This is great, thank you.
I didn’t quite understand how “Beware ratchet effects” fits into/connects with the rest of the section that it’s in—could you spell that out a bit? Also I’m curious if there are concrete examples of that happening that you know about & can share, though ofc very reasonable if not.
oh yeah my dispute isn’t “the character in the song isn’t talking about building AI” but “the song is not a call to accelerate building AI”
as Solstice creative lead I neither support nor oppose tearing apart the sun for raw materials
Take Great Transhumanist Future. It has “a coder” dismantling the sun “in another twenty years with some big old computer.” This is a call to accelerate AI development, and use it for extremely transformative actions.
Super disagree with this! Neither I nor (I have not checked but am pretty certain) the author of the text wants to advocate that! (Indeed I somewhat actively tried to avoid having stuff in my program encourage this! You could argue that even though I tried to do this I did not succeed, but I think the fact that you seem to be reading ~motivations into authors’ choices that aren’t actually there is a sign that something in your analysis is off.) I think it’s pretty standard that having a fictional character espouse an idea does not mean the author espouses it.
In the case of this song I did actually consider changing “you and I will flourish in the great transhumanist future” to “you and I MAY flourish in the great transhumanist future” to highlight the uncertainty, but I didn’t want to make changes against the author’s will, and Alicorn preferred to keep the “will” there because the rest of the song is written in the indicative mood. And, as I said before, Solstice is a crowdsourced endeavor and I am not willing to only include works where I do not have the slightest disagreement.
If the main problem with changing the songs is that many people in this community want to sing about AI accelerationism and want the songs to be anti-religious, then I stand by my criticisms
hmm, I want to be able to sing songs that express an important thing even if one can possibly read them in a way that also implies some things I disagree with
If the main problem with changing the songs is in making them scan and rhyme, then I can probably just pay that cost.
you are extremely welcome to suggest new versions of things!
but a lot of the cost is distributed and/or necessarily borne by the organizers. changing lines in a song that’s sung at Solstice every year is a Big Deal and it is simply not possible to do this in a way that does not cause discourse and strife
(I guess arguably we managed the “threats and trials” line in TWTR without much discourse or strife but I think the framing did a lot there and I explicitly didn’t frame it as a permanent change to the song, and also it was a pretty minor change)
re point 1 - maybe? unsure
[edit: one issue is that some irregularities will in fact be correlated across takes and STILL shouldn’t be written down—like, sometimes a song will slow down gradually over the course of a couple measures, and the way to deal with that is to write the notes as though no slowdown is happening and then write “rit.” (means “slow down”) over the staff, NOT to write gradually longer notes; this might be tunable post facto but I think that itself would take human (or really good AI) judgment that’s not necessarily much easier than just transcribing it manually to start]
re point 2 - the thing is you’d get a really irregular-looking hard to read thing that nobody could sightread. (actually this is already somewhat true for a lot of folk-style songs that sound intuitive but look really confusing when written down)
As someone who likes transcribing songs,
1) I endorse the above
2) if you ask me to transcribe a song I will often say yes (if it’s not very frequent) (it costs time but not that much cognitive work for me so I experience reasonable amounts of this as fun)
One thing that makes this hard to automate is human imprecision in generating a recording, espeically with rhythm: notes encode frequencies but also timings and durations, and humans performing a song will never get those things exactly precise (nor should they—good performance tends to involve being a little free with rhythms in ways that shouldn’t be directly reflected in the sheet music), so any automatic transcriber will get silly-looking slightly off rhythms that still need judgment to adjust.
Oh, also I wanted to comment on the section of your other post where you mention that Solstice contained a number of what felt like barbs at religion.
This is a fairly valid complaint, I think. I am sorry you felt barbed. I agree that barbs at the outgroup are not a great Solstice strategy; I specifically aimed to keep conflict-theoretic content out of my program (and edited e.g. some of the Underrated Reasons To Be Thankful accordingly). I think these were less salient to me for basically cultural and positional reasons, and it makes sense they were much more salient to you.
It’s also the case that there’s not much I would do differently even knowing in advance that someone would have this reaction, because (a) I disagree with some of the examples, (b) nearly all of the examples are in songs, written by people other than me, and already known and beloved within the community, and as such very difficult to change.
(The one example that’s not from a song I think you may have misheard—what I said there was “this next song started as a sort of, intra-religious rebuttal against overly literalist interpretations of the Bible”, which is not anti-religious.)
