Just wanted to say that I think most rationalist “holidays” or “rituals” are pretty cringe, but this one strikes me as something much more real and valuable. I’m not sure I agree with your concept of “Patron Saint holidays” for the community as a whole but this one seems at least somewhat virtuous and noble in a way that I think a lot of other stuff misses.
I noticed some downvotes there, which I presume are thanks to my low opinion of much of rationalist “holidays” and “rituals”. Would people be interested in discussing that more here? I think this one is notably better than what I’ve seen in other cases and I’m curious if people disagree, just don’t like me expressing negativity about other events, or what.
As I said on that post, I didn’t want to host a general discussion on rationalist holidays as a whole on that post in particular (but this one is fine), and didn’t feel right leaving up a casual trashing of things deeply meaningful to other people without letting them respond.
Any of the following would have made me feel better about the comment:
framing the dislike as a fact about you rather than an objective fact about rationalist holidays
giving explanations (beyond “cringe”, which is often used to police caring too much about unpopular things)
being its own post or a comment on one like this, rather than on a narrowly scoped and fairly personal post.
It wasn’t about defending rationalist holidays for me because rationalist holidays only occasionally resonate with me. But I respect what they mean to other people and didn’t like seeing them so casually torn down.
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, it was meant mostly as an aside and one that strengthened my praise for Vavilov Day (as indicating that this is appealing even to someone who dislikes most rationalist holidays), but I suppose the dislike was too controversial and/or too flippant.
I may write a post of my own describing why I don’t like rationalist holidays/think they can do better, but I think that post would itself likely be extremely controversial so I’d have to approach it carefully.
In my ideal world, one does not put major criticisms of something deeply meaningful to group A, in places where group A is obviously the target audience, in asides. That goes double when the host of that particular island in the archipelago does not want to host the discussion, and triple for anything more inflammatory than strictly necessary. This doesn’t mean criticism is banned or even discouraged, it just means that when you have a major difference in cruxes you focus on that crux rather than the implications of the crux (and in a place set up to handle that).
I am interested in why Vavilov Day feels different to people than common rationalist holidays. Czynski’s comment on holiday cores on the original post was useful and cruxy.
I am interested in why Vavilov Day feels different to people than common rationalist holidays.
I think that my comments on that will unfortunately involve substantial criticism of other rationalist celebrations in a way that you may not wish to host. I will perhaps write up another post with more detail.
I don’t endorse the archipelago model for LW and this is a good example of why—making that comment, I had no idea that you didn’t want to host the discussion or in fact what your opinions on other rationalist holidays were. I’m happy to go along with your decisions since that is the model we have, but I’m not sure how I would have known what you thought on these matters from the post I commented on.
I suspect the downvotes are because you used the word “cringe”, not merely because you were negative about rationalists holidays. That usage of “cringe” is disliked (example) and I think for a good reason.
Personally, I think Eliezer was straightforwardly wrong about that; I think the word is useful even if it’s misused by some—that said if we were to taboo “cringe” I think that if I had said “embarrassing and unworthy” or something like that I think it would have largely the same meaning.
I agree with this. In the twitter thread, Eliezer later posts an example where “cringe” is used in the sense of “tone deaf.” I think that’s closer to the original meaning and think it conveys something useful.
For instance, I tend to feel cringe emotions when people approach a group with a certain mood (usually upbeat and “this is the best thing”) but they are misreading the room and people in the room don’t know what’s going on and feel like the mood is out of place (or just happen to have a low hedonic setpoint and feel like they have not have signed up for something where they feel socially obligated to smile).
In theory, it could also go in the other direction (oversharing about a depressive topic when the room isn’t in the mood for that). I have more sympathies for that direction of misreading the room (or just not caring about keeping things “light”), but I could also imagine “cringy” to apply in that scenario.
So I think it’s probably a bad practice to call a general type of something (“rationalist rituals in general”) cringe because it implies a judgment regardless of execution and regardless of whether the sort of people who self-select to attend can enjoy something together. But I think it could be appropriate (depending on the specifics) to say something like “rationalist rituals are often cringy” to imply that the way they are run often leaves people with a feeling of “this was trying too hard” or “this part felt very artificial.”
