(+) Enrollment rates in primary/secondary/tertiary education
How are you defining ‘education’ here? Does homeschooling count? What about trade schools? Apprenticeships?
If a society had a college education rate of, say, 98%, would it have a higher or lower sanity waterline than a society with a college education rate of 30% where most of the other 70% went into employer-funded job training, apprenticeships, etc.?
And education depresses fertility. Until widespread genetic engineering or FAI, the values of populations whose fertility rate is above (replacement rate + defection rate) will gain support, and the values of populations whose fertility rate is below it will lose support. This especially matters in democracies, as anyone who follows Israeli politics can tell you. What this means is that, even if raising tertiary education rates raises the sanity waterline in the short term (which I’m not convinced of), it will likely lower it in the long run.
(+) Median level of awareness about world events
Why? Rationalists win. To the extent that awareness about world events helps you win, awareness about world events is rational. To the extent that awareness about world events does not help you win, you may as well be an anorak.
(-) Religiosity rate
How do you square this with the scientific consensus? Again, rationalists win. If you interpret the relevant studies as saying that religious people accrue benefits (social capital, a sense of meaning, a support network, etc.) from religion (rather than irreligion selecting against the personality traits that provide those things), you have to make the case that the epistemic rationality gains outweigh the instrumental rationality losses to the median human in the society you’re trying to affect, and that either these gains outweigh the losses from changing religion/engineering new religions or ‘saner’ religions can’t be created and our only choice is between Richard Dawkins and Creflo Dollar.
(-) Adolescent fertility rate
I would expect a society where 18-year-olds are financially and morally (and… wisdom-ly?) capable of raising children to have a higher sanity waterline than a society where, for financial, moral, and… wisdom-al? reasons, reproduction has to be deferred to one’s early thirties, unless the simplest way to raise the sanity waterline is to increase the rate of autism.
How are you defining ‘education’ here? Does homeschooling count? What about trade schools? Apprenticeships?
The UN statistics that I linked only record what we could consider to be mainstream education—school, university, graduate school/professional degrees. A truly comprehensive sanity metric would go beyond this.
If a society had a college education rate of, say, 98%, would it have a higher or lower sanity waterline than a society with a college education rate of 30% where most of the other 70% went into employer-funded job training, apprenticeships, etc.?
That’s true. One has to be on the lookout for pathological social trends masquerading as widespread rationality. For example, the current US attitude that you have to go to college is looking less and less rational by the day. That said, in some other country with 10% high school graduation rates and zero universities, I would consider any increase in those numbers to be a sanity improvement.
And education depresses fertility. Until widespread genetic engineering or FAI, the values of populations whose fertility rate is above (replacement rate + defection rate) will gain support, and the values of populations whose fertility rate is below it will lose support. This especially matters in democracies, as anyone who follows Israeli politics can tell you. What this means is that, even if raising tertiary education rates raises the sanity waterline in the short term (which I’m not convinced of), it will likely lower it in the long run.
There are a lot of complicated things going on with fertility rates. As a society becomes more sane, it also becomes more stable, and its overall fertility rate declines to the level of “elective” reproduction. In a truly sane society, one might imagine fertility rates ticking back up again, as overeducated adults actually obtain comprehensive financial security and feel comfortable having more children. I see myself as a possible example of this. My wife and I both have advanced degrees, but we chose to have three children because we can actually expect to provide three children with the kind of life that overeducated adults like us think they deserve.
Why? Rationalists win. To the extent that awareness about world events helps you win, awareness about world events is rational. To the extent that awareness about world events does not help you win, you may as well be an anorak.
I see “more knowledge about the world state” as being implied within the Omohudro drives. I agree that there is a saturation point. It is useful to know that there is a really bad war in Syria. It is not useful to know that parking fines in Singapore have increased by 4% in the last quarter. Unless you’re traveling to Singapore. One must diligently balance gathering information versus utilizing information.
I think knowing a basic slate of facts about current events would be well correlated with sanity. What goes on this slate would be flexible and subjective, but that doesn’t imply it would be useless as a measure.
How do you square this with the scientific consensus? Again, rationalists win. If you interpret the relevant studies as saying that religious people accrue benefits (social capital, a sense of meaning, a support network, etc.) from religion (rather than irreligion selecting against the personality traits that provide those things), you have to make the case that the epistemic rationality gains outweigh the instrumental rationality losses to the median human in the society you’re trying to affect, and that either these gains outweigh the losses from changing religion/engineering new religions or ‘saner’ religions can’t be created and our only choice is between Richard Dawkins and Creflo Dollar.
