Petrov Day: Logistics

[Raymond Arnold]

Petrov Day generally went really well. In some senses, of all the "rationalist" holidays I've seen, it feels the most like a real holiday. (in that it is both serious, based around something currently relevant/meaningful, somewhat culturally specific but easy for newcomers to participate in, and designed to be done by small families or groups of friends rather than Huge Events™)

However, the NYC Petrov day has never quite felt as solemn as it seemed like it was supposed to. I eventually lowered my expectation of how solemn it was supposed to feel. But someone specifically complained this year about it and I'd like to discuss ways to address it.

(I think Petrov Day should include solemn and non-solemn portions, but the solemn parts should be more solemn than they've been in NYC)

Issues include:

1) Basic Logistical screwups. 

There's a lot of things that need to be taken care of before the ritual starts, and if you forget them, interrupting the ceremony to work them out is pretty disruptive. Every disruption makes it more likely for people to laugh.

1b) Candle related logistical screwups

Not everyone was in arms reach of the candles, so we had to figure out who was the most appropriate person to do each candle-action. (We ended up having more than the recommended 8 people, I think about 12. I think Petrov Day could easily scale up to 20 people *if* instructions were designated explicit candlebearers whose job was to be near the candles and pass them around to other people.

1c) Button Related Logistical Screwups

In NYC, we awkwardly expected the button to appear at some point in the ceremony, and then right when Petrov showed up I was like "wait, is this thing written into the new script?" frantically scrolled to the end, verified that it wasn't, and then had to interrupt the ceremony to reveal the button.

2a) People don't all naturally adopt the right mood. Some people crack jokes.

2b) Sometimes the text is funny (i.e. the opening quote is from Hitchhiker's guide, or the "Moore's Law of Human Extinction"). This would probably be fine if people had a shared understanding of "we're trying to generally be serious, with occasional moments of levity to release tension and keep it interesting." But when people aren't sure what mood we're going for it in the first place, it can be confusing. 

3) Hard to read words.

A lot of the quotes are written in old-timey dialects that are hard to parse, with words that are hard to pronounce and understand. Every time someone stumbles over a word, at best, it sounds a little silly, and at worst they awkwardly go back and try to reread the sentence and stumble over it a second time.

3b) Some people are not skilled at oratory skills, and are hard to hear

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...so those are my observations. I discussed this and thought about it for a bit and have suggestions, but if you'd like to practice thinking about solutions on your own and contribute non-primed ideas, now's a chance to do so.

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Suggestion Solutions

0) Simplify The Text

To the extent that it's possible, replace complicated words (like "h5n1 influenza virus") with simpler words (like "bird flu."). For old-timey quotes, consider paraphrasing them to make them easier to say and understand. (This is somewhat questionable because the old-timey quotes are, well, quotes, but I think it works better to explicitly have them be paraphasings optimized for the experience than literal quotes)

1) Instructions All The Way Down

In general, my experience is when you are composing a ritual based on a set of instructions, anything not formally written down is going to get forgotten. This applies to Seder-like "read aloud" rituals as well as to Solstices if there's something you want to happen that you don't explicitly include in the powerpoint.

Right now, there's an "organizer's booklet" for Petrov Day as well as a "participant's booklet". The Organizer's booklet contains instructions for setting up, making sure you have materials, etc. But on the day of, we're basically just using the Participant's Booklet, and we forget a lot of things.

I've found it a good practice to have rituals explicitly include setting up for the ritual. A few reasons:

 - it makes sure things don't get forgotten (it gives everyone a chance to notice if something's missing, not just the host, who is human and may have forgotten)
 - it makes everyone feel like they're working together to *create* the ritual, rather than just participating in it.
 - you can use the "Instructions" segment of the ritual for...

2) Division between Sacred and Non-Sacred spaces)

Useful advice I got recently: When designing an event, think "how can I get a bunch of 11-year olds to go along with this?" (and corollary: as number of participants increases, participants can increasingly be approximated by "11-year-olds")

Much like Harry Potter encourages his armies to do mad-plotting so that later he can say "okay guys but seriously NOW I want you to be serious, Merlin Says"), having a segment when people can get the sillies out of their system can make them feel more willing to sit down and be serious when the time comes.

I think it'd be good for Petrov Day to *begin* in one area, where you discuss practicalities, and then transition into a more sacred space where people are quiet and contemplative. (This can be physical movement, i.e. moving from the living room to the dining room, or it can just involve taking a moment to breath and reflect or something)

Things to do in the Practicality section:

 - Make sure all the materials are there.

 - (Probably) explain in advance what all the materials are for and what they represent. (Some people were confused when we referenced the "9nth candle slot", and went to get another candle in mid-ceremony, when in fact there are 9 candle-slots but only 8 candles. Figuring things out mid-ceremony is harder than it sounds)

 - Get people used to narrating loudly (audible, dramatically, but seriously. At the same time, you give them space to be a little silly if they need to as they practice being loud.