On the main thread, I commented:
I noticed some downvotes there, which I presume are thanks to my low opinion of much of rationalist “holidays” and “rituals”. Would people be interested in discussing that more here? I think this one is notably better than what I’ve seen in other cases and I’m curious if people disagree, just don’t like me expressing negativity about other events, or what.
As I said on that post, I didn’t want to host a general discussion on rationalist holidays as a whole on that post in particular (but this one is fine), and didn’t feel right leaving up a casual trashing of things deeply meaningful to other people without letting them respond.
Any of the following would have made me feel better about the comment:
framing the dislike as a fact about you rather than an objective fact about rationalist holidays
giving explanations (beyond “cringe”, which is often used to police caring too much about unpopular things)
being its own post or a comment on one like this, rather than on a narrowly scoped and fairly personal post.
It wasn’t about defending rationalist holidays for me because rationalist holidays only occasionally resonate with me. But I respect what they mean to other people and didn’t like seeing them so casually torn down.
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, it was meant mostly as an aside and one that strengthened my praise for Vavilov Day (as indicating that this is appealing even to someone who dislikes most rationalist holidays), but I suppose the dislike was too controversial and/or too flippant.
I may write a post of my own describing why I don’t like rationalist holidays/think they can do better, but I think that post would itself likely be extremely controversial so I’d have to approach it carefully.
In my ideal world, one does not put major criticisms of something deeply meaningful to group A, in places where group A is obviously the target audience, in asides. That goes double when the host of that particular island in the archipelago does not want to host the discussion, and triple for anything more inflammatory than strictly necessary. This doesn’t mean criticism is banned or even discouraged, it just means that when you have a major difference in cruxes you focus on that crux rather than the implications of the crux (and in a place set up to handle that).
I am interested in why Vavilov Day feels different to people than common rationalist holidays. Czynski’s comment on holiday cores on the original post was useful and cruxy.
I think that my comments on that will unfortunately involve substantial criticism of other rationalist celebrations in a way that you may not wish to host. I will perhaps write up another post with more detail.
I don’t endorse the archipelago model for LW and this is a good example of why—making that comment, I had no idea that you didn’t want to host the discussion or in fact what your opinions on other rationalist holidays were. I’m happy to go along with your decisions since that is the model we have, but I’m not sure how I would have known what you thought on these matters from the post I commented on.
I suspect the downvotes are because you used the word “cringe”, not merely because you were negative about rationalists holidays. That usage of “cringe” is disliked (example) and I think for a good reason.
Personally, I think Eliezer was straightforwardly wrong about that; I think the word is useful even if it’s misused by some—that said if we were to taboo “cringe” I think that if I had said “embarrassing and unworthy” or something like that I think it would have largely the same meaning.
I agree with this. In the twitter thread, Eliezer later posts an example where “cringe” is used in the sense of “tone deaf.” I think that’s closer to the original meaning and think it conveys something useful.
For instance, I tend to feel cringe emotions when people approach a group with a certain mood (usually upbeat and “this is the best thing”) but they are misreading the room and people in the room don’t know what’s going on and feel like the mood is out of place (or just happen to have a low hedonic setpoint and feel like they have not have signed up for something where they feel socially obligated to smile).
In theory, it could also go in the other direction (oversharing about a depressive topic when the room isn’t in the mood for that). I have more sympathies for that direction of misreading the room (or just not caring about keeping things “light”), but I could also imagine “cringy” to apply in that scenario.
So I think it’s probably a bad practice to call a general type of something (“rationalist rituals in general”) cringe because it implies a judgment regardless of execution and regardless of whether the sort of people who self-select to attend can enjoy something together. But I think it could be appropriate (depending on the specifics) to say something like “rationalist rituals are often cringy” to imply that the way they are run often leaves people with a feeling of “this was trying too hard” or “this part felt very artificial.”