Stupid Questions March 2015

Last time I donated to the Against Malaria Foundation, I got a thank-you email that referred to me by name and said the amount of the donation. If you need people to prove to you that they donated, they could forward you the email. GiveDirectly also sends thank-you emails, but they don't say the amount, so pointing the donations at AMF would probably be better for your purposes.

You could use an intermediate step, like Charity Science's fundraisers (I'm sure there are plenty of other places that allow you to do this if Christmas/Birthday/Event doesn't fit your needs) so you can see how much is being donated. Then when you donate the whole lot to Givewell etc. at the end you can ask for a receipt/show it on your bank statement.

Weird things can happen, during meditation. Me, I've never experienced anything beyond boredom or relaxation – except this one time I went to a synagogue with my Sunday school class when I was 15-18 years old or so. I wasn't even trying to meditate ( I don't think I even knew meditation existed back then), but I was bored out of my mind since – not knowing any Hebrew – I couldn't follow any of it. So I must've fallen into a meditative state, but what I felt at the time (or rather, just after, because that's all I remember), was a feeling of immense gratitude at having been in the presence of God. I didn't talk about it with anyone and I didn't become Jewish, but really I should have, the experience was that strong. But I was shy, and I didn't want to call attention to myself. (I'm an atheist now, in case anyone wonders.)

Yes, it's normal. There are lots of directions you can go, and the direction (I think) you're talking about is a nice one.

I tend to use mascara mainly since it can be subtle or more dramatic and since I have glasses, it helps bring out my eyes behind them. Mascara is conveniently easy, not too many colors to choose from, not too much effort required to apply, and it generally looks good on everyone. I've found that my attractiveness increases significantly with just adding mascara, so I find it worthwhile. If there's a feature you want to play up, it's good to find a nice way to enhance it.

Light makeup, as far as I can tell, usually refers to a little mascara, a bb cream or light foundation, and maybe a bit of lipgloss or tinted chapstick.

I wear makeup regularly (I am a lady). "Light" makeup usually means natural-looking and easy to apply. The highest-yield stuff would be something to make your skin look smooth and even (foundation, tinted moisturizer or BB creme), something to make your lips pretty (gloss looks natural and is easy to apply although lipstick is longer-lasting and less sticky), and maybe a little eye makeup (this is easier to screw up but not really that hard; start with drugstore mascara and eyeliner pencil and consult Youtube if you want to take it any further). I'm happy to recommend specific products but a lot depends on your complexion.

Edit: Forgot to mention, if you have acne at all, spend money on a good concealer that matches you skin, Dermablend is the shit, this is probably worth it for gents as well as ladies

My wife is very minimalist at it, and she is saying the basic rule is, she has a wider mouth and smaller eyes so she wears eye liner and eye shadow and no lipstick to balance their size, and she would do it the other way around if her features were proportioned the other way around. I suggested her foundation as I find the illusion of perfect complexion the most attractive part of make-up illusions but she told me it is not healthy for the pores and suchlike.

This answer here: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-website-for-beauty-related-products Lead me to here: http://www.sephora.com/sephoratv/htfs-sephora-makeup.jsp

I think I saw a subject-blind study somewhere that indicated men prefer light makeup to no makeup despite their claims to the contrary.

Punishment as moral desert, and punishment as incentive lead to different results in some cases.

I think the evolutionary origin of ideas of "deserving punishment" is basically a need to incentivise others not to defect against you, but the actual intuition in most people's heads is just to assign utility to the suffering of "bad people" in some proportion with how bad whatever they've done is. Also the concept of free will as most people use it is pretty confused and gives confusing results if you have it interact with other concepts like "incentives".

There's a radiolab episode about blame that glances this subject. They talk about, for example, people with brain damage not being blamed for their crimes (because they "didn't have a choice"). They also have a guest trying to explain why legal punishment should be based on modelling probabilities of recidivism. One of the hosts usually plays (is?) the "there is cosmic blame/justice/choice" position you're describing.

Likely I am missing something. What am I missing?

