Ritual Report: Schelling Day

(In the interest of attempting to counterbalance the peer pressure here, I would like to officially solicit [perhaps privately, or perhaps ModusPonies may want to sent up an anonymous comment box], for people who attended the event who had criticisms or just were not quite as awed as the people who've commented so far)

This is not in any way intended to assume there was a problem worth examining. But one of the legitimate criticisms of ritual is that it creates something difficult to criticize, and I think all rationalist rituals should come built in with an appropriate time (a few days afterwards) to evaluate the event and try to counterbalance the social pressure to conform.

The group is focused on a living leader to whom members seem to display excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment.

If you count karma penalties as "punishment" as you do later, this adds up to the claim that LW both displays unquestioning commitment to and routinely punishes (~150 times in the last 30 days) its leader. I suspect that's an unusual behavior pattern for a cult; I wonder if there's any useful conclusion we could draw from it.

Members' subservience to the group causes them to cut ties with family and friends, and to give up personal goals and activities that were of interest before joining the group. (not sure about this)

At the level of analysis you're doing here, you could probably force anti-akrasia techniques into this mold. That is, someone spends all their time playing video games and then gets caught up in all of the productivity/mindhacking stuff that is popular on LW and then gives up playing video games! Eek!

Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members. (not sure about 'only' part, )

Well, without the 'only' part, you get "Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize with other group members," which is certainly true of LW. Again: eek!

Agreed that semantic discussions are rarely productive, and that the important thing is to honestly evaluate these various potentially harmful conditions and determine whether they apply... and, insofar as they do, attend to them and work out how to mitigate whatever harm they potentially cause.

In real life you sometimes get people who write, using different words, under dozen different articles: "I suspect that this all is just Eliezer's cult designed to extract money from naive people". How much of that is acceptable criticism, and how much is just annoying? Discussing that thing once, thoroughly? Yes, definitely. Dropping the idea around all the time? That's just poluting the space. Problem is that at the moment some people are already deeply annoyed, other people go meta and say we need criticism.

Democracy does not work well online. In real life, one person cannot be at more than one place. Online, one person is enough to be everywhere (within one website). In real life, you can avoid an annoying person by simply going elsewhere and taking your friends with you. Online, you must somehow stop people from doing annoying things, otherwise there is no way to avoid them, except by avoiding the whole website.

I don't have a problem with criticism. I have a problem with boring repetitive criticism. Someone says that having a ceremony is cultish. Okay. Let's discuss that. Someone says again that having a ceremony is cultish. Okay, here is some explanation, here are the differences. Someone says yet again that having a ceremony is cultish. Okay, I heard that already; give me a new information or stop repeating yourself. -- I would have no problem if someone wrote a critical article explaining the dangers of having a ceremony even in its LessWrongian variant, and proposed alternative ways to create personal connections. But dropping hostile comments to other peoples' articles is so much easier. Well, I am not impressed.

People who try hard to appear smart typically have a problem cooperating on anything. For a textbook example, visit Mensa. It is a miracle that Mensa ever gets anything done, because every time anyone proposes an idea, all people loudly disagree, to signal that they are not sheep. Okay, I get it, they are not sheep; but it is still funny how an organization consisting purely of highly intelligent people became such a laughing stock for the rest of the world. Probably they were too busy signalling that they are not sheep, so they missed the forest for the trees.

There is a time to disagree, and there is also a time to agree. If someone has a policy of e.g. never singing a song together with other people (because that might irrationally modify their feelings towards them), I accept if they decide to never sing a song together with fellow rationalists. Yes, they are consistent. I respect that. But if someone is willing to sing a song with random strangers, but would never sing a song with rationalists, that would be reversing stupidity. It means sabotaging yourself and your goals; trying to get some nonexistent points for doing things the hard way.

