Winter is coming, and so is Solstice season. There'll be large rationality-centric-or-adjaecent events in NYC, the Bay Area, and Seattle(and possibly other places - if you're interested in running a Solstice event or learning what that involves, send me a PM). In NYC, there'll be a general megameetup throughout the weekend, for people who want to stay through Sunday afternoon, and if you're interested in shared housing you can fill out this form.

The NYC Solstice isn't running a kickstarter this year, but I'll need to pay for the venue by November 19th ($6125). So if you are planning on coming it's helpful to purchase tickets sooner rather than later. (Or preorder the next album or 2016 Book of Traditions, if you can't attend but want to support the event).

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This is the second post in the Solstice 2015 sequence, discussing plans and musings on the potential cultural impact of the Solstice. The first post was here. 

This explores the Solstice's relationship with Atheism, Rationality, and Death.

Atheism

Some may be surprised that I don't consider atheism particularly core to the Solstice.

This probably will remain a part of it for the forseeable future. Atheists happen to be the demographic most hungry for some kind of meaningful winter traditions. And Beyond the Reach of God, a powerful essay that (often) plays an important role in the holiday, happens to frame it's argument around the non-existence of God.

But this doesn't actually seem especially inevitable or necessary. Beyond the Reach of God *isn't* about God, per se (at least, I don't see it that way). It's about the absolute, unforgiving neutrality of the laws of physics. It's about all the other sacred things that even atheists believe in, which they may make excuses for.

I think it's *currently* useful for there to a moment where we acknowledge that there is no God to bail us out, and that this is really important. But this may not always be the case. I would be pretty happy if, in 50 years, all references to God were gone from the Solstice (because the question of God was no longer one that preoccupied our society in the first place), but those crucial points were made in other ways. It can be a holiday for atheists without being about that in any specific way.

Rationality

It's common throughout the secular world to speak highly of "rationality." But oftentimes, what that means in practice is pointing out the mistakes that other people are making, the fallacies they're committing.

The brand of rationality that spawned the Solstice has a different meaning: a specific dedication to looking at the way your own mind and beliefs are flawed, and actively seeking to correct them. Looking for the sacred cows of your culture (be it liberal, libertarian, academic or otherwise) and figuring out how they have blinded you.

Rationality is... sort of a central theme, but in an understated way. It underlies everything going on in the event, but hasn't really been a central character.

This might be a mistake. In particular because rationality's role is very subtle, and easy to be missed. Axial Tilt is the reason for the season, not crazy sun gods. But the reason that's important is a larger principle: that beliefs are entangled, that habits of excuse-making for outdated beliefs can be dangerous -- and that this can apply not just to antiquated beliefs about sun gods but (more importantly) to your current beliefs about politics and finance and love and relationships.

Aesthetically, in a culture of rationalists, I think it's correct for "rationality" to be very understated at the Solstice - there are plenty of other times to dwell upon it. But since Solstice is going to get promoted outside of the culture that spawned it, it's possible it may be best to include songs or stories that make it's epistemic core more explicit, so as not to be forgotten. It would be very easy for the Solstice to become about making fun of religion, and that is very much not my goal.
 
This year I have a story planned that will end up putting this front and center, but that won't make for a very good "permanent" feature of the Solstice. I'm interested in people's comments on how to address that in a more longterm way.

Death

I think one of the most valuable elements of the Solstice is the way it addresses' death. Atheists or "nones" don't really have a centralized funeral culture, and this can actually be a problem - it means that when someone dies, you suddenly have to scramble to put together an event that feels earnest and true, that helps you grapple with one of life's harshest events, and many people are too overwhelmed to figure out how to do so.

Funerals, more than any kind of secular ceremony, benefit from prior ritualization - a set of clear instructions on what to do that feel familiar and comfortable. It's the not the time to experiment with novel, crazy ideas, even genuinely good ones.

So Solstice provides a venue to test out pieces of funeral ritual, and let the good ones become familiar. It also provides a time, in the interim, for people who haven't had the chance to grieve properly because their loved one's funeral was theistic-by-default.

I think for this to work optimally, it needs to be a bit more deliberate. There's a lot of death-centric songs in the Solstice (probably more than there should be), but relatively few that actually feel appropriate for a funeral. I'd like to look for opportunities to do things more directly-funeral-relevant, while still appropriate for the overall Solstice arc.

There's also a deeper issue here: secular folk vary wildly in how they relate to death. Some people are looking for a way to accept it. Other people think the very idea of accepting death is appalling.

