Raising the Sanity Waterline

I already mentioned this as a comment to another post, but it's worth repeating here: The human brain has evolved some "dedicated hardware" for accelerating certain tasks.

I already mentioned in that other post that one such hardware was for recognizing faces, and that false-positives generated by this hardware caused us have a feeling of hauntedness and ghosts (because the brain receives a subconscious signal indicating the presence of a face, but consciously looking around we see no one around).

Another such hardware (which I only briefly alluded to in the other post) was "agency detection". I.e. trying to figure out whether a certain event occurred "naturally", or because another agent (a friend, a foe, or a neutral?) caused it to happen. False positives from this hardware would cause us to "detect agency" where none was, and if the event seems something way out of the capacity for a human to control, and since humans seem to be the most powerful "natural" beings in the universe, the agent in question must be something supernatural, like God.

I don't have all the details worked out, but it seems plausible that agency-detection could have been naturally selected for, perhaps to be able to integrate better into a society, and to help with knowing when it is appropriate to cooperate and when it is appropriate to defect. It's a useful skill to be able to differentiate between "something good happened to me, because this person wanted something good to happen to me and made it happen. They cooperated (successfully). I should become their friend." versus "something good happened to me, despite this person wanting something bad to happen to me, but it backfired on them. They defected (unsuccessfully). I should be wary of them."

From there, bring in Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawkideas about tag-along selection, and it seems like religion really may be a tag-along evolutionary attribute.

Anyway, I used to be scared of ghosts and the dark and stuff like that, but once I found out about the face-recognition hardware and its false positives (and other hardware, such as sound-location) this fear has almost completely disappeared almost instantaneously.

I was already atheist or agnostic (depending on what definitions you assign to those words) when I found out about the hardware false-positives, so I can't say for sure whether had I been religious, this would have converted me.

But if it worked at making me stop "believing"[1] in ghosts, then perhaps it could work at making people stop beliving in God as well.

1: Here I am using the term "believe" in the sense of Yvain's post on haunted rationalists. Like everyone else, I would assert that ghosts didn't really exist, and would be willing to make a wager that they didn't exist. And yet, like everyone else, I was still scared of them.

If you want people to repeat this back, write it in a test, maybe even apply it in an academic context, a four-credit undergrad course will work.

If you want them to have it as the ground state of their mind in everyday life, you probably need to have taught them songs about it in kindergarten.

It seems to me that the principal issue is that, even if you know all those things... that doesn't guarantee that you're actually applying them to your own beliefs or thought processes. There is no "view source" button for the brain, nor even a way to get a stack trace of how you arrived at a particular conclusion... and even if there were, most of us, most of the time, would not push the button or look at the trace, if we were happy with our existing/expected results.

In addition, most people are astonishingly bad at reasoning from the general to the specific... which means that if you don't mention religion explicitly in your hypothetical course, very few people will actually apply the skills in a religious context... especially if that part of their life is working out just fine, from their point of view.

It may be fictional evidence, but I think S.P. Somtow's idea that "The breaking of joy is the beginning of wisdom" has some applicability here... as even highly-motivated individuals have trouble learning to see their beliefs, as beliefs -- and therefore subject to the skills of rationality.

That is, if you think something is part of the territory, you're not going to apply something you think of as map-reading skills.

Hm, in fact, here's an interesting example. One of my students in the Mind Hackers' Guild just posted to our forum, complaining that by eliminating all his negative motivation regarding work, he now had no positive motivation either. But it was not apparent to him that the very fact he considered this a problem, was also an example of negative motivation.

That's because even though I teach people that ALL negative motivation is counterproductive for achieving long-term, directional goals (as opposed to very short-term or avoidance goals), people still assume that "negative motivation" means "motivations I don't like, or already know are irrational"... and so they make exceptions for all the things they think are "just the way it is". (Like in this man's case, an irrational fear linked to his need to "pay the bills".)

And this happens routinely with people, no matter how explicitly and repeatedly I state that, "no, you have to include those too". It seems like people still have to go through the process at least once or twice with someone pointing one of these out, before they "get it" that those other motivations also "count".

Heck, truth be told, I still sometimes take a while to find what hidden assumption in my thinking is leading to interference... even at times when I'd happily push the "view source" button or look at the stack trace... if only that were possible.

But since I routinely and trivially notice these map-territory confusions when my students do them, even without a view-source button -- heck, I can spot them from just a few words in the middle of their forum posts! -- I have to conclude that there is something innate at issue, besides me just not being a good enough teacher. After all, if I can spot these things in them, but not me, there must be some sort of bias at work.

