3+ week, 2+ day ago (165+ words) Published on November 6, 2025 5:26 PM GMTIn 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting'evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that the book's central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false. The documents reveal that the group actively proselytized well before the prophecy failed and quickly abandoned their beliefs afterward. They also expose serious ethical violations by the researchers, including fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare investigation. One coauthor, Henry Riecken, posed as a spiritual authority…...

2+ day, 8+ hour ago (306+ words) Epistemic status: Figuring things out. From one perspective, this a question of how much should you be exposed to other people's crazy beliefs. Suppose that someone comes to the belief that you are evil. Perhaps they think you secretly murdered people and got away with it, or have ruined many many people's lives in legal ways, or that you're extremely power-seeking and have no morals. What should they do? But overall each piece of infrastructure should not attempt to model a full justice system. So it's a bit counterintuitive that sometimes you shouldn't do this, because you aren't good at it and might get it wrong and aren't being fair to them or cannot offer them due process. But I still want to know when (a) ends. When should you stop trying to police all the behavior around you? (One constraint…...

3+ week, 17+ hour ago (365+ words) It's been a while since I wrote about myopia! My previous posts about myopia were "a little crazy", because it's not this solid well-defined thing; it's a cluster of things which we're trying to form into a research program. This post will be "more crazy". "Good" means something along the lines of "helpful to all". There is a spectrum from extremely myopic to extremely non-myopic. Arranging all "thinking beings" on that spectrum, I claim that you get Good at both ends, with Evil sitting in-between. It turns out that myopic things aren't just useful to have around; they're necessary. This is because highly non-myopic beings love objective answers, for a lot of reasons. One reason is that objective answers give good Schelling points for coordination. If the non-myopic beings created Schelling points with their highly non-myopic logic, several things would…...

2+ week, 5+ day ago (180+ words) Is this type of goodness about memetic bullshit value claims or something else? Funnily enough, when I thought I had an example of this with washing vegetables it was somewhat controversial. Back in the day when debates about religion were fashionable, one of the standard back-and-forths went roughly like this" Today, the religious egregores are not so dominant. But their niche is still filled by the memetic egregore Goodness - the egregore whose constituent memes are claims about what is Good. The memetic egregore Goodness is the same type of thing as the older religious egregores. It feeds on the same feelings and instincts, and fills the same niche. And one can have basically the same arguments about it. Goodist: If we reject Good, then what's to stop us from stealing and murdering each other? Agoodist: Well, mostly people don't want…...

2+ week, 5+ day ago (131+ words) Crosspost from my blog. That said, this behavior supports a false consensus. You can become an expert on almost any small set of these questions, such that you don't really need to defer very much to anyone else's testimony about them. But you can't become a simultaneous expert on most of the questions that you care about. So, you have to defer to other people about many or most important questions. There are too many questions, and many important questions are complex and too hard to figure out on your own. Also, you can get by pretty well by deferring: a lot of other people have thought about those questions a lot, and often they can correctly tell you what's important to know. But deference has several deep and important dangers....

3+ week, 1+ day ago (842+ words) Published on November 8, 2025 6:31 AM GMTtl;dr Here's a pdf. The story of me making it is slightly fun. Augustine of Hippo, a prominent Christian of the 4th and 5th centuries who is recognized as a saint by many churches, wrote many things, including a work known as the Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Love (or the Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, or replace "Love" with "Charity", or, in Latin, Enchiridion de Fide, Spe, et Charitate or Enchiridion ad Laurentium). Recently, Claude 4.5 Sonnet recommended I give it a read as an intermediate Latin learner who's interested in Augustine's theology. Unfortunately, the only website I could find where I could read it in Latin looked unpleasing to me, and I wished I could read it in a more beautiful form. I asked my friends how I could do that, and Oliver Habryka suggested…...

2+ week, 5+ day ago (107+ words) We will be having a Secular Solstice event this year as usual! Please join us for a Solstice ritual with songs and speeches followed by an afterparty at the same location (a farmhouse that does concert rentals). This year we're in a fairly rural spot, so folks without cars will likely need a ride. Please see here to give/get a ride: CARPOOL SPREADSHEET Kids are welcome; we plan to set up kid-friendly space away from the main ritual. Doors open at 4, ritual begins at 4:30pm. Watch this space, more details to follow. Contact Maia or Rivka with questions. Hope to see you there!...

2+ week, 5+ day ago (605+ words) Published on November 11, 2025 2:49 AM GMTPeople have been celebrating Secular Solstice for over a decade now, in our small community. Many different programs and versions have been collected at Secular Solstice Resources (and elsewhere). The amount of material can be overwhelming. Many Solstice programs are based around original material being written or updated, speeches that are specific to the speaker, and other things that make it challenging to reuse.The goal for this program is to be an easy-to-follow, easy-to-reuse Solstice program for a group celebrating Solstice for the first time, or the first of a few times, possibly a small group, possibly without many resources.Simply print one copy of the program per participant (or fewer and have people share), and follow the directions.If you aren't familiar with the songs, you will need one or a few people to…...

3+ week, 5+ day ago (465+ words) Crosspost from my blog. May I not let hate into my heart; and May I not let my care for the aggressor prevent me from protecting what I love. May I always reach out a hand in peace; and May I never hold it out as they sever my wrist. May I seek symmetry, to take synchronized steps back from the brink; and May I not pretend symmetry where there is none. May I forgive when I expect forgiveness in return; and May I not forgive when I do not expect forgiveness in return. When there is time to say all that needs to be said, May I recount and denounce the crimes of my side; when there is not time, May I not be a prop in a libelous morality play. May I fulfill my moral obligations; and May…...

2+ week, 3+ day ago (843+ words) On a warm spring weekend, Jerry B wanders through Hyde Park. At a corner, he happens upon the Preacher Man, standing on a soapbox and proclaiming the Way of Truth. Jerry B: Now hold up, Preacher Man. I don't think I buy what you're selling. Let's try an example. Preacher Man:(Smiles approvingly.) You doubt my prescription, yet you neither brush it aside, nor blindly accept it; you argue back and make things concrete. That is the Way of Truth. Please, go on. Jerry B: Consider belief in the afterlife. Sure, obviously there is no afterlife as a factual matter, but belief in the afterlife spares so much pain for so many people. Again, I don't necessarily claim that belief in the afterlife works this wayin reality. But the thought experiment shows that it's at leastpossible for situations to come up in…...