Common Ground

I have my own opinions here, and I'll dive a bit more deeply into this in my next post. But for now, I'll just note that I want to help shape a funeral culture that does feel distinctive, with traditions that feel at least a little oddly specific (to avoid a sort of generic, store-brand feel), but which also strike a kind of timeless, universal chord. Funerals are a time when wildly disparate friends and family need to come together and find common ground.

When my grandmother died, I went to a Catholic mass. Two hundred people spoke in unison "our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." The words themselves meant very little, but the fact that two hundred people who speak them flawlessly together felt very meaningful to me. And I imagine it'd have been even more meaningful, if I believed in them.

In the secular world, not everyone's into chanting things as a group. But it still seems to me that having words that are familiar to you, which you can at least listen together and know that two hundred people also find them meaningful, could be very important.

Now, humanity has certainly not lacked for beautiful poetry surrounding death. Nor even beautiful non-supernatural poetry surrounding death. Nor even beautiful poetry-surrounding-death-that-matches-you-(yes-you)-'re-specific-worldview-surrounding-death. But what it does seem to be lacking is are well-known cultural artifacts that a wide array of people would feel comforted by, in a very primal way.

There's a particular poem that's meaningful to me. There's another poem (very similar, both relating to the turning of the seasons and our changing relationship with the seasons of over time), that's meaningful to my girlfriend. But they're just different enough that neither would be feel safe and familiar to both of us, in the event of someone's death.

So something I'd like to do with the Solstice, is to coordinate (across all Solstices, across the nation, and perhaps in other holidays and events) to find words or activities to share, that can become well known enough that everyone at a funeral could feel united.

An actionable question:

In particular, I think I'm looking for a poem (not intended to be the only element-addressing-death in the Solstice, but one that has a shot at widespread adoption),  with a few qualities:

 - Short enough (or with a simple refrain) that people can speak it aloud together.
 - Whether metaphorical or not, hints at a theme of relating to memories and the preserving thereof. (I think this is something most worldviews can relate to)
 - All things being equal, something fairly commonly known.
 - Since everyone's going to want their own favorite poem to be the one adopted, people interested in this problem should try applying some meta-cooperative-considerations - what do you wish other people with their own favorite poems were doing to try and settle on this?

If you have either suggestions for a poetic contender, or disagreements with my thought process here, let me know!

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In the next (probably final) post of this mini-sequence, I'll be talking about Humanism, Transhumanism, and the Far Future.

Winter is coming, and so is Solstice season. There'll be large rationality-centric-or-adjaecent events in NYC, the Bay Area, and Seattle (and possibly other places - if you're interested in running a Solstice event or learning what that involves, send me a PM). In NYC, there'll be a general megameetup throughout the weekend, for people who want to stay through Sunday afternoon, and if you're interested in shared housing you can fill out this form.

The NYC Solstice isn't running a kickstarter this year, but I'll need to pay for the venue by November 19th ($6125). So if you are planning on coming it's helpful to purchase tickets sooner rather than later. (Or preorder the next album or 2016 Book of Traditions, if you can't attend but want to support the event).

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I've been thinking for the past couple years about the Solstice as a memetic payload.

The Secular Solstice is a (largely Less Wrong inspired) winter holiday, celebrating how humanity faced the darkest season and transformed it into a festival of light. It celebrates science and civilization. It honors the past, revels in the present and promises to carry our torch forward into the future.

For the first 2-3 years, I had a fair amount of influences over the Solstices held in Boston and San Francisco, as well as the one I run in NYC. Even then, the holiday has evolved in ways I didn't quite predict. This has happened both because different communities took them in somewhat different directions, and because (even in the events I run myself), factors come into play that shaped it. Which musicians are available to perform, and how does their stage presence affect the event? Which people from which communities will want to attend, and how will their energy affect things? Which jokes will they laugh at? What will they find poignant?

On top of that, I'm deliberately trying to spread the Solstice to a larger audience. Within a couple years, if I succeed, more of the Solstice will be outside of my control than within it. 

Is it possible to steer a cultural artifact into the future, even after you let go of the reins? How? Would you want to?

In this post, I lay out my current thoughts on this matter. I am interested in feedback, collaboration and criticism.

Lessons from History?

(Epistemic status: I have not really fact checked this. I wouldn't be surprised if the example turned out to be false, but I think it illustrates an interesting point regardless of whether it's true)

Last year after Solstice, I was speaking with a rationalist friend with a Jewish background. He made an observation. I lack the historical background to know if this is exactly accurate (feel free to weigh in on the comments), but his notion was as follows:

Judaism has influenced the world in various direct ways. But a huge portion of its influence (perhaps the majority) has been indirectly through Christianity. Christianity began with a few ideas it took from Judaism that were relatively rare. Monotheism is one example. The notion that you can turn to the Bible for historical and theological truth is another.

