My Detailed Notes & Commentary from Secular Solstice
Previously: General Thoughts on Secular Solstice.
This blog post is my scattered notes and ramblings about the individual components (talks and songs) of Secular Solstice in Berkeley. Talks have their title in bold, and I split the post into two columns, with the notes I took about the content of the talk on the left and my comments on the talk on the right. Songs have normal formatting.
Bonfire
The Circle
This feels like a sort of whig history: a history that neglects most of the complexities and culture-dependence of the past in order to advance a teleological narrative. I do not think that whig histories are inherently wrong (although the term has negative connotations). Whig histories should be held to a very strict standard because they make claims about how most or all of human history functions.
The song describes morality in terms of an expanding circle of concern: kin → neighbor → humanity[1] → “feathers, fur, and silicon” → future.
Trying to line these up with historical societies or ideologies is … difficult. Many societies do not have a concept of ‘neighbor,’[2] and some do not understand ethics in terms of circles of moral concern.[3] A few moral systems are universalistic (i.e. they teach that people should have moral concern for all of humanity): Christianity,[4] liberal democracy,[5] and maybe Buddhism.[6] Actually practicing universalism is really hard: Most societies which preach universalism do not live up to its ideals.
Within one of these traditions, the whig version of history can make sense. Over the centuries, Christianity has dramatically expanded and Christian activists from Francis of Assisi to Martin Luther King have made it more true to the ideals of the New Testament. Similarly, liberal democracy has expanded dramatically, extended the right to vote for more people, and gotten better at defending many freedoms. (I don’t know what’s going on with Buddhism, but its failure to build/maintain a dominant position in India is evidence that universalist ideologies do not generally outcompete other ideologies.)
This song cannot be simply about the spread of an existing ideology like liberal democracy. It also looks beyond existing ideologies and wants to push its ethics to include animals, computers/software, and the long term future.[7] The whig history described by the song does not have good evidence when comparing across different ideologies.
Concern about the far future is, if anything, declining in societies that care more about individuals than kinship groups. Abraham looked at the stars and imagined what his descendants would be like in 5,000 years. Moral concern for animals and computers/software might be increasing, but these opinions seem uncommon, and whether the trends will continue is far from obvious.
The song’s argument about moral progress in the future is: The circle of moral concern will continue to grow, and therefore we should adopt tomorrow’s morals more quickly. The complexity of the history of ethics makes me skeptical that it is possible to predict what the future’s ethics will be. Even if we could, that would not imply that we should adopt them.
The arguments for animal rights, moral concern for computers/software, and longtermism will and should succeed or fail on their own merits, not because they match a whig history.
Life Is Too Short to Fold Underwear
I am often a fan of making mundane things sacred,[8] but this isn’t how you do it.
To make something mundane sacred, you intentionally do something different with it (which usually makes it harder) in order to materially or symbolically contribute to a higher cause. This is a ‘sacrifice,’ which etymologically comes from the Latin ‘to make sacred.’ For example, eating exclusively vegan can make preparing food a sacred act for an animal rights activist.
This song has intentionality in a mundane act, but the higher cause is yourself: the claim is that you should be willing to sacrifice for your own well-being.
This robs the sacrifice of its power. The power typically comes because you are willing to lay aside your own self interest because you believe in something greater than yourself. If it’s for yourself, then you’re not sacrificing anything or acknowledging anything greater than your personal desires, and so the act has not been made sacred.
A sacred act that you are doing for yourself is completely arbitrary.[9] Immediately after the song ended, the Master of Ceremonies (MC) reminded us that the opposite of the sacred act is equally valid.
This song also has an extremely concerning line in the chorus:
There’s good deeds to do and there’s sins to be sinned.
I do not support doing things, regardless of whether they are good or bad. I support doing good things and not doing bad things.
You might say that ‘sins’ here doesn’t mean ‘things which are bad’ and instead means ‘things which other people think are bad even though they really aren’t.’ I don’t buy this argument because (1) ‘sins’ is pared opposite to ‘good deeds’ and (2) the song doesn’t actually say that.
Time Wrote the Rocks
This is supposed to be anti-Biblical, in particular, anti-Young Earth Creationist. But Old Earth Creationism / Divinely Guided Evolution is also very well established in Christian tradition, and is fairly popular. There are loud voices on both sides the debate that pretend that this is a strict dichotomy, but they are misrepresenting the actual ideological landscape, either to consolidate their ‘side’ or to paint their opponents as extremists.
