Vavilov Day Discussion Post

I saw your original Vavilov post and thought it was a great idea. The history of cereal crops is really interesting, and Vavilov, like the other greats in the field during the 20th century (i.e. Borlaug), had a successful strategy(ies) for enhancing food production that boiled down to:

1. Scour the globe for the crops that grow in the harshest conditions.
2. Collect the seeds.
3. Plant elsewhere.

Utterly simple and it worked. Huge impact for the betterment of humanity. I found this to be inspiring and tickling to my sense of aesthetic, so I tried a three-day fast (25th-27th). It was difficult, though not as hard as I initially thought; the worst of it was trying to focus on my work while my coworker was eating pasta three feet away and the scents were wafting directly into my rhinencephalon. Last night I actually had a dream about eating a sandwich, and I was so disappointed in myself for breaking the fast early I snapped awake about two hours early. 

Day one was pretty easy for me; in the recent past I had started a low-cal diet for breakfast and lunch, and there's not much difference between 400 calories and 0 calories over a 12 hour period. 

Day two started picking up, especially towards the end of the day, when I found myself losing concentration easier and taking noticeably longer to complete certain tasks (i.e. finding where I left off reading a document, needing to triple-check my math before moving on).

Day three saw the start of mild muscle weakness, especially in my legs. Instead of standing and stretching my legs once per hour, it was now once every three or four, simply because I stopped feeling the urge to walk around. 

In retrospect, it would have been a good idea to collect various health metrics, like pulse rate, blood pressure, reaction times, cognitive tests; the simple stuff before, during, and after the fast, and track various changes. How long can you go without eating before your average reaction time resembles that of a persons with a blood/alcohol level of .08%? How long before your average time to solve an addition problem of a given difficulty doubles? Triples? How about typing rate, and the rate of mistakes made? While I'm sure many have studied this sort of thing for decades, it would have been a fun exercise in data collection and plotting.

KingSupernova, I ran virtually the exact opposite of the strategy you suggested, and now I wish I had tried, like the metaphorical smoker quit for 20 years, to keep a packet of oreos or something in my shirt pocket and see how that would have changed the situation. 

Overall, a great exercise in self-discipline, not to mention a valuable history lesson. Next year I'll shoot for a week and make sure to record some data.

Thoughts on having part of the holiday be "have tasty food easily accessible (perhaps within sight range) during the fast"?

Pros:

• It's in keeping with the original story.
• It can help us see the dangers of having instant gratification available, and let us practice our ability to resist short-term urges for long-term benefits.
• If the goal of rationalist holidays is to help us feel like our own community, then this could help people feel more "special". Many religions have holidays that call for a fast, but as far as I know none of them expect one to tempt themselves.

Cons:

• It makes the fast harder. If people are used to their self-control strategy being "don't tempt myself", this will be new to them, and if they end up breaking their fast, they'd likely feel demoralized.

So this wound up going poorly for me for various reasons. I ultimately ended up not doing the fast, and have been convinced that I’m not going to be able to in the future either, barring unanticipated changes in my mental-health situation. Other people are going to be in a different situation and that seems fine. But there are a couple community-level things that I feel ought to be expressed publicly somewhere, and this is where they're apparently allowed, so:

First, it's not a great situation if there are like three rationalist holidays and one of them is this dangerous/unhealthy for a substantial fraction of people (e.g., eating disorders, which appear to exist at a high rate in the ratsphere). As far as I can tell, nobody intended that outcome; the original Vavilov Day proposal was like 90% “individual thing to do for personal reasons”, 10% “new rationalist holiday”, and then commenters here and on social media seized on the 10% because we currently don’t have enough rationalist holidays and people are desperate for more. (This is why, e.g., the original suggestion that people propose alternative ways of honoring Vavilov didn't get any traction; that wouldn't have met the pent-up demand for more ritual as effectively, so there wasn't interest.) But it meant that the choice was between “do something that's maybe not at all a good idea for you” and “lose access to communal affirmation of shared values with no available substitute”. The idea here isn't that there shouldn't be anything this risky; it’s that something this risky should be one thing among many, and right now we aren't there.

The counterpoint is that if we hold every new idea to a “good for the overall shape of the community” standard then defending ideas from critics becomes too unrewarding and we don't get any new ideas at all. Bulldozer vs. vetocracy, except mediated by informal community attitudes rather than by any authority. This seems like a valid point to me and I don't have any particularly helpful thoughts about how to navigate this tradeoff.

(It might have been possible to mitigate the tradeoff—assuming we wanted something like Vavilov Day to be a rationalist holiday at all, rather than an individual thing, which maybe we didn't—by putting more overt focus on questions like “how should people decide whether this is good for them” and “how should people whom this isn't good for relate to it”. But while these seem pretty non-costly to me, it might be the case that other people have different ideas for what non-costly precautions should be taken, and if you try to take all of them then it's not non-costly anymore. Again, I don't know.)