But buried in that second point is something perhaps more important: religious truth is not found in the words of your tribal leaders and priests. It's found in a book. The book contains the facts-of-the-matter. And while you can argue cleverly about the book's contents, you can't disregard it entirely.

Empiricists may get extremely frustrated with creationists, for refusing to look outside their book for answers (instead of the natural world). But there was a point where the fact of the matter lay entirely in "what the priests/ruler said" as opposed to "what the book said". 

In this view, Judaism's primary memetic success is in helping to seed the idea of scholarship, and a culture of argument and discussion.

I suspect this story is simplified, but these two points seem meaningful: a memeplex's greatest impact may be indirect, and may not have much to do with the attributes that are most salient on first glance to a layman.

Simplicity

So far, I've deliberately encouraged people to experiment with the Solstice. Real rituals evolve in the wild, and adapt to the needs of their community. And a major risk of ritual is that it becomes ossified, turning either hollow or dangerous. But if a ritual is designed to be mutable, what gives it it's identity? What separates a Secular Solstice from a generic humanist winter holiday?

The simplest, most salient and most fun aspects of a ritual will probably spread the fastest and farthest. If I had to sum up the Solstice in nine words, they would be:

Light. Darkness. Light.
Past. Present. Future.
Humanity. Science. Civilization.

I suspect that without any special effort on my part (assuming I keep promoting the event but don't put special effort into steering its direction), those 9 pieces would remain a focus of the event, even if groups I never talk to adopt it for themselves.

The most iconic image of the Solstice is the Candelit story. At the apex of the event, when all lights but a single candle have been extinguished, somebody tells a story that feels personal, visceral. It reminds us that this world can be unfair, but that we are not alone, and we have each other. And then the candle is blown out, and we stand in the absolute darkness together.

If any piece of the Solstice survives, it'll be that moment.

If that were all that survived, I think that'd be valuable. But it'd also be leaving 90%+ of the potential value of the Solstice on the table.

Complex Value

There are several pieces of the Solstice that are subtle and important. There are also pieces of it that currently exist that should probably be tapered down, or adjusted to become more useful. Each of them warrants a fairly comprehensive post of its own. A rough overview of topics to explore:

Atheism.
Rationality.
Death.
Humanism.
Transhumanism.
Existential Risk.
The Here and Now.
The Distant Future.

My thoughts about each of these are fairly complex. In the coming weeks I'll dive into each of them. The next post, discussing Atheism, Rationality and Death, is here.

Summary:

 •  I'm beginning work on the 2014 Winter Solstice. There are a lot of jobs to be done, and the more people who can dedicate serious time to it, the better the end result will be and the more locations it can take place. A few people have volunteered serious time, and I wanted to issue a general call, to anyone who's wanted to be part of this but wasn't sure how. Send me an e-mail at raemon777@gmail.com if you'd like to help with any of the tasks listed below (or others I haven't thought of).

 •  More generally, I think people working on rational ritual, in any form, should be sharing notes and collaborating more. There's a fair number of us, but we're scattered across the country and haven't really felt like part of the same team. And it seems a bit silly for people working on ritual, to be scattered and unified. So I am hosting the first Rational Ritual Retreat at the end of September. The exact date and location have yet to be determined. You can apply at humanistculture.com, noting your availability, and I will determine

The Rational Ritual Retreat

For the past three years, I've been running a winter solstice holiday, celebrating science and human achievement. Several people have come up to me and told me it was one of the most unique, profound experiences they've participated in, inspiring them to work harder to make sure humanity has a bright future. 

I've also had a number of people concerned that I'm messing with dangerous aspects of human psychology, fearing what will happen to a rationality community that gets involved with ritual.

Both of these thoughts are incredibly important. I've written a lot on the value and danger of ritual. [1]

Ritual is central to the human experience. We've used it for thousands of years to bind groups together. It helps us internalize complex ideas. A winning version of rationality needs *some* way of taking complex ideas and getting System 1 to care about them, and I think ritual is at least one tool we should consider.

In the past couple weeks, a few thoughts occurred to me at once:

1) Figuring out a rational approach to ritual that has a meaningful, useful effect on the world will require a lot of coordination among many skilled people.

