Humanist vs Transhumanism. Hippies vs Techies

[Raymond Arnold]

Half-formed musings (written here instead of FB because it's a bit more controversial)

A thing the Solstice aims to provide is a sense of "your people." It's done a pretty job of this for people in the LW Sphere. I don't think it's especially succeeded for other random people who arrive at the NYC event - the content is good, it's fun/beautiful/meaningful, but there's nothing oddly specific there that makes you feel like this is _your_ event if you're a more of mainstream humanist.

And maybe that's just impossible. But as long as we're trying to eradicate death and everything, let's consider whether it is possible.

One problem is that many of the things I know of that really define mainstream secularism are things that I think are kinda actively harmful (demonizing of political opponents, making fun of religion). 

There *are* positive things that define mainstream secularism (in the "active belief rather than "beliefs about the outgroup"), but they tend to be things that rub LW-folk the wrong way. Some LW-folk actively disagree with these as virtues. My impression is most of them see them more as naive, oversimplified, or part of overall ideologies/frameworks that seem harmful, which raises hackles.

 - universal love/acceptance/tolerance

 - sustainability
 - reverence for nature

 - collectivism

As per my previous post: I think for both selfish-tribal and for practical reasons, LW are the primary audience of the NY Solstice. But within the bounds of "things that wouldn't alienate LW folk or feel actively wrong to me, Raymond Arnold", I'd like to see if there are aspects of any of the above that could give non-LW-folk a stronger sense that "these are my people."

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[Rasmus Eide]

On universal love/acceptance/tolerance: I wrote a quote thingy/micropoem once that might be useful: "Universal love must always be unconditional, and unconditional love must always be universal, because the guilty is a demographic, and identity is a condition."

Reverence for nature could also be made to work, by recognizing having reverence for something is not mutually exclusive with it being monstrous and an enemy. Where they intersect, the appropriate reaction is fear.

[Raymond Arnold]

Random emotional thoughts of my own, independent of "trying to cater to arbitrary people"

1. I find it offputting that rationalists tend to be offput by hippie things on principle. 

2. I was not able to get fully on board with transhumanism and living forever and stuff until I read Diaspora, and that's because Diaspora was the only transhuman-ish work that made any attempt to engage with "how do you handle overpopulation" and had an overall aesthetic of a future that included BOTH "spread across the universe" but also "be minimally invasive, leave no trace, avoid exponential growth because it ultimately leads to bad outcomes."

3. Point #2 has both an aesthetic component (which... I think I endorse, but I wouldn't ask anyone else to endorse). It also has practical components. Brienne recently-ish had a post asking "what is the optimal number of people to have?" with an eye for "eventually, every person should have at their disposal all of the resources of an entire star system. This may seem excessive to you now, but in a thousand/million years you (and everyone else) may find yourself wanting to do things you don't care about now. 

Preserving the dream time (when resources vastly outstrip the subsistence barrier) seems really important to me.

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[Mark Green]

As a rational thinker, I find that so-called rationalists who dismiss kindness are failing their fundamental brief. Humans are social creatures, and altruism is proven (by game theory) as the most effective strategy for ongoing survival of a group. Radical selfishness isn't rational.

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[Raymond Arnold]

In this case it's not that anyone's anti-kindness or pro-selfishness. It's more that people are anti public declarations of "let's all be kind together".

Like, I think the Less Wrong culture and Atheopagan culture and Sunday Assembly culture probably value many/most of the same things, but with different emphasis on what feels most meaningful. (For comparison: My understanding is you're generally pro technology, but a celebration emphasizing technology feels a bit off and weird. Is that accurate? I'm talking more about that same phenomenon but in reverse)

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[Jacob Kopczynski]

I definitely consider those values alienating-in-principle. I am anti-collectivism, very strongly anti-reverence for nature (both #FUCK THE NATURAL ORDER and on anti-mysterian grounds), and sustainability is a buzzword for assuming failure and steady-state resource flows. Universal tolerance isn't alienating in principle, but universal love absolutely is; if love is universal/unconditional it is worthless.

