Tag Archives: Religion

Loving Cranks to Death

By Robin Hanson · March 9, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (35)

From the latest Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion:

[David] Hume writes that clergy (at least those of radical sects) are inherently dangerous and that if allowed to compete with one another will inspire in their adherents "the most violent abhorrence of all other sects, and continually endeavor, by some novelty, to excite the languid devotion of [their] audience." He concludes that the solution is "to bribe their indolence, by assigning stated salaries to their profession, and rendering it superfluous for them to be farther active, than merely to prevent their flock from straying in quest of new pastures". Hume, an agnostic if not an atheist, takes the position that religion is not a public good but its opposite — a public bad — and that government intervention will avert the pervasive negative externality of religious controversy, which clergy create and that threatens public safety.

My colleague Larry Iannaccone:

Looking at Figure 1, one immediately spots the exceptionally low levels of religiosity in the Scandinavian countries and, conversely, the high level of religiosity in the U.S.  As predicted by [Adam] Smith, these extremes correspond to different market structures.  A single state-run (Lutheran) church dominates the market in every Scandinavian country.  In contrast, the United States enjoys a constitutionally mandated free-for-all in which hundreds of denominations compete and none has special status.

Eliezer a year ago:

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Augustine’s Paradox of optimal repentance

By Philip Goetz · March 1, 2009 4:09 pm · Comments (68)

Eliezer once wrote this about Newcomb's problem:

Nonetheless, I would like to present some of my motivations on Newcomb's Problem – the reasons I felt impelled to seek a new theory – because they illustrate my source-attitudes toward rationality. Even if I can't present the theory that these motivations motivate…

First, foremost, fundamentally, above all else:

Rational agents should WIN.

As I just commented on another thread, this is faith in rationality, which is an oxymoron.

It isn't obvious whether there is a rational winning approach to Newcomb's problem. But here's a similar, simpler problem that billions of people have believed was real, which I'll call Augustine's Paradox ("Lord, make me chaste – but not yet!")

All conservative variants of Christianity teach, in one way or another, that your eternal fate depends on your state in the last moment of your life. If you live a nearly-flawless Christian life, but have a sinful thought ten minutes before dying and the priest has already left, you go to Hell. If you are sinful all your life but repent in your final minute, you go to Heaven.

The optimal self-interested strategy is to act selfishly all your life, and then repent at the final moment. But if you repent as part of a plan, it won't work; you'll go to Hell anyway. The optimal strategy is to be selfish all your life, without intending to repent, and then repent in your final moments and truly mean it.

I don't think there's any rational winning strategy here. Yet the purely emotional strategy of fear plus an irrationally large devaluation of the future wins.

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Beliefs Require Reasons, or: Is the Pope Catholic? Should he be?

By Paul Gowder · November 26, 2008 11:00 am · Comments (26)

In the early days of this blog, I would pick fierce arguments with Robin about the no-disagreement hypothesis.  Lately, however, reflection on things like public reason have brought me toward agreement with Robin, or at least moderated my disagreement.  To see why, it’s perhaps useful to take a look at the newspapers…

the pope said the book “explained with great clarity” that “an interreligious dialogue in the strict sense of the word is not possible.” In theological terms, added the pope, “a true dialogue is not possible without putting one’s faith in parentheses.”

What are we to make of a statement like this?

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The Evil Pleasure

By Robin Hanson · November 4, 2008 8:00 am · Comments (41)

Pascal Boyer in Nature on religion:

One important finding is that people are only aware of some of their religious beliefs.  … For instance, experiments reveal that most people entertain highly anthropomorphic expectations about gods, whatever their explicit beliefs. … Research has shown that unlike conscious beliefs, which differ widely from one tradition to another, tacit assumptions are extremely similar in different cultures and religions. … Experiments suggest that people best remember stories that include a combination of counterintuitive physical feats … and plausibly human psychological features.  … Experiments show that it is much more natural to think "the gods know that I stole this money" than "the gods know that I had porridge for breakfast." …

Humans are unique among animals in maintaining large, stable coalitions of unrelated individuals, strongly bonded by mutual trust.  Humans evolved the cognitive tools to … gauge others’ reliability. … They can emit and detect costly, hard-to-fake signals of commitment. … When people proclaim their adherence to a particular faith, they subscribe to claims for which there is no evidence, and that would be taken as obviously wrong or ridiculous in other religions groups.  This signals a willingness to embrace the group’s particular norm for no other reason than that it is, precisely, the group’s norm.