Here's another way of evaluating the sanity of religious belief:

It's arguable that the original believers of religion were insane (e.g. shamans with schizotypical personality disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, etc...), yet with each subsequent believer in your culture, you are less and less insane to believe in it. During past history, it would only take a few insane or gullible people with good oratorical skills getting together to make religion sanely believable.

If you are religious because you see spirits, you are insane. If you are religious because your friend Shaman Bob sees spirits and predicts the rainfall, you aren't very smart, but you aren't insane either. If you are religious because your whole tribe believes in the spirits seen by Shaman Bob and has indoctrinated you from birth, you are not insane at all, you are a typical human.

There was a time in history when religion was completely eliminated from the social and scientific life -- the Soviet period, roughly from 1920s to 1980s.

I'm not informed well enough to judge the effects the removal of religion had on the Soviet science. Granted, the country went from rubble to Sputnik and nuclear weapons, but it is hard for me to untangle the causes of this -- there were other powerful factors at work (e.g. "if you don't do good science, we'll send you and your family to GULAG").

One thing, however, is certain -- after the Soviet Union collapsed, religion conquered its lost positions back in a matter of a few years. The memetic sterilization that has been going on for several generations didn't help at all.

Now, about 20 years after the collapse, we see quite a lot of academics publicly mentioning God in their TV interviews, and you'll never hear a public politician mentioning that he is an atheist -- after doing so, his career would be instantly ruined.

To sum up, I have to agree with the posters suggesting that the 'God-shaped hole' wanting to be filled is innate. Figuring out whether religion is an epistemic need, a signaling tool, or both of these mixed in some proportion is another story.

I just read a nice blog post at neurowhoa.blogspot.com/2009/03/believer-brains-different-from-non.html, covering research on brain differences of believers vs. non-believers. The take away from the recent study was "religious conviction is associated with reduced neural responsivity to uncertainty and error". I'm hesitant to read too much into this particular study, but if there is something to this then the best way to spread rational thought would be to try to correct for this deficiency. Practicing not to let uncertainty or errors slide by, no matter how small, would result in a positive habit and develop their rationality skills.

Recently I contemplated writing an "Atheist's Bible", to present the most important beliefs of atheists. Eventually I realized that this Atheist Bible would not mention atheism. "Atheism" is just the default belief state we were born with. Atheism isn't having reasons not to believe religion; it's not having reasons to believe religion. If one knows how the world works, there are no gaps for religion to fill.

The French Encyclopedia of the late 18th century was by design an atheist work; it carried out this design by not mentioning religion.

My father grew up in a heavily religious family, and rejected religion at an early age. I'd say he was a clever fellow, but the turning point wasn't intelligence, it was what a horrible little bastard he was as a child, as any of his siblings would tell you.

If you just don't give a shit, all the emotional manipulation in the world will just wash over you like water off a duck's back. And that's all religion really has going for it, appealing to hope, to fear, to love, to respect, to piety, to community.

If you can teach people truly not to care, a huge rotten portion of their psyche falls away. There is a cost, of course... but this will do the job the post demands.

To return to the question asked in the original post:

what could you teach people that is not directly about religion, which is true and useful as a general method of rationality, which would cause them to lose their religions?

My first reaction to the question -- too many constraints. I can't quickly think of anything that satisfies all three of them. However, if I'm allowed to drop one constraint, I'd drop the second one ("useful as a general method of rationality"), and my answer would be evolution.

In my experience, understanding evolution down to chemistry, down to predictable interactions of very simple parts that have nothing mystical or anthropomorphic about them can have a tremendous impact on one's further thinking.

There are a couple of large gorillas in this room.

First, the examples of great scientists who were also religious shows that you don't have to be an atheist to make great discoveries. I think the example of Isaac Newton is especially instructive: not only did Newton's faith not interfere with his ability to understand reality, it also constituted the core of his motivation to do so (he believed that by understanding Nature he would come to a greater understanding of God). Faraday's example is also significant: his faith motivated him to refuse to work on chemical weapons for the British government.

Second, evidence shows that religious people are happier. Now, this happiness research is of course murky, and we should hesitate to make any grand conclusions on the basis of it. But if it is true, it is deeply problematic for the kind of rationality you are advocating. If rationalists should "just win", and we equate winning with happiness, and the faithful are happier than atheists, then we should all stop reading this blog and start going to church on Sundays.