I don’t think it would be too hard to remove/de-emphasize the (partially imagined) conflict with religion and turn this into a song I really like.
Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
| Notes | Commentary |
This was a recurring talk throughout Solstice. Here is the complete list of the underrated reasons to be grateful, from the entire program:
| Mostly good. I am generally fond of reminding people of the virtue of gratitude. I also think that it is important to remind people of highly rated reasons to be grateful. There was some of this at Solstice, but I think that the rationalist community typically underrates this. Having the talk interspersed throughout the program was fun. It gave the audience familiar reference points. I have a few objections to the individual points: 8. I do not think that the obstruction of narratives is what allows truth to be found, or that the postmodern turn has made philosophy better at finding truth. 17. If you think that the sun should be torn for raw materials, explicitly say that. This feels like a dog whistle, which would not be epistemically virtuous. 19. This is a “Huh. That’s funny.” moment. If your belief that humans evolved as ruthless replicator machines seems in tension with the observation that humans seem moral, then maybe something’s going on here. |
Bold Orion
Great song ! Stars are awesome.
See also: Constellations are Younger than Continents. I am leaning towards replacing “continents” with “commonwealths.”
Embers
The Fallen Star
This song is much more accepting of anything supernatural than the rest of Solstice. It explicitly describes stars as small points of light that you can hold in your hand, and which can talk. The belief that it is referencing is that stars are spiritual beings made of fire which can grant wishes and which are fundamentally good, so you don’t have to worry about alignment problems (unlike genies, or fey, or a monkey’s paw, or …).
I took a very different message from this song than the following speaker.
The star tells the narrator that it is very weak and is about to go out, but it still could be able to grant a wish. The narrator responds with a giant list of wishes. We don’t know if the star actually could grant a wish because it goes out while the narrator is listening to the sound of his own voice.
In this situation, you should ask for something specific and quick: ‘Can you eradicate malaria?’ or (from the song): ‘I wish my mother would be well.’ That way, the star has a chance of fulfilling the wish before its light goes out.
This is a song about being more humble in your desires—and about speaking quickly.
On Wanting Things
| Notes | Commentary |
It was cruel of the star to make it safe to want things. You need to be safe for your circle to grow. We are not very good at being OK. We are better than we used to be. We often deal with brokenness by denial. This is often acceptable and adaptive. But this night is the time to notice this. Brokenness and mortality and existential risk. It is good to notice your wants. Sometimes what you want is something that you can just have. | I disagree about the message of the song. It might feel like you need to be safe in order to grow your circle, but that is wrong. One of the best ways to deal with suffering is to turn outwards and try to find ways to help others. In material ways, we are much better off than we used to be. But it’s not clear to me that this has translated into feeling OK more of the time. This divergence between material well being and mental well being is an important modern crisis. Existential risk features prominently in this program. More on this elsewhere. |
Offer to have people step out if being in the night is too uncomfortable for them. It takes a lot of courage to walk out of something like this, so this is less real of an offer than it appears.[11]
Night
Bitter Wind Lullaby
The second paragraph here is some notes that I’m not sure what they’re supposed to be attached to. Maybe commentary on this song by the MC.
From the perspective of not understanding winter. I interpreted it as being sung by a plant—or perhaps a small mouse. Apparently, the perspective is supposed to be early human. How early? I’m worried that the song falls prey to the fallacy that people in the past were a lot stupider than they were.
Trials scale with capabilities. We have the same monkey hardware, designed for a different setting. It is paralyzing to make decisions that impact the world. Feels impossible to live with, yet we do.
Hymn to Breaking Strain
Feels icky, although I’d have to look at the lyrics more closely to understand why.
Also probably technically false: I expect that military handbooks have estimates for how much stress men can bear before they stop being militarily effective.
