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You do a lot better with religion if you don't treat it as primarily a system of belief, but as a combination of a set of practices and a community that engages in them. Treat the beliefs as a secondary aspect and their inconsistancies and absurdities don't matter so much. That is, if people are making sacrifices to propitiate the gods, it is the act of sacrifice, not whatever beliefs the practioners hold about the ontological status of their gods, that is the important feature. I'm not sure how this impacts the argument for or against simplicity, except that culturally embedded practices tend to be harder to describe (more complex) than abstract systems of belief.

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"Our theory explains why simplicity is so highly desirable. To understand this there is no need for us to assume a 'principle of economy of thought' or anything of the kind. Simple statements, if knowledge is our object are to be prized more highly than less simple ones because they tell us more; because their empirical content is greater; and because they are better testable." -Karl Popper

The reason we want more testable models with greater empirical content is so that we can prove them wrong. If our model is wrong, and we don't yet know how to fix it, what do we gain from continuing to use and build upon it? the statement "You're wrong because your model is too simple. But I'm not going to tell you what your model is missing, at least not in a clear enough way to help you improve your model" is completely valid and useful in that it points out a problem. A solution would be nice too, but thats not always an option and not a necessary component of the scientific method.

Do you think the reason-based choice bias effects our ability to accept a criticism of a model when a better solution isn't included/available?

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where do you think Dawkins discusses (and justifies) his understanding of religion?

in the first half of the god delusion dawkins exhibits at least passing familiarity with the work of anthropologists such as pascal boyer and scott atran. but during the second half he pretty much ignores this and focuses specifically on abrahamic fundamentalism as the sine qua non of religion. my review of the book lays it out....

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razib: regarding The God Delusion, where do you think Dawkins discusses (and justifies) his understanding of religion? Which chapters (or page rangers)? I don't remember much of this kind of discussion at all, and glancing back at the table of contents online to refresh my memory shows nothing that rings a bell.

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robin, the general point is correct about what my point was. most human cognition is not explicit/conscious, and even explicit/conscious cognition is strongly shaped by implicit/unconscious variables. this is surely true of the nerds which populate these boards on a qualitative level, though i think quantitatively there is a difference insofar as OB readers probably pull a lot more of the weeds out of their mental garden on a regular basis than is the norm (part of this is probably due to there being less fertile soil in the first place, but part of it is a propensity toward this sort of self-criticism and training).

on the specific point re: religion, it is important to model religion because so many people care so much about it (and will use it as an *excuse* for war or killing themselves, etc.). and, you have another problem insofar as most religious people today explicitly adhere to the idea that their views are coherent and systematic. in fact, they believe that there are contradictions between their own systematic coherent views and those of others, and that these differences are important enough to coalesce around to further collective action. not only will people claim that they have a coherent and systematic worldview, but, they imbue these presumed worldviews with ontological importance and are emotionally attached to them. in short, religion names normal cognitive biases and processes, and supercharges them with very powerful emotional valences.

so, it is very easy i think for some atheists to confuse this ardor for something real which may be taken as an important variable in modeling human action. but, i think the cognitive psychology of religion suggests that these are shallow notional markers. e.g., most christians do not comprehend the athanasian creed to any substantive degree, despite disagreements predicated on its comprehension leading to violence and mass conflict.

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razib, I think the core of your observation is that many, perhaps most, people just don't put much of a premium on the coherence of their beliefs across different topics. It is jut not very important to them to have a coherent picture within which explicit beliefs and the implied beliefs which would make sense of their practices all fit well. I think this is true and helps us to understand many otherwise puzzling practices in many areas.

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I agree that this sort of foolishness happens a lot, but I think it's more a case of many people have a tendency to reduce multi-dimensional concepts to one dimension. It has no particular relation to religion.

yes. but, an important issue is whether you model a behavior as a continuous quantitative trait or a discrete meristic one with a few major morphs. religiosity and IQ are i think in the former category; many personality traits seem to be more in the latter. i state this because it looks like for personality we are finding quantitative trait loci of large effect (dopamine related), but for IQ we can not find these.

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On a related note, I wish that Harris' and Dawkins' had explicitly said (in their respective works), "this is my simplified model of religion which I recognize is very different from the model that most religious people have but which I believe (for reasons discussed below ...) is a good model for the aspects of religion and its relation to society that I am going to treat."

dawkins comes close to this in the god delusion. in fact, the first half the book is a relatively competent examination of various dimensions. the second half just pretends though that it is one dimension for the purposes of refutation.

