Future Proofing Solstice
Bay Solstice is this weekend (Dec 6th at 7pm, with a Megameetup at Lighthaven on Friday and Saturday).
I wanted to give people a bit more idea of what to expect.
I created Solstice in 2011.
Since 2022, I’ve been worried that the Solstice isn’t really set up to handle “actually looking at human extinction in nearmode” in a psychologically healthy way. (I tried to set this up in the beginning, but once my p(Doom) crept over 50% I started feeling like Solstice wasn’t really helping the way I wanted).
People ’round here disagree a lot on how AI will play out. But, Yes Requires the Possibility of No, and as the guy who made rationalist solstice, it seemed like I should either:
say explicitly: “sorry guys, I don’t know how to have 500 people look at ‘are we gonna make it?’ in a way that would be healthy if the answer was ‘no’. So, we’re just not actually going to look that closely at the question.”
or, figure how to do a good job at that.
This Solstice is me attempting to navigate option #2, while handling the fact that we have lots of people with lots of different worldviews who want pretty different things out of solstice, many of whom don’t care about the AI question at all.
It has been pretty challenging, but I’ve been thinking about it over 3 years. I’m feeling pretty good about how I’ve thread the needle of making a solid experience for everyone.
Somewhat more broadly: Solstice is about looking at the deep past, the present, and the far future. When I created it in 2011, the future was sort of comfortably “over there.” Now it feels like The Future is just… already happening, sort of. And some of the framing felt a bit in need of an update.
(Meanwhile there is a separate subthread about making Solstice do a better job of helping people singalong, both with a smoother singing difficulty curve, and picking songs that sort of naturally introduce new required skills in a way that helps you learn, mostly without feeling like you were “learning”).
It’s sort of a capstone project for the first half of my adult life. It’s felt a bit to me like the season finale for Solstice Season 4 Season 5, if Solstice was a TV show.
It’s still a bit of a weird thing that’s not for everyone, but, if the above sounds worthwhile to you, hope to see you there.
A thought I had when I read this sentence was, “what makes you think there is a healthy way?” It kinda feels to me like, just as there’s no way to get in a car accident that’s healthy for your body, there’s no way to actually believe the world is going to end that’s “healthy” for your mind. There could be better or worse ways it could impact you, but you’re gonna get some impact trauma.
Pushing back against that a little bit. There’s actually plenty of historical precedent for this sort of situation.
Throughout history, groups of people have found themselves in situations where most or even all of them dying is possible, or even likely. And yet they have work to do; they have to stay calm and do their jobs, they have to help each other, they have to work to reduce that chance, they have to accomplish the Mission whatever it is.
I’m thinking primarily of combat situations here. E.g. an army is encircled, and its only hope is to break out. Or a city is besieged, and its only hope is to hold out long enough to be relieved, if that ever happens which it probably won’t.
In situations like these, there are better and worse ways to behave, better and worse ways to orient, to collectively process the situation, etc. I don’t have a good grasp of what those better and worse ways are, to be clear, never having experienced encirclement or a siege myself, and only having read a bit about them in books, and not much about the morale/psychological angle. But the history did happen and probably the evidence is there in various books and documentaries for someone who wants to go learn from it.
You can still say “Even the best way to handle this sort of situation is going to leave you with trauma,” and maybe that’s true, but I think probably what Raemon had in mind by “psychologically healthy way” is more like “whatever the best way to handle this sort of situation turns out to be.”
I basically agree with all of this. I had this thought in part because I have the fairly strong sense that (current, US) society has a belief that there is a healthy state we should be aiming for, and does a lot of question substitution like “does this feel good/acceptable”. There are much better and worse ways to orient to x-risk, but it may be that all of them feel “bad/unacceptable” and it’s hard for me to see how they could be accurately labeled “healthy”.
Part of the reason I’m rolling the dice on running Solstice the way I am, is, it doesn’t really seem like we have the luxury of not engaging with the question. (But, there’s a reason I wrote this post including option #1 – if I didn’t think I had a decent chance of pulling it off I’d have done something different)
FYI I am also planning an aftercare / decompression / chat around a firepit thing for people who need that afterwards.
I don’t mind a bit of meta in my media, but sounds like this show has just become about how many more seasons the show will have.
#sixseasonsandamovie