Completely agree with your observations, and I say this as someone who (a) grew up with family singing, campfire singing (b) had pretty extensive choral training; (c) nevertheless later participated in and led community singing groups built on the idea that it's totally, absolutely fine to sing "badly"; (d) for many years hosted a successful wassailing party at which most people were not Christian and not familiar with caroling, yet happily and credibly belted out the Christmas carols they had just learned, on the porches of surprised neighbors; (e) is now a folkie very active in the pub singing tradition (f) with an armchair interest in ethnomusicology, oral tradition, and the neurobiosociology of community singing.
SO... a few thoughts:
You are absolutely right that the most important factor is giving people permission to sing, that everyone has the right to sing, your voice doesn't have to be good, you don't have to be in tune, and in fact it will be fine. If there are professional musicians present it can be important to explain to them what is going on, why they should be happy to hear bad singers sing, and how they can help by singing the melody loudly, and not wincing.
You may find helpful resources at https://singout.org/communitysings/, look up Pete Seeger's Tone Deaf Choir (historical), Matt Watroba's Community Sings (current, I think). They were brilliant at getting big crowds of non-singers to sing (and surprise themselves with how good they sound).
I'd be happy to exchange notes on repertoire. I am not sure what themes exactly suit the Rationalist Solstice scene, but I know what worked well for my motley wassailing crew and my community singing group.
There are characteristics of songs from oral tradition that support/encourage everyone to sing, which are common in older traditional songs, religious/church songs, childrens/camp songs. Yes, they arose from contexts where the participants could not read, but this is irrelevant. You do not want people reading words off of a sheet of paper or their phone. You want them to be present to the room and just sing. You want it to be easy to sing in the pitch dark with a candle in one hand and a glass of grog in the other. So the same rules apply.
Predictability. The tune is repetitive (no modulations, bridges, etc), and the lyrics have a formulaic pattern. A good example: "Where have all the flowers gone?". If someone has never heard the song, they have to stop singing and listen to hear the one word that is new in each verse; but then they can predict how the entire next verse will go, and can sing along to the whole verse as well as the chorus. And that song is not silly, and not a bad candidate.
Repetition. Songs with a chorus, as noted, you can sing the chorus once at the outset, and then people can sing it every time it repeats. Pro tip: sing every verse, and repeat the chorus after every verse. Stage folk performers will skip verses and only sometimes sing the chorus to avoid boring the audience; but it's not boring when there is no audience and everyone is singing. But choruses aren't the only form of this. Some songs have call and response where you repeat each line (or there's a formula for the response to the called line). Some have a refrain in which the last line or two of each verse is sung again. Look for songs with these features.
Familiarity. Obvious one. If a lot of people recognize a song it helps, even if they just hum the tune. A good example of this might be Silent Night. In traditional music, including church hymnals and pub ballads, tunes are heavily re-used. The same tunes are re-used for many different sets of lyrics, so you can leverage that everyone already knows the tune. Parodies (writing new songs to well known tunes) work well for this reason.
Physicality. Clapping, stomping, snapping, whatever, lets people participate even if they don't know the words or tune -- and surprisingly lowers inhibitions for singing.
For totally novel songs I think the best you can do is have an optional pre-run for people who want to learn them, use the same ones year after year, and make it ok to just listen and enjoy the ones you don't know. People pick up songs up with remarkable ease. They will accidentally find they are singing it next time. In this context, story songs are the easiest for people to remember; our brains are wired for stories. For example 'Good King Wenceslas' was the favorite most belted out at my Wassail, even though there are no choruses or refrains.
Since you are taking a long term view on this: wanna co-org a workshop on "singing for people who can't sing" at LessOnline next year?
1It seems impractical to recommend that someone spend a few years in cryptography
That's too literal. How about: always try to play chess/tennis with someone better than you, when you can. Get your early training -- when it's your full time job to study -- in the field you struggle to keep up in, not the one you clearly dominate in. Be the small fish in a big pond. You learn most from people who are better than you. You will learn epistemic humility and self-skepticism. You hopefully learn not to stake your ego on your genius. you learn how to make yourself useful to people you want to learn from.
