people when enjoying a piece of art. Its much more probable that they are not really bothered by the falsehood but bothered by the art being tagged in their brain as “something people from other tribe like”.
I know the phenomenon you refer to—I experience it with political art from “the others”. But I actually have established a compartmentalization of religious music where it’s like “okay, I totally disagree with this person, but the gulf of worldview is so huge that I can enjoy it anthropologically and perhaps even appreciate the underlying ideas that prompted them to develop that worldview, even if I think they went about it wrong.”
Very well, if you know about the phenomena and have upon introspection found the feeling to be different I’m going to update in your direction. I still think it is the more likley explanation though.
The followup post goes into some more detail, as well as related issues. Was curious if it addressed your concerns or raised new ones.
I do appreciate that you have apparently given these concerns some thought, I’ve put some weight to that in my mind.
But generally I think one can’t craft these memes without value altering applications. I don’t agree with Unitarian Universalism and this seems to be slowly reaching into their niche in both the social as well as ideological sense. Not everyone here is a “humanist”, whatever that means and those that aren’t might feel excluded by such language.
Adding ritual also I think reduces the “applicable rationality” to “save the world” ratio. This might not seem like a bad thing (who dosen’t want to save the world, for particular values of variable “save”?), but I think it should be acknowledged it is a step in the opposite direction that we find useful and proper when it comes to the relation between the organization of SIAI and the future unnamed rationality organization (presumably thus inheriting SIAI’s close connection to LW).
Why is the SIAI better off spinning off its rationalism promoting activities to a different separate organization? Why isn’t therefore the community better off enacting clear borders between when its happy spiralling around “rationality” and when its spiralling around “reducing existential risk” or slightly more dangerously “altruism”? This was basically done at an early point where all mention of “SIAI” and even talk of AI was temporarily banished from the community as a measure.
Was this a mistake? Or is the community more mature, not in its seed stage any more? If the latter dosen’t this mean LessWrong is basically done growing and expanding? If it will still do significant growing why don’t the same concerns that prompted the taboo, still applicable if to a lesser degree?
Also curses upon you Eliezer Yudkowsky! My count for that particular time wasting super-stimulus is now 28.
Thanks to your comments, I am looping that song, too. :p
I am sure there are ways of correcting this behavior if you really wanted to.
Oh my god I hate you.
I do think there is more going on here than signalling and applause lights, and there will be at least one more article where I explain the underlying thought process, and discuss both the utility and the danger of ritual.
After that, I’ll be inviting people to a separate mailing list if they want to discuss it in more detail. I do believe that Less Wrong should have as little content like this as possible. It is both bad for signal-noise-ratio of our primary, important content, and yes, it’s bad signalling to have it on the front page. (I have mixed feelings about this getting promoted—I actually do think it was important enough to warrant it temporarily, but I think it should probably be moved back soon so that passing viewers scrolling through our “good” content don’t run into it)
I was referring to the specific paragraph, though other examples in the article can be found.
Not sure exactly what you mean—those words were very explicitly true. I am genuinely upset that there are not enough good, powerful, moving songs that express ideas that I genuinely believe in. I’ll elaborate on why later.
They were ALSO signalling and applause lights—this entire article is signaling and applause lights—but I think things can be signalling and applause lights while also saying true things and being important.
I think that the question here is, were you bothered by the songs because you really don’t like falsehood? Or were you bothered by them because you like to think of yourself as someone who doesn’t like falsehood?
Once I put it that way, it seems silly. Almost anyone is at least somewhat bothered by something they know to be false, the first time they encounter it. Almost anyone can eventually learn to live with that falsehood, without embracing it, if they want to. People differ in degree on this, with some being more innately honest and others being less bothered by lies. (My analogy here is how illogical phrases like “could care less”, which viscerally grated on me when I was younger, would long since ceased to have been peeves of mine if I hadn’t domesticated and fed those peeves as pets.)
But this innate honesty is almost never what I care about. Since actually noticing that God is a silly idea is, for most people, not a reflexive action, having sensible opinions about God (and many other things) is less a factor of an innate allergy to falsehood than of a learned ability to be hard-nosed about truth-seeking. And signalling and applause lights are a worthwhile kind of evidence about whether a person has that learned ability.
In other words: yeah, “itched at the back of my mind” may be something you chose to have happen, and the “my mind” there may be largely a constructed identity rather than innate characteristics. But since I actually care about your constructed identity, I don’t have a problem with that.
It’s actually not a matter of “the songs bothered me because they were wrong.” In fact, if that’s what people got from the paragraph, I should rewrite it.
What bothered me is that there did not exist other songs, just as beautiful, with just as much cultural weight behind them, which I truly believed it.
The christmas carols weren’t the problem, they were just the benchmark I had to compare a non-existent thing to.
Yes, I think you should rewrite. Not that it’s bad the way it is, but it would be better if it had this more positive message.