Bay Solstice 2017: Thoughts

I haven't participated in these events because I have kids, which sounds really dismal when you consider that part of the point of these solstice celebrations is allegedly to build community.

If you want to build community, then you should want rationalists to bring their children. And if you want rationalists to bring their children and not have that ruin the ceremony, then you have to provide for the existence of children. Churches have this figured out. Short-term childcare is provided onsite at any church I've been to. Usually this just takes the form of an adjacent room with a couple of trustworthy adults.

I think there's some confusion about whether this is a religious ritual, a theatrical performance, or a community gathering. Different rules apply to each, and it's hardly fair to ask people to satisfy one expectation if they're led to believe that it's a different thing entirely.

The way Solstice is run in practice, is as a theatrical performance - there's a producer, who lines up a bunch of acts, and a venue, and finds an audience / sells tickets, and then the audience comes in and bears very little responsibility for what happens. Under that paradigm, it seems fine to have rules that preclude the presence of some children. The stakes are just not that high, for a once-a-year event - it's entertainment. There is lots of other entertainment to be had, though it's nice for some of the entertainment to be produced locally. Applause is appropriate at a theatrical event, unless there is a specific understanding otherwise.

If we want a religious ritual (and I think the intuition that there shouldn't be applause is pointing in this direction), then there needs to be an advance understanding as to what the ritual is, and what it means, unless we are trying to have a mystery religion - in which case the thing shouldn't be recorded for public consumption, and there should be some substantially stiffer admission requirements. The ritual should have power even without the addition of theatrical drama, because it should have meaning. It should be enactive. If we do this, then either it's a ritual for adults only, or there's something present for children to emulate, or be curious about. There should be aspects of it that are comprehensible to them, even if not all of it is. There should be things for them to do, to participate in the ritual. For the most part, I don't see this happening.

If we want an all-community gathering - if an important aspect of Solstice is that the whole community is there - then one of the central constraints in planning the event is that it has got to be run in such a way that the whole community can in fact show up without interfering with the event. If our standards of conduct are incompatible with parents bringing their children to the event, then we are excluding children from the community. If we want to be that sort of community, there should probably be some sort of public discussion on that point first. As far as I can tell, people care the most about the community gathering aspect, but a survey might be in order by someone who cares more about making Solstice a thing than I do.

There could, of course, be a multiple-part event or series of events, playing these different roles. I think there's been an attempt to triangulate the tension between these three things; audience participation schemes like last year's writing stuff on the wall is what it looks like to try to make a theatrical event communityish, and of course this is a theatrical event designed to deal on a very literal level with themes that the community is organized around, which gives it a bit of the flavor of ritual, but overall this triangulation seems like the sort of thing that is almost guaranteed to produce the sort of problem described in the OP.

Thanks for sharing. As is often the case, I find myself agreeing with you on most concrete points but unhappy with the overly negative tone you're taking. I hope that none of the core organizers are reading this now, because if I were them I'd want to take some more time to decompress before diving into criticism this harsh.

So, on to specific points:

I agree that this year was pretty scattershot, and didn't feel like the arc pulled together well. Have you talked to next year's organizer about helping out with creative direction? Running a Solstice and getting the tone of the arc right is pretty hard. Not just to say "Hey, don't complain if you can't help," because that's a legitimate thing to do - but I legitimately believe that having strong opinions about how the arc should be is really helpful for someone doing that work. And you clearly have strong opinions.

Similarly, my sense is that the quality of speeches is heavily dependent on having people available and willing to not only perform, but to write original speeches.

I think we really need to focus on what the organizers of Solstice can do to help prevent disruptions, rather than blaming the audience. One huge problem is that this year's venue has no acoustically isolated indoor space to take kids, let alone having onsite childcare. We really do need to find an alternate venue.

I'm not really sure what to do to prevent applause other than just saying "please hold your applause till the end." Maybe organizers of previous years could speak to how well that works, and/or other strategies they've used.

edit: One more thing re: candles: I wonder why we haven't used LED candles at venues that don't allow them? They're obviously not as good as the real thing, but I do think they add to the atmosphere - I've run a couple small Solstices where we used them, and it went well.

My overall thoughts on the arc (ignoring more logistical concerns that I've touched on elsewhere)

I liked each individual thing at Solstice. The overall connection between those things didn't work for me.

