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A couple minor edit suggestions:
Footnote [1] seems to have a missed "opportunity" after "every" in:
I can't help but notice people using these terms at every, no matter
To me, an individual's own inability to notice an exceedingly clear absence of any foundational body of knowledge behind anyone's particular persuasion tactics is much more representative of that particular individual's level of understanding with regards to persuasion itself.
To put it bluntly, this statement feels like several related sentences were put into a hydraulic press and this was the result. Perhaps rephrase into multiple component sentences? Fewer words does not necessarily make something easier to parse.
This seems like a useful and accurate overview of the general state of data utilization in many organizations.
In my work as a software engineer at a clinical research company, I'm frequently able to watch as my coworkers struggle to convince our clients (companies running clinical trials) that yes, it is critical to make sure all of available data entry options are locked to industry standardized terms FROM THE BEGINNING else they will be adding thousands of hours of data cleaning on the tail end of the study.
An example of an obstacle to this: Clinicians running/designing the trials are sometimes adamant that we include an option in the field for "Reason for treatment discontinuation" called "Investigator Decision" when that is not an available term in the standard list and the correct standardized code item is "Physician Decision". But they are convinced that the difference matters even though on the back end the people doing the data cleaning are required to match it with the acceptable coded terms and it'll get mapped to "Physician Decision" either way because the FDA only accepts applications that adhere to the standards.
In my opinion a common cause of this disconnect is those running trials are usually quite ignorant of what the process of data cleaning and analysis looks like and they have never been recipients of their own data.
As a pipe dream I would be in favor of mandatory data science courses for all medical professionals before letting them participate in any sort of research, but realistically that would only add regulatory burden while accomplishing little good as there's no practical way to guarantee they actually retain or make use of that knowledge.
literally, he did not believe in probabilities between zero and one. yes, such people exist. he would say things like “either it is, or it isn’t” and didn’t buy it when we tried to explain that a 90% chance and a 10% chance are both uncertain but you should treat them differently.
...How does someone this idiotic ever stay in a position of authority? I would get their statements on statistics and probability in writing and show it to the nearest person-with-ability-to-fire-them-who-is-not-also-a-moron.
Strange variant of Monte Hall problem I managed to confuse myself with:
You are presented with the three doors but do not know if you will have a chance to switch later. You know the host can decide to open one of the losing doors and give you the opportunity to switch or not, and does not wish to give away the prize.
If the player chooses the correct door first he is incentivized to open one and give you the option to switch, but since the player is informed of the rules that may convince the player not to switch.
If the player chooses an incorrect door first he disincentivized to give you the option to switch, but since the player is informed of the rules that may convince the player not to switch.
After the host informs you if do you or do not have the option to switch, you are given a piece of paper and asked to predict what is behind the door. If your prediction is correct you get what is behind the door. If your prediction is wrong && [a door was opened] you get what is behind the other one, If prediction is wrong && [no door was opened] you get what is behind one of the remaining doors at random.
Is there an optimal strategy: For the host? For the player?
My working memory is now shot and I can't say I'm confident the puzzle is logically coherent, but it was fun to make.
I don't think most of us mind clickbait so much as clickbait-and-switch, where the content is not what the headline promises. In this case, the 'bait' headline was more or less justified so I don't mind.
Because absent their monopoly on certain types of advertising, competitors could offer the same value for much less. In retrospect I suppose the actual problem is then the monopoly power not strictly the effort from the seller or lack thereof. I'll add to the OP to reflect that/cross out what I no longer endorse.
I don't agree with your labor theory of value - there are many complex and individual valuations that are quite valid. One can easily argue that the limited resource of buyer attention is worth a fair bit of money to secure, and the percentage-of-sale is just a nice way of charging more to people with more money.
I could be convinced to have a more nuanced understanding. I'm confident I have not read enough of the writing on the topic. What would you recommend?
We might be able to package this up into a nice tidy term and call it "volume insensitivity". See also: The un-intuitiveness of the square-cube law in regards to scaling things up or down.
