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Daniel_Burfoot comments on Raising the Sanity Waterline - Less Wrong
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There are a couple of large gorillas in this room.
First, the examples of great scientists who were also religious shows that you don't have to be an atheist to make great discoveries. I think the example of Isaac Newton is especially instructive: not only did Newton's faith not interfere with his ability to understand reality, it also constituted the core of his motivation to do so (he believed that by understanding Nature he would come to a greater understanding of God). Faraday's example is also significant: his faith motivated him to refuse to work on chemical weapons for the British government.
Second, evidence shows that religious people are happier. Now, this happiness research is of course murky, and we should hesitate to make any grand conclusions on the basis of it. But if it is true, it is deeply problematic for the kind of rationality you are advocating. If rationalists should "just win", and we equate winning with happiness, and the faithful are happier than atheists, then we should all stop reading this blog and start going to church on Sundays.
There are subtleties here that await discovery. Note for example Taleb's hypothesis that the ancients specifically promoted religion as a way of preventing people from going to doctors, who killed more people than they saved until the 19th century. Robin made a similar point about the cost effectiveness of faith healing.
Many of us don't, certainly not with happiness alone, but even if we did...
I accept a correlation between religious faith and happiness, but it's a long way from there to concluding that taking up religious faith is the best way to gain this happiness. Many sources of long-term happiness - sense of community, feelings of purpose, close family bonds, etc - are more likely to be seen in a religious person, but you don't have to turn to religion to experience them.
I hear that people who have had a lobotomy also live untroubled lives of quiet happiness.
If religion making people happier is a special case of conformity to prevalent ideas making people happier, then the happiness benefit from religion is strictly vampiric in nature. God knows religious people make me unhappy.
In which case, the rational thing would be to get rid of whatever emotional belief causes them to make you unhappy. Why be unhappy about a mere fact?
It's worth noting that 'mere' is a weasel word of the highest order. If you change that to 'Why be unhappy about a fact' then it loses its emotive force while having effectively the same content, unless you meant 'Why be unhappy about a fact that's not worth being unhappy about' in which case you're just baiting.
Actually, I had a specific meaning in mind for "mere" in that context: a fact, devoid of the meaning that you yourself assigned to it. The "mere fact" that Starbucks doesn't sell naughty underwear doesn't make it something to be unhappy about... it's only a problem if you insist on reality doing things the way you want them. Same thing for the existence (or lack thereof) of religious people.
So are you then denying meanings that come from other sources? Culturally constructed meaning? Meaning that comes from the relations between concepts?
One of the best things about being human is that I insist everything happen the way that I want it to. If it doesn't, then I overcome it by replacing it, fixing it, or destroying it.
Nope... but they're stored in you, and represented in terms of common reinforcers (to use EY's term).
You can only do that in the future, not the past. Religious people already exist, so anything bad you might feel about that fact is already pointless.
Only if you think emotion can't influence behavior. Feeling bad about religious people existing leads Dawkins to campaign against them, which is intended to stop people from being religious. It's sortof a virtuous circle. Do you think our feelings and actions only matter if they can change the past?
And if he didn't feel so badly about them, he might campaign in ways that were more likely to win them over. ;-) He seems far more effective at rallying his base than winning over the undecided.
In fact, it might be interesting to objectively compare the results of sending negatively- and positively- motivated atheists to speak to religious groups or individuals, and measure the religious persons' attitudes towards atheism and religion afterwards, as well as the long-term impact on (de)conversions.
I would predict better success for the positively-motivated persons... if only because positive motivation is a stronger predictor for success at virtually everything than negative motivation is!
I agree that this is common and pathological, but why do you think ALL unhappiness proceeds from it? There is a middle ground between dispassionate judgment and desperate craving.
Not really: there are two utility systems, not one. The absence of pleasure does NOT equal pain, nor vice versa. They are only weakly correlated, and functionally independent: they have different effects on the brain and body. And we can have mixed feelings, because both systems can activate at the same time.
But there's no inherent reason why activating the pain system is required in the absence of any given form of pleasure, or else we'd be mind-bendingly unhappy most of the time. MOST pleasant things, in fact, we are happy about the presence of, but not necessarily unhappy at the absence of.
