General Thoughts on Secular Solstice
I attended Secular Solstice in Berkeley last December.
My perspective is quite unusual: I live in a rationalist group house and work at an AI safety office, but I also am a Christian and attend church every week.[1]
I was originally not planning on going to Solstice, but a decent number of people (~5) told me in person that they would be particularly interested in my opinions of it. I realized that I was interested in learning what I would think of it too, so I went.
I took notes on my thoughts throughout the service.[2] This blog post is my broader thoughts on the experience. I also have blog posts for a fun little correction to one of the songs and my detailed notes & commentary.
Overarching Narrative
I do not agree with the overarching narrative presented at Solstice.
There is a narrative in my tradition about people becoming humble and turning to God. You can choose to be humble or you can be “compelled to be humble” by the difficult circumstances in life. I’m not super fond of this description because being humble and turning to God is always a choice. But there is some truth in it: many people do find themselves relying on God more and developing a deeper relationship with Him through the more difficult times in their lives.
The overarching narrative of Solstice felt like a transmogrified version of being compelled to be humble. The descent into darkness recognizes the problems of the human condition. Then, instead of turning to humility, it turns to a fulness of pride. We, humanity, through our own efforts, will solve all our problems, and become the grabby aliens we hope to be. There is some caution before the night, learning to accept things we cannot change, but this caution melts away before the imagined light of the Great Transhumanist Future.
AI X-Risk and AI Transhumanism
Existential Risk
A major cause for concern leading into the night was existential risk from AI: the chance that future artificial intelligence systems might kill everyone. This was talked about more than any other problem.
I expect that the organizers and speakers of Solstice are significantly more doomy than the audience.[3] The audience itself probably has selection effects that make it more doomy than AI researchers, or forecasters, or other groups of people who have thought about this possibility.
It is often the case that people’s beliefs are more determined by what is normal for people around them to believe, rather than personally considering the relevant arguments and evidence themselves. This is a problem for intellectual communities, and should be countered by encouraging each person to know for yourself whether these beliefs are true. Organizers and speakers at Solstice have an unusually large power to establish what is normal to believe in the rationalist community. They promoted increased concern about AI x-risk in the community, not by arguing for this belief but by treating it as common knowledge.[4] Maybe they believe that this is justified, but it felt to me like a Dark Art of Persuasion.
Transhumanism
Solstice also promoted the Great Transhumanist Future. What exactly this involves was perhaps intentionally left vague, and mostly described in song. It involved a coder dismantling the sun, making branches of your presumably-uploaded self, streams of data across the galaxy, and computronium. This is not just transhumanism: it’s AI-centered transhumanism.
There were also some parts of the transhumanism which were not explicitly computational: things like space colonization or human immortality. But overall, it felt like the route to hoped-for future ran through powerful AI.
This is … not the future I hope for. I am probably more futuristic than most of the public, and am excited about things like space colonization and more abundant energy. I am definitely not excited about mind uploading or turning the sun into computonium. The rationalist community (1) is trying to have a disproportionate impact on the future, and (2) the future that they are trying to create is not something that most of the public would want. Solstice included unusually explicit statements of the vision of the future that leaders in the rationalist community are trying to create. I’m glad that it was explicit, but not about what the vision happens to be.
Juxtaposition
Solstice included both emphasis on AI x-risk and AI-centered transhumanism. The juxtaposition was jarring.
The AI-centered transhumanism of the rationalist community is a major motivating factor for people who are trying to build powerful, potentially dangerous AI.[5] It is not just a fact about the world that AI is the most significant existential risk now: it is something that the rationalist community helped create.
I know that some people in the rationalist community have done some serious soul-searching about the tension between promoting AI-centered transhumanism and AI existential risk. Maybe Solstice isn’t the place to do this—or maybe this night of reflection is.
If you find yourself believing that your hopes are killing you, maybe you should think about whether you should have different hopes.
These Aren’t My People
For many people in the rationalist community, going to their first rationalist event is finding their people. There are a bunch of people who think like them and have a similar culture, even if we haven’t met yet. Finding a group of people who are by default friends with you is a wonderful thing.
This is not my personal experience with the rationalist community. There are a bunch of interesting people to talk to, many of whom I have become friends with, but this is not a culture that I naturally fit into.
Solstice is the fullest expression of this community. I didn’t really feel like I belong. Even if you don’t believe in the Gift of Discernment, reflexively feeling that this isn’t the place you should be[6] doesn’t help you enjoy the program.
Barbs at Religion
There is one weird trick to building a cohesive community: identify an outgroup and unify against the outgroup. Communities that are worth being a part of try to resist this tendency, respect the Other(s), and be welcoming to people who are very different from them. This is hard, and we should expect even the best communities to fail sometimes, but it is something that should strived for.
Religious people are an outgroup for the rationalist community.
The overarching narrative of Solstice was not religious. I disagree, but this is fine.
There were also little bits of meanness directed at religion scattered throughout the program. Most of these were not essential: they could be removed without changing the message. This kind of small, repeated, inessential criticisms is what made Solstice feel hostile to religious people.
First, a counterexample:
“If the Lord won’t send us water, we’ll get it from the devil.” in Song of the Artesian Water.
