[SEQ RERUN] Raising the Sanity Waterline

MinibearRex

Today's post, Raising the Sanity Waterline was originally published on 12 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Behind every particular failure of social rationality is a larger and more general failure of social rationality; even if all religious content were deleted tomorrow from all human minds, the larger failures that permit religion would still be present. Religion may serve the function of an asphyxiated canary in a coal mine - getting rid of the canary doesn't get rid of the gas. Even a complete social victory for atheism would only be the beginning of the real work of rationalists. What could you teach people without ever explicitly mentioning religion, that would raise their general epistemic waterline to the point that religion went underwater?

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Today's post, Raising the Sanity Waterline was originally published on 12 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Behind every particular failure of social rationality is a larger and more general failure of social rationality; even if all religious content were deleted tomorrow from all human minds, the larger failures that permit religion would still be present. Religion may serve the function of an asphyxiated canary in a coal mine - getting rid of the canary doesn't get rid of the gas. Even a complete social victory for atheism would only be the beginning of the real work of rationalists. What could you teach people without ever explicitly mentioning religion, that would raise their general epistemic waterline to the point that religion went underwater?

It feels a bit depressing that it feels like there hasn't been much progress toward this goal in four years.

Of course, it only feels that way, and it only feels that way because I'm a human and the vast majority of my ancestors would consider four years to be a significant chunk of their expected lifespan.

And yet.

You seem to suggest that the sanity waterline is increasing very slowly. Do you have any evidence for that? My null hypothesis would be that during the last four years the world remained the same on average, with some local increases in sanity and some local decreases. Is there an improvement which is more than a noise, on a society scale?

I am not even sure how to measure the sanity waterline. There are some obvious stupidities, having less of them would be an improvement. But if we focus on specific stupidities without really fixing what caused them, peop... (read more)

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