Yeah, I actully think the Pagan approach is almost entirely better, just requiring more skill, and in particular not being able to scale past 30 people or so, which is why I haven’t used it for larger tentpole events.
I think I basically answered this in the reply to vedrfolnir - more people requires more effort (the simple fact that you need additional ringleaders makes for a harder problem than a single priest scaling their audience). Each ringleader has more work to do the more people there are. Intimacy stops being felt when you don’t know everyone there, etc, it’s harder to know everyone there if there are more people. Scaling past 30 starts to mean you either need to project your voice loudly or use a microphone, which limits the ability to do soft whispers and/or ruins the pagan aesthetic.
(Also, this is a thing where empirically, it doesn’t seem to scale AFAICT. I haven’t done a formal study but my impression talking to pagans is that pagan groups rarely do scale past a couple dozen, whereas Christian churches frequently end up in the hundreds, so whether it makes sense or not it appears to be true)
I don’t think the barrier to scaling is the practice, but the people. Large group experiences can’t be narrowly custom-tailored because their aren’t enough people in the target audience; small groups can. People who don’t chafe at experiences that aren’t narrowly custom-tailored are unlikely to become pagans.
What do you think the barriers to scale are? Just difficulty in finding people comfortable with improvising within the framework to that many people, or?
Among other things, yeah—it requires more effort on the part of everyone. And the effort required scales with the number of people involved. The more people who are improvising, the more people you have to be paying attention to and modeling at once, the more you have to trust them, etc.
Yeah, I actully think the Pagan approach is almost entirely better, just requiring more skill, and in particular not being able to scale past 30 people or so, which is why I haven’t used it for larger tentpole events.
Huh. I don’t share the intuition that it can’t scale. As long as the improvising ringleaders are on the same page, why would it fail?
I think I basically answered this in the reply to vedrfolnir - more people requires more effort (the simple fact that you need additional ringleaders makes for a harder problem than a single priest scaling their audience). Each ringleader has more work to do the more people there are. Intimacy stops being felt when you don’t know everyone there, etc, it’s harder to know everyone there if there are more people. Scaling past 30 starts to mean you either need to project your voice loudly or use a microphone, which limits the ability to do soft whispers and/or ruins the pagan aesthetic.
(Also, this is a thing where empirically, it doesn’t seem to scale AFAICT. I haven’t done a formal study but my impression talking to pagans is that pagan groups rarely do scale past a couple dozen, whereas Christian churches frequently end up in the hundreds, so whether it makes sense or not it appears to be true)
I don’t think the barrier to scaling is the practice, but the people. Large group experiences can’t be narrowly custom-tailored because their aren’t enough people in the target audience; small groups can. People who don’t chafe at experiences that aren’t narrowly custom-tailored are unlikely to become pagans.
What do you think the barriers to scale are? Just difficulty in finding people comfortable with improvising within the framework to that many people, or?
Among other things, yeah—it requires more effort on the part of everyone. And the effort required scales with the number of people involved. The more people who are improvising, the more people you have to be paying attention to and modeling at once, the more you have to trust them, etc.
Also, the sheer trust and intimacy is an important part of it, regardless of complexity