I'm fully aware that there's more to nautical charts than the water's surface, and I used the term 'satellite photography' somewhat broadly. More of the deep ocean has been mapped by sensors in polar orbits, which can stay on-station indefinitely and cover the entire globe without regard for local obstacles, than ever was (or likely would have been) by surface craft and submarines.

I̶t̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶e̶a̶r̶s̶ ̶m̶o̶s̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶u̶r̶c̶h̶,̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶a̶r̶e̶n̶t̶l̶y̶.̶ ̶W̶o̶w̶.̶

Edit -- missionary.lds.org is latter day saints. One of their quotes was by a Jehovah's Witness, so I thought this was a guide for Jehovah's Witnesses. If the question is "Does it work for the specific individuals in the Mormon Church?" the answer is yes.

As far as achieving "communication and organization", probably both?

The authors provide more arguments than ones about telomeres. Further, they charge that he's misrepresenting evidence systematically, not just making specific proposals that turn out to be wrong. I agree giving prizes for increasing the lifespan of mice is a good idea, but that's not a very strong reason to support him. Do you have examples of novel scientific ideas he's had that have turned out to be useful?

which sounds problematic as one of its aims is to define pseudoscience.

?

They explicitly say that there is no rigid definition distinguishing pseudoscience from legitimate science. They claim that in order to distinguish between them it's necessary to point at specific instances of misleading behaviors, and they enumerate these behaviors at the very beginning of the paper.

Maybe rationalization is even neccessary for dealing rationally with real life (the word kind of gives it away).

Only in the sense that lying can be called "truthization".

But it's not obvious that they were more egalitarian when it comes to political power or ability to do violence.

When the most powerful weapon is a mounted knight in full plate mail, its easy for a small minority to dominate. When the most powerful weapon is the pointed stick...

As does Chesterton, less explicitly:

Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused. I know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defence of the indefensible.

and at length.

I get the impression that he (thankfully!) eased off on that particular template as time went on.

So now that you've made your argument more explicit, I largely agree, but let me defend Chesterton (and maybe to some extent Azathoth123) just a little. Specifically, I'll argue (1) that his metaphor is a bit more coherent than you give it credit for, (2) that he isn't claiming anything as silly as that the majority is always wrong, and (3) that if he's understood right then what he says isn't as hard to reconcile with the neoreactionaries' claims as you suggest. But I agree (4) that he isn't making any very interesting factual statement, (5) that it doesn't offer all that much support for neoreaction, and (6) that he's engaging in rhetoric rather than anything much like reasoned argument.

Chesterton's argument, so far as there is one, seems to go like this. "Everyone thought traditional Christianity was dying or dead, washed away by a great stream of enlightenment and skepticism and liberalism. Some of its parts might stay in place for a while before eventually being eroded away, but the ultimate outcome seemed in little doubt. But now we see something -- let's call it neocatholicism -- not merely hanging on as the tide rushes past but actually heading in the opposite direction, getting more traditional over time rather than less. This shows that neocatholicism, and by extension traditional Christianity generally, is still alive and kicking. Let us put this in the context of these other times I've described, when Christianity appeared to be dead or dying but then regained ascendancy; this is just another example of the same phenomenon, even though we haven't yet quite reached the bit where the Church triumphs again."

So Chesterton is saying that his Great Thingy is enduring where what presently looks like a great all-consuming stream is in fact ephemeral; give it another century or so, he says, and the Church will still be there stronger than ever while the stream of skeptical enlightenment dwindles and is eventually forgotten. So I don't see the difference you do with the neoreactionaries' view of their model of society.

I don't think the claim here is that the majority is always wrong. Nor that "only a living thing can go against the stream" proved Christianity right or proves neoreaction right. I think it's intended to be something less ambitious: the emergence in Chesterton's time of a Catholic reaction showed (according to Chesterton) that Catholic Christianity was a still-somewhat-vigorous living thing and shouldn't be written off, and the emergence of neoreaction in our time shows (according to Azathoth123, if I'm interpreting him right) that a reactionary view of society is a still-somewhat-vigorous living thing and shouldn't be written off.

