Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My Detailed Notes & Commentary from Secular Solstice, published by Jeffrey Heninger on March 25, 2024 on LessWrong.
Previously: General Thoughts on Secular Solstice.
This blog post is my scattered notes and ramblings about the individual components (talks and songs) of Secular Solstice in Berkeley. Talks have their title in bold, and I split the post into two columns, with the notes I took about the content of the talk on the left and my comments on the talk on the right. Songs have normal formatting.
Bonfire
The Circle
This feels like a sort of whig history: a history that neglects most of the complexities and culture-dependence of the past in order to advance a teleological narrative. I do not think that whig histories are inherently wrong (although the term has negative connotations). Whig histories should be held to a very strict standard because they make claims about how most or all of human history functions.
The song describes morality in terms of an expanding circle of concern: kin neighbor humanity[1] "feathers, fur, and silicon" future.
Trying to line these up with historical societies or ideologies is ... difficult. Many societies do not have a concept of 'neighbor,'[2] and some do not understand ethics in terms of circles of moral concern.[3] A few moral systems are universalistic (i.e.
they teach that people should have moral concern for all of humanity): Christianity,[4] liberal democracy,[5] and maybe Buddhism.[6] Actually practicing universalism is really hard: Most societies which preach universalism do not live up to its ideals.
Within one of these traditions, the whig version of history can make sense. Over the centuries, Christianity has dramatically expanded and Christian activists from Francis of Assisi to Martin Luther King have made it more true to the ideals of the New Testament. Similarly, liberal democracy has expanded dramatically, extended the right to vote for more people, and gotten better at defending many freedoms.
(I don't know what's going on with Buddhism, but its failure to build/maintain a dominant position in India is evidence that universalist ideologies do not generally outcompete other ideologies.)
This song cannot be simply about the spread of an existing ideology like liberal democracy. It also looks beyond existing ideologies and wants to push its ethics to include animals, computers/software, and the long term future.[7] The whig history described by the song does not have good evidence when comparing across different ideologies.
Concern about the far future is, if anything, declining in societies that care more about individuals than kinship groups. Abraham looked at the stars and imagined what his descendants would be like in 5,000 years. Moral concern for animals and computers/software might be increasing, but these opinions seem uncommon, and whether the trends will continue is far from obvious.
The song's argument about moral progress in the future is: The circle of moral concern will continue to grow, and therefore we should adopt tomorrow's morals more quickly. The complexity of the history of ethics makes me skeptical that it is possible to predict what the future's ethics will be. Even if we could, that would not imply that we should adopt them.
The arguments for animal rights, moral concern for computers/software, and longtermism will and should succeed or fail on their own merits, not because they match a whig history.
Life Is Too Short to Fold Underwear
I am often a fan of making mundane things sacred,[8] but this isn't how you do it.
To make something mundane sacred, you intentionally do something different with it (which usually makes it harder) in order to materially or symbolically contribute to a higher cause. This is a 'sacrifice,' which etymologically comes from the Latin 'to make sacred.' For example,...
