Reason as memetic immune disorder

[-]SK216y974

Another reason converts are more zealous than people who grew up with a religion is that conversion is a voluntary act, whereas being born into a religious family is not. Converting to a religion late in life is a radical move, one that generally requires a certain amount of zeal and motivation to begin with, so converts are pre-selected to be zealous.

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky16y761

I've come at this from a similar angle that is, I think, different in the details; and that is rationality as a failure of compartmentalization - the attempt to take everything you hear seriously.

Michael Vassar, again, has a similar angle which is different in the details: nerds result from failing to learn the nonverbal rules of adulthood that are different from the verbal rules.

[-]SforSingularity16y420

is rationality as a failure of compartmentalization - the attempt to take everything you hear seriously.

Many people enjoy reading books and watching films where the lead characters form a small group, pitted against all the odds to try to save the world. Many people - secular people - pay lip-service to the idea that every person in the world is equally important, and that we should value the life of an African peasant farmer as equal to our own.

It seems, however, that most people don't actually take these notions seriously, because their actions seem to have little to do with such beliefs.

One day, a bunch of nerds got together and started a project called the Singularity Institute, and they actually took seriously the notion that they should try to save the world if it really was threatened, and that the lives of others should be assigned equal weigh to their own. Almost everyone else though they were really weird when they started to try to act on these beliefs.

[-]Jack15y451

Almost everyone else though they were really weird when they started to try to act on these beliefs.

This is a terribly counter-productive attitude to have. I don't think trying to save the world is what people found weird. Lots of people, especially young people, have aspirations of saving the world. People think the Singularity Institute is weird because SIAI's chosen method of saving the world is really unconventional, not marketable, and pattern matches with bizarre sci-fi fantasies (and some of the promoters of these fantasies are actually connected to the institute). If you think the pool of potential donors are all hypocrites you make it really difficult to bring them in.

[-]SforSingularity15y160

There is a point I am trying to make with this: the human race is a collective where the individual parts pretend to care about the whole, but actually don't care, and we (mostly) do this the insidious way, i.e. using lots of biased thinking. In fact most people even have themselves fooled, and this is an illusion that they're not keen on being disabused of.

The results... well, we'll see.

[-]SforSingularity15y100

Look, maybe it does sound kooky, but people who really genuinely cared might at least invest more time in finding out how good its pedigree was. On the other hand, people who just wanted an excuse to ignore it would say "it's kooky, I'm going to ignore it".

But one could look at other cases, for example direct donation of money to the future (Robin has done this).

Or the relative lack of attention to more scientifically respectable existential risks, or even existential risks in general. (Human extinction risk, etc).

[-]SforSingularity16y190

See, e.g. Eliezer writing in 2000:

"There is no abused child, no oppressed peasant, no starving beggar, no crack-addicted infant, nocancer patient, literally no one that I cannot look squarely in the eye. I'm working to save everybody, heal the planet, solve all the problems of the world."

[-]Nick_Tarleton16y140

Michael Vassar also has Memes and Rational Decisions, which seems very close to the original post.

2MichaelHoward16y

Thanks for the link, excellent reading. I really must read more of Michael's stuff.

5play_therapist14y

I realize this is almost 2 years after your original posting, I'm going through Jimmy's top 100 articles now. I just wanted to say that failing to learn the nonverbal rules of adulthood that are different from the verbal rules pretty much describes Aspies. Yes, there is a big overlap between Aspies and nerds- but I think you can be an Aspie and not a nerd and vice versa.

3Will_Newsome15y

Oh, hm. I wish I had started taking these hypotheses seriously back in September 2009. /sigh. We need rationalist dojos so bad. It sucks that there's no one qualified to teach them, yet.

[-]Tyrrell_McAllister16y332

On the whole a very good post. But here --

The reason I bring this up is that intelligent people sometimes do things more stupid than stupid people are capable of. (For example, quite recently, several respected geneticists declared that there was no such thing as race - an idea that not even the dimmest kid I knew back in Detroit would have fallen for.)

-- you misunderstand the position that you're criticizing. The claim of the geneticists is not that race does not exist, but rather that it doesn't map to the joints at which geneticists, qua geneticists, find it particularly useful to carve reality. But when trying to understand the social world, within which your kid in Detroit is steeped, Race is certainly a useful way to carve reality. And this is all that people mean when they say that Race is a social concept, not a genetic one.

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky16y200

For example, quite recently, several respected geneticists declared that there was no such thing as race - an idea that not even the dimmest kid I knew back in Detroit would have fallen for.

That struck me as a stunning nonsequitur. The kid in Detroit has no possible way of knowing how much of what they see is genetic versus environmental - unless they go online and read the scientific literature. Offering that sort of surface observation as evidence is on the level of "any kid in Detroit can see the Earth is flat".

[-]cabalamat15y120

The kid in Detroit has no possible way of knowing how much of what they see is genetic versus environmental

Surely they could very easily observe that people with dark skin typically have parents with dark skin.

0arfle15y

But the child has good evidence for the social concept, if not for the genetic one. So he can disagree with "there is no such thing as race". Is this another one of those blegg/rube questions?

[-]PhilGoetz16y190

You're right.

Some of the people making the claim probably have a more nuanced interpretation in mind. Many people repeating the claim have the simple interpretation in mind; or may have the nuanced interpretation, but are stating it in a way that they hope will be misinterpreted, yet give them plausible deniability.

I don't remember now what the original "respectable geneticists" said. I have seen a summary of their work in Science magazine that used the simple interpretation. Does anyone have a link to some of the original publications?

2[anonymous]16y

A request to see the article corrected. This post has the combination of simplicity and relevance that makes me want to show it to others outside the lesswrong community, but the race anecdote damages its perceived credibility greatly. PS: If you agree with me thus far, I would also recommend removing the self-help section: "The vaccines: Updating and emotions." It's lower quality than the rest of the article in that support for your claims here is very weak; it is also much narrower in relevance (as only hardcore rationalists would be interested.)

[-]timtyler16y120

I'm not sure if Phil got the details right - but there are definitely a whole bunch of otherwise well-educated people who happily spout politically-correct nonsense on the issues of race and equality as though it was actually scientific truth. They typically cite Lewontin - but they ignore Lewontin's fallacy.

5MatthewB16y

Thank you for the mention of Lewontin's Fallacy. I have been stuck trying to remember the name of that fallacy for half a year (although, to be fair, I had not looked very hard to find out its name), due to a discussion on the Forums at the Richard Dawkins' website. I am amazed at the level of discourse that many discussions on that site fall to. There are a number of very bright people there, yet it seems that many commit all manner of fallacies in the name of either political correctness, or because they fear giving ground to irrational theists/theism. A great example is about the term belief. Many on the RDF state that they "Have no Beliefs," yet fail to realize that this statement itself is a belief. They have had many discussions in which the issue of race has come up, and I remembered reading about Lewontin, yet could not recall his name... Thanks, again.

9timtyler16y

Don't be too hard on them for that! "Belief" is an overloaded word. Some use it to mean a p=1 concept, while others use it to mean a p > 0.95 concept. Of course, p=1 ideas are crazy faith issues, but some people seem to sustain them. The "I have no beliefs" crowd just mean to say that they "have no p=1 beliefs that they hold with absolute faith" - which is a fair enough thing to observe.

