= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Solstice and Megameetup Preparations for 2013
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.
Givewell Survey - Opportunity to influence their research
Givewell's blog has recently begun a series of 5 self-evaluation posts (they are on the 4th right now) which discuss where the organization is at and where they're going. They're all worth a read. In particular, they build up to a survey for Givewell followers about how you'd like the organization to direct their research in the future, with options to emphasize existential risk and research even if the evidence is lower quality.
Meetup : Effective Altruism Dinner Party
Discussion article for the meetup : Effective Altruism Dinner Party
This Friday at Winterfell House, NY will be an Effective Altruism dinner party. Effective Altruism is the principle of accomplishing the most good on a global (or universal) scale, given limited time and resources. It can be worth thinking about whether you're the sort of person deeply motivated to dedicate their life to improving the world, or someone who's just trying to do more good on the margins without stressing out too much about it, or anyone in between. One issue Effective Altruists tend to face is that accomplishing the most good tends to engage the hard, mathematical sides of our brains, and less the warm, empathetic side. Of course, in the rationality community, people tend to enjoy thinking about complex, strategic problems in rigorous ways. But it's still nice to periodically get to feel that warm glow. We know we probably want to purchase our Utilons and Fuzzies separately, but it's useful to appreicate a direct connection between the warm motivation and the hard thinking that goes into accomplishing it. The evening will be an informal potluck dinner, where people can share past success stories and lessons learned, and talk about projects to collaborate on. Newcomers who are interested in the idea and trying to figure out how to go about having an impact can get familiar with some of the ideas behind the Effective Altruism community. I'll be talking about some potential projects for the oncoming year, in particular, an EA Camp being run by CFAR later in the summer. Bring some food to share. Winterfell has a nice kitchen if you'd like to do some cooking there. People can arrive and do cooking starting around 7:30, with dinner being served at 8:30. - WHEN + WHERE: Winterfell House Friday, February 22nd 7:30 PM - 10:00 PM
Discussion article for the meetup : Effective Altruism Dinner Party
AidGrade - GiveWell finally has some competition
AidGrade is a new charity evaluator that looks to be comparable to GiveWell. Their primary difference is that they *only* focus on how charities compare along particular measured outcomes (such as school attendance, birthrate, chance of opening a business, malaria), without making any effort to compare between types of charities. (This includes interesting results like "Conditional Cash Transfers and Deworming are better at improving attendance rates than scholarships")
GiveWell also does this, but designs their site to direct people towards their top charities. This is better for people with don't have the time to do the (fairly complex) work of comparing charities across domains, but AidGrade aims to be better for people that just want the raw data and the ability to form their own conclusions.
I haven't looked it enough to compare the quality of the two organizations' work, but I'm glad we finally have another organization, to encourage some competition and dialog about different approaches.
This is a fun page to play around with to get a feel for what they do:
http://www.aidgrade.org/compare-programs-by-outcome
And this is a blog post outlining their differences with GiveWell:
http://www.aidgrade.org/uncategorized/some-friendly-concerns-with-givewell
Ritual 2012: A Moment of Darkness
This is the second post of the 2012 Ritual Sequence. The Introduction post is here.
This is... the extended version, I suppose, of a speech I gave at the Solstice.
The NYC Solstice Weekprior celebration begins bright and loud, and gradually becomes somber and poignant. Our opening songs are about the end of the world, but in a funny, boisterous manner that gets people excited and ready to sing. We gradually wind down, dimming lights, extinguishing flames. We turn to songs that aren’t sad but are more quiet and pretty.
And then things get grim. We read Beyond the Reach of God. We sing songs about a world where we are alone, where there is nothing protecting us, and where we somehow need to survive and thrive, even when it looks like the light is failing.
We extinguish all but a single candle, and read an abridged version of the Gift We Give to Tomorrow, which ends like this:
Once upon a time,
far away and long ago,
there were intelligent beings who were not themselves intelligently designed.
Once upon a time,
there were lovers, created by something that did not love.
Once upon a time,
when all of civilization was a single galaxy,
A single star.
A single planet.
A place called Earth.
Once upon a time.
And then we extinguish that candle, and sit for a moment in the darkness.
This year, I took that time to tell a story.