Things I particularly liked:

• the concept of the Tarot card pairings was good, went even more interestingly than I expected (I figured we'd just mill about randomly, and we actually tried to solve it systematically in ways that felt appropriate to the event). Not everyone found their solstice-mate but a surprising number of people did, and I think it was an interesting enough activity to repeat in future years (at least until we get collectively good enough at it to solve it thoroughly), perhaps adding additional wrinkles to keep it fresh.
• Brent's outfit was amazing, and the hall generally had a look/feel that was very appropriate (Solstice often fails to have the right visual aesthetics)
• The opening song ("Orion"?) was beautiful and perfect, and I would be excited for it to become a Solstice mainstay.
• The Gift We Give to Tomorrow could have used more polish and rehearsal, but there were some features about it that made it work for me better than past years. Previously I'd seen it done in the center of the Solstice, where it needs to be very solemn. But one of the things about the original is that it's a bit... whimsical. And this is the first time that whimsicality got to come out. (Also, I think my single favorite moment of the solstice was when Naive Rationalist Guy A says "I just wanna know how humans ended up so nice", and Brent turns and is like ".... ..... seriously?" (I imagined him with his eyebrow raised, although he was turned away from me. I think Brent is quite possibly the ideal person to play the Austere Rationalist). I'd like to see the rough concept here polished more.
• I thought the Goddess of Everything else was very well orated - the original story didn't actually resonate with me and Blake's rendition of it touched me in ways I wasn't expecting.
• People in the hall singing Brighter Than Today despite lack of lyrics.
• I liked both the introduction and final speeches. ("we are so, soooo sorry")
• I hadn't connected Goddess of Everything Else and Gift We Give to Tomorrow before as two pieces approaching the same themes from different angles. I'm not sure whether I think they complement each other or are just somewhat repetitive, but I was interested in having the comparison made more obvious at least once.

There were bunches of other things I liked (I don't think there was a single thing I disliked, although some things I wish were arranged in the program differently), but those were the highlights.

I didn't experience much of an arc (the energy/vibe felt approximately like a straight line, mostly serious with small bits of comedic commentary). Beyond the Reach of God is a speech that normally makes me feel-serious-things, but all the things before it felt... approximately as serious, so it didn't stand out.

The key issues for me were:

• I really wanted to be able to sing along with stuff. For me 80% of the point of Solstice is being able to sing together. Different people have different takes on what good songs sound like and I'm not that particular about which ones we pick as long as someone choose them with some kind of aesthetic eye for tribal sacredness. I think the darkness section feels a lot more impactful if we've come from a section where people are jubilantly singing together.
• In particular, I think a magical thing happens when you have several communal songs in a row (maybe with 30-second stories in between) that doesn't remotely happen when you're alternating "long speech" + song. It lets people open up and feel more comfortable singing. It creates a feeling of "these are my people."
• I think there is something valuable to having the lights go from "fully on" to "half on" to "only the stage is lit" to "everything is in darkness." (and back). This can be logistically tricky depending on what kind of building you have, but is pretty important.
• Having intermission is fine, but having it in the middle of the dark, sacred section is fairly mood-killing. I liked the Tarot-mini-game, but I'd prefer it at a time when we've hit a natural stopping point. Goddess of Everything Else should be the culmination of a section, not the first speech that draws people back in.
• I think, ideally, there is some kind of moment in the middle, when the lights go out, that actually draws us together and feels like true ritual. I have also reliably failed to really create that moment in the past few NYC Solstices. I think it's one of the most important things to get right somehow, but it's a hard problem and I personally do not yet know what to do with it.

With minor nitpicks being:

• I think the "I want to become stronger" concept fits well into the center speech slot, but the Tsuyoku Naritai speech in particular doesn't have the kind of sacred tone I want there - it's more whimsical and funny. If you want this particular speech, I think it should be earlier in the evening, and I suspect the better call is to write a speech more custom-tailored for the event.
• Hymn Acxiom was beautiful but didn't especially fit the rest of the event.
• I'm not sure the event mentioned Winter even once. This isn't obviously wrong, but seemed a bit noteworthy.

Thoughts on small children:

I'm personally pro-small-children-at-holiday events. However, there are a few types of child-friendly events that serve different purposes.

There's community events for everyone, in which the purpose of small children attending is so they can actually participate, learn, etc. This requires content that kids can actually engage with.

Then there's community events for adults, in which the purpose of accomodating small children is to make sure all the parents can come. This requires making sure there's a place for the kids where they don't disrupt the ceremony.

I'm personally more excited by the former, although I think both styles of events are worth doing. The thing that stuck out was that last weekend's event felt explicitly like a serious-for-adults event, without actually giving the kids a thing to do or a place to be, so the kids runnin around stuck out more for me than they would have if the event was more lively.

This Solstice had me thinking on what I had imagined, when I first read about Solstice. When I was young and dreamed that we were going to Do This Rationally.

The organizers would have actual models about what brain buttons we were pushing to what effect—entangling the wellbeing effect of light with a specific narrative of human progress, evocative and non-representative stories, inducing existential fears and directing people to soothe them through social bonding with a particular crowd, deep rhythmic resonances that just hit straight to sys-1's sense of "really big", etc.—and share them ahead of time to enable informed consent.

The event would enshrine people's right and duty to conscientiously object at any point they feel the goals or epistemics have drifted in an undesirable direction:

• put in anti-Asch-conformity plants
• intentionally give up/change the most beloved part of the ritual from year to year to avoid status quo bias
• give the audience 5 minutes to actually consider whether to do this thing or what they need to do instead
• make a place for objectors to stand and be counted instead of silently bouncing out
• invoke curiousity about (but do not demand on-the-spot justifications for) why.