To explicitly answer your question: I don't think you're really missing anything. I suspect you just haven't fully internalized the idea that other people are using "merit"/"desert"/"deserve" in a different sense to you. (You believe it, but don't alieve it, in the local jargon.)

Edit: for what it's worth, I think your understanding of "merit"/"desert" is the more robust one, precisely because it holds up better in the face of determinism. The lay meaning ("cosmic justice") looks pretty shaky if one starts asking oneself questions like "Why is a paedophile whose paedophilia is caused by a brain tumour intrinsically more deserving of leniency than someone who's just always been a paedophile?".

Let's make sure we're talking about cryptographic hashing functions.

Let's say I make a prediction that Barack Obama is a werewolf. I don't want anyone to know I've made this prediction, because otherwise the Secret Werewolf Police will come and eat me, but I do want to lord it over everyone after the fact.

I take the string "Barack Obama is a werewolf" and I put it through a hashing function, (for purposes of this example, the hashing function MD5). This produces the output 37ecb0a3164e6422bedc0f8db82e45ec. The original string about Barack Obama is not recoverable from this output, because MD5 is a lossy function, but anyone else putting that string through the MD5 hashing function will get the same output. The hash output is like a fingerprint for the original string.

So if I put 37ecb0a3164e6422bedc0f8db82e45ec in a public place a year before Barack Obama transforms into a werewolf on live television, after the fact I can give people the original string and they can verify it for themselves against the hash output.

I use a Chrome plugin for most tasks that involve basic encoding of text values. (If I'm honest, I mostly use it for rot13, and more exotic uses aren't that common). There are also online hash generators for different hashing functions. Some popular hashing functions for this purpose are MD5 and SHA1.

Does this answer your question?

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I think the correct words are "digital signature", and there is a free program PGP who should be able to do it. There is also an EnigMail extension for the Thunderbird mail client, which automatically signs e-mail and verifies e-mail signatures.

Sorry, I don't understand this topic well, so I can only give you these pointers.

Is there some reason to think that physiognomy really works?

It is the case that appearances encode lots of information, because lots of things are correlated. For example, height correlates with intelligence, probably because of generic health factors (like nutrition). Nearsightedness and intelligence are correlated, but whether this is due to different use of the eyes in childhood or engineering constraints with regards to the brain and the skull is not yet clear. The aspect ratio of the face correlates with uterine testosterone levels, which correlates with masculinity. Those are just the particularly famous ones; an expert could keep going for some time.

The question of whether or not people's naive impressions correspond to actual correlations, though, is less clear. Overall, it looks like stereotypes are more likely to be right than not, and it's more likely that the ground fact shifts the impression than the impression shifts the ground fact. (How is thinking that blockier faces are found on more masculine men going to adjust the response of bone growth to testosterone in utero?)

The 2014 LW survey results mentioned something about being consistent with a finger-length/feminism connection. Maybe that counts?

Some diseases impact both reasoning and appearance. Gender impacts both appearance and behavior. You clearly get some information from appearance, but it's going to be noisy and less useful than what you'd get by just asking a few questions.

Extrapolating from just the American civil rights movement and Indian independence movements, both of them were accompanied by barely contained violent movements with the same goals. Acceding to the demands of the peaceful protests provided a way to give the status of winning the conflict to the peaceful people while meeting the demands of the violent. Conversely, the recent Occupy movement had no real violent wing to speak of and while a lot of people showed up for the protests and there was a lot of awareness raised, there was no legislative impact at all.

How does aggressively demanding compassion work?

Through forcing political and/or institutional and/or social changes. It's a slightly masked demand for redistribution of power.

Here's my speculation: By getting really angry about it, you're acting in a way that would make the desirable belief (don't misgender trans people, for example) common sense. Most people would get angry if you openly state stuff like "Women shouldn't be allowed to drive cars because they're stupid." By getting angry about less accepted stuff, you (try to?) give your belief a more mainstream status.

