We already rarely discuss politics, so would it be terrible to also discuss sex/gender issues as little as possible?

Discussing politics is not productive. The political opinions held by most people don't affect actual politics. Discussing politics would be a waste of time even if it wasn't mindkilling. I make a point of never reading local political news and not knowing anything about my country's politics, as a matter of epistemical hygiene.

Gender relations and understanding, on the other hand, are important in everyone's lives. I can't ignore gender like I do politics, and I wouldn't want to. On the contrary, I want to become rational and virtuous about gender.

So I very much want to have discussions about gender, unless the consensus is that our rationality is too weak and we can't discuss this subject without causing net harm (or net harm to women, etc).

I am not interested in adopting steel-manned Christianity one tradition at a time, though it does provide many convenient rationalist Schelling points. If I need rationalist communion, confession, abstinence, washing of feet, blessing of throats, or Paschal celebration, I will take them up as they appear useful, and not because the church calender makes them salient. That might sound like reverse stupidity. It is. I am intentionally suppressing hypotheses which have been brought to my attention for the wrong reasons.

The line about Lent being scientific is cute, but really Lent is, to observing Christians, a time to practice penance, cleansing, and devotion. Which means that Lent and analogous ceremonies in other religions (Ramadan, Yom Kippur) provide data on the folk psychology of obedience and cleanliness! Let's explore.

The primary evolutionary purpose of disgust is in response to foods and scents which should be avoided because they could cause microbial contamination of one's body. Disgust drives us to avoid elicitors of disgust, such as dirt, wounds, corpses, bodily fluids and discharges (blood, feces, vomit, semen, puss, urine), unprepared foods, certain animals associated with those things (cockroaches, rats, flies, lice).

Not only does disgust cause us to avoid certain stimuli, we also often reject e.g. foods based on their past exposure to disgusting things, even when the offending odors, tastes, and sights have been neutralized. This is quite useful, because microbes are not visible to the unaided human eye and contagion is a real thing. It's also a potential source of cognitive bias. Some children don't want to eat food that they have seen touched by non friends or kin, even though cooking subsequently sterilizes it. I think a bayesian statistician might call that a spurious association that fails to consider the effect of cooking to screen off known sources of contamination. Presumably this applies to the other domains where disgust applies, which I'll address shortly.

Many religions thus have rules about which interactions between objects make them unclean, and what rituals of cleansing can restore cleanliness. Leviticus 11 is a beautiful source of zany contagion laws. Touch a carcass, and you're unclean, but only until the evening. Pick up a carcass, and you'll also have to wash your clothes. If a crawling or flying bug falls into a ceramic pot, break the pot, it can't be cleaned. Bugs with jointed legs are cool though. Feel free to eat crickets and locusts. Seeds to be planted can touch dead bugs, but water that you pour on planted seeds can't. Et cetera. And we've all heard the anecdote about doctors refusing Semmelweis's insistence to wash their hands before medical procedures, because a gentleman's hands are never unclean.

More generally, humans have rituals of purification that apply to both disease and sin: baptism with holy water, anointing (abhisheka to Jains and Hindus) with milk, butter, yogurt, honey, and oils. Interestingly, I don't know of any cultures that cleanse with alcohol, which is an actual disinfectant, unlike yogurt, which spoils easily. In addition to washing and smearing, humans use smoke and incense to cover odors (not an effective epidemiological intervention).

Next, Lent is strongly associated with atonement for sins through sacrifice. The more you suffer, the better you're doing. Christians promote a self-critial mindset, recall their past selfishness, injustices, defiance, and obscenities. They sit in little rooms with old men and confess their shame.They inhibit their impulses and addictions, which are basal, animal, and akratic. They practice celibacy, they fast, and they impose dietary restrictions, on i.e. meats, caffeine, candy, or baked goods.Sexual abstinence is performed both because sex is pleasurable, and because it is associated with perversion and depravity (spousal abuse, exploitation, rape, incest, masturbation, zoophilia, cuckoldry). Catholics temporarily redefine fish to not be a meat, which apparently fools God.

There is much concern for conformity to orthodox rituals, and for which behaviors are permissible or taboo. They devote their time to prayer, and focus on their reverence, obedience, and faith in the authority of their deity and its church.

Most of that came from a lecture by Pinker on taboo language and an article by Haidt on his theory of moral intuitionism. There are some other concepts which I associate with Lent that I'll list now, followed by lists of associated adjectives, on the hypothesis that important psychological traits have strong lexical coverage. "They" will refer generally to religious people observing periods of sacrifice, self-critical reflection, or obedience.

