Rationalist Lent

I'm not changing anything for the next 40 days, but I did change one variable about 50 days ago: I stopped reading political news altogether. The experiment, so far, is clearly a success, so I'm going to keep it that way.

I'm thinking about stopping eating food, like this guy.

I am not interested in adopting steel-manned Christianity one tradition at a time, though it does provide many convenient rationalist Schelling points. If I need rationalist communion, confession, abstinence, washing of feet, blessing of throats, or Paschal celebration, I will take them up as they appear useful, and not because the church calender makes them salient. That might sound like reverse stupidity. It is. I am intentionally suppressing hypotheses which have been brought to my attention for the wrong reasons.

The line about Lent being scientific is cute, but really Lent is, to observing Christians, a time to practice penance, cleansing, and devotion. Which means that Lent and analogous ceremonies in other religions (Ramadan, Yom Kippur) provide data on the folk psychology of obedience and cleanliness! Let's explore.

The primary evolutionary purpose of disgust is in response to foods and scents which should be avoided because they could cause microbial contamination of one's body. Disgust drives us to avoid elicitors of disgust, such as dirt, wounds, corpses, bodily fluids and discharges (blood, feces, vomit, semen, puss, urine), unprepared foods, certain animals associated with those things (cockroaches, rats, flies, lice).

Not only does disgust cause us to avoid certain stimuli, we also often reject e.g. foods based on their past exposure to disgusting things, even when the offending odors, tastes, and sights have been neutralized. This is quite useful, because microbes are not visible to the unaided human eye and contagion is a real thing. It's also a potential source of cognitive bias. Some children don't want to eat food that they have seen touched by non friends or kin, even though cooking subsequently sterilizes it. I think a bayesian statistician might call that a spurious association that fails to consider the effect of cooking to screen off known sources of contamination. Presumably this applies to the other domains where disgust applies, which I'll address shortly.

Many religions thus have rules about which interactions between objects make them unclean, and what rituals of cleansing can restore cleanliness. Leviticus 11 is a beautiful source of zany contagion laws. Touch a carcass, and you're unclean, but only until the evening. Pick up a carcass, and you'll also have to wash your clothes. If a crawling or flying bug falls into a ceramic pot, break the pot, it can't be cleaned. Bugs with jointed legs are cool though. Feel free to eat crickets and locusts. Seeds to be planted can touch dead bugs, but water that you pour on planted seeds can't. Et cetera. And we've all heard the anecdote about doctors refusing Semmelweis's insistence to wash their hands before medical procedures, because a gentleman's hands are never unclean.

More generally, humans have rituals of purification that apply to both disease and sin: baptism with holy water, anointing (abhisheka to Jains and Hindus) with milk, butter, yogurt, honey, and oils. Interestingly, I don't know of any cultures that cleanse with alcohol, which is an actual disinfectant, unlike yogurt, which spoils easily. In addition to washing and smearing, humans use smoke and incense to cover odors (not an effective epidemiological intervention).

Next, Lent is strongly associated with atonement for sins through sacrifice. The more you suffer, the better you're doing. Christians promote a self-critial mindset, recall their past selfishness, injustices, defiance, and obscenities. They sit in little rooms with old men and confess their shame.They inhibit their impulses and addictions, which are basal, animal, and akratic. They practice celibacy, they fast, and they impose dietary restrictions, on i.e. meats, caffeine, candy, or baked goods.Sexual abstinence is performed both because sex is pleasurable, and because it is associated with perversion and depravity (spousal abuse, exploitation, rape, incest, masturbation, zoophilia, cuckoldry). Catholics temporarily redefine fish to not be a meat, which apparently fools God.

There is much concern for conformity to orthodox rituals, and for which behaviors are permissible or taboo. They devote their time to prayer, and focus on their reverence, obedience, and faith in the authority of their deity and its church.

Most of that came from a lecture by Pinker on taboo language and an article by Haidt on his theory of moral intuitionism. There are some other concepts which I associate with Lent that I'll list now, followed by lists of associated adjectives, on the hypothesis that important psychological traits have strong lexical coverage. "They" will refer generally to religious people observing periods of sacrifice, self-critical reflection, or obedience.

