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Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz - Less Wrong, More Rite

Scott

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Less Wrong, More Rite

[Dec. 17th, 2012|11:55 pm]

Scott

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friends, rationality, religion, travel

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By happy coincidence I ended up in the Northeastern US at the right time to attend Raemon's New York City solstice ritual.

The idea was that since most rationalists and Less Wrongers are atheists for whom the traditional categories of Christmas and Hanukkah don't apply (and, let's face it, way too white for Kwanzaa), we would make our own ritual, one centered around rationalist ideals, and use it as a Winter Season Positive Affect Schelling Point the same way all the religions do theirs.

Raemon is an awesome guy with an awesome house, and his track record from doing this the past few years was enough to attract what must have been about fifty awesome people. I'm not even going to talk about all of the people I met because I'm sure I'd forget some and then they'd get even more offended than they already are by me completely failing to recognize them even though I had met them a bunch of times.

The ritual itself was a little over four hours long (or should I say "a little over four frickin hours long") and consisted almost entirely of group sing-a-longs, mostly of songs Raemon had invented for the purpose. The theme was supposedly Stonehenge and the ancient belief that the sun god was departing and we needed to call him back, plus some triumphalism at how science has gotten us past the point when we have to be seriously worried about the winter, but it ended up digressing to Friendly AI and anti-deathism and silly songs about random Less Wrong ideas pretty quickly. I hope some of them will show up on YouTube but I can't guarantee it.

My favorites: well, we started with the classic science song The Sun Is A Mass / Of Incandescent Gas (A Gigantic Nuclear Furnace). Then in keeping with the Stonehenge theme, we sang the ancient mythicist version: The Sun Is A Guy / Who Travels Through The Sky (In A Great Big Chariot Of Fire). And then as a nod to the advance of science to more and more powerful and exact explanations, we corrected our "gas" model with The Sun Is A Miasma / Of Incandescent Plasma (It's Not Simply Made Out Of Gas). It was way more fun than it sounded.

I also really liked Catherine Faber's song Humans Wrote The Bible, God Wrote The World. Although it was the most explicitly atheist song on our line-up, it was also the one that most aspired to true sacredness. And boy did it get there.

Some of the other songs, like "I Found A Baby Genie" (basically Friendly AI: The Song) and "Luminosity" (

alicorn24's favorite) were super cute rather than transcendent. And some just plain made me smile. It's hard to imagine a more heart-warming, community-bonding activity than getting together with a bunch of nerdy friends and singing Still Alive together.

(Still others, like the ones played by this really good professional guitarist who showed up, were nice but kind of made me wonder "Wait, why are we listening to this song about driving to New Jersey again? What does this have to do with the progress of science recontextualizing the ancient story of the death and rebirth of the sun?" I was way less ready to forgive this by hour four than I was during hour two.)

There were also a few nods to genuine ritual. Raemon tried to have us gradually dim more and more lights as the night went on, but people's idiosyncratic lighting needs made this more of a random walk than a linear progression. Finally, we reached total darkness and two officiants read from The Gift We Give To Tomorrow by candlelight which was, I think, well done. Then Ray gave a...can I call it a sermon?...about coping with the death of his grandmother that made every single person I talked to cry. And there was a video with footage from the International Space Station that would probably have been really moving if it hadn't kept skipping and having the sound break and been interrupted by people declaring that it was obviously heavily edited.

But overall the impression I got was less pipe organ than guitar, less High Church and more the most amazing summer camp ever, the one we all wish we had gotten to go to as kids. (actually, CFAR, hire Raemon right now and make him start a rationalist summer camp). This was probably a good design choice: I don't think rationalists could have done High Church very well.

But darnit, I wanted High Church! Or at least something like the Longest Night out of the Kushiel series. Something with an obvious beginning and climax and conclusion that made us all feel like we had touched the transcendent. There were hints of that. The ceremony reading Gift We Give To Tomorrow with only a single flame burning in the darkness was pretty close.

...except then someone upstairs turned the lights on. And someone came in late and walked practically right over the altar, saying "Oh, don't mind me, I guess I'm late." And through the whole thing people were holding side conversations (have I ever mentioned how much I hate extraneous noise when trying to concentrate on something?) and getting up for seconds on dessert and if Raemon does this again next year he needs to hire one of those Zen monks with the sticks who whacks anyone who disturbs the profundity of meditation by so much as moving a muscle.

If the sun god decided to just not return this year because people were too disrespectful at the Solstice celebration, I would feel he was totally justified. An eternity of freezing darkness leading to a desolate grave for all life on Earth would be a completely fitting punishment for people chatting during what was supposed to be sacred ritual. And I feel the same way about people who talk during movies, although I have less leverage there trying to get the sun to withhold its light in righteous vengeance.

And theeeen

alicorn24 got one of her Mysterious Worrying Migraines and

dudley_doright had to go upstairs with her and try to help her, and by the time we were ready to go down they had turned on the Horrible Pounding Bass Music.

This is another reason the sun should go out. I had kind of assumed that rationalists were my people, that they would be the sort of people who in college always laughed at the dumb frat boys who would have pounding bass music in their parties and then stand around totally unable to hear or talk to one another. Apparently that's not true. Apparently an IQ 140 average community is not smart enough to realize that pounding painfully loud music at parties where people are trying to meet other people sucks and makes this impossible. So I left and spent the subway ride back trying to develop mechanisms for party design, then rejecting them as too "uncool".

Overall I had a good time and got to meet lots of people I'd never met and catch up with lots of people I had. The songs were hilarious, Raemon has magic group management powers, and the logistics - food, space, et cetera - were handled really well. I absolutely plan to go back next year if I'm in a geographically plausible area and have the weekend free.

But if the sun doesn't come back next year, you know who to blame.

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