Tag Archives: Secular Solstice

Probability: A Moment of Darkness

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This was the Moment of Darkness speech that I gave at Boston Secular Solstice 2016.

Epistemic status: I spent several weeks thinking about this, but wrote it in a couple hours before the ceremony, because writing is aversive and I’m an inveterate procrastinator. Although I believe the claim about power laws to be true in some broad sense, this is based primarily on half-remembered “conventional wisdom” that I suspect I absorbed by cultural osmosis from the works of Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It is nowhere near as well-justified in the speech itself as it ought to be; the two statistics cited were the only ones I could find in the time available.

Our community is ambitious. We aim to do big things, to solve adult problems.

Four years ago, in New York City, in a ceremony much like this one, Ray Arnold, the creator of Secular Solstice, spoke about this. He said:

We have people in this room, right now, who are working on fixing big problems in the medical industry. We have people in this room who are trying to understand and help fix the criminal justice system. We have people in this room who are dedicating their lives to eradicating global poverty. We have people in this room who are literally working to set in motion plans to optimize everything ever. We have people in this room who are working to make sure that the human race doesn’t destroy itself before we have a chance to become the people we really want to be.

And while they aren’t in this room, there are people we know who would be here if they could, who are doing their part to try and solve this whole death problem once and for all.

And I don’t know whether and how well any of us are going to succeed at any of these things, but…

God damn, people. You people are amazing, and even if only one of you made a dent in some of the problems you’re working on, that… that would just be incredible.

Indeed it would. It would be incredible. And I believe that the same is true of the people in this room today, four years later. We recognize that these things matter, that they matter more than most of society recognizes, more even than any of us can really visualize. The utilitarian significance of even the least of those problems is easily in the millions of lives.

But we are also a community of truth seekers. It’s not enough for the stories we tell ourselves about what we’re going to accomplish to be motivating; they have to be accurate. So, what should we expect when we set out to change the world?

Large scale technological and other change in society tends to obey power laws; a small minority of individual cases wind up having the vast majority of the impact. Y Combinator, the most prestigious startup accelerator in the world, has funded about a thousand startups; about three-quarters of their returns have come from just two of these. Making a big profit is a crude proxy for impact through a startup, but if we run with it, that gives us a probability of 0.3%. And that’s one of the higher-risk-higher-reward life paths available to someone today.

I didn’t have time to find more numbers, but as far as I know, they basically all look roughly like this. According to a study by the Financial Times [PDF], 40% of millennials think they’ll have a global impact. In other words, almost 40% of millennials are extremely miscalibrated.

So we see that truly changing the world is a rare event. But that, too, is part of the standard story; because it’s rare, you’ll have to work very hard and be very resourceful to pull it off. But you can still do it if you try, right?

This is the kind of thing that our brains tell us because of availability bias. As Bruce Schneier put it: “We tend to exaggerate [the probability of] spectacular, strange and rare events, and downplay ordinary, familiar and common ones.” He was talking about things like terrorist attacks, but it’s just as true of things like making a major scientific breakthrough. “Stories engage us at a much more visceral level [than data], especially stories that are vivid, exciting or personally involving.”

In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, “million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten”. It’s not any different from other fiction in this regard; it’s just more honest. Nonfiction isn’t much better because of selection bias; you hear about the guy who won the Nobel, and not about the hundreds of thousands of others who set out to win it and failed.

Eliezer Yudkowsky summed up the problem in “A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanations”:

Remember Spock from Star Trek? Spock often says something along the lines of, “Captain, if you steer the Enterprise directly into a black hole, our probability of survival is only 2.837%.” Yet nine times out of ten the Enterprise is not destroyed. The people who write this stuff have no idea what scientists mean by “probability”. They suppose that a probability of 99.9% is something like feeling really sure. They suppose that Spock’s statement expresses the challenge of successfully steering the Enterprise through a black hole, like a video game rated five stars for difficulty. What we mean by “probability” is that if you utter the words “two percent probability” on fifty independent occasions, it better not happen more than once.

(At least, not in the limit.)

There are fewer than fifty of us in this room, and the probability of an individual achieving the kinds of ambitions we’re talking about here is probably lower than two percent.