9MatthewB16y

I wish that were the case, but it seems to me that the "I have no beliefs" crowd that I am familiar with means that they have no beliefs for which P<1. In other words, they either know something with absolute certainty, or they give it no credence whatsoever. I can't think of how many times I have told them that they need to both reclaim the word "Belief" and to understand that they have many things for which P≠1 (P<1, but greater than .5, or some other arbitrary number for which they will accept some information as being true). Yet, sometimes the certainties of faith get assumed by those without faith (of the religious kind)

1PhilGoetz16y

I removed the not-very-good example, but I don't want to remove the final section. It is lower quality. What bothers me more is that it doesn't have a proper conclusive feeling about it; it doesn't tie the post together and wrap it up in a satisfying way.

0[anonymous]16y

Phil, If you are looking for others' thoughts that may be able to tie your post together, you might want to read the Douglas Adams Artificial god that I cite here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorder/14az

0netsp16y

-3PhilGoetz16y

While looking for this info, I came across this tidbit: James Watson, who claimed blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, is 1/6 black. Wonder how he felt on finding that out, especially since he's the guy who said, "I didn't win a Nobel prize. I won the [meaning most important ever] Nobel prize." I know a woman who I think had negative feelings about blacks, who learned, as an adult, that her father was black. She'd always thought he was Hispanic. She was a little upset by it, but mostly thought it was a funny story to tell people. One original publication is in the Feb. 8 2008 Nature Genetics. I don't have it. Articles citing it here. None of the titles mention race.

[-]michaelkeenan16y380

I don't think you understand Watson's point of view.

If I understand Watson correctly, he thinks the evidence suggests that the average IQ of native Africans is below 100. He didn't say that all Africans have IQs below 100. I don't know why you think he'd care that he's descended from a black person. Presumably he thinks a substantial minority of Africans still have higher IQs than 100, so if he really cares about the IQ of his black ancestor, it's still plausible that s/he had a high IQ.

But why would anyone care about the IQ of their ancestors? Even if you do think there are racial cognitive differences, there are better ways to measure your own IQ than to guess based on the race of your ancestors.

[-]PhilGoetz16y130

True, we should have more faith in our own demonstrated intelligence. But humans place values on things, and then make associations, and then have feelings. Under the circumstances, I would not expect him to have the level of detachment you suggest.

Anyway, I didn't mean to sound gleeful. (I'll edit my original statement a bit to try to fix that.) Or, rather, what glee I had was motivated not by my liberal, forward-looking views on race, but by my impression that Watson is full of himself. I approve of scientists making politically-unpopular statements when based on evidence.

I suspect that the same people who want to say there is no such thing as race, also would enjoy saying that Watson is 1/6 "black".

[-]timtyler16y140

Are you suggesting that Watson's statements were not based on evidence?

In the controversial comments that led to his retirement, Watson claimed of those in Africa:

‘‘all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.''

The lower average test scores of Africans is surely an undisputed scientific fact.

Whatever you think about Watson, in this case, he had the scientific evidence firmly on his side - as far as any scientific issue was concerned.

[-]MineCanary16y130

But it's fact that "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours"? That is, not only is there a difference in IQ distribution, that difference is so significant that "all our social policies" are not going to help them.

I remember reading something by Flynn explaining that people with IQs below 70 today still have problems functioning even though they might score in the average range if given an IQ test normed on a population from the same country decades ago. From this I gather that the correlation between IQ and how well someone can function breaks down when you compare different populations.

In order to conclude that Watson's quoted remark is scientific fact, you must not only prove that Africans have lower average IQ test scores, but you must prove that:

This interferes with our social policies towards Africa in some way.
Any evidence we draw about the capabilities of Africans with a certain IQ must be based on studies on the same population, not on Americans or Europeans or whatnot with the same IQ.

It's unlikely that such a broad sweeping statement like "all our social policies", applied to the whol... (read more)

[-]Nameless16y280

Can we please not have this discussion here? Posters here are posting under their real names or lasting pseudonyms, so they can't defend the un-PC arguments without making numerous crimethink statements that could rebound against them in real life. So those who advance the PC arguments will wind up shadowboxing with those who don't fear retaliation or reputational costs, and we won't get a real honest discussion.

Questions of race and intelligence will be settled decisively within 5 or 10 years when large scale whole-genome sequencing studies are done.

[-]wedrifid16y130

Posters here are posting under their real names or lasting pseudonyms, so they can't defend the un-PC arguments without making numerous crimethink statements that could rebound against them in real life.

While I'm not sure if avoiding the discussion altogether is an optimal solution I do share your frustration. It took me a while to realise that using my real name here was a bad idea. We aren't all that much less wrong.

1itsunder900015y

Yeah, rule numero uno of the internet is to remain ANON as much as possible.

1rastilin15y

Precisely. Especially since, while a lot of us have jobs where we either work for ourselves or our bosses just don't care... some of us have those repressive nightmare jobs where our bosses google for us regularly outside of work hours.

[-]SilasBarta16y120

Questions of race and intelligence will be settled decisively within 5 or 10 years when large scale whole-genome sequencing studies are done.

Oh, look honey! It's someone who thinks zealots are willing to change their minds when presented with overwhelming evidence!

That's nice, dear.

[-]MarkusRamikin14y100

Is it just me misunderstanding the subtleties of a foreign language, or is this un-LW-ishly rude?

7SilasBarta14y

It's complicated. Different people will probably interpret it differently. I figured the template is common enough that people would see it as a reference and not take the sarcasm personally, but still realize the argument rests on a shaky assumption. I got voted up a lot, so I figure people took it the way I intended.

5satt15y

But isn't it easy to make a temporary pseudonymous account on this website?

3Zander_Drax2y

14 years have passed. Has the issue been decisively settled?

[-]timtyler16y100

It was political correctness - and transparently so - just as it was for Lawrence Summers, Chris Brand and Frank Ellis before him.

"'What is ethically wrong is the hounding, by what can only be described as an illiberal and intolerant "thought police", of one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, out of the Science Museum, and maybe out of the laboratory that he has devoted much of his life to, building up a world-class reputation"

Richard Dawkins.

5Johnicholas16y

I have a proposed explanation for "backlash": personal investment. Some of us may have done well in IQ tests, and focused on intelligence (and the associated notion of rationality) as personal strengths. Accepting the notion that IQ tests don't measure anything "real" (except in the sense that they measure "the real ability to perform well on IQ tests"), would also mean downgrading estimation of one's personal worth. Explaining away evidence against IQ tests as "merely politically correct anti-racism" allows retaining that sense of worth.

3timtyler16y

Check with what happened: Watson was castigated for his views on the lower intelligence of Africans - not because of his other views about social policies.

