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!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
11hr 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 🙏
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
22hr ago
Okay, I take it back, that is the OG ToaKraka I know, love and am slightly perplexed by, in a good way.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d 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.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d 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.
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.
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.
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.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d 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.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
The cat poem you quoted is even funnier in context, by the way, because that's a Southern Song poem. Song Chinese were absolute aiurophiles, and they even had cat contracts known as naomaoqi (納貓契) specifying the cat's obligations to its owner and vice versa, signed with a paw print. Here is such an example where the cat agrees to patrol tirelessly, catch mice, and leave the numnums alone.
I'm not surprised that the Song Chinese would have significant overlap with the preferences of "musical men" as my hypothetical/nonexistent Irish grandmother would put it.
Jokes aside, thanks for the context! I think it's a damn shame that I don't have the time or energy to make the investment that would let me maximally appreciate Chinese culture. The little I know is very appealing.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
See, I know plenty of ways to improve wellbeing that do not necessitate believing in clearly false things. Not social fictions, not coordination schema, I mean believing in claims that are, as far as I can tell, factually incorrect.
Moreover, I think that the cognitive distortions and irrational decision making induced by religious belief has deleterious longterm consequences. Science, technology and empiricism also make our lives better without having to believe in false propositions. If there was a pill that made me happier at the cost of becoming irrational, I wouldn't take it unless the tradeoff was very favorable. I would rather be sane and sad than happy in delusion.
Organized religion, specifically the institutional kind with the lobbying arms and the political coalitions, has repeatedly and successfully obstructed things like embryonic stem cell research, IVF access, gene therapy trials, and HPV vaccination uptake. These aren't edge cases - these are tractable causes of preventable suffering that got derailed because a sufficiently large number of people believe things that aren't true about ensoulment and the sanctity of gametes. The wellbeing benefits of religious belief, to the extent they're real, accrue mostly to the believer. The costs of organized religious epistemology are frequently externalized onto people who never opted into the belief system. And those costs are significant.
I think even basic utilitarian calculus would demonstrate that it is absolutely worth bulldozing the religious edifice when honestly accounting for the lost potential.
The juice is not worth the squeeze. I will not drink the Kool-aid.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Fair points. If I was less lazy, I would have linked Yudkowsky's post myself, it was definitely in my head.
If we phrase the distinction as a stuck prior, sensitivity to evidence, etc like Scott tends to, the difference does seem quantitative rather than qualitative.
That's why I throw up my hands and argue for a pragmatic approach instead of some clearly defined mathematical framework. Bayesian agents are, as far as I'm aware, allowed to have axiomatic priors. Reasonable ones will be exceedingly careful regarding which priors they accept as axiomatic or even those they contingent treat as axiomatic unless truly walloped with evidence.
(Mathematicians use axioms, but are open to reconsidering said axioms. Some things are merely axiom-ish)
I do not contest that religious people are capable of changing their minds. Conversions or apostasy does happen, albeit on the margin. The reason for my disdain is that largely that they started with little evidence and do not sufficiently update with the enormous amount of evidence to the contrary.
It would be trivial to find someone who is "high functioning religious", in the sense that they are devout, successful and also willing to consider empirical arguments when said arguments aren't directly opposed to their core religious beliefs. They might acknowledge the power of science and empiricism by default, but I shake my head when they I present them with RCT evidence of the inefficacy of prayer and they keep praying. At that point, I am content in noting the enormous amount of cognitive siloing involved, and washing my hands of the matter.
As I often do, I bring up the example of an uncle of mine who is an accomplished microbiologist while also believing in homeopathy (I think he's a bit religious, but let's ignore that for now). He applies standards of empiricsms rigorously in one context, and is specifically trained to apply it everywhere. He, however, does not apply it at home. If that's not irrational, I don't know what is.
There are many other kinds of cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning: the same people who claim that the question of God is indecidable through material evidence often happily accept what they deem as physical evidence in favor. Separate and non-overlapping magisteria? Only when convenient. The logically consistent stance would be that even an incontrovertible miracle is null evidence in favor.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
¿Porque no los dos?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I considered that. It's also explicitly forbidden in my tenancy agreement, which doesn't allow for the use of adhesives on walls.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
the gameplay is worse than the previous game due to Rockstar pursuing "immersion" over fun in various ways
While I've never played RDR1, I agree wholeheartedly. The second game wastes so much of my time. I get Rockstar's desire to flex both their auteurial taste and their massive development budget, but come the fuck on. I don't need a ten second animation everytime I skin a deer or pick up a bottle off a shelf. At the very least, give us a fast-forward button.
