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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 3hr ago · Edited 2hr ago

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.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 4hr 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 🙏

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 14hr ago

Okay, I take it back, that is the OG ToaKraka I know, love and am slightly perplexed by, in a good way.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 17hr ago

Disclaimer: I did not look through all the literally thousands of proposed amendments.

I see you are getting lazy in your old age. The ToaKraka I knew would have at least read 500 of them.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 17hr ago

You are a braver man than I am. I might be able to get away with it (the walls are white), but I'm honestly not that strongly inclined to decorate. Maybe once I own my own place.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 17hr ago · Edited 17hr ago

See, FC, I don't have the time, nor do I care to write a 5 million word polemic that addresses the irrationality of every single religious, sect or cult on the face of the Earth. I think I have pointed out the mechanisms through which hundreds of millions or billions of people have been bilked or fleeced, and my conscience floats as light as a feather.

Your position appears to be that we must be falling for some other, unspecified grift. Only, why not specify it?

... Religion. Religion itself is the grift.

Since you will obviously disagree, I chose to start with examples that even you would find examples you would agree with.

Just because I can do this all day doesn't mean I want to do this all day. I have bodily needs that aren't rehashing the usual arguments ad-nauseaum, with a probability of you changing your mind that is a floating point error away from 0.

You seem to accept my operational definition of delusion. Then you ask me to apply it "rigorously".

Good rhetoric. Take a point. I think the implied argument is something like: "Your definition, applied consistently, would classify your own beliefs as delusions too."

But once again, you enjoy the benefit of implication, without making an argument I can engage with it. I can't rebut an argument that hasn't been stated. If you wants to argue that my belief in, say, scientific consensus on some contested empirical question constitutes a "fixed belief immune to updating," I'm genuinely happy to hear that case. Until it's made, I'm going to file this under "ominous foreshadowing that didn't pay off."

I gave examples of religious exploitation you claim don't apply to the Christians you know personally on this forum. Therefore I've "failed to provide" an example of how their delusion could be exploited. Therefore my claim that they are deluded (in the same sense as my clinical examples) is indefensible.

But this conflates two things that should be kept separate: exploitability and having been exploited.

Here's a toy analogy. Suppose I claim that a certain class of people systematically overestimate their driving ability - this is actually a well-documented cognitive bias where the majority of drivers rate themselves as above-average. Now suppose you respond: "Oh yeah? Show me an accident that I specifically caused due to overconfidence in my driving." This would be a strange objection. The point is about the cognitive architecture, not about whether any individual instance of the bias has caused identifiable harm to the specific person you're addressing.

Similarly, my point is not that every Christian has donated to a televangelist or converted to Mormonism. My point is that the cognitive mechanism that generates and sustains religious belief - specifically, the acceptance of extraordinary empirical claims on the basis of testimony, tradition, and subjective experience, with a fairly robust resistance to revision - is the same cognitive mechanism that makes people vulnerable to those exploits. The exploit is diagnostic of the mechanism. The absence of the exploit from your specific history doesn't mean the mechanism isn't there. How exacy am I supposed to know if you've done anything stupid because of your particular, potentially idiosyncratic beliefs? Do I look like God to you? I would have hoped he was more handsome, albeit not quite as articulate.

Suppose I argued that Atheists are all bloodthirsty murderers, and when questioned pointed to the 75-100 million murders from atheist regimes in the last century, and claimed your beliefs were exactly identical to theirs. I do not think you would consider this a valid argument, but if there's a difference between such an argument and what you're presenting here, I'm not seeing it. Perhaps you could point it out?

Would I consider that a bad argument?

Yes, duh. But here's the asymmetry: the claim about atheist regimes is a claim about what certain atheists did, not about a cognitive property that atheism itself entails.

Atheism is the absence of a belief - specifically the absence of theism. It doesn't, by itself, generate any positive empirical commitment that could be exploited. The Soviet state didn't murder people because atheism makes you susceptible to believing false things about kulaks. It murdered people for a complex of political, ideological, and economic reasons that were in no way entailed by the mere absence of belief in God. Nor is insane mass murder exclusive to atheism, because... most of history. I invite you to demonstrate that the average atheist is more likely to murder people than the average religious person. You will fail, but I would enjoy seeing you try.

Whereas my claim about religious belief is precisely about a cognitive property that religious belief does entail - namely, the acceptance of empirical claims (miracles, revelation, answered prayer etc etc) via methods that systematically bypass the kinds of verification we'd demand in other contexts.

This isn't an incidental feature of religion; it's constitutive of it. You can't be a Christian while remaining genuinely, symmetrically skeptical about the Resurrection in the same way you're skeptical about, say, claims for homeopathy. The belief structure requires differential standards of evidence. Religion stripped of unfounded empirical claims is simply philosophy, which is far less exciting.

So the analogy doesn't hold. One is a claim about behavior that some members of a group happened to exhibit. The other is a claim about a structural feature of the belief system itself.

I certainly agree that someone has a habit of making bad arguments. Sadly, I have much, much less time to write than I used to.

I also agree with your agreement about bad arguments, and I sympathize with a lack of time. And yet here you are, yet here I am. I must say that I do appreciate you attempting to take a stand instead of vanishing when challenged, I would be happy if you kept doing this, or at the very least acknowledge that you no longer wish to continue the debate.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 18hr ago · Edited 17hr ago

Denmark and Sweden are among Europe's least highly religious countries by Pew's 2018 typology, yet the Nordic countries continue to place near the top of global wellbeing rankings. That doesn't prove secularity causes better mental health. It does undercut any simple story that widespread disbelief is socially catastrophic.

