My peer-reviewed article in a psychology journal on the topic of meaning and purpose in a non-religious setting is now accessible without a paywall for a limited time, so get it while it's free if you're interested. I'd be interested in hearing your feedback on it. For those curious, the article is not directly related to my Intentional Insights project, but is a part of my aspiration to raise the sanity waterline regarding religion, the focus of Eliezer's original piece on the sanity waterline.

Based on an earlier suggestion, here's an outreach thread where you can leave comments about any recent outreach that you have done to convey rationality-style ideas broadly. The goal of having this thread is to organize information about outreach and provide community support and recognition for raising the sanity waterline. Likewise, doing so can help inspire others to emulate some aspects of these good deeds through social proof and network effects.

Reverend Caleb Pitkin, an aspiring rationalist and United Methodist Minister, wrote an article about combining religion and rationality which was recently published on the Intentional Insights blog. He's the only Minister I know who is also an aspiring rationalist, so I thought it would be an interesting piece for Less Wrong as well. Besides, it prompted an interesting discussion on the Less Wrong Facebook group, so I thought some people here who don't look at the Facebook group might be interested in checking it out as well. Caleb does not have enough karma to post, so I am posting it on his behalf, but he will engage with the comments.

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Religious and Rational?

“Wisdom shouts in the street; in the public square she raises her voice.”

Proverbs 1:20 Common English Bible

The Biblical book of Proverbs is full of imagery of wisdom personified as a woman calling and extorting people to come to her and listen.  The wisdom contained in Proverbs is not just spiritual wisdom but also contains a large amount of practical wisdom and advice.  What might the wisdom of Proverbs and rationality have in common?  The wisdom literature in scripture was meant to help people make better and more effective decisions.  In today’s complex and rapidly changing world we have the same need for tools and resources to help us make good decisions.  One great source of wisdom is methods of better thinking that are informed by science.  

Now, not everyone would agree with comparing the wisdom of Proverbs with scientific insights.  Doing so may not sit well with some in the secular rationality community who view all religion as inherently irrational and hindering clear thinking. It also might not sit well with some in my own religious community who are suspicious of scientific thinking as undermining traditional faith.  While it would take a much longer piece to try to completely defend either religion or secular rationality I’m going to try and demonstrate some ways that rationality is useful  for a religious person.

The first way that rationality can be useful for a religious person is in the living of our daily lives.  We are faced with tasks and decisions each day that we try to do our best in.  Learning to recognize common logical fallacies or other biases, like those that cause us to fail to understand other people, will improve our decision making as much as it improves the thinking of non-religious people. For example, a mother driving her kids to Sunday School might benefit from avoiding thinking that the person who cuts her off is definitely a jerk, one common type of thinking error.  Some doing volunteer work for their church could be more effective if they avoid problematic communication with other volunteers. This use of rationality to lead our daily lives in the best way is one that most would find fairly unobjectionable.  It’s easy to say that the way we all achieve our personal goals and objectives could be improved, and we can all gain greater agency.

Rationality can also be of use in theological commentary and discourse.  Many of the theological and religious greats used the available philosophical and intellectual tools of their day to examine their faith. Examples of this include John Wesley, Thomas Aquinas and even the Apostle Paul when he debated Epicurean and Stoic Philosophers.   They also made sure that their theologies were internally, rational and logical.  This means that, from the perspective of a religious person, keeping up with rationality can help with the pursuit of a deeper understanding of our faith.  For a secular person acknowledging the ways in which religious people use rationality within their worldview may be difficult, but it can help to build common ground. The starting point is different.  Secular people start with the faith that they can trust their sensory experience.  Religious people start with conceptions of the divine.  Yet, after each starting point, both seek to proceed in a rational logical manner.