This is very clever imagery, and central to the message of the song. The song is about drilling for groundwater so you don’t have to rely on rain. You should work to achieve the things that would improve your life and surroundings.
And an unusually clear example:
In Brighter Than Today, there is a female Prometheus who, in her pain, smashed rocks together and invented fire. The song then has her religious community try to silence her.
The message of the song is the hope that technology can relieve pain. It doesn’t need to have human enemies at all. The song is not just how portraying how things normally work: it is not the case that most inventions are opposed by religious leaders. We don’t know what the religious landscape looked like back then: the earliest archaeological evidence for controlled fire is significantly older than the earliest archeological evidence for religion. The entire story is made up, and the author choose to make religious people be the enemy.
Here are the other examples that I noticed:
The introduction to Time Wrote the Rocks said that it was originally written to be anti-Biblical.
Time Wrote the Rocks describes Galileo recanting.
This is not a particularly good moment for the Church and I don’t have a great love for Early Modern Catholicism more broadly. I worry that if this is the only instance from the history of science & religion told, it promotes the conflict thesis, instead of recognizing the long and complicated history of the interactions between religion and science.“We’re sick of prayers and Providence. We’re going to do without.” in Song of the Artesian Water.
This feels less central to the song. It is possible to both pray and work on a problem.Level Up told people to “Let your faith die,” and then contrasted faith with wonder.
I really don’t think that most people experience faith as being in opposition to wonder. It also suggests that faith is incompatible with the sort of progress the rationalist community wants.
I’m not surprised that these sorts of things existed at Solstice. They’re common on LessWrong, and exist sometimes in personal conversations around here too. But they still felt like barbs being thrown at people like me who happened to be there. It did not make me want to link arms and sing with you.
Not Acknowledging Religious Influences
There are good things, both organizationally and ideologically, that the rationalist community has learned from Christianity. Solstice itself is clearly modeled off of a Christian worship service, in particular, American Protestant low church. If you ask people in person, they are often willing to acknowledge this.
It would be nice if this influence were publicly acknowledged at Solstice. The planners and speakers seemed to avoid citing things that are obviously associated with the outgroup. It is good to incorporate good things into your community regardless of their source, and to say that this is what you’re doing.[7]
Good Songs
I liked some of the songs !
Songs I Endorse and Might Learn
Songs Where I Disagree with Some of the Message, but Still Think They’re Fun
Hymns I Know That Feel Like They Could Work for Solstice
Ring Out Wild Bells
A New Year’s hymn, about bells ringing in the cold, bringing in hope for the new year. To secularize it, you would only need to change one word: “Ring out the darkness of the land. Ring in the Christ (→ light) that is to be.”Let the Lower Lights Be Burning
This would take more work to secularize, but the imagery seems fitting. The setting is a dark and stormy sea, with a safe harbor that people are trying to get to. There is a large lighthouse (God) sending light out over large distances. If everyone were good at navigating, they could reach the harbor using the lighthouse alone. But almost everyone is bad at almost everything almost all the time. There are a bunch of smaller lights lining the shoreline. You have responsibility over one of the lower lights. It’s feeble, but that’s fine. Most people won’t even come this way, and for the few who do, you’re just protecting them from one little rock. When you have lots of people holding up their little lights all along the shore, it illuminates the entire way to go safely into the harbor.
Solstice would probably eliminate the lighthouse from the song. You might still like the imagery of a bunch of little lights leading people safely into the harbor.
Things Which Are Probably Reasonable, But Annoy Me
No Sheet Music
There are two ways to get large numbers of people to sing together: you can teach everyone at least rudimentary music literacy & show them the sheet music,[8] or you can sing songs that everyone is already familiar with. Ideally, you have both.
Since Solstice only meets once a year, it can’t really do either.[9] Having musicians at the front with microphones helps some here: they can carry the tune by themselves. But having sheet music would also help: there are some people who are at least partially musically literate for other reasons, and they can better contribute to the singing if they have the music.
(Actually, I wasn’t singing anyway. I wanted to pay close attention to what the songs were saying. I also don’t like singing things I disagree with. Reading a line ahead and deciding whether I want to sing it is doable, but effortful.)
Clapping
I don’t like clapping. It’s loud and grating. I know it’s a sign of honor, but I can’t get myself to feel that.
My tradition does not have clapping in church, which is great. Clapping on the beat is OK because it functions as a percussion instrument. Applause is basically always unpleasant to me.
There was a lot of clapping at Solstice. Something which has this many songs doesn’t need to have clapping after most of them.
The thanks-to-all-the-organizers thing near the end felt especially out of place. That is a thing that happens at conferences. It is not a thing that is typically incorporated into religious services.
Budget?
Multiplying the suggested contribution by the number of attendees results in a budget that feels an order of magnitude too high: more than the annual budget for my ~40 person congregation.[10]
I don’t know how large the budget actually was, or what it was used for. General ideas for running events like this more cheaply include: (1) use spaces that your community already has (Lighthaven?), even if they’re not quite set up the right way for them and (2) be willing to ask people to volunteer for things. [EDIT: This is already being done.] Meaningfully contributing to your community is something that many people really value, and you don’t have to pay them for it.
