Discussion article for the meetup : East Coast Solstice Megameetup

Discussion article for the meetup : East Coast Solstice Megameetup

Summary:

• We're running another Winter Solstice kickstarter - this is to fund the venue, musicians, food, drink and decorations for a big event in NYC on December 20th, as well as to record more music and print a larger run of the Solstice Book of Traditions. 

• There will also be a Rationality Megameetup the following Sunday. (More generally, people are welcome to come to Highgarden and spend the night starting on Friday - although we request that people register their presence via this form so we don't run out of space)

• I'd also like to raise additional money so I can focus full time for the next couple months on helping other communities run their own version of the event, tailored to meet their particular needs while still feeling like part of a cohesive, broader movement - and giving the attendees a genuinely powerful experience. 

The Beginning

Four years ago, twenty NYC rationalists gathered in a room to celebrate the Winter Solstice. We sang songs and told stories about things that seemed very important to us. The precariousness of human life. The thousands of years of labor and curiosity that led us from a dangerous stone age to the modern world. The potential to create something even better, if humanity can get our act together and survive long enough.

One of the most important ideas we honored was the importance of facing truths, even when they are uncomfortable or make us feel silly or are outright terrifying. Over the evening, we gradually extinguished candles, acknowledging harsher and harsher elements of reality.

Until we sat in absolute darkness - aware that humanity is flawed, and alone, in an unforgivingly neutral universe. 

But also aware that we sit beside people who care deeply about truth, and about our future. Aware that across the world, people are working to give humanity a bright tomorrow, and that we have the power to help. Aware that across history, people have looked impossible situations in the face, and through ingenuity and persperation, made the impossible happen.

That seemed worth celebrating. 

The Story So Far

As it turned out, this resonated with people outside the rationality community. When we ran the event again in 2012, non-religious but non-Less Wrong attended the event and told me they found it very moving. In 2013, we pushed it much larger - I ran a kickstarter campaign to fund a big event in NYC. 

A hundred and fifty people from various communities attended. From Less Wrong in particular, we had groups from Boston, San Francisco, North Carolina, Ottawa, and Ohio among other places. The following day was one of the largest East Coast Megameetups. 

Meanwhile, in the Bay Area, several people put together an event that gathered around 80 attendees. In Boston and Vancouever and Leipzig Germany, people ran smaller events. This is shaping up to take root as a legitimate holiday, celebrating human history and our potential future.

This year, we want to do that all again. I also want to dedicate more time to helping other people run their events. Getting people to start celebrating a new holiday is a tricky feat. I've learned a lot about how to go about that and want to help others run polished events that feel connecting and inspirational.

So, what's happening, and how can you help?

• The Big Solstice itself will be Saturday, December 20th at 7:00 PM. To fund it, we're aiming to raise $7500 on kickstarter. This is enough to fund the aforementioned venue, food, drink, live musicians, record new music, and print a larger run of the Solstice Book of Traditions. It'll also pay some expenses for the Megameetup. Please consider contributing to the kickstarter.

• If you'd like to host your own Solstice (either a large or a private one) and would like advice, please contact me at raemon777@gmail.com and we'll work something out.

• There will also be Solstices (of varying sizes) run by Less Wrong / EA folk held in the Bay Area, Seattle, Boston and Leipzig. (There will probably be a larger but non-LW-centered Solstice in Los Angeles and Boston as well).
  • If you'd like to be involved with the Seattle solstice, contact Jai at jai@seattlesecularsolstice.com. If you

• In NYC, there will be a Rationality and EA Megameetup running from Friday, Dec 19th through Sunday evening.
  • Friday night and Saturday morning: Arrival, Settling
  • Saturday at 2PM - 4:30PM: Unconference (20 minute talks, workshops or discussions)
  • Saturday at 7PM: Big Solstice
  • Sunday at Noon: Unconference 2
  • Sunday at 2PM: Strategic New Years Resolution Planning
  • Sunday at 3PM: Discussion of creating private ritual for individual communities
• If you're interested in coming to the Megameetup, please fill out this form saying how many people you're bringing, whether you're interested in giving a talk, and whether you're bringing a vehicle, so we can plan adequately. (We have lots of crash space, but not infinite bedding, so bringing sleeping bags or blankets would be helpful)

Effective Altruism?

Now, at Less Wrong we like to talk about how to spend money effectively, so I should be clear about a few things. I'm raising non-trivial money for this, but this should be coming out of people's Warm Fuzzies Budgets, not their Effective Altruism budgets. This is a big, end of the year community feel-good festival. 

That said, I do think this is an especially important form of Warm Fuzzies. I've had EA-type folk come to me and tell me the Solstice inspired them to work harder, make life changes, or that it gave them an emotional booster charge to keep going even when things were hard. I hope, eventually, to have this measurable in some fashion such that I can point to it and say "yes, this was important, and EA folk should definitely consider it important." 

But I'm not especially betting on that, and there are some failure modes where the Solstice ends up cannibalizing more resources that could have went towards direct impact. So, please consider that this may be especially valuable entertainment, that pushes culture in a direction where EA ideas can go more mainstream and gives hardcore EAs a motivational boost. But I encourage you to support it with dollars that wouldn't have gone towards direct Effective Altruism.

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 : Effective Altruism 102 (NYC)

Discussion article for the meetup : Effective Altruism 102 (NYC)

Hey all, this is just a reminder that New York community is hosting a megameetup this weekend. Some information here:

The weekend of April 5th and 6th, the New York Rationality community is hosting the Spring East Coast Megameetup of 2014. It'll be held at the Highgarden Group House / Community Center.

The Agenda:

Start Time: 3:30 PM on Saturday (Attendees are encouraged to arrive beforehand to mingle and talk to other arriving folk)

Attendees are encouraged to arrive by Saturday afternoon to have time to settle in. We'll begin at 3:30 PM with some opening remarks, followed by a presentation by David Carlson, on "Legal Concerns Surrounding Startups". This'll be followed by dinner and a workshop on Goal Factoring - looking at the things you do and introspecting on why you're actually doing them, to gain insight into your true goals and then develop creative ways to accomplish them.

The next day, we'll be holding an unconference, starting at 10:00 AM. People are invited to prepare 15 minute presentations on whatever they find interesting. Some topics people are preparing include:

• Running a kickstarter

• Talent coefficients and the growth mindset

• Current landscape of the Effective Altruism community

Donations to run the event and (and, on the off chance we break even, future events at Highgarden), are welcome at: 1FtWbh8GyAcDewSy32geCBgsFoHEN7UoZ

The official facebook event is here:

https://www.facebook.com/events/723051941048754

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.

Discussion article for the meetup : [NYC] Self Improvement - Productivity Apps

Discussion article for the meetup : [NYC] Self Improvement - Productivity Apps

Discussion article for the meetup : [New York] Effective Altruism (Outdoor!) Dinner Discussion

Discussion article for the meetup : [New York] Effective Altruism (Outdoor!) Dinner Discussion

Discussion article for the meetup : NewYork - Humanist Culture Open Mic

Discussion article for the meetup : NewYork - Humanist Culture Open Mic