Common knowledge is important. So I wanted to note:
Every year on Solstice feedback forms, I get concerns about songs like "The X days of X-Risk" or "When I Die" (featuring lines including 'they may freeze my body when I die'), that they are too weird and ingroupy and offputting to people who aren't super-nerdy-transhumanists
But I also get comments from people who know little about X-risk or cryonics or whatever who say "these songs are hilarious and awesome." Sunday Assemblies who have no connection to Less Wrong sing When I Die and it's a crowd favorite every year.
And my impression is that people are only really weirded out by these songs on behalf of other people who are only weirded out by them on behalf of other people. There might be a couple people who are genuinely offput the ideas but if so it's not super clear to me. I take very seriously the notion of making Solstice inclusive while retaining it's "soul", talk to lots of people about what they find alienating or weird, and try to create something that can resonate with as many people as possible.
So I want it to at least be clear: if you are personally actually offput by those songs for your own sake, that makes sense and I want to know about it, but if you're just worried about other people, I'm pretty confident you don't need to be. The songs are designed so you don't need to take them seriously if you don't want to.
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Random note 1: I think the only line that's raised concern from some non-LW-ish people for When I Die is "I'd prefer to never die at all", and that's because it's literally putting words in people's mouths which aren't true for everyone. I mentioned that to Glen. We'll see if he can think of anything else
Random note 2: Reactions to more serious songs like "Five Thousand Years" seem generally positive among non-transhumanists, although sometimes slightly confused. The new transhumanist-ish song this year, Endless Light, has gotten overall good reviews.
Coincidentally, I was thinking today about whether people upvote some LW articles because they felt really useful for them, or just because they believe they could be useful for other people. Another instance of a similar problem.
(Specifically, I was considering writing an article explaining some more or less high-school math. Because... well, people have random blind spots, so maybe this could actually help someone. It's an experiment, and I would get feedback in form of upvotes, right? And then I was like: oh crap, people could actually upvote this article even if it wouldn't be useful for anyone, just because everyone would be like: well, this is all obvious for me, but someone else will probably benefit from reading this.)
Is there a general solution? I guess in our culture, you could just tell people "please now express how you feel about the issue, ignoring your prediction of how other people will feel about it". Or perhaps create a poll containing options in the form of "I feel X, but I predict other people will feel Y".
I'll leave you wondering whether I upvoted this because I thought this comment was useful or I just someone else would have thought it was interesting. :P