I considered reviving this blog and decided against; I’m now putting general nonfiction thoughts at Dangerous Sincerity, and general fiction at Portions of Eternity.
It is dangerous to be sincere unless one is also stupid.
— Robert Gould Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists, Man and Superman
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword,
are portions of Eternity too great for the eye of man.
— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
This is moderately political, not in urging any political engagement, but in how to think about your own political relationship to current events and betrayed ideals.
Spite.
Nothing else their creator knew could grow in isolation, endure helplessness, and motivate even when all else was lost. Determination had to be earned, hope could be lost, love made you both weak and strong…
But the urge to spit in the eye of the heavens, to rage against those who had done you wrong, to strike at those you loathed even as you fell into death– it was destructive, yes, but the great beasts of her army were always meant to destroy.
Spite could be spun into obsession, sharpened by every trial, growing only more dangerous as other things were lost.
(source)
I think the benefits of spite are underappreciated.
To be sure, spite is dangerous. Hurting yourself to hurt someone else more, because you take grim satisfaction in their downfall even as it doesn’t help you at all, is a good way to get yourself hurt. And if you live a life without any major bad things happening, you will have very little use for spite. When things are going well, there’s no need to spite anyone.
But does that really describe anyone these days? Politics, X-risk, general romantic and social disintegration; heck, bans on fake meat. Even if you’re in good shape inside your own head, it’s a rare person today who’s living a charmed life.
Who versus? Who are we doing it versus!?
This is spite of a classic kind, but not a kind I would recommend to anyone. Framing your life around an enemy and spiting them is rarely productive or good for you. On the other hand, sometimes it’s straightforwardly good.
I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.
The obvious example is spite as decision theory – when someone’s screwed you over, and you don’t have any ability to salvage it for yourself, but you can make things even worse for yourself to ensure they do worse than they would have had they played straight with you in the first place. It’s better to be the kind of person who predictably engages in spite, to discourage anyone from betraying you. This is straightforward and intuitive and people largely don’t need it explained to them; systematizing explains why we have this instinct, and when it is a misfire. It doesn’t add new motivation, it just gives an explanation for why we have it.
Illegitimi non carborundum.
But consider this other form of spite: refusal to bow to pressure even when the pressure’s worked at making you regret it. Keep reading and writing Harry Potter fanfic even though J.K. Rowling has adopted views you find repulsive, because the stories are still good no matter what the author says about them. Refuse to give up symbols because someone else has adopted them – ignore the neo-Nazis who are Norse fans and keep playing a Norse character, or Hawaiian shirts or tiki torches or whatever.
Obviously you’d best be aware, so that other people who have ceded that ground and take offense don’t take you by surprise. And they will make your life harder for doing this – this is what makes it spite, and not just stubbornness. It would be easier to give things up because they’re tainted by association, but spite says to tank the cost and keep doing it. Do you really want to live in a world where every time neo-Nazis or bigots or terrible politicians pee on something and mark their territory, everyone else immediately gives it up, even if they were attached to it for most of their lifetime? Clearly we do not. That’s an awful world even before any of them start to observe it and exploit it, and if there’s anything the descendants of /pol/ know how to do, it’s exploiting this kind of thing.
So don’t give them an opening. Keep doing it. Enjoy your hobbies, your favorite stories by Rowling or Orson Scott Card or poems by Kipling. As long as you still enjoy them, and then maybe a little longer – as Scott says, there’s a point on the hyperstitious cascade where you give in, but it’s past the point where you get uncomfortable. And if you need motivation for pushing past that discomfort, the answer is spite.
Which brings me to why I was thinking about this, as a seasonal matter. For the American majority of those reading this, it is almost the Fourth of July. Many people dislike things the US Government has done even in normal times. And they’re right to, very often; you don’t have to go back to Japanese interment and Jim Crow to find reasons to be extremely disappointed in the USG. But many of those people then go a step further and get disgusted with the symbols of America – the flag, the bald eagle, the Fourth of July. And to those people, I say:
We were here first. They can’t have those symbols, and if they try, keep them anyway.