Interesting! I can see this happening when I wave my hand in front of my window. When the shadow of my hand gets too close to the shadow of my window frame, the shadow of my hand seems to elongate. The window frame is closer to the light than my arm is. It doesn't work if my hand is too close to the wall. It also seems to bend a little, depending on the angles; and if I have my fingers in a /\ shape and bring them together, I can make a shadow grow between them towards the tips, kind of like an A shape.

One thing I notice is that shadows don't have hard edges, they fade out. When two penumbras overlap, you might start to perceive shadow where you weren't expecting it. Whatever is closer to the sun will have a wider penumbra, and this might cause the shadow to seem to grow on the other object. My two fingers were the same distance from the sun, so it grew equally from them.

Unfortunately the sun went behind a building while I was writing this post, so I can't experiment further. If I'm right, I'd expect this to happen less with lightbulbs and other spot lights, where the penumbra will be smaller.

Quick research... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_blister_effect isn't very detailed, but it looks like I'm correct?

Yes, for example Michael Lynch. He wrote a surprisingly modest column here about his predictions. The problem with Lynch, as he freely concedes, is that he absolutely didn't predict other price movements.

Paul Krugman made the point recently that the only stock market forecasters who correctly predicted a market drop were those who always predicted falling markets. This is known as the ‘stopped watch’ approach to forecasting: constantly make one prediction and eventually the market will move in that direction. Especially for oil prices, which are highly variable, this works wonders to the point where the great Adam Sieminski often joked that you should predict the price or the date, but not both...

For the past several years, I have been suggesting that, without major improvements in the geopolitical situation, long-term oil prices should be about $60 a barrel. For this, I was derided by a number of observers, including the late Christophe de Margeri, CEO of Total, and I have been persistent the lowest of the ‘major’ forecasters, as seen in the DOE survey published earlier this year.

So am I a stopped watch? Or clever?

For years people have been noting that the entirety of the anemic growth in world oil production has been coming from these high-cost tight oil deposits and tar sands in North America, with all the companies involved going into massive debt resembling a financial bubble because the world economy could not support prices that high. It was no surprise to many that that would fall apart messily.

Not stupid and anxiety, even anxiety disorders are a thing. Question: do your upper traps feel panfully tense? For me yes and I have this impression it may be caused by anxiety.

IMHO neurotransmitter balance, either naturally or achieved with e.g. meditation. Anxious people are a bit too tuned for fight-or-flight etc.

AFAIK cortisol is largely responsible for it.

Things that work for me:

• L-Theanine, suntheanine, it works really well, people use it reduce social anxiety but it seems to work for all kind
• Magnesium with vitamin B! where i live the product is called Magna B6
• less caffeine or none
• more sleep
• exercise, not necessary boring stuff, actually fun sports
• fewer blood sugar spikes

What makes people calm & cool?

What works for me: relax the muscles; breathe deeply; stop the inner screaming; take time; imagine a larger context.

What separates people who are naturally calm & cool from those who use other methods to achieve it?

Probably habits. I would guess some people have a habit of doing the things like I mentioned; other people like me have to consciously remind themselves to do it.

But it also depends on the environment. It is easier to be calm if you have no real problems (unless you already have strong habits from the past when you had).

Tip for research: In personality psychology, the tendency to experience negative emotions is usually called neuroticism.

water is not a very good thirst quencher

Water is an excellent thirst quencher, I think your problem is that it's not a good want-a-beer quencher.

as my after-work fluid intake is mostly beer, I realized that now my brain cannot tell the difference between thirst and alcohol cravings.

Does your at-work brain confuse thirst with alcohol cravings too?

One idea would be thirst-like feeling -> drink water -> re-examine, but water is not a very good thirst quencher.

So test this by drinking something that isn't beer or water but matches your other criteria for good thirst quenchers. Carbonated water with lemon or lime juice in it will meet the criteria that you listed, but actually staying hydrated with water will just prevent you from getting thirsty in the first place. Seriously - ginger ale, lemon-lime or orange soda, etc.

