[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:
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.
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:
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.”
This refers to these lines in I Have Seen The Tops Of Clouds:
This isn’t a thing that our past selves expected - Lord Kelvin assured us that steel cannot fly; His mistake was quite subtle, and all we need hope for Is similar errors in proofs we’ll all die.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
If the main problem with changing the songs is in making them scan and rhyme, then I can probably just pay that cost.
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.
[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.