beliefs may be epistemically irrational while being instrumentally rational.
I predict pushback—LW won’t like that idea one little bit :-)
and just accept the notion that there may be something interesting going on underneath the surface.
That’s not the definition of “rational”, though.
You’re basically saying that with “irrational” beliefs one should go meta—look at them from the outside, consider actual consequences and effects, ponder why these beliefs exists… Yeah, sure. Going “Oh, you believe in , you must be so dumb” is dumb. And yes, “I don’t know why this works, but this works” is a reasonable :-) position to take.
I’m still not sure, though, that by the prediction metric science will look as badly as you hint and religions will shine. Contemporary religions generally shy away from testable (during the lifetime) predictions and for good reasons, too. As to science, I think the distinction between hard and soft sciences is pretty necessary here. Hard sciences live and die by predictions. Soft sciences spin narratives—just like your friendly pastor next door :-/
I predict pushback—LW won’t like that idea one little bit :-)
That claim seems totally fine to me. Inaccurate maps can still be useful, sometimes even more useful than more accurate maps as they can be simpler to use and easier to create. I wrote about that here.
Incorrect maps can also sometimes be useful. Examples of this are adaptive biases like the sexual over perception bias in men. From a truth-maximization perspective young men who assume that all women want them are showing severe social-cognitive inaccuracies, judgment biases, and probably narcissistic personality disorder. However, from an evolutionary perspective, the same young men are behaving in a more optimal manner. One which has consistently maximized the reproductive success of their male ancestors. Another similar example is the bias for positive perception of partners.
Which group has higher average happiness levels, religious or non-religious?
First, this is irrelevant to the question of who makes better predictions; and second, you might be able to show correlation but I have strong doubts you would be able to show causation.
Religions predict a lot of things. Every commandment in the Bible is a prediction, a hypothesis. Every parable, likewise. Do this, not that; the prediction is that “this” is better than “that”. If, on the whole, people who are strongly religious are more happy, those predictions hold true.
Do this, not that; the prediction is that “this” is better than “that”.
Maybe, but smushing together “making predictions” and “having a particular vision of the world” gets dangerously close to empty philosophising. Of course every worldview implies predictions, but “Jesus Loves You” isn’t an exercise in forecasting.
Besides, consider evolution. “Do not kill” works because societies without this commandment disintegrate pretty rapidly and do not make it. That doesn’t make it a prediction, just—like in biology—a change that’s good enough to survive.
Maybe, but smushing together “making predictions” and “having a particular vision of the world” gets dangerously close to empty philosophising.
Every hypothesis is a “particular vision of the world”, a particular idea about how the world works. Its usefulness is how well this idea translates to prediction.
Besides, consider evolution. “Do not kill” works because societies without this commandment disintegrate pretty rapidly and do not make it. That doesn’t make it a prediction, just—like in biology—a change that’s good enough to survive.
Science is just as much an evolutionary process? I’m not sure what the criticism here is.
See this article (full article available from sidebar), which argues that although conventional wisdom gives religion the advantage here, the reality may not be so clear-cut.
So, did you find that article because you, or whoever linked it to you, discovered it—or because you, or they, went looking for something which proved what you or they wanted to believe?
ETA: I’ve long held that atheists should form social support groups, and take the other best-of aspects of religion. The article is arguing that the things which make religion beneficial have nothing to do with religion. This is untrue; religion is inherently a social activity. It is, by its nature, pro-social. If we’re only grudgingly going to admit religion does anything right, that impairs our ability to figure out what it does right, and take those things for ourselves.
I’m still not sure, though, that by the prediction metric science will look as badly as you hint and religions will shine.
Which group has higher average happiness levels, religious or non-religious?
This is not the same question. Happiness is not a perfect indicator of good predictions, and people are not composed only of their ideology. This reframing gets farther away from the actual issue.
An indicator. If I can stick an electrode in your brain and keep you blissfully happy for the rest of your life, and hook you up to an intravenous drip to provide you with enough nutrients to keep you alive (but perfectly useless to everyone else, and perfectly incapable of achieving any of the goals you might have had before you were hooked up) for, say, 25 years—would you want it done?
I would not, because I care about things other than happiness. Happiness is my brain’s way of indicating that some kinds of goals are being met, and it’s a useful signal of those things, but it’s no more perfectly reliable than any number of other internal behaviour-guiding signals in my brain. If I trusted them all completely, I would make a lot of poor decisions about what to eat and when, whom to have sex with and when, when to give up on something because it’s too hard, etc., etc., etc.