I find I'm much less adept at first person three dimensional video games than two dimensional ones. This may have more to do with how in e.g. platformers, everything that can effect the player is in your field of view. Not so in three dimensional games where you can get, say, stabbed in the back and never so much as glimpse what got you. Hollow Knight is a much easier game for me than Dark Souls 3, despite people on the internet characterizing Hollow Knight as "2-D Dark Souls".
In similar avenues, there seems to be a dichotomy between people who think in relative directions vs those who intuitively think in cardinal directions.
The National Association of Realtors is a rent-seeking organization. This is because commissions should be strictly proportional to the amount of work required for the specific task able to change with market forces rather than an arbitrary percentage of the value of a particular property, since the effort needed to sell a property is not necessarily proportional to the value of said property.
I'm disgusted that they've managed to make a percentage of property value the accepted norm for commissions. How were people suckered into that rather than demanding per-hour rates?
Edited to reflect insight gained from comments.
The 'live under a rock' strategy has been quite effective for me. I stopped following most political commentary sources several years ago and I've never regretted it.
I avoid political conversations among my family and coworkers because the overwhelming majority are strongly religious and conservative. With beliefs so different from mine discussion is not likely to be productive nor pleasant.
I see, I suppose I interpreted 'scaling' a bit less generally. In that case I agree.
Also I just noticed you mentioned flywheels, which are one of my favorite pieces of technology. I long for someone to make a phone with a flywheel battery as a meme/gag gift.
This has parallels with how the factory-building game Factorio presents things. The thing that makes Factorio fun[1] is how it abstracts away those pesky prohibitively complex nuances of manufacturing & automation so that everything can feasibly be automated quickly and scaled ad infinitum. For example:
- The conveyor belts run on magic (they don't require any power, which isn't really explained considering every other electrical thing in the game requires pseudo-realistic levels of electrical input.)
- The assembling machines (essentially Autofacs) don't require any retooling/tuning/cleaning/etc to switch between completely different recipes seamlessly)
- No manufacturing equipment ever wears out or needs physical maintenance.
- Inserters (robot hands that handle objects to and from conveyor belts and the various structures) detect objects flawlessly and reliably and any kind can handle any type of object (and furthermore object sizes are abstracted such that all take the same amount of space on a conveyor belt)
- Electrical usage is abstracted so that you only need to keep generated power >= usage or things will start to slow down/get rolling blackouts. You don't need to worry about pesky throughput tolerances on cables, one small wooden power pole and its wire can handle just as much as a giant cross-country steel behemoth.
- & thousands of other small details abstracted away for simplicity.
Overall I hope we are able to progress to Autofacs in real life, I just don't see it being nearly as straightforward as any of us would prefer. Not that I want to discourage anyone from making the attempt! I just hope that they know what they are getting into.
- ^
Really really fun for engineering-minded people like myself.
Fun-hazard level — If you've never tried it before it might be wise not to unless you have incredible self discipline or several days of free time in the near future; It can be addicting.
Obviously, there would need to be a lot of scaling before it would make sense to internally produce computer chips.
More than mere scaling, this would require equipment orders of magnitude more precise and the necessary ultra-clean environment and all the minutiae those entail. Microchip manufacturing is Hard.
Interesting. I prefer working on smaller projects where I do the entire thing myself from start to finish. This is mostly because I don't particularly enjoy familiarizing myself with somebody else's code.
Although if I get stuck I will ask my fellow devs for input, and I enjoy showing them whatever cool thing I did once it's polished.
At my current workplace I fill the role of ad hoc programmer, where I'm the guy to ask if somebody needs some small tedious thing automated or parsed I'm the one who can get it done quickly.
I also don't prefer making software intended for other people to use. If something is a background data monitor or something it doesn't need a shiny intuitive UI or anything like that. I just need to write it and set it up to run every x days or whatever. If people besides me and other devs will need to use something, that adds an entire layer of tedium in the form of usage guides and more exhaustive (layperson friendly) documentation.
Very cool analysis!
A more natural way might be to say that in this world, there is no sampling-with-replacement, there is only sampling-without-replacement.
That is nicer. I don't have enough background in statistics to have fully internalized the regular terms for things. I end up tabooing myself and using more words than necessary.
