The Nonlinear Library LW - Prepsgiving, A Convergently Instrumental Human Practice by JenniferRM
Nov 25, 2023
09:49
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: Prepsgiving, A Convergently Instrumental Human Practice, published by JenniferRM on November 25, 2023 on LessWrong.
Most cultures have a harvest festival, and every harvest festival is basically automatically a Prepsgiving Celebration.
In the northern hemisphere this probably happens in November or October, and in the southern hemisphere it probably happens in May or June. There could be more than one celebration like this, and in the US, I think Halloween and Thanksgiving both count as instances.
Depending on how you want to frame it, you could argue that the Idea teleologically causes all these Instances, but you could just as easily claim that the Instances epistemically caused the Idea.
If you think this essay is a good idea, and don't want to change your behavior very much at first, I encourage you to enjoy your harvest festivals more mindfully and simply think of them as instances of this idea, and if this helps nudge the practice into a more personally and locally useful shape, all the better!
If you want to take the practice very seriously, and do it a lot (on monthly, weekly, or daily cadences) then I encourage you to still take traditional harvest festivals seriously and interrupt your local routines to integrate in anything that is larger or older or more important, because helping improve people's situational awareness is one of the virtues of such events.
The name of Prepsgiving is related to Thanksgiving, but the orientation towards time is reversed. Harvest festivals in general, and Thanksgiving specifically, all basically celebrate having successfully navigated a period when people had to think really hard about food to have a good life, whether that was pulling a lot of produce in from a field with complex machinery, or surviving a disruption in food supply lines, or whatever... it happened in the past and so looking back you can give thanks.
With Prepsgiving, you should also be looking forward, so you can get ready. Bringing this future orientation to existing events might help you notice the ways in which even just giving thanks for good things that happened in the past can help people be ready to better handle adverse events in the future.
There is an interesting pattern to human disaster planning, where we tend to prepare exactly for a hurricane, or an earthquake, or a tornado, or a fire, when we get into it as a individual person, but once we really take serious steps most people notice that there are lots of simple and easy things to do that help with ALL such patterns. In nearly all of those cases, it is useful to have a "go bag" with stuff that would be useful to use if living as a disaster shelter. In most of those cases "stored water" is probably useful.
Hiking equipment overlaps here a bit, because iodine pills are a very compact way to "get access to emergency water".
Prepsgiving isn't one single practice, that works one single way, but is the overall convergence of "holding a celebration to think about and get better at the convergences that arise in emergency food logistics across many possible emergencies".
For example, at a good Prepsgiving, there are probably more people rather than less people. This lowers the cognitive burden on average, helps aggregate rare knowledge, gives a chance for children to learn rare food preparation skills from trusted adults by observation, takes advantage of efficiencies of scale in food production itself, helps people become friendly and familiar with more people in their extended social network, and maybe starts to set up a social network in which food bartering could occur where huge gains from trade can be accessed through face-to-face processes if food supplies ever get surprisingly scarce for some amount of time.
Before covid, I always had Prepsgiving "as an idea that I should try to do more, and...
Most cultures have a harvest festival, and every harvest festival is basically automatically a Prepsgiving Celebration.
In the northern hemisphere this probably happens in November or October, and in the southern hemisphere it probably happens in May or June. There could be more than one celebration like this, and in the US, I think Halloween and Thanksgiving both count as instances.
Depending on how you want to frame it, you could argue that the Idea teleologically causes all these Instances, but you could just as easily claim that the Instances epistemically caused the Idea.
If you think this essay is a good idea, and don't want to change your behavior very much at first, I encourage you to enjoy your harvest festivals more mindfully and simply think of them as instances of this idea, and if this helps nudge the practice into a more personally and locally useful shape, all the better!
If you want to take the practice very seriously, and do it a lot (on monthly, weekly, or daily cadences) then I encourage you to still take traditional harvest festivals seriously and interrupt your local routines to integrate in anything that is larger or older or more important, because helping improve people's situational awareness is one of the virtues of such events.
The name of Prepsgiving is related to Thanksgiving, but the orientation towards time is reversed. Harvest festivals in general, and Thanksgiving specifically, all basically celebrate having successfully navigated a period when people had to think really hard about food to have a good life, whether that was pulling a lot of produce in from a field with complex machinery, or surviving a disruption in food supply lines, or whatever... it happened in the past and so looking back you can give thanks.
With Prepsgiving, you should also be looking forward, so you can get ready. Bringing this future orientation to existing events might help you notice the ways in which even just giving thanks for good things that happened in the past can help people be ready to better handle adverse events in the future.
There is an interesting pattern to human disaster planning, where we tend to prepare exactly for a hurricane, or an earthquake, or a tornado, or a fire, when we get into it as a individual person, but once we really take serious steps most people notice that there are lots of simple and easy things to do that help with ALL such patterns. In nearly all of those cases, it is useful to have a "go bag" with stuff that would be useful to use if living as a disaster shelter. In most of those cases "stored water" is probably useful.
Hiking equipment overlaps here a bit, because iodine pills are a very compact way to "get access to emergency water".
Prepsgiving isn't one single practice, that works one single way, but is the overall convergence of "holding a celebration to think about and get better at the convergences that arise in emergency food logistics across many possible emergencies".
For example, at a good Prepsgiving, there are probably more people rather than less people. This lowers the cognitive burden on average, helps aggregate rare knowledge, gives a chance for children to learn rare food preparation skills from trusted adults by observation, takes advantage of efficiencies of scale in food production itself, helps people become friendly and familiar with more people in their extended social network, and maybe starts to set up a social network in which food bartering could occur where huge gains from trade can be accessed through face-to-face processes if food supplies ever get surprisingly scarce for some amount of time.
Before covid, I always had Prepsgiving "as an idea that I should try to do more, and...