So that’s the problem: if you want to change the world, the outside view says it’s probably going to be all for nothing. Any attempt to do so in a way that avoids that problem is unlikely to have a large individual impact.

This problem is so omnipresent in any attempt to do something big that it’s common to just ignore it as background noise. We shouldn’t. We seek the truth because avoiding it inevitably leads to failure when dealing with hard problems. If we’re serious about solving them, we have to face this harsh reality head-on.

So what do we do about it?

One option is to give up, and stick to easy things that are likely to work. You can optimize for your own happiness pretty well that way. But this is no solution at all; we have to do the hard things because, as the Comet King said, “Somebody has to and no one else will.” At least, not on the margin.

Another option is unjustified optimism. This seems to be unfortunately common in our community. Some higher-level rationalists have implemented an advanced form of this where they make their monkey brains believe one thing even as they know the truth to be something else. This might work, if you can pull it off.

A third option is to forcibly suppress your monkey brain’s risk-aversion and submit yourself in obedience to the power laws: spend your life doing the risky thing, knowing that it will probably all be for naught, because it’s the right thing to do. If you’re working on more incremental things like malaria nets, this can work out okay. You can be like the man who throws the starfish back into the sea every day; others may say it doesn’t matter because more will always wash up, but it mattered to that one. If you’re aiming for something more all-or-nothing, like getting AGI right, then this may be psychologically harder.

But there’s one other option, and I think this is the one I like best: Embrace the community.

This works because of two reasons. The first is that, when you’re in a community of people with similar goals, you don’t have to do everything yourself. You can clerk the office that handles the funding, or host the convention that summons the family. You can be one of the people who makes the future turn out okay, even if you’re not the one-in-a-million who makes the scientific breakthrough that fixes everything.

The second reason is that our community might actually be awesome enough to beat the outside-view odds.

Four years ago, when Ray spoke those words, it didn’t necessarily look that way. That was around the time I found the community online, though I did not meet most of you until later. To be sure, some interesting things had already happened by then, and maybe the future will look back and see some of them as the beginning of the Great Change (or maybe not). But in those past four years, I’ve been lucky enough to watch us grow up, and start accumulating a track record of changing the world in real ways.

We brought AI risk from a topic argued about by nerds on internet forums to an issue taken seriously by the world’s foremost experts in the relevant fields, by billionaire influencers like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, and, as of last October, by the sitting President of the United States.

We solved the problem of figuring out which charities actually work for rescuing people from global poverty and moved hundreds of millions of dollars to them, and that number’s only going to grow.

With help from allied coalitions, we got giant corporations to dump the worst offenders of factory farming, banned confinement cages right here in Massachusetts, and brought funding and attention to an industry that has invented the most convincing meat substitute that has ever existed.

Not everything we’ve attempted has yet borne such undeniable fruit, and we’ve had our share of failures. But I think we’ve earned the right to call ourselves a community that’s capable of getting results, and I think there’ll be more soon, including in areas we haven’t even thought of yet.

The law of the universe is that you can’t beat the odds. But conditional on the right things? Yeah, I think you can.

Set List from Boston Secular Solstice 2015

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A few people have asked for the list of songs and readings performed at last week’s Secular Solstice. Here they are, with authorship information and links.

This set list was compiled by me, Chelsea Voss, James Babcock, Jeff Kaufman, and Julia Wise. Raymond Arnold, the creator of Secular Solstice, advised us throughout the process, and the program follows the traditional six-part Secular Solstice arc. The event itself was last Friday, December 11, at the MIT Chapel. Jeff, Chelsea, and Demetri Sampas provided piano accompaniment; Julia led the majority of the songs, with various others also leading songs and performing readings. The total duration of the Solstice was a little under two hours.

This post will be updated when the the text of the Moment of Darkness speech has been published online.

Light

Twilight

Eve

Night

Dawn

Light

Opening Speech from Boston Secular Solstice 2015

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I opened last week’s Secular Solstice by reading this. I haven’t edited it for publication; it reads like a blog post because that’s how I naturally write. (Probably not the optimal format for a speech, but oh well.)

