The True Spirit of Solstice?

post by Raemon · 2022-12-19T08:00:30.273Z · LW · GW · 31 comments

Contents

    Ancient, Eternal, and yet Personal 
    A Negotiation Game
  Sacred Schelling Power
    Winter Solstice is pretty Schelling
    Truthseeking is pretty damn Schelling.
    Survival and Flourishing?
  Extrapolating Holiday Definition
      Properties of Winter Solstice:
      Properties of Truth:
      The intersection of Truth, Solstice, and Survival and Flourishing:
  That said...
None
31 comments

A year ago at the Winter Solstice afterparty, I had a 5 hour discussion with various folk about what things are or aren't appropriate for Solstice. Some example debates: 

• "Is Solstice primarily a rationality holiday? An EA holiday? The broader secular community?"
• "How essential is the journey from light, into darkness, into light?"
• "Is it okay to have a Solstice where we don't sing Brighter Than Today?"
• "How important are singalongs vs speeches?"
• "How important is it for singalongs to sound polished, vs for them to feel like an organic part of the community? Is it appropriate to pay professional musicians?"
• "How important is transhumanism or x-risk?"
• "Is it good or bad to change lyrics over time?"
• "How important is it to celebrate Solstice on literal astronomical Solstice? If you don't, why are we calling it Solstice? Is it important for the name to be clear?"
• "Is it okay to have one solstice someday with a 'bad ending', where instead of climbing back out of the darkness hopefully, we just... sit with it, and accept that maybe it might be what the future holds?"

Many of these answers are subjective. But are they entirely subjective? I think this is a super interesting question. 

I generally support individual solstice organizers doing whatever they think is right, and not worrying much about what other people think. But I think it's an interesting question whether or not a "True Spirit of Solstice" exists.

You can have whatever arbitrary aesthetics you want. But, some aesthetics can be more or less self-consistent than others. And some aesthetics can be more, or less, in alignment with reality than others. 

It's important to be able to propagate facts into your aesthetics [LW · GW].

Ancient, Eternal, and yet Personal 

Here are two reasons I think people want holidays:

1. To be connected to something greater than themselves. To know that they are part of a story that started before them and will continue after them, something vast and eternal and powerful and beautiful.
2. To celebrate something oddly specific about them. My tribe, my family. A costly signal that I am part of this ingroup instead of that other one over there.

These are in tension. Holidays vary in how much of each they offer. 

Often, people want to know that they are not alone in their oddly-specific narrative. That their oddly-specific-ness is, in fact, powerful and vast or at least enduring. A central frustration of Solstice is that for many people, it is so close to being a holiday that encapsulates them. But, it is subtly off. Someone else's ritual often feels quaint, and you can appreciate it artistically and anthropologically. Ritual that almost succeeds but then does something weird you don't like is cringy and terrible.

And, for now, Secular Solstice is frankly one of the only games in town. If it doesn't work for you, your alternatives are either to hold a much smaller event for people you're highly aligned with, or to go to very different events that are more pagan, or vaguely-unopinionatedly-humanist, or more social-justice-flavored.

People often want a sense of grandness, of something greater than themselves. So there's something dissatisfying about splitting off to run a smaller solstice for highly aligned people. 

So we have a bunch of interest groups with slightly different aesthetics, all vaguely hoping to steer solstice in a direction that gives them more spiritual oomph that aligns with their beliefs, and an uneasy truce where you can't push a particular city's Solstice too far in any given direction without making people upset.

When it comes to individual solstices, I'm highly in favor of the organizer putting together a program with a strong, unified vision. But a question that comes up sometimes is "What is the spirit of Solstice?" Is there any objective foundation for it? Is it "whatever Raemon thought in 2011"? Is it "whatever each individual organizer thinks"? Is it all relative and "whatever the people want?"

My bullshit made up answer is:

• Solstice is 65% "vague social consensus" (heavily influenced by whoever shows up and runs solstices and then writes about it on the internet. That vague consensus includes some arbitrary founder effects and accumulated tradition)
• It is about 35% "objective aesthetic reality."

I could imagine flip-flopping on this, but it's what my gut says at the moment.

Why? 

It seems like ultimately Solstice is for people. If you cleave really closely to some set of principles but it turns out people don't care, they won't come. 

But also, if your holiday is a fully arbitrary, with people hewing to vague consensus with no spiritual core, I think you end up with a vapid holiday that doesn't do anything important (which fails to even retain people's interest). And if your big community holiday changes every single year as each new organizer executes a totally different vision... then you don't really have a tradition, which was part of the point.