Second, I’ve heard from multiple sources that some people had concerns about the event but felt that they couldn’t express them in public. (You should take this claim with a grain of salt; not all of my knowledge here is firsthand, and even with respect to what is, since I’m not providing any details, you can’t trust that I haven’t omitted context that would lead you to a different conclusion if you knew it.) The resulting appearance of unanimity definitely left me feeling pretty unnerved and made it hard to tell whether I should participate. There are obvious reasons for people to refrain from public criticism—to the extent that it’s a personal thing, maybe we shouldn't criticize people's life choices, and to the extent that it’s a community thing, maybe we should err on the side of non-criticism in order to prevent chilling effects—and I don't really have any useful thoughts about what to think or do about this. I’m not sure anyone should particularly do anything differently based on this information. But I'd feel remiss if I allowed it to just not exist in public at all.

(This wound up being mostly about the meta-level ritual/holiday stuff, but I’m posting it in this thread rather than the other one because I wanted to say something about the application of that meta-level stuff to this particular situation, rather than about how to build rationalist ritual/holidays in full generality. I'm basically in favor of the things being suggested in the other thread; my only serious worry is that nobody will actually do them, given that many of them have been suggested before.)

A little bit late, but I also particpated in this year's Vavilov Day, and suceeded!

It was my first ever fast longer than 16 hours, and I had no idea how well (or even if at all) I would manage. I started after dinner on the 25th and ended it with breakfast on the morning of the 27th, to spend less time of the fast awake.

At first, I just avoided food and otherwise went through my day as usual, to check where my limits were in the first place. The day went over quite smoothly, and at around 24 hours, when I knew just regular not-eating for 36 hours wasn't really hard for me, I went on to challenge myself by making waffles (a childhood favorite I hadn't had in a very long time), and saving them for the celebratory breakfast the next morning. Looking back, I believe that both the challenge and the reward were about appropriate to my capacity as a first timer.

I found the overall experience really interesting, and as I'm also favorable of the whole patron saint holiday idea, I'll be doing it again next year, perhaps with higher difficulty.

Of course all the people here have different levels of practice and varying limits, but maybe adding a ritual of preparing tempting food specifically to give it to others (to capture the spirit of saving something for somebody else at one's own loss) would be a nice community tradition.

Also, perhaps a fundraiser to support a cause related to securing global food supply? Though I have no idea how one would go about that. 

(I just enabled agree/disagree voting for this thread, at Elizabeth's requeset)

I had an obligation earlier tonight that would have conflicted with the fast, so I'm going to participate 2 days delayed I'll respond to this post with a brief description of how it went.

Regarding the length of the fast: I'll also be doing a 36 hour fast because it seems long enough to be challenging and short enough to be doable. The only other time frame I would consider trying is a 24 hour fast, but then I wouldn't have the experience of going to bed hungry, which feels somewhat central to the event.

I do enjoy that the fast breaks with breakfast.

repost of Hamnox's comment from the original Vavilov Day post

uncomfortable squirm

In my culture, one is to be super wary of lionizing martyrs.

I want to be excited about cool new holiday ideas. I think trying a fast in a coordinated group is a splendid idea. I want to celebrate the amazing capacity of humans to care about others and to do hard things for good reasons.

 

but pain is not the unit of effort.

dying for the cause is not a success.

not every cost is avoidable, but i never, ever want to become the kind of person

who mistakes the price sacrificed for a value bought

 

In my culture there's a meta-tradition around ritual hardships or labors: you are to set aside at least 5 minutes, by the very clock, for considering how you might cheat. If you find you could get results without the hardship, you are expected to cheat for the results and then go find some other way to challenge yourself.

 

I have done fasts before, but I did not partake in this year Vavilov Day, because, well, my birthday happens to fall in one of those days. 

Thinking about it afterwards, I should have. And I think this could be a positive thing to do for most people. Let me expand on that thought. 

• First, Most people have never been in a state where their body does not have food in their stomach, and the sets of feelings that come with it are interesting and thought provoking at the least, and can be life changing at best. most humans historically have fasted, voluntarily and involuntarily, and I don't think removing these set of experiences fully from our life it's a good thing, so any effort on bringing it back is a net positive in my eyes, but again, I do fasts from time to time. 
• Second, Done with a bit of care, meaning, taking enough electrolytes, the Keto Flu feeling disappears, and you are left with the feeling of constant energy that Ketosis gives you, which can be an interesting feeling, plus, Giving a break to our digestive system is actually valuable. 

The reason to celebrate Vavilov with a fast makes sense to me. Specially when doing a fast can increase focus, and celebrates a historical event that really changed the world. 

I hope to get in the bandwagon next year. 

On the main thread, I commented [LW(p) · GW(p)]:

Just wanted to say that I think most rationalist "holidays" or "rituals" are pretty cringe, but this one strikes me as something much more real and valuable. I'm not sure I agree with your concept of "Patron Saint holidays" for the community as a whole but this one seems at least somewhat virtuous and noble in a way that I think a lot of other stuff misses.

I noticed some downvotes there, which I presume are thanks to my low opinion of much of rationalist "holidays" and "rituals". Would people be interested in discussing that more here? I think this one is notably better than what I've seen in other cases and I'm curious if people disagree, just don't like me expressing negativity about other events, or what.