For Every Ailment Under the Sun
| Notes | Commentary |
Some grave concerns—about AI x-risk. Other disasters mentioned as an afterthought. End of humanity = end of all good things. Speaker is a therapist working at MIRI. “What’s worked for me as a therapist.” Serenity Prayer by Mother Goose. Surprised that nursery rhymes can be profound. Acceptance & agency. X-risk is mostly in the ‘can’t control’ bucket. We are bad at acceptance as a species. Really grieving is an active process. I am in love with living and prefer not to stop. Our children might be killed by it. After the pause—breath. I still exist, my children too. Keep on striving in the face of obstacles. Too soon to give up. Human brains thrive on trying. Make your little corner better. Gives permission to work on something else instead. Don’t fail to notice the present. It is OK or better. Joy is OK. Hard to say if tried & true strategies will work. I have doubts. Mix in plenty of play. Good advice even if you don’t think the world will end. Happiness on short time scales. | Despite the title, this talk focused on one ailment: powerful, dangerous AI. This talk functioned as a normalization of the belief that AI is likely to kill everyone. It did not argue for this position, but treated it as given, and demonstrated that high status people in the rationalist community have this belief. The speaker explicitly stated that she has not figured out how to deal with living under the threat of AI x-risk. I am skeptical of the wisdom of someone giving public advice on how to solve a problem that they have not solved for themself. Working through a problem together can be good on a smaller scale, but saying the same sorts of things in front of a large group of people seems likely to make mental health problems worse. Even if she is good for MIRI’s mental health, she might not be the right person for this. Her proposed solution / coping mechanism begins with a nursery rhyme. It is not surprising that it contains deep wisdom: a goal of nursery rhymes is to convey an important idea as easily as possible. But for this particular idea, there is something even more straightforward and well known: the Serenity Prayer, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”[12] Some of the advice she gave is good. The Serenity Prayer is good. Actually trying to solve the problems you’re facing is good. Caring about local problems and making your little corner of the world better is good. Some of the advice she gave is concerning. I don’t think a good response is to just focus on happiness on short time scales: happiness intended for longer time scales is more fulfilling, even in the moment. I worry that she felt the need to tell people that joy is OK. Joy is obviously, unambiguously good. It did not feel there was a theme uniting the advice. Instead, it felt more like a grab-bag of suggestions. I doubt that most people remembered the suggestions unless they wrote them down.[13] The net result of the talk was probably depressing, not helpful or consoling. |
No One Survives
Seems bad.
Songs Stay Sung
This is the key pivot point in the program, where the descent into darkness ends and the turn towards light begins.
I was very surprised because this song sounded Spinozist to me. I didn’t think that the rationalist community was particularly influenced by Spinoza. Other people I’ve talked to did not get this impression, so maybe I’m interpreting it wrong.
Spinoza[14] (and Einstein, who was a Spinozist) tends to think of experiencing the world as the result of an observer moving through a fully predetermined sequence of events, rather than as a continually changing present. The focus is on the ‘static’ 4D spacetime, rather than changes in 3D space. Think of the stack of frames that make up a movie, rather than the changing image on the screen. This results in a kind of indifference to how morally relevant different times are. There is no real reason to care about the present or future more than the past, because the whole thing ‘already exists’ and it’s just your experience moving through it. Despite Spinoza’s view of the world being mostly materialistic (Spinoza equates ‘God’ with all of Nature), Spinoza finds this to be a spiritually fulfilling experience.
This song treats the past as continuing to have real existence and derives hope and meaning from that, which is why it feels Spinozist to me.
Call and Response: Defiance
The thesis statement of the program.
Unsurprisingly, I disagree with it. Physics is indifferent, but physics is not all there is. We can be a light in the world, but the ultimate source of this light is from God.
The fact that there is a call and response also most precisely locates what tradition this program is modeled off of. Call and response came from African American churches, and so is much more common in American Protestantism than in European Protestantism. The fact this it is used only once suggests that this is modeled after a predominantly white church, not a predominantly black church or a church in Africa.[15]
Dawn
Brighter Than Today
This was the least surprising song to be sung at Solstice: a hymn of humanistic progress.
Half Monkey, Half God
| Notes | Commentary |
What do you see when you look at a person? “You who was forged by the death of your father’s brothers.” Check in with the monkey. He was not built for this. Have the monkey’s back, even when you fail. Work with yourself. You can do powerful things if you work together (with yourself). | I probably believe the title of the talk more literally than the speaker does. I disagree with how the word ‘God’ is used. He seems to mean ‘something that can understand and build the future.’ This is a very limited understanding of God. This is a discussion about a kind of dualism—like body vs mind or reason vs the passions. There are extremely well developed versions of this by e.g. Hume, which I am not familiar with. |
Song of the Artesian Water
Entertaining, even though somewhat anti-religious.