As for the question about "all", please give me an example of a form of unhappiness that does NOT derive from a conflict between your desires, and the current state of reality. ;-)
I agree with your first two paragraphs, but fail to see the relevance.
I must be matching cliches myself. I interpreted "you insist on reality doing things the way you want them" as referring to, as I said, pathological craving - a subset of "a conflict between your desires, and the current state of reality". I can't think of any unhappiness that has a reason other than that (although sometimes it has no apparent reason), but what of it? Having desires means having such a conflict (barring omnipotence or impossible luck).
My error, actually. I should have explained more clearly what I mean by "conflict"... I lapsed into a bit of a cliche there, undermining the point I was building up to from the first two paragraphs.
The key is conflict with the current state of reality, distinguished from future state. If you're busy being mad at the current state, you're probably not working as effectively on improving the future state. Negative motivation is primarily reactive, and past/present focused rather than active and present/future focused, the way positive motivation is.
A positively-motivated person is not in conflict with the current state of reality, just because he or she desires a different state. Whereas, someone with an emotion-backed "should", is in conflict.
So my question is/was, can you give an example of active unhappiness that derives from anything other than an objection to the current state of reality?
You implied that there's a "middle ground" between dispassionate judgment and desperate craving, but my entire point is that positives and negatives are NOT a continuum -- they're semi-independent axes.
Some researchers, btw, note that "affective synchrony" -- i.e., the correlation or lack thereof between the two -- is different under conditions of stress and non-stress, and conditions of high pain or pleasure. High pain is much more likely to be associated with low pleasure, and vice versa for high pleasure. But the rest of the time, for most people, they show near-perfect asynchrony; i.e., they're unrelated to each other.
Which means the "middle ground" you posit is actually an illusion. What happens is that your negative and positive evaluations mostly run in parallel, until and unless one system kicks into high gear.
You could compare it to a chess program's tree-trimming: you're cutting off subtrees based on negative evaluation, and more deeply investigating some, based on positive evaluations.
In the ancestral environment -- especially our prehuman ancestry -- this is effective, because negative branches equal death, and you don't have a lot of time to make a choice.
But in humans, most of our negative branch trimming isn't based on actual physical danger or negative consequences: it's based on socially-learned, status-based, self-judgment. We trim the action trees, not because we'll fall off a cliff, but because we'll seem like a "bad" person in some way. And our reasoning is then motivated to cover up the trimmed branches, so nobody else will spot our concerns about them.
So the trimmed branches don't show up in consciousness for long, if at all.
But, since the evaluation modes are semi-independent, we can also have a positive evaluation for the same (socially unacceptable) thought or action that we (for the moment) don't act on.
So we then experience temptation and mixed feelings... and occasionally find ourselves "giving in". (Especially if nobody's around to "catch" us!)
So this dual-axis model is phenomenally better at explaining and predicting what people actually do, than the naive linear model is. (People who approach the linear model in reality, are about as rare as people who have strongly mixed feelings all the time, at least according to one study.)
The linear model, however, seems to be what evolution wants us to believe, because it suits our need for social and personal deception much better. Among other things, it lets us pretend that our lack of action means a virtuous lack of temptation, when in fact it may simply mean we're really afraid of being discovered!
(whew, more fodder for my eventual post or series thereof!)
pjeby:
You are professing these unorthodox claims instead of communicating them. Why should I listen to anything you say on this issue?
I don't see how they're even remotely unorthodox. Most of what I said is verifiable from your own personal experience.... unless you're claiming that if having sex gives you pleasure, then you're in constant pain when you're not having sex!
However, if you must have the blessings of an authority (which I believe is what "orthodox" means), perhaps you'll find these excerpts of interest:
...
The paper containing these two excerpts (from the 1994 APA Bulletin), is probably worth reading in more detail; you can find a copy here.
So, at least in what might be loosely considered "my" field, nothing I said in the post you're referencing is exactly what I'd call "unorthodox".
Now that the idea has been singled out in hypothesis space, you can evaluate its plausibility on your own, even without supporting argument.
I didn't realize there was an orthodoxy saying that humans have one utility system.