Keep using them to represent the good things they’ve stood for for two and a half centuries, and spite them. Because much like I can say that the majority of my audience here is American, I can also say that the majority are liberals. Liberals in the sense that they intellectually descend from the classical liberal tradition of religious, cultural, and intellectual pluralism. That they believe in individual rights and freedoms and the government serving the people and generally not interfering too much, and particularly in free speech and free debate. (You might call yourself a libertarian or a bleeding-heart liberal or a moderate Democrat or, if you’re extremely based, a Pirate Party member. The descendants of classical liberalism are many.)
And one thing that’s unequivocally true is that these symbols of the USA were chosen by classical liberals and represented their ideals long before anyone now alive got to them. Not by perfect people; in many cases by people who did terrible things and in almost all cases significant hypocrites1. But by idealists who believed in ideals that we share and the current high-level government of the US does not.
Will some people think that, in remaining patriotic to the country that is “if right, to be kept right; if wrong, to be set right”, you agree with whichever stupid, evil, or both stupid and evil actions are currently being emitted from Washington? Yeah, some. Fuck ’em. These symbols are still ours. Spite the jerks who are polluting them. Take pride anyway. Two centuries of people immigrated to America in pursuit of those ideals; my favorite photo at Ellis Island is a row of men from the (Ottoman-ruled, Muslim-law) Balkans, sending a picture home to the old country showing them each with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a pistol in the other – “We are free to live as we like here, and if the new rulers change their mind, we can fight to stay that way.” Do you want to give up on that, just because we’re at a new low?
It was my family’s tradition, every July 4th, to read the entire text of the Declaration of Independence. Old TJ has gotten a much worse rap in the last generation than before, because he was one of the biggest hypocrites of all. And the clause about ‘merciless Indian savages’ has made people uncomfortable for a lot longer than that. But the idealism that made it work anyway shines through the hypocrisy. Fairly well known is the deleted clause denouncing King George for “captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither”, dropped from the Declaration, but his actions as President made clear that he wanted to break ‘slave power’ even while he benefited from it himself.2[^2] We are all the heirs of Thomas Jefferson, across the Western world – flawed, frequently enormously flawed, but trying to fix the flaws in the world and ourselves.
I intend to resume this tradition this year. And then go watch some fireworks. To all the Americans reading this, I suggest you do both yourselves.
I try not to follow politics too closely. Bad things happen, good things happen, they get reversed a few years later, most of the sound and fury signifies nothing. Especially in the short term where a lot more attention is paid to what amounts to gossip and interpersonal drama rather than anything that affects the issues. And the general rule that everyone gets very stupid where politics is concerned seems to apply perfectly well to politicians.
But it’s hard to ignore recently, and some parts of it, in addition to being hard to ignore, probably shouldn’t be.
I don’t think Donald Trump or Elon Musk set out to ruin the credibility and international dominance of the United States of America. I think they, respectively, don’t understand what that would mean, and didn’t consider whether that might be possible.
But look at what happened. Free trade agreements with our closest allies ripped up by the same man who renegotiated them six years ago. Sudden, no cushion no prep no backup stoppage of the most visible ways America intervened in a huge variety of developing countries, which produced goodwill in huge quantities (and at low prices). Trade war with everyone, replaced days later with slightly different and milder trade war with everyone, except for China who got global thermonuclear trade war. And our notional system of checks and balances, legislature reining in the executive and judiciary calling injunctions and prohibiting violations of existing law, ineffective at stopping it and completely powerless to slow it down.
This isn’t the first time a president decided to ignore law and precedent and push the extreme limits of what the executive could achieve in defiance of the judiciary, enacting sweeping legislation, huge economic changes, and radical shifts in philosophy. That would be FDR. (Or Andrew Jackson if you draw a broader circle.) But other than FDR being wildly popular and taking power at a time of crisis where radical measures of some kind were most likely necessary and even if not, endorsed by the populace, Trump’s still missing a major feature of making this possibly work out positively: a plan. A coherent goal for what, exactly, all the chaos is supposed to do or achieve.
(“Make America Great Again”, while a fine slogan as far as it goes, is not specific enough to use to aim policy.)
And so we have… change. Too much change. No one, Wall Street or Washington or London or Brussels or Laos or Kenya or Brazil, knows what will happen, or how long it will last. The executive, determined to be unitary or bust, switches decades of policy continuity on a dime and then swaps halfway back a week later. And the legislature did nothing to stabilize it, and the courts very little.