There are probably weird consequences in thermodynamics & physics from these hidden variables too, but I'm not sure what.
That's why I hedged with "Assuming it doesn't break causality or similarly hazardous anti-fun effects". It's difficult to invent any universal magic effects that don't throw a wrench in physics if the consequences are extrapolated far enough.
So if you're aware of Gambler's Verity and try to study it, then it cancels itself out!
This is fantastic!
I'm not sure the best way conflicting expectations could resolve. It could be a flat vote or have magnitude proportional to the amount of observations...Or even based on relative emotional investment! What could possibly go wrong?
Other good effects: nobody expects to get cancer, so I guess it doesn't happen?
Things happen exactly as in reality except the existence of expectation applies a base-rate multiplier. So there would be more disease because e.g. hypochondriacs would be more likely than normal to contract disease.
There are many ways conflicting expectations could resolve, I'm not sure which would make the most sense. It could be a flat vote or have magnitude proportional to the amount of observations.
If it was advantageous to use structures of those inside cells for reactions somehow, then some organisms would already do that.
Not necessarily. The space of advantageous biologically possible structural configurations seems to me to be intuitively larger than the space of useful configurations currently known to be in use.
In order for a structure to be evolutionarily feasible, it must not only be advantageous but also there must be a path of individually beneficial (or at minimum not harmful) small steps in between it and currently existing structures. If an adaptation does not lend itself to linearly realized benefit, e.g. one that works really well but only when 90%+ is 'correct', it has no evolutionary way to piece itself together from 0-90%.
Like, for example, it makes sense that a future LLM would be able to explain a mathematical concept that has been documented and previously discussed but I just can't see it solving existing frontier problems in mathematical theory, as it's a completely different "skillset".
Most non-mathmatician humans such as myself are arguably in the same boat for this specific example. I certainly wouldn't know how to begin to work on frontier mathematical theory, but despite this if I were an AI I would fit many definitions of an AGI, albeit a lowly human-level one.
It would be useful to have a distinction between 'routine' logical reasoning (being able to apply established knowledge dynamically) and novel logical reasoning (being able to synthesize new theories/ideas from existing ones).
LLMs can arguably do the first but not the second, however the line dividing the two can be hazy. Many "novel advances" are not 'new' as much as existing approaches from different domains being recombined to solve a different type of problem than they had previously been used for. Is this routine or novel? Could an LLM do this? Particularly if the problem were phased to be tabooed/abstractified to avoid using leading questions/keywords that would encourage the LLM to regurgitate the common approaches?
An impressive thing about LLMs is how well they can work with arbitrary problems, so long as the problems are not too far out of the training distribution.
An example:
I asked ChatGPT 4o:
"A widget = 14
A phro = -3
A midge = 5
An attached wrok multiplies value by 0.5
What is the value of: A widget with an attached wrok plus three phros and two midges, and three wroks by themselves?"
Solving this sort of (simple to a human) word problem requires combining the domains of basic math and conceptual relations between objects (i.e. <object> can have <relation> to other <object> which interacts with the properties of that thing) and also the ability to make assumptions from missing information (no explicit value was assigned to solitary wroks)
GPT answer:
"To find the value of the given expression, let's break it down step by step.
1. **Value of a widget with an attached wrok:**
- A widget is worth 14.
- An attached wrok multiplies the value by 0.5.
- So, the value of a widget with an attached wrok is .
2. **Value of three phros:**
- A phro is worth -3.
- So, three phros are .
3. **Value of two midges:**
- A midge is worth 5.
- So, two midges are .
4. **Value of three wroks by themselves:**
- Since a wrok by itself is not attached to anything and we don't have a specified standalone value for a wrok, we can assume it doesn't add any value by itself. So, three wroks by themselves are worth .
Now, we need to add all these values together:
First, let's handle the addition of 7 and -9:
Then, add the result to 10:
And finally, add the result to 0:
So, the value of a widget with an attached wrok plus three phros and two midges, and three wroks by themselves is ."
Is this logical reasoning? Depends on how you define it. It's certainly useful. How much of the thinking we humans do is 'mere' pattern matching with variable inputs? I suspect a large amount.