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I agree that this sort of foolishness happens a lot, but I think it's more a case of many people have a tendency to reduce multi-dimensional concepts to one dimension. It has no particular relation to religion. It's one of many general cognitive tendencies, just like the tendency to prefer anecdotal data from acquaintances over much larger amounts of aggregate (albeit faceless, impersonal) data.

Of course, as others have noted, reduction is absolutely necessary in most interesting cases, and is highly desirable when done properly. It's very rare though that reducing to just one dimension yields a useful model that makes good general predictions. It might yield good predictions and have good explanatory power in a narrow domain though, so it's not necessarily always a bad thing, but to assume that it is a good general model because it captures one important dimension is sheer idiocy.

On a related note, I wish that Harris' and Dawkins' had explicitly said (in their respective works), "this is my simplified model of religion which I recognize is very different from the model that most religious people have but which I believe (for reasons discussed below ...) is a good model for the aspects of religion and its relation to society that I am going to treat." I think they could make a good argument to that effect, which would obviate the many objections that they are ignorant of religion (which they are) and get those people who ignore them because they think their model is oversimplified to actually engage with the valid points they are making, many of which do just concern belief and the consequences of belief.

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Only people who know nothing about religion think that religion is nothing but belief

see my interlocutor "Reality Bites" on the linked post. this is not atypical. many non-religious people have a tendency of reducing religion to one dimension or parameter. e.g., "religion is about group identity." "religious is about belief." "religious is about fear of death."

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It's also true that "bracketed into the term 'atheist' are people with very different cognitive outlooks and frames ...". It is true pretty much any time you group people together based on qualities other than "having the same cognitive outlook and frames ...". Isn't this obvious, common knowledge?

Only people who know nothing about religion think that religion is nothing but belief (i.e., doesn't include shared rituals, morality, history, worldview, prejudices & biases, culture, etc.).

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Don't say "You're wrong because your model is too simple". How do you know what's too simple? Say "you're wrong because you mispredict X".

It seems unlikely that very many models are too simple. It seems like they're probably too complicated, in fact. In many cases, they're trying to explain things on the wrong level and have incorrect unstated assumptions.

Much like the earth-centric models of astronomy aren't too simple - they're way more complicated than the heliocentric gravitational model.

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also, how i view religion, is a very abbreviated post which outlines the general outlines of my mental model of religion.

And for the record I was a teen cultist and my dad and brother were/are church pastors.

one hypothesis which i think needs exploration is the possibility that bracketed into the term "religious" are people with very different cognitive outlooks and frames who trade in the same nominal semantic currency and so are not aware of the very radical difference in their cognitive gestalt when it comes to the religion which they presumably share. i have a hunch that many highly textual and theologically oriented religionists are actually much more like atheists than they are like the vast majority of religious people. i also suspect that a disproportionate number of religious professionals and writers of books outline the nature of religion in an apologetic manner fall into this category.

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and to be explicit, i do much prefer the company of OB readers and singulitarians than i do "normals." the set of axioms which i have intersects with this group to a great extent and the clarity of the reasoning process is satisfying. that being said, i have seen in my own confusion as to the behavior of sincere religious people an echo of the tendency to project onto to other humans my own bias toward systematic coherency.

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For social scientists I think there is actually an advantage in having a less powerful intuitive understanding of human behavior - it helps us notice things that need explaining.

yes. this may be so.

My experience is that people who complain about the 'simplicity' of the explanations for various human behaviors are often reacting to the implicit suggestion that people who engage in those behaviors are stupid, foolish, or motivated by unreasonable emotions.

right, but that's not me.

"What is an experimental prediction that you think you make differently from me?"

to be explicit about it may atheists have a view of religion which mirrors their own rational models of the world premised on clear and distinct axioms. some religionists, generally the professionals and "religon nerds," are also invested in this model. many religionists will agree with the characterization that their religion is an operation of inferences from a particular set of premises (e.g., the lord's prayer, the bible, the vedas, etc.). i think these assumptions lead to false predictions.

and yes, social science is the light in the darkness of our ignorance.

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I think Razib has a fundamentally good point about the distinction between scientific inquiry and the attempt to reduce irrational behavior in society. One can study religion or bias in society without making normative judgments. To that extent at least, Razib's post is a helpful criticism of some readers of Overcoming Bias and some singulitarians, who don't seem to get much deeper in their analysis of apparently more biased people than saying "less rational than me, bad!"

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