Even if you consider this all a good thing (and if you call shutting down PEPFAR a good thing you’re an awful person, but possibly a coherent one), good for America, you have to look at the perspective from every other country.
And that perspective is this:
And what that amounts to, is that the United States, which spent fifty years building itself up as the leader of the free world and the ally of anyone struggling to achieve democracy and prosperity, is now completely unreliable. No treaty you make now can be relied on to still mean anything in ten years. No promise of aid to keep you together while you industrialize is worth the paper it’s written on.
Trust is a social illusion, but usually it’s a very durable one, because everyone wants to maintain it. America has just shown how fast it snaps in half and pops like a soap bubble when someone doesn’t.
And we see, across the map, reaction to it. Canada swung a hopeless election into a solid win by defying Trumpism. The EU and the UK are looking back to each other. China is launching a concerted influence campaign in the places USAID is most sorely missed.
In 1941, LIFE magazine proclaimed in the editorial pages that we should begin an American Century of global dominance in the service of democracy and freedom and “lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels”.
We can now say that the American ‘Century’ lasted a little over 80 years.
This is what bothers me – not that all these political actions are bad, though I do believe they are. But that they’re not fixable.
Say you get a basically optimal scenario for recanting, rejecting Trump’s philosophy, and repairing the damage. The midterms are so bad for Republicans that the stress gives the Donald a heart attack, he doesn’t make it through the week, and President J.D. Vance walks back many pieces of it and starts trying to build credibility back, honor breached treaties, and do as much as he can on the international stage without alienating his base and the promises he’s made domestically. He runs in 2028 and loses to, let’s say Cory Booker, who then spends eight years vigorously fixing whatever he can, doing a good job of being Barack Obama II and reshaping America’s image to be Not Trump like Obama did for Not Bush. His political capital to do it remains endless and domestic issues do not interfere.
After those ten years, how close do you think we’d be to having the international dominance we had in 2020? How much would anyone else believe we wouldn’t set it on fire again, tear up the treaties and do what we liked for another two to eight years when the next reckless demagogue got sworn in?
Thirty years to build, fifty years to maintain, one hundred days to completely destroy.
Ten years wouldn’t repair it. Thirty years might, in which case my parents, in their sixties, wouldn’t live to see it. That still might be enough – it might be fifty years, in which case I, in my mid-thirties, might not live to see it.
And that assumes that the political will sticks to it for three decades. The Marshall Plan was popular with the Greatest Generation, likely because it was the extension of the project of the war by other means. It funded a lot of American industry to supply Europe with the tools to rebuild, paid a lot of American wages and salaries to do it. Would we be able to do the same now, without such an obvious target and supply of domestic companies willing to hit it?
No. The beacon of Liberty’s lantern is out. The lamp may shine beside the golden door, but it won’t shine in Africa or Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe. If we’re lucky it may stretch as far as South America and NATO. Even if we try, it won’t be believed, and what good is a light no one believes is shining?
I don’t know if we get Chinese dominance or a multipolar world or – honestly probably the most likely – AI catastrophe. But we don’t get another twenty years of Pax Americana.
And that, that can’t be ignored.
The future is inherently unpredictable. I don’t mean that it’s impossible to predict, physics continues to hold and in principle it says everything. Only that we can’t. We don’t know what’s coming, and that might be the scariest thing, ultimately.
You might think I’m talking about AI, and I am, but even without that, even near-zero progress will be terrifyingly difficult to predict.
Like, okay, there’s this machine. You may have seen it at the Exploratorium. A motor spins at about 200 RPM, and it’s fixed to a worm gear, and that turns a round spur gear, fixed to another worm gear, another spur gear, and so on, twelve pairs of gears in all. Gear ratios mean the second pair are already moving too slow to see or feel. The twelfth spur gear and its axle will take two trillion years to spin once. So it hardly matters that the worm gear on the end of that shaft is instead a round gear, buried in a solid block of concrete.
And that’s really overdoing the point, or underselling it. The seventh round gear will take seven thousand years to turn once. The eighth, well, I’m pretty sure it will be over a thousand years to move it by one tooth. Might as well put the concrete there.
I first met this machine, or a near-identical cousin, when I was about eight years old, at the MIT Museum in Massachusetts. I don’t know if this affected how I think about time. Probably I would have been like this anyway. But I think it makes an important point.
