Comment author: ChristianKl 13 December 2015 10:27:57AM 0 points [-]

I think Effective Altruism fits the eight criteria you gave.

I don't think rationality!CFAR currently has all eight at the moment but I think there a good chance that it will get them in the future.

In both cases calling them religions is likely not helpful.

Comment author: KevinGrant 13 December 2015 12:02:58PM 0 points [-]

I'm doing a little reading on both of them now. Big question: how to make them successful as social movements. I wonder if their elements can be modeled in a fashion similar to that which I did above. And if so, if there's anything that such an application can tell us about how to improve their chances for success.

In response to Engineering Religion
Comment author: kithpendragon 07 December 2015 06:31:17PM 4 points [-]

What is success for a religion?

I'd say it seems pretty fundamental that Religion is a kind of meme. One measure of success for memes is their ability to spread (virulence). If that is your only measure, you're likely to have some ethically terrible things going on. It seems (to me) like an obvious constraint that the meme must spread without causing any obvious harm in its wake (except to related memes that may be in competition).

What useful purposes does religion serve?

I consider [create an in-group] to be a pretty central (usually unstated) optimization point (not exactly a purpose) in most religions. This has some well-studied psychological effects on said group that can benefit all its members socially, psychologically, and (further down the causal line) medically. Although it tends to lead to some unfortunate side-effects for the out-group.

How would you design a "rational religion", if such an entity is possible?

Problem is that I've seen more than one source define "religion" as something like "systematic belief in the supernatural". I'm not convinced that such belief can be "rational" (optimal for making more effective decisions). Perhaps as a stepping stone -- use a religious-type belief system as an infection vector, then strip the supernatural elements away bit by bit; but that seems awfully deceitful to me.

Comment author: KevinGrant 12 December 2015 06:39:41PM 1 point [-]

This seems like a promising direction. So let's say that by religion I mean a useful meme. The meme consists of a doctrine. That is, a collection of statements regarding human belief or action. A person infected with the meme lives in accordance with the doctrine. The doctrine is designed to cause a useful effect, apart from its own flourishing. The effect is caused by changes in behavior of the people infected by the meme. The effect need not be explicitly stated within the doctrine. This a broad definition of religion, as it doesn't require that the doctrine contain any statements about the supernatural. But at this point I want to keep things open. As some posts have suggested, there's a lot of argument about what does or doesn't constitute a religion.

In order to be successful, a useful meme must be sufficiently:

  1. Transmissible, meaning that it must be pragmatically possible to expose many people to the meme.
  2. Infectious, meaning that a significant number of people exposed to the meme must become infected.
  3. Contagious, meaning that it must spread of its own accord, until it has infected a threshold number of carriers. The threshold may differ from meme to meme, and is whatever threshold is needed to enable the successful creation of the desired useful effect.
  4. Viable, meaning that it must be possible for a person to survive and prosper when infected with the meme.
  5. Robust, meaning that once a given person is infected, it must resist eradication within that individual.
  6. Hardy, meaning that it must be able survive, and possibly flourish, in a variety of intellectual environments, and there must be no commonly found environment in which it cannot survive.
  7. Resistant. Meaning that beyond a certain degree of spread, there cannot be an obvious method by which a (presumably non-infected) person or group can eradicate it.
  8. Stable, meaning that it must not change its nature significantly over time. Changes that continue to allow it to flourish and to cause the desired effect are permissible.

This list is not meant to be definitive or exhaustive. And I don't claim to be using the best terminology.

For example, some religious doctrines contain the idea that if you cease to believe in any part of the doctrine, you will suffer in Hell upon death. This idea might enhance the robustness of the religion by discouraging the development of disbelief. Others contain the idea that it's your duty, or that you're rewarded in some fashion, for converting non-believers. This idea might enhance the contagiousness of the religion by encouraging those who are already infected by the meme to work to infect others.