We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people.  We feel an even deeper pleasure letting everyone know of this fact.  This feeling is EVIL.  Learn to see it in yourself, and then learn to be horrified by how thoroughly it can poison your mind.  Yes evidence may at times force you to disagree with a majority, and your friends may have correlated exposure to that evidence, but take no pleasure when you and your associates disagree with others; that is the road to rationality ruin. 

Added 6Nov: I didn’t mean to emphasize the size of the group you agree with.  The emotion is mainly tied to believing the same as an in-group, relative to an out-group.

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Intelligent Design Honesty

By Robin Hanson · September 11, 2008 6:00 am · Comments (77)

The excellent and famous philosopher Thomas Nagel on teaching intelligent design:

When … in response to the finding that the teaching of creationism in public schools was unconstitutional, the producers of creation science tried to argue that young earth creationism was consistent with the geological and paleontological evidence, … their arguments were easily refuted. … That is a good enough reason not to teach it to schoolchildren. ..

I agree with Philip Kitcher that the response of evolutionists to creation science and intelligent design should not be to rule them out as "not science." He argues that the objection should rather be that they are bad science, or dead science: scientific claims that have been decisively refuted by the evidence. … However, the claim that ID is bad science or dead science may depend … on the assumption that divine intervention in the natural order is not a serious possibility. …

So far as I can see, the only way to make no assumptions of a religious nature would be to admit that the empirical evidence may suggest different conclusions depending on what religious belief one starts with, and that the evidence does not by itself settle which of those beliefs is correct, even though there are other religious beliefs, such as the literal truth of Genesis, that are easily refuted by the evidence. I do not see much hope that such an approach could be adopted, but it would combine intellectual responsibility with respect for the Establishment Clause. …

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Disagreement is Disrespect

By Robin Hanson · September 5, 2008 6:00 am · Comments (59)

Consider these dueling bumper stickers:

Hate_is_not_a_family_value_2

Disagreement_is_not_hatred

Here religious conservatives do seem unfairly maligned: seeing a behavior as immoral is not at all the same as “hating.”  These folks also rightly seethe at how they are usually portrayed in popular film and TV, and at seeing their democratic ideals violated when even local voting majorities can’t prevent their kids from being taught evolution in public schools.  You can feel this resentment in the enthusiasm for Palin.  (Of course since I’m not religious about God, sexual preference, or democracy, this all bothers me lots less.)

But this does seem a handy opportunity to repeat that while disagreement isn’t hate, it is disrespect.  When you knowingly disagree with someone you are judging them to be less rational than you, at least on that topic.  (Judging them less informed or experienced by itself can’t create disagreement.)  It might be only a minor disrespect, if you think this disagreement suggests little about whether you’d disagree with them elsewhere.  But disagreement is disrespect, nonetheless.

Added: Wikipedia says hate speech is:

Speech intended to degrade, intimidate, or incite violence or prejudicial action against a person or group of people based on their race, gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, language ability, moral or political views, socioeconomic class, occupation or appearance (such as height, weight, and hair color), mental capacity and any other distinction-liability. [emphasis added]

How exactly do you disagree with someone’s moral views without degrading them?  Can you really say pedophelia is disgusting without degrading pedophiles?