It is not just our personal lives that can be improved by rationality, it’s also the ways in which we interact with communities.  One of the goals of many religious communities is to make a positive impact on the world around them.  When we work to do good in community we want that work to be as effective as possible.  Often when we work in community we find that we are not meeting our goals or having the kind of significant impact that we wish to have.  It is my experience this is often a failure to really examine and gather the facts on the ground.  We set off full of good intentions but with limited resources and time.  Rational examination helps us to figure out how to match our good intentions with our limited resources in the most effective way possible.  For example as the Pastor of two small churches money and people power can be in short supply.  So when we examine all the needs of our community we have to acknowledge we cannot begin to meet all or even most of them.  So we take one issue, hunger, and devote our time and resources to having one big impact on that issue.  As opposed to trying to be a little bit to alleviate a lot of problems.

One other way that rationality can inform our work in the community is to recognize that part of what a scarcity of resources means is that we need to work together with others in our community.  The inter-faith movement has done a lot of good work in bringing together people of faith to work on common goals.  This has meant setting aside traditional differences for the sake of shared goals.  Let us examine the world we live in today though. The amount of nonreligious people is on the rise and there is every indication that it will continue to do so.  On the other hand religion does not seem to be going anywhere either.  Which is good news for a pastor.  Looking at this situation, the rational thing to do is to work together, for religious people to build bridges toward the non-religious and vice versa.

Wisdom still stands on the street calling and imploring us to be improved--not in the form of rationalist street preachers, though that idea has a certain appeal-- but in the form of the growing number of tools being offered to help us improve our capacity for logic, for reasoning, and for the tools that will enable us take part in the world we live in.  

Everyone wants to make good decisions.  This means that everyone tries to make rational decisions.  We all try but we don’t always hit the mark.  Religious people seek to achieve their goals and make good decisions.  Secular people seek to achieve their goals and make good decisions.  Yes, we have different starting points and it’s important to acknowledge that.  Yet, there are similarities in what each group wants out of their lives and maybe we have more in common than we think we do.

On a final note it is my belief that what religious people and what non-religious people fear about each other is the same thing.  The non-religious look at the religious and say God could ask them to do anything... scary.  The religious look at the non-religious and say without God they could do anything... scary.  If we remember though that most people are rational and want to live a good life we have less to be scared of, and are more likely to find common ground.

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Bio: Caleb Pitkin is a Provisional Elder with the United Methodist Church appointed to Signal Mountain United Methodist Church. Caleb is a huge fan of the theology of John Wesley, which ask that Christians use reason in their faith journey.  This helped lead Caleb to Rationality and participation in Columbus Rationality, a Less Wrong meetup that is part of the Humanist Community of Central Ohio. Through that, Caleb got involved with Intentional Insights. Caleb spends his time trying to live a faithful and rational life. 

Published a piece in The Huffington Post popularizing dual-process theory in layman's language.

P.S. I know some don't like using terms like Autopilot and Intentional to describe System 1 and System 2, but I find from long experience that these terms resonate well with a broad audience. Also, I know dual process theory is criticized by some, but we have to start somewhere, and just explaining dual process theory is a way to start bridging the inference gap to higher meta-cognition.

Not "rationality evangelism", which CFAR is doing already if I understand their mission. "Rational evangelism", which is what CFAR would do if they were Catholic missionaries.

If you believe in Hell, as many people very truly do, it is hard for Hell not to seem like the world's most important problem.

To some extent, proselytizing religions treat Hell with respect--they spend billions of dollars trying to save sinners, and the most devout often spend their lives preaching the Gospel (insert non-Christian variant).

But is Hell given enough respect? Every group meets with mixed success in solving its problems, but the problem of eternal suffering leaves little room for "mixed success". Even the most powerful religions are stuck in patterns that make the work of salvation very difficult indeed. And some seem willing to reduce their evangelism* for reasons that aren't especially convincing in the face of "nonbelievers are quite possibly going to burn, or at least be outside the presence of God, forever".

What if you were a rationalist who viewed Hell like certain Less Wrongers view the Singularity? (This belief would be hard to reconcile with rationalism generally, but for the sake of argument...) How would you tackle the problem of eternal suffering with the same passion we spend on probability theory and friendly AI?

I wrote a long thought experiment to better define the problem, involving a religion called "Normomism", but it was awkward. There are plenty of real religions whose members believe in Hell, or at least in a Heaven that many people aren't going to (also a terrible loss). Some have a stated mission of saving as many people as possible from a bad afterlife.

