(In the interest of attempting to counterbalance the peer pressure here, I would like to officially solicit [perhaps privately, or perhaps ModusPonies may want to sent up an anonymous comment box], for people who attended the event who had criticisms or just were not quite as awed as the people who've commented so far)
This is not in any way intended to assume there was a problem worth examining. But one of the legitimate criticisms of ritual is that it creates something difficult to criticize, and I think all rationalist rituals should come built in with an appropriate time (a few days afterwards) to evaluate the event and try to counterbalance the social pressure to conform.
I agree completely. Everyone, feel free to leave me anonymous feedback.* Let me emphasize that, if anyone had a bad experience, I really want to know.
*This address is not just for Schelling Day. Anyone is welcome to give me any sort of feedback.
The group is focused on a living leader to whom members seem to display excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment.
If you count karma penalties as "punishment" as you do later, this adds up to the claim that LW both displays unquestioning commitment to and routinely punishes (~150 times in the last 30 days) its leader. I suspect that's an unusual behavior pattern for a cult; I wonder if there's any useful conclusion we could draw from it.
Members' subservience to the group causes them to cut ties with family and friends, and to give up personal goals and activities that were of interest before joining the group. (not sure about this)
At the level of analysis you're doing here, you could probably force anti-akrasia techniques into this mold. That is, someone spends all their time playing video games and then gets caught up in all of the productivity/mindhacking stuff that is popular on LW and then gives up playing video games! Eek!
Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members. (not sure about 'only' part, )
Well, without the 'only' part, you get "Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize with ot...
In real life you sometimes get people who write, using different words, under dozen different articles: "I suspect that this all is just Eliezer's cult designed to extract money from naive people". How much of that is acceptable criticism, and how much is just annoying? Discussing that thing once, thoroughly? Yes, definitely. Dropping the idea around all the time? That's just poluting the space. Problem is that at the moment some people are already deeply annoyed, other people go meta and say we need criticism.
Democracy does not work well online. In real life, one person cannot be at more than one place. Online, one person is enough to be everywhere (within one website). In real life, you can avoid an annoying person by simply going elsewhere and taking your friends with you. Online, you must somehow stop people from doing annoying things, otherwise there is no way to avoid them, except by avoiding the whole website.
I don't have a problem with criticism. I have a problem with boring repetitive criticism. Someone says that having a ceremony is cultish. Okay. Let's discuss that. Someone says again that having a ceremony is cultish. Okay, here is some explanation, here are t...
Wait, the 14th? Oh crud. I... I meant to be there but I remembered it as 'my second weekend in boston' instead of an absolute date. So when my arrival was delayed by a week...
Oops.
This is simultaneously hilarious and weak evidence that the holiday isn't working as intended (though I think repeating the holiday every year will do the trick).
Anyway, I think that mentioning this on RationalWiki is appropriate as a public service to other readers. Do you disagree with that?
I do. Provoking people only to get it as fodder to use against them is the epitome of 'gotcha'; it is dishonest, misleading, poisons discussion, and you should be ashamed of yourself for doing this.
You should also read up on the modern sociological literature of 'cults', because from your comments earlier, you seem to be going on some vague popular pejorative conception of 'cults', while they've deprecated the term entirely based largely on grounds reflected in some of the comments made to you, that 'cults' turn out to meet needs of their participants, do useful things, mirror established organizations closely, have high attrition rates and fail at anything which could be described as 'brainwashing', and in general, there is no apparent substantive content to the term 'cult' beyond indicating 'the speaker dislikes a particular group'.
Anyway, the point is not to argue whether your group fits the details of some definition of the word "cult" (discussions about the semantics of a word tend to be intellectually unproductive). The point is why it is generally considered harmful to be part of a cult and whether these reasons apply to your group as well.
I'm much happier to have the discussion on that level, but I think the primary argument you've put forward is the definition. If the definition isn't important enough to contest, it's not important enough to rest your argument on- and so you need to identify the causal mechanisms by which these behaviors are harmful.
The elements on the list that pertain to these rituals are "Use X to Y": "use chants to suppress doubt" and "use confessions to control by guilt." You notice the chants and confessions and are worried- but it's the Y that make cults harmful. If there's a group activity that includes confessions as a guilt-reducing measure, then that should be evidence against cultishness and harm, but it's not clear that you would see it that way. Notice the "if": I don't think the ritual as practiced is designed to redu...
You're welcome!
I do try to think in terms of fallacies, and I think that warning signs are indeed important heuristics, though they can be spurious. They should make you update your beliefs to some extent.