Doing nothing novel, just ordinary unchanging slow steady progress, will produce a result, in under a thousand years, that looks completely different from the forces that created it.
AI may mean that we can’t predict ten years out. I think it probably does. But even without that, a thousand years? We have no idea what’s coming. The best technologist, the best historian, the best sociologist, the best superforcaster, even if they were all fused into one mega-expert, they can’t forecast out that far, and if they’re honest with themselves they know it. And generally they are honest; you don’t get to be the best in those fields by fooling yourself about how much you know. The policy wonks who talk on TV or Twitter aren’t them, they’re, well, mostly the midwits who’d rather be known for usually failing than be unknown.
Some people say, well, shouldn’t we make scenarios anyway? Won’t that help?
I say, No. Absolutely not.
You’ll still be confused, but now you’ll also be meta-confused. You will have a fictional example to generalize from, and that might make you forget, in whole or in part, that you are still confused.
So… declare bankruptcy. Stop trying. It helps, in my experience.
Much easier to not worry about what wild things, good or bad, the future will bring, when you accept that none of the details will be anything like anything you imagine. No matter how bad or bizarre your worries about the unpredictably-far future, whether that means a thousand years of normal life or ten of AI super-progress, you can say to yourself, confidently:
“It will certainly not be like that.”
And you’ll be right.
Which doesn’t mean we can’t say anything about the future. The future will be wild. It will not look like the present. Either we will be dead, or we will have the power to ever-more-radically alter the universe, or both.
Probably not in that order.
If we have nonhuman successors, they’ll have that power, probably whether or not we’re dead. That will cap out somewhere, there isn’t infinite power on the table …except maybe if there’s a simulation. But it will get a long way from us, now. We, or they, will be capable of climbing the Kardashev Scale, using the Sun, and then many suns, and we probably will. We can confidently guess that physics will get solved.
But details? A boot stamping on a human face forever? Planets tiled with factory farms? The Matrix?
No. Those aren’t going to happen. It might be worse, and it might be better, but it will be weirder. Inconceivably weird, almost certainly.
Now, this does mean giving up some things. Dreams of specific futures die just like nightmares. But as Gendlin said: What is true is already so. Those dreams were false already. Owning up to that won’t make it worse. Ignoring it won’t make it go away.
And one thing it doesn’t mean giving up, is optimism, or the attempt to steer. We shouldn’t steer toward specific detailed futures; that will only mislead us. But we can steer toward properties of futures.
It is good to steer toward averting apocalypses.
It is good to steer toward humanity being able to recover from apocalypses.
It is good to steer toward humans retaining control of AGI, or of our shared values retaining control, or both.
It is good to steer toward humanity’s values retaining the important parts of today’s values, however much of them we deem are important enough to lock in.
If you see something that you think can be done, now or soon, to steer the world in those directions, that’s somewhere to be optimistic. Or in other good directions I didn’t mention. Talk to an expert, if you aren’t one already. These problems don’t get easier because they’re more abstract. Harder, if anything. But they were abstract already.
And while we’re thinking, and working, time will pass. That machine, it gives you a very visual, almost tactile feel for how the time will pass.
Brrr… A third of a second. Brrr… Ten seconds. Brrr… Ten minutes. Brrr… Ten hours.
Twenty days. Three years. A century and a half.
Seven millennia.
It takes a whole lot of time, to make up each of those steps. We don’t know, very nearly can’t know, what will happen by the end of those longer steps.
But in the shorter steps, there’s a lot of space to push toward better futures. In the longer times, even small pushes go a long way.
And there’s a lot of room to live. Ten seconds, ten minutes, ten hours at a time.
The darkness isn’t behind us. And we don’t know how many steps of the gears it is away. But we have time, to use as best we can, and as best we see fit.
And there’s a lot of time, packed into that time.
On the occasion of the first, that I know about, reuse of my speech I Have Seen The Tops of Clouds in a later Solstice, I was incidentally asked how I adapted it from the original (technically a v21) by Quinn Norton. It got extremely good reviews for Bay Solstice 2016, was one of the first suggestions for non-music on the Solstice album in 2019, and is being reused for Bay Solstice 2024, so it’s fair to call this a success.2 And if you look at the essay, it’s great, but it’s definitely not suitable for use as a speech. So, how did I do it?
