Rational Evangelism

A related anecdote: Recent months I am translating Sequences to Slovak, because I expect written word to be more effective recruitment tool than my person; simply because my time doesn't scale, but I can write put a free PDF online and link it from a blog or facebook or mention it in e-mail. (Also, I believe that Eliezer did think and discuss with other smart people about spreading rationality much more than me; so if he considered writing the Sequences an efficient use of his time, some of those reasons probably apply to using my time to translate it. Sure, the audience is much smaller, but so seem to be my opportunity costs, at least at this moment.)

So, I was talking with a friend, a religious girl, and although there is only epsilon chance of ever converting her, I told her about my already completed parts of translation anyway, simply because it didn't cost me anything. And she was like: "Yeah, translating is cool. I am translating this book by Chesterton." And I felt like: Damn, whatever tools of conversion I try, religion is already doing it, and much better. But then I realized I could treat this as an evidence that I am probably doing something that works, so it's kind of a good news.

Maybe the existing religions are not as efficient as they could be, but they are still pretty damn impressive; probably hundred times more impressive than we even think they are. Also they have to solve problems with maintaining their power, preventing internal fights, defending against powerful external enemies who literally want to kill them; all of this at the same time, for centuries -- the kind of problems most rationalists can't even imagine yet, because we still sometimes have a problem with organizing regular meetups for dozen people. The more people you have in your movement, the more average is their average IQ, because there is just not enough high-quality material. To organize them into something meaningful; to allow them to contribute meaningfully to your goals, that's a task of astronomic proportions. And the religions do it successfully -- so I would be very humble at giving them an advice on how to do this even better. There certainly is an opportunity or two they have missed, but that's because they are focusing on thousand other opportunities at the same time.

The fact that a girl who is nobody in the structure of our local Catholic church is doing an equivalent evangelism work as me, at this moment the most active LWer in my country... that feels like seeing a fraction of Omega and realizing that your life's mental effort is equivalent to one of the many things that Omega keeps doing on pure instinct all the time, without even noticing. After this experience I feel totally unqualified to advice Omega about how to do its job better. (Would you like to make bets about which of these books has a higher probability to be sold in bookshops within the next five years; and if both are published, which one will have more readers and reviews? Even if they both had the same chance, that book by Chesterton is merely a drop in an ocean of similar literature. Although, diminishing returns, etc. And literature is just a part of the whole evangelizing system.)

Speaking as a former Evangelical Christian, I was always perplexed by why my particular sect—which was pretty damned radical about spreading the Gospel—wasn't much more radical. In my mind, it was very rational to be radical with our 65-90 year temporary lifespan on earth in order to "save" as many people from infinite torture as possible (sell all possessions, focus money in unevangelized areas, etc.)...but many people didn't seem to behaving in ways that signalled they understood this.

In retrospect, here is why IMO that happens:

• They don't understand (50% of people) - Eternity just doesn't register conceptually. They see hell as bad, but cannot fathom the degree of badness, certainly not enough to be radical about "witnessing" to others.

• They don't care (10-40% of people) - They don't think spending their lives helping others get saved is that important because it benefits them relatively little. (No one ever says this out loud.) It seems to me to be an empathy disposition issue.

• They don't think being radical will be effective (10-40%) - Some in this group are sincere—they believe a more nuanced, patient approach to evangelism will yield the best results. Further, they tend to be of a more "God is sovereign and will do what he wills" theological stance—they tend toward pre-destination, etc. vs. the idea the whole world can be saved. Others in this group actually belong to the "I don't care" group, but feign "God is sovereign" beliefs because they don't wanna evangelize.

Some small remnant does understand the implications of eternity in hell and have empathy strong enough to be deeply affected. They typically go crazy or leave the church.

I have the impression that a lot of people convert to religions while finding the doctrinal content of those religions to be almost an afterthought. They make the identity claim after clearing some threshold that sets the one religion apart from other live options, then find out what their new "we" believes and what their new "we" is supposed to do about it on a day to day basis, up to a lay member's understanding without detailed theological contemplation of any kind. This serves a few purposes for the growth and stability of the religions:

1) Domino effect - if you get enough or a significant enough part of somebody's in-group, it's much easier to shift their "we".

2) Marketability - if practicing the religion requires irritating practices or sacrifices, you can introduce them later after you've got commitment.

3) Some ability to operate as a bloc - whoever's producing or interpreting doctrine can say "we believe X" without a thousand amateur theologians bikeshedding the details based on their own understanding.