An indicator. If I can stick an electrode in your brain and keep you blissfully happy for the rest of your life, and hook you up to an intravenous drip to provide you with enough nutrients to keep you alive (but perfectly useless to everyone else, and perfectly incapable of achieving any of the goals you might have had before you were hooked up) for, say, 25 years—would you want it done?
Ah, wireheading. No. For reasons that I’ll get into below.
I would not, because I care about things other than happiness. Happiness is my brain’s way of indicating that some kinds of goals are being met, and it’s a useful signal of those things, but it’s no more perfectly reliable than any number of other internal behaviour-guiding signals in my brain. If I trusted them all completely, I would make a lot of poor decisions about what to eat and when, whom to have sex with and when, when to give up on something because it’s too hard, etc., etc., etc.
What would make those decisions poor, however? Is it because they would reduce your long-term happiness?
You’re engaging in a bit of mind-body duality here; your brain isn’t a separate thing that imposes stuff on your mind, your brain is your mind. Your brain’s happiness is your happiness; and likewise, the reverse. First, it’s important to note that pleasure isn’t happiness; this is something I assume you’re consciously aware of, but you appear to conflate the two somewhat in terms of what kinds of decisions you use as examples.
Why wouldn’t I wirehead? Because the idea horrifies me. As soon as the electrodes go in, I’m quite certain I’d prefer that state. I wouldn’t even agree to five seconds of it, however, because I expect after five seconds, I’d readily agree to twenty five years; a few seconds of wireheading is equivalent to twenty five years, because I expect it would erode any desire not to do it. And the extreme unhappiness I feel with relation to the idea of wireheading tells me that it isn’t right for me, and, I expect, it isn’t right for people in general.
I call happiness the indicator; if you rewire my turn signal indicators in my dashboard, which normally indicate whether or not my turn signals are flashing, so that they are always on, are my turn signals always on? Or have you merely destroyed a useful signal?
What would make those decisions poor, however? Is it because they would reduce your long-term happiness?
No. (Not entirely, anyway; happiness is one of my goals.)
You’re engaging in a bit of mind-body duality here
I really don’t think I am. I did not claim (and I do not believe) that those things are being signalled by/in my brain to something outside my brain. If I say “the contents of address 0x1453C are the chess program’s estimate of how much danger the white king is in”, I’m not claiming it’s using the contents of that address to signal to something other than itself. Similarly with happiness in the brain. The “I” of which I speak is, of course, implemented on and in the hardware of my brain. And yes, my brain’s happiness is my happiness; I am not claiming “I should pay less attention to my brain’s happiness in order to maximize my happiness” but “I should pay less attention to my brain’s happiness in order to make the world more the way I want it to be”.
pleasure isn’t happiness [...] you appear to conflate the two somewhat in terms of what kinds of decisions you use as examples.
My apologies; I think I must have been insufficiently clear. Those weren’t meant to be examples of bad decisions I would make by attending too much to happiness, but of bad decisions I would make by attending too much to similar brain-signals. Hunger, lust, fear, and so on.
I think your analogy with a car’s turn signals is a good one, but it seems to me to make my point for me. If you are in your car, what you care about isn’t which way the indicators are flashing but what roads you drive down. If you are on the road and looking at another car, what you care about isn’t which way the indicators are flashing but whether and which way it’s actually going to turn. Happiness is, indeed, like the turn signals: it’s a pretty reliable but imperfect indicator. We are generally happier when the world is the way we want it to be, but the circuitry that assesses the match between the world and our purposes is imperfect and subvertible, and sometimes we can do better than maximizing our happiness. Wireheading is a useful example because it poses as starkly as possible the question: if happiness and actually getting the world the way you want it are forcibly separated, which one is it you actually care about? And, as I think we are agreed, almost everyone chooses the latter and wants other people to do the same.
So, how does all this apply to the discussion a few comments upthread? The question was whether religious belief is effective (specifically in terms of practical predictions about the world, but I think a strawmanned version of your argument would be less specific on that point) and you suggested that “are religious people happier or unhappier than non-religious people?” is an equivalent question, or maybe (you weren’t explicit) just a very good proxy for it.