Unfortunately, my basic answer is ‘no tricks, I just did it the hard way.’ By which I mean I practiced it dozens of times. At least a couple times a week I’d stand in my bedroom and use the back of a chair as a pseudo-lectern and read through it a couple times and take a half-hour or so doing it. I think I read it through something like forty times.
Now, this works. It worked for me, very well, and it probably would work for you. If your raw material is reasonably good and you make edits on the fly and keep them and get off-book3, your raw material probably doesn’t even need to be great, for your speech to be great.
But it takes a lot of fucking effort. I was depressed and obsessive and focused like a laser on making the only time people would notice my existence be really impressive, and also had nothing else to do. That pile of distorted thoughts made it really motivating, and this did, in fact, work, I blew the audience away hard enough that even my depressed ass could tell. Even today I can give some of the core pieces of the speech from memory on minimal prompting and it comes across well.
‘Use the Try Harder, Luke‘ is, while good advice, generally not the advice people want while they’re doing something that’s already pretty damn hard like plan and organize a Solstice. Especially a smaller one where the person arranging the site and the program is also giving most of the speeches themselves.
Also, it’s been six years now. I don’t remember most of the details. Was I off-book by the beginning of December, or not until a week before Solstice? Did I make several rounds of edits, or just one, maybe two? I don’t remember.
But wonder of wonders, I have a digital footprint and can look at what I was doing over a two-month period six years ago with, frankly, somewhat more detail than is entirely comfortable to notice.
I encountered the essay on Tumblr via @fuckyeahdarkextropian in January 2015, which was probably my first encounter with it. It stuck with me and I reblogged it every few months for the next year and a half, according to Siikr’s search of my tumblr blog.
I first suggested the essay for 2016 Solstice on November 9th, in a message to Brent Dill/@ialdabaoth, the organizer that year. I also sent an email to Quinn Norton asking for permission, which never got a response.
I made almost all the edits to the Google Doc I, apparently, used for this purpose, over the next two days. He had access to the doc and suggested two cuts for pacing; I took one and left the other in. I made no significant edits after November 20th.
So good news, apparently you don’t really need external feedback? Unless my answer was ‘be talented at this’, which I would not really expect is among my skills but maybe I wouldn’t know.
I can’t find the date of Bay Secular Solstice 2016 but it was probably the 17th; I’m pretty sure it was a Saturday, so it was either 17th or 10th, and I sent an email sharing my edited draft on the 18th.
So my above recollections are inaccurate and I only had about a month. Also, I wasn’t making edits as I went, just drilling the delivery obsessively. (That part’s accurate. My housemates at the time could probably confirm it, even, the floor wasn’t that thick and they could probably hear it.)
Obviously the hardest part of the speech is what speech to give at all. Writing an original speech is hard and I have no experience with it and I will not try to give you any advice on how to do it. Picking an essay to make into a speech is also hard and it’s been six years since I did it, but I will try.
Pick something that speaks to you personally. Maybe not the whole thing – I don’t, honestly, give a damn about climate change and didn’t then either – but there should be a core part of the essay that gives you strong feelings. This is the part you’re here to say; when you make edits and practice, the point will be to present that, in whatever context it needs, to best effect. You’re trying to evoke those feelings in your audience.
How do you pick that? I dunno, man. I haven’t read any essays which gave me shivers in the last couple years so I don’t think I can try to do another worked example with more attention paid to it. The Hans Rosling TED talk about industrialization (a similar theme used a year or two ago) could use some editing; you want to focus on “Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children’s books.” and ideally cut or reframe the rest around it. I might give it a try, but it doesn’t excite me and extracting a transcript is annoying.
Actually, I’ll give a little advice on original speeches: probably identify that core emotion and write that part first, the same way. That probably will help.
To give a speech: There is no substitute for practice. I took the stage with a copy of my speech, the same sheet of paper I’d had in practice, but I was thoroughly off-book. I think I glanced at it two or three times; I remember I gave most of the speech to my Uber driver a couple hours later with the script still in my bag. Frankly, I think this may be more important than good editing. The difference between a slightly hesitant speech where you have to glance down every couple seconds and one where you’re rehearsed and free to gesticulate and even step around the stage a little for emphasis and delivery is massive.