Haha makes sense. I wasn't sure what the demographic distribution was likely to be.
You're right, "objectively" doesn't fit as well in that statement as I thought.
That is how I intended 'convincing' to be interpreted.
For almost every category of X, you'll be judged hard for your preferences, even if you didn't consciously choose any of them.
It depends on if X is a demographic/group or a variable. "I don't want to date people who are [uneducated/from a drastically different cultural background]" sounds a lot less politically correct than "I want to date people with whom I estimate a high probability of mutual relationship satisfaction." because you don't have to explain your criteria to everyone.
I admit that's more semantic obfuscation of judgement risk markers than it is mitigating the problem.
The rule "90% of everything is garbage" applies, but recent moral values are rejecting any sorts of hierarchies, even between functional and dysfunctional countries, cultures, cities, religions, values, etc.
When society suppresses attempts to evaluate concepts or situations as objectively better or worse than alternatives, is it any surprise that polarization increases?
If there are no commonly agreed upon benchmarks to calibrate against it becomes a war of whoever can shout loudest/most convincingly.
I think a significant contributing factor that makes 'simple' questions in some contexts prohibitively difficult to answer is the lack of True Availability of the information being requested.
In this case, I'm defining True Availability[1] as the requested content being already prepared and organized into the correct format and grouped together, needing no further processing other than finding it. Conditional Availability would be when you know how to obtain the information, but it requires some degree of processing and filtering to be ready for consumption.
In computer science, this is similar to a lookup table. Lookup tables typically contain a collection of pre-calculated results for common computations, because looking up a result in a table is generally faster than calculating it from scratch.
Anything you have in a LT is Truly Available, whereas anything you have to calculate is Conditionally Available.
In your example of freedom of information requests, the questions are hard to answer because they are only available on the condition that someone filters the requested information from everything else and then prepares it into a usable format for releasing.
If I was tasked with refining the information availability of a large organization, I would attempt to prepare publicly-releasable copies of everything that COULD legally be requested via freedom of information act and publish a public database of that. Let them knock themselves out. Individual request processing and answering sounds like a terribly inefficient method of sharing information.
There are probably legal/bureaucratic/practical difficulties to my proposed solution, but my point is merely that there are in some contexts systemic barriers making answers disproportionately expensive rather than answers being intrinsically more difficult in every case.
- ^
I suspect there already exist more conventional terms for the concepts I'm referring to, but I'm making do with what I already have Available.
If you want to be generally skilled at the type of challenges D&D Sci provides, putting some points into the data science and statistics proficiencies would be a good way to start.
In particular, some related skills:
- SQL - Easy to pick up for someone with good technical skills. Challenging to master. Before going too deep on relational databases I also recommend learning good theory and practices behind it like the different design forms and why they're important.
- R programming language
- Familiarization with various statistical analysis methods and what use cases they are intended for
As a software developer who works on object-level automation every day, I'm intimidated by the difficulty of attempting to definitively quantify 'profit from automated tasks' in a useful way.
For example, how do we define 'automation'? "A task that formerly needed to be done by a human that now doesn't need to be"? A printing press is automation by some interpretations of that insufficient definition.
Some changes in efficiency also have similar effects on productivity without being 'automation' (although much less scalable), for example a user that becomes highly proficient in the hotkeys of a complex platform may see massive improvements in their productivity, and subsequently eliminate jobs that would have been needed if they hadn't become more productive.
I suspect if additional taxes were levied on 'job automation' it would merely create large incentives for companies to skirt around whatever the legal definition of automation was, and potentially hide it in things like the above example.
In the case where there was no 'automation tax' created, I would anticipate a NIT to be reasonable but not sustainable because I expect automation to continue to remove jobs at an accelerating rate in years to come. I do not expect tax revenue to increase at the same rate because my current understanding is that the most wealthy tend to also be those most proficient at exploiting loopholes in the tax system to evade as much as possible.
My takes here are almost entirely conjecture and I'd appreciate someone more informed to correct and/or clarify.
I'm in a similar situation. I have very little self control with sweets/candy if I have them available. I can far more easily stop myself from buying them in the first place.
