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MixedNuts comments on Ritual Report 2012: Life, Death, Light, Darkness, and Love. - Less Wrong
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You're saying that enabling an extremely common feature of human brains through words, music, aesthetically pleasing stimuli and social interaction is making people less sane? To formalize the argument beyond your horrified shriek and my incredulous stare, what's the problem with religion?
It's a superstimulus, and all superstimuli are dangerous? It might be fair to say it's one - religion existed in the ancestral environment, but modern forms are likely optimized beyond that. But superstimuli are everywhere - chocolate and Photoshopped models and FarmVille. Are you generally this panicked about them, and if so why aren't you a Ludddite?
It strongly reinforces ingroup cohesion. Humans need social bonding, but maybe you're complaining that religion does that too quickly and with too little trust testing? Are you this freaked out about sports, politics, or fandoms? Also note that these are yearly rituals, not regular congregations.
It puts people in a more suggestible state. Like... just about everything, according to priming research. At least not more than belonging to a group which will downvote you and call you stupid on the Internet for unpopular beliefs.
No, it seriously puts people in a more suggestible state - it's better modeled as a drug that as a behavior. Yes, and there's another bonding behavior that delivers a lot of oxytocin and endorphins, namely sex. This is a good reason to avoid sex if you're a secret agent man who might let the wrong word slip, but usually dwarfed by the benefits. As mind-altering behaviors go, meditation is freakier - and it turns out to be healthy.
It has a tradition of being used as a vehicle for stupid ideas and violence. We could just, y'know, not do that, but there are also solutions, like Discordianism, which is designed to be impossible to coherently take seriously enough to be a fanatic.
Name three? Note that aesthetic appreciation is only a subcomponent of religious wonder, and that "holy mackerel this is awesome" is a different type.
Claim to not be a cult
Scumbag Lesswrong
start stealing ideas from cults.
I've lurked on LW for a long time and can shrug off the second-hand embarrassment without fail, but I'll be damned if I ever link anyone I know to this web site. This undercurrent of LW does more damage than anything Roko ever posted.
I'm no stranger to ritual/awe/group bonding (Merzbow & MDMA: the reason for the season), but there is some hazy aesthetic line past which I cannot follow. Nor will I risk being associated with. Sorry.
If you enjoy this stuff, than more power to ya. Have a blast. Just keep in mind how many people are seriously turned off from LW because of it.
[in agreement with, rather than directed at, drethelin]
I - sadly but determinately - second that motion. A "Ritual Report" in Main ... because our community does not have enough novel ideas that are hard to swallow as is.
Thanks for sharing this, Quiet; I'm sad to say I agree with you. I think rationality as a movement can't afford to be associated with ritual. It's just too hard to believe that it's not a failure mode. I personally find Raemon's perspective inspiring and convincing. Raemon, it seems to me that you have a very sane perspective on the role of ritual in people's lives. And I'm all about trying to acknowledge and work with our own emotional needs, e.g. in this post. But I personally think openly associating with Ritual with a Capital R is just too sketchy looking for the community. It saddens me to have to worry about such alarm bells going off, but I think it's the reality.
Of course there are other easier-to-worry-about negative effects of ritual than simply appearances; what I'm saying is that, Raemon, even if you are able to avoid those failure modes --- and I have to say, to me, you seem very trustworthy in this regard --- I think strong ritual associations are worth avoiding for signaling alone.
I just want to say — lest Raemon, other ritual-type-event-organizers, or people who share their values and views on this subject, get the wrong idea — that we should distinguish between these two positions:
I, personally, am not concerned about LW's image, or my image if I associate with LW, and I make no comment about the strategic implications (for e.g. CFAR) of LW communities engaging in rituals; I just want to head off any conclusion or assertion that the only reason anyone would object to rituals is a concern about appearances, reputation, or the like.
(This, I think, is a special case of "well, people don't like X because they don't understand X" — "no, I understand X just fine and I still don't like it". Relatedly: "We shouldn't do X because people might draw the wrong conclusions about us" — "Well, let's do X and just not tell anyone" — "Actually, I think we shouldn't do X for reasons that have nothing to do with other people's opinions of us for doing X!")
I second this. I think it's kind of bad for LW's image to be associated with cult-like stuff, but I don't think it matters that much. But it would be really bad for ME if LW became really about ritual.
It really does; already there were some unfortunate occurrences when I tried to initiate new acolytes, ahem, I mean when prodding some friends across the inferential chasm.
(edit: Answered Raemon per PM)
BTW, there's inferential distances, and there's fuzzy-inferential distances, the latter being rationalization distances past some length.
I'm saying I don't think it matters much if it scares away random people.
I would like to hear more about that.
LWers are primates, too, so some of us need this pack bonding thing in a form of a ritual. I'm not one of those, but I can see how others can feel differently. And given that rituals, whether religious or civic, are pretty much standard and often spontaneous in most communities, I don't see how having a ritual for some subgroup would harm the High Ideals of Rationality. It even might make the participants appear more human, by counteracting the perception of "straw Volcan"ness.
I'm not saying rationalists should avoid engaging in ritual like the plague; but I do a lot of promoting of CFAR and rationality to non-LW-readers, and I happen to know from experience that a post like this in Main sends bad vibes to a lot of people. Again, I think it's sad to have to worry so much about image, but I think it's a reality.