It’s included in the 2012 Ritual Book. I was going to post it at the end of the sequence. But I realized that it’s actually pretty important to the “What Exactly is the Point of Ritual?” discussion. So I’m writing a more fleshed out version now, both for easy reference and for people who don’t feel like hunting through a large pdf to find it.
It’s a bit longer, in this version - it’s what I might have said, if time wasn’t a constraint during the ceremony.
A year ago, I started planning for tonight. In particular, for this moment, after the last candle is snuffed out and we’re left alone in the dark with the knowledge that our world is unfair and that we have nobody to help us but each other.
I wanted to talk about death.
My grandmother died two years ago. The years leading up to her death were painful. She slowly lost her mobility, until all she could do was sit in her living room and hope her family would come by to visit and talk to her.
Ritual Report 2012: Life, Death, Light, Darkness, and Love.
One winter ago, twenty aspiring rationalists gathered in a room, ate some food, sang some songs, and lit some candles. We told some stories about why the universe is the way it is, and what kind of people we want to be.
I wrote some things about the experience. But here's a fairly succinct description: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.
Holding your own LW Solstice
Winter is coming, and with it, the Less Wrong Solstice, a celebration of humanity's progress over the centuries and how our relationship with sun and winter has changed.
There is, of course, the public meetup in NYC. But I've now had two different people, in different regions, discuss with me the possibility of holding local Solstice parties. Currently it's unclear whether either of them are going to happen, but after the second person asked about it I realized I should probably post about it here.
I was already putting together materials that would make it easier for other people to hold their own events, I just hadn't expected to need it for this year. I expect to have them *mostly* finished by the end of this week (this means a pdf of a book of songs, and a powerpoint you can use instead of a songbook that includes scrolling lyrics and helps keep people focused on a central location rather than staring down at the pages in their lap)
It's still a sizeable amount of work to put a Solstice party together. You'll probably want to tailor it for the interests of your own friends. If you're doing something similar to what I'm doing, you'll want:
1) People to prepare tasty dishes for a communal dinner
2) At least one musically skilled person to lead songs, and/or good orator to do readings.
3) Several enthusiastic people who are excited about singing songs, whether or not they have a musical background
4) A bunch of light sources to extinguish and relight over the course of the evening.
We're holding the NY event on the 15th so people who are busy on the actual Solstice (due to family obligations) can come. But if you're doing it with local people, you can probably hold it on the Solstice itself (Friday, December 21), or whenever is convenient for you. (The themes of the night also make for a good New Years party)
Let me know if you'd like access to the materials as they become available.
NYC Winter Megameetup, Event RSVPs
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.
[Optimal Philanthropy] Laptops without instructions
Just read this article, which describes a splashy, interesting narrative which jives nicely with my worldview. Which makes me suspicious.
http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php
The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell "neighborhood" properly and whatnot isn't a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn't going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.
Rather than give out laptops (they're actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, "hey kids, here's this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!"
Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren't unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you're going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?
But that's not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here's how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference last week:
"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.
So this sounds really inspiring and stuff, even subtracting some obviously sensational stuff (I assume "hacked Android" means "opened up the preferences dialog and flicked a switch"). I've poked around a bit and found similarly fluffy pop-philanthropy articles. Anyone know if there's more reliable information about this out there?
Meetup : Winter Solstice Megameetup - NYC
Discussion article for the meetup : Winter Solstice Megameetup - NYC
Nearly a year ago, in NYC we held the first Less Wrong Winter Solstice - a celebration of the past, present and future of winter, and the progress humankind has made over the years, and the progress we will continue to make.
We'll be doing it again this year, on the weekend of December 15th and 16th. Our exact plans are still in motion, but people who want to come from out of state may want to start thinking about travel plans.
It is likely that the communal music celebration will be on Saturday evening, and that Sunday afternoon will be freeform discussion with refreshments. Due to limited seating, my recommendation is that people who primarily want to meet a lot of Less Wrong folk should come to the Sunday party, and people who specifically want to participate in ritual should come on Saturday.
(Don't shy away from coming to the evening celebration if you want to, we can make room. I just know that there are people who like big LW community events but don't care much for ritual/tribalism, and figure it's better not to try to cater to everyone all at once)
The event will be held at Winterfell House, a three story apartment building that 5 of us recently acquired in Manhattan. It would be useful if we knew, sooner rather than later, how many people to expect, so we can plan the scale of the event accordingly.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}