If I allow myself to buy a bag of candy I've already lost and I will consume all of it in a matter of hours/days.
How much of the developed world's economy is devoted to aesthetic personalization of products rather than accomplishing the essential functions of [product here]?
I am not saying aesthetics or personalization are 'bad', however I suspect that if the cost were quantified and demonstrated to people along with examples of more productive things that could be done with that money, many people might prefer forgoing some of our more wasteful things.
Example:
The cost of having thousands of different styles of sink faucet, instead of a small number of highly efficient and optimized faucet designs for distinct use cases [small household kitchen, large household kitchen, small form factor, high throughput restaurant]. These costs are created via the overhead caused by the redundant costs of engineering, design, manufacturing, and logistics.
These same factors apply more or less to every product where variations are sold primarily for aesthetic rather than functional purposes, particularly when they replace existing functional versions.
I believe the root cause of this inefficiency is our psychological tendency to overvalue ephemeral utility such as using possessions as social status tools rather than trying to optimize how we collectively use our limited economic output. For example, if a sizeable portion of the money in the market for functionally useless decorations were able to go towards medical research.
I do not know how a more efficient allocation of resources could be practically enacted. According to my understanding most attempts at centrally planned economies have even less success than the free market, as inefficient as it is.
If a large portion of people decided to prioritize their purchases better that would work, but that's obviously a very challenging coordination problem.
There's soft skills in "communicating to others without hurting them", (i.e. "tact")
What about the situation in which:
- One has highly religious relatives who are somewhat less cognitively functional that oneself
- You wish you could help them have a map more closely coupled to reality
- You are confident that you have a good chance of convincing them of reality, but not that the knowledge would actually be a net gain for them to have, since:
- They are so invested in their beliefs that the realization of falsehood might do irreparable psychological damage
Yes, but it thankfully for me only lasted a couple of hours and they didn't start keeping track until near the end.
I had a very similar experience as a teenager after a mild concussion from falling on ice. According to my family, I would 'reboot' every few minutes and ask the same few questions exactly. It got burdensome enough that they put up a note on the inside of my bedroom door with something along the lines of:
"You are having amnesia"
"You hit your head and got a mild concussion"
"You've already been to the ER, they said you're likely to be fine after a few hours and it is safe to sleep."
The entire experience was (reportedly) very stressful to me due to disorientation.
Yes.
For example: The common saying, "Anything worth doing is worth doing [well/poorly]" needs more qualifiers. As it is, the opposite respective advice can often be just as useful. I.E. not very.
Better V1: "The cost/utility ratio of beneficial actions at minimum cost are often less favorable than they would be with greater investment."
Better V2: "If an action is beneficial, a flawed attempt may be preferable to none at all."
However, these are too wordy to be pithy and in pop culture transmission accuracy is generally sacrificed in favor of catchiness.
Yeah, many people, like the majority of users on this forum, have decided to not build AGI.
Not to build AGI yet.
Many of us would love to build it as soon as we can be confident we have a realistic and mature plan for alignment, but that's a problem that's so absurdly challenging that even if aliens landed tomorrow and handed us the "secret to Friendly AI", we would have a hell of a time trying to validate that it actually was the real thing.
If one is faced with a math problem where you could be staring at the answer and know no way to unambiguously verify said answer, you are likely not capable of solving the problem until you somehow close the inferential distance separating you from understanding. Assuming the problem is solvable at all.
Yes, thanks!
What would the minimal digital representation of a human brain & by extension memories/personality look like?
I am not a subject matter expert. This is armchair speculation and conjecture, the actual reality of which I expect to be orders of magnitude more complicated than my ignorant model.
The minimal physical representation is obviously the brain itself, but to losslessly store every last bit of information —IE exact particle configurations— as accurately as it is possible to measure is both nigh-unto-impossible and likely unnecessary considering the moment-to-moment changes living causes to the particles, while "self" appears constant.
So would the detailed information of cell positions and compositions be sufficient granularity? How practical would it be? I don't know of any existing technology that is able to achieve the level of detail that would likely be required. MRI is very impressive, but while structure can be viewed (at least down to a 0.2mm resolution as of 2024-04-02), chemical composition cannot (as far as I know).