I am toying with the idea to alternate alcoholic and non-alcoholic beer in the evenings to de-train the association

What? You're suggesting that you should train yourself to associate the taste of beer with satisfying your craving for hydration here, so the association that you're trying to de-train is the one between beer and satisfying alcohol cravings? That's crazy, dude. Look at how much energy you've put into thinking about ways to keep drinking beer while avoiding satisfying alcohol cravings and put the same amount into thinking about ways to not drink beer. That will be an easier way to decouple the satisfaction of your cravings for hydration alcohol.

I'm an alcoholic and have been sober for about 7 years now so take that into account. My advice is that you quickly try all the ways you can think of to control your drinking. Make notes about what you're trying and how well it works. Track stuff like servings of alcohol consumed, etc. so that you can look at how well your control mechanisms work. Spend some time with no control mechanism in place and just track your consumption for a baseline if necessary (maybe even do this for a week or two in between trials to see if your baseline fluctuates). Make notes about things that trigger cravings. If something works, tweak it or stick with it. If none of them work, consider that you'll either need to abstain entirely from alcohol (and avoid things that trigger cravings for a little while) or that you're just going to slide further into alcoholism and make the necessary adjustments in your life to do those things. Gather information and be honest with yourself.

Nope, not really. With no math, the thing is, the different "branches" take up a fraction of the world. Classically you might say "If eating cake is 2 units of utility and not eating cake is 0 units, then a 50% chance of cake is 1 unit." Quantum mechanically, you'd say "If eating cake is 2 units of utility and not eating cake is 0 units, then 50% of my current measure going to eating cake is 1 unit."

See Egan's Law.

I really, really hate the 'many worlds' idea, and I hope it's not true. All those almost-me's in all those worlds –what are they doing? Some of them may be great people, but lots of them are bound to be much worse than me. Every time my flipping imagination comes up with something horrible I could do, does some other Berna in some other world really do it? No, no, no, no – I really, really don't want to even think about that.

Huge. If you've ever felt the teansiest bit like killing someone, youre a murderer somewhere. Enjoy!

I think you need to learn the kind of things for that that many people here would consider a waste of time to learn.

There was a good discussion on LW about Arthur Chu's performance on Jeopardy LINK - especially how he took advantage of regular patterns underlying question selection and "random" events to try and maximise his winnings.

The comment thread on that discussion also mentions other "rationalist" practices by other contestants.

I seem to remember Roger Craig used a very systematic and rational approach to winning Jeopardy.

Why would it help with trivia?

No. "Expected value" refers to the expectation of a variable under a probability distribution, whereas "expected utility" refers specifically to the expectation of a utility function under a probability distribution. That is, expected utility is a specific instantiation of an expected value; expected value is more general than expected utility and can refer to things other than utility.

The importance of this distinction often arises when considering the utility of large sums of money: a person may well decline a deal or gamble with positive expected value (of money) because the expected utility can be negative (for example, see the St. Petersburg paradox).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine#Adverse_effects

The amount of evidence depends on the vaccine, but the US National Academy of Sciences published a long report on this in 2011.

The committee finds that evidence convincingly supports a causal relationship between some vaccines and some adverse events—such as MMR, varicella zoster, influenza, hepatitis B, meningococcal, and tetanus-containing vaccines linked to anaphylaxis. Additionally, evidence favors rejection of five vaccine-adverse event relationships, including MMR vaccine and autism and inactivated influenza vaccine and asthma episodes. However, for the majority of cases (135 vaccine-adverse event pairs), the evidence was inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship.

This?

"Often the sender has a certain meaning to convey with his message, hoping the receiver will interpret it correctly. This right interpretation can be called the preferred decoding or preferred reading. When the interpretation of the message is different from what was intended, this can be called aberrant decoding."

Or maybe this?

"Word-sense disambiguation [...] is identifying which sense of a word (i.e. meaning) is used in a sentence, when the word has multiple meanings."

It depends on context. In terms of an academic paper, it basically means a scholarly review of someone else's work or publication. For example this article by Brian Ball is a critical notice of a book by Scott Soames. It discusses the ideas in the book, expands on some of them, casts doubt on others, suggests alternatives. Critical as in literary criticism.