Portrays working to improve your situation as opposed to praying for relief, which is not typically how religious people understand things. You can do both: “Pray as though everything depends on God. Work as though everything depends on you.”
This song sounded like bad geology to me. You need very particular conditions to get an artesian well: you can’t just find pick a place to drill and reasonably hope to find it. Artesian wells are also typically shallow, so if you’re 1,000 feet down and haven’t found anything, you should probably stop. Unfortunately for my intuition, the words were written by an Australian poet. Australia has the largest and deepest artesian aquifer in the world, covering the entire eastern half of the Outback. In much of Australia, it is reasonable to pick a random spot and drill thousands of feet down to find artesian water.
The song says something about how Watt defined the unit ‘horsepower.’ I don’t know the particular history for how he choose the value he did (obviously, not all horses produce the same power), but there are a lot of myths surrounding it. It’s good to be careful to not get the history wrong.
I Have Seen the Tops of Clouds
Preamble:
| Notes | Commentary |
“I don’t think it’s good to be hopeless.” Hope is an uncertainty. Your OKness shouldn’t be uncertain. | I don’t think that hope is intrinsically uncertain. You can hope for something that you know will happen in the future: “The Sun’ll Come Out … Tomorrow !” This feels much more Stoic than the rest of the program. |
The song was partially fun, partially concerning.
Morning
We Will Not Die of This
Motherhood & childbirth.
| Notes | Commentary |
(Has one leg. Is expecting a child.) Historically, 1% of births resulted in the mother’s death. 1⁄20 lifetime chance of dying in childbirth. 50% of children would die before reaching adulthood. Now, 1% → 1⁄3000 and 50% → 4%. Details of how this happened. Story of Semmelweis figuring out handwashing is good in 1847. Malnutrition & disease are intertwined. Congenital abnormalities are the major cause of infant mortality now. Prematurity is increasingly survivable. Baby incubators were a carnival attraction ! Still work to be done around the world—but much better than the past. Somalia has the worst infant mortality: 1⁄7, not 1⁄2. | Yay ! I knew the handwashing story, but not the preemies in the carnival story. It feels like peak nineteenth century medicine. |
Ballad of Smallpox Gone
Yay !
Feels a bit militaristic, but solidly directed at the enemy of all mankind.
Hopefully, we’ll have to write some new verses about polio soon.
Tomorrows
MC: You may be working on civilization-scale projects. I hope it goes well for you—and the world. Also people working on smaller projects.
Level Up
General call for action, without emphasizing that the actions should be good.
Feels heavily influenced by video games.
The Orange
| Notes | Commentary |
I bought an orange at lunch today. It made me so happy. Ordinary things to do—peace & contentment. “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” | Cute & fun. |
The Great Transhumanist Future
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. Despite the earlier cautions about wanting things, this leans all the way into wanting everything you could possibly imagine.
The song starts with the second dog whistle for “a coder” dismantling the sun in this Solstice, although it was too obscure and so had to be explained before the song started. Other specific things mentioned include mind uploading, “branching” your self, “VR porn and a unicorn.” I know this sounds somewhere tongue-in-cheek, but I think that the people who wrote it actually would prefer a world with widely available virtual reality porn and where people could gene edit animals to make a unicorn.
This is not the future I hope for.
If you’re wondering how we took the leap from wanting to eat oranges and not die in childbirth to wanting this ‘Great Transhumanist Future,’ so am I. This is the sort of thing that makes people sometimes say that AI safety researchers have read too much science fiction.
Five Thousand Years
Mostly questions:
What kind of future do you want?
What kind of world do you hope to build?
Also gives some description of what he wants: immortality & space colonization.
This feels less concerning than the previous song about the far future, but I don’t think it actually is. Conditional on people actually wanting everything described above, I would much rather they say it publicly instead of just asking suggestive questions.
When policy makers and the public are making decisions about AI, it would be useful for them to know if some of the relevant actors have long term goals that include uploading everyone’s minds, tearing apart the sun, and sending von Neumann probes at almost the speed of light across the universe. Not telling them these goals makes the resulting decision making much less democratic.