(But don't pick the field you can't keep up in at all; you won't learn anything when you are utterly lost; you'll likely be demoralized by the attempt, even if everyone is kind; and you risk being a true burden, toward whom kindness won't always be extended).
Are there others who could make a similar claim of having exceptionally good and hard to explain intuitions
Yes. PM me.
Not only is it rare but there seems to be a surprisingly large gap between my intuitions and the next closest person's.
This is a natural consequence of having many interests and switching fields many times; you bring a unique set of factual knowledge, concepts, heuristics, theoretical frameworks or insights to the problem at hand. You pay the cost of not likely being the most-expert or most-competent in most or all the fields you care about, but you reap the benefit of having uncommon insights, which tend to be orthogonal to the rest of the field (and perhaps for this reason incomprehensible to them).
Weak analogy: If reality could be mapped to one orthogonal basis set, it's as if each specialization only has a few basis functions; the good fields have at least one basis function that explains a large fraction of the power in at least the signal set [dimension of reality] they study. But other parts of reality that don't happen to project onto their set are entirely invisible to them. Interdisciplinary field-switchers get to accumulate basis functions as they go; so they always have some at their disposal that are orthogonal to the set in use within the current discipline. The more disparate two disciplines, the less overlap in their endogenous basis sets (but perhaps that is a tautological statement, a definition of 'disparate').
It seems hard to explain using anything we know from cognitive science. Standard explanations for good intuitions include that they're distilled from extensive prior experience or reasoning, but I moved from field to field and as a result was often a newcomer.
This could be exactly why you were able to have exceptionally good intuitions, see https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Afdohjyt6gESu4ANf/most-people-start-with-the-same-few-bad-ideas?commentId=JBHcLYgk77c7vxeGk
pertinent analysis from Rand Institute:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/external_publications/EP70594.html
“At the end of the last decade and the beginning of this one, human society itself was subject to a kind of penetration test: COVID-19. The virus, an unthinking adversary, probed the world's ability to defend against new pathogens. And by the end of the test, it was clear that humanity had failed.”
To clarify, the ground truth P(R) is constrained to be constant over the 5 trials of any given experiment?
My immediate thought is McClintock's transposable elements. AFAICT, this has only been mentioned by AI-generated lists in this thread, so to fill in a bit more for anyone who doesn't know the story: in the 1940s, McClintock observed genetic and cytological evidence from crosses of corn plants, which she argued could best be explained by assuming certain genetic elements routinely change their position in the genetic map, often breaking other genes when they insert, and restoring those genes again when they excise. For context, the discovery that genes had fixed positions on linear genetic maps that were collinear with chromosomes was still relatively new (1913), and the field of genetics was largely consumed by the job of determining these maps. Her interpretation was therefore very much against the current, and it was mostly dismissed and derided. But she was right. It wasn't until molecular biology confirmed their existence in the 60s-70s that transposable elements ("jumping genes") became widely accepted. She got the Nobel Prize for her discovery over four decades after she made it.
I take it the reason for asking for such case studies is that singular discoveries can be exceptionally impactful, so it would be good to enrich for them. Therefore it's of interest to ask what happened to McClintock in the intervening decades. My understanding is that she was able to continue her work the entire time, despite the skepticism of the field, due entirely to the Carnegie Institute. Carnegie Institute created a permanent position at Cold Spring Harbor Lab specifically for her, freeing her from teaching and administrative obligations, but more importantly, shielding her from the need for peer acceptance of her ideas (peer-reviewed grants, peer-reviewed papers). Importantly they backed her permanently and unconditionally, so that she was completely free to pursue whatever drove her curiosity, regardless of anyone else's opinion, even theirs.
This highlights the huge impact a private benefactor (individual or institution) can have by backing individual innovators. The trick is how to figure out who is worth backing. It's only impactful if one ignores or even actively anti-correlates with the usual metrics that academia rewards; but some or even most marginalized mavericks are in fact crackpots, so anticorrelating isn't enough. One has to be confident in positively judging people or ideas to be worthwhile, without relying on evaluations by leaders and experts.
useful, thanks
fwiw when I was doing research on wild-caught california ground squirrels I was told the population was known to harbor hantavirus (as well as plague). Consequently, we had to suit up like an anthrax research facility every time we worked with them. I have no idea why this was believed.