Given how little we are given to go on, evaluating the plausibility of a vaguely suggested hypothesis is hard work. One should only do it if one sufficiently expects it to lead to fruition, otherwise you can solve the riddles posed by the Oracle of White Noise till the end of time. Maybe a proper writeup in a separate post will do the trick.
Why be unhappy about something that isn't a fact?
I don't understand your question. Are you trying to make a case for unhappiness being useful, or supporting the idea that unhappiness is not useful?
I'm saying that if you're going to be unhappy about anything - a position I do currently lean toward, albeit with strong reservations - then you should be unhappy about facts.
Sometimes the important facts of which you worry are counterfactual. Which, after all, is what happens when you decide, determining the real decision, based on its comparison to your model of its unreal alternative.
In order to be unhappy "about" a fact, the fact has to have some meaning... a meaning which can exist only in your map, not the territory, since the fact or its converse have to have some utility -- and the territory doesn't come with utility labels attached.
However, there's another source of possible misunderstanding here: my mental model of the brain includes distinct systems for utility and disutility -- what I usually refer to as the pain brain and gain brain. The gain brain governs approach to things you want, while the pain brain governs avoidance of things you don't want.
In theory, you don't need anything this complex - you could just have a single utility function to squeeze your futures with. But in practice, we have these systems for historical reasons: an animal works differently depending on whether it's chasing something or being chased.
What we call "unhappiness" is not merely the absence of happiness, it's the activation of the "pain-avoidance" system -- a system that's largely superfluous (given our now-greater reasoning capacity) unless you're actually being chased by something.
So, from my perspective, it's irrational to maintain any belief that has the effect of activating the the pain brain in situations that don't require an urgent, "this is a real emergency" type of response. In all other kinds of situations, pain-brain responses are less useful because they are:
And while these characteristics could potentially be life-saving in a truly urgent emergency... they are pretty much life-destroying in all other contexts.
So, while you might have a preference that people not be religious (for example), there is no need for this preference not being met, to cause you any actual unhappiness.
In other words, you can be happy about a condition X being met in reality, without also requiring that you be unhappy when condition X is not met.
Should I not be unhappy when people die? I know that I could, by altering my thought processes, make myself less unhappy; I know that this unhappiness is not cognitively unavoidable. I choose not to avoid it. The person I aspire to be has conditions for unhappiness and will be unhappy when those conditions are met.
Our society thinks that being unhappy is terribly, terribly sinful. I disagree morally, pragmatically, and furthermore think that this belief leads to a great deal of unhappiness.
(My detailed responses being given in Feeling Rational, Not For the Sake of Happiness Alone, and Serious Stories, and furthermore illustrated in Three Worlds Collide.)
Argh. You keep editing your comments after I've already started my replies. I guess I'll need to wait longer before replying, in future.
Your detailed responses are off-point, though, except for "Serious Stories", in which you suggest that it would be useful to get rid of unnecessary and soul-crushing pain and/or sorrow. My position is that a considerable portion of that unnecessary and soul-crushing stuff can be done away with, merely by rational examination of the emotional source of your beliefs in the relevant context.
Specifically, how do you know what "person you aspire to be"? My guess: you aspire to be that person, not because of an actual aspiration, but rather because you are repulsed by the alternative, and that the alternative is something you're either afraid you are, or might easily become. (In other words, a 100% standard form of irrationality known as an "ideal-belief-reality conflict".)
What's more, when you examine how you came to believe that, you will find one or more specific emotional experiences... which, upon further consideration, you will find you gave too much weight to, due to their emotional content at the time.
Now, you might not be as eager to examine this set of beliefs as you were to squirt ice water in your ear, but I have a much higher confidence that the result will be more useful to you. ;-)
By "person I aspire to be" I mean that my present self has this property and my present self wants my future self to have this property. I originally wrote "person I define as me" but that seemed like too much of a copout.
Yes, I'm repulsed by imagining the alternative Eliezer who feels no pain when his friends, family, or a stranger in another country dies. It is not clear to me why you feel this is irrational. Nor is it based on any particular emotional experience of mine of having ever been a sociopath.
