Yes, theism is really a uniquely awful example.
Oversimplifying a little, let's divide the factors that lead to memetic success into two classes: those based on corresponding to evidence, and those detached from evidence. If we imagine a two-dimensional scattergram of memes rated against these two criteria, we can define a frontier of maximum success, along which any idea can only gain in one criterion by losing on the other.
Religion is what you get when you push totally for non-evidential memetic success. All ties to reality are essentially cut. As a result, all the other dials can be pushed up to 11. God is not just wise, nice, and powerful - he is all knowing, omnibenificent, and omnipotent. Heaven and Hell are not just pleasant and unpleasant places you can spend a long time in - they are the very best possible and the very worst possible experiences, and for all eternity. And so on; because all of these things happen "offstage", there's no contradictory evidence when you turn them up, so of course that's where they're going to end up.
This freedom is theism's defining characteristic. Even the most stupid pseudoscience is to some extent about "evidence": peo...
No - I think this comment just makes my earlier point, that we have such a negative impression of religion because we categorize anything irrational as "religion".
Consider Scientology. I think we can agree it's a religion. But it doesn't presuppose a spiritual realm which can cause effects in the natural world and yet not be investigated. It doesn't disclaim evidential reasoning; it actually relies on evidential reasoning. Just not very good evidential reasoning, which is designed primarily to have good stagecraft.
Consider Hinduism. It doesn't have much dogma. It isn't about making claims about the world the way Christianity or Islam is. It's more like a catalog of Jungian archetypes and models for thinking about the world. A Hindu "God" isn't a cause of events in the world, it's more like a manifestation of patterns of events.
Consider Buddhism. It doesn't have any "offstage" place for events that impact our world.
Consider animism. It also is very brief on dogma. It's very evidential. The volcano erupted; therefore, the volcano god is angry.
Consider Unitarianism. Brief on dogma. It's mainly about community.
So why do we call these things religions? Because "religion", the way most non-LW people (can we call them MW people?) use it, has to do with providing explanations, perspectives, guidelines, and community.
The 'war on drugs' is the obvious example that sprang to mind and has already been mentioned. It has cropped up a number of times without objection.
I suspect that one of the reasons theism has 'special status' is that it requires little domain specific knowledge to recognize its irrationality. Basic scientific and historical knowledge and experience of the world are enough to throw up serious doubts for anyone who starts down the path of rationality. Other examples that spring to mind require a little more specialist knowledge.
An example: there is some overlap between the 'economist blogger' community and the OB readership. Economics bloggers have on occasion discussed the fact that there are certain uncontroversial truths accepted within economics that are not uncontroversial amongst non-economists. Examples are the benefits of free trade over protectionism, the ineffectiveness of price controls, the general efficiency benefits of markets and the net benefits of relatively open immigration policies. I had to learn a bit about economics and be presented with the results of studies to be fully persuaded by some of these arguments - unlike atheism it was not obvious to me from my dir...
Anyone got any other examples of things just about everyone here has seen the folly of, even though they're widespread among otherwise-smart people
The idiocy of the drug war tends to be my own favourite example.
The so-called terrorism threat? I did a count the other day on how many civil liberties had been removed by the terrorists vs those removed by the government.
Nationalism in general?
I guess you'd claim that things like forwarding chain letters, belief in homoeopathy or healing crystals or orgone guns, the 'nature is good' fallacy and whatnot aren't common enough.
I think that marijuana legalization in particular can be used as an example we all agree about. (Does anyone reading this actually disagree about that? Leave a comment if so.)
"Modern man is so committed to empirical knowledge, that he sets the standard for evidence higher than either side in his disputes can attain, thus suffering his disputes to be settled by philosophical arguments as to which party must be crushed under the burden of proof."
Thank you, that's the reply I was looking for. We know of a lot of harm caused by marijuana criminalization and very little harm caused by marijuana. Controlled experiments would be very hard to do. In such a state of evidence the sum is unambiguous: revoke the law.
Do we have any data supporting marijuana criminalization? It looks like a simple mistake that ought to be rewound. That summation of the current evidence seems unambiguous, even if we don't know the actual effects of decriminalizing down to the last decimal place - especially considering that decriminalization is in principle reversible after gathering more information.
Marijuana should be freely obtainable from licensed merchants. It would probably be taxed at a high rate, and there should be laws against operating machinery while under its influence. There would also probably be some licensing mechanism to guarantee its purity.
If possible, all individuals currently in prison for marijuana-related offenses should immediately be released.
The resulting savings in law enforcement resources and prison space, and the accompanying increase in tax revenue would be tremendous. In addition, patients in extreme pain would be able to manage that pain at minimal expense using plants which are easy to cultivate, rather than paying exorbitant amounts to pharmaceuticals.
Biologists would be free to research the effects of THC on the human body, which they are currently forbidden from doing. There have been some indications that THC my have tumor-destroying properties -- not nearly strong enough that I should immediately recommend cancer patients start lighting up as often as possible, but certainly strong enough that if not for the legal issues, follow-up studies would have been performed by now.
That is what I, at least, mean by "marijuana legalization". From my epistemic vantage-point it is an easy win and it is astounding that our government continues to get it so blatantly wrong.