4) Ability to appeal to the general population - if you look hard at even the most popular religions, they are complicated, detailed philosophies. Your IQ 100 and below run-of-the-mill followers, to say nothing of their small children, aren't going to get it; there's a numbers advantage to letting them wave your flag anyhow.

These advantages are real, significant, and probably even replicable for a more secular memeset - but I think if we tried it, we'd be missing our own point.

Only say 'rational' when you can't eliminate the word.

We speak often of borrowing from religion, but these conversations mostly touch on social bonding, rather than what it means to spread ideas so important that the fate of the human race depends on them.

I think you underrate the importance of social bonding. It's the most important thing. Creating more LW meetups and making sure that the people on those meetups have a great time so that they come back is more important than trying to convince strangers with no previous interest.

When it comes more to advertising to the outside I think HPMOR is a good tool.

Then if you are wearing TV shirts, think about getting a HPMOR TV-shirt. If people ask you what it means tell them about what a great book HPMOR happens to be.

Facebook is also a great medium to feature great passages of HPMOR.

I've met plenty of Christians who exude the same optimism and conviviality as a Rick Warren or a Ned Flanders....what's stopping us from teaching ourselves to live the same way?

Availability bias. How often are you actually visualizing that future? Focusing on it? Experiencing it? Then again, likely some people just have a greater capacity for that kind of thing than others.

I watched a series of interesting youtubes from a woman who is an atheist now, but grew up in a pentecostal family, and was very devout. The interesting thing here was that she shared her experience of being a Christian, and what evidence she had of the truth of Christianity. The evidence was experiential, in sights and sounds and feelings. Part of it was the satisfaction of feeling the love of that infinite, all powerful being who was looking over you, in whose presence you'll soon enough be spending an eternity of bliss. I can understand how experiencing that daily would make one quite a positive person.

I wonder if you actually have to believe the literal truth of that to experience it. I doubt it. And I wonder how many "believers" don't literally believe it either, and are just part of a mutually reinforcing feel good theater, and know it, but won't let on, because that puts a damper on the show. You can see why such people would be annoyed with atheists - they're just a bunch of kill joys who just don't get the joke, and ruin it for everyone else. A bunch of soldiers in the Buzzkill Army.

The evangelism techniques of unspecified "religion" are actually pretty ineffective. Religions have a poor record of converting new believers who are already adults; religions spread by being the religion of the oppressor (so that the oppressed can join and gain more political power), focusing on children, and/or the precursor memes of the society that one is evangelizing in already point towards some of the religion's tenets. What religions do have are thought patterns and social sanctions that prevent one from thinking too far outside of that religion (i.e. dark arts epistemology). Religion is good at retaining people who are already converts, not making new ones.

Let's take Christianity as an example. One of the reasons that it was successful in the Roman Empire was that a lot of the underlying themes of Christianity fit well within the wider Greco-Roman culture. Greeks/Romans were already exposed to concepts like dying/rising gods, virgin births, the concept of hell, martyrdom, etc. before Christianity. Even the etymology of the word "evangelism" has deep roots to Greco-Roman military culture. Another thing that (orthodox) Christianity had going for it was that it was marketed by Christians as an "ancient" religion tying its heritage to Judaism; Greco-Roman culture was especially suspicious of new gods or novel religions.

Even so, Christianity around 300 AD was about the same size as Mormonism is today. What prompted the true spread of Christianity was gaining the political power of the Roman Empire with Constantine's conversion, in essence becoming part of the "cultural language" of the Roman Empire. Meaning that anywhere Roman culture spread, Christianity spread as well. This is why Christianity is relatively unsuccessful in parts of the world that aren't directly or indirectly descended from the Roman empire (India, Japan, etc.). Even for atheists in the west, Christianity is part of our cultural language, so many converts to Christianity are simply confusing familiarity and veracity.

Continuing with the Mormons: Their evangelism is actually failing in the first world, so they are moving their evangelism efforts to the global south like many other versions of Christianity. Which makes sense in a way, since economic inequality seems to make people more susceptible to religious belief.

I think rational (i.e. effective) evangelism would model something more, well, effective, like advertizing/marketing or hostage negotiation.

EDIT: I would also like to point out that another persuasion technique is storytelling. People seem to temporarily assume the morality of characters they read in stories. The LW community sort of already has this with HPMOR.

I can't find the comment of Eliezer that inspired this but:

The "If-you-found-out-that-God-existed scale of ambition".

1) "Well obviously if I found out God exists I'd become religious, go to church on Sundays etc."