I think it’s not that great a proxy, for reasons comparable to those involving wireheading: there are mechanisms by which religious belief or unbelief could affect a person’s happiness that are basically unconnected with whether the world is the way they want it to be. You might be happy or unhappy about your expected fate in the afterlife, even if there is in fact no afterlife. You might be happy or unhappy because of “religious experiences” that you interpret as coming from the gods or ancestral spirits or whatever, even if in fact their origin is inside your head. You might also be happy or unhappy about how well God’s purposes are being fulfilled in the world, which is unsatisfactory in a different way, kinda parallel to the way that if you were given 5 seconds’ wireheading you might then want it to continue for 25 years: the furtherance of God’s purposes would indeed be one of your goals, but it might be a bad goal if you have it only because of factually incorrect beliefs about God.
I’m not sure how to answer that question. An affective state that one tends to want more of, but that doesn’t distinguish it from some other such states. The thing that is (or at least feels like it is) common between, e.g., the following experiences:
Having nearly finished eating a very tasty and large, but not too large, meal.
Confidently anticipating a promotion at work.
Successfully finding a solution to a difficult mathematical problem.
Playing with one’s children.
Sitting companionably with friends.
Having just been unexpectedly kissed by someone one has long admired and desired.
Being on an exhilarating but not actually frightening or nauseating roller coaster.
Religious conversion (if ecstatic) or deconversion (if a relief).
Learning that one does not after all have a life-threatening medical condition.
(I could prolong the list considerably, but I don’t think it would add much. The items in the list are all “self-regarding” in some sense, but for most people plenty of “other-regarding” things could go in such a list too.) What is (or feels like it is) common between pleasure, satisfaction, and joy. (But those terms are doubtless in as much need of definition as “happiness”.) One’s instinctual sense of the extent to which things are as one wishes.
All of those (admittedly vague) descriptions appear to me to be pointing to a single (admittedly vague) thing, and that is what I call happiness. Does that help?
I mostly agree with this, but I think you might have an idea of “getting the world the way you want it” which is more utilitarian than what most people actually want. I think we can summarize most of what most people mostly want by “living a good and happy life together with other people.”
Happy is there because people are in fact interested in happiness, but not only happiness. “Good” is there because most people are moral realists or some equivalent, and they would not want to live a happy life if in fact it was an evil and harmful one. “Together with other people” is there perhaps just because given human nature, it is very difficult to understand a life as being actually good or happy without it.
There are certainly other things that people care about, but I think that contains most of it. And unless you put a very high weight on believing the truth, that is all consistent with having false religious beliefs, and in fact for many people it is easier with religious beliefs.
I wasn’t claiming that happiness is or should be incompatible with religious belief or observance. Only that “religious people are happier” wouldn’t be very strong evidence that religion is beneficial by any other metric, and “religious people are unhappier” wouldn’t be very strong evidence that it’s harmful by any other metric.
Happiness is the indicator for whether or not a thing works for people.
I don’t think so.
Prevalence is the primary indicator of whether or not a thing works for people. Does a civilization which promotes patriotism in the local population make the people happier by doing this? I doubt it. But they probably do make their civilization more robust, more fit in a survival sense by doing so.
I predict pushback—LW won’t like that idea one little bit :-)
That’s not the definition of “rational”, though.
You’re basically saying that with “irrational” beliefs one should go meta—look at them from the outside, consider actual consequences and effects, ponder why these beliefs exists… Yeah, sure. Going “Oh, you believe in , you must be so dumb” is dumb. And yes, “I don’t know why this works, but this works” is a reasonable :-) position to take.
I’m still not sure, though, that by the prediction metric science will look as badly as you hint and religions will shine. Contemporary religions generally shy away from testable (during the lifetime) predictions and for good reasons, too. As to science, I think the distinction between hard and soft sciences is pretty necessary here. Hard sciences live and die by predictions. Soft sciences spin narratives—just like your friendly pastor next door :-/
Given posts like Truth: It’s not that great I wouldn’t expect a strong pushback.
That claim seems totally fine to me. Inaccurate maps can still be useful, sometimes even more useful than more accurate maps as they can be simpler to use and easier to create. I wrote about that here.
Incorrect maps can also sometimes be useful. Examples of this are adaptive biases like the sexual over perception bias in men. From a truth-maximization perspective young men who assume that all women want them are showing severe social-cognitive inaccuracies, judgment biases, and probably narcissistic personality disorder. However, from an evolutionary perspective, the same young men are behaving in a more optimal manner. One which has consistently maximized the reproductive success of their male ancestors. Another similar example is the bias for positive perception of partners.
I’ve had this particular post in my drafts for… oh… over a year, now? For pretty much that reason.
Which group has higher average happiness levels, religious or non-religious?
First, this is irrelevant to the question of who makes better predictions; and second, you might be able to show correlation but I have strong doubts you would be able to show causation.