There are subtleties here that await discovery. Note for example Taleb's hypothesis that the ancients specifically promoted religion as a way of preventing people from going to doctors, who killed more people than they saved until the 19th century. Robin made a similar point about the cost effectiveness of faith healing.

 NATURALISTIC METAETHICS

"Could you - realistically speaking, regardless of fairness - win a Nobel while advocating the existence of Santa Claus?"

Absolutely! Your examples already show that that level of insanity is tolerated. The difference is only social acceptance of one belief vs. another.

The only way to change that is to have a culture in which people are held to a high standard in every part of their lives. Today if you examine the reason people believe anything, you come off as the jerk. Even outside of religious beliefs.

Person makes unfounded statement, people don't challenge unfounded statement. That's polite conversation. Some people like a few iterations of challenge-response, but only wierdos follow the turtles all the way down.

We look a t a scientists work, what they do outside of their work is ignored in general. Do we want to start discounting the credibility of a physicist because he cheats on his wife?

So, further to my earlier comment about teaching people how to be happy and how to flourish, I have a question to ask. Suppose that (for some reason) everyone in the world was always very happy with their lives. Would people even consider religion as a serious option in their hypothesis space? I don't think so. Imagine trying to convert a citizen of Banks' Culture to Christianity. Would they even take you seriously? Would it be like trying to convert a grown-up to belief in Santa Claus?

Err... I actually toss around endorsements of "spirituality" in those contexts where doing so seems likely to have positive effects. Naive realism is a supernatural belief system anyway, just a more subtle than average one. I'll invoke Einstein, Hume and Spinoza as precedents if you wish. Who do you think, by the way, is more likely to convince a theist to sign up for cryonics, a person who says "god is a stupid idea, this is the only way to survive death" or a person who says "I believe in god too, but I also believe in taking advantage of the best available medical technologies". I'd accept a double blind study showing that the former worked better, but it's not how I'd bet.
More importantly, I think that the canary function is more valuable than any harm caused by moderate Christianity, especially if combined with a possible vaccine function. Also, Sam Harris DOES talk about spirituality, and Dennett about free will. Finally, for what it's worth, we only have one data point for a scientific civilization rising, and it was in the religious West not the relatively secular China. Weak evidence, but still evidence.

"Consider this thought experiment - what could you teach people that is not directly about religion, which is true and useful as a general method of rationality, which would cause them to lose their religions?"

• Teach people how to be happy, how to have high self-esteem, and how to flourish in their lives. Teach them what the pitfalls of human happiness are, what the evolutionary reasons for human misbehavior are, and what we can do about them. Also, as a second line of defense, create a rational religion-replacement.

I have some good experience in this area, because whilst at university I spent time around the university evangelical Christian society. Disturbingly, some members were better mathematicians than me, all were highly intelligent. What they almost all had in common was that they all had some good reason to be unhappy with their lives: they were socially awkward, ugly, mentally unbalanced or had self-confidence issues, etc. The attractive, socially adept, self-confident crowd spent their free time drinking, playing in the sports teams and socializing in a very ahem secular way.

Robin (elsewhere in this comment thread) says:

"They just don't have enough incentives to apply those tools in these context."

I agree completely, at least in the case of clever Christians.

Since you brought up Dawkins, I think teaching about Memetics would be very useful in raising the "sanity waterline". Learning about Memetics really forces you to analyze your beliefs for selfish replicator ideas.

In addition, it challenges the view that consensus is an impregnable defense for believing bizarre things. You are put in the position of actually having to try to cite evidence for why you believe things. Of course even that doesn't work very often, since most people have very strong ideological immune systems that protect their beliefs. But asking those questions, and trying to justify your beliefs is a necessary first step.

Some of the claims made by this post now seem somewhat dated. Are there plans for a revamp?

If you don't care about consistency, there's really no way to be argued into caring about it. Not rationally, anyway, and not even with unconscious logic. It can only be done by "pushing a motivational button", and without a very detailed model of how your mind works, someone else can only do that by flailing about at random.

Self-consistency is the most basic aspect of effective thought.

That's what the dead canary, religion, is telling us: that the general sanity waterline is currently really ridiculously low. Even in the highest halls of science.