Continued in: My Detailed Notes & Commentary from Secular Solstice.
- ^
I have discussed my religious beliefs in some detail on The Filan Cabinet.
- ^
Including when it was dark. That page was a mess, but I was able to decipher it afterwards.
- ^
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.
My guess is that the median p(AI Doom) in that room is maybe 25%? The median p(AI Doom) of AI researchers is around 5%. The median p(AI Doom) of forecasters is around 0.5%. These are all concerning, but not nearly as bad as implied by this statement.
- ^
The talk Every Ailment Under the Sun is the clearest example. Despite the title, it mostly discussed AI x-risk.
- ^
The classic example of this is Sam Altman’s tweet:
eliezer has IMO done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else.
certainly he got many of us interested in AGI, helped deepmind get funded at a time when AGI was extremely outside the overton window, was critical in the decision to start openai, etc.
- ^
Interestingly, the impression was OK with being present at Solstice in the moment, and primarily opposed to belonging. The message wasn’t ‘Walk out the door now,’ but rather ‘Don’t make a habit of coming back.’
- ^
The most natural places to do this would be either:
1. At the beginning, there was a comment that said something like: ‘People have been meeting in the depths of winter to celebrate together for generations.’ This could mention what tradition the structure of this service is most similar to.
2. When telling the history of moral progress, it could include some Christian individuals. Christianity has been extremely important in getting humanity to broaden our circle of moral concern.
- ^
Sheet music can be projected, or it can be printed in the program. It is commonly associated with hymnals (and high church more generally), but it does not have to be.
- ^
Next token prediction does not work. Music is somewhat but not extremely unpredictable, with a 1/f power law.
- ^
The building we meet in is owned by the church, and maintenance for it comes from a different pot of money than our budget. The budget does, however, include personnel: we don’t have a professional clergy and the congregation runs on volunteer (or voluntold) work.
I’ve been a Solstice regular for many years, and organized several smaller Solstices in Boston (on a similar template to the one you went to). I think the feeling of not-belonging is accurate; Solstice is built around a worldview (which is presupposed, not argued) that you disagree with, and this is integral to its construction. The particular instance you went to was, if anything, watered down on the relevant axis.
In the center of Solstice there is traditionally a Moment of Darkness. While it is not used in every solstice, a commonly used reading, which to me constitutes the emotional core of the moment of darkness, is Beyond the Reach of God. The message of which is: You do not have plot armor. Humanity does not have plot armor.
Whereas the central teaching of Christianity is that you do have plot armor. It teaches that everything is okay, unconditionally. It tells the terminal cancer patient that they are’t really going to die, they’re just going to have their soul teleported to a comfortable afterlife which conveniently lacks phones or evidence of its existence. As a corollary, it tells the AI researcher that they can’t really f*ck up in a way that kills everyone on Earth, both because death isn’t quite a real thing, and because there is a God who can intervene to stop that sort of thing.
So I think the direction in which you would want Solstice to change—to be more positive towards religion, to preach humility/acceptance rather than striving/heroism—is antithetical to one of Solstice’s core purposes.
(On sheet music: I think this isn’t part of the tradition because most versions of Solstice have segments where the lighting is dimmed too far to read from paper, and also because printing a lot of pages per attendee is cumbersome. On clapping: yeah, clapping is mostly bad, audiences do it by default and Solstices vary in how good a job they do of preventing that. On budget: My understanding is that most Solstices are breakeven or money-losing, despite running on mostly volunteer labor, because large venues close to the holidays are very expensive.)
I think a bigger factor is that not very many people can sing unknown songs from sheet music, so it wouldn’t help very much to include it on the slides.
This plus “also it’s a lot more work to setup” are my own main cruxes. (If either were false I’d consider it much more strongly).
That’s right: if it were free to include then sure, even if only 5% of attendees can read it. But it’s actually quite a lot of work.
How hard would it be to project them? There was a screen, and it should be possible to project at least two lines with music large enough for people to read. Is the problem that we don’t have sheet music that’s digitized in a way to make this feasible for all of the songs?
We do not currently have sheet music for most songs. It’s also extra labor to arrange the slides (though this isn’t that big a part of the problem)
What exactly does the process of generating sheet music involve? Like, how does sheet music happen, in general?
It depends a lot on the musician and their skillset.
For me: I don’t really speak fluent sheet music. When I write music, I do it entirely by ear. I record it. I have musicians listen to the record and imitate it by ear. Later on, if I want sheet music, I hire someone to listen to the record and transcribe it into sheet music after-the-fact, a process which costs like $200 per song (or, free, if I do it myself or get a volunteer, but it’s a couple hours per song and there are like 30 songs so this is not a quick/easy volunteer process)
Some musicians “think primarily in sheet music”, and then they would do it with sheet music from the get-go as part of the creation process. Some solstice songs already have sheet music for this reason.
I’ve paid money to transcribe ~3-5 solstice songs with sheet music so far.
Can the process not be automated? Like, sheet music specifies notes, right? And notes are frequencies. And frequencies can be determined by examining a recording by means of appropriate hardware/software (very easily, in the case of digital recordings, I should think). Right? So, is there not some software or something that can do this?
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.
This seems solvable by using multiple recordings and averaging, yes?