 - Practice reading somewhat complicated words (given that step 0 is probably not possible to completely fix) and go over norms on how to approach them. (For example, "if you screw up, just keep going rather than trying to repeat it)

 - Figure out who will be responsible for lighting candles

 - Make sure people have explicit time to go over any house rules. (For example, how the button will be used, if you're using it. In NYC, we also use an hour glass and an instrumental soundtrack to time the event.)

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[Daniel Speyer]

Strongly agree about instructions. 

One more logistical thought (I think Laura said this too): the phones were isolating.  Especially for something in the dark.  If I look at a glowing screen in a dark room, I literally don't see anyone else. 

Granted, reading paper in the dark doesn't work. And being able to read what other people are saying helps a lot. 

A data projector might solve this.   I'd we all sit in less than a semi circle, we can all see one wall. If we use light on dark text,  it won't illuminate the room too much. Maybe start white on stars and gradually shift to red on black.  We could pass a wireless mouse or something so the reader hits next slide. 

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[Raymond Arnold]

(If anyone's used printed out paper booklets in recent years for Petrov Day, curious what your subjective experience was?)

I have mixed feelings about the phones. Or rather, I agree with "they are isolating", but they feel like the least bad option so far.

Projectors are possible, but I'd like to develop general social tech for "have a ritual that doesn't require $300 objects to conduct by small groups of people." Most people can get candles and cell phones. 

Light-on-dark-text seems like it could help even with phones (perhaps insufficient, but at least a strict improvement over the status quo)

(The first year, we tried printed out pamphlets, and my experience was "I had a hard time hearing what people were saying because not everyone enunciated well enough, and as a result I was slightly bored/annoyed rather than connected to my fellow humans." It was also hard to read)

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[Taymon A. Beal]

Report from Boston:

The mood went fine; I think everyone did it basically correctly and it felt the way I think it was supposed to. (It wasn't a "spiritual experience" for me personally, but that basically never happens.) There were various logistical imperfections, like figuring out how to make the candles work since we got a kind that's not good for using to light other candles, but we rolled with them. People did trip over words (and errors in the booklet) sometimes and it'd be better to have ways of dealing with this.

We used printed paper booklets. The Citadel has ceiling-mounted LED strips, which we set to blue (something I learned from my days as a theatre tech; blue is what you use when you want the stage to be perceived as dark but still need people to be able to see). This worked super well and I 100% recommend it; unfortunately, it doesn't solve the problem of not requiring any equipment that everyone doesn't already have. :-P

Taymon

[James Babcock]

When we run Petrov Day in the Boston area, we technically run more than one instance in the same house - a table upstairs, a table downstairs, and a table in a bedroom. This solves the too-many-people-to-fit problem, but multiplies the equipment required.

I'm really hesitant to replace quotes with paraphrases. I agree that it's better experience in the moment, but... it feels dishonest, and I think it would be bad for the aesthetic. As a not-specific-to-Petrov-Day principle, I dislike history when history is told through secondary sources, because that tends to distort. But I do agree that it would help to have some explanation around this issue, to tell people to just keep going if they stumble. Actually, I want to cut the amount of non-quotation text further.

Moving from one room to another to keep a space sacred would be nice, but - in our particular case, it wouldn't work logistically, because we don't have enough suitable rooms. I think lighting changes serve much the same purpose; perhaps they should be given as explicit instructions.

[Raymond Arnold]

>

When we run Petrov Day in the Boston area, we technically run more than one instance in the same house

Oh, that's interesting. Would not have guessed that but makes super-sense. That'd be (currently) hard in NYC, although at Highgarden it'd have worked.

> Moving from one room to another to keep a space sacred would be nice, but - in our particular case, it wouldn't work logistically, because we don't have enough suitable rooms. I think lighting changes serve much the same purpose; perhaps they should be given as explicit instructions.

Agreed. I think having an explicit "okay, having gone over the instructions, and deciding who is reading first, now we will turn out the lights, and then take 3 silent breaths before beginning to dissipate any excess energy" would accomplish most of the goal.

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[Raymond Arnold]

> As a not-specific-to-Petrov-Day principle, I dislike history when history is told through secondary sources, because that tends to distort

Fair. I've been mulling over the difficult-to-parse quotes for years and not being sure what I'd even suggest for them.

<<Subjective experience follows, consider figuring out what your subjective experience of Petrov Day quotes is before reading>>

One thing I do think would help is to put the quote-source and short explanation beforehand rather than afterwards. I realize this is counter to how quotes work when written in books, but when reading/listening to something out loud, I find it difficult to concentrate when I'm trying to figure out who is talking and why. 

At it's best, "names/explanations after the quote" make for a neat mini-mystery. "Who is this person and how do these old-timey-words relate to the subject matter?" ... "Oh, it's James Watt, that makes sense." But when almost the entire work is quotes, my subjective experience is spending most of my time feeling confused and slightly annoyed, briefly punctuated by "oh, I see." 

Oddly enough, the best example of it working correctly is the Hitler quote - that quote *doesn't* have any old-timey mannerisms (probably because it's a translation?). It sounds perfectly comprehensible the first time through, but you still get the experience of learning who said it which subverts the experience.

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