I guess I also draw a distinction between rejecting some religious practices and being mean to religious people.
The Brighter Than Today verse is very much a thing I wouldn’t write that way myself but will by no means change because everybody is extremely attached to it. (I’ve heard a very similar complaint about it from a very secular friend, and I think you and she are basically right but I don’t disagree with the song strongly enough to refuse to sing it as is.)
But like I do think there is pretty substantial validity to your feeling here anyway, especially given that it is not uncommon for rationalists to be much more antitheist and anti-religious-people than this. Sorry about that.
[note: I initially read this post like a month ago, forgot to comment, have not reread now before commenting]
Thanks for writing this, as the creative lead I really like seeing what people think!
I like your geological review of Song Of The Artesian Water. (I also like your factual nitpick of Bold Orion, elsewhere.)
I want to somewhat disagree with some of your overall approach to the content of Solstice, largely exemplified here:
There is a phenomenon in comparative theology where people are much more sensitive to whether the theology is correct in a talk than in a song. If you say a controversial doctrine in a talk, people might get upset, come up and argue with you afterwards, or even start attending a different congregation. If you put the same doctrine in a song, people are more likely to smile and sing along. People know this, and sometimes write extremely partisan songs that take advantage of the phenomenon. ‘Know This That Every Soul Is Free’ comes to mind as an example. The appropriate response is to take the content of songs as seriously as the content of talks. Their words probably do reflect the author’s intent.
This song is the most explicit statement of the future that the rationalist community hopes to build.
A thing about Solstice is that while there is a creative lead who curates and sometimes edits the content, plots the thematic arc, and writes new content to connect the dots and lay out the overall ~philosophy and claims of the program (which might be different year to year!), the content is really quite crowdsourced and represents a patchwork of beliefs and ideals that all point in somewhat the same direction but not exactly the same direction.
As I said at the start—it’s not a liturgy, it’s a reflection. (A series of reflections, rather.)
Even though I chose every piece in the program, edited some of the song lyrics, and had creative input into the speeches, I would say the only pieces in the program that I agree with fully with no reservations are the speeches/interludes I wrote myself. (Maybe not even those depending how strict you get with “no reservations”—there are any number of clarifications I could add that would slightly improve the accuracy of my content but make the program interminably long and boring. (I spent a lot of editing time cutting wordcount.))
With speeches other people wrote for the program, I made a lot of suggestions; the authors took some of my suggestions and not others. This is as it should be! A lot of the point of having community members get up and speak their own words is so that they can speak from the heart, from what they know and believe, from their own experiences in the world. Of course I’m not going to choose a speaker who wants to talk about something antithetical or just orthogonal to my Solstice concept—but neither do I expect anyone to align 100% with all of my beliefs and priorities, and this is fine and good.
With songs it’s even worse. Songs have to rhyme and scan. This trades off against optimizing your meaning with anywhere near as much precision as you can in prose. Obviously this doesn’t mean you can throw out the whole project of having your words mean things you endorse! But you probably won’t be able to chisel your meaning as finely; you have to accept some degree of poetic license and/or being merely directionally correct.
One example that stuck in my mind is that—admittedly in a footnote to your other post—you said:
The most doomy statement I recall implied that there was a proof that alignment would fail. The speaker expressed hope that there might be a subtle flaw in that proof, much like there was a subtle flaw in Kelvin’s argument that manned powered flight would not work.”
This refers to these lines in I Have Seen The Tops Of Clouds:
This isn’t a thing that our past selves expected -
Lord Kelvin assured us that steel cannot fly;
His mistake was quite subtle, and all we need hope for
Is similar errors in proofs we’ll all die.
I don’t know if Dan Speyer (who wrote these lines) believes it is literally true that there is a literal proof we’ll all die. I chose this song and wrote new music for it because I felt strongly that the song said an important thing that I wanted in my program, and I certainly don’t literally believe this. I think this is Close Enough to things I do believe that I don’t feel it’s out of place in my program. (And there are other parts of the song that I am much more closely aligned with and which are the main reasons I wanted to include it.)
Editing songs is quite costly. Firstly in time and effort (which are at an extreme premium during Solstice prep, it’s SO much work) - making things rhyme and scan is no small task. But also, many Solstice songs are passed along from Solstice to Solstice with the expectation that, over time, people will learn them and sing them from memory. (This expectation is very much a reality with a lot of Solstice songs at this point.) Violating people’s expectations about a song they already know is a pretty significant cost actually—not insurmountable, and we do edit songs sometimes, but not at all trivial.