9MineCanary16y

I know. I knew when I was writing that. The ideas in that paragraph were just forming as I typed them out, which is why I attributed cause where I didn't mean to. Something closer to what I mean: It's fine to discuss intelligence differences between race. My intro psych textbook has a long discussion about it. People have an uproar when, instead of saying, oh, here's what the test results are, here's what the results of experiments that shed some insight into the cause of the differences (ie environment vs. genetic), and leaving it at that, someone says that there's a difference in IQ and that that explains social inequity. So, yeah, they're objecting because it's racist, not because it challenges institutions or policies (other than the institution of denying racial difference, which to me seems relatively rational considering all the sources of bias that would cause people to make too much of racial difference). But it's not racist just because he says Africans have done poorly on IQ tests but because he defaults to assuming that that's enough to be "gloomy about the prospects of Africa". Furthermore, his quote in this piece of the interview: is pretty much as racist as you can get. His piece of evidence here is the anecdotal observations non-specific employers that fit right into a really old stereotype. Additionally, it seems odd--employers recruit who they employ, and you wouldn't hire someone who had insufficient intelligence to do what you were hiring them for--the job selects for people of a certain intelligence range (which may be offset by, say, an intelligent person with a disability or who just didn't get an education, or an average person who's outperforming expectations of her intelligence due to hard work and a certain cultural background)--so race shouldn't matter because you can only hire someone from a certain race for a job given they have adequate intelligence for the job. All the press I've read so far on the topic stresses general racism,

[-]Z_M_Davis16y331

I lean toward the politically correct side because it's the side that [...]

Taboo side. Complex empirical issues do not have sides. Humans, for their own non-truth-tracking reasons, group into sides, but it's not Bayesian, and it has never been Bayesian.

Or we think we group up into sides, but I'm not even sure that's true. You write that the egalitarians are nuanced and present evidence, whereas the human biodiversity crowd (or whatever words you want to use) are just apologists for their favorite narrative, but there are a lot of people who have the exact opposite perspective: that the hbd-ers are honest and nuanced and the egalitarians are blinded by ideology. But in fact, there are no sides physically out there: rather, there are only various people who have studied various facets of the topic to various degrees and who believe and profess various things for various reasons. And this question of what various people believe is distinct from the question of what's actually true.

I realize that this kind of aggressive reductionism isn't very predictively useful---that indeed, I'm probably just a few steps above saying, "Well it's all just quarks and leptons anyway." But ... (read more)

[-]Tyrrell_McAllister16y160

Upvoted, because you make the case well that we shouldn't identify with sides when discussing issues like this.

But you're not really using "Taboo" in the sense that Eliezer described. "Sides" do exist as social phenomena. They are a certain sort of coalition that people group into when they engage in public discourse. As you say, sides exist for non-truth-tracking reasons. However, like race, we need the concept of sides to talk about social dynamics, so, like race, sides exist.

(Of course, they exist as nothing more than certain configurations of the pieces of the stuff out of which reality is made.)

1timtyler16y

Briefly - since this is getting off topic - if anyone is interested, my views on the matter are here: http://timtyler.org/political_correctness/

5Mike Bishop16y

|The lower average test scores of Africans is surely an undisputed scientific fact. Yes, but most interpreted him to be claiming that their genes prevented them from attaining equal test scores. This is definitely disputed. http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/494.html http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/495.html http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/flynn-beyond/

0timtyler16y

It was Watson - not those with reading comprehension problems among his audience - who wound up out of a job.

0PhilGoetz16y

I'm not expressing an opinion on whether Watson's statements were based on evidence.

2itsunder900015y

Why? To have a reasonable measure for the intelligence of their children. Heard of regression to the mean? An unusually smart person from a background of dumb hick proles, is not going to have kids nearly as smart as they are. People understand this at a genetic level when picking out mates. "Meet the family" before you decide to keep the girl/guy.

7Nick_Tarleton16y

Probably not terribly affected, as he has plenty of information about his intelligence screening off (EDIT: as steven says, this is not the correct term) his ancestry, and he AFAIK never claimed black people to be 'inferior' in any sense other than lower average IQ.

4steven046116y

I disagree.

2Douglas_Knight16y

Is this it? many ungated versions.

2PhilGoetz15y

This seems more the opposite. It says,

1itsunder900015y

-wtf am i reading- that "1/6" black came from a funky genetics test. A reasonable test for percentage of blackness, is going back say, about 5 generations, and seeing how many black people are in his ancestry. There were none, since his parents/grandparents,yada yada came from Europe. Wonder how he felt about it? He understood it was a bullshit media piece.

0TheAncientGeek9y

Is there a genetic funkiness test?

1timtyler16y

The first link is a 404. Maybe try here: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/10/watsons-black-dna-ultimate-irony/

1AndyCossyleon12y

That is what some people mean. Others truly believe there are literally no differences between human populations apart from skin color and bone structure, and of course culture.

0Tyrrell_McAllister12y

Yes, there are no doubt some people who believe that.

0[anonymous]16y

The point I've heard, back when I pressed a professor on the rather absurd statement "race is not genetic," is that if you were simply to look at a bunch of human genomes, and compare them to one another, and rank them by their similarities and differences, the genes controlling race probably wouldn't occur to you. This seems quite plausible.

[-]RobinHanson16y250

Rather than refusing to try to be consistent in my own beliefs, I find it far more useful to notice what kinds of beliefs most people don't really take seriously enough to be clear about what they mean, to bother to follow through with the most simple sorts of implications, and so on.

[-]CronoDAS16y232

IIRC, the position of the Catholic Church is that the death and resurrection of Jesus fulfilled the Covenant and freed humans from the obligation to live according to the Jewish law of the Old Testament. In other words, sometimes the blind spots are explicitly acknowledged and handwaved away instead of being overlooked.

[-]PhilGoetz16y120

Good point. Protestants also say that. Although note that Christians sometimes cite Old Testament commandments as if they still applied today. Even "Be fruitful and multiply", which was just for Adam & Eve. Also note that for many years the Catholic Church demanded obedience to the commandment not to charge interest on loans, which is an Old Testament commandment. Ironically, primarily (only?) Jews charged interest on loans.

[-]AldgarOmk14y130

Well, the command not to charge interest on loans in the Old testament was only within your own people: e.g. a Jew shouldn't charge interest from a fellow Jew, but he could charge interest from non-Jews as much as he liked.

Now, the Christians view themselves as the "new chosen people", so they couldn't charge interest from each other, so the banking system had to be performed by Jews, who could - in clean conscience and following their religious beliefs - loan/charge interest from non-Jews(Christians).

In short, the whole "irony" is lost once you actually study the specific commandments and the historical context of the described situation.

7Johnicholas16y

Is this an example of Lampshade Hanging? http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging

1DSimon15y

Maybe closer to an attempted conversion from Fridge Logic into Fridge Brilliance.

[-]CronoDAS16y201

I have a theory that "radical Islam" is not native Islam, but Westernized Islam. Over half of 75 Muslim terrorists studied by Bergen & Pandey 2005 in the New York Times had gone to a Western college. (Only 9% had attended madrassas.) A very small percentage of all Muslims have received a Western college education. When someone lives all their life in a Muslim country, they're not likely to be hit with the urge to travel abroad and blow something up. But when someone from an Islamic nation goes to Europe for college, and comes back with Enlightenment ideas about reason and seeking logical closure over beliefs, and applies them to the Koran, then you have troubles. They have lost their cultural immunity.