I think most people giving speeches at Solstice I’ve seen are about 80% off-book; they need to check their notes every fifth sentence or so. Getting that down to every tenth sentence, or twentieth, or fiftieth, is a big deal. Getting 95-98% off-book gives you much more freedom to deliver the speech as a performance; the last 2% is not really worth it, though you’ll feel like a boss if you can do it. For comparison, Shakespeare’s actors were probably only about 95% off-book; they had someone backstage prompting them with the start of the next sentence before they got more than a half-second of delay, rather than looking at their text, but same deal. They were professionals, but also they had as many as ten plays in active rotation at a time and less than two weeks to learn a new one. Aspire to Shakespeare-tier knowing your lines; if you can do it, you don’t need to come anywhere close to a Shakespeare-tier script.
Do you need public speaking training? Absolutely not; I have none, and sucked at it then. It might help you get the performance down better with less practice, though. Same goes for theater training; I have never acted in a play since I was five, though I find it fascinating as an art form and therefore know some random minutiae4.
On editing: Looking back at what I started with and what I finished with, other than rephrasing things so a first-person account was less dishonest, the most important parts might actually be the places I changed the whitespace. The piece of Norton’s original around the wham line is almost entirely flat paragraphs, with just “I have seen the tops of clouds.” standing on its own. Here’s what it looks like in my edited doc:
Big break for ‘And I have.’, smaller breakup of the whole next paragraph to space out the sentences and let them sit and hit. And actually, looking back at this now, the paragraph before it should get broken up a little as well. At least between ‘talisman against the night’ and ‘I don’t use it too often’, and maybe before ‘When I am very frightened’ and/or ‘When I feel so small and broken’ as well. Also, I can actually see some places I’m quite sure I delivered it with pauses the text doesn’t show, like pausing between ‘I know mysteries that great philosophers would have died for, just to have them whispered in their dying ears.’ and ‘I can look them up on my smartphone’, which both makes it hit harder and produces an excellent laugh line. So it may be slightly inaccurate to say I didn’t edit it midstream; I just didn’t write my edits down. (Sorry to the unnamed person giving the speech this year, and to anyone else outside the Bay! Forgot to share my wisdom in durable form.)
Oh, that’s a side point. It was a very serious and heavy, if optimistic, speech, and it still had a couple laugh lines. Don’t shoehorn those in, but don’t worry too much about the tone having a couple notes where it swerves. Except the Speech of Darkness, probably. That’s hard mode, sorry, and I don’t have a good idea how to do it.
On getting approval: I believe it was always my intention to go ahead with the speech if I never got a reply from Ms. Norton, but I did not specify in my email to her. In 2019 when the Album was getting made, Ray Arnold asked for suggestions for non-music that might go on it; I asked Quinn again, this time explicit that I wouldn’t do it without a positive response, and got an affirmative reply within two hours. (The GoFundMe campaign didn’t hit its goal, and while IIRC a shorter album was made, none of the speeches were included.) Moral of this story: Say explicitly what you’re going to do if you don’t get a reply, but don’t worry too much if you don’t hear back, or don’t have a way to contact the person in question. From my ironclad sample size of one, not only will they not mind, they’ll not mind enough that they’ll instantly approve commercial use when asked again three years later.
Lastly: In the words of Magic the Gathering: “Practice makes perfect, but obsession makes better.” You will not get it perfect. More than for most audiences, it’s important to warn you against trying. I put more work into this than was healthy, because I wasn’t, and I doubt the last dozen repetitions was actually buying much on the margin. Put more work in than seems necessary, but pace yourself anyway. If it’s good enough to be worth using again, you can do another editing pass then, before you start rehearsing it again.
Anyone who has been following my blog will note that I changed URLs to be a ritual-focused blog and then went silent, and now I’m back at the old URL of thepdv.wordpress.com. I was pretty enthusiastic, so what changed?
Short version? My P(Superintelligence before 2070) skyrocketed.
Given current ML progress, it no longer looks plausible that anyone in the current rationalist community who does not already have adult children will have adult grandchildren on this side of the Singularity. We will most likely have one more generation who reach adulthood; we will not have two. Either we’ll be dead, or we will cross the point beyond which the future cannot be predicted, which is, remember, what ‘singularity’ means.
