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. 

This is mainly of interest to Effective Altruism-aligned Less Wrongers. Thanks to Agnes Vishnevkin, Jake Krycia, Will Kiely, Jo Duyvestyn, Alfredo Parra, Jay Quigley, Hunter Glenn, and Rhema Hokama for looking at draft versions of this post. At least one aspiring rationalist who read a draft version of this post, after talking to his girlfriend, decided to adopt this new Valentine's Day tradition, which is some proof of its impact. The more it's shared, the more this new tradition might get taken up, and if you want to share it, I suggest you share the version of this post published on The Life You Can Save blog. It's also cross-posted on the Intentional Insights blog and on the EA Forum.

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The Valentine’s Day Gift That Saves Lives

This will be of interest mainly to EA-friendly LWs, and is cross-posted on the EA Forum, The Life You Can Save, and Intentional Insights

The Life You Can Save has an excellent tool to help people easily visualize and quantify the impact of their giving: the Impact Calculator. It enables people to put in any amount of money they want, then click on a charity, and see how much of an impact their money can have. It's a really easy way to promote effective giving to non-EAs, but even EAs who didn't see it before can benefit. I certainly did, when I first played around with it. So I wrote a blog post, copy-pasted below, for The Life You Can Save and for Intentional Insights, to help people learn about the Impact Calculator. If you like the blog, please share this link to The Life You Can Save blog, as opposed to this post. Any feedback on the blog post itself is welcomed!

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How a Calculator Helped Me Multiply My Giving

It feels great to see hope light up in the eyes of a beggar in the street as you stop to look at them when others pass them by without a glance. Their faces widen in a smile as you reach into your pocket and take out your wallet. "Thank you so much" is such a heartwarming phrase to hear from them as you pull out five bucks and put the money in the hat in front of them. You walk away with your heart beaming as you imagine them getting a nice warm meal at McDonalds due to your generosity.

Secular people are a natural target group for pitching rationality, since they don't suffer from one of the most debilitating forms of irrationality and also because they have warm fuzzies toward the concept of reason. From reason, it's easy to transition toward what it would be reasonable to do, namely be reasonable about how our minds work and how we should improve them. I did a Rationality 101 for Secular People presentation that was pretty successful, with a number of people following up and showing an interest in gaining further rationality knowledge. Here's a video of the presentation I made, and it has the PP slides I made uploaded into SlideShare. Anyone who wishes to do so is free to use these materials for their own needs, whether sharing the video with secular friends or doing a version of this workshop for local secular groups.

Elitism and Effective Altruism

Many criticize Effective Altruists as elitist. While this criticism is vastly overblown, unfortunately, it does have some basis, not only from the outside looking in but also within the movement itself, including some explicitly arguing for elitism.

Within many EA circles, there are status games and competition around doing “as much as we can,” and in many cases, even judging and shaming, usually implicit and unintended but no less real, of those whom we might term softcore EAs. These are people who identify as EAs and donate money and time to effective charities, but otherwise lead regular lives, as opposed to devoting the brunt of their resources to advance human flourishing as do hardcore EAs. To be clear, there is no definitive and hard distinction between softcore and hardcore EAs, but this is a useful heuristic to employ, as long as we keep in mind that softcore and hardcore are more like poles on a spectrum rather than binary categories.

We should help softcore EAs feel proud of what they do, and beware implying that being softcore EA is somehow deficient or simply the start of an inevitable path to being a hardcore EA. This sort of mentality has caused people I know to feel guilty and ashamed, and led to some leaving the EA movement. Remember that we all suffer from survivorship bias based on seeing those who remained, and not those who left - I specifically talked to people who left, and tried to get their takes on why they did so.

I suggest we aim to respect people wherever they are on the softcore/hardcore EA spectrum. I propose that, from a consequentialist perspective, negative attitudes toward softcore EAs are counterproductive for doing the most good for the world.

Why We Need Softcore EAs

Even if the individual contributions of softcore EAs are much less than the contributions of individual hardcore EAs, it’s irrational and anti-consequentialist to fail to acknowledge and celebrate the contributions of softcore EAs, and yet that is the status quo for the EA movement. As in any movement, the majority of EAs are not deeply committed activists, but are normal people for whom EA is a valuable but not primary identity category.