Do we know what the important variables are, and do we know what tolerances within which the hypothetical "Mind of Theseus" is still the same mind? (I suspect this is a philosophical question and the answer is fully subjective and we have no way of knowing.)
Unfortunately that only helps for those with the necessary experience to discern good work, and also the time and desire to inspect it.
It's unfortunate that monetary incentives are notoriously vulnerable to being Goodharted into uselessness or worse. You try to offer a bounty on X [undesirable thing], people start [building/breeding] more of them and making a killing.
This is not to say incentives and/or subsidies can never work, only that implementing them effectively is a non-trivial task.
While they don't expect to literally see Jesus in person, there's a lot of emphasis on 'personal revelation' which is for the most part just conditioning to get believers to interpret their own regular ol' intuition/emotions as communication from the Holy Spirit. If someone believes that strongly enough, the brain provides whatever thoughts/feelings they subconsciously expect to 'receive'. It's both impressive and disturbing how well this cycle can work. Anticipation can easily function as a self-fulfilling prophecy as long as the anticipated experience is fully mental and emotional.
And because this 'evidence' has been accepted by them, they also expect their prayers to be able to miraculously heal sickness/disease (except for when it doesn't of course; "God's will" etc etc.)
I think they are genuinely unvaccinated. They believe (or profess to believe) in tons of quack medicine but AFAIK they don't spend loads of money on it. If they had a health emergency they'd still go to an ER, so they're not completely in denial of modern medicine.
Thanks for that! You're fortunate you got out before going on a mission. I lasted only a few months before I became bored out of my mind and couldn't do it any more.
I'm not even going to attempt to convince my parents. I know them well enough that if I prepared a good enough strategy I'd estimate a >40% chance of convincing at least one of them, but their lives and personalities are so enmeshed with the church that losing it would likely do them more harm than good at this point.
How did you approach dating after leaving? I don't have much of a friend group now (not specifically because I left, I just drifted away from my friends from HS after a few years) so it's really tough to meet women.
That's neat! In my case I didn't leave because of HPMOR specifically, although it certainly didn't hurt.
I'm doing decently well, thanks for asking!
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I don't think any but the most rational/educated theists think in terms of probability to that degree. Many feel they are certain in their beliefs.
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It doesn't make a huge difference. I know several Mormons who are likely smarter than I am (mathematicians & engineers, etc). Shaking off an entire upbringing of brainwashing is a test of critical thinking, not general intelligence. Intelligence only helps to solve problems once you apply it to the situation. Once you compartmentalize religion and surround it with mental caution tape, no amount of brilliance is likely to help unless you allow the tape to be removed.
I think one of the most important steps to being able to walk away was realizing that I could take the things I thought were good with me, while leaving out the things that I thought were false or wrong.
I second this, thanks!
I would say it's possible, just at a lower probability proportional to the difference in intelligence. More intelligence will still correspond to better ideas on average.
That said, it was not acclaimed scientists or ivy-league research teams that invented the airplane. It was two random high-school dropouts in Ohio. This is not to say that education or prestige are the same thing as intelligence[1], simply that brilliant innovations can sometimes be made by the little guy who's not afraid to dream big.
- ^
By all accounts the Wright Brothers were intelligent
To clarify, I was allowed to read fiction[1], just not on Sundays. Although my mom did disapprove of Harry Potter for a long while because 'something something glorifies occult beliefs something something'.
A couple of my own hypothesis to take with a grain of salt:
- One big part of the problem is the tendency of some to vastly underestimate how difficult it is to cover up anything that a lot of people know. Also a lack of fact checking. (My friend/relative/trusted neighbor told me this, therefore it must be true)
- I think QAnon theories appeal to much of the same crowd as cults. If someone is willing to believe <small niche group> has secret knowledge that has
failed peer reviewbeen suppressed by <Big Government/Forces of Ambiguous Evil>, they are more likely to accept the plausibility of other claims with similar appeal. So 911 conspiracy people are more likely to also believe that vaccines cause autism or <snake oil/homeopathy/fad treatment of the week> cures cancer but Big Pharma is keeping it secret, etc.
