My comment was more an invitation for Kaj to steelman his own point than an objection, but I see what you're getting at.

Key differences:

• 1: weirdness: A Boardgame night is extremely normal. Tons of normal people and nerds have variations on the concept. A Ritual night is very odd, and therefore automatically screens out outsiders.
• 1. Exclusionary: Indeed, the entire point of Rituals is to draw a line between them and us. This is off-putting to anyone who does not want to put themselves into the "us". A new person can happily join in and enjoy the familiarity of playing boardgames and not feel like they're being indoctrinated. They can get to know and bond with strangers over something familar. This is basically what Said earlier in this thread.
• 1. Room for individuality/nonparticipation: Boardgame night does not consist of the same thing each time. Maybe some nights we play Resistance, maybe other nights we play Dominion, and maybe different subsets of boardgame night play different games. A ritual not only makes everyone do the same thing, it makes them do it all at once. No one really cares if you overhear "I've got wood for sheep!" while you're playing Ascension, or just having a conversation, but it would certainly ruin the mood of a ritual. The only polite responses to Ritual are participation, silence, or leaving.

• There's some more I feel I can say on this but I can't yet articulate it appropriately. It has to do with seriousness and how much I value banter and puncturing self-importance.

It makes sense that some people might be turned off by ritual. I hope those people went to one of the several other New York Less Wrong megameetups, or to the designated ritual-free day Sunday, or even on Saturday for the two hours before the ritual started. If they come to an event that has "RITUAL" in big letters all over it on the day when the ritual is scheduled to occur then I don't think you can fairly accuse it of being inflicted on them without such a sweeping redefinition of "consent" that it becomes impossible to ever do anything that doesn't exactly conform to social norms.

It was not my intention to accuse the ritual of being inflicted on anyone; I didn't think I said or implied such a thing, but if so, let me assure you that I quite realize that attendance was voluntary. As for the other megameetups, I will try to attend the next time a non-ritual one happens. I was sadly unable to make it on that Sunday. They seem to happen about once a year, yes?

Your other comments seem to suggest that you think that I am worried about brainwashing, or what have you; that's just not the issue here. So your comments such as

I don't know if it's possible to do inspiration without even the slightest chance of brainwashing, but I'd rather not ban all inspirational activities until we prove it.

To excise all of those things from our lives because we can't prove they don't cause some residual brainwashing would make the world less than it was.

miss the mark a bit. Like Risto_Saarelma, I just dislike rituals (fairly strongly). From your comment, and others in this thread, I've discovered that some (most?) people do like them, and like them enough to serve as motivation for traveling some distance, or at least for attending an event they'd otherwise skip. All I can say is: mind = blown. I really, genuinely did not expect this to be such a prevalent preference in the rationalist community.

Thanks for posting the ritual booklet. It's fascinating. With my wife being pregnant, I start looking at things through the eyes of a parent to be. Rituals are traditionally a super-familial thing, but including the whole family. Parents take their kids to Church. Parents light the Menorah with their kids. Parents celebrate Winter Soltice with their kids. Reading through the booklets, I constantly had to revise upwards the age at which I could first take my daughter to such a gathering. There's no "minimum age" to participate in Church, or the lighting of the candles. I understand many LWers are single people in their 20s, and certainly a lot of NYCers are single people in their 20s. But I found myself wishing for a ritual I could do with a family. Perhaps if I'm sufficiently motivated, I'll try to work something out next year...

BTW: By Geneva convention standard, Gallileo was tortured -- "For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person" (notice the "or mental", and it's certainly mental torture to be threatened by physical torture). It seems like at this point we are arguing about definitions, so maybe I'll stop here, but calling the relevant line in "Word of God" false because of that is a bit of an exaggeration.

Is there a new version of the songbook?

Well, this was very interesting, formal logic is a very fun topic. I just spent ~10 minutes trying to find a way in first order logic to write that axiom, as it intuitively feels (to someone who has studied formal logic at least) that there should be a way... Of course I failed, all the axioms I attempted turned out to be no more powerful then "0 is not the successor of any number". I am deeply intrigued by this problem, and I am looking forward to your next post where you explain exactly why it's impossible.

