HI guys! I maybe totally misinterpreting the LessWrong community and Rationalist movements in general but it seems to me that rituals and holidays are exactly just that: Rituals and HolyDays. Whatever dress you put on them, with time they become religious crutches for people who need help or feel insecure. For what I understand of it it feels New Age-i/Scientology-i. Not that I have any problem with any of these. People believe in whatever they want to believe in. If it makes anyone happy it already made a step towards a better world, a better community (radical/hate religions excluded, however they may make their own community happier...). Anyway as a rocksteady atheist all I can see in these initiatives is another masked religion. Just think about it. How many devote Christians you know who actually follow the commandments to the fullest, who don't lie, don't kill, etc. Most of them are in it for the feel of security, for the support and justification they need. Again, no problem with that but how does that figure with people who think that a brighter future is possible by improving themselves and doing things just to do good. OK I see that the community can provide help, the feel that you are not alone it this, good advice, etc, but by formalising, ritualising it it feels like the whole thing is just falling back to the old and I think, outdated routines of religion and will lose the whole point long term:ie, creating a strong and independent individual via self improvement, informed and capable enough to do what is right. NB: some self-criticism: I have never attended any of these rituals, so I have no real clue how it actually looks like. I may be totally wrong. Please enlighten me
Thank you for the link, the article was very informative. You obviously have considered this type of objections before and found it to be low risk/ acceptable. Maybe I should leave the topic here but I still feel against it. I also feel you slightly downplayed the possible long term outcomes in your article.
By all means I do agree with the utility of rituals by helping the community to become coherent, induce otherwise possibly difficult changes in its members and provide support - at the beginning. When all participants feel strongly about its message and aim and interpret it as intended.
You see the danger right at the end of your article when you make the note about the possibility of a 'hollow, self-propagating memeplex'. You seem to think that this scenario is either unlikely or worth the risk. The way I see it, it is inevitable. As the community grows and with it the number of geographical places and members of partaking in these rituals increases,there will be an ever-increasing chance of people starting their own version of it. It is already happening. Their version will be slightly altered, abridged, possibly more focused on different aspects, eg minimizing reflection, which, as I understand, may be a challenging part of it, and maximizing the easy-to-follow, more automatic or interesting themes. They may even actively extend their sociological catchment area to include more easy-to-influence individuals, to 'spread the word' more efficiently. There will be no bad intention at any stage of the process, it merely 'dilutes' the original idea. It may even (likely) prove to be more popular than the original,but losing sight of the aim. How are you planning to prevent that? Would you nominate a regulatory body to formalize and control? Or a Pope? I am also not talking about near future events, but if you are serious about your and the community's aims, you are probably thinking for the long term, maybe decades, even centuries.What is you vision? How is it going to look like in, say, 200 years? What about a thousand? Not a few movements lasted that long... As I see it, that is long term planning and with great aims, the only way worth doing.
I am still not sure what the long term plans of LessWrong are anyway. Is it planning to form an elite, closed circle of people, capable of changing the direction the world is heading (a bit Masonist?) or is it trying to sow the seed for the wider population, aiming to change the way people think in general (rituals likely will end up forming a religion with a different name)? Is there a third (or fourth, etc) possibility?
I am not an anthropologist and maybe talking a lot of nonsense but I have read a very interesting book a few years ago, I would definitely recommend it on the topic. It is called 'The History of Magic and the Occult' by Kurt Seligmann. I think it is rather outdated and not too scholarly, however it gives a very good overview of the formation of rituals, religions, etc and highlights the connections between them over the ages.