In terms of a product, particularly a computer, a critical notice is a warning that there's a severe problem, and normally accompanies steps to remedy the defect. Critical as in acute.

There may also be other popular uses that I'm not aware of.

a simulation that selects an Everett branch at random from a distribution given by the Schroedinger Equations

At which moment do you select the random branch?

The equations say that each branch has an "amplitude"; and unlike probabilities, these amplitudes are complex numbers. Which means that two nonzero amplitudes added together can produce a zero outcome. (As in: "yes, it is possible that 'A and X' happens, and it is also possible that 'A and not X' happens, but 'A' is completely impossible".)

This effect almost completely disappears at larger scale, because what we define as a "state" on the large level includes zillions of possible states on the small level (for example, the state "the chair is in the middle of the room" corresponds to zillions of possible combinations of particles), and these large states interact just like classical probabilities, because of some mathematical laws about large numbers and complex numbers.

So yes, on larger scale we can pretend that the world is randomly selected from all the possible branches. It just doesn't make sense on the small scale... which is exactly how the quantum effects were discovered, because we were originally thinking in terms of probabilities, and then we couldn't explain the double-slit experiment.

It looks to me as if your calculation

• assumes that all the surplus heat due to human activity goes into the oceans, and none into the atmosphere, and then
• estimates the change in ocean temperature as opposed to any change in atmospheric temperatures.

But when people worry about AGW it usually isn't primarily ocean temperatures they're worried about, it's land temperatures where people live and grow crops, and the mechanism they worry about isn't that human activities make the oceans hotter and everything else follows along, it's that human activities warm the atmosphere which changes human comfort and crop yields and so forth.

So, assuming the consensus view on AGW generally, what your calculation suggests is that we should expect to see the atmosphere warming faster than the oceans. (That might have interesting consequences for things like winds but I don't know enough about this stuff for my guesses to be worth much.)

Unevenly distributed. Most of the warming happens near the poles, the tropics change less.

I think the "everybody" is really an American-centric thing. As far as I can tell, all of the New Atheist types are non-European, or who focus most of their polemics on American audiences.

I've never lived in Europe, but this was my experience growing up in the US:

• "You don't believe in Jesus/God? I must not have raised you right"
• "You've treated me better than all of my previous boyfriends/girlfriends, but you don't believe in Jesus so I'm breaking up with you"
• "You're new to the area? Where did you move from? Oh, Nowhereville, Alabahoma? I'm from Otherplace, Nevexico. So what church do you go to?"
• "How come you're not going to the prayer breakfast/luncheon?"
• "You didn't get the job/your car broke down/lost your wallet/etc.? Don't worry, god has a plan for you"
• "Can you believe these scientists and their evolution/global warming/sciency science talk? They'll say anything to reject god, right? My pastor says XYZ so therefore it's true"

I've lived in a lot of places in the US and in my experience the places where this sort of stuff doesn't happen are mainly large cities like NYC or San Francisco. And even then, it has to be the parts of those cities that are leaning on the more affluent side of things. It's not just a USA Bible-Belt phenomenon... I've actually never lived in or visited the Bible Belt so it must be a lot worse there.

Looking at people around me (EDIT: Central Europe), there are not so many hardcore believers (although I have already met a few of those, too), but there are many... I would call them "half-believers". People who believe they believe, and who follow the commands of the religious leaders when doing it is cheap. For example, despite what religion says about sex, they have as much sex as the atheists, only they later ask God to forgive them. They visit church once in a long time, for example only for Christmas, weddings, and funerals. Etc.

But in my opinion, even those half-believers can do a lot of damage. For example, they obey their religious leaders when the cost is paid by someone else. Does my pastor tell me to avoid premarital sex? Uhm, I will pretend I want to avoid it... then I will do it... and then I will confess my sins and ask forgiveness, just like all my friends do. Does my pastor tell me that homosexual marriage offends God? Well, since I am not a homosexual, I will follow God's will at this point.