2) "Actually, most religious people don't seem to really believe what their religion says. If I found out that God existed I'd have to become a fundamentalist, preaching to save as many people from hell as I could."

3) "Just because God exists, doesn't mean that I should worship him. In fact, if Hell exists then God is really evil, and I should put all my effort into killing God and rescuing everyone from hell. Sure it sounds impossible, but I wouldn't give up until I'd thought about the problem and tried all possible courses of action."

4) "God is massively powerful. Sure I'd kill him if I had to, but that would be a catastrophic waste. My true aim would be to harness God's power and use it to do good."

(Reposted from here.)

A master was once unmoved by the complaints of his disciples that, though they listened with pleasure to his parables and stories, they were also frustrated for they longed for something deeper. To all their objections he would simply reply: "You have yet to understand, my friends, that the shortest distance between a human being and truth is a story."

You need a good story. That's all. A good story.

2 things come to my mind as examples:

The first one is about the past and comes from a novel called "Quo Vadis" which is about early christianity. There is a scene there where a roman guy searching a girl he wanted stumbles on a christians meeting and there was Peter retelling the story of Jesus. The power of his words as a living witness made the guy forget what he was looking for. Personal testimony is one huge attention grabber if is done right.

The second one is from Dune. Pardot Kynes, the planetologist, tells to the fremen the story of Arrakis could become and tells it so well that Uliet, the guy in charge of killing him chose to take his own life and with this self-sacrifice started the terraforming process.

So, what would a rational story be about? Health and Happiness sound like good bets. It should incorporate elements described by religious mysticism, stuff like Love, Joy, Strength, Peace, Trust, etc. It should position itself to the current effort to find common ground... like the Charter for Compassion. It should be about a long journey of discovering the power of love.

"What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but expressing them. And so we cannot avoid this conclusion: it is biologically evident that to gain control of passion and so make it serve spirit must be a condition of progress. Sooner or later, then, the world will brush aside our incredulity and take this step : because whatever is the more true comes out into the open, and whatever is better is ultimately realized. The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

At the risk of sounding naive, we have one big advantage, which is that our core dogma doesn't sound batshit ridiculous on its face.

When you're competing to get people to believe in (and fund) your invisible goblin over the other guy's invisible dragon, you're going to need to rely on violence, intimidation, social pressure and anti-epistemology.

When you're just trying to convince people that the sky is in fact blue, and then go on to show them that you can build rockets and Internets out of such simple facts, and that goblins and dragons don't actually fit anywhere in the web of understanding, it just seems like you shouldn't have nearly as much trouble making your case.

It's like, "My God is the God of Israel and He will smite the Unbeliever, now battle my transforming snake-staff," versus, "My God is the God of Physics, now hold this Cesium-137 while I go get my snake staff."

Maybe this is off-base, but it seems like a lot of the people who one might want to preach rationality evangelism to, like liberal science-supporting policy-makers and upper-class liberals are very wary of anything that sounds like prosthelytizing (I am not talking about atheist technophiles who haven't found LW yet. That's an easier audience). A lot of them are vague atheists/agnostics who have a vague sense that extreme doctrines about a vastly different future for the human race are scary and weird and fanatical. I think they would strongly reject religious evangelicals, and likewise an evangelical-seeming approach might backfire on them. Which is not to say that some evangelical techniques might not be helpful, just that they would have to be tweaked to fit liberal cultural norms (not sound too threatening, be introduced in a friendly rather than authoritative way, etc.)

I have been wondering about a large-scale attempt by LWers to write layperson-appropriate articles about LW topics in widely read media sources (Huffpo, Vice, Wired, maybe Cracked). Speaking as an ex-agnostic liberal, I found it very difficult to find LW, and really figure out what it was about, with almost no prior knowledge of most of the topics. If I had casually heard about transhumanism or existential risk, I would have looked up more about it (I know this, because that's what happened, eventually). I've never had luck introducing anyone to LW directly, but have been able to by sending them through HPMOR or some Peter Singer talks.

It's worth considering that people who believe in Very Bad Future Outcomes have been working to prevent those outcomes for thousands of years, and have stumbled upon formidable techniques for doing so.

Judaism has a formidable technique. If someone tries to get you to worship another god, "thou shalt surely kill him, thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death." D'varim 13:6-10

Christianity has a formidable technique. Jesus said: "But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before Me." Luke 19:27

Islam has a formidable technique. Regarding non-Muslims, "kill them wherever ye find them." 4:89.

Violence is a time tested and true means of persuasion and religion makes use of it.