I also think that rationalist ritual is already too hippy/mysterian. Two examples: I have been to Bay Solstices and enjoyed them but from all descriptions of the NYC Solstice and the Secular Solstice resource book, there is a more singalong style, which I would hate. I am the kind of person that stomps on the off beat of a rhythmic clap to try to break it apart, because it makes me very uncomfortable. Second example: Doom Circles. The first doom circle I went to was initially run by someone who had only been in one once, and was not running it as originally envisioned; it was pretty concrete, solemn but not mystical. Then someone came in partway through who was more familiar with the original idea, and they took over running it, making it more fuzzy and abstract; immediately it made me much less comfortable and I switched from being annoyed I had to leave to very glad I had an excuse.

And while not everyone in the rationalsphere has these reactions, I'm not even an ex-anything, so I suspect that there are others who have even stronger ones, such that they don't go to rituals or holidays at all.

[Raymond Arnold]

Quick clarification in case it was needed: This post is specifically for me gathering information for the NYC Solstice, not suggestion any other particular solstice should do the thing I'm trying to do with it.

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[Zvi Mowshowitz]

I also think alienating-in-principle is more correct than different-emphasis. There is substantial overlap, over which we disagree on emphasis, but a number of important points that are very much not that. To take the four you mentioned:

 - universal love/acceptance/tolerance

 - sustainability
 - reverence for nature

 - collectivism

I am an extreme case on this one but for me #4 is essentially History's Greatest Monster.

The concepts of sustainability and reverence for nature are in practice Not Helping and alienating, even if I could happily define an alternate thing that could still be called each of these things and would be good. 

Universal love/acceptance/tolerance is a more complex case but in practice what they are selling, I'm not buying. Degree of not buying depends a lot on details, since the concept is usually (to be polite) not coherent. 

On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 12:53 PM, Jacob Kopczynski <ja.kop...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Raymond Arnold]

Yeah, sorry about another point I was unclear on: "kindness/love/etc" was something I expect to be more of a matter of emphasis and details.

The other 3 points I expect to be much more contentious. It may not be possible to talk about this without going into extreme detail about my own views. (I expect Zvi/me to disagree on emphasis, but Zvi/Mark to disagree [currently] more fundamentally. My goal here, if possible, is to end up with a program that Zvi and Mark could both come to and feel actively good about, in a way everyone involved feels, rightly (honestly), is pointing in the direction of true, valuable things they endorse.)

I do think this is hard but I also believe fairly strongly it is possible.

I'll respond in more detail later.

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[Glen Raphael]

I'm in Zvi's camp on this one. The collectivist/egalitarian impulse is a very scary thing I'd rather not encourage - it doesn't scale - and to the extent "Sustainability/Reverence for nature" conflicts with "Science! Progress! Economic Growth!" I'll usually be on the other side. 

[Glen Raphael]

To elaborate on the last bit: Virginia Postrel once wrote a book called The Future and its Enemies positing among other things that we might usefully divide the world into two camps: dynamists and stasists. The dynamists are more comfortable with the prospect of stuff radically changing over time whereas the stasists tend to find change scary and prefer stability and control. "sustainability" is a stasist value; I self-identify as a dynamist.

(a couple links on the book:
http://www.quebecoislibre.org/13/130215-9.html
https://vpostrel.com/future-and-its-enemies
)

[Laura Baur]

Having just seen my aunt, who is a leftist old-school hippy, I will say there is a lot we do NOT overlap on.  After arguing about why her proposed policies (which were socialist and almost communist and I will not discuss specifics because that is it's own debate) were unlikely to work, she accused me of being cynical.  When I pointed out that everything is better than it has ever been and getting better due to technological progress, she went full ludite and accused technology of being the problem, because it had destroyed our sense of community and values.  Her solution:  Have the government standardize the curriculum to teach (her) values and control distribution of everything.  That would be fair afterall.

[Zvi Mowshowitz]

I think the opposite question is also worth thinking about. We often assume we have an affinity for leftist/hippie style groups, and that they share our values and ideas more than we disagree, and ask if we could work together and/or have a joint ritual. 