Predictions for what makes for a good life?
I think that religions do not predict anything, but help people deal with their lot in life—whatever it might be.
Religions predict a lot of things. Every commandment in the Bible is a prediction, a hypothesis. Every parable, likewise. Do this, not that; the prediction is that “this” is better than “that”. If, on the whole, people who are strongly religious are more happy, those predictions hold true.
Maybe, but smushing together “making predictions” and “having a particular vision of the world” gets dangerously close to empty philosophising. Of course every worldview implies predictions, but “Jesus Loves You” isn’t an exercise in forecasting.
Besides, consider evolution. “Do not kill” works because societies without this commandment disintegrate pretty rapidly and do not make it. That doesn’t make it a prediction, just—like in biology—a change that’s good enough to survive.
Every hypothesis is a “particular vision of the world”, a particular idea about how the world works. Its usefulness is how well this idea translates to prediction.
Science is just as much an evolutionary process? I’m not sure what the criticism here is.
See this article (full article available from sidebar), which argues that although conventional wisdom gives religion the advantage here, the reality may not be so clear-cut.
I’m an atheist. I imagine you are too.
So, did you find that article because you, or whoever linked it to you, discovered it—or because you, or they, went looking for something which proved what you or they wanted to believe?
ETA: I’ve long held that atheists should form social support groups, and take the other best-of aspects of religion. The article is arguing that the things which make religion beneficial have nothing to do with religion. This is untrue; religion is inherently a social activity. It is, by its nature, pro-social. If we’re only grudgingly going to admit religion does anything right, that impairs our ability to figure out what it does right, and take those things for ourselves.
This is not the same question. Happiness is not a perfect indicator of good predictions, and people are not composed only of their ideology. This reframing gets farther away from the actual issue.
Happiness is the indicator for whether or not a thing works for people.
An indicator. If I can stick an electrode in your brain and keep you blissfully happy for the rest of your life, and hook you up to an intravenous drip to provide you with enough nutrients to keep you alive (but perfectly useless to everyone else, and perfectly incapable of achieving any of the goals you might have had before you were hooked up) for, say, 25 years—would you want it done?
I would not, because I care about things other than happiness. Happiness is my brain’s way of indicating that some kinds of goals are being met, and it’s a useful signal of those things, but it’s no more perfectly reliable than any number of other internal behaviour-guiding signals in my brain. If I trusted them all completely, I would make a lot of poor decisions about what to eat and when, whom to have sex with and when, when to give up on something because it’s too hard, etc., etc., etc.
Ah, wireheading. No. For reasons that I’ll get into below.
What would make those decisions poor, however? Is it because they would reduce your long-term happiness?
You’re engaging in a bit of mind-body duality here; your brain isn’t a separate thing that imposes stuff on your mind, your brain is your mind. Your brain’s happiness is your happiness; and likewise, the reverse. First, it’s important to note that pleasure isn’t happiness; this is something I assume you’re consciously aware of, but you appear to conflate the two somewhat in terms of what kinds of decisions you use as examples.
Why wouldn’t I wirehead? Because the idea horrifies me. As soon as the electrodes go in, I’m quite certain I’d prefer that state. I wouldn’t even agree to five seconds of it, however, because I expect after five seconds, I’d readily agree to twenty five years; a few seconds of wireheading is equivalent to twenty five years, because I expect it would erode any desire not to do it. And the extreme unhappiness I feel with relation to the idea of wireheading tells me that it isn’t right for me, and, I expect, it isn’t right for people in general.
I call happiness the indicator; if you rewire my turn signal indicators in my dashboard, which normally indicate whether or not my turn signals are flashing, so that they are always on, are my turn signals always on? Or have you merely destroyed a useful signal?
No. (Not entirely, anyway; happiness is one of my goals.)
I really don’t think I am. I did not claim (and I do not believe) that those things are being signalled by/in my brain to something outside my brain. If I say “the contents of address 0x1453C are the chess program’s estimate of how much danger the white king is in”, I’m not claiming it’s using the contents of that address to signal to something other than itself. Similarly with happiness in the brain. The “I” of which I speak is, of course, implemented on and in the hardware of my brain. And yes, my brain’s happiness is my happiness; I am not claiming “I should pay less attention to my brain’s happiness in order to maximize my happiness” but “I should pay less attention to my brain’s happiness in order to make the world more the way I want it to be”.