(So the actual alleged truth being asserted would be something like this: "Something that goes against the current of popular opinion, not merely holding on but pushing in the opposite direction, must have some vigour to it, and it may turn out to win in the end." Which, like the literal statement about floating bodies, is probably true but not very interesting.)

To support his stronger thesis that traditional Catholic Christianity is (not merely not quite dead yet, but) everlasting and always ultimately triumphant, Chesterton appeals to a bigger historical context in which (so he says) it has repeatedly seemed dead but returned greater and more terrible than ever before. I'm not sure whether the neoreactionaries make a similar claim.

There's still very little here in the way of actual argument, but that's how Chesterton rolls. Some clever and counterintuitive ideas, a paradoxical way of presenting them, lots of rhetorical fireworks and ingenious metaphors, and his work is done. If you get as far as thinking carefully about whether what he says is actually correct then his verbal pyrotechnics obviously weren't impressive enough.

which makes progressivism the stream itself, rather than a dead thing floating down some other stream.

Well progressivism self-identifies as "being on the right side of history".

It's not only a matter of meet.

It's a matter of those people strongly self identifying as atheist will other people don't care that much about the question.

Right.

And, in particular, I think that when someone says "atheism is a religion" they're (almost?) always saying it for rhetorical effect rather than as a carefully considered statement they'd be prepared to explain the exact meaning of and give justification for. Which means, I think, that it's reasonable to respond in a way optimized for rhetorical effect (e.g., with the sort of comparison HalMorris posted upthread -- I don't really think it's a "rationality quote", but I think it's a perfectly good response to "atheism is just another religion").

If the person who said "atheism is a religion" then follows up with something more carefully considered that isn't refuted by likening atheism to turning the TV off, or being bald, or not playing any notes on the piano, or whatever, that's a good outcome: you've got something actually worth discussing. If they just drop the subject, that's a different kind of good outcome: a silly rhetorical trick has been neutralized by a less silly rhetorical trick. (Less silly because I think the response is more defensible than the original provocation.)

Even religious people have a concept of "bad religion" -- the religion of their enemies. What they worship is not some abstract concept of religion in general, but one specific religion. Other specific religions are wrong.

Saying "atheism is a religion" is reducing a new enemy to a subtype of the old enemy they already have millenia of experience fighting against. It's not suggesting that atheism is equivalent to e.g. Christianity (something high status), but rather that it is equivalent to Baal worship (something low status).

In the real world I doubt that's true.

That's why I remarked that all universal generalizations are wrong. I bet there are, here and there, a few people whose attitude to Richard Dawkins is similar to a typical Roman Catholic's attitude to the pope. But I'm pretty sure they're rare. "Atheism has a rare failure mode where X happens" is not at all the same proposition as "In atheism, X happens".

an example of practice that's a bit ritualistic.

Oh yes, you reminded me of a category of unreasonable response I failed to mock in my original comment, so let me go ahead and mock it now.

"But atheists admire the writings of people like Russell and Ingersoll, which is like having sacred scriptures! And some of them do significance tests or always check the same things when they get into the car, which is like having rituals! And to be an atheist you have to not believe in a god, which is like having a body of doctrine you have to agree with! And many atheists expect there to be super-advanced aliens, or superintelligent AIs, now or in the future, and that's like believing in supernatural superior beings! Etc., etc., etc.!" Nope. Those similarities are vague enough that if you're willing to accept that sort of thing then everything "is a religion". Software development is a religion: the scriptures are things like Kernighan & Ritchie or Knuth; the sacred places are maybe the Googleplex and (in memory only, now) Bell Labs; there are rituals like checking that all your tests pass before committing code to the version control repository; etc. Business is a religion: the prophets are famously effective businesspeople like Carnegie and Rockefeller in the past or Jobs and Elon Musk more recently; the system of ethics is the principle of always maximizing profits; the authority figures are CEOs; etc. Playing chess is a religion; the scriptures are opening manuals and books of famous games; there are lots of rituals like saying "j'adoube" before touching a piece you aren't moving, and shaking hands with your opponent at the start or end of the game; the rules of chess somewhat resemble an ethical code and a body of doctrine; etc. I could go on for hours but I hope you're bored already.