Another relevant fact is that, for most of Islam's history, Islamic nations were militarily equal or superior to anyone that they were likely to come into contact with. Islam was a religion founded by conquerers, not by the conquered, and being in a position of profound weakness compared to Western (Christian/Jewish/secular) civilization is something that's simply never happened to them before. Radical Islam could very well be simply the Islam of the fourteenth century faithfully reproduced in the modern era, and the fact that it tends to involve suicide bombings instead of conquering armies is a matter of circumstance rather than ideology. I suspect that, if the Christianity of the fourteenth century, or the Judaism of the first century, were to be faithfully reproduced today, it would be equally horrifying.

[-]SilasBarta16y110

I'm not so sure. One point Sam Harris has made (can't find the source atm) is that the Lebanese are in roughly the same position with respect to Israel as the Palestinians, but the Lebanese are predominately Christian rather than Muslim, and commit almost no terrorist acts. Harris argues that it's like a lab experiment where you put two oppressed peoples next to each other, but with different religions and watch what happens.

9CronoDAS16y

Sam Harris actually specifically cites Palestinian Christians. (Who do exist.)

6CronoDAS16y

Well, maybe not equally horrifying, but still horrifying. You might not be aware of this, but the infamous "Spanish Inquisition" was a relatively humane law enforcement organization when compared to standard practices in the the rest of Europe.

2jhuffman14y

Is there any reason to think Lebanese Christians are more similar to 14th century christians than to modern western christians?

0waveman15y

Yes. The original poster's statements about the benign nature and gentleness of early Christianity do not reflect its history eg death penalty for those who refuse to convert, burned all the books they could find, later on the slaughter of tens of thousands in Jerusalem during the crusades.

0wedrifid15y

On the other hand Judaism of the first century was hardly at its peak of its power or horror. I seem to recall a penalty of death being declared for those who didn't follow the command to genocide those they conquered, elderly, women, children and babies alike. Come to think of it lifestock may well have been included as well. I don't think they had the power or inclination for that sort of thing in the first century.

[-]Vladimir_Nesov16y180

So, there is a hidden component in levels of belief: together with stated level of certainty, bland "truthiness" of a statement, there is also a procedural perspective, with the statement applying with different power in different contexts. This more nuanced level of belief is harder to see and harder to influence: take "belief in belief" as a special case; on one hand there is certainty, on the other it refuses to speak of the real world.

Compartmentalization seems to be the default method for managing "quoted" beliefs: instead of keeping track of what evidence there is for what, just start directly believing everything, but in narrow contexts. If the facts check out, collections of new pieces of knowledge pass coherence checks and gain influence. Insanity remains in the quarantine indefinitely, and even if within its crib it calls the shots, it is a mistake to interpret it as accepted by the person as a whole. When an aspect of most people is insane, it is so by design, part of the never-ending process of reevaluation.

This mechanism is also probably what's responsible for people not even caring to distinguish positive assertions from the negative one... (read more)

[-]CronoDAS16y130

Related: Nerds Are Nuts

1cousin_it16y

Thanks for that link. Razib is very impressive as usual.

[-]netsp16y120

Phil,

Well written and thought provoking. Reading this, I was reminded of a Douglas Adams essay/speech abut Balinese rice farmers and the way their religion is highly suitable to growing rice. The gods that they cite as reasons for this or that aren't necessarily real and some of the practices may actually be useless, but the end product is a very successful harvest. You might ask a rice farmer why he decided to plant this plant here. His answer could involve some custom that if the moon does this and the chickens do that, I need to put a plant here. That's obviously silly, but it doesn't mean the plant shouldn't be there. The customs and beliefs are the basis for how they do things and how they do things is good for growing rice.

I went back and reread the essay and noticed that I remembered it a little wrong. I also noticed that this isn't some interesting overlap between what you and he are thinking about. What you call the memetic immune system he calls an "artificial god". Actually, I think that your concept is a subset of the artificial god. You seem to assume his position of the artificial god and use it to construct this immune system idea. I think that you would enjoy the piece: http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/

[-]markrkrebs16y110

"The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap." -Eric Hoffer, the True Believer

Love your post: religion as virulent namb-shub. See also Snow Crash by Stephenson.

8RobinZ16y

Quick tip: HTML doesn't work in the comments, but you can make italics by putting asterisks (*) around the thing to be italicized. There should be a "Help" link below the comment window that will unfold a list of markups.

3wedrifid16y

So there is. You know I had never noticed that!

3RobinZ16y

It's not a complete guide - longer tutorials are available elsewhere - but it has the things you usually need.

[-]Lumifer12y100

a lot of the rules in the Bible are impossible, illegal, or embarassing to follow nowadays; like wearing tassels, tying your money to yourself, stoning adulterers, not eating fruit from a tree less than 5 years old, and not touching anything that a menstruating woman has touched;

I take it, the author doesn't know many Orthodox Jews..?

5Davidmanheim5y

Those aren't actually how orthodox Jews interpret the rules, or apply them nowadays. Tassels are only on very specific articles of clothing, which are hidden under people's shirts, I'm not even sure what "tying money to yourself" is about, adulterers are only stoned if the temple stands and only under nearly-impossible to satisfy conditions, trees less than 5 years old are only considered a biblical problem in Israel, and if you're unsure, the fruit is allowed in the rest of the world, and the ritual purity laws don't apply in general because everyone is assumed to be contaminated anyways.

[-]Steve_Rayhawk16y80

The mechanism isn't the same as for diseases[. . .] I suspect that, over time, individual selection favors those who are less zealous. The point is that a culture develops antibodies for the particular religions it co-exists with - attitudes and practices that make them less virulent.
Sometimes, reason [. . .] lets us see the blind spots, but not the dangerous memes. Either of these ways, reason can lead an individual to be unbalanced, no longer adapted to their memetic environment, and free to follow previously-dormant memes through to their logical conc

... (read more)

3Steve_Rayhawk16y

(Sometimes I worry about the problem of how to extend the principle of charity to memes that cannot be safely taken literally.)

3SilasBarta16y

My answer is to judge them by the success of the actions they lead their practioners to do, not the falsifiable (or deliberately unfalsifiable) claims about reality they espouse.

[-]Larks16y60

This sounds like Burke for the 21st Century,

"prejudices and prescriptions and presumptions are the instruments which the wisdom of the species employs to safeguard man against his own passions and appetites."

I suppose this can also explain why new cults, from Born-again Christians to the Scientologists and extreme environmentalists, seem so much more harmful than the boring old Church of England and the like. How fast do we think these counter-beliefs can arise?

6PhilGoetz16y

I don't know; but we should factor in historical context when examining the record. I mentioned that religions of subjugated people are kinder; on the flip side, religions that have political power are often harmful, even if old. You can't look at Catholicism in the middle ages as being just a memetic system. Politics produces results that memetic theory wouldn't predict.

[-]cousin_it16y60

Great post, thanks, upvoted.

So most any value-core will go evil if allowed to unfold to its logical conclusions. This sounds correct to me, and also it sounds just like the motivation for FAI. Now your argument that humans solve this problem by balanced deterrence among value-cores (as opposed to weighing them together in one utility function) sounds to me like a novel intuition applicable to FAI. We have some researchers on the topic here, maybe they could speak up?

