I think this is a great idea, and intend to participate, in whatever way I can.
This feels like another good candidate of adding to the rationalist/secular calendar of holidays. These only get invented when people decide to try new things, so I doubly appreciate this.
As for what to do, a simple thing I would be interested in is just learning more about the story. Who were they, how did they get to be at the seedbank? What was the onset of the siege like, and how did they adapt as things changes?
I’d also be learning about other seedbanks, and how they came about.
Finally, as a more ritual-y thing to do, maybe we could make a little seed bank of our own. I expect it to mostly be symbolic.
I don’t love the process for generating rationalist holidays right now and tentatively think it would be better to switch to a patron saints model. People who want to can have their own hero or event that’s especially close to their heart (and maybe a few secondary ones, or ones important to their friends), and if several people who like each other pick the same one they do stuff together, and if a lot of people pick the same one that becomes a more shared holiday (although still not mandatory).
One reason for this is there are just actually a lot of heroes in the world, with wildly varying resonances for a given individual, and the number of holidays the community can adopt and take seriously is pretty small. People only have so much time, and are often sharing their holiday budget with religious or more widespread secular holidays.
But the more important reason is that I really want some holidays that challenge or are demanding of people, and people vary a lot in how much of what kind of challenge they can safely take on at a given time. A cultural push for fasting could be really bad for people with eating disorders, even if there’s a well respected medical or practicality exemption. Mass Winter Solstice is in constant conflict over how dark to go, given people’s different needs. Lots of people felt they’d been injured by being mailed doomsday codes for LW or EAF for Petrov day…
But if you take away everything that could possibly hurt someone, you’re left with parties (and even those aren’t fun for everyone), and that feels sad and unfulfilling to me. So I think letting holidays exist and be respected without automatically scaling them would decrease damage done to people while upping the ceiling on what’s achievable to those that want it.
If any particular hero/event does end up being so overwhelmingly popular it becomes a mass holiday, that seems fine, but letting it be an emergent process rather than an immediate bid for universality seems so much better.
My approach has been to try to have each holiday target one value. “Humans can achieve phenomenal things”, “Civilization is fragile”, “Cached thoughts sneak up on you”. Time of year and trappings I pick downstream from the core idea. It’s tricky because, if it works, it will stick even if the value isn’t good, or stops being good in the future, so I think it’s necessary to be pretty careful with what values you pick. (Also I haven’t gotten anyone else to collaborate with, and it’s definitely not a one-person job; relatedly I have no successes yet.)
Generally I think good holidays should have a very small core of essential trait/ritual, preferably explicitly marked to organizers, and the rest can accrete, be discarded, accrete again differently, vary from one instance to the next, etc.
For Solstice (or, as I internally label it, “Brighter Night”) I consider the core to be the three-part arc (dim > dark > light), with the candle-lighting ritual if at all possible, and the Speech of Darkness. The rest is nonessential. (Even my favorite parts, primarily the choir.)
Petrov Day doesn’t have a core beyond “take a minute to not destroy the world”, which is not a useful core. I think that is related to why it keeps going badly—people trying to add a core, without carefully thinking about the effects of the addition will be.
One person fell for a subsequent spear phishing attack and suffered reputational damage—see On Destroying the World.
This probably isn’t the right place to debate whether this should count as “injured”.
Re: more of the history. Working on it, but there was a combination of wanting to save something for a post on Vavilov Day, and Anna having priorities for the last week beyond finding Russian sources for me.
Re: seed banks. I’ve been trying to figure out how to make this work. I think if we do something with plants, we have to make a reasonable effort to keep it alive over the next year, and I don’t actually care enough about plants to do that (plus January is bad for planting).
But maybe this would be a good shelling day for everyone to inventory their food and make sure they have met their own targets for shelf stable emergency supplies? It’s not perfectly on theme, but stocking up on food is reasonably connected to sieges, and it is a genuinely useful thing to do.
I think this is a great idea, and intend to participate, in whatever way I can.