• They have high standards:
  diligent, meticulous, exacting, perfecting, thorough, high standards

• The standards center around impulse control:
  self control, discipline, restraint, mildness, moderation, conservation,

• And denial of sensual comforts:
  sober, ascetic, abstaining, austere, sacrificing, refraining, modesty, chastity,

• And fear of supernatural authority:
  deference, reverence, veneration, obedience, meekness, piety, humility,

• They want to meet the standards:
  drive, purpose, focus, intent, aim, motivation, determination, commitment, conviction, resolution, vigilance

• Failure to meet their standards will be met with bad consequences, and is no casual, laughing matter:
  solemn, stoic, grave, somber, serious, mature

• They have respect for the virtue of attempting and or succeeding to meet their standards:
  strength, resilience, tenacity, endurance, perseverance, constancy, persistence,

• They endure their sacrifices willingly:
  patient, calm, composed, abiding, constancy

And a few stray thoughts that don't have lexical coverage: Along with fasting and impulse control comes a desire to consume few resources and to not burden others, self reliance. Also a general disdain for personal wealth and material possession. Rather than promoting open-mindedness, flexibility to change, and experimentation, Lent enforces conformity to established traditions (which might be the rational choice if personal experimentation does not produce fruits commensurately with invested effort).

If you actually want to adopt a Lent-based rational tradition, consider some of those points.

As I understand it, Lent is a holiday where we celebrate the scientific method by changing exactly one variable in our lives for 40 days.

As I understand it, the other main point is to focus on giving up one thing that may be acting as a superstimulus, the restricting it to 40 days is a great way to make it easier to temporarily quit.

This seems useful. I'll be giving up reddit for the next 40 days.

Very well. I will give up my most time consuming occupation. I will give up LessWrong. It takes up about an hour of surfing per day.

I will still work through the ePub of the sequences. And who knows, when I get back, EY might've finally posted another part of the latest sequence! (that whole 'three times per week' hasn't exactly worked out...)

I intend to do a caffeine cut soon because I've reached an insane tolerance rate. I may also cut chocolate and/or sugary foods in general, but am unsure such a life would be worth living.

I have a candidate and it might be an odd one. I think I'll give up watching the Daily Show for 40 days. I've been watching it for almost its entire existence (before Jon Stewart was the host) and take a certain hipster pride in the fact that I watched the show before it became the widely known, popular thing it is now. But for awhile now, I haven't derived that much enjoyment from actually watching it. Some interviews, an occasional chuckle here and there, but mostly I find myself annoyed at how lazy the writing has become and Stewart's increasing tendency to stretch out bits well past their actual punchline.

But it's been such an ingrained habit for so long and it feels like compromising part of my identity, albeit a small, insignificant part of it. So, for the next 40 days, I won't watch the Daily Show.

Not the Colbert Report though, that show is genius.

This is likely to be a poorly-controlled experiment, isn't it? For instance, my quality of life changes greatly based on sleep quality, which lately is controlled by work schedules, seasonal allergen exposure, and whether or not my baby is teething, none of which I can greatly effect and any of which could overwhelm any experimental variable.

But what the heck:

I was only contemplating this before, but it seems like a good idea and perhaps posting here will make it "official" in my head: I'm going to be a teetotaler for the next 40 days. I've never been a heavy drinker, but it's been months since I've gone more than a couple weeks completely dry, and it would be good to double-check that I haven't developed any habituation.

I'm attempting to give up the fundamental attribution error.

I'll start: I'm going to give up rice. I eat a lot of rice by default. I've wanted to try cutting out "bad carbs" for awhile, but this has been the main sticking point, so it's got to go.

I was thinking of making February "catch up with people I've been meaning to catch up with" month. But I kept putting it off and failed to think of a catchier name.

So instead I decided to give up procrastinating about social initiation for Lent.

So far it is working well: I'm learning about how difficult it is to schedule things with adults (which more interesting than intimidating upon reflection) and also learning that rejection does hurt a whole bunch but that I am more resilient in the face of it than I suspected.

Seems like a potential way for enforcing THE GODDAMN PRECOMMITMENTS.

I'm making the same sacrifice I did during Advent: going to bed by 1am

The thing I really like about late hours is the flexibility of them. As long as I’m awake and alert feeling, there’s always more time to get things done. It doesn't necessarily take a toll on my life (thankfully, I seem to need less sleep than average), but it’s not great having that time in the open-ended evening instead of the morning.
I like whatever superpowers accrue to me, but enjoying a strength is different than denying a limit. So I’d rather shift my waking time to the morning, when I’m much more aware of my constraints than leave it flapping around in the evening, when I don’t feel accountable to anyone or anything.

This is a great idea!

I'm going to quit LW and doing things other than work at work. I know that's two variables, and therefor more likely to fail, but they can be separate commitments.

See you April 1st. Kick my ass if I'm back before then.

I grew up in a relaxed Christian family, so Lent was kind of always like this for me. Well, more of a challenge than a controlled experiment. I gave up sugar (within reasonable boundaries) last year. My blog post announcing it if you're looking for the details. I was successful, and it was surprising how many products are actually quite sweet.

I kind of forgot, this year, or perhaps I just have so many other changes I'm trying to make that it felt overwhelming to try to do something else too.

How about giving up magical thinking? I don't know if it would be possible though as it seems to creep in at the margins.