[-]PhilGoetz16y170

An interesting observation! An objection to it is that this approach would require your AI to have inconsistent beliefs.

Personally, I believe that fast AI systems with inconsistencies, heuristics, and habits will beat verifiably-correct logic systems in most applications; and will achieve general AI long before any pure-logic systems. (This is one reason why I'm skeptical that coming up with the right decision logic is a workable approach to FAI. I wish that Eliezer had been at Ben Goertzel's last AGI conference, just to see what he would have said to Selmer Bringsjord's presentation claiming that the only safe AI would be a logic system using a consistent logic, so that we could verify that certain undesirable statements were false in that system. The AI practitioners present found the idea not just laughable, but insulting. I said that he was telling us to turn the clock back to 1960 and try again the things that we spent decades failing at. Richard Loosemore gave a long, rude, and devastating reply to Bringsjord, who remained blissfully ignorant of the drubbing he'd just received.)

6[anonymous]13y

Hah! I just came across your comment, Phil :-) I was "Rude"? Hey, you were sitting next to me, and egging me on by saying "No it isn't" quietly to yourself every time Bringsjord tried to assert his (nonsensical) claim. But anyway. I'd claim that I was not rude, really. Bringsjord kept interrupting my attempts to ask my question with loud, almost shouted comments like "If you really think that, I feel sorry for you: you really need to go back and try to get a grasp of elementary logic before you ask me questions like this!!" So I got a little .... testy. :-) :-) I really wish someone had recorded that exchange.

6cousin_it16y

That fellow Bringsjord seems to me an obvious kook, e.g. he claims to have proven that P=NP.

9PhilGoetz16y

He claims to have an argument that P=NP. He's a philosopher, so "argument" != proof. Although approaching P=NP as a philosophical argument does strike me as kooky. Better proof of kookhood is that he was at AGI mainly to present his work on hypercomputing, which he claimed was a computational system with more power than a Turing machine. One element of his argument was that proofs using hyperset logic (which he said is an entire field of logic nowadays; I wouldn't know) use a notation that can not even theoretically be represented by a Turing machine. These proofs were published in two-dimensional journal articles, in black-and-white print. I did not notice any fractal fonts in the proofs.

[-]Richard_Kennaway16y130

He claims to have an argument that P=NP. He's a philosopher, so "argument" != proof. Although approaching P=NP as a philosophical argument does strike me as kooky.

If it's this argument, it's wrong. It is based on the claim that soap films solve the Steiner problem, which they don't. I tried this myself for four pins; here is a report of six-pin soap-film configurations. The soap film, obviously, only finds a local minimum, not a global one. But finding a local minimum is computationally easy.

Elsewhere, in a paper that detracts from the credibility of the journal it appears in, he argues that people can perform hypercomputation, on the grounds that we can imagine people performing hypercomputation. (Yes, I read all 24 pages, and that's what it comes down to.)

One element of his argument was that proofs using hyperset logic (which he said is an entire field of logic nowadays; I wouldn't know)

Judging by Google, the only wide use of the word "hyperset" in mathematics is in non-well-founded set theory. If that is what he was talking about, it's equiconsistent with the usual sort of set theory and has no more significance for AI than the choice of programming l... (read more)

1MatthewB16y

Oh... This is sad work (Bringsjord). His argument for hypercomputation by people seems remarkably similar to Alvin Plantinga's Modal Ontological Argument for God. I am also suspect of much of what Penrose has to say about Computationalism, although I am not yet sufficiently knowledgeable to be able to directly confront his work in any meaningful way (I am working to rectify that problem. I seem to have a knack for formal logic, and I am hoping that when I get to upper division logic classes that I will be able to more directly confront arguments like Penrose's and Bringsjord's)

0billswift16y

I came across a wikipedia article on hypercomputing a while back, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation , the whole theory doesn't seem at all well supported to me.

4timtyler16y

It is a field with an imaginary object of study.

3MichaelVassar16y

It would be nice though, if outsiders could show some respect by demonstrating, as is probably demonstrable but difficult, that its object of study is incoherent, not just imaginary. I'm not really sure it makes sense to talk about mathematical objects as being imaginary but not incoherent.

0Paul Crowley16y

I'd be very surprised if this Universe was super-Turing, but you think it's actually incoherent? I can definitely conceive of a hypercomputational cellular automata, what is it about the idea of our Universe being hypercomputational that seems incoherent to you?

4MichaelVassar16y

I think that it is very common for things that we casually think we can definitely conceive of to actually be incoherent. I also think that almost everyone else underestimates how common it is.

1Paul Crowley16y

I think I'm correcting for that. Do you agree that the halting oracle function itself is well-defined? If so, what seems inconceivable about a cellular automaton whose rules depend on the output of that oracle? OK, you have to stretch the definition of a cellular automaton to allow it, perhaps by allowing cells to have unbounded state, but the result is a wholly defined and therefore surely in-principle-conceivable Universe which is super-Turing. No?

0timtyler16y

Respectful outsiders? Is that a reference to the inner sanctum of the Hypercomputation sect? ;-)

-1timtyler16y

It's not incoherent. There could be such a thing as Hypercomputation. However, nobody has found any evidence that it exists so far - and maybe they never will. Hypercomputation enthusiasts claim that its existence doesn't matter too much - and that it's a valuable concept regardless of whether it exists or not. Maybe.

4Nick_Tarleton16y

I don't disagree (i.e., I don't see any positive reason to doubt the coherence of hypercomputation – though Michael sounds like he has one), but remember not to confuse subjective conceivability and actual coherence.

0MatthewB16y

And, now I see why I am skeptical of hypercomputation. It seems to all necessitate some form of computation over an infinite number of steps. This would require some severe bending of the rules or constraints of physics, wouldn't it? timtyler's comment below mine seems to be appropriate:

0arfle15y

Doesn't Newtonian gravity require computation over an infinite number of steps?

3Nick_Tarleton16y

An AI doesn't have to have a purely logical structure (let alone a stupid one, e.g. structureless predicates for tables and chairs) in order to be able to logically prove important things about it. It seems to me that criticism of formally proving FAI by analogy to failed logical AI equivocates between these things.

1MichaelVassar16y

Will beat equals be developed first or be more capable than. Selmer doesn't understand LOTS of things that Eliezer understood at age 12, he's superficially similar, but it's a very superficial similarity.

1Eliezer Yudkowsky16y

Could be correct or wildly incorrect, depending on exactly what he meant by it. Of course you have to delete "the only", but I'd be pretty doubtful of any humans trying to do recursive self-modification in a way that didn't involve logical proof of correctness to start with.

8PhilGoetz16y

One of the big problems is that he was trying to talk about the logical correctness of human-level symbolic statements about the world. Even if the logic is correct, there is no correct, consistent mapping from the analog world, to symbolic descriptions, and back. A mapping that's close enough to work 99.99% of the time isn't good enough when you're talking about proof.

1timtyler16y

Companies are the self-improving systems of today - e.g. see Google. They don't hack the human brain much - but they don't need to. Brains are not perfect - but they can have their inputs preprocessed, their outputs post-processed, and they can be replaced entirely by computers - via the well-known process of automation. Do the folk at Google proceed without logical proofs? Of course they do! Only the slowest and most tentative programmer tries to prove the correctness of their programs before they deploy them. Instead most programmers extensively employ testing methodologies. Testing is the mantra of modern programmers. Test, test, test! That way they get their products to the market before the sun explodes.