A Negotiation Game

A coordination problem is when there's extra utility on the table, if only people would choose the same strategy. This requires something of a negotiation. The process of negotiating involves Schelling Points – you can theoretically haggle over anything, but certain features of physical reality, social reality, or negotiation theory have an impact on the negotiation landscape. (See The Prototypical Negotiation Game [LW · GW])

People could go celebrate their own teeny solstices tailored exactly for their worldview, but then they'd miss out on the feeling of being part of a huge community that is (largely) aligned with their values. 

Not only that – if people only ever celebrated teeny solstices optimized exactly for them, they'd have trouble finding even a few other people to celebrate with. But by having large solstice events that are heavily advertised, you can draw in people who are like "oh, Secular Solstice exists? Cool, I'll go to that." This grows the pool of people to celebrate with over time.

Twelve years ago, if I wanted to celebrate Exactly The Perfect Solstice For Ray, I wouldn't have been able to find anyone to celebrate with. But last December 20th I was able to casually message a few friends and say "Yo, I want to do a small private solstice with properties X, Y and Z. It'll be weirder than usual. It's not for everyone, and might not be for you. Are you in?" And because they'd been to a few solstices, they had a rough understanding of what to expect. 

6 people came. 

That's not a lot. But it's more than I think would have come 10 years ago.

So, two payouts for a negotiated Big Community Solstice include:

• People get to feel part of something bigger, in the moment. (You might care about this for yourself, personally, as well as for some broader social cohesion)
• Big solstices help attract attention and build momentum towards people participating in other rituals.

Most people agree that Rationalist Solstice isn't completely arbitrary. They aren't here to celebrate a generically big holiday, they are here to get something oddly specific and sacred-to-them (otherwise, they'd probably be happy with Secular Christmas). 

But many solstice organizers, despite probably agreeing there is something "more important than social consensus" at stake, disagree strongly on the answers to the opening questions. 

Sacred Schelling Power

Epistemic status: mulling it over in realtime.

Winter Solstice is pretty Schelling

Lots of cultures have a sun god, because the sun is a giant burning orb in the sky that everyone can see. Most cultures don't celebrate the story of Hannukah, because that was an oddly specific thing that happened to one particular group of people one time.

Lots of cultures somehow commemorate the Winter Solstice. Fewer cultures celebrate Stanislav Petrov [LW · GW] or Smallpox Eradication Day. 

You might still want to celebrate the latter, if they are important to your ideology. In fact, both of the latter holidays are driven by being relevant to humanity-writ-large, and they each have some global-scale Schelling power.

But Winter Solstice is one of the ultimate Schelling Holidays. When you choose to celebrate solstice, you are engaging in a many-thousands-year-old tradition, which humans across the world converged on independently, without communicating. No matter where you lived, it was important that once a year it got dark, and then light, and the world renewed.

It's not quite a human universal, but it's very common. It happened in at least some equatorial regions where "winter/snow" wasn't even a thing – my guess is that "longest night of the year" is just an obvious point to orient your year around regardless of how seasons work for you.

So, it's significant to me to celebrate winter solstice in particular, as a way of aligning myself with humanity writ large. To be part of not just my small rationalist ingroup.

Perhaps even more than that – insofar as there exist aliens that celebrate holidays (admittedly a big conditional), they also evolved on spherical planets with axial tilt. That probably also affected their lives and their cultures. I'd expect a disproportionate number of their holidays to be influenced by a winter solstice. To celebrate winter solstice is to align yourself with any symbolically literate sapients who built civilizations-with-holidays, in a world that sometimes grew darker and colder on regular intervals.

(I currently lean towards 'aliens are rare, if not nonexistent, in this universe', and am unsure how likely axial tilt is to be a thing in a broader multiverse. The principle here still feels important to me though)

Truthseeking is pretty damn Schelling.

Plenty of winter solstice celebrations already exist. Some of them are even secular. But the second term in my "core values of solstice" is a commitment to truthseeking.

People have a lot of different goals. Some of those goals are mutually exclusive. Some of those goals involve social reality. Some include anti-epistemic ideologies. 

But, objective reality is a forcing function on values. If you're trying to get anything done, even something rooted in anti-epistemology... sooner or later you need to interact with the physical world. The physical world doesn't care what you believe. Some part of you (or your civilization) needs to understand this, at least on some level.

A focus on truth may feel cold and lonely. Even the parts of society nominally on Team Truthseeking often conflate objective truth [LW · GW] with political posturing [LW · GW].

I think it'd be worth celebrating truth, even if it were and would always be lonely.

But insofar as there are aliens who celebrate holidays... well, okay I'm making a prediction here that is hella philosophically murky. But my guess is that across the multiverse, truthseeking wins. I think civilizations get better at it over time, they develop better intellectual tools, those intellectual tools make into wider swaths of society, and those civilizations go on to generate a disproportionate percentage of the portion of the cosmos settled by civilization-like-things.

