A few questions on International Rationality

tangential: have you compiled a list of interesting substances where the info is in Russian?

One political party (the one currently in goverment) ''auctions'' 111,000 dollar dinners with the party's leader (prime minister). This year only one-non Chinese person bought it, and those Chinese people bought it impulsively at random events

I can add, that there are more at least slightly religious people in Russia today, than 10-20 years ago. Transhumanism may be supported by people, who was graduated in USSR, but now Russia Orthodox Church becomes more influential and helps to support irrationality and biases. Science fiction in Russia is dominated by the fantasy book, which can't support any rational ideas and transhumanism.

But, there are also people, who have studied natural sciences in colleges and may want to become more rational and support, for example, cryonics.

I have also met some Japanese people, and I can say, that they prefer to be practical and even utilitarian in their life, and this can be seen as rational approach. Comparing with Russia, they have much more "user friendly" things in their daily life, for example, remote controlled WCs.

Having grown up in China, it took a LONG time to shake off all the belief in belief that primary school instilled in me (if you read the singing and dancing article recently: I marched together with the entire school every day from the age of 6. Infer about my personality what you will.) Deconstructing the ridiculous amounts of blatantly untrue cached thoughts I have takes a lot of mental willpower, even now. Indoctrination doesn't have to be about religion.

The problem with TCM is that it's just not been scientifically researched. There's bound to be lots of good stuff, especially in the herbal stuff (it's not homeopathy, there's at least active ingredients in there), and there's bound to be lots of bs, especially in the chi stuff, but it needs a significant western pharmaceutical team to dig through everything, find the useful chemicals and isolate the effects, with the expertise but without the biases of Chinese researchers. Unfortunately, that's a massive undertaking that I don't see happening any time soon. I mean, the success story of artemisinin in malaria treatment should be encouraging, and I personally assign a 90%+ probability that somewhere in TCM there are useful treatments/cures for things that western medicine don't cope with very well yet, but isolating them could be a difficult task.

the field of TCM

This nature article on TCM shows a similar lack of scepticism.

The US is less religious than Africa, South America or the Middle East but more religious than pretty much everywhere else. IIRC there's an absurdly large percentage of Americans who says they would never vote for an atheist president -- higher than for any other group of people they asked the question about.

But in what way is being religious considered 'weird' in the US?

This is the best answer I've seen so far. At the risk of losing karma, I'll point out nevertheless that America is the land of libertarian individualism like no other, which in my opinion explains everything.

What reason do you have to believe we're more inclined to weirdness?

"Weirdness" is closely related to a high score in the psychological trait openness in the big5.

According to this meta-analysis the correlations between religiosity and openness are somewhat mixed:

"while Openness is negatively related to religious fundamentalism (weighted mean r=−0.14, P<0.01) and, to some extent, intrinsic-general religiosity (r=−0.06, P<0.01), it is positively related to measures of open or mature religiosity and spirituality (r=0.22, P<0.0001)."

how much research has been done into cross-cultural variation of cognitive biases?

Some research has been done, but not that much. The resources required for such studies is generally pretty intensive. But most of the literature suggests that cognitive biases don't change that much between cultures. For example, the literature on the Monty Hall problem shows that the the answer rates look nearly identical in all tested cultures (which include the US, Britain, China and Brazil among others). This is discussed with further references in Jason Rosenhouse's book "The Monty Hall Problem." I'm under the impression that there's similar literature for confirmation bias, but I don't have any citations off hand.

I realize that even a small percentage of English-speakers is still a huge number of people, but I don't think it's more than half of all the potential rationalists in the world.

I believe I do.

To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing quite like SIAI or lesswrong in continental western Europe. People aren't into AI as much as in the US, and if there's rationality thinking being done, it's mostly traditional rationality, skepticism, etc.

This is true, at least in Italy. Most of the concept of LW version of rationality are simply not known.

Atheism can score high in many countries, as a rule of thumb countries to the north are more atheistic, those to the south (Spain, Portugal, Italy, etc.) are more religious.

While Spain and Italy are nominally quite religious (i.e. most people would classify themselves as christian), the majority of people are definitely not fervent believers . Nothing to do with what I understood is the situation in the U.S.: most people never go to church if not for weddings and funeral, and even fewer people follow the (catholic) religious orthodoxy. It's usually a classic case of belief in belief/cached thought: it has happened to me more than once to have a discussion with a "religious" person, only for her to realize in the end that she was more likely agnostic or mildly theist.

Religion has still his enormous political and social weight, of course, but it's mostly inertia.

as a rule of thumb countries to the north are more atheistic, those to the south (Spain, Portugal, Italy, etc.) are more religious.

Is that just the historical Catholic-Protestant divide?

In the scandinavian countries SIAI-style thinking seems at least as common to me as in the US (eg comparing Sweden to New York, which I believe is of similar size).

But when we went to a meetup in Rome, that was even worse -- the only people who came were foreigners. Thus a hypothesis: traditionally Catholic lands are not friendly to LW-style rationality.

It's more due to the fact that very few Italians (or southwestern Europeans generally) have fluent English. I mean, in my experience the average English teacher in Italy has worse English than the average bartender or policeman in Prague. I don't think religion wouldn't have a large effect, at least not around Rome (though it possibly would further south and east).

Have LW meetups been held in the Republic of Ireland (an English-speaking “traditionally Catholic land”)?

Can you expand on your reasons for believing that? It's my intuition as well, but I mostly disregard that intuition because it's so obviously distortable by the fact that the vast majority of my interactions with such people have been on English-language forums.

There is a difference -- while most people don't do math, at least they don't invent and spread alternative math. People who don't do rationality usually spread their preferred version of irrationality.

This is why trying to be rational in a society of irrational people is more difficult than trying to do good maths in a society of mostly math-illiterate people. The math person cannot cooperate with most of his neighbors, but also does not have to fight them. Also, the math-illiterate people usually don't pretend that they are great in math. Learning math can be difficult, but learning rationality is more difficult when so many people are trying to deceive you.

While I think I see why the parent was downvoted, I would add that in my experience atheism doesn't correlate very strongly with rationality, insofar as rationaltiy can be said to mean anything. I know plenty of successful scientists who are Christian. I know plenty of atheists who repeatedly make poor life choices. Telling me someone is religious does not help me predict whether I will be able to beat them on any practical contest of wits or reasoning.

The majority of Chinese I have encountered both inside and outside of China believe in traditional Chinese medicine, including the healing powers of chi and all the other aspects that are no better than homeopathy. Of course all of these individuals have claimed to be atheists. There are many flavors of systematic irrationality.

Assuming you consider believing in zero gods rational... Why privilege one number out of infinitely many?

Occam's razor. Deity hypotheses are both very complicated and don't offer much in the way of useful predictions.