Church tries to infuence politics, to get money from state, and to teach religion at schools. -- It is especially the last part which makes me extremely angry (as a former teacher): If we don't teach imaginary animals, or imaginary continents at school, why the fuck do we teach imaginary fairy-tale creatures? If I knew I had a colleague who teaches children that 2+2=5, I would consider it my ethical duty to get them fired, but when I have a colleague who teaches the same children about gods and angels, I am supposed to shut up a pretend that nothing weird is happening? Fuck no.

Just because our problems are not as big as in the Bible Belt, it doesn't mean they don't exist.

Just because your closest circle of friends and acquaintances think like what you just described, you should not generalize.

Your closest circle does not represent the entirety of society, because it is heavily defined by your profession, political views and other factors.

This bothers me as well. I don't see why rejecting the mythology should be grounds for rejecting the institution and its many social functions that have yet to be replicated in any capacity by secular organisations.

I know there are people in the US Bible Belt who still mean it, and they have angry atheist children, but how comes the majority of Internet discussion kinda revolves around them?

I'd assumed that was a side effect of North American hegemony of the Anglophone Internet.

But now I notice I don't actually know how people talk about religion on websites not dominated by Americans or Anglophones. Is there more focus on analysis or on normative judgement? If the latter, do people judge local religious institutions rather than American religion? Or is the target still mainly the Bible Belt and the like? (I could just Google things like "Slovenian atheist forum", run the results through Google Translate, and see what people are posting. But it's probably hard to get a representative view that way.)

Related.

Show her some pictures

Have you asked her how to test if there is such a hair? Why she favors that hypothesis? Does she think this is magic?

Restricted to the premise that some form of Buddhism is correct, how would it fit with the idea that everything is impermanent that Buddha would have a magic hair that delays inevitable falls?

I'm not even sure one needs anything as complicated as being heavier on one side, even if the rock were uniform the center of mass would be above the cliff.

This?

"Since the ideal gas law neglects both molecular size and intermolecular attractions, it is most accurate for monatomic gases at high temperatures and low pressures. The neglect of molecular size becomes less important for lower densities, i.e. for larger volumes at lower pressures, because the average distance between adjacent molecules becomes much larger than the molecular size. The relative importance of intermolecular attractions diminishes with increasing thermal kinetic energy, i.e., with increasing temperatures. More detailed equations of state, such as the van der Waals equation, account for deviations from ideality caused by molecular size and intermolecular forces."

Yet she sleeps with a man on the space ship, showing that she practices a liberal morality by traditional christian standards.

About that...

The usage of making a trysting-place of the church by young men and young women was so universal that only moralists were scandalized by it. The virtuous Christine de Pisan makes a lover say in all simplicity: "Se souvent vais ou moustier, / C'est tout pour veoir la belle / Fresche comme rose nouvelle."

The Church suffered more serious profanation than the little love services of a young man who offered his fair one the "pax," or knelt by her side. According to the preacher Menot, prostitutes had the effrontery to come there in search of customers. Gerson tells that even in the churches and on festival days obscene pictures were sold tanquam idola Belphegor, which corrupted the young, while sermons were ineffective to remedy this evil.

As to pilgrimages, moralists and satirists are of one mind; people often go "pour folle plaisance." The Chevalier de la Tour Landry naïvely classes them with profane pleasures, and he entitles one o fhis chapters, "of those who are fond of going to jousts and on pilgrimages."

On festal days, exclaims Nicolas de Clemanges, people go to visit distant churches, not so much to redeem a pledge of pilgrimage as to give themselves up to pleasure. Pilgrimages are the occasions of all kinds of debauchery; procuresses are always found there, people come for amorous purposes. It is a common incident in the Quinze Joyes de Mariage; the young wife, who wants a change, makes her husband believe that the baby is ill, because she has not yet accomplished her vow of pilgrimage, made during her confinement. The marriage of Charles VI with Isabella of Bavaria was preceded by a pilgrimage. It is far from surprising that the serious followers of the devotio moderna called the utility of pilgrimages in question. Those who often go on pilgrimages, says Thomas à Kempis, rarely become saints. One of his friends, Frederick of Heilo, wrote a special treatise, Contra peregrinantes.