• They have high standards:
  diligent, meticulous, exacting, perfecting, thorough, high standards

• The standards center around impulse control:
  self control, discipline, restraint, mildness, moderation, conservation,

• And denial of sensual comforts:
  sober, ascetic, abstaining, austere, sacrificing, refraining, modesty, chastity,

• And fear of supernatural authority:
  deference, reverence, veneration, obedience, meekness, piety, humility,

• They want to meet the standards:
  drive, purpose, focus, intent, aim, motivation, determination, commitment, conviction, resolution, vigilance

• Failure to meet their standards will be met with bad consequences, and is no casual, laughing matter:
  solemn, stoic, grave, somber, serious, mature

• They have respect for the virtue of attempting and or succeeding to meet their standards:
  strength, resilience, tenacity, endurance, perseverance, constancy, persistence,

• They endure their sacrifices willingly:
  patient, calm, composed, abiding, constancy

And a few stray thoughts that don't have lexical coverage: Along with fasting and impulse control comes a desire to consume few resources and to not burden others, self reliance. Also a general disdain for personal wealth and material possession. Rather than promoting open-mindedness, flexibility to change, and experimentation, Lent enforces conformity to established traditions (which might be the rational choice if personal experimentation does not produce fruits commensurately with invested effort).

If you actually want to adopt a Lent-based rational tradition, consider some of those points.

The idea that Christianity was born under a foreign military occupation and had to compromise with it & Islam didn't and went on to make it's own empire is correct.

But the author's assertion that Islam can be nothing but theocratic -"it lacks separation of church and state"- is far from accurate. In the first place, the first Muslim civil war was fought over the question of whether government was secular (Sunni's) or theocratic (Shi'a) and was resolved in favor of the secular side. The fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslims past and present theoretically & practically confirm secular over theocratic government is not a minor footnote, the author paints with a very wide stroke here.

Muslims did have institutions besides the basic Caliphate structure, in fact the Arabs borrowed quite heavily from the Roman/Byzantine tradition in the early (Umayyad) years, going on to absorb the Sassanid modes of government in latter (Abbasid) times. Successive Muslim kingdoms and empires mixed and merged those traditions with their own according to their specific tradition (Turkish, Berber etc) well enough to rule over vast swathes of the old world and their numerous peoples and traditions for well over a millennium, continuing to this day. So the claim that "Islam" lacked/s institutional ingenuity/flexibility is moot. All 'civilizations' have up and down periods, history is not so simple as to be explained from first principles yet.

He makes another inaccurate assertion; that Europeans left the Middle Easterners and co. in the dust because of "separation of church and state".

The advancements in science and technology the Europeans used to gain an edge with weren't hindered by the church by the sixteenth century or thereabout when the Ottomans began receding. In fact some of those discoveries were made by men of the church in the first place. My point being; church and state as in "political and religious power lying in separate hands" isn't what gave the Europeans an advantage, my own opinion is that geographic and ethnic factors played that role but that's a post of it's own so I'll stop here.

As an exercise, does "give unto Ceaser ..." explain why say, the Chinese succumbed (Unequal Treaties, Opium Wars)? Does democracy? The United Kingdom is both a democracy and fairly prosperous, but current china is an authoritarian 'People's Republic' and seems poised to be even more prosperous. Yes there are differences in scale but then wasn't Qing China -the guys who lost the Opium Wars- much larger and more populous than the British Isles back then too? Whatever it was that made the British beat the Chinese back then or makes China ascend so quickly today as to leave All of Europe combined let alone the UK in its dust, it's clear that simplistic answers like "Separation of Church and State" or "Favorite Ideology" are not sufficient if you want to say something meaningful about history.

It's a great book; I recommend it highly. (And it's on Libgen.)

"You can't reject absolutes without un-restraining certain particulars -that should remain just that- to replace it" is this a fair description of your position here Wei?

"old dead guys" is mind kill, and it sounds immature/impolite.

On the post itself, it'd be awesome if SIAI starts this in-house, something along the lines of semester long CFAR boot camp.

Hm. You seem to have edited the comment after I responded to it, in such a way that makes me want to take back my response. How would we tell whether the former group needs to more actively combat procrastination?

I would be surprised because it's significantly at odds with my experience of the relationship between procrastination and insight.