Oh, I agree that the optics would be better if the post in question was in Discussion, not Main.
Rationality Itself remains unphased by a backyard party blog meetup, that's for sure.
I think Academian's post on the role of narrative in self-image touches on the seemingly disjointed purpose of a Rationalist Ritual. We all have our unique approaches to rational thought - my own experience consists largely of the dissolving of narratives in search of actual cause & effect. Not all narratives are destructive (or even wrong), but my employment of rational thought has never included them. Constructing and reinforcing narratives is what ritual is all about. Subjectively, the two just don't click for me.
Using Less Wrong as a maypole to dance around seems.. goofy, at best. Lesser things have been rot13'd around here.
If this is what it takes to signal that we have emotional lives, then fuck me running.
Have they mentioned they are not a cult today?
Hey, at least cults made the trains run on time!
I'm not seeing it; none of the above appears to be saying "Some people think religion-inspired rituals are da bomb, other people think they are horrible, so the truth must be somewhere in between".
Your use of "you guys", now, that strikes me as... below the belt.
No, I'm not saying "Politics and religion both make you very loyal to untrustworthy groups, so they're exactly as bad as each other", I'm saying that politics is at least as bad as religion in this area, so that can't be the reason you dislike the latter. It would help a lot if you stated your reasons, since apparently all of my guesses are wrong.
Citation needed. All groups built around an ideology make people think less straight, and some parts of religion make that worse, especially the cultural norm against criticizing religious ideas. Is there anything about making groups feel sacredness that makes it worse? Does solitary religious practice make people think less straight at all?
Also, are you Algernon-lawing the effects on religion on people who think exceptionally straight in the first place, or are you claiming that they always outweigh the benefits of religion against anxiety, unhappiness, discouragement, etc.?
I'm worried about turning into a cult, but not about looking more like a cult at constant actual cultishness. People not interested in investigating how conformist and closed-off we are can use the characteristics that are easy to eyeball, sure. Making the community less fun in order to making it grow faster in against the selfish interests of most members.
Something like that may qualify (I've never comprehended numbers greater than about twelve, let alone ten to the power thereof, so I wouldn't know). Does it make you feel connected to something greater (I think stargazing in general does that) and serene and loving (of everything) and loved (by nothing in particular)?
Some works of art also qualify, some of which aren't meant to be religious. But they seem to need additional religiousish behaviors to make you the right kind of rapt.
I am curious, are you suggesting (or do you think) that feeling this way, and experiences that make you feel this way, are a good thing?
That was just describing the emotion, but yes, I advocate it.
Pros: It feels several kinds of good. It improves mood afterwards, both directly (serenity, happiness) and indirectly (feeling loved improves self-esteem, feeling loving improves patience). It improves courage, motivation, and focus. It's a short-term fix for anxiety (which works even on partial success). It increases aesthetic appreciation. It's interesting, though most of the fun bits (like hallucinations) aren't universal.
Cons: If you attribute it to an external source, it can give you wrong beliefs. If you practice it in a group, it'll bind the group more than you might want. You might acquire some weird compulsions (I can't write "G-d", I occasionally have to stare at things). Some of the props might be expensive, depending on what works for you.
No I'm not. I'm saying that the religious groups you've observed go wonky because they're ideological groups, and that adding religion (without a taboo against criticizing it) won't increase the wonkiness. I admit it's hard to find examples because nearly all surviving religions have such taboos, but you could propose a mechanism, or any sort of attempt to answer "What's wrong with religion?" seriously I've been asking this for three comments spit it out already.
Okay, so... you don't think religion actually moves people who already think straight away from the optimum, you think that it suggests bad ideas to overconfident people, who are insufficiently skeptical of them because of said overconfidence? Is that right? So, in this example, it'll make people who think they're good skeptics but aren't more confident that existential risks and AGI are likely and other popular LW beliefs, more than any series of speeches at a big LW meetup?
Wait, what? Sure there's a whole lot of people here who are rather funny in the head, but people who are sensitive to ideas explained passionlessly in blog posts aren't examples of people more affected by religion...
You make a convincing argument in favor of banning sex. :P
Yes, but people go funny in the head too if sexually frustrated (also religiously frustrated, but more people are susceptible to the former). You could have anonymous wordless one-night-stands to get some of the benefits of partnered sex without it influencing the rest of your life, but you still get frustration from sexual tension between specific people.
Alternately we could take a leaf from bonobos and replace "hello" and "thanks" with sex. If everyone is permanently hovering between afterglow and indiscriminate horniness, nobody has a relative advantage in manipulating or lovebombing (heh) others.
However, most people's solution to the tradeoff between caution ("don't want to ruin our friendship", "don't stick your dick in crazy", and so on) and getting laid doesn't put all the weight on the former.
I meant more in weirdtopian terms than immediate ones. Love as wireheading and so on. It was mostly sarcastic, anyway.
Even more convincing in favour of celibacy, which indeed has a long pedigree in many traditions of enlightenment.
I actually wrote "in favor of celibacy", but decided it wasn't strong enough. Why should I let everyone else get brainwashed and selfishly save only myself?