(I made a tiny change in What A Wonderful World—from “they’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know” to “they MAY learn much more than I’ll ever know”—and I got a LOT of feedback about that!)
Not to mention that you’ll never get all rationalists to agree on what the One Truest Possible Form Of The Song With No Errors Or Wrong Emphases Or Unwanted Implications is, and we don’t have a central authority to dictate that, which is good. (Another, related, part of your approach I disagreed with is the note that maybe Gretta shouldn’t be sharing wisdom on a problem she hasn’t fully solved for herself. I don’t think anyone has fully solved the problem of grief and fear for themself, and I don’t think anyone ought to go around claiming they have. We’re all just people trying to figure out the world and sharing our little bits of hard-won wisdom with each other, trying to piece together a patchwork model of the world and how to live in it.)
With Great Transhumanist Future, I very specifically tried to frame the song as one possible vision of a bright future, rather than the one true thing we’re all aiming at. This is very much a case where I endorse the song as part of a pluralistic mosaic of visions, and agree with many parts of it, but don’t necessarily see every thing it yearns for as a thing I myself want in my future, and absolutely don’t want to claim anyone else must. But I think the rich detail of a specific vision is far more interesting and motivating (including for noticing where one might disagree!) than a sanded-down universal vision that only contains what everyone agrees on.
It’s fair that there’s only so much framing can do, though, and like, it makes a lot of sense to me that given that you feel in general only very partially value- and goal-aligned with rationalists, you will also feel pretty unaligned with a lot of the stuff in Solstice and largely with the arc overall. This is very valid, and I appreciate you sharing this perspective! I just wanted to note that I think you might be interpreting the program in a significantly more narrow and prescriptive way than it was intended.
I notice that you have a lot of specific examples of bad answers but no specific examples of good answers—are good answers just obviously good, or are ~all answers not specifically called out as bad answers generally good, or something else? Would be curious to see some examples of good answers.
Some lyric change ideas tossed around in a brainstorming session in the choir Discord:
fjords and empires and all
glaciers, sovereigns and all
states and seas and stones and all
seas and sovereigns and all
seas and pyramids and all
You don’t necessarily have to have every individual person showing up every week, though, just often enough that the thing happens in aggregate. Choir manages weekly during concert season and biweekly the rest of the time! D&D groups often manage weekly. It’s still hard but it’s not, like, completely obviously impossible like “every person shows up every week”.
I think in addition to the “specific individual people I’ve personally hurt” case, there’s the case of people (or animals) who were probably hurt structurally downstream of choices I’ve made (e.g. animals hurt by my consuming animal products, or perhaps, like, people in coerced labor situations who made products I bought, or something), or possibly also people I chose not to help (e.g. homeless people who asked me for money I didn’t give them)? I think in these cases (but also some ~interpersonal-conflict-type cases) I have a kind of conflicting mix of (a) an urge towards compassion (b) something like a block on compassion, a flinching away from letting myself feel it (c) sometimes something like anger for ~putting me in a situation where I feel this way?
I think in these situations one case for prioritizing & making space for compassion on purpose is that in fact it’s often already there but I am fighting it and tying myself up in painful and useless internal conflict, whereas if I can find a stance where I am allowing myself to feel it and still make tradeoffs about it, I do not get stuck in this way. But it can be hard given the ~block on thinking about it.
Whereas I guess in the Hitler case (or, personally my default example of person-who-I-find-it-unusually-easy-to-hate is Stalin) my default stance doesn’t have all that much compassion in it so rather than removing a block I have to cultivate the compassion in the first place? But if I’m going ahead and thinking about it there’s not necessarily the same kind of mental block involved. So I guess it’s harder in some ways, easier in others.
Here it is!
This was so adorable I showed it to all my housemates and we read the book aloud together.
(Note for any future Solstice historians that this is not the full program! Also any future Solstice historians should bug me to put the program up on https://secularsolstice.github.io/ if I have not yet done this by January or so.)
A cool thing about the amount of critical mass we have in Berkeley is that we can do things like have a rationalist choir! And more generally a rationalist culture, things like “songs everyone knows and will sing along with if I have a singing night”, and a large set of people to find friendships and relationships in if one is picky, etc. It does have the drawback that it’s easy to get stuck in a local optimum of only hanging out with rationalists, which is suboptimal in some ways. But the benefits are also pretty substantial imo.
for some reason these crows made me laugh uncontrollably