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Merry Sciencemas: A Rat Solstice Retrospective

I TAKE this blog very seriously.

My half-dozen readers are counting on me for accurate, unbiased takes on Bay Area culture—a genuine read on the pulse of the collective consciousness. So when a friend invited me to the 2024 Secular Winter Solstice festival, I knew I had to deliver some serious boots-on-the-ground reporting of the event.

I wouldn't consider myself a "rationalist" by any means, despite my profoundly autistic qualities. Nor do I sympathize with the "post-rationalist" navel-gazing endemic to the theater kid slash hippie types. No, it feels we've taken a specific moment in 2019 and churned it into a gray paste. None of it appeals to me. If I were to aspire to a label I would be a romantic—I want to feel things—but it's hard to wring poetry out of a life fixed to a monitor, so like most boring people I turn to chemical enhancement.

My drug of choice for this event would have been LSD. Nazi stuff. Very scientific. Perfect for getting into the mindset of these MIRI-pilled "pivotal act" types. But unable to source on such short notice, I made a quick "donation" to my local "shroom church" and received some "sacramental" psilocybin gummies instead. Too touchy-feely? Perhaps, but I'd have to make do.

Carpooling with my friend, I disclosed the nature of my journalistic project, which was met with disappointment and anxiety but not surprise. I had a history of spastic behavior in the aftermath of some particularly ill-timed doses, but I assured him I was in fact a "very stable genius," and in the worst case he could pretend he didn't know me. Four gummies, forty milligrams of psilocybin in a Berkeley parking lot kicked off the longest night of the year.

MY NOTES from the ordeal—scribblings in a small wire-bound notebook—paint a bleak picture of my mental state that night.

two and a half hours??
"well ackshually"
7:48—feelin it

The vibrational energies in the auditorium were immediately punishing, trading somber speeches against twee secular hymns about space colonization and self-care.

Prometheus, they say, brought God's fire down to man
And we've caught it, tamed it, trained it since our history began
Now we're going back to Heaven just to look Him in the eye
And there's a thunder 'cross the land and a fire in the sky

I was surprised at how juvenile the atheist thread was—going "neener neener" to some imagined "sky daddy." But I figured this resonated with a crowd that deliberately sought out a "secular" solstice celebration.

What would Mishima make of this, I thought. Row after row of soft, fuzzy flesh. I could feel the disgust in his words: such signs of physical individuality as a bulging belly (sign of spiritual sloth) or a flat chest with protruding ribs (sign of an unduly nervous sensibility) were excessively ugly... To me, these could only seem acts of shameless indecency, as though the owner were exposing his spiritual pudenda on the outside of his body. Brutal. On top of that, I could feel his disgust with me for summoning him to this place, so I dismissed him.

Slumped in my chair, I lifted my vision above the sea of bald spots and fedoras covering bald spots to projected lyrics becoming increasingly tesselated.

There was the thing with the ceiling
There was the thing with the floor
There was the thing with the funny kind of feeling
And the ambulance at quarter to four

One damn thing after another
Troubles gotta stand in line
Oh, stick with me, we'll get through this together
Takin' one damn thing at a time

Hey guys, I know we all feel like fucking losers sometimes. No! That's not me! I see bundles of proteins and lipids arranged in a giant colony of cells, their lives given over to the implementation of a wet protein computer that thinks it's a person. Awful. You're a monkey. You're a monkey! Feel warmth for this monkey! The command to care about myself was delivered in such an infantilizing way—as if I were just now discovering my own foot and trying to put it in my mouth—that the homunculus in my brain threatened to resign if forced to carry it out.

want to strike that
boy in choir—out of tune!!
must compose myself

It was dire. I promised my friend, sitting right next to me, that I absolutely wouldn't scream and tear off all my clothes and run into traffic and kill myself. Oh, but what else made sense? I had peeled back my aura to reveal its red flesh, only to be generously salted with striver-class guilt. You are not enough. You know you're not enough. Your peers see you as competition. Your institutions see you as cannon fodder. The universe is cold and indifferent. But hey, shhh. You're only human! Don't cry!

tongue chewing
cheek biting
"remember to practice self care!"

Breath control. I wasn't breathing. I could feel my heart thumping around like a tennis shoe in a drying machine. Who could have predicted this? Fortunately, I was able to get a lock on my subtle body and realign my chakras before I totally crashed out. Deep breaths. I glanced at the time—8:03 pm. Calm! Very calm. There was no fucking way that was thirty minutes.

These kinds of drugs tend to inspire self-reflection, if only because they paint your subtler mental moves in goofy neon colors. And it was thanks to this that I began to feel—perhaps rightfully—a sense of shame. The three-part motif of the night hung over me as a small "click" on a plastic candle left the room completely dark: the world is awful, the world is getting better, the world can be better. These people are earnest. They genuinely needed hope, and here I was, sneering. There was no spiritual battle, no pagan Saturnalia to decry, just people. Scared people. Imagine tripping at an AA meeting so you could blog about it to strangers on the internet.