I wonder if there's any good data tracking the relative frequency of this sort of thing?
In a similar vein, Utah has more MLM schemes per capita than any other state.[2]
At least nobody I know believes in Flat Earth...as far as I know.
When you grow up knowing nothing else, it just feels normal[1] (except for occasional twinge of cognitive dissonance when evidence contradicts something you believe[2])
A culture of strong neighborhood communities and tight-knit extended families which provide a social support system and financial and physical safety net. Growing up, if my family had a crisis[3] or even some mundane need like running out of eggs for a recipe[4] we knew 10+ people living on the same block we could call or walk over to on a moments notice.
Despite my disenfranchisement with the LDS church as a whole, individual members and local leaders are generally nice[5] people who fulfill useful and productive roles in society.
There's also a admirable emphasis on education for the sake of becoming better/more effective as opposed to education for it's own sake[6].
- ^
- ^
- ^
assuming it wasn't the type of emergency to necessitate calling 911
- ^
which can become a particularly serious problem if you don't believe in shopping on Sunday
- ^
As with many things, mileage may vary. Some Mormons are more insular than others. A few years ago a General Authority (Basically somebody who's high up in the leadership of the entire church) chastised "members of the church who forbid their kids from playing with the children of non-members"[paraphrased]
- ^
As with most metrics, it's easy to Goodhart.
On a completely unrelated note, footnotes can be used to enhance communication, so why shouldn't I start evaluating my comments by how many footnotes I can cram in?
It was a gradual process over several years. Eventually one or two relatively small things became the metaphorical straws that broke the camel's back.
Especially after beginning to study science and statistics in earnest, I became increasingly aware of how inconsistent it was to have different standards of evidence for religion vs science. Once I could no longer fool myself into arbitrarily moving the goalposts my beliefs collapsed very quickly.
Something else that helped me was the good ol' Sagan standard of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
About the same way many non-religious people rate the bible: It has many consistency and continuity issues, with a few potentially insightful things mixed in that you could find elsewhere more efficiently.
Growing up being expected to read every day to search for 'personal revelation' somewhat puts a sour taste in my mouth when I think about it now. I certainly have better things to read when I have a choice in the matter.
My favorite part these days is the amusingly flagrant disregard of archeological plausibility. (A civilization called the 'Jaredites' allegedly numbered in the millions on the American continents before wiping themselves out in a series of wars. Archaeological evidence? Very little if any.
e.g. "practically how do you explore alcohol in a way that isn't dangerous")
Yeah, that's the sort of thing that could be useful. I still have never tried alcohol. I know in theory it would be fine when used responsibly and in moderation, but lack of knowledge/deep conditioning are hard to overcome. I could go to a bar, but I wouldn't even know the approximate 'strength' of various types of drinks or how fast alcohol takes effect/wears off/how soon it would be safe to drive again.
Not to mention I don't have any idea how sensitive I am personally to alcohol, so I wouldn't go try a drink without a trusted friend with me to stop me from doing anything really stupid.
explicitly avoiding a permanent state of having an "ex-mormon" identity, which strikes me as healthy
Yeah, I agree. I avoid dedicated ex-mormon communities. In my answer to Joseph_C I said:
"...r/exmormon is quite a bad environment IMHO. While there are some nice and reasonable folks, they seem to be either a minority or simply less vocal than those who are not. A significant portion of those who frequent exmo-specific groups (or at least post often) tend to be those who are angry and bitter. As far as I can tell some of them still blame the church for everything bad in their life even decades after leaving.
Those with a more healthy outlook tend to move on and find better things to do."
NB: I have a casual interest in high-demand religions, but have never been a part of one (with the arguable exception of the rationality/EA community).
From what I can tell, the rationality/EA community is lacking many 'tells' that tend to be present in high demand religions. For example:
- There's no taboo against criticizing leadership
- There's no intrusive way to extort monetary contributions (occasional requests for donations are a lot less intrusive than "pay your tithing or lose out on privileges/go on guilt trip"
- Ideas are just ideas, not some unified one-size-fits-all this-is-how-to-live-your-life-or-consequences (social or otherwise).