So where are they falling short? 

If you were the Pope, or the Caliph, or the supreme dictator of some smaller religion, what tactics would you use to convince more people to do and believe exactly the things that would save them--whether that's faith or good works? Why haven't these tactics been tried already? Is there really much room for improvement?

Spreading the Word

This post isn't a dig at believers, though it does seem like many people don't act on their sincere belief in an eternal afterlife. (I don't mind when people try to convert me--at least they care!)

My main point: It's worth considering that people who believe in Very Bad Future Outcomes have been working to prevent those outcomes for thousands of years, and have stumbled upon formidable techniques for doing so.

I've thought for a while about rational evangelism, and it's surprisingly hard to come up with ways that people like Rick Warren and Jerry Lovett could improve their methodology. (Read Lovett's "contact me" paragraph for the part that really impressed me.)

We speak often of borrowing from religion, but these conversations mostly touch on social bonding, rather than what it means to spread ideas so important that the fate of the human race depends on them. ("Raising the Sanity Waterline" is a great start, but those ideas haven't been the focus of many recent posts.)

I'm not saying this is a perfect comparison. The rationalist war for the future won't be fought one soul at a time, and we won't save anyone with a deathbed confession. 

But cryogenic freezing does exist. And on a more collective level, convincing the right people that the far future matters could be a coup on the level of Constantine's conversion.

CFAR is doing good things in the direction of rationality evangelism. How can the rest of us do more? 

Living Like We Mean It

This movement is going places. But I fear we may spend too much time (at least proportionally) arguing amongst ourselves, when bringing others into the fold is a key piece of the puzzle. And if we’d like to expand the flock (or, more appropriately, the herd of cats), what can we learn from history’s most persuasive organizations?

I often pass up my chance to talk to people about something as simple as Givewell, let alone existential risk, and it's been a long time since I last name-dropped a Less Wrong technique. I don't think I'm alone in this.** 

I've met plenty of Christians who exude the same optimism and conviviality as a Rick Warren or a Ned Flanders. These kinds of people are a major boon for the Christian religion. Even if most of us are introverts, what's stopping us from teaching ourselves to live the same way?

Still, I'm new here, and I could be wrong. What do you think?  

* Text editor's giving me some trouble, but the link is here: http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/practical-faith/evangelism-interfaith-world 

** Peter Boghossian's Manual for Creating Atheists has lots to say about using rationality techniques in the course of daily life, and is well worth reading, though the author can be an asshole sometimes.

Does anyone know of a good article that illustrates how society is generally irrational, and how making society more rational would have huge benefits, because it'd be a very high level action?

I'm writing an essay about how to improve education, and one of my proposals is that a core part of the curriculum should be rationality. I believe that doing this would have huge benefits to society, and want to explain why I think this, but I'm having trouble. Any thoughts?

Edit: Part of Raising the Sanity Waterline talks about common ways in which people are irrational. However, they're all links to longer Less Wrong articles. Preferably, I'd like to illustrate it in a few sentences/paragraphs.

I am considering trying to get a job teaching statistics from a Bayesian perspective at the university or community college level, and I figured I should get some advice, both on whether or not that's a good idea and how to go about it.

Some background on myself: I just got my Masters in computational biology, to go along with a double Bachelors in Computer Science and Cell/Molecular Biology.  I was in a PhD program but between enjoying teaching more than research and grad school making me unhappy, I decided to get the Masters instead.  I've accumulated a bunch of experience as a teaching assistant (about six semesters) and I'm currently working as a Teaching Specialist (which is a fancy title for a full time TA).  I'm now in my fourth semester of TAing biostatistics, which is pretty much just introductory statistics with biology examples.  However, it's taught from a frequentist perspective. 

I like learning, optimizing, teaching, and doing a good job of things I see people doing badly. I also seem to do dramatically better in highly structured environments.  So, I've been thinking about trying to find a lecturer position teaching statistics from a Bayesian perspective.  All of the really smart professors I know personally who have an opinion on the topic are Bayesians, Less Wrong as a community prefers Bayesianism, and I prefer it.  This seems like a good way to get paid to do something I would enjoy and raise the rationality waterline while I'm at it. 