"Religious people are at the forefront of science." Okay. Also, a Pew survey of AAAS scientists found 33% believe in God, 18% in a higher power, and 41% in neither, which is already substantially less religious than the general population. If you want the sharper number, Larson and Witham's survey of National Academy of Sciences members found roughly 92% rejected belief in God or a higher power. Individual religious scientists exist, obviously. Mendel was a friar, Collins ran the NIH. But that's the exception being abused to do the work of a rule.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/

A survey of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in May and June 2009, finds that members of this group are, on the whole, much less religious than the general public.1 Indeed, the survey shows that scientists are roughly half as likely as the general public to believe in God or a higher power. According to the poll, just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. By contrast, 95% of Americans believe in some form of deity or higher power, according to a survey of the general public conducted by the Pew Research Center in July 2006. Specifically, more than eight-in-ten Americans (83%) say they believe in God and 12% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. Finally, the poll of scientists finds that four-in-ten scientists (41%) say they do not believe in God or a higher power, while the poll of the public finds that only 4% of Americans share this view.

If being smarter and more scientifically capable makes you less religious, or vice versa, that is really not a point in favor.

More to the point: "religion uniquely reinforces honest behavior through the cultivation of unquestioning belief." I want you to sit with that sentence and poke at it for a bit. You have just identified the exact mechanism I object to - unquestioning belief - and presented it as a feature. That same cognitive substrate is what has driven documented obstruction of embryonic stem-cell research, explicit Catholic institutional opposition to IVF, and religiously motivated vaccine hesitancy in certain communities.

You can't neatly extract "unquestioning belief makes people cooperative and honest" while quarantining "unquestioning belief obstructs gene therapy trials." It's the same cognitive operation applied to different objects. To the extent that religious belief is not incompatible with leading a normal life, that is by virtue of the remarkable human ability to compartmentalize and ignore the annoying ramifications of their "sincere" beliefs.

The free-rider argument proves too much, and you've already spotted this. you mentioned Maoism in the same breath. Any sufficiently coercive ideology with strong ingroup enforcement produces cooperative, rule-following, trust-generating behavior. That's a point in favor of strong social institutions generally, not religion specifically. You're essentially arguing: "false beliefs that produce prosocial behavior are net positive." Fine. Then show me that religion is the uniquely optimal vehicle, not merely the incumbent with path-dependent lock-in. You haven't shown that. I doubt you can show that.

Give me a few tens of billions of dollars (that's pocket change), and I promise I will likely find a way to make humans more pro-social through merely physical interventions. Give me a few hundred billion (now we're talking about real money) and I'll stake my head on it.

You win no extra points for being sane and sad.

I'm not collecting points. I'm trying to have accurate beliefs about the world. An epistemically broken tool is a broken tool regardless of whether using it feels good. If I'm wrong about something, I want to know. You're describing a pill that makes me feel better by making me systematically worse at determining what is true. I've already told you I wouldn't take that pill unless the tradeoff was very, very favorable. You have not demonstrated the tradeoff is favorable. What. You have done is demonstrated that the incumbent system has measurable benefits while largely declining to engage with the costs I enumerated.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 18hr ago · Edited 17hr ago

There is a difference between noticing a pattern, and then ascribing it significance or meaning. Especially when the pattern is generated by a random, non-agentic process.

As I have said repeatedly, sanity and insanity are not binary states. Maybe "all" humans are biased, for evo-psych reasons, to have an overactive agent detector. Maybe this genuinely was adaptive in the ancestral environment. Maybe it serves some minor positive functions today, what of it?

At least Wikipedia says that:

Sanity (from Latin sānitās 'health; sanity') refers to the soundness, rationality, and health of the human mind, as opposed to insanity.

That sounds like a "sane" definition to me. You have claimed that your definition doesn't rely on logical reasoning, without forwarding what you actually think it relies on.

Since the definition I've endorsed itself relies on health, consider that health is also a spectrum. Being chubby with creaky joints and BO is, with minimal assumptions necessary, bad health.

But I wouldn't diagnose that person with "fat stinky slob disease" and have them involuntarily committed. I wouldn't apply for a detention certificate so I could force them to take ozempic.

Similarly, the average religious person is, per my operational definition, clearly insane. They are not maximally insane, like someone who thinks the lamp posts are speaking to them and ordering them to rip off their skin. Also, there is no pill to cure religious conviction, though we might be able to do something about temporal lobe epilepsy.

Even if rationalists on the internet tell you otherwise, human beings are not logical, and this is not actually a flaw

I am a rationalist on the internet. Who exactly is claiming that humans are perfectly logical in the first place?? Have I heard of them?

It is also clearly a "flaw". You have no given me any reason to believe otherwise. You might as well claim that "most cars have dents in the bodywork, therefore a car that was hit by a bus is not flawed". I can see glaring flaws in that argument, and I would not buy that car.

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self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi 19hr ago

I do not think a mainstream website asking new users to write a list of slurs in order to finalize their onboarding would go down for very well. By not very well, I mean that lawsuits are probably on the table. That includes when a moderator challenges someone to prove they're human.

If Suspicious_Catetpillar_522 refuses to use the n-word on command, you have narrowed them down to either a bot, or the average American lib.

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