At the very least, when you notice them you should do a formal outside view perspective, to compare to your inside view perspective. You can often learn a bit about how to present things this way.
What do you mean by causal models in this context?
I think that the discussion would have gone more productively if you had narrowed your original commen...
One of my favorite versions of this: is the National Institute of Health a cult? The answer may surprise you!
So we just ran this ritual at the Cincinnati meetup. We had nine participants, and went three rounds; everybody spoke at least once, and some three times. It was clearly possible to continue with more rounds, but I think we were roughly at the limit of our attention span; more would have been counterproductive. in accordance with the insight about confessions and struggles being much the same thing, we combined these into one category, which seemed to work well. We had a mix of all four categories, with some being, as our resident theorist put it, superpos...
I've previously marked V_V as a probable troll. It seems a lot of feeding is going on. This post in particular is not an appropriate place for it. I'm thinking of adding a term to the Deletion Policy for, well, this sort of thing on any post that reports a positive community effort - see Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate for the rationale.
When I was doing OB and the Sequences, I realized at one point that Caledonian was making it un-fun for me since each post was followed by antihedons from him, and that if I didn't start deleting his comments, I would proba...
I think it might actually be a good idea to give any poster the power to delete replies in their post's comments thread - Facebook does this automatically and I don't think it's a problem in real life, except of course for the trolls themselves - but that would require development resources, and as ever, we have none.
This is a terrible idea. People already try to bully people out of disagreement with their point. Giving everyone the power to delete dissenters in their threads introduces drastically undesirable incentives. It means that people would, and, indeed should systematically downvote every comment in a thread if they believe the local PostDictator has or will abuse their local dictatorial powers. That is the only way to eliminate the bias in the conversation.
I've previously marked V_V as a probable troll. It seems a lot of feeding is going on.
I agree that it's possible that V_V is trolling. I think it's more likely that they're just educated enough to cut themselves, thinking in terms of fallacies and warning signals, rather than causal models.
But I responded to V_V because you have the critics you have, not the critics you want, and because they do sometimes raise concerns that are worth considering. It is a questionable idea to share secrets in a public setting, but I suspect that V_V and other observers overestimate the social distance between the attendees; I know I would be comfortable telling the regulars at my LW meetup quite a bit about myself, because I've been friends with them for quite some time now. When you cast it as "we're friends that would like to deliberately be friendlier, and that includes targeted attempts to get to know each other better," it loses much of its danger.
(It still has the awkwardness of "how dare you be deliberate in your dealings with other humans!", but I don't think it's possible for that awkwardness to go away, and that's something that most posts on social issues seem to b...
I don't think you understand the concept here. I'm not deleting comments because it gives me a satisfying feeling. I deleted Caledonian's comments because he was successfully shifting OB to troll comments and discussion of troll comments, and this was giving me an 'ouch' feeling each time I posted. I tried talking myself out of the ouch feeling but it didn't actually work. I asked people to stop feeding the troll and that also didn't work. So I started deleting comments because I don't live in a world of things that ought to work.
Banning all meta discussion on LW of any kind seems like an increasingly good idea - in terms of it being healthy for the community, or rather, meta of any kind being unhealthy.
/r/science occasionally vaporizes half the comments in their threads now and it hasn't seemed to hurt them any. I don't think censorship actually hurts reputation very much, certainly not enough to make up for the degree to which meta blather hurts community.
I don't think censorship actually hurts reputation very much, certainly not enough to make up for the degree to which meta blather hurts community.
Censorship of offtopic and idiots is very much appreciated and not usually regarded as the squicky kind of censorship, except on places like r/anarchism, which I wouldn't worry about.
As always, I encourage you to do more public executions. (keyword "public". The masses must know that there is a benevolent moderator delivering them from evil trolls).
Banning all meta discussion on LW of any kind seems like an increasingly good idea - in terms of it being healthy for the community, or rather, meta of any kind being unhealthy.
+1. Even those of us who participate in meta discussions don't necessarily appreciate their existence. Start with this thread.
Vaniver was wrong to single your reaction out in this instance.
I am also opposed to deleting comments because they cause antihedons for community organizers. In general, I am opposed to the exercise of institutional power to achieve hedons or avoid antihedons instead of to achieve institutional goals, and am particularly opposed in the case that doing so damages institutional goals.
It seems to me that the deletion of criticism, even ill-intended criticism, damages several key goals of the LW community.
Seems to me you misunderstand this aspect of trolling: someone systematically working to create an ugh field about some topic, person, or a blog. Pavlovian conditioning through online communication.