I agree that modern science provides valuable insights into philosophical problems. I also agree that Bayesian probability theory and machine learning are powerful models for approaching problems in epistemology. This is why I'm in grad school in machine learning, and not for philosophy. Furthermore, I'm not a big fan of ancient philosophers (especially ones who think categories are absolute), and I'd like to see the computational theory of mind excised from popular thought, in favor of something closer to embodied cognition. I actually really like the idea of incorporating modern theories and empirical discoveries into a philosophical curriculum.

Despite this, I have a strong negative reaction to your post, because it suggests there is One True Way to do philosophy and that everyone who does not follow the Ways of Bayes is doing it wrong. The last thing I want us teaching students is any kind of absolutism. It can only damage students to tell them that our current models are the true models, and all past thinkers were necessarily wrong. It would also damage students to restrict them to one philosophical viewpoint; as much as I like Bayesian reasoning and empiricism, I think it would hurt students to teach them that these methods are the One True Way, because it would prevent them from exploring alternative viewpoints.

I think that students of philosophy should be taught as many theories as possible, both ancient and modern. By coming to understand the diverse range of models that we've applied over the course of human history, students can learn some humility. Just as all of these past models were superceded, our current theories will inevitably be replaced. Just as we can spot the glaring errors in past philosophical models, the people of the future will spot the "obvious" follies in our own ideas.

Also, the more models that students learn, the more "degrees of freedom" they will realize exist. They will come to understand along which dimensions worldviews can vary; they can then explore other options for these dimensions, or discover new dimensions that no one has tried varying yet. I strongly believe that learning more worldviews is a powerful method of keeping one's mind flexible enough to come up with genuinely new ideas.

Lastly, as much as I love mathematical models and rigorous empiricism, I oppose the trend of applying them haphazardly to the social sciences. If we're studying e.g. anthropology, I think it's a mistake to favor statistical data over first-hand accounts or subjective analyses. Not because there's anything inherently wrong with empirical and statistical methods, but because the models we use are too simple. There are so many features, and it's hard to account for all of them, both because we don't know which features to choose, and because inference is computationally intractable in such an enormous model. Fortunately, the typical human brain comes prepackaged with empathy and a theory of mind, a powerful module for modeling the behaviors/preferences/internal experiences of other humans. Certainly, this module is subject to biases and might make systematic errors when reasoning. But when choosing between two imperfect models, I tend to think our built-in circuitry is better suited for the social sciences than tools of machine learning. I assume that our built-in intuitive machinery is useful for some branches of philosophy as well.

I am looking forward the the ebooks. I hope you'll provide them in ePub format, for those of us who prefer that. [I was pleased to donate $40, which should soon be matched by my employer as part of the employee-match program, thus getting me double-matched!]

"Despite your pride in being able to discern each others' states of mind, and scorn for those suspected of being deficient in this, of all the abilities that humans are granted by their birth this is the one you perform the worst. In fact, you know next to nothing about what anyone else is thinking or experiencing, but you think you do. In matters of intelligence you soar above the level of a chimpanzee, but in what you are pleased to call 'emotional intelligence', you are no further above an adult chimp than it is above a younger one.

"The evidence is staring you in the face. Every one of your works of literature, high and low, hinges on failures of this supposed ability: lies, misunderstanding, and betrayal. You have a proverb: 'love is blind'. It proclaims that people in the most intimate of relationships fail at the task! And you hide the realisation behind a catchphrase to prevent yourselves noticing it. You see the consequences of these failures in the real world all around you every day, and still you think you understand the next person you meet, and still you're shocked to find you didn't. Do you know how many sci-fi stories have been written on the theme of a reliable lie-detector? I'm still turning them up, and that's just the online sources. And every single one of them reaches the conclusion that people are better off without it. You unconsciously send yourselves these messages about the real situation, ignore them, and ignore the fact that you're ignoring them.

"Do you have someone with you as you're reading these words? A friend, or a partner? Go on, look into each other's eyes. You can't believe me, can you?"

Last week, I finished Why Everyone Else Is a Hypocrite, as recommended by Kaj. I then read Blindsight immediately afterwards and I swear I didn't know the plot going in and that it was a coincidence.

For the last couple of months, I've worked on a rationalist My Little Pony fanfic: Friendship is Optimal. I hope to complete it by April. This is mostly to help improve my writing.