My apologies; I think I must have been insufficiently clear. Those weren’t meant to be examples of bad decisions I would make by attending too much to happiness, but of bad decisions I would make by attending too much to similar brain-signals. Hunger, lust, fear, and so on.
I think your analogy with a car’s turn signals is a good one, but it seems to me to make my point for me. If you are in your car, what you care about isn’t which way the indicators are flashing but what roads you drive down. If you are on the road and looking at another car, what you care about isn’t which way the indicators are flashing but whether and which way it’s actually going to turn. Happiness is, indeed, like the turn signals: it’s a pretty reliable but imperfect indicator. We are generally happier when the world is the way we want it to be, but the circuitry that assesses the match between the world and our purposes is imperfect and subvertible, and sometimes we can do better than maximizing our happiness. Wireheading is a useful example because it poses as starkly as possible the question: if happiness and actually getting the world the way you want it are forcibly separated, which one is it you actually care about? And, as I think we are agreed, almost everyone chooses the latter and wants other people to do the same.
So, how does all this apply to the discussion a few comments upthread? The question was whether religious belief is effective (specifically in terms of practical predictions about the world, but I think a strawmanned version of your argument would be less specific on that point) and you suggested that “are religious people happier or unhappier than non-religious people?” is an equivalent question, or maybe (you weren’t explicit) just a very good proxy for it.
I think it’s not that great a proxy, for reasons comparable to those involving wireheading: there are mechanisms by which religious belief or unbelief could affect a person’s happiness that are basically unconnected with whether the world is the way they want it to be. You might be happy or unhappy about your expected fate in the afterlife, even if there is in fact no afterlife. You might be happy or unhappy because of “religious experiences” that you interpret as coming from the gods or ancestral spirits or whatever, even if in fact their origin is inside your head. You might also be happy or unhappy about how well God’s purposes are being fulfilled in the world, which is unsatisfactory in a different way, kinda parallel to the way that if you were given 5 seconds’ wireheading you might then want it to continue for 25 years: the furtherance of God’s purposes would indeed be one of your goals, but it might be a bad goal if you have it only because of factually incorrect beliefs about God.
What is happiness, to you?
I’m not sure how to answer that question. An affective state that one tends to want more of, but that doesn’t distinguish it from some other such states. The thing that is (or at least feels like it is) common between, e.g., the following experiences:
Having nearly finished eating a very tasty and large, but not too large, meal.
Confidently anticipating a promotion at work.
Successfully finding a solution to a difficult mathematical problem.
Playing with one’s children.
Sitting companionably with friends.
Having just been unexpectedly kissed by someone one has long admired and desired.
Being on an exhilarating but not actually frightening or nauseating roller coaster.
Religious conversion (if ecstatic) or deconversion (if a relief).
Learning that one does not after all have a life-threatening medical condition.
(I could prolong the list considerably, but I don’t think it would add much. The items in the list are all “self-regarding” in some sense, but for most people plenty of “other-regarding” things could go in such a list too.) What is (or feels like it is) common between pleasure, satisfaction, and joy. (But those terms are doubtless in as much need of definition as “happiness”.) One’s instinctual sense of the extent to which things are as one wishes.
All of those (admittedly vague) descriptions appear to me to be pointing to a single (admittedly vague) thing, and that is what I call happiness. Does that help?
I mostly agree with this, but I think you might have an idea of “getting the world the way you want it” which is more utilitarian than what most people actually want. I think we can summarize most of what most people mostly want by “living a good and happy life together with other people.”
Happy is there because people are in fact interested in happiness, but not only happiness. “Good” is there because most people are moral realists or some equivalent, and they would not want to live a happy life if in fact it was an evil and harmful one. “Together with other people” is there perhaps just because given human nature, it is very difficult to understand a life as being actually good or happy without it.
There are certainly other things that people care about, but I think that contains most of it. And unless you put a very high weight on believing the truth, that is all consistent with having false religious beliefs, and in fact for many people it is easier with religious beliefs.
I wasn’t claiming that happiness is or should be incompatible with religious belief or observance. Only that “religious people are happier” wouldn’t be very strong evidence that religion is beneficial by any other metric, and “religious people are unhappier” wouldn’t be very strong evidence that it’s harmful by any other metric.
Happiness is the indicator for whether or not a thing works for people.
I don’t think so.
Prevalence is the primary indicator of whether or not a thing works for people. Does a civilization which promotes patriotism in the local population make the people happier by doing this? I doubt it. But they probably do make their civilization more robust, more fit in a survival sense by doing so.
What works for persons, if you prefer. Patriotism helps civilization; does it help a person?