[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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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Striving to Accept, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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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?

What could you teach people without ever explicitly mentioning religion, that would raise their general epistemic waterline to the point that religion went underwater?

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. - 1 Thessalonians 5:21.

Confound not truth with falsehood, nor knowingly conceal the truth. - Quran 2:42.

This one seemed sketchy to me, until I remembered that the older meaning of "prove" was not to establish irrefutably, but to put to the test. Taken in that light, it makes a lot more sense.

1[anonymous]13y

Except "truth" in these memeplexes is regularly redefined to mean "the beliefs of our religion, which are 'proved' by the existence of our holy books."