This seems like bait but I'm answering anyway.
No, I think it's still a bad thing because (as with most religions) it fuels beliefs that prevent people from even considering trying to solve problems like aging and death because "heaven will be better than mortality", "God will make everything better", etc.
In addition, even while they have more children than the general population there's an estimated 46-60% retention rate of young adults staying in the church. If you factor that in, even assuming 60% retention the overall birthrate of ~3.4 * 0.6 = 2.04 birthrate of those who stay Mormon[1], and so by that metric they are disappearing just like the majority of the developed world (this is not taking new converts into account).
That being said, population sustainability is a real economic and practical problem in the long-term. Any rationalist with a sufficiently stable economic situation should seriously consider having kids, if for no other reason so that more humans grow up in an intellectually healthy situation.
- ^
Please correct me if this is the wrong way to estimate this.
- I found LessWrong via HPMoR. I found HPMoR because it was mentioned offhand on an unrelated article as an example of a piece of fan-fiction that was actually good...and it was.
- Many of my friends and most of my immediate and extended family are Mormon. I'll happily discuss my opinions to any who seem like they want help/are searching for answers, but I'm not in the habit of proactively questioning their beliefs since bringing up info directly critical of the Church tends to make True Believers instantly defensive and suspicious. Social 'immune systems' are incredible in how they defend existing beliefs.
I do try to indirectly raise the sanity waterline in the hope that others will find their own way out of their own volition.
I'm more or less resigned to leave those who are content alone, it seems quite futile to try to rescue someone who doesn't want to be rescued, and they might not appreciate it even if the 'brute force logic' solution did manage to convince them. - Anything that can be destroyed by the truth should be. 50 years ago would have been more difficult to find my way out of because the internet didn't exist.
- Even between households there's a lot of variation in how certain rules and interpreted. My family was more on the extreme end of the Sabbath Observance spectrum, while most other kids I knew were allowed to play video games and generally do what they wanted on Sunday. It was very difficult to grow up dreading every Sunday, and even though I wasn't all that 'rebellious' of a teenager necessity caused me to find a quiet spot to read sci-fi/fantasy novels or play video games when my parents weren't looking.
Some other things my parents didn't allow:- No Pg-13 movies, mostly because anything remotely sexually suggestive was considered 'inappropriate'. This essentially was enforced only at home. They acknowledged there was nothing stopping us from watching whatever movies at our friends houses and they wouldn't try to stop us, but they would passively disapprove. Most other Mormon families were far more lax about this and less prudish about media in general.
- They discouraged caffeine, although that was more relaxed. I know there are some Mormon communities that consider ALL caffeinated drinks taboo instead of just Tea and Coffee.
- Teenagers were not allowed to date at all until age 16 or older. Being a socially awkward early-teen boy this had the unfortunate consequence of me reasoning that "since I can't date anyway what's the point of getting to know girls?"...Which I would realize later was just an excuse to avoid doing things out of my comfort zone and I should have used that important time to develop my social skills in a safe environment.
- I had a decent amount of internet access and quickly became better at computers than both of my parents. I taught myself coding by learning to mod games, and my skill with code eventually turned into a career. There wasn't total isolation from current events, although everything I heard was filtered through the highly-conservative lens of the adults around me. (A few of my relatives are also members of the JBS and believe that 911 was an 'inside job' and similar things from the Q-Anon bingo chart.) My parents were very opposed to all attempts to build high-density housing[1] nearby because of traffic/infrastructure concerns.
- ^
(i.e. anything more dense than 1/3 acre lots with a yard)
Strong neighborhood communities called "wards" are a very nice thing to have. The one where I grew up was full of nice people who would watch out for each other, help elderly people with yard maintenance, etc. IIRC Cities in Utah county have some of the lowest crime rates in the USA, despite having a moderate (~600k within 5,550 sq.km) population.
Not all Mormon neighborhoods are equal, but the good ones are excellent places to live. I definitely miss the instant community connection that (good) wards have. (They don't exclude non-members from neighborhood events, but a lot of the 'structural' social interaction happens at church and church-related activities)