Who to optimize for at Solstice

[Raymond Arnold]

Disclaimer: At least one person expressed worry that I talk sometimes as if I'm an "authority" on Solstice, and this is the sort of post I'd expect to elicit that reaction. In general I think individual organizers should do whatever they think best for their community.

I see myself as "the person with the most experience of how the most different Solstices have gone, and how/why they went that way", and as such have some thoughts that I think it'd be good for others to be aware of as they make their decisions, but don't mean any advice to be worded more strongly than that.

This post is soliciting thoughts/feedback and what I should prioritize at NY Solstice (although that discussion may have some bearing on how people approach Seattle/Berkeley/Boston)

Part 1. Musings on who to optimize for at Solstice

I'm currently of the opinion (but not strongly, and am interested in the thoughts of various organizers) that public, open-invite Solstices work best when you:

1) figure out which target audiences you want to be part of the event

2) pick one of those audiences to *pseudomaximize* the experience of. 

Doing a deep dive in a particular experience/aesthetic can create a more potent experience than wishy-washily trying to offend no one. But there's not actually any single group/belief-set that makes up more than 60% of any given Solstice.

(At least, I don't think so. I don't have good data on this. "Less Wrong" and "Effective Altruist" and even "Transhumanist" are not actually much more specific than "Secular". Most Solsticegoers at the NYC Solstice end up selecting some combination of the three. And I know within those groups is a lot of variety on how they think about the future)

By "pseudomaximize", I mean, "try to give the an average member of that group as powerful an experience as you can, using language that will, as little as possible, alienate the other types of people you expect to come to your Solstice." (and if you can do something with ZERO alienation that is only, say, 1% less inspiring than something slightly alienating, err on the side of non-alienation)

3) Pick 1-3 groups (in order of priority), to pseudomaximize the experience of, within the constraints of not compromising on the experience of the first group.

In the Bay/Boston/Seattle, this might be fine tuned enough to evaluate different subsets of EA, different kinds of rationalists and futurists. 

In NY, the primary group is a loosely defined "future-leaning Effective Altruist types", and the subgroup is "traditional humanists", which also means "traditional left-leaning person whose most salient values are something like "equality, sustainability and the environment."

Next: Equality/Sustainability vs Growth

I wrote all this out mostly to establish what framework I was working within, before getting to the real question I wanted to figure out.

Part II coming soon

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[Raymond Arnold]

(last section should read "question I wanted to figure out - but this ended up being pretty long on its own and seemed like it warranted its own discussion section)

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[Zvi Mowshowitz]

I agree strongly with optimizing for one group/experience, and Being The Best Thing You Can Be for some value of "thing", subject to avoiding alienating other people more than necessary, rather than trying to be all things to all people. 

In general (not just for solstice) I find this gives a better experience even if I'm not in the target group, so long as we're not too opposed. 

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