Summary by MC
Dreaming of possible futures.
Journey through darkness to light and wealth.
What a Wonderful World
Everyone stands, links arms, and sings together.
Re-grounds the high-flying dreams about the future to the community that is currently present.
I don’t look forward to the same future as you, and so don’t end up in the same place as you do.
- ^
Luckily, “nation” was not included in the song. Nationalism dates to the late 1700s / early 1800s, and so clearly postdates universalist ideologies. Don’t mistake Romanticism’s reaction to the Enlightenment with pre-Enlightenment thought.
- ^
A neighbor is someone who lives physically close to you, but is not kin, and who you consider to be your equal morally & politically.
- ^
If a king and subject interact according to their socially prescribed roles, they might be seriously following their society’s moral code, even though neither of them are ‘within each others’ circle of moral concern.′
- ^
Universalist ideals are common in the New Testament: the Parable of the Good Samaritan, “love your enemies,” “there is no Jew or Greek,” etc.
- ^
I notice myself being unsurprised that liberal democracy developed in the West, which had long traditions of both universalist ethics and republican government.
- ^
I don’t know much about Buddhism, but I think that at least some versions of it promote universalism.
- ^
Although not in other directions, like fetuses.
- ^
Note that I am talking about whether or not something is sacred here, not whether or not it is good. It is possible to make something sacred to an evil cause.
- ^
Symbolically contributing to a higher cause may seem arbitrary from a societal perspective, but it is definitely not from any individual’s perspective. If you decide to replace the Seder dinner at Passover with barbecue, then what you’re doing isn’t Passover anymore.
- ^
I think this is percentage points, but my notes did not make the distinction.
- ^
This is also a concern at various points in my religion. I think that we have made some real progress on this front, but have not fully solved it.
- ^
Apparently, this Mother Goose rhyme is older than the Serenity Prayer. The oldest version is by Epictetus, a Greek Stoic.
This still feels weird because the Serenity Prayer is so much more common. If the speaker was originally familiar with the Serenity Prayer, and then looked for a different version, then this would be refusing to acknowledge influence from religion. If she first encountered this version, then it would not be.
- ^
Which is hard in the dark.
- ^
I have read several of each of Spinoza’s and Einstein’s works, but I am not an expert on Spinozism.
- ^
The music is also more similar to what you would hear in a predominantly white than a predominantly black American Protestant church.
[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:
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:
This refers to these lines in I Have Seen The Tops Of Clouds:
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.
Thank you for responding! I am being very critical, both in foundational and nitpicky ways. This can be annoying and make people want to circle the wagons. But you and the other organizers are engaging constructively, which is great.
The distinction between Solstice representing a single coherent worldview vs. a series of reflections also came up in comments on a draft. In particular, the Spinozism of Songs Stay Sung feels a lot weirder if it is taken as the response to the darkness, which I initially did, rather than one response to the darkness.
Nevertheless, including something in Solstice solidly establishes it as a normal / acceptable belief for rationalists: within the local Overton Window. You might not be explicitly telling people that they ought to believe something, but you are telling that it is acceptable for high status people in their community to believe it. I am concerned that some of these beliefs are even treated as acceptable.
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. Some of the organizers believe that this is the sort of thing that will literally kill everyone. Even if it goes well, it would make life as it currently exists on the surface of the Earth impossible. Life could still continue in other ways, but some of us might want to still live here in 20 years.[1] I don’t think that reckless AI accelerationism should be treated as locally acceptable.
The line in Brighter Than Today points in the same way. It’s not only anti-religious. It is also disparaging towards people who warn about the destructive potential of a new technology. Is that an attitude we want to establish as normal?
If the main problem with changing the songs is in making them scan and rhyme, then I can probably just pay that cost. This isn’t a thing I’m particularly skilled at, but there are people who are who are adjacent to the community. I’m happy to ask them to rewrite a few lines, if the new versions will plausibly be used.
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.
Is this action unilateral? Unclear. There might be a global consensus building phase, or a period of reflection. They aren’t mentioned in the song. These processes can’t take very long given the timelines.
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.
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
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)
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.
seems like it goes against the rationalist virtue of changing ones’ mind to refuse to change a song because everyone likes it the way it is.