Imagine a situation where every time you speak about a topic X, someone kicks you in a foot. Not too painfully, but unpleasantly enough. Imagine that there is no way for you to avoid this feeling (except for not speaking about X ever again). Do you expect that in a long term it would influence your emotions about X, and your ability to think about X clearly? If yes, why would you want to give anyone this kind of power over you?
This is an art some people are very successful at. I don't know why exactly they do that; maybe it is deliberate on their part, or maybe they have some bad emotions related with the topic or person, and they can't resist sharing the emotions with a larger audience.
In the past I have left one website I participated on for a few years, just because one crazy person got angry at me for some specific disagreement (I criticized their favorite politician once), and then for the following months, wherever I posted a comment about whatever topic, that person made sure to r...
I'm not going to tolerate that kind of negative stimulus being applied to community organizers.
Yes.
I think it might actually be a good idea to give any poster the power to delete replies in their post's comments thread - Facebook does this automatically
No.
A Facebook page is a personal fiefdom within which one has absolute power (within the limits of what one's feudal superiors, i.e. the owners of Facebook, and beyond them the state, allow). The same applies to personal blogs. Making a post or a comment here puts it up for grabs by anyone. That is what a discussion forum (which this is) is for. I specifically do not want that power over replies to my posts here.
Could I get a quick list of those top dozen improvements, so I can estimate the hourly rate for a $5k pay, and then forward that on to my extremely talented programmer fiance (who is also a LWer)?
Off the top of my head:
More ambitious projects:
Don't hold weird ceremonies.
This brings up some interesting history, actually. Synthetic subcultures -- fraternal orders, service organizations, social clubs not associated with a particular hobby -- used to be a lot more common than they are now; the Freemasons are probably the best-known example, but far from the only one. Ritual was quite common among them, basically as a group-cohesion hack. Now, the lines between an initiatory society and a mystery religion are pretty hard to draw, but generally these organizations didn't claim religious status...
As one of the participants, I can honestly say Schelling Day was a highlight of the past year. The experience was every bit as powerful as described. Afterwards, I felt a sense of friendship and goodwill towards my friends (old and new) that was nearly overwhelming.
Thank you so much for organizing this event. Here's to next year's Schelling Day!
Glad this went really well!
We've done some non-ritualized group therapy sessions at the New York meetup, which seem similar. I'm interested in running something closer to what you describe here, and see if it feels noticeably different.
Yeah, out of all those things you put "check" on, I'd probably not put "check" on a single one of them (or at the very most one or two), since almost all of what you just said are a gross misrepresentation of the truth, bordering on libelous.
On Sunday, April 14th, the Boston group held our first Schelling Day celebration. The idea was to open up and share our private selves. It was a rousing success.
That doesn't do it justice. Let me try again.
By all the stars, you guys. This was beautiful.
About fifteen people showed up. Most of us were from the hard core of Boston's rationalist community. Two of us were new to the group. (I'm hopeful this will convince them to start attending our regular meetups.) There was a brief explanation and a few vital clarifying questions before we began the ritual, which went for maybe 90-120 minutes, including a couple of short breaks. All of us spoke at least once.
I don't want to go into specifics about what people said, but it was powerful. I learned about sides of my friends I would never have guessed at. People went into depth about issues I had only seen from the surface. I heard things that will make me change my behavior towards my friends. I saw angst and guilt and hope and pain and wild joy. I saw compassion and uncertainty and courage. People said things they had never said before, things I might not have been brave enough even to think in their position. I had tears in my eyes more than once.
Speaking went remarkably smoothly. I set a timer for five minutes for each speaker, but it never ran out. (Five minutes is a surprisingly long time.) Partway through, Julia suggested we leave a long moment of silence between speakers, which was a very good idea and I wish I'd done a better job of enforcing it.
Afterwards, we had a potluck and mingled in small groups. At first we talked about our revelations, but over time our conversation started drifting towards our usual topics. Next time, in order to keep us on topic, I'll probably try adding more structure to this stage.
The other area I wanted to improve was the ritual with the snacks. We had five categories: Struggles, Confessions, Hopes, Joys, and Other. There weren't many Hopes, and there wasn't much distinction between Struggles and Confessions. I'll change this for next time, possibly to Hardships, Joys, Histories, and Other. There's room for improvement in the specific snacks I picked, too.
This celebration was the most powerful thing I've experienced since the Solstice megameetup. I don't think I want to do this again soon—it was one of the most exhausting things I've ever done, even if I didn't notice until after I'd left—but I know I want to do it again sometime.
To everyone who came: I'm so proud of what you did and who you are. Thank you for your courage and sincerity.