0Technologos16y

As Eliezer has already showed, "test, test, test"ing AIs that aren't provably Friendly (their recursive self-modification leads to Friendly results) can have disastrous consequences. I'd rather wait until the sun explodes rather than deploying an unFriendly AI by accident.

0timtyler16y

The consequences of failing to adopt rapid development technologies when it comes to the development of intelligent machines should be pretty obvious - the effect is to pass the baton to another team with a different development philosophy. Waiting until the sun explodes is not one of the realistic options. The box experiments seem irrelevant to the case of testing machine intelligence. When testing prototypes in a harness, you would use powerful restraints - not human gatekeepers.

3Technologos16y

What powerful restraints would you suggest that would not require human judgment or human-designed decision algorithms to remove?

9Richard_Kennaway16y

Turn it off, encase it in nanofabricated diamond, and bury it in a deep pit. Destroy the experimental records, retaining only enough information to help future, wiser generations to one day take up again the challenge of building a Friendly AI. Scatter the knowledge in fragments, hidden in durable artifacts, scatter even the knowledge of how to find the knowledge likewise, and arrange a secret brotherhood to pass down through the centuries the ultimate keys to the Book That Does Not Permit Itself To Be Read. Tens of thousands of years later, when civilisation has (alas) fallen and risen several times over, a collect-all-the-plot-coupons fantasy novel takes place.

-4timtyler16y

Want to restrain a man? Use a facility designed by the government with multiple guards and built with vastly more resources than the imprisoned man can muster. Want to restrain a machine? You use the same strategy. Or you could use drugs, or build in a test harness. Whatever - but however you look at it, it doesn't seem like a problem. We can restrain individuals pretty securely today - and there is no indication that future developments are going to change that. What's with the question about removing restraints? That isn't a problem either. You are suggesting that the imprisoned agent contacts and manipulates humans "on the outside" - and they attempt a jail-break? That is a strategy available to other prisoners as well. It has a low success rate. Those few that do escape are typically hunted down and then imprisoned again. If you are particularly paranoid about escaped prisoners, then build a higher security prison. Typically, you can have whatever security level you are prepared to pay for.

5CronoDAS16y

The hypothetical AI is assumed to be able to talk normal humans assigned to guard it into taking its side. In other words, the safest way to restrain it is to simply not turn it on.

3Technologos16y

And not just by persuading the guards--the kind of AIs we are talking about, transhuman-level AIs, could potentially do all kinds of mind-hacking things of which we haven't even yet conceived. Hell, they could do things that we will never be able to conceive unaided. If we ever set up a system that relies on humans restraining a self-modifying AI, we had better be sure beforehand that the AI is Friendly. The only restraints that I can think of that would provably work involve limiting the AIs access to resources so that it never achieves a level of intelligence equal to or higher than human--but then, we haven't quite made an AI, have we? Not much benefit to a glorified expert system. If you haven't read the AI Box experiment reports I linked above, I recommend them--apparently, it doesn't quite take a transhuman-level AI to get out of a "test harness."

3timtyler16y

You don't use a few humans to restrain an advanced machine intelligence. That would be really stupid.

-1phob15y

Safest, but maybe not the only safe way? Why not make a recursively improving AI in some strongly typed language who provably can only interact with the world through printing names of stocks to buy? How about one that can only make blueprints for star ships?

-6Scott_Jackisch16y

0MatthewB16y

Steve Omhundro has given several talks that talk about the consequences of a purely logical or rationally exact AI system. His talk at the Sing. Summit 2007 The Nature of Self-Improving AI discussed what would happen if such an Agent were to have the wrong rules constraining its behavior. I saw a purely logical system as being one such possible agent type to which he referred.

[-]MichaelVassar16y140

When you make every part of a balanced system more powerful without an overseeing process maintaining balance you don't get a more powerful balanced system, you get an algae bloom.

5cousin_it16y

Why without? We can put an overseeing process in. It probably doesn't have to be very smart - after all, the overseeing process for humans is pretty stupid compared to a human.

[-]Jiro12y50

Not only does this work when someone is trying to follow his religion rationality, it also works when someone is trying to follow rationality rationally.

In other words, not only can becoming more rational lead you to discard the cultural antibodies to religion without discarding the religion, becoming more rational can lead you to discard the cultural antibodies to all sorts of crazy ideas without discarding the crazy ideas. It works for non-religious crazy ideas as well as for religious ones. It even works when the crazy ideas are themselves "ratio... (read more)

[-]MondSemmel12y51

Christianity was pacifist at the start, as it arose in a conquered people. When the Romans adopted it, it didn't make them any more militaristic than they already were.

But conversely, Christianity became a lot more militaristic when it became the state religion. Listen e.g. to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast Thor's Angels (free as of 01/2014; 4h long).

I have a theory that "radical Islam" is not native Islam, but Westernized Islam.

-> What about e.g. the fatwa over Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, or blasphemy laws, or whatever? Th... (read more)

[-]DanielFilan6y40

My guess is that his name is "A. J. Jacobs" and not "A. J. Acobs"

[-]Eli Tyre6y40

I'm also reminded of a talk I attended by one of the Dalai Lama's assistants. This was not slick, Westernized Buddhism; this was saffron-robed fresh-off-the-plane-from-Tibet Buddhism. He spoke about his beliefs, and then took questions. People began asking him about some of the implications of his belief that life, love, feelings, and the universe as a whole are inherently bad and undesirable. He had great difficulty comprehending the questions - not because of his English, I think; but because the notion of taking

... (read more)

[-]Beeblebrox4y30

As a Christian who is pretty familiar with the history of Christianity (less so with Islam, and embarrassingly ignorant as to Buddhist thought), I would suggest that perhaps the point on adult converts being radical needs some nuance.

From a Christian perspective, the AJ Jacobs experiment is intended to make any religion look idiotic, due to a very woodenly literal interpretation of what it means to follow the commands of the old and new testaments.

Although there may be some adult converts who do such actions, this seems pretty abnormal, and although adult ... (read more)

[-]Psy-Kosh16y30

Interesting. So I guess the idea is we have immunities that 'wrap' memes so toxic that our incomplete rationality might be subverted by them and instead ensure that those ideas simply don't interact with the rest of it? So that neither is rational thinking allowed to attack them, but neither are they 'allowed' to extend their influence?

[-]Zvi16y30

I've found being very careful when you find yourself deviating from everyone around you to be excellent advice, and I do so whenever I can - the first time I deviate in a certain way, after which it gets filed under confirmed ways in which I act differently. That seems to keep the cost of doing so manageable even for the quite abnormal.

[-]Douglas_Knight16y30

I agree with everything you say, but you vascillate between somewhat contradictory positions: that the default is to have disconnected beliefs; or that the default is to have particular "antibodies" preventing action on particular "beliefs." Could you elaborate on this?

I do agree that both are important phenomena. I think the default is disconnected beliefs. I'm not clear on the prevalence and role of "antibodies." Maybe they're just for over-verbal nerds infected with the Enlightenment. But I think they're more general.