The ideas contained in here come primarily from Raymond Arnold’s writings on humanist ritual, particularly “The Story of Winter”, and from Kevin Simler’s writings on the evolution and function of religion, particularly “Post-Atheism: Religion Refactored”.

Good evening. Welcome to Secular Solstice.

If you haven’t been to a Secular Solstice before, you might be asking yourself: What exactly are we, as secular humanists, doing here, in this building which is for ostensibly religious services, participating in a ritual which includes readings and group singing and other elements that sound suspiciously like a religious service?

If you have been to a Secular Solstice before, then go ahead and ask yourself that question anyway, because I think it turns out to be kind of a deep question.

Religion has been a feature of most human societies for the past 12,000 years or so, though some aspects of it are older. We don’t entirely understand how it began. One story, which you may have heard before if you attended a previous Solstice in New York, is that human brains have evolved to be good at dealing with other humans, so when early humans encountered natural phenomena like the weather, they tended to attribute them to human-like agents—the gods. And so they would start asking these gods for things like a good harvest, and over time these prayers and practices evolved into religion as we know it today.

It’s a neat story, but it’s not the whole story. Why the social aspects of religion? Why pray and sing and have all these rituals in public, with other people? Why isn’t religion just a personal thing?

Perhaps—and I’m not an anthropologist, I don’t know how much agreement there is on this among experts—but perhaps religion helped tribes to coordinate.

Rituals and music served to provide group bonding experiences. Myths and legends helped give the tribe a sense of shared purpose. Religious laws and commandments helped them live harmoniously with one another. Taken together, these factors could help make the members of a tribe more able to trust one another, to cooperate in prisoner’s dilemmas. And perhaps those tribes that could do this were rewarded with a greater ability to survive and reproduce than those that could not.

And sometimes, they were able to coordinate to do more than just that. Sometimes, they were able to do things like spend hundreds of years dragging hundreds of tons of stones over 150 miles to build something like Stonehenge, the ancient archaeological wonder. We don’t fully understand why Stonehenge was built, though it seems to have had some kind of ritual purpose. One theory, which has garnered a fair bit of academic support, is that Stonehenge was a place of healing. These ancient people coordinated to bring this place into existence so that the sick and injured could be ritually healed there, through the power of ringing sounds that were made by hitting the rocks.

Unfortunately, human physiology doesn’t actually work that way, and so these rituals didn’t really heal the sick. That’s the danger of this kind of cultural evolution; it can only get you so far. It might be useful to have beliefs that give you a sense of belonging with your fellow humans, but it’d be even nicer if these beliefs were, y’know, actually true. So that you don’t spend hundreds of years building a healing center that doesn’t actually work. And these sorts of evolved religions didn’t quite get there.

But of course, I’m not telling you anything here that you don’t already know. The more interesting question for secular humanists is: Can we get these benefits of religion—particularly, in the context of Secular Solstice, the benefits of ritual—without giving up the benefits that come from believing things that are actually true?

Some of us think that we can. And for the fifth year now, Secular Solstice has been a test of that hypothesis.

One way to help make this work, of course, is to be explicit about what exactly we’re trying to do. This wouldn’t have worked for the early humans—they didn’t know enough about their own history or how the universe actually functions—but it can work for us. So, instead of praying to the gods and hoping that this incidentally brings us closer together, I can just tell you directly that the theme for this Solstice is coordination—the benefits it can bring us, the challenges in making it work, and ultimately, why we as a species will need to get better at it, if we want to survive and prosper.

Speaking of the gods…perhaps we shouldn’t dispense with them entirely. They may not exist in a literal sense, but they can still be useful as metaphors. An abstract concept can be easier to wrap your head around if you give it a name and a face, as the ancients did. We may have had more practice with high-level abstract reasoning than they did, but this stuff is still complicated and we need all the help we can get in understanding it. Provided, of course, that we remain aware of what we’re doing. So in that sense, you may hear the names of a few gods spoken as part of this ritual tonight.

So that’s why we’re here tonight. We can bring ourselves closer together, and perhaps, in time, build our own Stonehenge—but one based on the truths we’ve learned about the universe.