Unfortunately, I've been spoiled on the plot by virtue of just being around the internet too long, so I'm unlikely to come back to the game. Damn shame, the plot was interesting for the half a dozen hours I played, but I am categorically unwilling to tolerate that pace till the end.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I have a soft spot for classical Chinese poetry. Of course, I can only read the translations. It says something about me that my favorite is:
Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man.
Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.
Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.
Hey. I'm not trying to be an edgelord. I just like it.
Alternatively:
Night after night you used to massacre rats
Guarding the grain store so ferociously
So why do you now act as if you live within palace walls
Eating fish every day and sleeping in my bed?
(Very different authors)
I do not own a cat, though I my attitude towards them is mildly positive. But if I imagine a dog instead, it warms the chilly cockles of my heart. There's one lying on my feet, warming them while taking up half my bed. He snores and is very gassy, and I will sleep poorly, but I do not have the heart to move him. If that is not love, what is?
(I can imagine my future wife describing me in those terms.)
Fine, back to being an edgelord again:
Stroking the sword while lamenting the social realities
Though that's more of a seal than a poem. The calligraphy looks sick.
Then:
"Oh great sea, you are made of water."
"Oh horse, you have four legs."
"Oh beauty, you have large eyes and a mouth!"
I promise that this is very hilarious in context. Go read Reverend Insanity.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Gwern-senpai noticed me (again)!
This time, he restacked a Substack post of mine (the one about a regrettable decision to use AI to generate pictures of the children I wish I had), and shared it on his own private subreddit /r/Gwern (it's also private in the sense that you can only join or view it after being whitelisted).
(The previous incident was some kind of link roundup he maintains on his site. It took me some digging to figure out why Substack's analytics claimed that I was getting traffic from gwern.net)
I had to shown up and gush about it, though he immediately congratulated me on my expedition into uncharted AI-psychosis territory. I believe that is mostly a joke, but for the sake of completeness, I told him that it was better described as an AI-mediated acute stress reaction. Look, neither diagnosis is in the DSM, I get to call it whatever I like. I am definitely not crazy, ChatGPT says so itself.
As achievements go, this is the rare kind that is both incredibly niche but also incredibly important (to me). I wish I could frame it on the wall. If I can't do that (my landlord is not accommodating of any holes that weren't there when I moved in), then I will come here to brag instead.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Ah. You. You do not have the power to make me engage with you after you've annoyed me.
I think it is abundantly clear that I am unusually willing to engage in debate and spend an immense amount of effort in elaborating on my arguments, usually in good faith. That includes people I earnestly disagree with or those who dislike me.
I think that is evidence that someone who still manages to annoy me into disengaging is more likely to be in the wrong than I am. I think I was sufficiently clear and took great pains to make my position clear, but as Yudkowsky said, you can't win an argument with a rock, at least not if you expect a written concession. You can't even get the rock to admit that your position is internally consistent and coherent, even if it disagrees with the premises. I would still rather argue with the rock.
But what do I know? Let the court of public opinion be the judge, and let it make a ruling in-absentia. I'm not interested in showing up for this hearing. I hang out and chat here because I like to, not because I am obliged to.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
This makes me think there might be a cleaner line between "true delusion" and the other two proposed categories than I had initially expected. Why not consider the "you can't empathize your way into it" criteria as a (if not the) major boundary of the concept?
Because the ability to empathize is subjective, helplessly so. And just because you think you can empathize with someone doesn't mean you are accurately simulating their inner cognition.
I can try and empathize with an octopus. I can try and imagine having tentacles, but I do not think I could capture the qualia of an octopus even if I tried my best. I can dream of being a butterfly, but that is not the same as actually being a butterfly.
Alternatively, a society of autistic people might be fully functional (if they're high functioning autists). They might have severe deficits of theory of mind and can't actually understand the way that a neurotypical person in their midst actually feels. They might well call him broken or insane. Or a religious enclave might consider an unbeliever in their midst to be the crazy one, and feel very confident in their belief.