From the standpoint of rationalists, this kind of thinking looks insane. Yet is just species-typical thinking with a hardwired basis, as others in this thread have observed. The kind of cognitive biases that lead to religion, especially social ones such as group conformity and social proof, were/are adaptive. This is how sane human minds work. It is the rationalists who are the crazy people.

sorry, that was Michael Vassar, not Phil Goetz, just posting from the latter's computer. Will stop that now.

You linked to your Dark Side Epistemology post, which is all about the generally anti-rationalist propaganda generated by organizations with bogus claims to shield, but avoid mentioning here that a reduction in religion would thus raise the waterline at least somewhat. Why?

Are there any specific strategies/plans to get Rationalists into positions of socio-political power?

Could a targeted approach be used to reach people who are already in such positions, like say the pope, for a ripple effect?

When you consider it—these are all rather basic matters of study, as such things go. A quick introduction to all of them (well, except naturalistic metaethics) would be... a four-credit undergraduate course with no prerequisites?

I wonder what it would take to make and run a MOOC? I know that MOOC software has been open sourced (e.g. OpenMOOC, edX). If a single undergrad course could have that big an impact on the world, isn't it worth doing?

First link in article not worky. Black Belt Bayesian's blog got wiped out?

Crisis of Faith - though you'd better find something else to call this ultimate high master-level technique of actually updating on evidence.

Any suggestions? I might actually be teaching this class soon.

Outlaw debating class.

Just a few points:

1) I would not call atheism "rationality." Atheism requires a certain degree of blind faith and accepting lack of evidence for religion as evidence of not-religion which is not in concordance with the principles of rationality. Perhaps "agnostic atheism" would be a more reasonable perspective. "There is a god" and "there is no god" are both non-falsifiable assertions, and I can think of few things that I would accept as corroborating evidence thereof. You cannot deduce atheism from the fact that religion does not seem to be correct. You can, however, reasonably state that while there might be a god, there probably is not.

2) Occam's razor is not necessarily applicable sui generis. I would direct you to Elliott Sober's excellent paper on the subject, "Let's Razor Occam's Razor." It is a useful argument against the existence of a god, but certainly not definitive.

Begs the question - I would posit that the minimum assumption for any form of 'spirituality' is body/mind duality, and your proposed 'better' definition of insanity presupposes the result that there is no axiomatic, logical system that can result in body/mind duality being either true, or undecidable.

However, so long as it is even undecidable, then a person that uses it as an axiom for further thought is no more 'insane' than someone that explores the logical consequences of parallel lines crossing.

Now, Religion posits not only body-mind duality, but a number of other assumptions, and those other assumptions are generally quite amenable to debunking. But I suspect dualism itself qualifies as undecidable, which would place it outside the pale of propositions which one can both maintain a cohesive logical structure and explicitly deny.

Arguing about the existence of a god is like arguing about free will. The only worthwhile argument concerns differences in anticipated experience, notably things like "Does prayer work?".

I would dispute the (implied) part of this post that suggests removing religion would necessarily be a good thing. Besides being a way to explain rainbows and earthquakes and whatnot, it is also a "solution" to the prisoner's dilemma. For explanations of physical phenomena, religion is no longer needed. But the "morality" problem is still there. Make everyone rational, and they will do the rational thing, i.e. defect when faced with a prisoner's dilemma (or tragedy of the commons, or whatever). Getting rid of religion may certainly have its benefits, but I would not be too sure it would be an overall good thing.

The answer is so simple, I don't understand why you guys are so strained about it.

Teach people to base their beliefs on reality. Teach them to systematically check their beliefs to make sure they're connected to reality. Via induction and conceptual reduction. (If you want to prove that an abstract concept is connected to reality, you break it apart into its constituent concepts. Keep doing this until you've broken the abstract concept up into 1st-level concepts that represent percepts Once you get from the abstract concept to the perceptual level, your idea has been proven to be connected to reality.)

The problem underlying religion is that people think faith is an acceptable source of knowledge. Teach them that all knowledge must be derived from observation, and you can undercut religion.

"Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others." -John Galt

The naivety and arrogance of this post is somewhat breathtaking. Religion is (or can be) primarily a set of practices and attitudes, not a collection of propositions, and is perfectly compatible with rationality. In any case, it is one of those things that humans do and efforts to get rid of it would seem doomed, as can be readily seen by the way people here (atheists, transhumanists, rationalists, etc) all create pseudo-religions to replace the ones they reject. Religion is a universal part of human nature; you can't be a good reasoner without understanding how humans work; so you must at least understand what religion is. You can start here