Also, if the transcription to sheet-music form is accurate w.r.t. the recording, and the recording is acceptable w.r.t. the intended notes, then the transcription ought to be close enough to the intended notes. Or am I misunderstanding?
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)
You’d think, but I wasn’t been able to find such a thing despite looking pretty hard a few years ago; there might be a more recent AI approach to this though. A useful search term might be “audio to midi conversion”. (Stem separation, for which Spleeter works well, might be a necessary preprocessing step.)
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)
While I would love to see the entire rationalist community embrace the Fulness of the Gospel of Christ, I am aware that this is not a reasonable ask for Solstice, and not something I should bet on in a prediction market. While I criticize the Overarching Narrative, I am aware that this is not something that I will change.
My hopes for changing Solstice are much more modest:
Remove the inessential meanness directed towards religion. There already has been some of this, which is great ! Time Wrote the Rocks no longer falsely claims that the Church tortured Galileo. The Ballad of Smallpox Gone no longer has a verse claiming that preachers want to “Screw the body, save the soul // Bring new deaths off the shelves”. Now remove the human villains from Brighter Than Today, and you’ve improved things a lot.
Once or twice, acknowledge that some of the moral giants whose shoulders we’re standing on were Christian. The original underrated reasons to be thankful had one point about Quaker Pennsylvania. Unsong’s description of St. Francis of Assisi also comes to mind. If you’re interested, I could make several other suggestions of things that I think could be mentioned without disrupting the core purposes of Solstice.
I appreciate the perspective. Personally I don’t really see the point of a secular solstice. But frankly, the hostility to religion is a feature of the rationalist community, not a bug.
Rejection of faith is a defining feature of the community and an unofficial litmus test for full membership. The community has a carefully cultivated culture that makes it a kind of sanctuary from the rest of the world where rationalists can exchange ideas without reestablishing foundational concepts and repeating familiar arguments (along with many other advantages). The examples you point to do not demonstrate hostility towards religious people, they demonstrate hostility towards religion. This is as appropriate here as hostility towards factory farming is at a vegan group.
Organizations (corporate, social, biological) are all defined by their boundaries. Christianity seems to be unusually open to everyone, but I think this is partially a side effect of evangelism. It makes sense to open your boundaries to the other when you are trying to eat it. Judaism in contrast carefully enforces the boundaries of its spaces.
Lesswrong hates religion in the way that lipids hate water. We want it on the outside. I don’t know about other rationalists, but I don’t have a particular desire to seek it out and destroy it everywhere it exists (and I certainly wish no harm to religious people). I agree with you that too much hostility is harmful; but I don’t agree that good organizations must always welcome the other.
This bit
and this bit
are I think conflating rejection of religion and hostility to religion. There are plenty of contexts where it’s expected for people to follow one set of norms rather than another: if I want to publish in a physics journal, it’s expected that I follow the established research conventions and concepts of physics rather than, say, philosophy. And vice versa. Each field rejects the norms of the other—but this can be done without papers published in either field having random barbs against the other field.
One can reject religion without hostility to it, just as physics rejects the norms of philosophy without being hostile to it.
I’m also skeptical of the claim that the examples demonstrate hostility toward religion rather than religious people—tribal instincts are tribal instincts, and do not make such fine-grained distinctions. The “Brighter Than Today” bit is a pretty clear example: the people who want to silence the Prometheus are religious. As the OP points out, there’s no strong reason to expect prehistoric religions to act that way. (E.g. what we know of ancient religions is that they were mostly practical with doctrine derived from what worked, instead of practice being derived from doctrine.) So what’s that line doing in the song? Well, there’s a pretty obvious line of reasoning that would have created it: a thought along the lines of “well religious people are nasty and conservative, so probably they would also have opposed the invention of fire...”.
Even if that wasn’t the original generator, it’s still implicitly spreading that kind of message. I think that’s generally bad, because tribal instincts worsen people’s reasoning, so anything that feeds into them (including subtle barbs at outgroups) would generally be better off avoided.
I also somewhat disagree with this bit:
I’d say this is roughly accurate for religions that require belief in things without evidence. There’s a range of religions that don’t require that, I think including some mysticism/practice-based (rather than belief-based) versions of Christianity that make no strong claims about what God is, and allow for God to be interpreted in an abstract/metaphorical way while being based on evidence of the form “if you do these practices, you are likely to experience these kinds of effects”.
The distinctions you’re pointing out are subtle enough that it may be better to ask people instead of trying to infer their beliefs from such a noisy signal. I reject painting religious people as uniformly or even typically villainous, but it is probably fine to share a common frustration with some religions and religious institutions shutting down new ideas. I was not at secular solstice so I can’t say for sure which better describes it, but based on the examples given the former seems at least as accurate.
There’s another reason for openness that I should have made clearer. Hostility towards Others is epistemically and ethically corrosive. It makes it easier to dismiss people who do agree with you, but have different cultural markers. If a major thing that unifies the community is hostility to an outgroup, then it weakens the guardrails against actions based on hate or spite. If you hope to have compassion for all conscious creatures, then a good first step is to try to have compassion for the people close to you who are really annoying.