To celebrate truth is to align yourself with any sapients who built civilizations-with-holidays, who decided it was important to Actually Figure Things Out.

It's noteworthy, if you were living alone on an island trying to survive, "truth" might not stand out as something important, it'd just be a matter-of-fact part of doing stuff. Celebrating truthseeking seems like it's most important for societies which have built up some manner of social-reality-beliefs that differ from object level truth, which then need a counterbalancing culture.

Survival and Flourishing?

"Winter Solstice" and "Truth" are sort of about "facts-of-the-matter." But there's an important third component – how do we relate those facts of the matter? Why do we care?

Unfortunately, this is where I think people start being less on-the-same-page. You might call the third thing "survival" or "flourishing" or "human values" or "effective altruism" or "ambition." Different people relate to those quite differently, and sometimes find each other's frames pushy and controlling, or off-base. 

But there's something important here, about humans working together for a better future. 

I think "human survival and flourishing" is the lens that's both "relatively unopinionated", as well as "narratively cohesive." 

What's the deal with winter? The world becomes harsh and it's hard to survive. What's the deal with truth? It helps you survive. And the thing that's really exciting about humanity is that we not merely survived our hardships, but we overcame them, developing enough surplus to thrive.

Extrapolating Holiday Definition

For now, let's ignore the Mysterious Third Thing, and focus on the first two, "solstice" and "truth."

Properties of Winter Solstice:

1. The night is long. The world is dark.
2. The world is colder.
3. Tomorrow will be brighter than today.
4. (But, tomorrow will be colder than today – the thing that changes tomorrow is that the rate of getting-colder slows down, eventually switching to "starts getting warmer" sometime in February)

Darkness means that it's harder to see. There might be a cliff you could fall off, or a dangerous animal lurking in the shadows.

How the coldness plays out varies by region. If you're sufficiently north, it means the world is withered. The coldness specifically conveys resource scarcity, and the threat of death. It means that people draw close together into their houses where it's easier to conserve heat. Huddling close together comes with other downstream social effects. 

If you're in Berkeley, it means a rainy season where things are actually more lush and green. (I invented Secular Solstice in New York, where it actually snowed, and it sure has been awkward since people started celebrating in the Bay, or Austin Texas. I'm still not sure what to do about that. The status quo is to vaguely pretend Winter Is Actually Hard, or to feel connected to ancient people who occupied particular latitudes where winter WAS Actually Hard, or, to just sorta ignore it)

Properties of Truth:

...almost everything, really? 

In some ways "truth" is a catch-all for "everything real that matters." The question is "what matters, though?". 

In addition to "knowledge about what matters, mattering", "relevant-truth" matters to Solstice because it's the mechanism by which oddly-specific details enter into the ritual. Oddly-specific details help bridge the gap between a holiday connected with global-Schelling-power, and your specific ingroup. 

The intersection of Truth, Solstice, and Survival and Flourishing:

So, on the longest night of the year, we're here to celebrate how we survived and thrived.

We survived and thrived, despite facing inhospitable, mysterious challenges. 

Through solstice, I choose to feel connected to the various human tribes who independently converged on 'winter solstice' as a time to celebrate. I celebrate the story of humans throughout history who found ways to survive and thrive. And I celebrate the particular hardships and mysterious challenges we face today. 

There are some object-level-fact-of-the-matter about those present-day mysterious challenges to our surviving and thriving. I think AI existential risk is real, and pretty likely to kill everyone this century. I think there are particular obstacles to humans thriving, and particular work being done to fix it, that are worth celebrating. 

Which high level facts make sense to emphasize depend on what problems the world in fact faces. We could turn out to be wrong about some of them. I think it's important for claims at a rationalist Solstice to focus on areas where there's a reasonable consensus among the participants, and to avoid frame things in a "we believe" fashion that pressures people to think. But, I think a holiday that celebrates truth should IMO deal in specific concrete facts/claims, not just vague high-level platitudes. 

That said...

Reminder, I do think Solstice is still, like, 65% convergent historical cultural happenstance, and that's okay. Communities acquire traditions that are oddly specific. The particular cluster of music genres and styles of speeches are a bit arbitrary. I think Brighter Than Today is important to sing every year (unless you're deliberately making a symbolic point by dropping it), but, this is only because it turned out people really liked it and converged on it feeling important.

I'm interested in taking everything I just said, and then re-applying it to the questions I asked way back in the beginning, but, I've been working on this post for a year and it's Solstice Season so I think it's time to just Ship It. I'll leave "the answering of the questions" as an exercise to the reader and call it a day.

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