Using this framework, perhaps the original post might be improved a bit. Putting some of the questions asked in the original post into the new framework, we get:

  1. What useful purposes does religion serve? That is, what kinds of "useful purposes" can be designed into such memes?
  2. Are any of these purposes non-supernaturalistic in nature? That is, can a completely non-supernatural religion flourish and create a useful effect?
  3. What is success for a religion and what elements of a religion tend to cause it to become successful? That is, what elements of currently existing religious doctrines have helped them to become successful?
  4. How would you design a "rational religion", if such an entity is possible? That is, is it possible to design a religion that encourages "less wrong" cognition?
  5. What are the relationships between aspects of a religion, and outcomes involving that religion? For example, Catholic doctrine includes elements that discourage birth control. Lack of birth control encourages higher birthrates among Catholics. This encourages there to be a larger number of Catholics in the next generation than would otherwise be the case. Thus the toolkit now contains one element: the prohibition of birth control as a means of increasing the contagiousness of a religion.
  6. How do aspects of religion cause them to evolve differently over time? For example, Catholicism contains a permanent, authoritarian hierarchy of individuals who are dependent on the church for their survival and satisfaction. Without the Church, a Cardinal with no other job skills might starve or suffer disrespect from the community. Thus he is incentivized to increase the authority of the Catholic church in order to help secure his own survival. Over time, Catholic doctrine adopted the idea that the Pope is infallible. It might be possible to draw a line between the two phenomena and say that in a doctrine which supports a social structure that includes a permanent, authoritarian hierarchy of individuals who are dependent on believers for their survival and satisfaction, the doctrine will tend to evolve towards the accumulation of power for the hierarchy so as to ensure and increase their survival and satisfaction. Possibly another element for the toolkit.

What other such heuristics exist? Would a large enough collection of such heuristics aid in the analysis and design of religious movements?

In response to Engineering Religion
Comment author: ChristianKl 07 December 2015 01:37:00PM 0 points [-]

Could you define what you mean with the word religion?

Comment author: KevinGrant 07 December 2015 01:54:05PM 1 point [-]

Unfortunately, I can't give a good definition for this except by example. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism, Atheism. I suppose that it might even be possible to ask the questions assuming that science is a religion. The focus of the questions is intended to be on the engineering and social aspects, rather than on a question like "Should Atheism be considered a religion?" I understand that the vagueness makes this a less than perfect delineation of a topic.

Engineering Religion

2 KevinGrant 07 December 2015 01:34PM

This topic is vague and open-ended.  I'm leaving it that way deliberately.  Perhaps some interesting, better defined topics will grow out of it.  Or perhaps it's too far afield from the concept of less wrong cognition to be of interest here.  So I view this topic as exploratory rather than as an attempt to solve a specific problem.

What useful purposes does religion serve?  Are any of these purposes non-supernaturalistic in nature?  What is success for a religion and what elements of a religion tend to cause it to become successful?   How would you design a "rational religion", if such an entity is possible?  How and why would a religion with that design become successful and serve a useful purpose?  What are the relationships between aspects of a religion, and outcomes involving that religion?  For example, Catholicism discourages birth control.  Lack of birth control encourages higher birthrates among Catholics.  This encourages there to be a larger number of Catholics in the next generation than would otherwise be the case,  Surely there are other relationships like this?  How do aspects of religion cause them to evolve differently over time?

Comments (32)
Comment author: ChristianKl 30 November 2015 10:25:45AM 1 point [-]

Yes.

If you want to put the link behind LessWrong in a comment you have to write [LessWrong](http://lesswrong.com). I think for the topline post it's html <a href=http://lesswrong.com>LessWrong</a>

Comment author: KevinGrant 30 November 2015 11:07:59AM 1 point [-]

Done. Not pretty, but the links seem to work.

Comment author: ChristianKl 30 November 2015 09:28:29AM 0 points [-]

This was going to be a reply in a discussion between ChristianKl and MattG in another thread about conlangs

In general when you refer to another thread on LW, it's good to add a link.

Comment author: KevinGrant 30 November 2015 10:02:19AM 1 point [-]

How do I do that? Is it sufficient to edit a web address into the text of the old and new threads?

Comment author: [deleted] 29 November 2015 05:27:46PM *  1 point [-]

In English I can say: "Dear readers," without specifying gender.

