#secular solstice

The rats are so right that the whole "the dust goes on to make new stars" bit in the original doesn't really work, both because the stars eventually die and because stars continuing in a universe devoid of life is worthless to us. Famously, the stars don't care but we do. "Our lives stay lived" is a way better fit for the point the song is making.

This excerpt from Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

For my 2,500th post, I think I might as well write a long overdue description of my experience at the most recent Secular Solstice. I usually have to delay this for holiday-related reasons, and this time I'm much later still, so that this will be a little quick and haphazard. There isn't a ton to report on beyond what I usually talk about, like my love of all the music, and my looking back across the years and seeing that I'm still in the same holding pattern as I have been since 2022 (and in some sense, before) of being unable to say that I know what my long-term professional future holds as I've been in a seemingly eternal job hunt throughout all of this time. (This always comes to a head during a particular portion of the ceremony -- I almost said "service" since it feels so much like a long church service in certain ways -- when we are asked to stand up according to what category we fall into with regard to actively helping the world through effective altruism versus not being in a place where we feel able to do that.)

This was the fourth time I've done the NYC Secular Solstice but the first time I've not arrived late -- I was in the room early in fact, and so for the first time was able to get a really good seat -- in particular, it was the first time I sat through all of the first and second "acts", and also the first time that I was staying the night right on the premises (it was in a hostel this year) so that I didn't have to leave any afterparty early to travel home in the wee hours of the morning. I enjoyed the singing a lot, especially as I'm gradually getting to know some of the songs despite never having listened to them outside of a rationalist event, and I'm determined this time to start listening to them regularly on a YouTube Secular Solstice channel that I believe has recordings of them, maybe even download sound files of them, etc.

Not only were the usual suspects around for the Solstice and/or the afterparty, such as @drethelin, but I was surprised to see that a bunch of people that I identify with the Bay Area were also present, including Eliezer Yudkowsky and Anna Tchetchekine. This is likely because, for the first time since I began going to this event, it took place later in December, pretty much on the actual solstice in fact, and perhaps somehow it worked out schedule-wise for the Bay Area people to show up. There were others, including Amanda Luce, that I'm not sure are Bay Area people but I met them at LessOnline over there and don't remember previously seeing them in the Northeast. Unfortunately, the Bay Area people who made it didn't include Scott or Ozy. I sat next to Anna during the "service" itself and once again had nothing to approach Yudkowsky about so didn't (someone I was talking to at the afterparty was interested in trying to strike up conversation with Yudkowsky and attempted an opener like, "So, tell me something I'm probably confused about", to which he tells me Yudkowsky responded with, "Nah, I'm not going to do that" while walking away).

There were two afterparties, one immediate and taking place the same room of the solstice event (the second year this was done, which is a great improvement over having to go somewhere else), and the second a bit later in a nearby bar. A highlight of the first afterparty was that I, after a number of years of realizing who SSC/ACX commenter and Less Wrong contributer sniffnoy was (a fellow mathematician with some indirect professional connections to me), finally got to meet him and talk to him properly. We had a nice conversation about mathematical stuff and what we each did for research; it was a bit strange to be chatting almost exactly in the way I would at a math conference without any discussion of rationalist community -related things at all. I didn't mention my handle at all (nor did I have it written down anywhere, as I was unable to get a badge this time), partly because it didn't organically come up and partly because I'm twitchy about revealing that to anyone in my professional realm. Maybe he'll stumble upon this post and make the connection, I don't think I really mind either way.

First of all, my strong feeling about the whole thing is that, while the solstice event itself is great and well done and worthwhile, just showing up for the solstice event is just not the way to do things: it's only one part of a much larger rationalist "megameetup" which -- I now get the feeling more strongly than ever -- would be really fun and interesting. I was convinced enough of this the previous time to make some effort (limited by the sheer hecticness of my November this past year) to figure out a way to be in NYC for the whole weekend, preferably without paying tons of money for lodging. But I just couldn't figure out any feasible way to do this, in particular because of the timing right around my students' final exams. I wish I had managed somehow, though: the people who attend the solstice event are just so visibly interesting and engaging and overall seem fun to spend a whole weekend with; and I imagine I could learn a ton on rationality- and EA-related topics if I did the Megameetup.

Anyway, I managed to arrive late again to the start of the event (for at least the second year in a row), just because I had too many things to take care of at my home before setting off for NYC, and Hofstadter's Law always applies to my journey to any particular part of NYC. What's funnier is that I also missed the beginning of the "second act" as I got caught up in conversation with several people during the intermission who weren't actually doing the solstice and didn't realize I was, and I didn't realize for a while that Part 2 had begun. I followed the semi-tradition (at least from two years ago) of arriving at and doing the event on no dinner, but some free snacks provided by one of the organizers outside the room helped a lot here.

I found the songs as meaningful as always and recognized many of them -- the main one that's stayed with me since is "Bitter Wind Blown", but there were some others that I remembered distinctly. There was a song I didn't recall from previous programs where part of the chorus was about not being able to "find my tribe, find my tribe, find my tribe", and I found that one spoke to me quite a lot. Altogether I'm ready to forcefully repeat what I've said after previous rationalist solstice events: the content of this music and the vibe of the whole event touches me more deeply than any type of religious service I've been to.