But what if we have just as much or more affinity for the other two approaches? If we think about the Arnold King approach as described in The Language of Politics, I think that Solstice is fundamentally about Civilization triumphing over Barbarism (Technology over Darkness?!) rather than about Oppressor vs. Oppressed. What would a Red-State Solstice look like?

[Raymond Arnold]

There definitely exist hypothetical Red State Solstices, but I think they are weirder and more alien than Zvi is probably imagining them to be (approximately as alien as hippie Solstice is). I recently reread Scott Alexander's "I can tolerate anyone but the outgroup", and this paragraph is striking:

On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.

But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?

When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.

  
For the past 5 years, Solstices (in the Bay, in NY, and elsewhere) have been fairly apolitical, and they have attracted hippies, leftists, bleeding heart libertarians and right-leaning libertarians. They do not attract actual Republicans. 

"Technology vs Barbarism" is a fair characterization of the high level themes of Solstice, but the underlying theme is "knowledge and understanding are constantly evolving, you need to be willing to change your mind and you (yes, you) may need to be able to give up things you currently hold sacred." You could strip that part out completely to make Red State Solstice work but I don't think the result is anything good. 

I think it's a fair characterization that generic leftists are approximately as bad about that as mainstream rightists, but leftist signalling games are at least (charitably, "trying to be about that", uncharitably "pretending to be about that", but in either case a fundamentally different beast).

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[Zvi Mowshowitz]

I agree those problems would be hard or worse. I also agree that if you need to take out "be willing to change your mind and perhaps give up things you hold sacred" that's a price that we should not be willing to pay or even really consider. And in any case, given the lack of group overlap there's no good way to get takeoff on such a thing even if we could come up with a worthy design - the people who it would be good for, wouldn't know it existed, as noted above. But I do want to think about it more anyway because it feels like trying to figure it out has interesting things to say. 

[Raymond Arnold]

I do agree it's an interesting question.

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[Raymond Arnold]

(May followup on Red State Solstice sometime later, but back to the original topic)

I think there are problems with how the American Left organizes itself and its thinking, and one of my goals with Solstice (rather: one of my stretch goals. I'm not under any illusions I'm likely to succeed), is to help nudge the left towards better*self reflection and critical thinking.

[* noting that right now the Left does *lots* of self reflection and critical think pieces about itself, but in a way that I don't think often gets at the heart of the problem.]

The only way Solstice can do that is if it's something that they actually care about. Right now, there's a lot of stuff they vaguely endorse but it feels slightly off and doesn't feel like "their" event.**

So I think it's a lot more helpful to *look* for the commonalities, rather than emphasize the differences. It seems like a better world if Laura's Aunt (or, if that's a stretch, people similar-ish to her) comes to Solstice, likes it enough to keep coming, and gradually absorb certain kinds of self-awareness that I don't think are common enough in left-circles (or libertarian circles, for that matter).

Is that all a misguided fool's errand?

I actually usually try to urge Solstice-runners NOT to do this sort of thing (i.e. use Solstice to "nudge" people in a direction), because the naive ways they go about it is weird and alienating and paternalistic-in-a-bad-way*.

The way I do it is still weird and alienating in threads like this. I *think* the end process turns out... mostly harmless, possibly also ineffectual. (I think I usually try to resolve things by speaking in metaphors that people can interpret in different ways, and I think literally no one gets the metaphors as I intend them, sometimes in surprising ways I didn't intend at all but at still "harmless")

This is all to say:

a) I am interested in pursuing the goal I'm describing in part 1 of this post
b) I am interested being being talked out of the goal at the meta level, if people dispute the goal at the meta level.

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[Zvi Mowshowitz]

On thing b, before I start talking about the actual common ground search...

