It makes sense that some people might be turned off by ritual. I hope those people went to one of the several other New York Less Wrong megameetups, or to the designated ritual-free day Sunday, or even on Saturday for the two hours before the ritual started. If they come to an event that has "RITUAL" in big letters all over it on the day when the ritual is scheduled to occur then I don't think you can fairly accuse it of being inflicted on them without such a sweeping redefinition of "consent" that it becomes impossible to ever do anything that doesn't exactly conform to social norms.

A lot of the above criticisms act like the ritual ruined a perfectly good meetup, but I think without the ritual this meetup would not have occurred. I went there all the way from Maryland because I wanted to see the ritual after reading about it last year. I dragged a friend who was also there because she loved rituals. Many people there weren't even in the LW community at all and came only because they wanted to see what the ritual was about. Quite a few people organized cross-continental flights from California because they wanted to participate in the ritual. If Raemon had said "Okay everyone, let's have yet another meetup and talk about Bayes for a few hours", there simply wouldn't have been a meetup of this size.

So on utilitarian grounds, I think it is a pure loss to take dozens of people for whom this is one of the highlights of their year, and hold them hostage to the purely theoretical possibility that there might be someone who wants to go to a megameetup, refuses to go to any of the many non-ritual megameetups, mysteriously hates ritual despite her insistence on only going to the megameetup with "ritual" in the name, refuses to go on the designated non-ritual day, refuses to leave or even go upstairs when the ritual starts, and is such a utility monster that her needs outweigh those of everyone else.

And knowing what the ritual was like, it's also hard for me to take the idea of exclusion seriously. I understand why people who came on the second day might feel like they missed something, but the same would be true if we'd all gone out to watch a movie Saturday night and they hadn't seen it. But other than that? We sung silly songs from Portal and Firefly together for a while. Now we are closer far than brothers, and shall never again feel respect or human feeling for anyone outside our sacred circle.

No, seriously, I do understand the idea of the Dark Arts (I coined our community's use of the term). But I think there's a difference between brainwashing and inspiration. Brainwashing changes your beliefs, inspiration helps you live up to them. I don't know if it's possible to do inspiration without even the slightest chance of brainwashing, but I'd rather not ban all inspirational activities until we prove it.

If it helps, think of this less as people in robes chanting in a dead language and more as our version of a school graduation (which, uh, also involves people in robes chanting in a dead language, but you get the picture). At a school graduation they sing songs, somebody talks about the values of the school and the importance of learning, and then everyone goes forth psyched about their future and has fond memories later. The same is true of weddings, funerals, the Fourth of July, birthday parties, summer camps. To excise all of those things from our lives because we can't prove they don't cause some residual brainwashing would make the world less than it was.

As a secular Jew, I grew up treating Passover and even my Bar Mitzvah in about the same way I treated birthday parties and summer camps; a fun time to get together and sing and appreciate family and friends, a marking of life transitions and the passing of time. But it grew harder and harder for me to appreciate them when I realized that I didn't really approve of celebrating the deaths of the Egyptian first-born, or that chanting the Torah and drawing moral lessons from it felt kind of like BSing in front of everyone. Even school graduations got to feel a little like "go forth and be a cog in a slightly more complex machine than the one you are currently a cog in."

In New York, I was able to have a good time and sing and meet people and mark the passings of the seasons, and for one of the first times affirm values that I really believed in. When Raemon got up there and started talking about how each year the sun went dark, and each year people died during the winter, but each year the sun came back - and when he went onto how each year we humans added a little bit more of our own light, and one day we would conquer the darkness entirely and no one would have to die anymore - well, it was a beautiful experience. Not life altering, not rationality-maximizing, but beautiful. And to be terribly clinical, the person I was before the ritual would have approved of everything that went on, which is not a test simple brainwashing can pass.

I agree that experiencing the sacred can be done individually. So can sex. It's not the same, though, in either case. Ever since the days of lighting fires and chanting about the gods, we've been doing our sacredness in groups. Even the ancients who took "sacred" totally literally knew you needed a minyan. It just works better. It's something I feel a need for. And I'd only fulfill that need in a group I completely trust, because of the brainwashing and awkwardness concerns you mentioned. And this was it. I don't think I took it seriously on an intellectual level, and I didn't have the same feelings as the people above who said it helped cement concepts into their mind. But I felt catharsis afterwards. I smiled a lot and sang a lot and it was good.

A commenter downstream said that his worry here "has to do with seriousness and how much I value banter and puncturing self-importance". I think we already have too much self-importance puncturing; too much irony. I think on the scales of "funny things should be taken lightly, solemn things should be taken with solemnity", we are too good at the former and too worried about social stigma to do the latter. In fact, of everything I'm impressed with Raemon for, the thing that impressed me most was his ability to take himself seriously, to resist the overpowering urge to say "Ha ha guys, I don't really think I'm cool enough to have strong feelings and officiate a celebration of the seasons, it's all just ironic, I'm not silly or something."

Except when it was silly. Raemon had the rare skill to design a night for us that was both funny and solemn at once, in exactly the right places, and to the exact degree that each idea required. I appreciate the humor but I think it was the solemnity that was beautiful.