9PhilGoetz16y

"Antibodies" is a vague metaphor, by which I meant any aspect of your decision process that blocks or sidetracks a dangerous chain of reasoning. I didn't think about whether these blocks were active responses, or passive omission of a justified inference (eg., disconnected beliefs). It operates as a metaphor by suggesting co-evolutionary dynamics as a way of looking at the problem. It's not a valid metaphor for trying to figure out the exact mechanism.

6ChrisHibbert16y

voted up for backing away from the details of the metaphor rather than trying to justify them. Not always an easy choice.

2Douglas_Knight16y

As it stands now, it's all omitted inference. But I think the monk is the default--almost all inferences are omitted. If that's the default, I think drawing attention to them and calling them "antibodies" is a figure-ground error. (But maybe you don't think it's the default.) I might talk about co-evolution, not between beliefs and blind spots, but between actions and excuses. The excuses can't be too incoherent, because some people pay some attention to them. What I took to be "antibodies" were elaborate excuses, excuses for not drawing inferences between the first-order excuses, but I think the race example was the only example you gave of this. Maybe these are rare and most people just use first-order excuses for what they do, not excuses for why they don't actually follow the first-order excuses.

4MichaelVassar16y

Maybe the default is disconnected beliefs and actions driven by imitation. New religions tell people that they shouldn't base their actions on imitation of their local authorities, forcing them back on nominal beliefs and forcing them to make inferences.

2Douglas_Knight16y

Why don't they just imitate the missionary? Surely, the missionary communicates "be like me," not "be different from them"? I guess it could be only the over-verbal converts who notice that menstruating women have cooties. They might make good stories without being representative. But there is the general principle that converts are more observant; are they radically more observant, or do they merely find more observant people to imitate? (if the latter, why?)

4Nick_Tarleton16y

Or maybe (just speculating) "I too am a sinner; I am merely a bringer of good news; look to God, not to me".

0Jack15y

A better metaphor than antibodies is probably vectors. The degree of compartmentalization in a person's belief network is a feature of the memetic environment- equivalent to the concentration of population or prevalence of vermin in the context of microbes. When people have a low degree of compartmentalization mimetic schema take over lots domains of thought just has urban living (pre-sanitation) increased the spread of disease. I don't think there is an obvious sense in which the degree of vectorization has a 'default' though, unless you just want to make it zero because that is convenient.

[-]gilch3y20

The mechanism isn't the same as for diseases, which can't be too virulent or they kill their hosts. Religions don't generally kill their hosts.

Don't drink the Kool-Aid ;)

Prevalent communicable diseases usually don't kill their hosts, because those that do (like Ebola) tend not to spread, and thus are not prevalent.

There have been multiple recorded instances of cults ending in mass suicide, as well as a gamut of other harms to adherents. Those that don't implode from their virulence may spread and survive, eventually becoming old enough to graduate and be called "religions" (i.e. prevalent cults).

Sounds like exactly the same mechanism to me.

[-]Michael Wiebe14y20

This article seems relevant: "Clever sillies: Why high IQ people tend to be deficient in common sense."

The author argues that high IQ people solve problems by using abstract reasoning instead of evolved common sense. Moreover, general intelligence is mainly useful for solving evolutionarily novel problems, and can actually be a hindrance for problems which were a regular part of the evolutionary environment (for example, social situations). Hence, when facing problems where humans have evolved behavioral responses, smart people who apply abstract reasoning and override common sense often end up doing silly things.

[-]gwern14y120

Unfortunately, it's by Bruce Charlton. I've noticed that whenever this hypothesis comes up, it seems to be solely used as a political cudgel to attack liberals - which means I trust the paper as far as I can throw it.

(Why is the 'clever silly' idea always used to attack things like diversity, and not equally abstract and historically unprecedented shibboleths of the right like untrammeled free markets?)

1celeste4y

I also don't understand why politics isn't considered evolutionarily novel. There is a difference between 1) social organization of a small tribe and 2) management of a polity containing large institutions and thousands to millions of people. As far as I can tell, no one considers tribal political affiliation desirable.

-1Michael Wiebe14y

I would recommend skipping the section on political correctness. I do think the first two sections give a good lesson on how a little reason can be a dangerous thing.

2ikrase13y

Looks like he got hoist by his own petard.

[-]MatthewB16y20

I have read something very similar to this someplace else before reading this article (on a side-note. This is the very first article I ever read completely on Less Wrong, and had I not contracted H1N1 at the end of September I would have joined Less Wrong at that time).

I too have read A Year Living Biblically. Mostly so that I would have ready material should I ever have to talk to my Evangelical Aunt and Uncle who are busy preparing a huge number of people in Texas for the Rapture and Second Coming of Christ (Hoo boy?!?).

I seem to recall in the article t... (read more)

[-]teageegeepea16y20

Your point about educated fundamentalists has been made elsewhere.

Its possible that some of the geneticists merely think it is good to perform (to steal Hopefully Anonymous' favorite word) such a belief, perhaps for Straussian reasons. Hence the popularity of the replacement term among many scientists "population".

[-]Ge Gao2y10

I am many years late to the conversation, but this is fascinating. I think this is a good framework for explaining why taking moral theories to their logical extremes often yield unpalatable conclusions at odds with our moral intuitions - because they are overpowering our illogical cultural antibodies. It's still a good read after 10+ years :)

[-]Alephwyr3y10

I am skeptical of any epistemics that conflate memetic survival with truth, even weakly. Mostly because acting on certain beliefs can destroy evidence for other beliefs. Partly because I can think of no reason that all truths should intersect with anthropocentrism. An example of the former might be the destruction of native american agricultural and hunting techniques by the destruction of the environment. An example of the latter might be, more contentiously, natalism vs antinatalism. If antinatalism is true it still loses me... (read more)

[-]Jes3y10

That's the point. In (protestant) Christianity, the old law was a standard that humans could never follow. But the old law had to be paid in blood. So God became human himself, so that he could pay in blood a law that only he could live up to.

It sounds like the author accidentally LARPed as an orthodox Jew.

[-]Polytopos5y10

The trouble is that these antibodies are not logical. On the contrary; these antibodies are often highly illogical. They are the blind spots that let us live with a dangerous meme without being impelled to action by it.

That is a brilliant point. I also loved you description of the Buddhist monk taking questions from a Western audience. The image of incompatible knowledge blocks is a great one, that actually makes a lot of sense of how various ideologically conditioned people are able to functionally operate.

The example that comes up for me is a... (read more)

[-]Lumifer12y10

I have a theory that "radical Islam" is not native Islam, but Westernized Islam.

Depends on what do you call "radical Islam", but I think that a bit of study of Islam's early history should disabuse you of that notion.

