self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
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A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4hr ago
Thank you. I'm glad we're in agreement.
Overall there’s a neglect of the ‘what’s the alternative’ problem.
People love to imagine [Fabricated Options] (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gNodQGNoPDjztasbh/lies-damn-lies-and-fabricated-options).
I’m not trying to make some grand point. Yes there are grand points to be made, but for most people migrating or working in sweatshops or whatever, it’s not a grand point, it’s an individual one.
Agreed. In a society where sweatshops are the only way they can financially stay afloat, shutting down the sweatshops means a return to the fields for subsistence agriculture. Don't let the bad become the enemy of the even worst. If the people you are trying to save are telling you they're not in need of saving...
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6hr ago
What did they produce in the last few hundred years that isn't the various forms of Dubai Chocolate (stinky vs not)?
You are still trying to force me into a claim so much dumber than my real one that I am half-tempted to accept it out of pity, the way one humors a confused child who has mistaken a pigeon for a parrot.
I did not say that all false beliefs are identical in content, origin, phenomenology, or social consequences. I did not say that the average Christian is clinically indistinguishable from a man trying to dig the MI6 transmitter out of his bone marriwnwith a spoon. I did not say that every religion is equally harmful/easy to exploit. I only said I find them equally laughable. You keep reaching for that version because it is easier to refute than the one I actually wrote.
My actual position is annoyingly moderate. Religion belongs on the same broad spectrum of fixed false belief as superstition, paranoia, overvalued ideas, and delusion, but in a milder, more culturally normalized, more socially buffered, and often less acutely impairing form. That is all. That is the claim. If you want to fight me, fight that one, not the straw homunculus you have assembled from indignation.
Your "what prank can you pull on us?" argument is a particularly bad detour, because exploitability is not the essence of irrationality. It is one possible consequence among many. A false belief does not become rational merely because it is not easy to monetize.
Suppose a man sincerely believes the moon is made of cheese. This belief is false. It is fixed. It is almost certainly resistant to the relevant evidence. It is also mostly inert. He will still wake up, brush his teeth, commute to work, and remember his anniversary. He may humiliate himself at dinner parties. He may post with great confidence on subjects that ought to humble him. But the fact that I cannot found a billion-dollar scam empire on lunar Camembert does not somehow promote him into the ranks of the epistemically elect.
If the Moon is too close and topically relevant, then please pretend that he holds this belief about a random celestial object 2 million light-years away. It doesn't particularly matter for my argument.
Likewise with phobias. A person can be pathologically afraid of spiders without being especially easy to grift. A person can have bizarre, rigid, maladaptive beliefs that only surface in narrow domains. "Can this belief be exploited by a prankster?" is not a serious criterion. It is a criterion you reached for because the salt example made the comparison uncomfortable.
And yes, obviously there is a difference between "this stranger threw salt at me and now I am doomed" and "a man two thousand years ago was God incarnate, and a long tradition with libraries, cathedrals, councils, and dead languages tells me so." Of course there is. One belief has vastly more social proof, prestige, and inherited scaffolding behind it. That matters. Out of respect for the fact that you have continued engaging with me, I will concede that not all religions are equally ludicrous in my eyes, though I consider are all ludicrous to some degree. This is the biggest concession you will get out of me.
A brand-new cult founded last Thursday by a charismatic lunatic with excellent cheekbones and piercing eyes has much less Bayesian cover than a religion that has survived centuries. Social consensus is evidence in the Bayesian sense. Not decisive evidence, not good enough to get you home, but evidence nonetheless. It makes the belief more understandable. It makes the believer less individually blameworthy. It makes the whole thing more stable and often less behaviorally explosive.
It does not make it true.
This is the part you keep trying not to notice. Cultural legitimacy is not a sacrament that transmutes bad epistemology into good epistemology. A polished falsehood is still a falsehood. A high-status delusion is still a delusion wearing robes and speaking in iambic pentameter.
Psychiatry already understands this, which is why psychiatry does not simply define mental illness as "being wrong about things." If we did, half the species would qualify before breakfast, 90% by dinner. The actual questions are practical ones. Is the belief fixed? Is it culturally incongruent? Does it cause disproportionate harm? Does it impair function? Can we intervene usefully? These are thresholds of remit, not revelations from Sinai about what counts as rational belief.
A mole and a melanoma are both unpleasant growths that do no good for you. Only one gets you rushed to oncology. This is not because the mole has attained ontological innocence or has become good for you. It is because medicine triages severity rather than pretending low-grade pathology has become health by popular acclaim.
