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sbenthall comments on Four things every community should do - Less Wrong
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Do you think that rationalism is becoming a religion, or should become one?
Rationalism is a toolset with which to approach problems, not a belief system. If you had a functioning brain, you would know that.
For people like Nassim Taleb religion is also about following a bunch of habits such as praying and going to church every sunday and not centrally about belief.
That's completely unrelated to my point? How is a habit the same thing as a tool at all? Besides, that's not even remotely a widely-held definition for religion. I never really understood why anybody upvotes your posts, every single one of them is nonsensical to the point of idiocy.
The idea that religion is primarily about belief is very popular among atheists.
If you don't have a habit to regularly use a mental tool that tool is worthless. Having the skill to solves Bayes formula is worthless if you don't have the habit to use it for non-textbook problems.
Exactly. Belief itself is merely an opinion. I may believe the universe was created by a Great Lizard in the sky, but per se that doesn't mean anything; it only means I have a weird belief.
Some beliefs push people to action. If I believe the Great Lizard will punish me unless I eat a potato every day, I will pay attention to eating potatoes, and perhaps I will even vote for subsidies for potato producers. But that still is not a religion.
Religion is the social behavior connected with the belief system. They are mutually dependent. A part of the behavior is that you should study the belief, debate it with other believers, and maybe even try to convince non-believers. A part of the belief is that you should do the behavior, and make other people in your group do it. This is the central loop; and then there are additional behaviors and beliefs growing from it.
So, back to the original question -- even rationality in practice has this loop at its core. To believe rationally, there are some things you need to do, e.g. study, avoid mindkilling, et cetera. And to behave rationally, you have to know what is rational.
Sometimes you are in this loop without being aware of it; without reflecting on it. You were taught rational behavior; you were taught rational beliefs. But there is a risk that something will throw you out of the loop, either by a sudden change, or slowly step by step.
I think that LW rationality is about being in this loop and being aware of it. Not only we happen to be not chronically mindkilled; we also actively try to avoid mindkilling; and we know that we are doing that to keep ourselves in the rationality loop. Not only do we happen to have relatively correct beliefs about physical universe and humans; we also actively try to understand it better; and we know that we are doing that to keep ourselves in the rationality loop. Shortly, it's not just that we happen to be rational at this moment, but we are also trying to remain rational, and preferebly become even more rational.
Similarly to religions, reflective rationality is a self-preserving set of behaviors and beliefs. If you believe that X is good, you probably also believe that preserving X is good, therefore yes, I support attempts to make rationality self-preserving.
And now we are exploring what exactly does it take for a system of behaviors and beliefs to be self-preserving. Both on individual and social levels; not only because we have the goal of "raising the sanity waterline", but also because these levels interact. We are a social species; the more of us will be rational, the easier it will be for each of us. Because we can discuss our beliefs, help each other with our behaviors, solve common problems, learn from others' failures, find a company for projects that require cooperation of multiple people.
...for your goals and the situation and other variables not stated. "Rational" is not a function with only one variable, which is why "Rational X" posts are unwelcome.
In fact, treating "rational" as a one-argument function is precisely what would make rationalism appear to be a religion. If anything, one-place functions are what religion is famous for. ;-) Good(thing), Evil(thing), Christian(thing), un-Christian(thing). When we speak as though there exists Rational(thing), we should not be surprised if people think a new religion is being proposed.
"Religion" means too many different things. To a sociologist, religion is not just a creed, it's a social behavior; it's something people do, not only something they believe. People get together and do various things together, which they explain in various terms — a Zen Buddhist meditation session doesn't look very much like a High Church service, except that both involve a lot of people in a hall together.
Depends on what connotations of relgion you mean. But ensuring ulturally that the scientific process doesn't stop - and provides value by forming a religion-like commuity around it does sound like a viable way.
Reminds me of the approach proposed for warning of radioactive waste dumps for 10000 years:
Not a good analogy. Something that works and reliably gives its users comparative advantage (such as science) shouldn't need a mechanism to keep alive an "essential message". Institutions to teach it, and to keep it clean, yes: but those are universities, not religions.
And universities, once established, also tend to be extremely durable. They just haven't been around for thousands of years yet. But while they have, many more newly-founded religions than universities have died.
Universities are not a good example of the institutions he was talking about. Durability isn't the only important factor. One of the main strengths of religious institutions is their sheer pervasiveness; by inserting itself into every facet of life, religion ensures that its disciples can't stray too far from the path without being reminded of it. Universities, sadly, are not capable of this level of involvement in the lives of communities or individuals.
In this case, rationality should seek to emulate religion by creating institutions and thus a lifestyle that makes its ideas pervasive. For example, if you could attend weekly lectures at your local "rationality church" or have those better at the art of rationality available to guide you the way priests guide Christians, becoming and staying a rationalist would be much easier and thus more accessible to the populace. This already sort of happens through the internet and meetups, but what religion has is a proven formula that builds communities around ideas, and we can definitely learn from it.
That's called totalitarianism, by the way. Not many people consider it to be a good thing.