Maintaining a culture across one generation is feasible without a coherent strategy. More likely to succeed with a strategy, certainly, but feasible without one. Only for two generations (or more) is it desperately important to work out rituals, holidays, social practices, etc., that preserve the values and good qualities of the community and carry them into the future.
It’s still interesting and I may try things. But it’s no longer my contribution to the community and the shared project. It’s just a fun hobby.
We are up here, blowing in the cold wind on the warmest day of the year, by our own hands.
Abolishing disease is great, something to celebrate cerebrally. But today, we’re speaking to the lizard brain: look around, make a call, and leave a message:
We build mountains!
We don’t always live up to our potential. But if you ever doubt our potential, remember this. We are the ones who build mountains.
-excerpts from my plans for a speech for High Summer
Welcome back to my blog, now moved to a dedicated site for a renewed focus on holiday crafting and secular, individualist, rationalist ritual.
My next plan is a slightly refined older design I never tested out: High Summer. In line with the wheel of the year schema, this belongs in mid-August, when Celts had Luggasnadh. Its message is the potential of humanity, as we have already demonstrated it, and a reminder of what we are capable of in the future. Its expected emotion is awe. Its medium for those is simple: feel the wind on your face from a tall, open-air place, one that is entirely man-made. Notice and remember, viscerally, that we have built mountains.
I am actively looking for a location in the middle Bay (SF/Oakland, presumably) to host this. The SF POPOS law says that all the rooftop decks should be free to the public for this kind of purpose, but it’s not enforced at all so I’ll probably have to pay money for it. I probably don’t need more than a couple other people to run the event, but a couple would probably be very helpful.
Not all rituals should be holidays. Some should commemorate important one-time events. Marriage is an existing ritual, and one which we seem to have worked out a pretty decent secular variant of. Historically, many societies also had one for adoption; this is not something we have a worked example of in modern society.
These are also both special cases of a more general schema: ritual for acknowledging someone as family. Historically, this was very important, since a lot of social safety net was built on the family (and the rest was usually built on the parish church). Rituals like this are very useful, because it’s not enough to recognize someone as family, you also have to establish common knowledge in your community that you have recognized them as family. It is/was expected that family came before the rest of the community, unless your community member’s needs were much, much greater. It was a explanation and excuse for what would otherwise be considered unfair partiality, and if that common knowledge was in place, it avoided the appearance that the unfair partiality was motivated by personal grudges or vitriol.
So this seems like an excellent ritual we should have. However: copying the idea across naively, it fails as individualist ritual. Acknowledging family tends to move the local culture towards thinking of families as units, and that is unacceptably anti-individualist. What we need is something related, but different. Not a ritual marking someone as kin… but, perhaps, one marking someone as kith. In the sense suggested to modern ears by the phrase “kith and kin”; this sounds like it means the people who are as important as kin/family, but who are not family. (This is not what the word meant historically, but absent a better term, I don’t see any reason to let that get in the way of a good name.)
This overlaps substantially with polyamory; many people with multiple partners will have something more family-like with some, especially if there are kids, but remain commensurably close to their other partners. But, and this is very important, that is not transitive. If I am dating Alice and have been for years, and Alice is also dating Bob and has been for years, this does not mean I am kith with Bob. Generally it means I can at least get along with Bob at the kitchen table, or else there would be strain on Alice’s relationships, but who Alice considers her ‘inner circle’ is entirely her own business. It becomes my business only to the extent that this creates conflict, conflict that either I or Alice finds more intolerable than the prospect of ending our close relationship.
I do not have a design for this ritual, yet. But I do have other desiderata:
Variants we might want to support:
Epistemic Status: Better thought-through than previous things I’d written on the subject. Still very fuzzy and iffy. Being kicked out of my drafts folder after about 3 years.
As anyone who reads this blog is probably aware, I have had some vehement, public disagreements about community norms, Circling(/Authentic Relating) and how much to distrust status instincts. I had an extended conversation about that whole cluster with Divia Eden at a dinner party some time ago, and concluded that at least a substantial part of my motivation was poorly-grounded, causing me to significantly underestimate the costs of my preferred approach.