-- J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages

If there are any significant brain changes, all the bets are off. The easiest brain change would be accepting psychedelics as part of religious practice. That wouldn't even take new technology.

However, it wouldn't surprise me if there's going to be intelligence increase technology and more sophisticated methods of emotional modification. I assume the desire for religion has something to do with brain chemistry/structure, and brain tech probably isn't going to be tested for how it affects religiosity.

Karen Armstrong has a theory that new religions arise (sometimes?) when a culture's methods of doing things are clearly not working. We could be heading into a period of institutional breakdown. If that leads to one or more major new religions, the details are assuredly not predictable.

Predicting the future is tricky business. No one's going to disprove the existence of God anytime soon, and besides religion has close ties to culture. Uncertain times have often led people to seek refuge in the old traditions. On the other hand, many of the social pressures to attend the local church have faded now that people can readily find like-minded individuals online and form their own communities.

We see religion becoming more popular in some places and less popular in others. Christianity is on the rise in China, for example. Many faithful are incorporating changing social mores into their belief, while many of the secular dabble in Eastern mysticism.

Then again, global nuclear war could render the question moot.

Yet she sleeps with a man on the space ship

I'm fairly sure that this is already fairly common among today's Christians. Far from universal, but far from unknown.

I can see that christians have already started to disappear.

Needlessly rude, I think.

The options seem to be:

• less education,
• more complex rationalization, or
• more compartmentalization.

On the other hand, unless there is some really amazing improvement in education (one that would make people not only better remember the teachers' passwords, but also understand physics and rationality on the gut level), I could imagine the religion in 300 years to be pretty much the same as it is today.

If people can imagine Santa Claus and microwave oven existing in the same universe, they can also imagine Santa Claus and quantum teleporter existing in the same universe.

The religious mainline cultural institutions are simply too wealthy to disappear in 300 years, especially if they don't pay taxes. I would assume that they will simply adapt with the times as they always have. I could see world where people consider Islam or Catholicism like we see the Amish today, as outsiders.

Today I see two general and opposite strategies.

Some people basically accept the modern world at least as far as technology goes, keep their religious beliefs, but modify the, how to put, aesthethics of it to fit the modern world (but values, politics often not, creating strange mixes) and basically you get the kind of American Protestant churches that have TV screens with preaching recordings going in it or Chick comics for some to me strange reason nobody says "But wait, we are conservatives, we are not supposed to like all these modern things like screens and comics, we should try to keep things old!" This is a strange mix, because it is aesthethically and technologically modern yet the content of beliefs and values/politics can be unmodern and it can come accross as a shock. I cannot predict what will happen with them because this is a mindset very different to me, I always keep my aesthethics and conent in synch. If I want to preach liberalism, I won't wear a medieval robe. Conversely, I cannot imagine preaching 19th century sexual mores without wearing 19th century clothing and so on. I simply cannot predict how minds like this function.

Some other people are more like, conservative is conservative. This is more amongst aging European Catholic populations: they try to reject the modern world in a more coherent way, they watch little TV, they go to really old looking churches, they read old poetry, watch operas, go to stage plays not cinemas, wear bow ties, really try to keep things old and shut out modernity. They are not Amish, so they will use technology at work, but kinda need to be dragged into it. These people are at least understandable to me, their worldview is coherent. I used to think this will become extinct, as modernity offers so many advantages. However it seems people don't use those well. People have a smartphone in their pocket they could use to learn things from Wikipedia yet they use it to like jokes on Facebook while they ride the subway. The old-fashioned religious conservative who decides to rather read a book of old poetry on the subway is not actually worse off. As long as they use tech at work or OK with being healed modern ways, they are not much worse of practically and this could survive, as a subculture, pose, atittude, the Retro People. And it is a fitting match with religiosity.