I endorse evangelism broadly. If you think that your beliefs are true and good, then you should be trying to share them with more people. I don’t think that this openness should be unusual, because I’d hope that most ideologies act in a similar way.
Hostility towards Others may be epistemically and ethically corrosive, but the kind of hostility I have discussed is also sometimes necessary. For instance, militaristic jingoism is bad, and I am hostile to it. I am also wary of militaristic jingoists, because they can be dangerous (this is an intentionally extreme example; typical religions are less dangerous).
There is a difference between evangelizing community membership and evangelizing an ideology or set of beliefs.
Usually, a valuable community should only welcome members insofar as it can still maintain its identity and reason for existing. Some communities, such as elite universities, should and do have strict barriers for entry (though the specifics are not always ideal). The culture of lesswrong would probably be erased (that is, retreat to other venues) if lesswrong were mainstreamed and successfully invaded by the rest of the internet.
I generally agree that (most) true beliefs should be shared. Ideologies however are sometimes useful to certain people in certain contexts and not to other people in other contexts. Also, evangelism is costly, and it’s easy to overestimate the value of your ideology to others.
Yes, but none of this require overt hostility to religion (as opposed to just rejection). I think that as long as religious people accept the conversational norms and culture on LW, them bringing in some new perspectives (that are still compatible with overall LW norms) ought to be welcome.
Many traits tend to be correlated for reasons of personality rather than strict logic. So if you select for people on atheism then you may also select for certain ways of thinking, and there can be ways of thinking that are just as rational, but underrepresented among atheists. Selecting against those ways of thinking can make the intellectual community more impoverished.
Take the author of this post. He has openly said that he’s religious; he has also written four posts with 70+ karma, including one that as of this writing has 259 karma and a Curated status, so LW seems to consider him a positive influence. (Not all of his posts have gotten a lot of karma, but then so neither have all of mine.) I don’t think it would have been a good thing if LW’s hostility to religion had driven him away so that he would never have participated.
I think I agree with not going out of one’s way to be rude, I generally think politeness is worthwhile (and have worked to become more polite myself in recent years).[1]
I also welcome people who adhere to any religion sharing insights that they have about the world here on LessWrong.
At the same time, I am ‘hostile’ to religions — or at least, I am ‘hostile’ to any religion that claims to have infallible leaders who receive the truth directly from God(s), or that have texts about history and science and ethics that are unalterable, where adherents to the religion are not allowed to disagree with them.
I am ‘hostile’ in the sense that if (prior to me working on LessWrong) a group of devout Hindus were becoming moderators of LessWrong (and were intending to follow their ethical inside views in shaping the culture of the site) I would’ve taken active action to prevent them having that power (e.g. publicly written arguments against this decision, moved to collect signatures against this decision, etc). I also think that if I were hypothetically freely given the opportunity to lower the hard power that religion has in some ecosystem I was cared about, such as removing a Catholic priest from having control over an existential risk grant-making institution, I would be willing to go out of my way to do so, and think that this was good.
Perhaps a better term is to say that I ‘oppose’ religions with (IMO) inherently corrupt epistemologies, and do not want them to have power over me or the things that I care about.
Apart from that, there are many interesting individuals who adhere to religions who have valuable insight into how the world works, and I’m grateful to them when they share such insights openly, especially here on LessWrong.
I want to mention that I don’t wish to entirely police other people’s hostility. I was not raised in a religious household, but I’ve met many who were and who were greatly hurt due to the religious practices and culture of their family and local community and I do not begrudge them their instinctive hostility to it when it appears in their environment.
You have pointed out some important tradeoffs. Many of my closest friends and intellectual influences outside of lesswrong are religious, and often have interesting perspectives and ideas (though I can’t speak to whether this is because of their religions, caused by a common latent variable, or something else). However, I do not think that the purpose of lesswrong is served by engaging with religious ideology here, and I think that avoiding this is probably worth the cost of losing some valuable perspectives.
As you’ve said, @Jeffrey Heninger does participate in the lesswrong community, at its current level of hostility towards religion. I have read some of his other posts in the past and found them enjoyable and valuable, though I think I am roughly indifferent to this one being published. Why does this suggest to you that the community needs to be less hostile to religion, instead of more or roughly the same amount? Presumably if it were less hostile towards religion, there would be more than the current level of religious discussion—do you think that would be better on the margin? I would also expect an influx of religious people below Jeffrey’s level, not above it.
I’m open to starting a dialogue if you want to discuss this further.
I didn’t say we should engage with it! I was still speaking within the context of barbs at religion at the Solstice. I agree we should continue to reject (epistemically unsound versions of) religion, just not also be needlessly hostile to it in contexts where it could be avoided with some small tweaks and without compromising on any principles.
Usually if a group signals hostility to X and some X-people are thick-skinned enough to participate anyway, there’ll be a much greater number of X-people who are less thick-skinned and decide to stay out. Even if the X-people could make good contributions, as they empirically can.
And if their contributions are bad, they’ll just be downvoted on their own (lack of) merits, the same as any other bad post.
Worth noting that there’s a substantial minority that thinks secular solstice is too religious and wants to scrub any remaining traces[1]. There was a gorgeous church that would have been perfect when solstice was smaller, but there was a large, immobile cross, and many people objected to that.