The autists might be able to, after a great deal of empirical research, be able to accurately predict the behavior of neurotypical people. Actually autistic people do often learn how to "mask", but passing as neurotypical does not necessarily make them neurotypical. Similarly, psychiatrists can predict the behavior of the psychotic (to a degree), even if we do not "understand" them in the Jasperian sense.
I am not an expert on phenomenology, but I do not fully agree with Jasper and his supporters. I think I can empathize with the insane or the religious, at least to some degree, even if I do not agree with them. Am I right? I don't know. Who does? On what grounds?
Considering both the Christians and the salt-based curse believers, both seem to be engaged in perfectly normal cognition - that is, I suspect that what both groups are doing is reasoning off of the apparent beliefs of people they trust at some point in their pasts. This is partially captured in the cultural congruity aspect, but seems distinct.
It is still a kludge. I would say that the our understanding of the universe is at a point where we can look at both the salt-aversive and the typical Christian and confidently say that both are incorrect. The world simply does not behave the way their beliefs would imply it does. The evidence is abundant, there are anti-cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see.
Now, social consensus is evidence, in the Bayesian sense. It makes holding erroneous beliefs more defensible, or at least more understandable, than when they arise in a vacuum. A black person in America might well believe that thousands of black people are unjustly shot by the popo on an annual basis, because of media bias and their own in-group consensus. I would not call that a central example of delusion, it is possible for people to just be plain old wrong because of the bad luck of existing in an environment that does not optimize for truth. I just think that the evidence against the claims of the typical religion is even stronger, but that is more of a quantitative difference than a qualitative one.
("What evidence filtered evidence?")
If I was less lazy, I'd expand on the implications of/for Bayesianism. But the delusional, in the standard psychiatric sense, can be modeled as having stuck priors that do not update on new evidence. Scott has discussed this with more depth and rigor than I can ape.
Conversely, I could imagine a devout Christian hitting his head and suddenly losing all belief in the immaterial. Despite his beliefs coming closer to what I expect to be correctness, I find it very easy to rate him as less sane than the curse believers - something has clearly gone wrong with his cognition in a way that I cannot model as reasoning in the normal sense.
I disagree! I see it as the equivalent of percussive maintenance, sometimes a sufficient shock to the system can break it out of a maladaptive pattern.
Within psychiatry, consider ECT. Let's say you're depressed and think you're an awful human being who deserves to die. I take you, put you under anesthesia, then induce seizures in your brain through the application of electric voltage.
You wake up, you no longer feel depressed, and you no longer want to kill yourself. Do you think that an electric shock is a valid argument against their position? Nonetheless, they're doing better, they're more functional at the very least. I would happily say that the process has made them more sane.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
The definition I'm working from is the one I laid out above: an incorrect fixed belief that is immune to updating on empirical evidence. Of course, the sufferers from said delusion often will claim to have empirical evidence in favor, but said evidence is, shall we say, scanty.
If you want me to believe in the existent of an Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omnibenevolent Deity, then firstly, I would expect the world to look rather different than it does. If you want to explain away the discrepancies, then I expect more than a book compiled from the accounts of questionably educated Bronze Age nomads. How convenient, that the miracles dry up when cameras and the internet arise. Maybe AI video will cause a second Renaissance. I live in hope.
If we're as laughably deluded from your perspective, what's the equivalent prank you can pull on us?
See. I'm a rather nice person, if I say so myself. I have no intention of making a viral TikTok channel. I also do not, to the best of my knowledge, pull "pranks" on the delusional. I do not convince manic patients to give me their money, grannies with dementia to write me into their will or ask hot women with BPD to sleep with me while they're splitting and consider me the best doctor to ever live (with one notable exception, but let's not talk about my ex).
Must I imagine some? Very well. I might consider opening a church and appoint myself pastor. I might make the (reasonable) case that God rewards devotion with material reward, including money and success. I might even call it a prosperity gospel.
I might then convince my eager, gullible flock that God demands that they pay for my private jet. Trickle down economics backed by theological currency, as we say in the business.
Oh.
Wait.
You mean to say that my entirely hypothetical prank is... real? In the year of your lord 2026? Huh.
I guess I'll fall back to my backup plan, finding a few gold tablets and asking ChatGPT to translate ancient Egyptian papyri to support claims of ancient Jewish settlement in the Americas. Surely no one's thought of that one. If all else fails, I'm sure describing a very real journey around the world on the back of a flying horse will do the trick. I might not even need to leverage my mild fame as a niche scifi author.