The proper moment for criticism is when something worth criticising happens. Not when someone merely pattern-matches something to something, and cannot stop obsessing about that. Here is a group of people who all voluntarily decided to share some powerful emotional moments together. Did they commit suicide later? No! Did they donate all their money to Eliezer? No! Did they send disconnection letters to their relatives? No! Did they refuse to talk with their friends who didn't participate in the ritual? No! Did they kill someone or send death threats? No! Are they reduced to mindless zombies? No! Are they keeping the details secret from the rest of the world, threatening to punish whistleblowers? No! -- So why the hell does someone keep repeating that it essentially is the same thing; and why should I pay any attention at all to that kind of criticism?

Wait, the 14th? Oh crud. I... I meant to be there but I remembered it as 'my second weekend in boston' instead of an absolute date. So when my arrival was delayed by a week...

Oops.

Anyway, I think that mentioning this on RationalWiki is appropriate as a public service to other readers. Do you disagree with that?

I do. Provoking people only to get it as fodder to use against them is the epitome of 'gotcha'; it is dishonest, misleading, poisons discussion, and you should be ashamed of yourself for doing this.

You should also read up on the modern sociological literature of 'cults', because from your comments earlier, you seem to be going on some vague popular pejorative conception of 'cults', while they've deprecated the term entirely based largely on grounds reflected in some of the comments made to you, that 'cults' turn out to meet needs of their participants, do useful things, mirror established organizations closely, have high attrition rates and fail at anything which could be described as 'brainwashing', and in general, there is no apparent substantive content to the term 'cult' beyond indicating 'the speaker dislikes a particular group'.

Anyway, the point is not to argue whether your group fits the details of some definition of the word "cult" (discussions about the semantics of a word tend to be intellectually unproductive). The point is why it is generally considered harmful to be part of a cult and whether these reasons apply to your group as well.

I'm much happier to have the discussion on that level, but I think the primary argument you've put forward is the definition. If the definition isn't important enough to contest, it's not important enough to rest your argument on- and so you need to identify the causal mechanisms by which these behaviors are harmful.

The elements on the list that pertain to these rituals are "Use X to Y": "use chants to suppress doubt" and "use confessions to control by guilt." You notice the chants and confessions and are worried- but it's the Y that make cults harmful. If there's a group activity that includes confessions as a guilt-reducing measure, then that should be evidence against cultishness and harm, but it's not clear that you would see it that way. Notice the "if": I don't think the ritual as practiced is designed to reduce guilt for all participants, though it may do so for some participants.

Saying "I would be worried about sharing private information in a setting like this, and I think others should be worried as well" is a valuable contribution to the discussion, but "This smells like cultishness" is not. (In particular, it seems wise to include a warning that, while the group is composed of friends, three can keep a secret only if two are dead, in order to discourage people from sharing things it would be unwise to share even semi-privately.)

promote unearned loyalty

What would earned loyalty look like?

You're welcome!

I do try to think in terms of fallacies, and I think that warning signs are indeed important heuristics, though they can be spurious. They should make you update your beliefs to some extent.

At the very least, when you notice them you should do a formal outside view perspective, to compare to your inside view perspective. You can often learn a bit about how to present things this way.

What do you mean by causal models in this context?

I think that the discussion would have gone more productively if you had narrowed your original comment to the feature of the ritual that worried you, the effect it could have, and how that feature could reasonably lead to that effect. Then, people can focus on the individual components of the specific worry, rather the amorphous charge of cultishness. Even if you only noticed the danger because of it sounded your cult alarm, you don't need to use that as part of your explanation of why you think it's dangerous.

Indeed, if you can't come up with an independent reason for why it's dangerous, that's moderate evidence that it's not dangerous, but still suggests something like "I'm worried about group confessions as a component of this ritual; what could go wrong?", which will get the contrarians to do your imagining for you.

Even if in the majority of these meetings all or most members are long-time friends, there can be concerns about sharing very personal information.

I think these concerns are worth informing attendees about- "hey, remember, there's no oath of secrecy here, but also please don't spread stories without permission"- but because attendees can choose to share whatever they like, there's no element of coercion to be worried about. (There might be a reciprocity concern, but that seems minimal and could be ameliorated with the addition of a targeted "X is verboten" rule.)