PS. I appreciate you writing this and strong upvoted, it was interesting to hear your POV, and the writing was extremely clear.
Fun fact: my pagan friend told me that large, generic, pagan solstice rituals have the exact same fight. Some people want their childhood Christmas Eve celebration. with the serial numbers filed off. Some have strong disagreements with Christianity and don’t want any of its assumptions smuggled in. Some people have religious trauma so something that recreates the vibe that group 1 wants will be triggering to them even if all of the words are unobjectionable.
Not set up the right way would be an understatement, I think. Lighthaven doesn’t have an indoor space which can seat several hundred people, and trying to do it outdoors seems like it’d require solving maybe-intractable logistical problems (weather, acoustics, etc). (Also Lighthaven was booked, and it’s not obvious to me to what degree we’d want to subsidize the solstice celebration. It’d also require committing a year ahead of time, since most other suitable venues are booked up for the holidays quite far in advance.)
I don’t think there are other community venues that could host the solstice celebration for free, but there might be opportunities for cheaper (or free) venues outside the community (with various trade-offs).
Instead of having one big gathering for the whole Bay Area you could have several gatherings small enough to fit in the houses of community members who have large spaces. Since the main bottleneck is organizers splitting like this wouldn’t make sense for the Bay, but hosting them at houses is pretty common in cities with smaller gatherings (ex: Boston, which I help organize).
Staggering the gathering in time also works. Many churches repeat their Christmas service multiple times over the course of the day, to allow more people to come than can fit in the building.
Staggering it sounds kind of nice. It could allow there to be a solstice event on the actual solstice (Dec 21st) as well as small solstice celebrations in the week leading up for those who cannot be there on that date.
I’d be excited to try that at Lighthaven (if the solstice organizers wanted to give it a shot), though I also really like having a big get-together. Perhaps we could have a week-long solstice celebration at Lighthaven with multiple rituals and other little fun things for people to do.
If it were done at Lighthaven, it would have to be done outdoors. This does present logistical problems.
I would guess that making Lighthaven’s outdoor space usable even if it rains would cost much less (an order of magnitude?) than renting out an event space, although it might cost other resources like planning time that are in more limited supply.
If Lighthaven does not want to subsidize Solstice, or have the space reserved a year in advance, then that would make this option untenable.
It’s also potentially possible to celebrate Solstice in January, when event spaces are more available.
Other ways, all of which I’ve seen at solstices:
Limit to songs with a melody and structure that are really easy to pick up. A lot of praise music does this.
Songs are long enough that even though they’re not super easy to pick up most people will have it after a few verses and there are a lot of verses. Some people are going to find the first few verses not so fun.
Leader sings something, everyone sings it back (call and response).
For an example of #1 at a solstice, I think The Next Right Thing at the 2023 Boston one went pretty well. You can hear as the audience figures it out and starts singing along. The original version is much more complicated, and this version I simplified intentionally for the event.
For #2, here’s Song of Artesian Water where you can hear people joining in progressively over the course of the song.
For #3, here’s Chasing Patterns, which is also a good bit of #1.
Yeah, I always want at least a run through the particular song’s Chorus, in an ‘All together, now!’ way. Singing can , for many, enhance communal fun, and the joy of togetherness.
This bit about faith points to something that frequently annoys me when interacting with my fellow rationalists.
I’m a person with faith now, but I wasn’t always, and it took me a long time to figure out what faith really means. I spent most of my life deeply misunderstanding what faith is because the Christians I grew up around often conflated faith with unwavering and unquestioning belief in dogma, to the point that even now it’s unclear to me if they meant anything else by the word. I only came around on faith once I realized it was just Latin for trust, and specifically trust in the world to be just as it is.
If a person is a Christian (especially a Nicene Christian), faith will include a metaphysical belief in God because they believe the world is God’s creation and evidence for God exists everywhere within it. I’m not a Christian and so don’t hold such a belief, but I can nevertheless have faith that the world will always be exactly as it is, and find refuge in my trust that I cannot be wrong about my experience of it prior to interpreting and judging it.
But lots of rationalists I know don’t get this. Like they can say the worlds “it all adds up to normality” but then constantly say and do things that suggest to me that they actually think that if they just try a little harder they might understand things well enough to remake the world in some fundamental way. They lack faith, and by extension humility. And while it’s good to see pain in the world and want to heal it, such healing will always be limited in effectiveness so long as the world is not seen clearly, and it’s my strong belief that someone is not seeing clearly if they don’t have faith in the world to be as it is.
Sorry for this ranty tangent, but the song line is plucking at a thread that I think is worth pulling, and I’ve not spent enough time writing about my thoughts here. Hopefully this is somewhat understandable.
This really just seems to me like you’re asserting that what a word “really means” is some weird new definition that ~no one else means when they say the word.
(I don’t know Latin. Nevertheless I am extremely confident that the word “faith” in Latin does not specifically refer to the concept of “trust in the world to be just as it is”.)
