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CarlShulman comments on Raising the Sanity Waterline - Less Wrong
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You linked to your Dark Side Epistemology post, which is all about the generally anti-rationalist propaganda generated by organizations with bogus claims to shield, but avoid mentioning here that a reduction in religion would thus raise the waterline at least somewhat. Why?
Because religions aren't the only ones who need or generate the Dark Side. They've just got the largest, most sophisticated flocks of paid Sith.
It's true that if religion vanished the derivative of the Dark Side would level off somewhat, but the existing Dark Side would have already been generated.
To put it another way, suppose that all religion vanished from universities tomorrow in a surgical intervention. Would the general quality of science go up? How much? Why?
I don't even think religion is the worst / most influential offender. That would probably be fiction. People marinate in the stuff, and it's cram full of magical thinking even when omitting the overtly supernatural.
Restricting the effect to universities prevents me from drawing on a key factor I had in mind, external pressures that shape scientific research, since in popular opinion support for science competes with religion on average. More popular support for and deference to science could have significant positive effects (depending on your model).
Still, the Dark Side needs to be sustained, and when its emotional underpinnings are removed a superstructure can collapse suddenly. Moreover, the negative affect for their previous faith-based religions would tend to make ex-believers more susceptible to the idea of reliance on logic and evidence.