Hi! I was the logistics lead for the program, and I also had some input on the creative side, including helping to translate The Fallen Star. Probably not to anyone’s surprise, I disagree with much of your commentary, but I did enjoy reading it. Thanks for your notes! Let me know if you or anyone has any questions: I don’t promise to answer everything, and I don’t check this site that often, but I could probably shed some light if there’s anything anyone was confused by, particularly on the logistics side.
this bit is from an earlier post that this post links to, but it got me curious, and your comment is on this one, so:
how many volunteer-hours would you estimate went into last solstice?
Sure, let’s see. So, first off, nearly everyone involved in the program was a volunteer, including myself and Anna (the creative lead). No one was paid anything except the venue staff, the childcare providers, and travel and lodging for the professional musicians.
It’s difficult to estimate how much time Anna and I put into this, but a few numbers to set a bound:
- If you just total up the time we spent in officially scheduled meetings about it, that’s about 30 hours each. The first such meeting was in February 2023, ten months before the event.
- There were many, many hours of unscheduled time spent thinking, planning, bouncing ideas off of each other, figuring out who would perform what and in what order (on the creative side), negotiating with venues on what we’d be able to do and when and for how much (on the logistics side), and other such tasks.
- Anna and I both took several weeks leading up to Solstice off of work, because it just wasn’t possible to do both; Solstice preparation was already a full-time job.
Smaller than that in individual terms, but definitely the largest collective expenditure of volunteer-hours was the choir (which Anna also participated in, pulling double duty there). There were 24 hours of official choir practices, plus five hours of rehearsals (tech and dress), multiplied by 22 choristers. Of course many of those put in more than that minimum number, scheduling unofficial sectionals where they could practice together and just practicing on their own time.
Not every performer was in choir, though—the other performers all practiced on their own time and attended the dress and tech rehearsals. And, in order to be selected as performers at all, they needed to audition either in-person or with a recording. That’s not counting the time spent creating the performances, either: translating The Fallen Star was a collaborative effort involving several hours from the main contributors and small contributions from a number of others. I won’t even guess at the time spent writing the various speeches.
Then there was the livestream team. The three of them were good enough at their jobs that frankly I don’t have a great estimate of how much time they put in, because I basically never needed to manage them. This was not their first time doing the livestream for the event and they set up next to the venue A/V team and just went. They attended the tech rehearsal also.
There were the dozen or so former organizers and volunteers that we interviewed, mostly during the early stages, so that we knew what we were getting into, who each gave a little of their day to talk about what they’d done and wished they’d done better.
There were the day-of volunteers, who arrived at the venue hours before the event and moved things around on and off the stage, advanced the slides on the projector, helped with taking tickets, answered questions and directed people, and so on. We did pay the ones who skipped the event entirely so that they could provide childcare.
Enough people participated in Solstice as a volunteer that regrettably, I’m probably forgetting some of them as I type this out now. My estimate for the volunteer-hour total for this event would be a four-digit number. Of our costs, over half of them were related to the venue or related costs such as event insurance. Very few of our costs could be significantly defrayed by volunteer hours without making pretty significant asks of individuals who were already putting tons of time into this event, which seemed incorrect.
Hope that answers your question!
This is more volunteer-based than I was expecting. I would have guessed that Solstice had a lot of creative work, the choir, and day-of work done by volunteers, but that the organizers and most of the performers were paid (perhaps below market rates). As it is, it is probably more volunteer-based than most Christmas programs.
I’ll edit the original post to say that this suggestion is already being followed.
I’m curious what you think of the original version of the song, which I interpret as something like anti-Young Earth but pro-Divinely Guided Evolution.
The original version of the song reads to me as being deist or pantheist. You could replace ‘God’ with ‘Nature’ and the meaning would be almost the same. My view of Divinely Guided Evolution has a personal God fiddling with random mutations and randomly determined external factors to create the things He wants.
It is definitely anti-Young-Earth-Creationism, but it is also dismissive of the Bible. Even if you don’t think that Genesis 1 should be treated as a chronology, I think that you should take the Bible seriously. Its commentary on what it means to be human is important.
As the original author of underrated reasons to be thankful (here), I guess I can confirm that tearing apart the sun for raw materials was not an intended implication.
as Solstice creative lead I neither support nor oppose tearing apart the sun for raw materials
And guinea worm.