In my culture, one is to be super wary of lionizing martyrs.
I want to be excited about cool new holiday ideas. I think trying a fast in a coordinated group is a splendid idea. I want to celebrate the amazing capacity of humans to care about others and to do hard things for good reasons.
but pain is not the unit of effort.
dying for the cause is not a success.
not every cost is avoidable, but i never, ever want to become the kind of person
who mistakes the price sacrificed for a value bought
In my culture there’s a meta-tradition around ritual hardships or labors: you are to set aside at least 5 minutes, by the very clock, for considering how you might cheat. If you find you could get results without the hardship, you are expected to cheat for the results and then go find some other way to challenge yourself.
I think you’re raising reasonable points, fairly gently. I think the overall issue is important, and was in my mind as I planned and wrote this. I get that, given that this post was high karma and curated, and has at least one comment saying we should scale Vavilov day immediately, it felt important to you to note the pitfalls (even if I already pushed against the universalization). But I don’t have a way to respond to this in LW comments that doesn’t feel like justifying my personal choices, and I’m not interested in doing that.
Potential alternatives include “you create a top-level post discussing the general case”, an off-LW conversation between us, or just not following up. If anyone else wants to continue this conversation I encourage you to make your own post doing so (and feel free to link to it here): I’m leaving this comment up because I think it’s important, but I will be locking or deleting comments that attempt to continue the conversation further on this post.
uncomfortable squirm
In my culture, one is to be super wary of lionizing martyrs.
I want to be excited about cool new holiday ideas. I think trying a fast in a coordinated group is a splendid idea. I want to celebrate the amazing capacity of humans to care about others and to do hard things for good reasons.
but pain is not the unit of effort.
dying for the cause is not a success.
not every cost is avoidable, but i never, ever want to become the kind of person
who mistakes the price sacrificed for a value bought
In my culture there’s a meta-tradition around ritual hardships or labors: you are to set aside at least 5 minutes, by the very clock, for considering how you might cheat. If you find you could get results without the hardship, you are expected to cheat for the results and then go find some other way to challenge yourself.
I think you’re raising reasonable points, fairly gently. I think the overall issue is important, and was in my mind as I planned and wrote this. I get that, given that this post was high karma and curated, and has at least one comment saying we should scale Vavilov day immediately, it felt important to you to note the pitfalls (even if I already pushed against the universalization). But I don’t have a way to respond to this in LW comments that doesn’t feel like justifying my personal choices, and I’m not interested in doing that.
Potential alternatives include “you create a top-level post discussing the general case”, an off-LW conversation between us, or just not following up. If anyone else wants to continue this conversation I encourage you to make your own post doing so (and feel free to link to it here): I’m leaving this comment up because I think it’s important, but I will be locking or deleting comments that attempt to continue the conversation further on this post.
EDIT: Created a discussion post here.
Thanks. What is your culture?
Not a literal culture, rather In My Culture.
This was probably a reference to In My Culture.