The crucial point is that if you ditch the goal of these projects as “useless if not actively bad“, as I had done, you should expect to get gut-level motivation weakening and falling out of step with intellectual motivation. Particularly, going too far in that direction is like to produce very intelligent, dedicated, completely depressed and lumpen people. We have so many of those hanging around the Berkeley rationalist cluster that the specific subset who are transwomen acquired a collective name (together with a couple extra traits): “catgirls”.
A Testable Prediction has been made, in Accordance with The Law. Behold! The test came back positive. We do need something in this genre, or we will, directly, fall into this failure mode. However, I still think that most practitioners here are Not Paranoid Enough. More care is needed in how we align intellectual priorities with internal felt priorities and, ideally, with socially-shared priorities. This is necessary, but it is very, very easy to get wrong.
So we need something better planned. We need the Bardic Conspiracy.
While our modern neoreactionaries didn’t originate their line of thought, and anti-enlightenment thought is approximately five minutes younger than the enlightenment, I think that ultimately, most of the problems they see in modern society stem don’t come from democracy or ‘demotism’; they came about because Germany built the Autobahn.
Naturally, there are a couple steps in this chain of logic. And it’s possible I’m misunderstanding NRX thought. But if you’ll bear with me for a moment:
It’s a common claim in NRX circles that we have lost social technology that was making our lives far better for a very long time, and that if we could replace them, we could get ‘more good stuff and less bad stuff’, generally accompanied by some variation on this graph:
To be fair, this version of the graph raises some questions about the usual explanation, and looks more like prison-unresponsive long-cycle variation in the crime rate than a breakdown of social technology. There are a lot of confounders, so I’m willing to basically accept the premise (somewhat for the sake of argument): we have a very high imprisonment rate now, just to get almost as good lack-of-crime as we used to get with much lower punishment, and the reason we had it then was better social tools for discouraging crime.
When did that break down? Well, roughly the 60s. In the wake of the pill? True, but also in the wake of the Interstate Highway System. We had very long experience iterating on social systems that worked to punish defectors and encourage good behavior on the scale of a town, and despite the changing nature of the city, on the neighborhood level they worked pretty well, too. What the critical parts were, I’m not sure. Perhaps religion, perhaps sexist social roles; the only confident claim I’ll make is that the system of public shame and reputation were important. What’s critical here is that they broke down in the face of easy cross-country transportation. You could outrun your bad reputation – Kerouac’s On The Road is a description of this outrunning process at work. (Scott Alexander drew attention to this aspect of the story, h/t Scott.)
And the Interstate was basically inevitable, once Eisenhower saw the Autobahn at work. And Eisenhower may have been an unusually good wartime logistician (tangent: why isn’t there a word for that profession?), but not an extraordinary one; what he saw soon, someone else would have seen soon enough. Which gets to my point: the Autobahn was built for war, but by existing and being used, it ensured the mobility that would break down the assumptions underlying our effective social technology.
“AH HAH!” says my hypothetical interlocutor, “But you have tracked this back to another dangerous demotist society, the Nazis!”. This is of course true. But was the Autobahn a fascist idea? Would the Prussian monarchy that united Germany under Bismarck’s hand, or much earlier encouraged the development of the post roads along with the House of Thurn Und Taxis, really have turned down the possibility of massive strategic mobility it offered? No, this was a pure power move; if the military moved faster on well-paved roads, it was going to be built.
So who is to blame for that, then? The inventor of the tank? Henry Ford, for making the car mass-produced enough to be a mass weapon of war? The inventor of the diesel engine? In my view, it’s inseparable; the timing could have been different, but from the moment the steam engine was invented, the car, the transportation network, and the breakdown of the locality-based social system were just a matter of time.
Now, one of the traditional NRX reactions is to say that yes, this is all terrible, and we should therefore go back to monarchy. But short of destroying all the products of the Industrial Revolution, we can’t actually reverse the trends. We do need better social systems, but the old ones could at best be a short-term patch that broke down as quickly as The New Republic when it met The Festival.
Which still presents a problem: How can we recover the social benefits of robust localized reputation and societal expectations without sacrificing the economic, health, and non-bigotry benefits our development has given us or setting ourselves up in a perpetual war against the free flow of information? Here are a couple ideas:
Wrongs and Rites 