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MichaelVassar comments on Church vs. Taskforce - Less Wrong
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One possibility is that churches, by being hypothetically obligatory to all, produce communities with approximate gender balance. By emphasizing inclusiveness they create a place for those who display sub-typical signs of selective fitness, people who hunter-gatherer instincts promote rejecting to avoid social contamination. With conformity they encourage such people not to drag the group down overly much. All of these features seem unlikely to form in natural communities if they are pursued explicitly. By default people join communities that appealed to their gender, communities that signaled status through membership or both. Most non-religious communities with ideals of inclusiveness also emphasize tolerance and individuality, leading to the less severe physical equivalent of trolls.
The closest thing that I have found to a secular church really is probably a gym. Far better than church in most respects, but not up to the standard this post seems to aspire to.
Michael: "The closest thing that I have found to a secular church really is probably a gym."
Perhaps in the short run we could just use the gym directly, or analogs. Aristotle's Peripatetic school and other notable thinkers who walked suggests that having people walking while talking, thinking, and socializing is worth some experimentation. This could be done by walking outside or on parallel exercise machines in a gym (would be informative which worked better to tease out what it is about walking that improves thinking, assuming the hypothesized causality is true). Michael, I realize you are effectively already doing this.
-Rob Zahra
One obvious implication of this is that we should be making our homes in warmer climates. Even if you, personally, have high resistance to foul weather, it's going to be tougher to get people to walk and converse with you year-round in Boston than it would be in Miami.
This conflicts with the observation that, at least in modern times, the colder parts of the world have tended to produce the better thinkers. I'm not sure it would be smart to move from Cambridge to South Beach in hopes of leading a more intellectually fruitful life...
Yes, it's been noted (I don't have the citation handy) that internet startups, for instance, work better in places with warmer climates, presumably for this reason (though Boston seems to be a notable counterexample).
I would take the Bay Area to be a counterexample to this.
The Caribbean, India, Brazil, Mali, Saudi Arabia. These places are hot, not the Bay Area.
In any case. From a somewhat global experience: Colder-> More productivity and Intelligence I suppose this happens because: Warm -> More places to go -> more gatherings -> More friends and mates -> More time spent on humour, social display, human contact, warmness, swimming etc... -> more groups -> Lower maximal threshold of intelligence for a conversation (Conversation with too much inferential distance regarding almost any topic or moral sense between Alpha and Omega, thus requiring "Friends series" level of superficial-ness to work) -> Less need to commit brains to intelligence of non-humour non-pragmatic-money-work kind
If you have great and funny friends by the swimming pool, and your status decreases every time your intelligence triggers, why exactly will you read Principia Mathematica?
There's been some speculation that one reason warmer areas have been less productive is that they were more conducive to having parasites around which reduced the average intelligence of the population (which could have also longer-lasting impact on culture and values after the parasites have been eradticated). Hookworm and Guinea worm seem to be the most commonly mentioned examples of this. The good news is that if this is correct then the ongoing projects to eradicate parasites should help raise the general intelligence of the population.
One thing to keep in mind here is that what matters most for people being really smart is the size of the far end of the tail of the distribution (since that's where the smart people who accomplish things lie). So a small shift in the bell curve can result in a large shift in the relative fraction of the population that is far right enough in the distribution.
Well, what's the Internet for if not this? Wear a headset and chat to interesting people while using an exercise machine...
Interesting. I also combine walking and thinking -- even in the office (thankfully, we have a 'thinking corridor'). My ideal daily dose is about 7 kilometers (4.34 miles), but unfortunately it's difficult to find a good thinking route in a city -- too much cars, too few forests.
I regularly combine thinking and walking as well. I try to walk outside for at least a half hour daily, preferably along an unfamiliar path or in a new pattern. I find that this is a good time to integrate new information via insights. This could be because my mind is at ease, and the novel sequence of environmental stimuli may be conducive to avoiding cached thoughts.
Hmm. Just realized that what casually appear to me to be the most popular gym chains, the YMCA and its Jewish imitator the JCC, and the most popular gym sport, yoga, all have nominally religious origins (though I'm not sure any meaning for "religious" that includes Christianity and Hinduism is a natural kind).
The closest thing to a secular church that I have ever encountered are Light Opera Societies. In the UK lots of towns above a certain (quite small) size have one.
They pursue harmless but uplifting goals. The goals are challenging, but achievable. Participants must follow the instructions of a group leader precisely. Participants must learn to trust other group members. Performing in front of others is a fairly intense social experience. Once you have signed up, attendance every week is almost mandatory for a significant period of time.
EDIT: for those not into this kind of thing, Light Opera means Gilbert and Sullivan, or Singing in the Rain.