The reason Catholics are better organized than humanists is that they're official, communal, and hierarchical and we're not. The reason cults are better organized than Catholics is that they're even more official, communal, and hierarchical.

If the Pope says "Donate ten percent of your money to me," then there's an expectation that ordinary Catholics will obey. They've committed to following what the Pope says.

If you, Eliezer, posted on this forum "Please donate ten percent of your money to the Institute That Must Not Be Named", well...actually, I don't know what would happen. A few rare people might do it to signal that we liked you. But although we often follow you, we are not your followers. We haven't made a committment to you. We associate with you as long as it's convenient for us, but as soon as it stops being convenient, we'll wander off.

If you really want to get an infrastructure as powerful as the Catholic Church, you need to ask us to officially swear loyalty to you and start publically self-identifying as Rationalists with a capital R (the capital letter is very important!) You need to put us through some painful initiation ritual, so we feel a commitment to stick around even when the going gets tough. You need to make us publically profess how great Rationalism is to all our friends enough times that it would be a major social embarrassment to get kicked out for not obeying you enough. You need to establish a norm that following Eliezer's requests is so completely expected it would be strange to refuse and we'd be going against all our friends. And then you need to keep telling us about how much better off we are as capital-R Rationalists than as members of the boring old general public. Then you can start ordering us to donate ten percent of our income and expect Pope-level compliance rates.

The cultists do all of this, and the Catholics try but generally fail, which is why many Catholics don't listen to the Pope nearly as much as atheists think. If you didn't want to go quite this far, even making us pay $5 for a (physical, laminated, colorful) Less Wrong membership card would probably make a difference. Once we did that, we'd be members of something, instead of people who came to a blog every so often to discuss an interest. The brain cares a lot about this sort of thing.

[edit: better explanation below in response to ciphergoth]

Various themes in the culture of Catholicism make it easier to be charitable because they help Catholics avoid the rational arguments that would discourage them.

The most difficult hurdle to giving to a charity is determining if the charitable gift is worthwhile. Will the gift do enough good? Is the charity deserving? Are you just enabling poor people to stay poor? Catholicism by-passes all of these rational arguments with irrational beliefs*. These beliefs may not be universally held, but I believe they are part of the culture:

(1) Sacrifice is a good thing in of itself. Value is placed on the sacrifice itself, not just the good that comes out of the sacrifice. Thus the giving Catholic doesn't have to worry (as much) about whether the charity is really deserving.

(2) People in need have an elevated status. No need to argue within oneself about whether poor people deserve help and no need to weigh their utility function with your own -- as a Catholic, believe that they deserve the money or time more than you do.

(3) The reward is intangible. You don't need to expect or require that there will be an immediate benefit as a result of your charity. This prevents discouragement when the charity doesn't seem to be working.

Any person who gives to charity may hold any of these beliefs to any extent. I would bet that the more rational a person is, the more good they will do with a given amount of money. However, it is the irrational components that are probably most responsible for the amount of money that is given -- and the more money that is given the better, perhaps. Even though some money is wasted, there's more money going to the worthwhile charities as well.

*You could argue that the irrational beliefs are just assumptions that are made in the game. There may actually be rational arguments behind them, but the belief is a short-cut because the arguments need not be constantly re-examined, especially by the set people who are not interested in arguments.

I really like Matt's point that not all undesired behaviors are irrational. Rather they reflect conflicts of interest within yourself, at a single time or over different points in time. It makes sense that we would have conflicts since we are very complex systems trying to optimize several things simultaneously.

In a stereotype of rationality, rational people are seen without emotions or any physical senses, like computers or robots. Unlike computers and robots, though, people are human beings with organic bodies. I think it is a mistake to discount the importance of having physical bodies which place demands on our utility functions. Matt gave the example of wanting some carbs. My thesis in this comment is that perhaps all irrational behaviors, which are not due to faults in logic or incompletely considered information, is the "fault of" our physical bodies. Everyone knows that if we don't feel well, it changes everything. Many people can't think rationally if they're too hungry.

Discounting the broad category of undesired behaviors that are really examples of the conflicts of interest described by Matt, I asked myself what other times does emotion cause me to act irrationally? These would have to be examples when I behave in a way that I really don't prefer (i.e., not just due to a conflict of interest) but I am unable to make decisions in the way that I do prefer because of my emotions.

I can think of many, many examples! In these examples, my emotions hold sway and cause me to act in ways that I do not wish -- not even at that time. Then in these cases, is it not another example of the influence of a physical body? Perhaps you have a different view, but I think of emotions that I cannot control as being physically based. If I could just turn off the surge of hormones in my body, then I could behave normally and rationally.

I would be interested in ways (mind over matter? psychology? Cognitive behaviorial therapy as ciphergoth mentioned?) to have more control over these hormones when some control is needed.

I agree with the other posts. I had a distinctly negative somatic marker when I read the word 'emotion' and this discomfort made it impossible for me to carefully read the rest of the post. If I was required to (say, for work), then I would have to wait until the negative response attenuated -- usually it take a half a day or so to willfully erase a somatic marker.

I'm a beginner that thinks meta-discussions are fun..