2HalMorris10y

The OP did write: Which I think acknowledges some of that early history. I assume what is said about Judaism has to do with the slaughter of Canaanites, which is possibly more than half legendary, unlike the exploits of Islam which happened in a much better documented time. In different times and places, Islam has been extremely sometimes fanatical, and at other times received Jews who were driven out of Spain by the Inquisition, and showed toleration of other ideas. The ups and downs have probably been due to many causes, but there really has been an awakening in recent decades of Islamic fanaticism, and in this case, at least, I think the OP's thesis might account for some of that; the thinking was just a bit too loose and brainstorm-ey. It is kind of a puzzle to have so many Muslims combining western education, and the ability to function in a modern metropolitan setting combined with extreme fanaticism. A peak of Christian holy-warring, torturing and witch-burning came when Protestants set out to rid Catholicism of the many "irrational" (having no basis in the bible) false sacraments, and between the Reformation and the Counter-reformation, both Protestants and Catholics were studying the gospels more rigorously and attempting to weave it into a more logical justifiable structure. I grew up in the 50s and 60s in a very loose sort of Methodist protestantism that was very unconcerned with issues like the literal 7 days of creation, with hell for sinners, with Satan going around tempting people, or with contesting evolution. It seemed to me only a few fossils insisted on all those sorts of things. For most, a general sort of largely "good Samaritan" morality seemed the most salient thing, and there was not much in society to challenge the general sexual mores of moderate protestantism. I think it's true generally, that religions, especially if lacking a strong central structure like that of Catholicism or Mormonism, or Islam esp. in times when the idea of a a

4Richard_Kennaway10y

Does it work? I am imagining a believer retorting that of course their beliefs present a real problem to others, and the bigger the problem the better. As indeed might a Christian accused of presenting a real problem to the rich, or a vegan accused of presenting a real problem to the meat industry, or an Ethical Altruist presenting a real problem to people buying $5000 bespoke suits. The whole point of being an activist for any cause is to be a real problem to their opponents. To be told that they are a real problem is to tell them that they are succeeding.

1Lumifer10y

I don't think it's puzzling. Examine your implicit assumptions -- which exactly part of your worldview would say that Western education and living in a city should be incompatible with religious fanaticism? The issue with Islam is not that it's "inhumane", the issue is that it is naturally a totalitarian religion. Christianity says "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's", but Islam says no such thing. From an Islamic point of view there is absolutely no reason why politics should not be subservient to faith and indeed the Christian approach is routinely called schizophrenic.

0HalMorris10y

Cultural development seems not to follow such orderly laws that we can use the word "incompatible" very often if ever. But going to a western university tends to promote individual thought over blind acceptance of whatever you were taught in childhood, and while someone who spent their live in some valley in Afghanistan or northern Pakistan, never exposed to different people, might imagine westerners as cloven hoofed devils, it is at least a reasonable point of view to suppose that going to school with westerners could lesson that kind of visceral revulsion. I'm a little take aback, as "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" is an admonition to obey established political authority. And "render unto God what is God's" is the possibly subversive part -- though it's only recommending obedience to a competing authority". Also, Christian Russia, esp around the time of Ivan the Terrible was arguably the most totalitarian major state for its time (the main argument would be over China, I think). I believe Paul's writings give ample admonitions to obey authority, and for slaves to obey their masters. What would you say in the doctrines of Islam makes it "naturally a totalitarian religion"? I assume you have some analysis that leads you to that conclusion.

[-]Adam Zerner12y00

I think your main point - that selective application of rationality could be dangerous - is true. But the question then is how often is it dangerous? And in what way should we apply rationality? Should we not apply rationality because it could be dangerous? I think the article would have been much better if these questions were brought up, and addressed.

I get the sense that applying rationality is usually more good than bad. Although I don't really know enough about radical religions to say if it's true for them too.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

[-]play_therapist14y00

You said, "The history of religions sometimes resembles the history of viruses. Judaism and Islam were both highly virulent when they first broke out, driving the first generations of their people to conquer (Islam) or just slaughter (Judaism) everyone around them for the sin of not being them. "

I am not familiar with that history of early Judaism. Can you cite any references I can read about it? (I do admit I have not read the entire old testament, perhaps it's in there?) By the way, I have heard that Roman Catholics are actively discouraged from reading either testament directly.

6gwern14y

Have you read even the early books? The constant warfare and near-genocides engaged in until they built up an empire? Then you have, even much later, all the rebellions which prompted the Romans to raze the Temple and exile most of the Jews. (An oddity I always found to be an example is that one of the lost books of the bible is titled 'The Book of the Wars of the Lord'.)

2Jiro12y

In order for the Old Testament to be evidence of Jews acting genocidal, the Old Testament would have to be true to a sufficient extent. If it's not, you don't have Jews being genocidal, you have Jews telling stories about their ancestors being genocidal. It was my impression that non-religious historians do not believe that the genocides described in the Old Testament as being done by Jews actually happened.

1gwern12y

It was my impression that non-religious historians do not believe all the little stories and miracles, but I had not noticed that they entirely disbelieved accounts like conquering Canaan and believed that there was evidence indicating they were pacifists and did not exterminate any local populations or engage in warfare, and the archaeological evidence, to the extent that it can speak on the matter (since it's going to be very difficult to investigate genocides from millennia ago when you are excluding all available written evidence as possibly untrue), supported it (the example that comes to mind is the burning of Jericho, although it's disputed how well the observed destruction layer fits into the chronology).

0polymathwannabe12y

Those stories most likely didn't happen. Still, the fact that their religion is entirely dependent on those bloody stories says a lot about the ancient Hebrews' priorities.

7Jiro12y

It seems fundamentally unfair to compare cases of religions whose people actually committed genocide to religions whose people tell stories about committing genocide. This is especially so considering the original post here, which points out that people don't actually follow all the commands of their religions and have blind spots about the religions not saying what they say. That applies to stories about genocide just as much as it applies to direct commands--you can reason all you want that someone who believes that fictional genocides were real and justified is as vicious as someone who actually commits genocide, but people's minds don't work that way. It's entirely possible to think Biblical genocides are justified and have blind spots which would lead you not to commit genocide in any real-life situation. (In fact, I'm not erven sure I could call all the possibilities blind spots. If you believe genocide is only justified when commanded in person by God, is it really a blind spot to say "God doesn't directly speak to anyone nowadays, so I won't commit any genocide"?)

-6polymathwannabe12y

0play_therapist14y

Thanks. Whatever reading I did of the old testament was back when I was a teenager- which was long ago.I don't remember how far I got, not very. I was reading the commentary along with it, and it was tedious. Perhaps I'll get back to it when I get a chance. That's certainly not the spin that was put on the history we were taught in Hebrew school.

[-]Steve_Rayhawk16y00

It is because of the potential in posts like this that I wish that Less Wrong had an edit queue, or that the wiki were used as an edit queue. Do you have plans to write a longer version?

0PhilGoetz16y

I wasn't planning on it. Perhaps, if I knew an appropriate place to publish it.

[-][anonymous]16y00

Considering religious belief as virus suggests a larger pattern expressed in the physical world as a whole, does it not? Do our beliefs reflect that pattern or is our perception of the pattern inate?

[-]jackelq16y-40

Regarding religious belief as viral suggests a larger pattern expressed in the physical world as a whole, does it not? Do our beliefs reflect that pattern or is our perception of the pattern inate to our humanity?

-35ReViZeD16y

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

535

Reason as memetic immune disorder

535

535

A prophet is without dishonor in his hometown

Cultural immunity

Reason as immune suppression

The vaccines?