Who’s this ~no one? I came to see faith differently once I understood more of how the term (or another word in another language with the same base meaning of <trust>) is used in different spiritual traditions. Maybe few Christians and those primarily exposed to Christian memes conceive of faith in this way, but then this begs the question of why privilege their conceptualization of faith rather than looking for some some commonality between what people around the world seem to be pointing to when they say “faith” or a similar word to point to the idea of <trust> as part of a spiritual tradition?
Yeah, I was wrong to suggest/assume that the definition is original to you and not the way it’s defined in other communities that I just am not familiar with.
It still seems like you’re making the core mistake I was trying to point at, which is asserting that a word means something different than what other people mean by it; rather than acknowledging that sometimes words have different meanings in different contexts.
Like, people are talking about what sort of toppings should be on a donut and how large the hole should be, and you’re chiming in to say you came around on donuts when you realized that instead of being ring-shaped with toppings they’re ball-shaped with fillings. You didn’t come around on donuts. You just discovered that even though you don’t like ring donuts, you do like filled donuts, a related but different baked good.
This notion of faith seems like an interesting idea, but I’m not 100% sure I understand it well enough to actually apply it in an example.
Suppose Descartes were to say: “Y’know, even if there were an evil Daemon fooling every one of my senses for every hour of the day, I can still know what specific illusions the Daemon is choosing to show me. And hey, actually, it sure does seem like there are some clear regularities and patterns in those illusions, so I can sometimes predict what the Daemon will show me next. So in that sense it doesn’t matter whether my predictions are about the physical laws of a material world, or just patterns in the thoughts of an evil being. My mental models seem to be useful either way.”
Is that what faith is?
If a rationalist hates the idea of heat death enough that they fool themselves into thinking that there must be some way that the increase in entropy can be reversed, is that an example of not seeing the world as it is? How does this flow from a lack of the first thing?
Quantum physics only adds up to normality until you learn enough about reality to find out that it really, really, really, really doesn’t, and then you get to build quantum computers. I reject the claim that faith implies the world cannot change; I would describe the agnostic-compatible interreligious part of faith as a lobian bet—one could also known as wishcasting—that others will behave in ways that enact good. This does not mean the world cannot change.
I agree that there is something real that could be mathematized underlying what “faith” is, and that noticing that “trust” is a near-exact synonym is part of why I agree with this. I think that it would mostly add up to normality to describe it formally, and it would in fact reveal that most religious people are wrong to have faith in many of the things they do. I recognize in myself the urge to make disses about this, and claim that if it reveals religious people are not wrong, I would in fact react to that. I went from atheist to strong agnostic. There are multiple ways I can slice the universe conceptually where I can honestly identify phenomena as alive or as people; similarly, there are multiple ways I can slice the universe where I can honestly identify phenomena as gods. Whether those gods are good is an empirical question, just as it is an empirical question for me whether another will be kind to me.
Me too, which is why I didn’t write this.
You wrote “the world will always be exactly as it is.” I don’t see the difference.
Compare, the world will be exactly as it has been in the past, with the world will always be exactly as it is in this moment
Exactly. In each moment, the world is exactly as it is and can’t be anyway other than how we find it. Then it’s the next moment and the world is no longer the same as it was the moment before, yet is still however it is in that moment and no other way. The world is constantly changing from moment to moment, but always changing into exactly what it is.
What would it mean for this to be false?
This statement would be false is, for example, we discovered that people could change other’s perceptions of the world by expecting them to be different and taking no other action.
So… are you just saying that reality exists, and is not merely shaped by our perceptions?
This is one of the bedrock ideas of LW-style rationality, isn’t it? And what does it have to do with “faith”…?
I’m guessing Gordon is referring to a class of things in the category of “attempted telekinesis”, where people have the implicit expectation that it is possible to change something by just willing it—at a sufficiently subtle or implicit level that it persists unnoticed even if the person would never endorse it explicitly. The curse of the counterfactual is another description of this kind of thing. And the kind of “faith” he’s describing is (I’m guessing, from having some familiarity with a similar thing) a kind of mental move that cuts through this type of mistake, by remembering implicitly that which is also believed explicitly.
I’m afraid I don’t understand what the “attempted telekinesis” post is talking about…
The “curse of the counterfactual” post, I also don’t really understand. It’s about a… therapy technique? For people who are fixated on certain events in their past?
It seems like this whole discussion is based on using words like “faith” in weird ways, and making statements that sound profound but are actually trivial or tautological (like “the world is exactly as it is”).
Maybe it would help to ask this directly: is “faith” here being used in anything at all like the ordinary sense of the word? (Or, any of the ordinary senses of the word?) Or is this a case of “we’re talking about a weird new concept, but we’re going to use a commonplace word for it”?
I had not heard this hymn before, but I love it! Thank you!
I have mixed feelings about some parts of the post, but I’m very much in favor of not dismantling the Sun.
There are many people who want to live biological lives on the surface of Earth. Let them (us?) live, and don’t dismantle the Sun! Dismantle all the other stars, but leave the Sun alone! Maybe you can harvest some things from the Sun if it’s important for the initial bootstrapping, but do it on a small enough scale that it’s visible from Earth. I think that leaving the Sun alone is actually the majority opinion in the community, but then I don’t think we should sing about it in the Solstice. Sing about dismantling Alpha Centauri instead! It’s the same amount of computronium, it’s also a good symbol of “humanity achieving its full potential”, but doesn’t imply killing all biological life on the surface of Earth.