For fun, try applying the above list to a "group" such as Yahoo!, Google, Apple, etc. You might come to the surprising conclusion that most hi-tech businesses are actually cults. (What went wrong?)

So we just ran this ritual at the Cincinnati meetup. We had nine participants, and went three rounds; everybody spoke at least once, and some three times. It was clearly possible to continue with more rounds, but I think we were roughly at the limit of our attention span; more would have been counterproductive. in accordance with the insight about confessions and struggles being much the same thing, we combined these into one category, which seemed to work well. We had a mix of all four categories, with some being, as our resident theorist put it, superpositions.

Everyone seemed pleased with the results; it was even suggested that we might run the ritual more often than once a year. In truth, any organised activity that leads to someone shouting, in full seriousness, "Sweden shall be CLEANSED with FIRE and FLAME" cannot be all bad.

I've previously marked V_V as a probable troll. It seems a lot of feeding is going on. This post in particular is not an appropriate place for it. I'm thinking of adding a term to the Deletion Policy for, well, this sort of thing on any post that reports a positive community effort - see Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate for the rationale.

When I was doing OB and the Sequences, I realized at one point that Caledonian was making it un-fun for me since each post was followed by antihedons from him, and that if I didn't start deleting his comments, I would probably stop continuing (though I certainly didn't know as much then about reinforcement psychology, I still appreciated this on some instinctive level). I'm not going to tolerate that kind of negative stimulus being applied to community organizers.

I think it might actually be a good idea to give any poster the power to delete replies in their post's comments thread - Facebook does this automatically and I don't think it's a problem in real life, except of course for the trolls themselves - but that would require development resources, and as ever, we have none.

Don't hold weird ceremonies.

This brings up some interesting history, actually. Synthetic subcultures -- fraternal orders, service organizations, social clubs not associated with a particular hobby -- used to be a lot more common than they are now; the Freemasons are probably the best-known example, but far from the only one. Ritual was quite common among them, basically as a group-cohesion hack. Now, the lines between an initiatory society and a mystery religion are pretty hard to draw, but generally these organizations didn't claim religious status and I'm inclined to believe them.

For reasons I don't fully understand, these started falling out of fashion sometime during the mid-20th century. The main survivals these days, at least in the United States, are college frats and sororities, service clubs along animal-club lines (Lions Club, etc.), and certain branches of Masonry; generally these are in decline, or have substantially changed their model, or both. You could also make a case for the Scouting movement. which survived thanks to its educational niche.

I'm starting to think of the social branch of the LW community as something like a stab at reviving this sort of organization, and I think rituals like the OP's are best viewed in that context. Unfortunately that's not a prototype that's likely to occur to most people, and so I do see ritual as a potential PR difficulty, maybe something that should be offloaded onto local communities rather than promoted globally. Raemon seems to be thinking along similar lines, to his credit.

But in any case I wouldn't consider it positive evidence for anything untoward. It's just a social tool, and not even an intrinsically Dark Artsy one -- though the existing rituals are not my cup of tea, personally speaking.

More thoughts on this on the earlier post.

As one of the participants, I can honestly say Schelling Day was a highlight of the past year. The experience was every bit as powerful as described. Afterwards, I felt a sense of friendship and goodwill towards my friends (old and new) that was nearly overwhelming.

Thank you so much for organizing this event. Here's to next year's Schelling Day!

Glad this went really well!

We've done some non-ritualized group therapy sessions at the New York meetup, which seem similar. I'm interested in running something closer to what you describe here, and see if it feels noticeably different.

Yeah, out of all those things you put "check" on, I'd probably not put "check" on a single one of them (or at the very most one or two), since almost all of what you just said are a gross misrepresentation of the truth, bordering on libelous.

The solstice rituals didn't look quite right: according to the reports it seemed that people were taking them too seriously.
But at least you could have given them the benefit of doubt: these people came from Christian or Jewish backgrounds and missed their traditional holidays, so they invented a replacement.

But group confession sessions are way beyond the rituals of mainstream religions, they are outright cult practices: http://www.prem-rawat-talk.org/forum/uploads/CultCharacteristics.htm