I hope you get my point. I don't know if the kinds of people who found and spread religion are more likely to be grifters or mentally ill, or maybe both.
I could elaborate further, I could do this all day, but you have a distressing tendency to vanish whenever I make an effort post calling out a bad argument you make, for n>>1. Why bother? You can go read some archived Atheist vs Theist Grand Debate, or watch something on YouTube. I'm too old for this shit, I just sigh at perceived silliness and get on with my life while doing my job as best as I can. If your God did his job, I wouldn't have to do mine, and I could definitely use a break.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
You are correct. I'm not making an argument against solipsism, I'm explaining the difficulties now associated with identifying if a string of text online was written by a member of Homo sapiens sapiens.
A day in a psych ward will disabuse you of the notion that there's a bright line between sanity and insanity.
Just to start, we have distinctions between a true delusion, a fixed belief and an overvalued idea. Said distinction is incredibly subjective and often artificial.
The overvalued idea is the most familiar. Someone becomes absolutely convinced their neighbor is sabotaging their career, or that 5G towers are causing their migraines. The belief is wrong, probably, and they hold it with more intensity than the evidence warrants.
However: if you corner them and argue carefully enough, they squirm a little. They might say "well, I suppose I could be wrong, but..." There is still some kind of cognitive negotiation happening. The belief is upstream of their reasoning, but their reasoning is not entirely offline. Lots of people you know have overvalued ideas. You might have some. I might have some. Most of the time, they're like the mites that live on your skin, not beneficial, but not so debilitating you'll inevitably run face first into the consequences of your poorly founded beliefs.
The fixed false belief turns the dial up. Now there is no squirming. The person is simply certain. A deeply depressed patient knows, with the same confidence you know your own name, that they are a fundamentally evil person who has ruined everyone around them. You cannot argue them out of it because it does not feel like a belief to them - it feels like a perception, like reporting what they can plainly see. The fixedness is the thing. Evidence just bounces off.
I emphasize false fixed belief, because you might well believe that you have 5 fingers per hand. Someone might show up and make a really convincing argument to the contrary. Maybe they claim to show that Peano arithmetic is flawed, or that you have somehow grossly misunderstood what the number 5 means, or what counts as a finger. You are unlikely to give a shit, and for good reason.
(There are the usual "proofs" that pi is equal to 4, or that 1=2. The mathematically unsophisticated might never be able to find out the logical error, but they usually do not actually end up convinced.)
The true delusion (what Karl Jaspers called the primary delusion) is something stranger still. It is not just a fixed false belief. It has a particular quality of being un-understandable from the inside out. A man wakes up one morning and suddenly knows, with crystalline certainty, that he has been chosen to decode messages hidden in highway signs. There is no paranoid personality that led here, no trauma that makes it psychologically legible. It arrived fully formed, like a piece of foreign software running on his brain.
(Look up autochtonic delusions for more)
Psychiatrists following Jaspers say you can't empathize your way into it. You can understand a depressed person thinking they're worthless, but you cannot really follow the phenomenological path to "the license plates are speaking to me specifically."
Other than that, delusions are completely immune to evidence, and also culturally incongruent. Put a pin in that till I come back to it, it's very important.
The clinical rule of thumb: overvalued ideas yield under pressure, fixed beliefs are immovable but emotionally coherent, and true delusions feel less like conclusions the person reached and more like axioms that were simply installed.
You know, I tried my hand at writing a few Koans about psychiatry a while back. I might as well share one I'm fond of:
A patient who had recovered from psychosis came to Master Dongshan and said, "For two years I believed the government had implanted a transmitter in my skull. I was as certain of this as I am now certain it was a delusion. The feeling of knowing was identical in both cases. How am I to trust any of my beliefs ever again?"
Master Dongshan said, "You are asking perhaps the most important question in all of epistemology, and I notice you arrived at it not through philosophy but through suffering."
The patient said, "True enough, but forgive me for not finding your statement very helpful."
Master Dongshan said, "No. That's why you paid me to prescribe you meds, not for a lecture on philosophy. But consider: everyone around you walks through life with that same unjustified feeling of certainty. They've just never been given reason to doubt it. You now know something that most people do not. You know that the experience of being right and the fact of being right are completely different things."