As long as tobacco is legal, anything less harmful should also be legal. (This is more of an argument in favor of banning tobacco than legalizing other substances, though.)
I suspect that for large numbers of politicians -- probably the maqjority -- the question of whether a proposition is true doesn't really interest them all that much. They are more interested in whether a proposition will win or lose them votes. If they think it'll lose votes, they won't agree with it, and most lack the intellectual curiousity to care whether it is true.
For what it's worth, I've recently started reading this site and am an Orthodox Jew. I have no particular plans to stop reading the site for the time being, because it's often rather interesting.
It may be worth considering that while rationalists may feel they don't need religion, almost all religious people would acknowledge the need for rationality of some kind. If rationality is about achieving your goals as effectively as possible (as some here think), then does it suddenly not work if your goals are "obey the Bible"? No -- your actions will be different from someone with different goals (utilitarianism, etc.), but most of the thought-process is the same.
Suppose you have an extremely high prior probability for God sending doubters to Hell, for whatever reason. Presumably the utility of going to Hell is very, very low. Then, as a rational Bayesian, you should avoid any evidence that would tend to cause you to doubt God, shouldn't you? I certainly don't know much of Bayesian probability, but I can't see any flaw in that logic.
The question seems rather similar to that of Omega. The winners are those who can convince themselves, by any means, that a particular beli...
In the Middle Ages, I'm not sure atheism would be too much more rational than theism, in any sense. To the average European in the year 1000, being an atheist would probably be about as rational as being a heliocentrist, i.e., not at all. We know all the arguments in favor of atheism and heliocentrism, but they didn't. No amount of rationalism is going to let you judge things based on evidence you don't know about.
The average person back then could probably have given you plenty of evidence for God's existence. The evidence would be weak by modern standards, but not by medieval standards. No one was conducting scientific studies then: almost any assertion not directly checkable was supported by pretty weak evidence. Theism might make few predictions and test them rarely, but the same was true of all the alternatives. On the other hand, theism at least had coherent and consistent answers to a slew of basic questions like "How did life arise?", which atheism did not.
So I think the answer is that the only rational principle that would have allowed you to deconvert in medieval times would be "single-handedly reconstructing modern science".
Here's an obvious one: investing in actively managed mutual funds when one could invest in index funds instead. (Investing in index funds is not always an option - if your organization's pension plan hires an idiot money manager, what can the average worker do about it?)
Anyone got any other examples of things just about everyone here has seen the folly of, even though they're widespread among otherwise-smart people?
Naïve free will, and moral realism. Related to religion, but, I think, distinct.
In the realm of politics or economics, for instance, surely there ought to be some.
An obvious hypothesis: a substantial number of people on LW hold ideas about politics or economics that a substantial number of other people on LW think are roughly as rational as theism, we're at least implicitly aware of this, and we avoid the topic because we think that our rationality is too weak to get past the "mind killer" effect at this point.
For instance: I suspect that most of economics is total bunk and think that libertarian political positions are tragically naive. There's certainly a chance that I'm wrong, but I don't expect that starting a debate over either topic on LW would produce useful results.
Theism is safe because it's fairly obviously irrational, requires little specialized knowledge to see past, and we know we already mostly agree on it.
I don't think this is at all true that theism is a uniquely awful example.
What about Ayn Rand's Objectivism? I just ctrl-f'd for that on this page and I'm AMAZED to report that no one else seems to have mentioned this obvious example yet.
Things like dualism are right out, but also non-mystical things like homeopathy.
Seems to me there are lots of simply referencable ideas or schools or thought that rationality cleans up.
Secondly, though, I think that rationality often leads reliably to positions that are just a bit less easy to squirt out in a name or phrase like that. Take... free trade, for instance.
The popular common positions are to argue for or against it (mind-killing politics), but I'd think a person using rationality should reliably come to the more nuanced position that free trade is mathematically proven to be the most optimal, but there are problems in the details of switching to it that need to be addressed (ie, what happens when the safety standards between two areas are different? And while yes, everyone will be better off on average afterwards, what about those people who will be negatively affected by the transition? Do we want some policy for helping them through or...
Someone on OB (Michael Vassar?) once said that religion is the main reason they know not to be a majoritarian, or something to that effect.
There are other examples of near society-wide apparent rationality failures that seem obvious to many here -- and sure enough, they receive a significant amount of discussion. I'm thinking in particular of cryonics/transhumanism, as well as certain Unnamed Things.
I don't think we should be squeamish about using theism as an example where it applies. This is, after all, an advanced rationality forum -- one expects folks...
This is, after all, an advanced rationality forum -- one expects folks here to either be well beyond giving serious consideration to the claims of religion, or at the very least interested enough in epistemology to be able to stomach critiques of theism.
I'm glad to know that we are so much more advanced at being Bayesian rationalists than silly folks like Robert Aumann or, uh, the Reverend Thomas Bayes.
Yes, I'm being snide, but this sounds a bit too self-congratulating. Are we really in a position to be all but saying "these specific beliefs are a prerequisite for posting"?