This feels like another good candidate of adding to the rationalist/secular calendar of holidays. These only get invented when people decide to try new things, so I doubly appreciate this.
As for what to do, a simple thing I would be interested in is just learning more about the story. Who were they, how did they get to be at the seedbank? What was the onset of the siege like, and how did they adapt as things changes?
I’d also be learning about other seedbanks, and how they came about.
Finally, as a more ritual-y thing to do, maybe we could make a little seed bank of our own. I expect it to mostly be symbolic.
I don’t love the process for generating rationalist holidays right now and tentatively think it would be better to switch to a patron saints model. People who want to can have their own hero or event that’s especially close to their heart (and maybe a few secondary ones, or ones important to their friends), and if several people who like each other pick the same one they do stuff together, and if a lot of people pick the same one that becomes a more shared holiday (although still not mandatory).
One reason for this is there are just actually a lot of heroes in the world, with wildly varying resonances for a given individual, and the number of holidays the community can adopt and take seriously is pretty small. People only have so much time, and are often sharing their holiday budget with religious or more widespread secular holidays.
But the more important reason is that I really want some holidays that challenge or are demanding of people, and people vary a lot in how much of what kind of challenge they can safely take on at a given time. A cultural push for fasting could be really bad for people with eating disorders, even if there’s a well respected medical or practicality exemption. Mass Winter Solstice is in constant conflict over how dark to go, given people’s different needs. Lots of people felt they’d been injured by being mailed doomsday codes for LW or EAF for Petrov day…
But if you take away everything that could possibly hurt someone, you’re left with parties (and even those aren’t fun for everyone), and that feels sad and unfulfilling to me. So I think letting holidays exist and be respected without automatically scaling them would decrease damage done to people while upping the ceiling on what’s achievable to those that want it.
If any particular hero/event does end up being so overwhelmingly popular it becomes a mass holiday, that seems fine, but letting it be an emergent process rather than an immediate bid for universality seems so much better.
My approach has been to try to have each holiday target one value. “Humans can achieve phenomenal things”, “Civilization is fragile”, “Cached thoughts sneak up on you”. Time of year and trappings I pick downstream from the core idea. It’s tricky because, if it works, it will stick even if the value isn’t good, or stops being good in the future, so I think it’s necessary to be pretty careful with what values you pick. (Also I haven’t gotten anyone else to collaborate with, and it’s definitely not a one-person job; relatedly I have no successes yet.)
Generally I think good holidays should have a very small core of essential trait/ritual, preferably explicitly marked to organizers, and the rest can accrete, be discarded, accrete again differently, vary from one instance to the next, etc.
For Solstice (or, as I internally label it, “Brighter Night”) I consider the core to be the three-part arc (dim > dark > light), with the candle-lighting ritual if at all possible, and the Speech of Darkness. The rest is nonessential. (Even my favorite parts, primarily the choir.)
Petrov Day doesn’t have a core beyond “take a minute to not destroy the world”, which is not a useful core. I think that is related to why it keeps going badly—people trying to add a core, without carefully thinking about the effects of the addition will be.
How did people get injured by getting mailed Doomsday codes on Petrov Day?
One person fell for a subsequent spear phishing attack and suffered reputational damage—see On Destroying the World. This probably isn’t the right place to debate whether this should count as “injured”.
Re: more of the history. Working on it, but there was a combination of wanting to save something for a post on Vavilov Day, and Anna having priorities for the last week beyond finding Russian sources for me.
Re: seed banks. I’ve been trying to figure out how to make this work. I think if we do something with plants, we have to make a reasonable effort to keep it alive over the next year, and I don’t actually care enough about plants to do that (plus January is bad for planting).
But maybe this would be a good shelling day for everyone to inventory their food and make sure they have met their own targets for shelf stable emergency supplies? It’s not perfectly on theme, but stocking up on food is reasonably connected to sieges, and it is a genuinely useful thing to do.