The patient said, "I have.... issues with framing this as some kind of gift. It feels more like a nightmare. I can no longer trust my own experience."
Master Dongshan said, "You have described the starting point of all genuine inquiry. Most people never reach it. They are too comfortable inside the feeling of knowing to notice it is only a feeling."
The patient was not comforted, but was, in a way he found no use for, enlightened.
Okay. You can take the pin out now.
Notice the emphasis on culture context. If you've ever mindlessly scrolled TikTok or Insta reels, you might have seen a "prank" where this second-gen Nigerian citizen in the UK follows random older first-gen immigrants, introduces himself, then declares that "he was sent from Nigeria to kill you."
He then makes some weird gesture with his hands, takes out a pinch of salt from his pocket and throws it at the victim. They immediately panic, though the response varies from running away screaming, running at him screaming with the intent to do bodily harm, or to pull out a Bible and chant verses while weeping.
(Hardly a once-off. It seems a concerningly large number of elderly Nigerians carry a convenient pocket Bible for such occasions)
He doesn't pull out a knife, he's unfailingly polite, he just throws salt at them, which I'm given to believe is supposed to represent some kind of black magic curse.
Can a pinch of salt hurt you? Not unless you're a slug.
You might feel like laughing at these silly, superstitious fools. Haha, they think witch doctors can hurt them!
If you (for a general you) are a Christian, or any other religious denomination, you are exactly as laughably deluded from my perspective. You hold what, to me, is a clearly unfounded belief that is immune to updating on empirical evidence. That saint who rolled their eyes and spoke in tongues? You don't see people getting beatified for that these days, after we've got EEGs and research on temporal lobe epilepsy.
Unfortunately, if we used this perfectly reasonable standard for insanity, the patients in the psych ward would outnumber those outside. Grudgingly, we keep track of whether the delusions you hold are common, especially for your cultural milieu, and whether they are causing you disproportionate harm. Also, can we do anything about it? Is there a drug I can give some deeply religious pensioner that'll stop them from believing in God? Not that I'm aware of. If they're peeling off their skin to get at the hidden chip inserted by MI6, then I at least have some hope that risperidone will help.
Wait till you see the nonsense involved with evaluating delusional disorder. Othello syndrome involves feelings of immense jealousy and suspicion that your partner is cheating on you, based on little evidence. Simple enough?
And then you see someone who has a seemingly sweet, loving and faithful wife, who gets diagnosed with Othello syndrome, and then discover that said wife was actually cheating on them all along. It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.
How the fuck is a psychiatrist supposed to know for sure? We simply persevere, and it mostly works. When it doesn't, it makes the papers and we get served lawsuits.
If someone has Othello syndrome and makes their partner so annoyed that they end up cheating, does that retroactively invalidate the diagnosis? You can tell me, after you find a time machine. I'm sure plenty of philosophers have made a living writing about Gettier cases, but I'm not a professional philosopher, and I don't let philosophy get in the way of fixing people.
Yes, same day as the essay I wrote about hanging out in the outpatient clinic. There was a lot more that happened which I haven't had the time or energy to cover. I writeup a mere fraction of the weird shit I see in my career.
It was the clearest-cut example of Cotard delusion I've ever seen. One for the textbooks. The fact that it has a name in the first place is also evidence of it being more than a one-off idiosyncracy (not that I know if my colleagues read Sacks, I haven't).
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I'm not claiming that there's zero value from making laws that are difficult to enforce.
Littering leaves litter. Cheating prior to LLMs? Easier to catch. There is far more clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing, or at least some kind of accessible physical evidence that can be used to adjust priors.
This is much harder when the standard is any use of an LLM at all. How do you know? How can you even find out, short of someone being incredibly sloppy or confessing?
It's closer, quantitatively and qualitatively, towards writing legislation against thought-crime without some kind of futuristic machine that can actually parse thoughts. You might have a law on the books saying it's illegal to jerk off while thinking of minors, but even if you catch someone with their pants down, they can just claim they envisioned Pamela Anderson. How can you tell?
Plenty of rules for the Motte hinge on subjective assessments by us mods. But it would be absurd to add one that says that you can't swear aloud after reading a comment from someone you don't like.
The worst part is that false accusations will run rampant. That increases moderation load, and that effort would be better spent elsewhere.
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.
More options
Context Copy link