Just reminding everyone of one more sad thing - every good cause to rally people under generally needs an enemy. And if there isnt one, it usually develops or is found. People somehow just want to be against things rather than for them..
Also, atheism seems to be one of the few things most of us here have in common so Matt Newports post hits a nail there. We have a tradition of bashing theism. Traditions go a long way towards cementing a sense of community, so they do have a positive side. But the fact is that once a tradition has developed, people who break it are usually viewed as outsiders in some sense so it makes sense for people to stick to the traditons.
In my (admittedly not immense) experience, intelligent theists who commit to rationality (and stay theists indefinitely) either engage in some heavy-duty partitioning of their beliefs - that is, they commit only partially to rationality, and consider part of their belief network exempt - or cover the gaps in their communicable rationality with incommunicable religious experience. In the first case, it's a clear case of not being wholly rational; if we can talk about those people as a convenient, accessible example of not-wholly-rational individuals with a...
Maybe "religion" is like "schizophrenia". We don't know what schizophrenia really is, so we tend to call anything that makes someone really crazy "schizophrenia".
Religion is not a well-defined category. There are things in it that don't have much in common with other things in the category (Buddhism), and things not in it that have a lot in common with other things in it (Marxism, other 'isms', political affiliations)
There are so many...
The obvious ones:
• Any sort of pseudoscience (homeopathy, astrology)
• Conspiracy theories (9/11, moon landing)
• Expensive magic pills that make you slim
• Racism, fascism
Less obvious, subtle:
• "You can't judge other people's opinions"
• Any inadequate or naive view on free will (as far as I can see, the amount of naive free willers is far bigger than that of theists)
• Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (maybe not anymore?)
Probably still controversial or hard to avoid even with good epistemic hygiene:
• Rejection of cryonics
• Tabooing human sexuality
So. Is theism really a uniquely awful example?
It is for Christianity and Islam, and their reliance on magic books taken as dogmatic truth. Maybe others could speak to Islam, but the major strains of Christianity specifically exalt Faith as superior to Reason for the important questions in life.They're not just wrong on the facts, their metawrong on the best means to obtain facts, and ideologically committed to that mistake. That makes them uniquely awful.
Racism and sexism are pretty good candidates as well. Prejudice in general would be even more inclusive; one could even consider religion to be a special case of prejudice against reality.
Many smart people are more likely to believe a fact to be true if they want the fact to be true. This is something we should all see the folly of.
There are so many...
The obvious ones:
Less obvious, subtle:
Probably still controversial or hard to avoid even with good epistemic hygiene:
I was going for a bit of this post's point in my post. I actually can think of a good example in economics that I've applied specific principles from OB to argue against, but I'm wary about setting off people's political minds, so I prefer not to bring it up.
I'd suggest objective morality, essentialism, and various folk psychology ideas like the "self" and "freedom." Perhaps more controversially, "the sanctity of life."
No doubt I'll be voted down for this.
But I (for one) think theism can be a rational position, and the apparent consensus here is just an example of your group-think.
Likewise with the drug-war. I imagine legalizing marijuana is a libertarian position, not necessarily held by a rationalist.
When an LW contributor is in need of an example of something that (1) is plainly, uncontroversially (here on LW, at least) very wrong but (2) an otherwise reasonable person might get lured into believing by dint of inadequate epistemic hygiene, there seems to be only one example that everyone reaches for: belief in God. (Of course there are different sorts of god-belief, but I don't think that makes it count as more than one example.) Eliezer is particularly fond of this trope, but he's not alone.
How odd that there should be exactly one example. How convenient that there is one at all! How strange that there isn't more than one!
In the population at large (even the smarter parts of it) god-belief is sufficiently widespread that using it as a canonical example of irrationality would run the risk of annoying enough of your audience to be counterproductive. Not here, apparently. Perhaps we-here-on-LW are just better reasoners than everyone else ... but then, again, isn't it strange that there aren't a bunch of other popular beliefs that we've all seen through? In the realm of politics or economics, for instance, surely there ought to be some.
Also: it doesn't seem to me that I'm that a much better thinker than I was a few years ago when (alas) I was a theist; nor does it seem to me that everyone on LW is substantially better at thinking than I am; which makes it hard for me to believe that there's a certain level of rationality that almost everyone here has attained, and that makes theism vanishingly rare.
I offer the following uncomfortable conjecture: We all want to find (and advertise) things that our superior rationality has freed us from, or kept us free from. (Because the idea that Rationality Just Isn't That Great is disagreeable when one has invested time and/or effort and/or identity in rationality, and because we want to look impressive.) We observe our own atheism, and that everyone else here seems to be an atheist too, and not unnaturally we conclude that we've found such a thing. But in fact (I conjecture) LW is so full of atheists not only because atheism is more rational than theism (note for the avoidance of doubt: yes, I agree that atheism is more rational than theism, at least for people in our epistemic situation) but also because
Does any of this matter? I think it might, because
So. Is theism really a uniquely awful example? If so, then surely there must be insights aplenty to be had from seeing what makes it so unique. If not, though ... Anyone got any other examples of things just about everyone here has seen the folly of, even though they're widespread among otherwise-smart people? And, if not, what shall we do about it?