repost of Hamnox’s comment from the original Vavilov Day 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.
Hamnox is pointing out a real risk that should be taken into consideration. But I think that ~taking hardship too seriously can cause the hardship to expand, the same way some forms of back pain are made worse by babying them (others are made worse by pushing too hard. Sometimes the same person’s back pain will alternate between these states. Reality is devastatingly complicated). Being too scared and not scared enough of hardship have both held me back at points, and although I didn’t articulate it at the time, one of my goals in Vavilov Day was to quantify the cost of the hardship so I could make finer trade-offs.
I have overall been frustrated with the sense that rationalist holidays need to work for everyone, and would very much like to advocate for the concept that things can be hard, too hard for some people, and still very beneficial for others, and neither group is doing anything wrong. That goes both for “things some people are doing” and “no seriously, this is a community holiday”
repost of Hamnox’s comment from the original Vavilov Day post
Hamnox is pointing out a real risk that should be taken into consideration. But I think that ~taking hardship too seriously can cause the hardship to expand, the same way some forms of back pain are made worse by babying them (others are made worse by pushing too hard. Sometimes the same person’s back pain will alternate between these states. Reality is devastatingly complicated). Being too scared and not scared enough of hardship have both held me back at points, and although I didn’t articulate it at the time, one of my goals in Vavilov Day was to quantify the cost of the hardship so I could make finer trade-offs.
I have overall been frustrated with the sense that rationalist holidays need to work for everyone, and would very much like to advocate for the concept that things can be hard, too hard for some people, and still very beneficial for others, and neither group is doing anything wrong. That goes both for “things some people are doing” and “no seriously, this is a community holiday”