All of us were softcore EAs once - if you are a hardcore EA now, envision yourself back in those shoes. How would you have liked to have been treated? Acknowledged and celebrated or pushed to do more and more and more? How many softcore EAs around us are suffering right now due to the pressure of expectations to ratchet up their contributions?

I get it. I myself am driven by powerful emotional urges to reduce human suffering and increase human flourishing. Besides my full-time job as a professor, which takes about ~40 hours per week, I’ve been working ~50-70 hours per week for the last year and a half as the leader of an EA and rationality-themed meta-charity. As all people do, when I don’t pay attention, I fall unthinkingly into the mind projection fallacy, assuming other people think like I do and have my values, as well as my capacity for productivity and impact. I have a knee-jerk pattern as part of my emotional self to identify with and give social status to fellow hardcore EAs, and consider us an in-group, above softcore EAs.

These are natural human tendencies, but destructive ones. From a consequentialist perspective, it weakens our movement and undermines our capacity to build a better world and decrease suffering for current and future humans and other species.

More softcore EAs are vital for the movement itself to succeed. Softcore EAs can help fill talent gaps and donating to effective direct-action charities, having a strong positive impact on the outside world. Within the movement, they support the hardcore EAs emotionally through giving them a sense of belonging, safety, security, and encouragement, which are key for motivation and mental and physical health. Softcore EAs also donate to and volunteer for EA-themed meta-charities, as well as providing advice and feedback, and serving as evangelists of the movement.

Moreover, softcore EAs remind hardcore EAs of the importance of self-care and taking time off for themselves. This is something we hardcore EAs must not ignore! I’m speaking from personal experience here.

Fermi Estimates of Hardcore and Softcore Contributions

If we add up the amount of resources contributed to the movement by softcore EAs, they will likely add up to substantially more than the resources contributed by hardcore EAs. For instance, the large majority of those who took the Giving What We Can and The Life You Can Save pledges are softcore EAs, and so are all the new entrants to the EA movement, by definition.

To attach some numbers to this claim, let’s do a Fermi Estimate that uses some educated guesses to get at the actual resources each group contributes. Say that for every 100 EAs, there are 5 hardcore EAs and 95 softcore EAs. We can describe softcore EAs as contributing anywhere from 1 to 10 percent of their resources to EA causes (this is the range from The Life You Can Save pledge to the Giving What We Can pledge), so let’s guesstimate around 5 percent. Hardcore EAs we can say give an average of 50% of their resources to the movement. Using the handy Guesstimate app, here is a link to a model that shows softcore EAs contribute 480 resources, and hardcore EAs contribute 250 resources per 100 EAs. Now, these are educated guesses, and you can use the model I put together to put in your own numbers for the number of hardcore and softcore EAs per 100 EAs, and also the percent of their resources contributed. In any case, you will find that softcore EAs contribute a substantial amount of resources.

We should also compare the giving of softcore EAs to the giving of members of the general public to get a better grasp on the benefits provided to improving the world by softcore EAs. Let’s say a typical member of the general public contributes 3.5% of her resources to charitable causes, by comparison to 5% for softcore EAs. Being generous, we can estimate that the giving of non-EAs is 100 times less effective than that of EAs. Thus, using the same handy app, here is a link to a model that demonstrates the impact of giving by a typical member of the general public, 3.5, vs. the impact of giving by a softcore EA, 500. Now, the impact of giving by a hardcore EA is going to be higher, of course, 5000 as opposed to 500, but again, we have to remember that there are many more softcore EAs who give resources. You’re welcome to plug in your own numbers to get estimates if you think my suggested figures don’t match your intuitions. Regardless, you can see the high-impact nature of how a typical softcore EA compares to a typical member of the general public.

Effective Altruism, Mental Health, and Burnout: A Personal Account

About two years ago, in February 2014, my wife and I co-founded our meta-charity. In the summer of that year, she suffered a nervous breakdown due to burnout over running the organization. I had to - or to be accurate, chose to - take over both of our roles in managing the nonprofit, assuming the full burden of leadership.