A key underlying question is why exactly the people you are appealing to are getting this 'off' feeling; my model of them says this makes sense, but has too many explanations for why they do, some charitable and some not so charitable. In particular, I have the following question: Is this off-feeling due to:

A] Positive Selection via Points (e.g. it doesn't score enough "my people" points) 

B] Negative Selection via Checklist (e.g. you didn't endorse ALL of my groups/causes/ideas)

C] Negative Selection via Opposition (e.g. you said something that makes you off)

D] Selection via Alliance (e.g. you are not explicit that you are left-wing and/or fail to condemn the outgroup)

This also points to what one might consider the 'problems in thinking' in the sense that [B] and [D], and depending on details [C], can be considered failure modes.

The hope is that we are dealing with either [A] or at least [C] in a way that can be fixed; the question above implicitly wants to believe [A]. 

If it is [A], then "all we have to do" is find common ground. This is a hard problem but sounds solvable, and if done right seems compatible with what we want to do.

If it is [C], then our job is to, essentially, censor things until nothing is too weird or too much in conflict with their goals. There is an optimal trade-off here, either moving along the production possibilities frontier or finding pareto improvements, but my guess is that we are close to optimal, as we've put a lot of effort into this and made some big compromises. I am not enthused about making more.

If it is [B] or [D] we are drawing dead - the value we are going for would be destroyed by any solution that worked for these problems.

[Zvi Mowshowitz]

Now, on actual common ground - I'll look at the four values above and see what I can do via brainstorming (I endorse none of this, just trying things out):

 - universal love/acceptance/tolerance

There was a dark time, and then there was... the enlightenment? I think one can talk about Classical Liberal values without pissing off too many people, and they can readily fit into the theme if you wanted to. Of course, if we are talking about the type of liberal who is not also a classical liberal, this will not help you. But then, in that case, it comes back to my noting that I don't usually find proponents of this coherent.

 - sustainability

"Built to Last" is the tag line for Ford Trucks. Stonehenge was pretty damn sustainable. What is Five Thousand Years about but true real sustainability? Hell, what is LITTLE ECHO about but sustainability? We all agree that 'not falling apart' is good, so maybe we can work on reframing things a bit - talk about our plans with more of the right applause light words? Sounds cheap but it could work, maybe. Or we could go the other route and point out that not going forward is not sustainable, but that's not going to give you what you are looking for here, I'd presume.

 - reverence for nature

Blue Skies. Carl Sagan. God Wrote the Rocks. Nature is deep and wide, man, and it's freaking awesome (and part of the whole winter cycle thing). Yay Nature! The key problem is where nature is great becomes nature vs. science/technology/industry/progress/etc, so let's avoid that part. The song where we talk about all the great things we get from nature doesn't sound bad. But we're also kind of hitting this already, aren't we? 

 - collectivism

As a way of organizing society, this is Ancient Doom and History's Greatest Monster, but we don't have to go there. We also all got together and built Stonehenge (in some sense). So instead, let's talk about how we're all in this together. Either we succeed, or we don't. The good version of this talks about outcomes.  

A lot of this boils down to "we already do the 'good' versions of this stuff quite a bit" and maybe that's the important take-away here: That isn't getting the job done, so what's wrong? Can't fix until we figure that out?

[Raymond Arnold]

Thanks - good framework for the problem and appreciate the work and willingess to try it out.

The conversations that prompted this current project were "C", but my hope is that it can be addressed via "A"-like things. (i.e. there are a few elements of Solstice that are very mildly offputting, not enough to be a dealbreaker, and if there were more positive points then those things would be offset).

I started writing this before Zvi made the second post with possible themes to explore. Before we get to that... I'm realizing I should be more explicit about what evidence I have to work with right now (which honestly isn't much). And maybe before we do a deep-dive into ideological leftism, it'd be helpful to an overview of all the clusters of people who aren't as enthused as they could be.

 - Left-wing people, who feel the ideology to be subtly off, and are particuarly offput by the implications of "spread across the world and galaxy living forever".

 - Artists and "in-touch-with-their-feelings" people, who feel the event explains too much, talks too much, and is cerebral at the expense of letting people get out of their system-2 headspace, which they would naively assume was kind of the point.

 - Nerds coming from Scott's blog who often don't like the singing, want it more cerebral, more discussion and explanations, less church-like. (Also maybe care more about the meetup aspects than the ceremony aspects)

Of those, the Slatestarcodex-ish people give the most feedback and are easiest to work with in Solstice's current form, but there's a pretty hard limit to how many of them I expect to ever come and Scott already promotes this pretty hard. 

