SebastianGarren comments on Ritual Report 2012: Life, Death, Light, Darkness, and Love. - Less Wrong

20 Post author: Raemon 23 December 2012 06:56PM

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Comment author: Raemon 24 December 2012 06:15:52AM *  4 points [-]

"Hack your psyche" was Daenerys' phrasing, but I'd approximately endorse it. Basically, there are ways that are brain works, badly. For example, we tend to want to shy away from harsh truths, and look for excuses not to do a lot of work. Reading Litanies of Tarski is explicitly supposed to build into yourself the idea that you are a person who IS capable of re-evalulating beliefs, regardless of how comfortable they are. Reciting the litany may or may not actually be useful for this, especially in group settings. I actually lean towards it NOT being that useful, but being harmless and fun. (More on this later)

In "The Value and Danger of Ritual" I go into how I used the ritual-development process to make myself the sort of person who cared about the world and was willing to work to improve it, even if it meant accepting math that felt intuitively wrong to me.

If any of my friends suggested doing any of this at any holiday party I've been to, I (and most other people present) would look at them as if they had spontaneously gone stark raving mad. If the host of the party were the one suggesting this, and if they managed to make it happen, I would seriously consider never attending any of their holiday parties again.

I do understand your visceral response to this (I can easily imagine similar visceral responses of my own to things that are only slightly different), but you make a leap from "the host does this thing which I am not used to" to "the host appears stark raving mad." There's a big gap there where I think you think something actually bad happened, but which you haven't articulated any negative consequences beyond your instinctive aversion.

I recognize that this is asking a fairly hard question, and don't feel obligated to respond right away. But I'd like to you to articulate, if you can, which of the following, you feel revulsion to:

Singing songs
Singing songs about things you believe strongly in
Singing or reciting things in groups

Making any deliberate effort to build group cohesion and signal tribal loyalty
Having candles
Deliberately lighting and extinguishing candles to produce an effect
Deliberately manipulating lighting to produce an emotional effect

Reading excerpts from authors you like
Reading excerpts from authors you respect a lot and who have shaped your worldview
Reading excerpts from only one particular author you respect (I share this concern, I'll address it in an upcoming post)

Giving a speech in deliberately manipulated lightning (taboo "sermon")
Giving a speech in to an audience whose emotional state has been deliberately altered
Giving a speech whose goal is to build group unity
Giving a speech whose goal is to call people to action towards a difficult goal

Having some meetups featuring group activities that some portion of the potential community won't enjoy (examples include music, as well as strategy games, presentation on material you don't care about)
Having some group activities that some portion of the potential community actively dislikes

Deliberately provoking emotional responses (without attempting to build group cohesion or call to action)

Do any of those trigger a response individually? Can you identify which ones either cause a visceral response, or you feel would cause a negative consequence to occur? Either individually, or collectively?

Comment author: SebastianGarren 31 December 2012 01:53:47AM 0 points [-]

I think this wonderfully evokes a point which may be off the radar, namely, that 'ritual' or whatever you call it (the possibility for group aesthetic experiences) is all around us in society. It permeates everything, it is all pervasive. I think that is true.

Choose the ritual that is right for you... not because it is most moving or pretty, but because it is the most true as far as you can discern.

A tangential point: It seems to me that aesthetic questions, questions of art, beauty, poetry, and the place of literature while occasionally mentioned are Less Wrong's greatest blind spot. To recall Hamlet, it seems to me that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your rationality. Perhaps there are questions which we are not ready to discuss, which is fine. We don't necessarily need to attack the immense, perhaps incommensurable, differences between the aesthetic morality of people-who-think-they-think-rationally, us.