In the Fall of 2014, I myself started to develop a mental disorder from the strain of doing both my professor job and running the organization, while also taking care of my wife. It started with heightened anxiety, which I did not recognize as something abnormal at the time - after all, with the love of my life recovering very slowly from a nervous breakdown and me running the organization, anxiety seemed natural. I was flinching away from my problem, not willing to recognize it and pretending it was fine, until some volunteers at the meta-charity I run – most of them softcore EAs – pointed it out to me.

I started to pay more attention to this, especially as I began to experience fatigue spells and panic attacks. With the encouragement of these volunteers, who essentially pushed me to get professional help, I began to see a therapist and take medication, which I continue to do to this day. I scaled back on the time I put into the nonprofit, from 70 hours per week on average to 50 hours per week. Well, to be honest, I occasionally put in more than 50, as I’m very emotionally motivated to help the world, but I try to restrain myself. The softcore volunteers at the meta-charity I run know about my workaholism and the danger of burnout for me, and remind me to take care of myself. I also need to remind myself constantly that doing good for the world is a marathon and not a sprint, and that in the long run, I will do much more good by taking it easy on myself.

Celebrating Everyone

As a consequentialist, my analysis, along with my personal experience, convince me that the accomplishments of softcore EAs should be celebrated as well as those of hardcore EAs.

So what can we do? We should publicly showcase the importance of softcore EAs. For example, we can encourage publications of articles that give softcore EAs the recognition they deserve, as well as those who give a large portion of their earnings and time to charity. We can invite a softcore EA to speak about her/his experiences at the 2016 EA Global. We can publish interviews with softcore EAs. Now, I’m not suggesting we should make most speakers softcore EAs, or write most articles, or conduct most interviews with softcore EAs. Overall, my take is that it’s appropriate to celebrate individual EAs proportional to their labors, and as the numbers above show, hardcore EAs individually contribute quite a bit more than softcore EAs. Yet we as a movement need to go against the current norm of not celebrating softcore EAs, and these are just some specific steps that would help us achieve this goal.

Let’s celebrate all who engage in Effective Altruism. Everyone contributes in their own way. Everyone makes the world a better place.

Acknowledgments: For their feedback on draft versions of this post, I want to thank Linch (Linchuan) Zhang, Hunter Glenn, Denis Drescher, Kathy Forth, Scott Weathers, Jay Quigley, Chris Waterguy (Watkins), Ozzie Gooen, Will Kiely, and Jo Duyvestyn. I bear sole responsibility for any oversights and errors remaining in the post, of course.

A different version of this, without the Fermi estimates, was cross-posted on the EA Forum.

EDIT: added link to post explicitly arguing for EA elitism

The Less Wrong meetup in Columbus, OH is very oriented toward popularizing rationality for a broad audience (in fact, Intentional Insights sprang from this LW meetup). We've found that doing in-person presentations for secular groups is an excellent way of attracting new people to rationality, and have been doing that for a couple of years now, through a group called "Columbus Rationality" as part of the local branch of the American Humanist Association. Here's a blog post I just published about this topic.

Most importantly for anyone who is curious with experimenting doing something like this, we at Intentional Insights have put together a “Rationality” group starter package, which includes two blog posts describing “Rationality” events, three videos, a facilitator’s guide, an introduction guide, and a feedback sheet. We've been working on this starter package for about 9 months, and finally it's in a shape that we think it's ready for use. Hope this is helpful for any LWs who want to do something similar with a secular group where you live. You can also get in touch with us at info@intentionalinsights.org to get connected to current participants in “Columbus Rationality” who can give you tips on setting up such a group in your own locale.

Here's my article in Lifehack, one of the most prominent self-improvement websites, bringing rationality-style ideas to a broad audience, specifically long-term orientation, mere-exposure effect, consider-the-alternative, and agency :-)

P.S. Based on feedback from the LessWrong community, I made sure to avoid mentioning LessWrong or rationality in the article.