The other two clusters *seem* like they should number in the 100,000s of thousands in NYC and it should be an achievable goal to get a couple hundred of either of them to show up. They  *don't* give me much feedback, so I'm mostly limited to people who are sort of forced to be invested in the Solstice, which distorts the feedback a bit. 

Concrete feedback has come from:

Phil Robinson

Alex Federici
Amy (Connection movement lady from 2014)

My parents, grandmother and sister (leftwing types - they were the motivating example for this thread)
Anne Klaeysen (head of Ethical Culture). 
Eden (the guest singer this year)

I ran out of time this morning, will have to stop there for now. Will go into the specific feedback later.

On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 8:13 AM, Zvi Mowshowitz <the...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Raymond Arnold]

I ended up having an in-person convo with Zvi that dived into this a bit. (I also had a convo with Mark although it ended up going in different directions and I forgot to talk to him about death. :/ :p)

Highlights from the Zvi conversation:

After goal-factoring a bit, I realized that what I specifically want is to be able to talk *more* about the far future and "death is bad"[1] in Solstice, and doing that specifically requires addressing concerns many people in the audience will have about:

• Overpopulation 
• General fear of taking resources without regard for longterm sustainability
• More specific concern about each additional human's carbon footprint (i.e. Global Warming)
• Strong associations with "life extension" meaning "keeping people alive when they are old and decrepit and it doesn't feel like a kindness to do so.
• A huge difference in understanding/worldview between a vision of "humans living more or 

I *don't* think the role of the Solstice should be change anyone's mind about these things (partly because I don't think it's possible, and partly because I don't think it's ethical to use a ritual environment to change people's minds about things). I also think adequately diving into each of those issues would be a huge task. So a better approach is to find a way to bypass them.

My current strategy for this is to talk in open-ended metaphors (i.e. talk less about humans living forever and more about stories/memories living as long as possible, which I think is something everyone can get behind). But the problem is that the metaphors are basically pretty opaque for everyone no matter what their worldview.

Some things Zvi articulated (Zvi, if I'm badly summarizing, lemme know)

1) there is some vague sense in which Solstice has progressively felt less and less like "the holiday for you and your people". (I don't recall if we were able to pin down exactly why, since most of the relevant content has actually stayed the same since 2012). Part of that involves it not being clear what *my* goals are with the event.

2) an important goal for solstice from Zvi's perspective (which I share) is that once a year we should at least be reminded "there is a world that needs saving, and maybe you aren't in a place to do that right now, but once a year you should at least think about it.")

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[Raymond Arnold]

Sorry, third bullet should be "humans living more or less like they currently are", and "concretely imagining computer uploads or radically different biological descendants in a world where the relationship between death and childbirth are incredible different than they are now"

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[Rasmus Eide]

Might be none of my business because I can't ever attend for geographical reasons, but it really sounds like you are trying to have a ritual specifically for the purpose of being "the holiday for you and your people", but for two incompatible groups of people. If this is the case you have 3 options: give up on it being able to deliver that part at all to either group, bite to bullet and alienate one of the groups, or make two entirely separate rituals. The concepts of this type of ingroup ownership, and that of euphemism and compromise, are inherently antithetical.

[Zvi Mowshowitz]

I think that is an excellent thing to say explicitly, and it is important. I think I was too reluctant to say it explicitly during the conversation Ray and I had, and this was a mistake.

On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 1:38 PM, Rasmus Eide <armo...@gmail.com> wrote:

Might be none of my business because I can't ever attend for geographical reasons, but it really sounds like you are trying to have a ritual specifically for the purpose of being "the holiday for you and your people", but for two incompatible groups of people. If this is the case you have 3 options: give up on it being able to deliver that part at all to either group, bite to bullet and alienate one of the groups, or make two entirely separate rituals. The concepts of this type of ingroup ownership, and that of euphemism and compromise, are inherently antithetical.

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