It seems to me that you are verging here on the failure mode of having psychoanalysis the way that some people have bad breath. If you don't like my arguments, argue otherwise. Just casting strange hints of childhood trauma is... well, it's having psychoanalysis the way some people have bad breath.
So far as I can tell, being a person who hurts when other people hurt is part of that which appears to me from the inside as shouldness.
I don't know. Is it useful for you to be unhappy when people die? For how long? How will you know when you've been sufficiently unhappy? What bad thing will happen if you're not unhappy when people die? What good thing happens if you are unhappy?
And I mean these questions specifically: not "what's good about being unhappy in general?" or "what's good about being unhappy when people die, from an evolutionary perspective?", but why do YOU, specifically, think it's a good thing for YOU to be unhappy when some one specific person dies?
My hypothesis: your examination will find that the idea of not being unhappy in this situation is itself provoking unhappiness. That is, you think you should be unhappy when someone dies, because the idea of not being unhappy will make you unhappy also.
The next question to ask will then be what, specifically, you expect to happen in response to that lack of unhappiness, that will cause you to be unhappy.
And at that point, you will discover something interesting: an assumption that you weren't aware of before.
So, if you believe that your unhappiness should match the facts, it would be a good idea to find out what facts your map is based on, because "death => unhappiness" is not labeled on the territory.
Pjeby, I'm unhappy on certain conditions as a terminal value, not because I expect any particular future consequences from it. To say that it is encoded directly into my utility function (not just that certain things are bad, but that I should be a person who feels bad about them) might be oversimplifying in this case, since we are dealing with a structurally complicated aspect of morality. But just as I don't think music is valuable without someone to listen to it, I don't think I'm as valuable if I don't feel bad about people dying.
If I knew a few other things, I think, I could build an AI that would simply act to prevent the death of sentient beings, without feeling the tiniest bit bad about it; but that AI wouldn't be what I think a sentient citizen should be, and so I would try not to make that AI sentient.
It is not my future self who would be unhappy if all his unhappiness were eliminated; it is my current self who would be unhappy on learning that my nature and goals would thus be altered.
Did you read the Fun Theory sequence and the other posts I referred you to? I'm not sure if I'm repeating myself here.
I agree with your reasoning, but I think there are plenty of reasons to be unhappy about religion that go beyond the absence of a preferred state.
In other words, I think I should be actively displeased that religion exists and is prevalent, not merely being non-happy. Neutrality is included in non-happiness, and if the word were used logically, unhappiness. But the way it's actually used, 'unhappy' means active displeasure.
How is this active displeasure useful to you? Does it cause you to do something different than if you merely prefer religion to not be present? What, specifically?
How does "religious people make me unhappy" motivate anything useful? And to whom is it sending this "honest signal"? What mode of thinking is being changed?
In other words, how is being unhappy about the mere existence of religious people actually useful to the specific person who stated that?
At the moment, what you've said could equally apply to death being a good thing, because it motivates us to not waste time, and because it kills off the less intelligent. In other words, it sounds like a way to justify continued belief in the usefulness of your own unhappiness.
But it was the question I asked, in context. The "mere fact" referred to in my question was the existence of religious people -- it was not an abstract question to be applied to any random "mere fact".
Right -- because that's exactly what happens when you take a point out of context, treat it as an abstraction, and then reapply it to some other specific fact than the one it was relevant to.
Detrimental to whom, relative to what purpose? Evolution doesn't have our personal goals or fulfillment in mind -- just reproductive success. It's merely a happy accident that some of the characteristics useful for one, are also useful for the other.
If you want status and connection, seek them out. What does that have to do with the fact that you don't have them elsewhere?
Do you have to be unhappy because Starbuck's doesn't sell underwear, and Victoria's Secret doesn't serve coffee? Or do you just go to someplace that has whatever you're looking for at the moment?
That's how you operate when you have a preference, rather than an emotionally-backed addiction.
In this case, the emotional rule backing the addiction is a "should" -- the idea that people "shouldn't" be religious or "should" be rational. Such rules produce only pain, when you're not in a position to enforce them.
However, if you change "they should" to "I prefer", then you don't have to be unhappy when reality doesn't match your preferences. You are still free (and still motivated) to change the situation, if and when you have the power to do so, but you are not also bound to become unhappy whenever the situation is not exactly as you prefer.