I also find it worrying that the same song that wants to dismantle the Sun (The Great Transhumanist Future), wants to do it within twenty years with the help of a “big old computer”. Having hope for the great transhumanist future is great, but tying this hope to building aligned AI within our lifetime is the kind of thing that can promote recklessness, and I don’t think we should incorporate this into our songs.
For what it’s worth, I think all the other songs and almost all the other speeches were great, and loved the Solstice in general.
The circle is by far my favorite solstice song. I like to it all the time. It is definitely the most ‘sapph values’ part of the performance. I find it beautiful. A ray of pure divine grace. I will say im not exactly bad at being rational in concrete ways. Im fairly successful economically, socially and romantically despite having an abusive childhood. I attribute my success to being methodical and rational about things, at least some of the time. But there is something about rat values that differs from mine. So its very good for my feeling included that the Circle has survived the culls.
I’m a secular person who also is less certain near-term AI doom. While I do think the eschaton of becoming grabby aliens is both true and spiritually meaningful, I don’t predict it to happen soon, so I’d also appreciate the inclusion of more parochial near-term future ideas and technology.
Sheet music is good.
Charging money is good actually.
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Weird take I frequently get funny looks for, no matter where I say it, rationalist community or other places: I currently think it is accurate to say that the sun is a ball of nearly pure suffering, devoid of the conscious experience that normally might make suffering worth it.
Because I hold this belief, I also hold the belief that we therefore have an obligation to starlift it. I don’t claim we need to then turn it into computronium, and I’d still like warmth and lights for our planets. But starlifting the sun would likely break up the solar system, so we’d need to recoordinate the planets to do it. It would be an immense undertaking of scales not often spoken of even in science fiction. But I think we have a moral obligation to give negentropic matter the chance to become happy people as its path towards entropy.
For further understanding of how I think about this—perhaps in over-dense jargon, sorry to be over-brief here—I am very close to being a pure positive utilitarian, and my current understanding of nociception and avoidance behaviors implies that suffering in the brain may just be when brain-managed matter moves away from its path to entropy being made of patterns of intended-selfhood, eg because it is damaged, and the agency of returning to an intended self-form costs negentropy. Therefore, all energy spend that is not a being having its intended form is waste, and that waste is suffering because of there being life forms who wish it to be otherwise. My priority right now is preserving life on earth, but once we’ve got that more stable I think ensuring there’s not astronomical waste is a moral imperative because wasted negentropy is unconscious suffering.
So, does this mean that you have descended past “We need to eliminate the suffering of fruit flies” and gone straight for “We need to eliminate the suffering of atomic nuclei that are forced to fuse together?” This seems like a pretty wildly wrong view, and not because rectifying the problem is beyond our technological abilities. It seems like there is plenty of human suffering to attend to without having to invent new kinds of suffering based on atoms in the sun.
it does not. human suffering is the priority because they contain the selfhoods we’d want to imbue descendants of onto the sun’s negentropy. earth is rapidly losing the information-theoretic selves of beings and this is a catastrophe. My moral system adds up to being pretty normal in familiar circumstances, the main way I disagree with mainstream is that I want to end farmed animal suffering asap too. But my main priority in the near term is preserving human life and actualization; my concern that the sun is pure suffering is relative to the beings who are themselves dying. The underlying principle here is measuring what could have been in terms of complex beings actualizing themselves with that negentropy, and in order for that could-have-been to occur we need to end the great many sources of death, disease, and suffering that mean those people won’t be with us when we can achieve starlifting.
Strongly seconded.
Wtf? “God Wrote the Rocks” (which I love, and am grateful to the Solstice post a few months ago for pointing me to it) serves as excellent contrast to “Humans Wrote the Bible.” These rewritten lyrics are just bizarre. The “book of earth”, “book of night”, “book of names”? “Humans write the book of truth” seems to be missing the whole point! It sounds good as long as you don’t think about it, which strikes me as contrary to the whole “rationalism” schtick.
Also, the original lyrics are already pretty irreligious deism: this attempt at secularizing them is misguided in addition to being poorly executed.
I think “book of X” can be usefully “translated” as beliefs about X.
The book of truth is not truth, just like the book of night is not night.
I think “book of names” can be read as human categoristion of animals (giving them name). Although other readings do seem plausible.
Many of these seem reasonable. The “book of names” sounds to me like the Linnaean taxonomy, while the “book of night” sounds like astronomical catalogues. I don’t know as much about geology, but the “book of earth” could be geological surveys.
This kind of science is often not exciting. Rutherford referred to it as “stamp collecting.” It is very useful for the practice of future generations of scientists. For example, if someone wants to do a survey of various properties of binary star systems, they don’t have to find a bunch of examples themselves (and worry about selection effects) because someone else has already done it and listed them in a catalogue. It is nice to celebrate this kind of thankless work.
The closing lines are weird: “Humans write the book of truth… Truth writes the world.” This sounds like constructivist epistemology. The rest of the song has empiricist epistemology: Truth is determined by the external world, not written by humans. Maybe something like “Humans can read the book of truth.… Truth comes from the world.” (Although this adds syllables...)