This year was lovely performances, nice speeches, an interesting activity, a good evening of food and entertainment. But I did not get what I wanted.

I'm not sure how much of what I wanted is actually doable.

But when I hear loadbearing speeches lifted straight from the previous year's lineup—unchanged from the sequences, I wonder—have we learned anything new at all? I hear a tidy little myth like The Goddess of Everything Else and worry about false appearance of consensus.

I know the arc of Bay's Solstice has moved more towards emphasizing community than x-risk, yet I do not think we have changed our ritual tooling to match this shift. One or two extra interactions happened that day, but is the audience any more empowered to act as a community than it was before? How could we have reliably solved the Tarot Card problem? What conversations need to continue happening after Solstice and how will they happen?

It would be ludicrous to reinvent something of Solstice's magnitude every year. But where there's risk of your logistics and epistemics clashing, I think we should err more on the side of vastly simplifying events than on the side of sloppier epistemics.

I think next year I only want yin meditation, oaths sworn by candlelight, and a playlist of personally meaningful songs. Perhaps I'll do it with five friends and one lonely stranger.

Thoughts on applause:

I agree that it is disruptive (the most obvious part was after "Sound of Silence"), but there is a weirder problem that needs solving to address that.

In years where people've explicitly banned applause, my reaction after a song that was really good is not to go "okay, the song is over and I feel sacred", it's "I really want to applaud right now and I can't and I feel awkward." This is exacerbated if there is a 30-90 second wait in between songs/stories as new performers get on stage.

I think people generally want to applaud for things that they liked.

So I think my preferred solution is to have an opening section of the night that's not attempting to be solemn per se, where applause is reasonable. Then, have a shorter section (30-45 minutes) that's explicitly "okay guys we are doing the sacred thing now, please do not applaud during this section. Then end with songs that are sacred but uplifting/inspirational in a way where applause is fine, and so feels natural.

And meanwhile, in sections (whether 30-45 minutes or the entire event) that you're not supposed to applaud in, I think it's really important to have the transition from one act to the next be immediate, so that I'm not sitting there wishing I could applaud and not having anything else to do.

I have a feeling this will become the defacto share-thoughts-on-Bay-Solstice-2017 thread, which seems mostly fine but kinda sad to have the explicit title "Bay Solstice flopped". I'd be interested in sharing my thoughts here (positive and negative) but would feel better doing so if the title was something more like "Thoughts on Bay Solstice 2017" or whatever. (This is not to say I think PDV is obligated to do that, just noting this as a thing to consider)

I was going to write my thoughts here, but I am tickled to find that I would simply be copy and pasting the main post. Agreements:

• Clapping kills the mood, and is by far the #1 problem I'd name. People being uncomfortable not clapping is not significantly different from people being uncomfortable participating in a ritual; it's what solstice is there for, so let's actually do it.
• Quiet children being welcome during the ceremony seems reasonable, but [specific child who hasn't consented to be named] is an unusually loud kid. I noticed that, having other children there, it wasn't children in general, it was this small person specifically. I like the proposal of a kids room for loud small beings, I don't want to just kick small folks out.
• Having a "solve this!" challenge in the middle made me suddenly go from trying to be solemn to trying to do a thing, and worried that I might fail. Which combined badly with
• Being in a large crowd in a highly acoustically reflective space made it very hard to have conversations, on top of the feeling of rushed socializing: everyone is trying to find the best person to talk to, and so I feel like I'm taking my friend's time up if I try to talk to them when they could be meeting people; and this doubly so if I try to talk to someone new, because they don't even know me. This makes solstice completely fail as a community gathering for me. I was only able to interact with people I already knew. If we were going to make a community gathering, why not optimize for reducing friction in getting to know people better?

Meta: I'm unsure how I feel about having this all publicly. I initially was going to say "I really think Solstices should have a feedback form set up to launch immediately afterwards so that you can get accurate feedback quickly." This has some properties:

• nobody anchors off each other (or overcompensates for anti-anchoring)
• by default you hear feedback on a the single-best and worst things people can remember. The feedback you get from a formal survey gives you a better sense of how the thing actually was overall. It tells you which parts were "okay but not great", and you see a lot of moderate positive feedback that you'll probably miss by default.
• You avoid a weird giant public meta thread

On the flipside... you gain a weird giant public meta thread. Whether this is good or bad I think depends on the organizers - some people probably could really use a break before dealing with public opinion. I know I personally usually prefer to straight up find out what people liked and didn't like and start thinking about how to do a better job next year.

The giant meta-thread also serves a function of actually giving people who haven't been to Solstice yet a better sense of what it's like. Comments beget more comments which draw attention, and keep the thing in the public zeitgeist more.