Not necessarily. It's totalitarianism if said institutions do the ensuring through force, and without the consent of the disciples. However, by choosing to belong to a religious community, people choose to have institutions and members of the community remind them of the religious values.
The mark of totalitarianism is not force, but rather complete control over all aspects of life.
"He loved Big Brother".
I made no mention of control. Simply being present in all aspects of life is not the same as having control over all aspects of life. For example, if you live in a western society it's extremely probable that marketing and advertising are present in many aspects of your life, but I don't think either of us would say that the simple fact of their presence gives the marketers control over those aspects of your life.
Well, yes, but I think that in practice living within a religious community imposes a lot of pressure to conform to the religious norms. Some of that pressure is social (from not being invited to the right cocktail parties to outright shunning) and some can be direct and violent. I recall that the haredim are not above throwing stones at cars on a Saturday...
I agree that this is the case in some religious communities, and that this is not necessarily the direction a rationalist community should go. (On the other hand, I have a hard time agreeing with the proposition that social pressure in favor of rationality is a bad thing, but I have yet to reach a definite conclusion on the subject.) However, I happen to be familiar with several religious communities where direct and violent pressure to conform is not the case, and it is those communities I wish to emulate.
I'm not sure that science 'itself' (i.e. without cultural aspects shared with religion) "reliably gives its users comparative advantage". The advantage for the individual is quite small - if not negative in some cases. It is only by the society embracing science that it gains the society at large a large advantage.
Now that we have science we individuals may find that 'doing' science is to our individual disadvatage and abstain from it (freerider-wise).
If on the other hand you see science as a set of cultural rules and customs - and your university example points in that direction - then science already has lots in common with religion. Why not build on that?
I'm not talking about benefits to individuals as much as benefits to companies and societies. I believe that of two otherwise very similar companies and societies, if one does R&D and the other doesn't, the one that does will very reliably outcompete the other in the long term.
I'm all for developing non-superstitious alternatives to religion, and I do think community-building is a vital part of that. But to be inside that reference class must give rise to many associations, not all of which are fortunate. In particular, it renders the "creed" a matter of subjective belief and feeling. I wouldn't want the Sequences to be seen that way. The creed your imagined community should center around would have to be something compatible with them, yet distinct from them. Humanism is one of the more obvious possibilities.
Free-riding can happen among societies too. It is quite possible that a society doing little R&D itself but applying R&D results from other societies outcompetes those. I hear this is happening in the form that some asian countries learn from the west without investing as much.
Freerider societies actually outcompeting innovators? Name three.
I wouldn't call it freerider society but rather copy-cat societies but...
Japan did this at the end of the 19th century:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2781050?uid=3737864&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104386363121
And China did this until recently
http://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/processors/arm-days-of-china-copying-western-tech-are-ending-1247241
I guess quite a few asian satellites e.g. Taiwan did/do this too.
I don't know if those examples show 'outcompeting'. The overall picture of various countries doesn't show late growers exceeding the absolute wealth of early growers (maybe one would predict this based on cultural/human-capital/institution theories?).
As far as Western industrialization went, the big players in roughly chronological order were the UK, Netherlands, France, USA, & Austria/Germany. It seems fair to call them the 'innovators', and you seem to have only East Asian countries in mind, so I'll look at just China/Taiwan/Korea (South, but not North)/Japan/Hong Kong (which I think is all of them) as 'imitators'.
Consider their wealth (GDP PPP per capita); in descending order it goes: United States (10), Hong Kong (10), Netherlands/Belgium (13/24), Austria/Germany (16/17), Taiwan (22), France (26), Japan (27), UK (28), South Korea (30), and 60 places way down the list is China (89).
How badly are they outcompeted? Well, South Korea & China beat none of them, Japan just barely edges out the UK (which we might attribute to socialist decay), Taiwan is past France & the UK but is pretty small, and Hong Kong is even more exceptional (tiny & UK-founded). In general, it seems to be better to be an 'innovator' than a (successful) 'imitator'.
If I drop Hong Kong as too tiny and exceptional, the permutations seem to be going in the direction of innovation being better too:
At least, if the East Asians are 'outcompeting', it doesn't look like it's clearly happened yet.
I find it a very sensible move to go for numbers here, esp. GDP/capita, but I'm not sure that captures the outcompeting/freeriding that was meant.
If you're talking about copycats reducing the distance they lag behind innovators, at a reduced cost relative to what the innovators invested into building that distance, those are good examples.
For outcompeting, no.
It's hard to do country comparisons because of all the confounders. But for particular industries, it's easy to find examples.
The Japanese automobile industry clearly outcompeted the US one during the late 80s and the 90s, for example. Or look at where all the semiconductors are produced.
This is not to say that being a copycat is better than being an innovator -- just that the first-mover advantage sometimes is significant and sometimes is not.
Reducing the distance they lag behind by copy-catting is outcompeting - in the relative sense. Otherwise they wouldn't catch up but fall further behind. That they didn't start out at the same level could be considered more historical chance than missing ability.