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Suspiciously Vague LHC Forecasts

By Robin Hanson · August 10, 2008 12:30 pm · Comments (32)

Me in ’06:

You can get 80% of the improvement that prediction markets offer by using a much simpler solution: collect track records.  … When people make forecast-like-statements, write them down in a clear standardized form, and then check back later to see who was more accurate.

I’m at scifoo (Nature/O’Reilly/Google Science Foo Camp) and yesterday heard a talk about the Large Hadron Collider that will go live in a few weeks – and had a disturbing thought.  Odds are very good that within the next few years we will see news articles where bigshot physicists say a new LHC result vindicates a theory they’ve been pushing.  But today there are no public predictions by high-profile physicists stated precisely enough to be clearly scored for accuracy!  While weather, business, and sport forecasters commonly make scoreable probability forecasts, here are the sorts of forecasts bigshot physicists make:

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The Problem at the Heart of Pascal’s Wager

By Paul Gowder · August 9, 2008 6:00 am · Comments (16)

It is a most painful position to a conscientious and cultivated mind to be drawn in contrary directions by the two noblest of all objects of pursuit — truth and the general good.  Such a conflict must inevitably produce a growing indifference to one or other of these objects, most probably to both.

- John Stuart Mill, from Utility of Religion

Much electronic ink has been spilled on this blog about Pascal’s wager.  Yet, I don’t think that the central issue, and one that relates directly to the mission of this blog, has been covered.  That issue is this: there’s a difference between the requirements for good (rational, justified) belief and the requirements for good (rational, prudent — not necessarily moral) action.

Presented most directly: good belief is supposed to be truth and evidence-tracking.  It is not supposed to be consequence-tracking.  We call a belief rational to the extent it is (appropriately) influenced by the evidence available to the believer, and thus maximizes our shot at getting the truth.  We call a belief less rational to the extent it is influenced by other factors, including the consequences of holding that belief.  Thus, an atheist who changed his beliefs in response to the threat of torture from the Spanish Inquisition cannot be said to have followed a correct belief-formation process. 

On the other hand, good action is supposed (modulo deontological moral theories) to be consequence-tracking.  The atheist who professes changed beliefs in response to the threat of torture from the Spanish Inquisition can be said to be acting prudently by making such a profession.

A modern gloss on Pascal’s wager might be understood less as an argument for the belief in God than as a challenge to that separation.  If, Modern-Pascal might say, we’re in an epistemic situation such that our evidence is in equipoise (always keeping in mind Daniel Griffin’s apt point that this is the situation presumed by Pascal’s argument), then we ought to take consequences into account in choosing our beliefs. 

There seem to be arguments for and against that position… 

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Where Does Pascal’s Wager Fail?

By Utilitarian · August 3, 2008 6:00 am · Comments (65)

The topic of Pascal’s wager has been mentioned several times before on Overcoming Bias, most notably in Eliezer’s post on Pascal’s mugging. I’m interested in discussing the question with specific reference to its original context: religion. My assumption is that almost all readers agree that the wager fails in this context — but where exactly?

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Fear, God, and State

By Robin Hanson · July 14, 2008 6:00 am · Comments (17)

A stunning hypothesis from the latest Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

High levels of support often observed for governmental and religious systems can be explained, in part, as a means of coping with the threat posed by chronically or situationally fluctuating levels of perceived personal control. Three experiments demonstrated a causal relation between lowered perceptions of personal control and … increased beliefs in the existence of a controlling God and defense of the overarching socio-political system.  A 4th experiment showed … a challenge to the usefulness of external systems of control led to increased illusory perceptions of personal control. … A cross-national data set demonstrated that lower levels of personal control are associated with higher support for governmental control.

It seems we hope a stronger and more benevolent God or State will protect us when feel less able to protect ourselves.  I’d guess similar effects hold for medicine and media – we believe in doc effectiveness more when we fear out of control of our health, and we believe in media accuracy more when we rely more on their info to protect us.  Can we find data on which beliefs tend to be more biased: confidence in authorities when we feel out of control, or less confidence in authorities when we feel more in control?

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