2) If this project *were* to go badly somehow, I think the most likely reason would be someone copying parts of what I'm working on without understanding all the considerations that went into it, and creating a toxic (or hollow) variant that spirals out of control.

3) Many other people have approached the concept of rational ritual. But we've generally done so independently, often duplicating a lot of the same work and rarely moving on to more interesting and valuable experimentation. When we do experiment, we rarely share notes.

This all prompted a fourth realization:

4) If ritual designers are isolated and poorly coordinated... if we're duplicating a lot of the same early work and not sharing concerns about potential dangers, then one obvious (in retrospect) solution is to have a ritual about ritual creation.

So, the Rational Ritual Retreat. We'll hike out into a dark sky reserve, when there's no light pollution and the Milky Way looms large and beautiful above us. We'll share our stories, our ideas for a culture grounded in rationality yet tapped into our primal human desires. Over the course of an evening we'll create a ceremony or two together, through group consensus and collaboration. We'll experiment with new ideas, aware that some may work well, and some may not - that's how progress is made.

This is my experiment, attempting to answer the question Eliezer raised in "Bayesians vs Barbarians." It just seems really exceptionally silly to me that people motivated by rationality AND ritual should be so uncoordinated. 

Whether you're interested directly creating ritual, or helping to facilitate its creation in one way or another (helping with art, marketing, logistics or funding of future projects), you are invited to attend. The location is currently undecided - there are reasons to consider the West Coast, East Coast or (if there's enough interest in both locations) both. 

Send in a brief application so I can make decisions about where and when to host it. I'll make the final decisions this upcoming Friday.

The Winter Solstice

The Retreat is part of a long-term vision, of many people coming together to produce a culture (undoubtably, with numerous subcultures focusing on different aesthetics). Tentatively, I'd expect a successful rational-ritual culture to look sort of Open Source ish. (Or, more appropriately - I'd expect it to look like Burning Man. To be clear, Burning Man and variations already exist, my goal is not to duplicate that effort. It's to create something that's a) easier to integrate into people's lives, and b) specifically focuses on rationality and human progress)

The Winter Solstice project as (at least for now) an important piece of that, partly because of the particular ideas it celebrates, but also because it's a demonstration of how you create *any* cultural holiday from scratch that celebrates serious ideas in a non-ironic fashion.

My minimum goal this year is to finish the Hymnal, put more material online to help people create their own private events, and run another largish event in NYC. My stretch goals are to have a high quality public event in Boston and San Francisco. (Potentially other places if a lot of local people are interested and are willing to do the legwork). 

My hope, to make those stretch goals possible, is to find collaborators willing to put in a fair amount of work. I'm specifically looking for people who can:

• Creative Collaboration. Want to perform, create music, visual art, or host an event in your city?
• Help with logistics, especially in different cities. (Finding venues, arranging catering, etc)
• Marketing, reaching out to bloggers, or creating images or videos for the social media campaign.
• Helping with technical aspects of production for the Hymnal (editing, figuring out best places

Each of these are things I'm able to do, but I have limited time, and the more time I can focus on creating

If you're interested in collaborating, volunteering, or running a local event, either reply here or send me an e-mail at raemon777@gmail.com 

Discussion article for the meetup : Salt Lake City, UT: Schelling Day

Discussion article for the meetup : Salt Lake City, UT: Schelling Day

This winter, we'll be hosting a megameetup on December 13th-15th. This is the weekend of the Winter Solstice, a big event we're putting together the rationality, humanist and transhumanist communities of the area. (The Solstice celebration is on Saturday evening - if you'd like to attend, you should check out the kickstarter and back it. Seating is limited and tickets are sold in advance are $25).

Eight members of the New York Rationality community recently moved into a gorgeous house in Brooklyn. It's got 5500 square feet. The first floor, approximately 1800 square feet, has four areas that with sliding doors that can either be treated as a single, huge meetup space, or broken into smaller areas.

Also it has secret doors.

We have named it "Highgarden."

We're really looking forward to turning this into a genuine rationality community center. We have self improvement meetups every other Sunday (the next one is on the October 13th), and have other one-off events in the works.

Friday night and Saturday afternoon will primarily casual hangouts, before most of us head over to the Solstice event. On Sunday there will be a presentation on the current state of Effective Altruism. We're aiming to have other presentations as well but details are not finalized yet.

We have a large (but not unlimited) array of crash space, so if you'd like to spend Friday and/or Saturday night at Highgarden, you should let us know in advance.

Looking forward to seeing many of you there!