So, the first question is whether this is the most efficient way to get paid to promote rationality.  I did send in an application to the Center for Modern Rationality but I haven't heard back, so I'm guessing that isn't an option.  Teaching Bayesian statistics seems like the second best bet, but there are probably other options I haven't thought of.  I could teach biology or programming classes, but I think those would be less optimal uses of my skills.

Next, is this even a viable option for me, given my qualifications?  I haven't taken any education classes to speak of (the class on how to be a TA might count but it was a joke).  My job searches suggest that community colleges do hire people with Masters to teach, but universities mostly do not.  I don't know what it takes to actually get hired in the current economic climate.

I'm also trying to figure out if this is the best career option given my skillset (or at least estimate the opportunity cost in terms of ease of finding jobs and compensation).  I have a number of other potential options available:  I could try to find a research position in bioinformatics or computational biology, or look for programming positions.  Bioinformatics really makes "analyzing sequence data" and that's something I've barely touched since undergrad; my thesis used existing gene alignments.  I could probably brush up and learn the current tools if I wanted, but I have hardly any experience in that area.  Computational biology might be a better bet, but it's a ridiculously varied field and so far I have not much enjoyed doing research.

I could probably look for programming jobs, but they would mostly not leverage my biology skills; while I am a very good programmer for a biologist, and a very good biologist for a programmer, I'm not amazing at either.  I can actually program: my thesis project involved lots of Ruby scripts to generate and manipulate data prior to statistical analysis, and I've also written things like a flocking implementation and a simple vector graphics drawing program.  Everything I've written has been just enough to do what I needed it to do. I did not teach myself to program in general, but I did teach myself Ruby, if that helps estimate my level of programming talent.  Yudkowsky did just point out that programming potentially pays REALLY well, possibly better than any of my other career options, but that may be limited to very high talent and/or very experienced programmers.

Assuming it is a good idea for me to try to teach statistics, and assuming I have a reasonable shot at finding such a job, is it realistic to try to teach statistics from a Bayesian perspective to undergrads?  Frequentist approaches are still pretty common, so the class would almost certainly have to cover them as well, which means there's a LOT of material to cover. Bayesian methods generally involve some amount of calculus, although I have found an introductory textbook which uses minimal calculus.  That might be a bit much to cram into a single semester, especially depending on the quality of the students (physics majors can probably handle a lot more than community college Communications majors).

Speaking of books, what books would be good to teach from, and what books should I read to have enough background?  I attempted Jaynes' Probability Theory: The Logic of Science but it was a bit too high level for me to fully understand.  I have been working my way through Bolstad's Introduction to Bayesian Statistics which is what I would probably teach the course from.  Are there any topics that Less Wrong thinks would be essential to cover in an introductory Bayesian statistics course?

Thanks in advance for all advice and suggestions!

TED has launched a new initiative: TED Education

TED-Ed's mission is to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world. We do this by pairing extraordinary educators with talented animators to produce a new library of curiosity-igniting videos.

http://education.ted.com/

So maybe we could get someone to do a short talk/lecture on rationality related topic(s) (maybe cognitive biases?)? Or anything else that is related to raising the sanity waterline. Or at least just suggest the idea.

From wikipedia:

Eyewitness testimony isn't reliable-- it degrades rapidly with time (significant fading in 20 minutes), is easily overridden by circumstances (people are apt to assume that the guilty person is in a line-up unless they're specifically told the guilty person might not be there-- there's a risk of saying the best match is it rather than looking for a genuinely satisfying match), cross-racial identification is less competent than within race identification[1], the presence of a weapon makes accurate identification less likely....

It goes on-- if you have any interest in this sort of thing, I recommend reading the whole article.

[1] I wonder if this has been tested in societies with different classification systems. For example, I've been told by someone who lived there that in Ireland, everyone is classified as Catholic or Protestant-- even if they're Jewish. Would Irish people have problems doing identification across the Catholic-Protestant line, even if all the people involved would be considered white in America and not set off the identification problem?