I think Eliezer Yudkowsky already addressed this point several times on "that other site" (Overcoming Bias). Basically "happiness" is a nice-sounding one word summary of "what people want", but it's inaccurate.
Look at the examples of the wish-granting genie/AI. If you wish for "happiness", it'll turn you into a pile of orgasmium, basically grey-matter which just experiences infinite pleasure constantly. You've got happiness, but it seems like it's not what most people actually want.
"I think the example of Isaac Newton is especially instructive: not only did Newton's faith not interfere with his ability to understand reality,"
Actually, his belief that God constantly corrected the motion of the planets to ensure that they'd remain stable over time crippled his ability to recognize that the planets' deviations from predicted orbits could be caused by other, unknown planets.
Other people, who weren't hung up on trying to find visible signs of godly intervention, used those deviations to predict where new planets should be, and then found them with astronomical searching.
Rationality: 1 Religion: 0
Citation?
I'm going to echo Eliezer's request for a citation. As far as I know this is simply wrong. First of all, Newton understood that planets interacted with each other gravitationally. Indeed, taking this into account gave slightly better data than the strict Keplerian model. The only planet in this solar system that was predicted based on apparent gravitational influence was Neptune which was predicted based on deviations in the orbit of Uranus. (In fact, people had seen Neptune before but had not realized what it was. Galileo saw it at least once but didn't realize it was a planet (Edit: See remark below)). Uranus wasn't even recognized as a planet until 1781 (some prior intermittent observations of Uranus had marked it possibly as star) and even then wasn't widely accepted as a planet for a few years. Newton died about 50 years prior. So there's no way he could have had any hope of using anomalies in the orbit of Uranus to detect Neptune. The situation gets worse given that the anomalies weren't even recognized until Bouvard's detailed calculations in the early part of the 19th century revealed the discrepancy between the observed and predicted orbit of Uranus.
I thus find Annoyance's comment very hard to understand. It is very hard to attribute Newton's religion as a reason why he didn't use gravitational anomalies to predict the presence of other planets when no such anomalies were at all severe enough in his lifetime to even justify the claim.
I suspect that the commentator may be confusing this with the issue of the stability of the orbits. That is, the orbits of the planets are an inherently chaotic system. Newton had an intuitive but non-rigorous intuition of this problem and suggested that God might step in from time to time to nudge a planet to prevent it from doing something wildly bad.
There are two good books to read on these and related issues. One is Kuhn's "The Copernican Revolution." Despite Kuhn's general philosophy coloring the presentation it gives an excellent summary of the history of astronomy especially around the switch from the Ptolemaic to Keplerian models. The other book to read is Alan Hirschfeld's "Parallax" which focuses on the problem of stellar parallax from ancient times to the modern era and uses that as a general theme to discuss the history of astronomy.
Edit: Just checked. Apparently the claim that Galileo saw Neptune is not completely clear cut at this point. There are two diagrams which show an object in roughly the right places if those observations were taken at the right time but there's no hard evidence. This doesn't impact the overall point substantially.
The paper "Religious Involvement and US Adult Mortality" [Hummer, Rogers, Nam, Ellison] concludes that there is "a seven-year difference in life expectancy at age 20 between those who never attend and those who attend more than once a week."
Now, I'm skeptical of this claim, but it's still a bit shocking.
-for ease of other readers, the difference is in favour of the religious.
I don't think anyone is making the argument that you do. Plenty of people get through life without basic rationality, and some even do interesting and amazing things. That's not an argument for being religious though - at best, it shows that in certain cases religion doesn't completely cripple your rationality. It's still a risk, however.
As for religious people being happier than atheists, ... In my experience, the average atheist is not at the basic level talked about in this post. Slightly more rational than the average theist I've met (and I tend to more time around the smarter, more rationalizing type of theist), but still not even close to this.
Obviously that's just anecdotal, so I wouldn't bet much on it at all, but it's enough for me to question the validity of applying murky evidence about happiness and religion to a discussion about teaching basic rationality. If anything, I would say that evidence seems to more strongly indicate that we should teach basic rationality, because leaving religion without it might make it more difficult to be happy.