When + Where

Highgarden House -851 Park Place Brooklyn NY, 11261

Friday, December 13th, 7:00 PM - Saturday, December 15th, 7:00 PM

Like most things, winter was once a mystery. 

The world got cold, and dark. Life became fragile. People died. And they didn't know what was happening or understand why. They desperately threw festivals in honor of sun gods with all-too-human motivations, and prayed for the light's return. 

It didn't help. Though we did discover that throwing parties in the middle of winter is an excellent idea. 

But then something incredible and beautiful happened. We studied the sky. We invented astronomy, and other sciences. We began a long journey towards truly understanding our place in the universe. And we used that knowledge to plan for the future, and make our world better. Five thousand years later, the winter isn't so scary. But the symbol of the solstice - the departure and return of the sun - is still powerful. The work we have done to transform winter from a terrifying season of darkness into a modern festival of light deserves a reverence with all the weight of an ancient cultural cornerstone.

And the work we have yet to do, to fully explore humanity's potential, is even more inspiring.

- humanistculture.com

Almost three years ago, the NY Rationality community celebrated their first Winter Solstice. This year, I'm ready to share this with as many people as possible. I'm aiming to host a large, concert event, with a goal of filling an 800-seat auditorium. I'm hoping to reach several different communities, connect people, and teach a broader audience about some important rationality concepts.

To make this happen, we're running a kickstarter, beginning today, that'll determine the scope of the event.

A Brief History:

We didn't intend it to be a big thing - it was just twenty of us gathered in a room, celebrating something we thought was important. I put together a series of songs and stories about the oddly specific things that we valued. 

I meant it as a small, personal holiday. But I took its construction seriously. I put a lot of thought into why ritual works, why it's so hard to build from scratch, but how you might build it from scratch anyway.

And then I wrote some blog posts about it, and... it turned out to really really resonate with people here. And when I shared with non-Less Wrong folk, even people who had little interest in rationality, they still by and large found it interesting and powerful. I had worried it might look weird - to the contrary, it almost seemed reassuringly normal... and yet also something distinct and new that seemed novel and compelling.

The first year, there were 20 attendees from NY. The second year, we had 50 people coming from Boston, San Francisco and other places, and a group in Ohio who took as inspiration to create their own event. The event was far more successful from an emotional standpoint - many people walked away feeling inspired, connected and awed.

A few months ago, the Melbourne rationalists, put on their own Winter Solstice as well. And this December, we have people in Boston, San Francisco, Ohio, Germany, and Washington DC planning their own events.

What Comes Next:

In NYC this year, my goal is to make a serious stab at creating mainstream culture. I should note that this is somewhat different from "Less Wrong Culture" - there are somethings that LW offers that I think are genuinely valuable to everyone, and there are things I think we focus on because of the people LW attracts. I'm branding this as distinct from Less Wrong (the website I'm running this from is 'humanistculture.com', and is intended to be a general hub for skeptical/rational/humanist artwork and culture.

But we have important messages that the rest of the world should hear. One of my primary goals with the event is to make the ideas behind Effective Altruism not just intellectually but emotionally salient, and to hightlight Existential Risk, in particular, as a concept that people should seriously evaluate. Dovetailing with this will be an attempt to reach people who have the potential to become valuable agents of positive change, and giving them some activation energy.

One event isn't enough to radically change anyone's life, unless they were already hovering on the cusp of agent-hood. So it is also my hope to host a large reception afterwards, where people can connect over what they just experienced, and find their way to a community that will meet their needs, where they can become the people they want to be, over time. For some people, this will be Less Wrong or similar groups. For others it may be Effective Altruism-focused groups, or more mainstream secular communities.

Although this is growing beyond the LW community at this point, it has firm roots in some of our most important ideas. I think it will continue to have value to the community here. 

The kickstarter page is here, for those who wish to come, or to support the event.

I'm officially spinning the Solstice and related ritual stuff into something distinct from Less Wrong (there are good reasons to leave LW focusing on straight-up rationality, and I think it should cater more towards "serious business intellectuals" than trying to appeal to the masses, which is essentially my goal). 

I'll be checking in from time to time to let people know what I'm doing. I just posted an introduction newsletter for Solstice and Megameetup activity for 2013. You can view it here, and if you want to participate in future discussion, you may want to join the rational-ritual mailing list. 

Some key points:

The Winter Solstice 2011 had been a bit of an experiment, and went well enough, but left us with a sense of "all right, now let's do that for real next year." I think the 2012 Solstice delivered on that. Our house was filled to the brim with 50 people, and I got a lot of profound thanks from people who described it as very emotionally affective, helping them deal with death and successful at community bonding in a way that few other things had been for them. 