The emotional nadir of the night was a speech called Doctor's Note, in which the narrator descibed how a series of academic failures and suicide attempts knocked their ambitions down from longevity research, to effective altruism, to their current part-time minimum-wage teaching job. Sorry, I can't save the world today. I'm allergic. It ended on an incredibly bleak note:

I do not make a visible change in the quality of our world, and all around me, every minute, thousands of humans die, billions of animals are tortured, the world gets warmer. We are poised on the brink of annihilation half a dozen different ways.

I do what I can. It is not nearly enough. I can only hope that I'm doing the very best I can.

It was here, head in my hands, that I finally lost my composure. God bless them but the speech didn't work. I know it didn't work. I've seen how the rationalists respond to status and credentials, how they turn their back and walk away once they deem you "not intelligent enough." They do it to me, to my friends—grown men playing out high school clique dynamics. Not all of them, but absolutely enough to be a recognizable pattern. And the less cynical ones, what are they supposed to make of the speech? Well, I guess it could be worse. It was a brave moment that deserved a better audience—a better ideology than guilt. I was dumbfounded by it all.

THE SECOND HALF of the program did little to soothe the gut-punch of the first. I did not cry about the HMS Carpathia, as was promised. I did not enjoy the songs about vaccines, nor did I clap for the Gates foundation (we all know what that sick fuck did). The strongest speech was Scott Alexander's Parable of the Talents, which delivered his habitual clarity of thought. But then the songs started again.

By way of a reply, I say a fool such as I
Who sees a song as somewhere to begin
A song is somewhere to begin
The search for something worth believing in
If changes are to come there are things that must be done
And a song is somewhere to begin

Something worth believing in... I leaned over to my buddy: It's almost as if there's something... missing from this whole event. Can't quite place it.

Oh, entropy is bearin’ down,
But we got tricks of sticking’ ‘round.
And if we live to see the day,
That yellow fades to red then grey,

We’ll take a moment, one by one.
Turn to face the dying sun.
Bittersweetly wave good bye—
The journey’s only just begun!

In five thousand years...
(Whatcha wanna do, whatcha wanna see, in another)
Five million years...
(Where we wanna go, who we wanna be, in another)
In five billion years...
When all that we once know is gone,
We’ll find a way to carry on
In five billion years.
Five billion years...
Whatcha want to do, whatcha wanna see, in another
Five billion years...

Sure, why not. Live five million years. Five billion years. You can just say numbers! Sorry about that genuine crisis of meaning we gave you, best we can do is jingle some spaceships in your face. I scratched angrily in my notes: terminal Minecraft brain. The universe is a video game and soon we'll figure out the "God Mode" cheat code and do whatever we want. Very Mormon.

At this point I was winded, having depleted my psychic reserves. The Yudkowsky speech pinged clean off of me, but even in the absence of substance I still grew annoyed with the cadence. Don't get me wrong, I like the rats! For all of their faults, they're some of the only honest people in a town full of sycophantic vampires. But good lord, are they exhausting. And it's a shame to see that so much of their suffering is self-inflicted.

Yes! Self-inflicted. The solution is obvious, but unfortunately it's also the one they're not allowed to accept: just stop caring! It's not a prerequisite for being a good person. There's no teacher to give you a good grade on life for worrying really hard. Nor is caring a requirement for meaningful action—the meaning is in the action itself, not how badly you wanted to do it.

That's illogical. Obviously you need to care about things in order to act, which means you need a utility function. And there's no getting around axiom selection, so you might as well optimize for human—

Just stop caring. You don't need a well-defined utility function. You're not a VNM reasoner—you're a human being! And you don't exist separately from this "cold dead universe," you are that very same universe observing itself. Consider, are you truly being compassionate? Or are you simply imposing your aesthetic preferences? Do you love the world unconditionally? Or only when it bends to your will? Let go! Don't limit yourself to just the organizing principles that fit in your head.

This doesn't mean going off into the mountains to meditate forever—far from it! You can still help people and do good things. But don't do it because you need to be a good person, or because you can't stand suffering. Act for the sake of the action itself, without attachment to outcomes.

It's frustrating because the festival almost gets it. You have seen the tops of clouds. There is beauty in the world. But it's not yours. You don't get to keep these things, they just pass through you. A romantic project would embrace this impermanence, it would celebrate fleeting vitality over five million years of stagnation. But it is nowhere to be found.

As the lights came on, I assured my friend that I was feeling "extremely normal, extremely stable." And that I "really hadn't felt anything at all on account of my high tolerance." And we headed to the after-party in search of booze to dull the nerves.

Dropping shrooms at ratsol—where does it land on the qualia-meter? I'd say it's on par with a solid mule-kick to the head. Bravo! Would not recommend.