Eliezer is asking about whether we should tolerate tolerance. Let's suppose -- for the sake of argument -- that we do not tolerate tolerance. If X is intolerable, then the tolerance of X is intolerable.

So if Y tolerates X, then Y is intolerable. And so on.

Thus, if we accept that we cannot tolerate toleration, then also we cannot tolerate toleration of tolerance, and also we cannot tolerate toleration of toleration of tolerance.

I would think of tolerance as a relationship between X and Y in which Y acquires the intolerability of X.

I think I can help. You have set up a game of chance so that the expected value for the house (yourself) is negative. That means that on average you would have to pay out more than you would receive. However, while the payout is very big the chances of winning are very tiny so you wonder if this changes the game. In some sense, you are asking about the expected value of the game when you know the law of large numbers is not going to apply, because you are not going to play enough times for the ratio of wins to losses to average out.

This is a problem about sampling. The number of times you play the game will be much smaller than the number of games needed to yield the expected average. Suppose you conduct the game (only!) a million times. How reasonable is it to expect that you would collect a million dollars and not have to pay anything? In other words, we just need to calculate the probability of not having any "win" in the sample size of a million. The probability of a win in such a small sample size is tiny (epsilon) - so you wonder if you could consider it effectively zero and if it would be worthwhile to play the game.

The answer is that the chances are extremely high that you will not have to pay out anything (1-epsilon) so in almost every case it is lucrative to play the game. However, when you do lose, you lose so big that it (really does) cancel out the winnings you would be making in most case. So the expected value still holds -- it's not profitable to play the game.

My brain -- and your brain too, probably -- keeps buzzing that it is profitable to play the game because in almost every conceivable scenario, we can expect to make a million dollars. Human beings can't correctly think intuitively about very small and very large numbers. Every time your brain buzzes on this problem -- remind yourself it is because you're not really weighing the enormity of the pay-off you'd have to pay. Your brain keeps saying the probability is small, but the product of the probability and the payout is a finite, non-zero number.

As several comments below have eluded, perhaps the impracticality of such a pay-off is detracting from the abstract understanding of the problem. However, this is a fascinating question, and should be addressed squarely. (I'm pretty certain you didn't mean that you would just claim bankruptcy if you lost. Then your game would really be a scam, though I suppose we could argue about whether it is a scam in a sample where no one wins.)

I would like to give an example that I think fits here. (Do you think it fits?) It has to do with the common practice of summarizing the whole abortion debate with whether or not "life begins at conception". Putting the debate entirely aside (of course!) this is my favorite example of words that have no meaning outside of identifying yourself with this group or that group, and thus is the beginning and the end of terribly sloppy thinking.

Does life begin at conception? We need to define "life" first. OK, anything that is composed of cells and metabolizes is some sort of common definition. For simplicity, let's call the unit of life an "organism". So we are asking if an organism first begins living at conception. Sort of obviously "yes" and totally irrelevant when you think about what the words actually mean, yet somehow this frames the debate for many people.

1. All men are created equal.

• has multiple interpretations. The commonly intended one is an axiological statement about what rights we ought to give to people, so is not something you can argue about.

1. The lottery is a waste of hope.

• is a complex mixture of empirical statements and axiological statements. The axiological statements are things like "it is better for people to improve their lives than delude themselves into thinking that their lives are good"

1. Religious people are intolerant.

• is empirically testable and true

1. Government is not the solution; government is the problem.

• mostly testable and mostly false, though it does include some axiological component

1. God exists.

• is either testable and false, or complete nonsense, religious apologists tend to switch interpretations

1. Imagination is more important than knowledge.

• not well defined enough to be testable, though there are strict interpretations involving the balance between creativity and rigor and knowledge in science that could be tested.

1. Rationalists should win.

• is a definition, not a claim.

This is a terrific post! It begins to arrive at what is really crucially wrong with the majority of thinking. As someone who only feels comfortable with statements when terms are well-defined and verifiable, I must be a natural positivist. Granted, it's a bit bizarre that the question ,"How are you?" throws me through a loop unless the context is very clear (the doctor's office is OK), but I wish that such concepts would catch on with the media -- I mean those who really design to report the news, so I could tell them apart from those that babble lots of impressions and other nonsense.

In a situation where someone who seems to be very like-minded is more tolerant to another person X than I would be, I would be very interested in why, if I don't already know. Perhaps my friend has reasons that I would agree with, if I only knew them. (Some pragmatic reasons come to mind.)

If I still disagree with my friend, even after knowing his reasons, I would then express the disagreement and see if I couldn't convert my friend on the basis of our common views. If I fail to convert him, it is because our views differ in some way. Is the view we disagree on minor or major? I would base my annoyance/intolerance/punishment on the view we disagree on, not his tolerance of person X.

There is the possibility that it is not possible or practical to find out my friend's reasons for the inappropriate tolerance. In that case, if my friend really does seem reasonable in all other ways, so that I am strongly convinced he really is like-minded, than I would have to give him the benefit of the doubt. There is the possibility that if I knew his reasons, I would agree.

(Later edit: This was my first comment on Less Wrong!)