Now I'm gearing up for this year's work. I have a few main goals for this year:

• Have Solstices and Megameetups at a number of cities other than New York.

• Have one very large Solstice in NY (looking to seat at least 100 people and trying to seat 800 if I can, in a large auditorium), that caters to the mainstream skeptic/freethinker/humanist crowd. (There will also be a smaller, more intimate and transhumanist Less Wrong Solstice in NYC, but I'm leaning towards it not doubling as a megameetup)

• Create an official website that ties this all together, and makes it easier for people to get involved, share music/art, and find people to collaborate with. I want it to be distinct from Less Wrong  so that people who aren't interested in ritual don't feel put out, as well as give non-LW-folk a chance to discover it. 

 

For the first goal to be successful, we're going to need other other people doing some non-trivial logistical work. A few people had expressed interest in having Solstices or megameetups in their city but weren't sure if they were able to take on that responsibility personally. Some people were interested in making a Solstice happen but hadn't actually personally experienced it and weren't sure they were qualified.

These are non-trivial obstacles, but I think they can be addressed. 

I've just posted two facebook events for The Winter Solstice Megameetup, the weekend of December 15th-16th.

One is for the Solstice Celebration - a Saturday night of ritual, song, stories and dance, catering to both Less Wrong-folk as well as other anyone with rational/humanist/futurist worldview they want to celebrate.

The second is the official Less Wrong Winter Megameetup, a Sunday afternoon of mingling and conversations with interesting aspiring rationalists. While there will not be a primary public discussion, people are encouraged to come with ideas about their goals for the next year. Take an opportunity to get a lot of feedback from smart, interesting people, many of whom have tackled some big projects and life changes in the past.

Both events are potluck - bring some great food to share with great people.

People from out of state attending both events are welcome to stay the night at Winterfell House. (You are advised to bring a sleeping bag - there is plenty of floor space but may not be enough mattresses for everyone)

If you have facebook, you're encouraged to RSVP on the events so we have as accurate a headcount as possible. If not, and you haven't already indicated you're coming, please reply here to let us know which day(s) you're coming.

Discussion article for the meetup : Winter Solstice Megameetup - NYC

Discussion article for the meetup : Winter Solstice Megameetup - NYC

Discussion article for the meetup : New York Summer Festival Megameetup

WHEN: Saturday, June 23rd 2012, 1 PM (as well as additional meetups the surrounding days)

WHERE: Central Park, New York, NY

The weekend of June 23rd, the New York Less Wrong community will be hosting a summer festival. Less Wrongers from around the world are invited to intend. Features include:

• A Saturday of sun and fun in Central Park. (Unless rain is forecast, in which case this will be on Sunday).
• Picnic Lunch. Share food and swap stories with Less Wrong folks. Engage in intellectual discussion while stimulating your monkey brain's desire for tribal bonding.
• Compete in feats of strength and sport.
• Singing and dancing.

Summary: Sir Francis Bacon's birthday (Jan. 22) is a holiday devoted to the sciences, with a side order of bacon. Check out the website and share the Baconmas cheer with everyone!

What is Baconmas?

For the past few years, I've been celebrating the birthday of Sir Francis Bacon (Jan. 22) as a holiday, hosting parties with both science experiments and bacon dishes. It's been excellent enough that I want to share it with everyone else, so I made a website devoted to Baconmas and I'd like you to check it out (and share it if you like it).

It goes without saying that holidays devoted to the sciences can be a force for good as well as a lot of fun (if you haven't, you should see the writeup of the Solstice Celebration for an awesome example). I thought it would be especially powerful to have a holiday that was (1) explicitly about science, (2) fun to celebrate, with a "hook" like bacon, and (3) positive and open to everyone.

The main "tradition" of Baconmas is simply to try something new with each celebration, and to record how it went. Everything else is just a suggestion. I think it's clear that the Zombie Feynman school of science is a powerful and good meme. Science isn't only about the things that are shiny and fun, but it should be shiny and fun whenever possible. So I'm linking a bunch of fun, easy experiments (that have actual content for both novices and the scientifically literate).

How can I help Baconmas grow?

Are you as excited about Baconmas as I am? Great! There are some things you can do to really help!

