I think it would be more useful to frame such matters as whether they improve or damage your chances of creating children who reproduce. [1]
For the most part this involves getting laid, but also a great deal more, including status.
[1] Now that I think about it, I don't think I've ever seen a grand overview of what most increases the odds of having grandchildren.
I think it would be more useful to frame such matters as whether they improve or damage your chances of creating children who reproduce. [1]
Just to clarify- this isn't literally the case. The extent to which we have different thinking paradigms for near and far is due to evolution- which maximized the chances of large numbers of people who share a large fraction of the organism's genetic material (perhaps by increasing the number of grandnephews as well as grandchildren). But the effect this feature of our psychology has on us in the current era doesn't...
The terms Near and Far are to be taken in the context of Robin Hanson's Near/Far articles.
I was reading a fairly convincing article linked from a comment here about how theistic beliefs are so scantly supported, when not outright contradictory, that it's a doubtful whether anyone truly holds them at all. Of course there is a whole battery of explanations around the self-deception, signalling and belief-in-belief cluster, but the question that got in my head was about the kinds of people that can or cannot profess to hold these beliefs.
A common thread in many a 'deconversion' story is that some inconsistency in a person's worldview comes to their attention, and they can't let go until they have undone the whole fabric of their belief system. But given that most people are happy living productive lives while simultaneously nominally carrying around massively conflicted worldviews, what is it that makes certain individuals not capable of this fairly common human feat?
So the hypothesis that I'm considering is that the people who came to atheism this way, are those who demand detailed consistency of their Far ideals. Alternatively, they could be those for who what is normally considered Far is actually Near, in other words those with an unusually high Buxton Index. Combining the two, perhaps for people with a high Buxton Index, Far simply evaporates, as it comes under the scope of things that are relevant to a person's planning. (Edsger W. Djikstra, when introducing the Buxton Index, says that "true christians" have a Buxton Index of infinity. I think that couldn't be more wrong. Perhaps it is the case for singularitarians though.)
The obvious reason to be suspicious of this idea is that it's very flattering for those that fall in this category, which includes myself. Rather than dithering about it, I'd rather expose it to the community and see if it seems to have legs in the eyes of others.