"The father of my mother feels (passively) that that my left ringfinger touches him 2 centimeters in inferior direction from his right earlobe" (At the present he lies on his back, so inferior is not the direction towards the center of the earth). How would you say that in ithkuil?

I think one of us has misunderstood ithkuil (it may be me). I've only done a bit of looking into it, but my understanding is that it can do both of what you mentioned above. The difference is that you can't say "dear readers" of a non-specific gender without specificying that you mean a non-specific gender. Which means you only say "dear readers of a non-specific gender" if you know that's who you're addressing, if you're addressing only male readers it would be a completely different sentence. In other words, you can be general but you can't be ambiguous. If you're trying to get clearer in your thinking, this is a property you want.

Ithkuil also has all sorts of conujugations that get very specific with object placement and relation to one another. It's almost ideally suited for your second sentence.

Comment author: KevinGrant 30 November 2015 08:10:50AM *  2 points [-]

You're all getting into some really interesting material here, and I think that it has significance beyond the scope of conlangs. I didn't want it to get lost, or ignored by non-conlangers, here, so I started a new thread for it, called "The value of ambiguous speech". This isn't to say that it wouldn't be great to see more discussion of the application of ambiguity to Ithkuil, but I didn't want you to miss out on the wider thread if your attention was focused here.

Update: ChristianKl pointed out to me that I should put a forward link to the new discussion here (bear with me, I'm a newbie), so I'm going to try to edit one in after the fact.

Click here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/n0o/the_value_of_ambiguous_speech/

The value of ambiguous speech

4 KevinGrant 30 November 2015 07:58AM

This was going to be a reply in a discussion between ChristianKl and MattG in another thread about conlangs, but their discussion seemed to have enough significance, independent of the original topic, to deserve a thread of its own.  If I'm doing this correctly (this sentence is an after-the-fact update), then you should be able to link to the original comments that inspired this thread here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/n0h/linguistic_mechanisms_for_less_wrong_cognition/cxb2

Is a lack of ambiguity necessary for clear thinking?  Are there times when it's better to be ambiguous?  This came up in the context of the extent to which a conlang should discourage ambiguity, as a means of encouraging cognitive correctness by its users.  It seems to me that something is being taken for granted here, that ambiguity is necessarily an impediment to clear thinking.  And I certainly agree that it can be.  But if detail or specificity are the opposites of ambiguity, then surely maximal detail or specificity is undesirable when the extra information isn't relevant, so that a conlang would benefit from not requiring users to minimize ambiguity.

Moving away from the concept of conlangs, this opens up some interesting (at least to me) questions.  Exactly what does "ambiguity" mean?  Is there, for each speech act, an optimal level of ambiguity, and how much can be gained by achieving it?  Are there reasons why a certain, minimal degree of ambiguity might be desirable beyond avoiding irrelevant information?

Comments (37)
Comment author: RichardKennaway 29 November 2015 11:19:30PM 2 points [-]

The works of Anna Wierzbicka on semantic primitives may be of interest (although they are mainly contained in expensive academic books and gated journal articles). She found a core of about 20 such primitives, although in later work she expanded them substantially. These are primitives discovered (by her methods) from the study of human languages, rather than constructed on a logical basis.

Comment author: KevinGrant 30 November 2015 07:33:10AM 1 point [-]

Sounds like a good addition to my reading list, although I just looked at her books on Amazon and the prices on most of them are outrageous (I couldn't sell a book for $28, let alone $280). But with luck it might be possible to dig up a list of the basic primitives, with commentary, on the internet somewhere.

Comment author: jimrandomh 29 November 2015 11:28:01PM 2 points [-]

Phrases tend to take on meaning distinct from or supplementary to their constituents. In written English, you can highlight this with quotes or capitalization, both of which are disruptive and therefore under-used. In spoken English, marking a special phrase is very awkward, and is done extremely rarely.

It'd be nice to have a function word or pair of function words for this. It could probably double as a parenthesization mechanism.

Comment author: KevinGrant 30 November 2015 07:32:04AM 1 point [-]

Perhaps a special sort of quote symbol used to highlight metaphors?

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