If a standard of comparison is broad enough to say that every institution or practice is "like a religion", then the fact that it says atheism is like a religion is completely uninteresting.

motte-and-bailey

I'd agree if atheists were, when not being challenged by theists, busily engaged in worshipping the shade of Christopher Hitchens, or insisting that everyone has to read "The God Delusion" once a year, or otherwise behaving in ways that would plausibly count as religious. But I don't see that; I genuinely think such things are really rare. There may be a bailey corresponding to the motte of just-disbelieving-in-gods (I put it that way because I do think the common claim that atheism means only not positively believing in any particular god has a whiff of motte-and-bailey about it, but that's not something I've been arguing for or assuming) but if there is I don't think it has anything to do with atheism being religion-like. (Things that might go in the bailey: the idea that religion is harmful as well as merely factually incorrect on the question of gods; admiration for science and maybe some preference for treating all questions in a broadly scientific manner; secularism.)

Is it? My impression is that most people would consider utilitarianism to be a moral code, even if they thought it a terrible one.

Ah. Great PR there, Dawkins.

Silence can be part of a piece of music (and that's been obvious since long before Cage; that's not the point he was making) but that doesn't mean silence is a musical chord.

Similarly, atheism is an opinion on a question relevant to religion but it isn't a religion.

A is probabilistically true (i.e., in most cases) iff the majority of people are idiots)

Given that people aren't really good idiot oracles, and in particular that if you care about the respect other show you in general then on some level you will also often be bothered by disrespect from idiots, I think A can very well be true even if most people aren't idiots.

at least for values of "real" that don't bake in the conclusion

That was the impression I had. Yes, Rand is making the normative claim that 'accidental' success is not 'real,' and that 'happiness' acquired in ways other than 'honest use of your intelligence' is not 'real,' but those seem like fine normative claims to me.

Primarily, by pretending that a "usually" is an "always". "Real success is never accidental" is, empirically, definitely false. "Real success is almost never accidental" would be the less strong, but more correct, version.

That would depend on what you mean by success now wouldn't it? If you believe people who take calculated risks and get unlucky aren't successful, then perhaps you're right. But you can't claim you can make a statement more correct by assuming you know what every word means. Parsing ambiguity is part of rationality. (Though my downvotes would indicate it's not...)

Lack of diversity may be a problem because then you've got a lower chance of getting the right answer somewhere in there.

That, too, but there are other issues as well -- e.g. risk management through diversification.

Otherwise, what could be thought about that doesn't have a correct answer?

Is she pretty?

Should I be a vegetarian?

What's the best way of tackling that problem?

It's an example of someone speaking out against genocide. The effort ultimately failed, but engaging in political advocacy against mass murder could reasonably be considered efficient altruism?

Forgive my fulfilling of Godwin's Law, but if a Nazi leader repeatedly told Hitler "Don't kill the Jews because struggling against them in the economic marketplace will make Germans stronger" would you consider this leader a "good guy"?

Why is Publius Scipio Nasica a "good guy"? His opposition to Carthage's destruction was based on his idea that without a strong external enemy Rome will descend into decadence.

Well, it did.

While I agree with the overall sentiment, I think it's important not to overdo this approach. Let me explain.

Consider the situation where you have a stochastic process which generates values -- for example, you're drawing random values from a certain distribution. So you draw a number and let's say it is 17.

On the one hand you did draw 17 -- that number is "real" and the rest of the distribution which didn't get realized is only "imaginary". You should care about that 17 and not about what did not happen.

On the other hand, if we're interested not just in a single sample, but in the whole process and the distribution underlying it, that number 17 is almost irrelevant. We want to understand the entire distribution and that involves parts which did not get realized but had potential to be realized. We care about them because they inform our understanding of what might happen if the process runs again and generates another value.

Similarly, if you treat history as a sequence of one-off events, you should pay attention only to what actually happened and ignore what did not. But if you want to see history as a set of long-term processes which generate many events, you're probably interested in estimating the entire shape of these processes and that includes "invisible" parts which did not actually happen but could have happened.

There are obvious methodological pitfalls here and I would recommend wielding Occam's Razor with abandon, but that should not conceal the underlying epistemic point that what did not happen could be important, too.

Good point.