I feel like I agree with Elizabeth’s suggestion that we allow holidays to rise to prominence naturally rather than advocate for universal observance, but for different reasons.
Chief among those reasons is that if we are bidding for a holiday to be universally celebrated, it is almost certain to be designed by the advocate rather than explored by the celebrants. This has two problems: one, it puts a ceiling on how successful the holiday can be due to the design decisions made in the original campaign; two, if the designed elements fail, they are likely to take the whole holiday down with it, and we lose the lessons/examples/opportunity-for-a-good-party thereby. Letting people opt-in to experiment and then mimic the activities they like gives both a better shot at deeper engagement and a higher likelihood of the holiday being kept, at the cost of being slower to reach social fixation.
I also suggest a different pattern than Patron Saints (though I approve of it) to include: celebrations of battles. Notably this includes significant defeats—the US celebrates Pearl Harbor Day, for example. I imagine the ‘rationalist battles’ consisting of a group of people who try Doing the Thing for one of our central concerns. Any time this happens it should eventually be resolvable into Thing is Done! or Thing is Sustainably Underway! or Failed to Do the Thing. If there are interesting features of the story, like a really good showcase of rationalist virtues under pressure, or new failure modes, or anything else, it might be worth celebrating on an ongoing basis.
I like the battle pattern in addition to the saints pattern because I believe we’re entirely too focused on individuals in full generality, and its always a group effort at the cruxes of history.
I like the idea of allowing holidays to form and grow organically—I agree with your assessment that things get weird when a holiday is designed in isolation and then shoved toward a group.
The challenge that I see in this approach is in figuring out how to get that organic growth to happen on the extremely short timelines that we come to expect from modern online life. Most mainstream holidays represent gradual change over multiple human lifetimes, and I have the impression (perhaps unfounded?) that an unspoken success metric in new holiday creation is to see adoption within a few years.
What does “letting people opt-in to experiment and mimic” look like in practice to you? When I guess at what it might look like online, I imagine a group of people with large followings blogging, tweeting, and generally talking about the holiday before, during, and after it.
Pretty much just like Vavilov Day. Elizabeth also wrote that post, and was responding to someone suggesting it be added to the rational holiday calendar. So the short version is it looks like this:
Elizabeth: Vavilov was a cool guy. I will commemorate him and his people by undergoing a small fraction of their suffering voluntarily.
Others: Cool idea—me too!
I think two important features of rationalists aid in the spread of things like a good holiday. One is intentionality, which is to say we do a lot of things with a definite purpose as opposed to by convention or on impulse. Two is articulation, which is to say we are often ready to explain our thinking and motivations. As a consequence, I expect meeting your discussion standard to be pretty straightforward because it is practically embedded from the beginning: the announcement of the celebration; the note that the celebration is actually occurring now; the retrospective on the celebration. You can see this pattern in the solstice posts, for example.
I feel like I agree with Elizabeth’s suggestion that we allow holidays to rise to prominence naturally rather than advocate for universal observance, but for different reasons.
Chief among those reasons is that if we are bidding for a holiday to be universally celebrated, it is almost certain to be designed by the advocate rather than explored by the celebrants. This has two problems: one, it puts a ceiling on how successful the holiday can be due to the design decisions made in the original campaign; two, if the designed elements fail, they are likely to take the whole holiday down with it, and we lose the lessons/examples/opportunity-for-a-good-party thereby. Letting people opt-in to experiment and then mimic the activities they like gives both a better shot at deeper engagement and a higher likelihood of the holiday being kept, at the cost of being slower to reach social fixation.
I also suggest a different pattern than Patron Saints (though I approve of it) to include: celebrations of battles. Notably this includes significant defeats—the US celebrates Pearl Harbor Day, for example. I imagine the ‘rationalist battles’ consisting of a group of people who try Doing the Thing for one of our central concerns. Any time this happens it should eventually be resolvable into Thing is Done! or Thing is Sustainably Underway! or Failed to Do the Thing. If there are interesting features of the story, like a really good showcase of rationalist virtues under pressure, or new failure modes, or anything else, it might be worth celebrating on an ongoing basis.
I like the battle pattern in addition to the saints pattern because I believe we’re entirely too focused on individuals in full generality, and its always a group effort at the cruxes of history.
I like the idea of allowing holidays to form and grow organically—I agree with your assessment that things get weird when a holiday is designed in isolation and then shoved toward a group.
The challenge that I see in this approach is in figuring out how to get that organic growth to happen on the extremely short timelines that we come to expect from modern online life. Most mainstream holidays represent gradual change over multiple human lifetimes, and I have the impression (perhaps unfounded?) that an unspoken success metric in new holiday creation is to see adoption within a few years.
What does “letting people opt-in to experiment and mimic” look like in practice to you? When I guess at what it might look like online, I imagine a group of people with large followings blogging, tweeting, and generally talking about the holiday before, during, and after it.
Pretty much just like Vavilov Day. Elizabeth also wrote that post, and was responding to someone suggesting it be added to the rational holiday calendar. So the short version is it looks like this:
Elizabeth: Vavilov was a cool guy. I will commemorate him and his people by undergoing a small fraction of their suffering voluntarily.
Others: Cool idea—me too!
I think two important features of rationalists aid in the spread of things like a good holiday. One is intentionality, which is to say we do a lot of things with a definite purpose as opposed to by convention or on impulse. Two is articulation, which is to say we are often ready to explain our thinking and motivations. As a consequence, I expect meeting your discussion standard to be pretty straightforward because it is practically embedded from the beginning: the announcement of the celebration; the note that the celebration is actually occurring now; the retrospective on the celebration. You can see this pattern in the solstice posts, for example.