• Tell all your friends! Share the website, the Twitter feed, and the Facebook event page. If you're part of a relevant forum (anything from a subreddit to the XKCD forums), share it there too!
• Host a Baconmas party, and then send me (happybaconmas at gmail) pictures/video/testimonials that I can add to the site! These will help Baconmas 2013 grow even faster than 2012.
• Create a local Baconmas Meetup group, and send me a link that I can post.
• Find or invent any of the following: experiments, recipes, traditions, carols, guest blog posts; then send them to me for the Baconmas site!
• One thing that would be totally incredible: a funny video biography of Sir Francis Bacon, done with puppets/costume/animation/whatever works for you! I'd love to do this myself, but may not have the time.
• Give me feedback and ideas for the website and everything else!

P.S. Thanks for all the comments on my advice request post! I made a few key additions based on your input.

I think I have problems with this:

Litany of Gendlin

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.

And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.

Do you actually think that's true?

I honestly don't think I do. I think there are horrible truths that can wreck your life if you're not prepared to deal with them. I think it may *usually* be best if you self-modify to be able to handle them, so that you don't run into trouble later. But to say there's NO difference ignores the fact that your emotional reaction to things is ALSO part of reality.

I like the idea behind it but I don't think I can really endorse it. I'm struggling because I'd like to incorporate it into my project, but it feels too wrong. And while I'm okay with chopping up lengthy sequence posts to so they can be read out loud, rewriting this to match my beliefs... well, it's not exactly a crime against humanity but it's technically not the Litany of Gendlin anymore which ruins some ritual-oomph. (And the part that I'd most want to change is the last two lines, which are the most powerful part)

Ideally it would communicate: "Lying to yourself will eventually screw you up worse than getting hurt by a truth," instead of "learning new truths has no negative consequences."

This distinction is particularly important when the truth at hand is "the world is a fundamentally unfair place that will kill you without a second thought if you mess up, and possibly even if you don't."

EDIT TO CLARIFY: The person who goes about their life ignoring the universe's Absolute Neutrality is very fundamentally NOT already enduring this truth. They're enduring part of it (arguably most of it), but not all. Thinking about that truth is depressing for many people. That is not a meaningless cost. Telling people they should get over that depression and make good changes to fix the world is important. But saying that they are already enduring everything there was to endure, seems to me a patently false statement, and makes your argument weaker, not stronger.

Potential change I can think of that doesn't wreck it too much and keeps it similar enough that I don't feel too bad: "Not owning up to it will only make things worse." Artistically I think it might be better to change the wording to something like "Refusing to admit it will only make things worse," but then the change becomes big enough that I feel kinda wrong again.

Maybe refer to it as Litany of Gendlin', to distinguish it while staying classy.

SECOND EDIT: It's become pretty clear, looking a collection of comments, that Typical Mind Fallacy is at work here. Some people value truth and emotional response differently. My problem is that a) *I* value emotional response as the end, and my preference for truth, while extremely useful, is only there to facilitate emotional response in myself and others. b) I know there will be other people at the event in question who share my position.

In any case, I'd like advice from the people who believe the Litany is inaccurate (or at least are able to model people who believe that) on how to handle the situation.

Previously, I posted a version of The Gift We Give Tomorrow that was designed to be read aloud. It was significantly abridged, and some portions reworded to flow better from the tongue. I recently finished another part of my project: An abridged version of Beyond the Reach of God. This one doesn’t lend itself as well to something resembling “poetry,” so it’s more a straightforward editing job. The original was 3315 words. The new one is currently 1090. I’m still trying to trim it a little more, if possible. GWGT was 1245, which was around 7 minutes of speaking time, and pushing the limit of how long the piece can be.

For those who were concerned, after paring this down into a collection of some of the most depressing sentences I've ever read, I decided it was NOT necessary to end "Gift We Give Tomorrow" on an echo of this post (although I'm leaving in the part where I reword the "Shadowy Figure" to more directly reference it). That reading will end with the original "Ever so long ago."

Beyond the Reach of God:

I remember, from distant childhood, what it's like to live in the world where God exists. Really exists, the way that children and rationalists take all their beliefs at face value.

In the world where God exists, he doesn’t intervene to optimize everything. God won’t make you a sandwich. Parents don't do everything their children ask. There are good arguments against always giving someone what they desire.

I don't want to become a simple wanting-thing, that never has to plan or act or think.

But clearly, there's some threshold of horror, awful enough that God will intervene. I remember that being true, when I believed after the fashion of a child. The God who never intervenes - that's an obvious attempt to avoid falsification, to protect a belief-in-belief. The beliefs of young children really shape their expectations - they honestly expect to see the dragon in their garage. They have no reason to imagine a loving God who never acts. No loving parents, desiring their child to grow up strong and self-reliant, would let their toddler be run over by a car.