At the same time, I feel that my mind was elsewhere this time perhaps even more than the last time. I was tired (partly just from having rushed for hours to get there mostly on my own steam) and had generally been stressed out for weeks, and somehow the continuity of doing this for the third consecutive year brought up feelings that weren't entirely positive: I feel like my life is in a holding pattern over the past three years, with being at the same non-permanent job and not knowing what the next step is (along with, of course, being perpetually single and having no idea still in my late 30's where to expect my personal life to go). At no moment is this brought to my attention more forcefully than the part where members of the audience are asked to stand up in stages based on their involvement in EA, and there's still not much I can say for myself on that front -- I can't bring myself to do much until I know better what my financial and professional future looks like, and I hope this will change in the near future. Moreover, I began thinking of how this was the first rationalist event I'd been to where I could say that a solid decade ago I already knew and was very enthusiastic about the rationalist movement and had (a decade earlier) dreamed of becoming heavily involved, and ten years later almost none of that has happened -- it's not something I long for in most of my day-to-day life, but there's something inspiring about seeing some of the people at the forefront of the main Northeastern US branch of it in their element organizing stuff. Regardless of all this, for me there's something wonderfully moderately relaxing about singing along with a bunch of mostly-strangers that I still managed to enjoy quite a lot.

A major, major plus to the arrangements this year was that the solstice event was at the same convention center as the entire Megameetup, and in particular this meant that the after party was directly within and outside of the room the solstice ceremonies had taken place in. It's hard to overstate how much easier this made the evening as a whole (especially when compared to my experience two years earlier when I had made the mistake of attending by car!). My time at the after party was still limited, as I had to think about making the journey home without being up most of the night, but I was there long enough to have a bunch of conversations and appreciate how delightfully visibly autistic and rationalist-y and distinctly young-to-early-middle-age the whole crowd was. Again, the after party made me wish I could have spent the whole weekend and actually gotten to know more of the people there.

In terms of meeting familiar faces/handles, I saw a lot of @drethelin, whom I'd gotten to know in person at the previous NYC Secular Solstice (after being acquainted with him from Tumblr and SSC comments sections for most of the past decade). My impression of him as an unfailingly pleasant and affable person has been further cemented. He had to listen to way too much of me grousing over the academic job market and having no idea how things will be for me geographically in a year's time (primarily this was in the context of being able to attend further NYC rationalist events). In addition, I saw a bit of @taymonbeal but didn't speak to him beyond literally just saying hello and almost certainly not giving him enough time to have any idea of who I was. I'm pretty sure that during the event I was sitting directly behind Zvi and his family, but I remembered less about Zvi than I used to back when I was seeing his blog posts regularly (I don't know why I don't anymore) and remember only that I used to follow his Wordpress(?) blog and that I think he gave a speech at the solstice event two years ago. Again, I was at the cusp of cementing a number of new acquaintances, but time didn't allow me to pursue this much. Conversation was always fun and interesting. An unexpected theme was dating prospects for a single guy seeking women in different part of the country (in which several people emphasized the usual wisdom that NYC is the best place for this), which I don't recall actually bringing up myself, which at one point led to advice about how to increase my own dating prospects: I was told to... I think the phrase was "make myself bigger", which was clearly a euphemism for building up the muscles in my upper body (a goal I've already had for a while but am currently barely any closer to figuring out how to do). The gender ratio was not great, and there was definitely (as one may guess from the subject matter just mentioned) a "young-ish nerdy male" vibe in the after party, but most everyone appeared to be enjoying themselves and not to be hiding in their shells, whether a guy or not.

I had quite a journey just to get to the secret free/available parking spot where I had left my car (in a different part of the city altogether), and just around midnight I was buying a gyro for a very late supper from an outdoor seller and thinking over how one day not long from now I may lead a more responsible and tied-down life and feel nostalgia for the time when I could be alone on a public street at midnight in freezing cold getting food. Then I had a very spooky but not-unpleasant-to-look-back-on experience wandering the completely vacant streets of a park near one in the morning looking for my car before I had to make the long drive home (during which, strangely, I managed to stay wide awake much more easily than on the drive there).

I'm tempted to resolve never to attend the NYC Secular Solstice again without attending at least part of the Megameetup or without living closer to NYC, but we'll see. (There actually is a small but not insignificant chance, which I didn't have evidence of three weeks ago, that I may get a job closer to the city than I am now.)

I will, however, just like the last three years, attend NYC's Rationalist Secular Solstice, this time actually almost directly on the date of the winter solstice. I'm sure I'll see people like @drethelin and @taymonbeal there -- and maybe @augurydefier as well? -- and it seems that Tumblr user and frequent ACX/ToT/LessWrong commenter sniffnoy will be in attendance (I've known him parasocially since the very beginning of my contact with the rat community in 2014 and have very little level of separation from him professionally as we're mathematicians from neighboring research areas, but I've never actually met him face-to-face and am undecided on whether I should reveal my handle to him if I do thanks to my general paranoia about ever allowing my "Liskantope life" and my professional life to overlap).

I'm sure I'm leaving out tagging someone or other who I might also meet, but my brain is fried. Tomorrow is my first chance for a long time, and my last until I've traveled to my family, that I could in theory get a good sleep -- if I once again sleep badly, I'm afraid I won't be at my best at the Solstice.

I believe that afterparty will be at the site of the solstice celebration like it was last year, which happens to be at a hostel, and as I booked a bunk in that hostel to stay in tomorrow night, for the first time I won't need to hurriedly leave the afterparty to travel home, and it will be my level of exhaustion that will determine how far into the wee hours I'll be able to stay at it. (There is a potential issue with Sniffnoy possibly hosting a different afterparty somewhere else -- I'm guessing based on partial info I see on the schedule -- which would be more iffy for me.)

Recording's still up for anyone else who missed out, wants to see what it involved, and isn't put off by sincere emotion.