Religion is similar. The average religious believer is not in my professional remit because he is usually functional, socially supported, and not trying to peel his skin off to get at the government microchip. This is not a concession that his beliefs are suddenly epistemically robust. It means only that psychiatry is a field of applied damage control, not a celestial customs office sorting healthy minds from unhealthy ones with metaphysical perfection.
And yes, selection pressure matters. Religions are, among other things, Lindy cults. The most brittle, virulent, self-destructive versions tend not to do well over long timescales. If your movement reliably persuades followers to castrate themselves, drink poison, or await the spaceship behind the comet on a date reality can falsify by Tuesday, you do not get a thousand years to refine the theology. The religions that survive are often those that have learned, explicitly or otherwise, to become harder to falsify, less immediately socially destructive, and more symbiotic with ordinary life.
That does not acquit them. It just means reality has already done some pruning.
Jonestown is a cult with the sharp edges still attached. Anglicanism is a cult whose sharp edges have been filed down over centuries until half the congregation is there for weak tea, social continuity, and the vague sense that one ought to be reverent around stained glass. The latter is obviously less dangerous. It does not follow that transubstantiation has become less silly at the molecular level.
Your atheist analogy fails for the same reason. "Atheist" is too expansive a category to do the work you want it to do. Stalinism was not merely atheism plus bad manners.
I will restate the point I consider obvious. Here it is: the murderous atheist regimes of the 20th century were not murderous because of their atheism. Their atheism was, at best, incidental - a byproduct of a broader ideological framework that happened to have excised God and replaced him with the State, History, or the Party. The killing followed from the positive doctrines, not from the absence of a belief. You cannot derive "shoot the kulaks" from "there is no God" without considerable additional scaffolding for the framework. For an existence proof, consider that I am an atheist and have murdered 0.000... kulaks.
In exactly the same way, prosperity-gospel hucksterism is not identical to theism as such. If your objection is that I am flattening all religious cognition into one blob, perhaps do not immediately flatten all irreligion into Pol Pot wearing a "There Is No God" pin.
You keep demanding a false binary. Either religion is exactly the same as florid psychosis, or else it belongs to some protected category of respectable belief that cannot be grouped with superstition, paranoia, magical thinking, or delusion at all. No. Reality is not obligated to fit your neat little bins. I have expended great effort into explaining the nuance here.
Some false beliefs are mild. Some are catastrophic. Some are culturally reinforced. Some are private and bizarre. Some are emotionally intelligible. Some arrive like malware. Some merely make you tedious at parties. Some get you exorcised. Some get you elected. They can still belong to the same family without being interchangeable.
That was my point from the beginning. It remains my point now.
So let me say it as plainly as I can:
No, I do not think the median churchgoer is equivalent to a floridly psychotic inpatient.
Yes, I do think the median churchgoer holds beliefs that are false, unusually resistant to empirical correction, and granted an extraordinary amount of deference because they happen to be old, common, and ornamented.
No, "it is not easy to prank me with this belief" does not rescue it.
No, the fact that some religious traditions are more sophisticated, adaptive, or socially beneficial than others does not move them out of the broad territory of irrational conviction. It just makes them better engineered examples of it.
And no, I do not need Mormon gold plates, Nigerian salt curses, medieval relic fraud, prosperity gospel, and Nicene Christianity to be identical in every respect in order to notice that they rhyme.
You seem to want a world where the only irrationality worth naming is the kind that sprints shrieking from table salt. Unfortunately, most human irrationality is much better dressed than that. It wears vestments. It has tenure. It quotes Aquinas. It donates to charity. It teaches its children to be kind. And when asked for evidence, it suddenly develops a passion for metaphor.
That it is sometimes benign (or not pathological to a degree we feel obligated to treat), sometimes socially useful, and often aesthetically superior to the alternatives does not make it sane.
It makes it successful. I hold it in contempt nonetheless, because I care about epistemic purity. Sue me.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
23hr ago
Embarrassingly, I did not heed the advice, and asked ChatGPT to create hypothetical kids for my girlfriend and I.
It's okay. In hindsight, I should have expected that sharing that essay would immediately prompt a few dozen people to try their hand at repeating my mistake. That is the downside of posting on rationalist/contrarian forums, everyone wants to touch the stove to see if it's actually hot. My burns were temporary, and you sound like you've made a full recovery 🙏
I am always slightly alarmed when you're in agreement with me, but thank you nonetheless.
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