But what if you built a simulated universe? Could you escape the reach of God? Simulate sentient minds, and torture them? If God's watching everywhere, then of course trying to build an unfair world results in the God intervening - stepping in to modify your transistors. God is omnipresent. There’s no refuge anywhere for true horror.

Life is fair.

But suppose you ask the question: Given such-and-such initial conditions, and given such-and-such rules, what would be the mathematical result?

Not even God can change the answer to that question.

What does life look like, in this imaginary world, where each step follows only from its immediate predecessor? Where things only ever happen, or don't happen, because of mathematical rules? And where the rules don't describe a God that checks over each state? What does it look like, the world of pure math, beyond the reach of God?

That world wouldn't be fair. If the initial state contained the seeds of something that could self-replicate, natural selection might or might not take place. Complex life might or might not evolve. That life might or might not become sentient. That world might have the equivalent of conscious cows, that lacked hands or brains to improve their condition. Maybe they would be eaten by conscious wolves who never thought that they were doing wrong, or cared.

If something like humans evolved, then they would suffer from diseases - not to teach them any lessons, but only because viruses happened to evolve as well. If the people of that world are happy, or unhappy, it might have nothing to do with good or bad choices they made. Nothing to do with free will or lessons learned. In the what-if world, Genghis Khan can murder a million people, and laugh, and be rich, and never be punished, and live his life much happier than the average. Who would prevents it?

And if the Khan tortures people to death, for his own amusement? They might call out for help, perhaps imagining a God. And if you really wrote the program, God *would* intervene, of course. But in the what-if question, there isn't any God in the system. The victims will be saved only if the right cells happen to be 0 or 1. And it's not likely that anyone will defy the Khan; if they did, someone would strike them with a sword, and the sword would disrupt their organs and they would die, and that would be the end of that. 

So the victims die, screaming, and no one helps them. That is the answer to the what-if question.

...is this world starting to sound familiar?

Could it really be that sentient beings have died, absolutely, for millions of years.... with no soul and no afterlife... not as any grand plan of Nature. Not to teach us about the meaning of life. Not even to teach a profound lesson about what is impossible.

Just dead. Just because.

Once upon a time, I believed that the extinction of humanity was not allowed. And others, who call themselves rationalists, may yet have things they trust. They might be called "positive-sum games", or "democracy", or “capitalism”, or "technology", but they’re sacred. They can't lead to anything really bad, not without a silver lining. The unfolding history of Earth can't ever turn from its positive-sum trend to a negative-sum trend. Democracies won't ever legalize torture. Technology has done so much good, that there can't possibly be a black swan that breaks the trend and does more harm than all the good up until this point.

Anyone listening, who still thinks that being happy counts for more than anything in life, well, maybe they shouldn't ponder the unprotectedness of their existence. Maybe think of it just long enough to sign up themselves and their family for cryonics, or write a check to an existential-risk-mitigation agency now and then. Or at least wear a seatbelt and get health insurance and all those other dreary necessary things that can destroy your life if you miss that one step... but aside from that, if you want to be happy, meditating on the fragility of life isn't going to help.

But I'm speaking now to those who have something to protect.

What can a twelfth-century peasant do to save themselves from annihilation? Nothing. Nature's challenges aren't always fair. When you run into a challenge that's too difficult, you suffer the penalty; when you run into a lethal penalty, you die. That's how it is for people, and it isn't any different for planets. Someone who wants to dance the deadly dance with Nature needs to understand what they're up against: Absolute, utter, exceptionless neutrality.

And knowing this might not save you. It wouldn't save a twelfth-century peasant, even if they knew. If you think that a rationalist who fully understands the mess they're in, must be able to find a way out - well, then you trust rationality. Enough said.

Still, I don't want to create needless despair, so I will say a few hopeful words at this point:

If humanity's future unfolds in the right way, we might be able to make our future fair(er). We can't change physics. But we can build some guardrails, and put down some padding.

Someday, maybe, minds will be sheltered. Children might burn a finger or lose a toy, but they won't ever be run over by cars. A super-intelligence would not be intimidated by a challenge where death is the price of a single failure. The raw universe wouldn't seem so harsh, would be only another problem to be solved.

The problem is that building an adult is itself an adult challenge. That's what I finally realized, years ago.

If there is a fair(er) universe, we have to get there starting from this world - the neutral world, the world of hard concrete with no padding. The world where challenges are not calibrated to your skills, and you can die for failing them.

What does a child need to do, to solve an adult problem?

The Gift We Give Tomorrow