We’re sitting at a weird point in history where we have dynamited all our social institutions except religion, so it makes religion look artificially appealing. I don’t think statement “epistemic rationality gains outweigh the instrumental rationality losses to the median human” is true. I think 95% of religious people have never even been exposed to even a basic level of rationality and don’t even know what it could do for them, much less for society.
Regardless of that, I think it is demonstrably true that countries with lower religiosity are, on the balance, more sane. It’s not always the case, because there are other bad ideas that can take the place of religion. Thus, the need for many aggregated metrics in coming up with a final “sanity score”.
I would expect a society where 18-year-olds are financially and morally (and… wisdom-ly?) capable of raising children to have a higher sanity waterline than a society where, for financial, moral, and… wisdom-al? reasons, reproduction has to be deferred to one’s early thirties, unless the simplest way to raise the sanity waterline is to increase the rate of autism.
I don’t think 18-year-olds can be wisdom-ly capable of raising children. But, 18 is not really adolescent. It’s uncontroversial to say that a well-structured society has fewer pregnant 13-year-olds.
That’s true. One has to be on the lookout for pathological social trends masquerading as widespread rationality. For example, the current US attitude that you have to go to college is looking less and less rational by the day. That said, in some other country with 10% high school graduation rates and zero universities, I would consider any increase in those numbers to be a sanity improvement.
This sounds like an exploration/exploitation problem. If every society heads for the known maximum of sanity, it’ll be much more difficult to find higher maxima that are yet unknown. If the USA had headed for the known maximum of sanity after seceding from the British Empire, we’d have a king.
Just as it seemed clear to the revolutionaries that the known maximum of sanity in government was suboptimal, it seems clear to me that the known maximum of sanity in education is suboptimal. High school on the Prussian model is about burning years of life in order to be socialized into government-promoted cultural norms and be prepared for work where discipline matters more than thought—e.g. industrial jobs and the military. College on the American model is about burning years of life (and taking on massive amounts of debt) in order to be socialized into academia-promoted cultural norms and obtain a certificate that says, essentially, “this person is allowed to work”. Although it’s probably true that most existing societies with 10% high school graduation rates and zero universities rank lower in sanity than the USA, it’s also probably true that the USA is, modulo technological improvement and the increase in conceptual vocabulary that flows from that, less sane now than it was before the GI Bill, Griggs v. Duke, etc., because it’s completely viable and even promoted for 22-year-olds to have no work experience, a mountain of debt, and a head full of nonsense. If people could, say, test into paid job-training programs—internships, apprenticeships, etc. -- at the age of 16, and if this were the mainstream life path, this would be a sanity improvement: the resulting 22-year-olds would have financial stability, six years of work experience, markedly less political indoctrination, and no mountain of debt taken on to pay parasitic political radicals for a “see, I’m not banned from working!” certificate.
The only downside I can see is the potential effect on basic research, but I’m not sure how significant that would be.
We’re sitting at a weird point in history where we have dynamited all our social institutions except religion, so it makes religion look artificially appealing. I don’t think statement “epistemic rationality gains outweigh the instrumental rationality losses to the median human” is true. I think 95% of religious people have never even been exposed to even a basic level of rationality and don’t even know what it could do for them, much less for society.
What could it do for them? If, say, health and an extended lifespan are saner, how do the downsides of being, say, a Seventh-Day Adventist outweigh the known upsides? (Remember that most people are much better at compartmentalization than most LW posters, and that decreases in religion don’t mean decreases in folk magic—if anything, the atheistic communities I’ve seen outside LW are heavier on folk magic than the religious ones I’ve seen. The other side of that, however, is that some folk magic can be legitimately useful—but astrology and MBTI don’t strike me as falling inside that category.)
I suspect, at a moderate level of certainty, that epistemic blindspots of the type that religion requires are highly toxic to both individual and society-level rationality.
But let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that a Seventh-Day Adventist in modern times is precisely no worse off in their day-to-day life due to their religious beliefs. That Seventh-Day Adventist still has to live in a world where “we respect the beliefs of everyone”, which is code for “fantasy and magical thinking centered on ancient books have to be continuously considered in a wide variety of public policy discussions”.
If the sanity waterline were truly raised to the point that religion “goes underwater”, then we would only have to deal with the normal human failure modes of discourse that occur on a civilizational level, which are already pretty bad, without having to also juggle the policy desires of religionists. So, choosing a saner civilization means you accrue the benefits of a saner civilization.
Of course, I don’t actually think that an individual Seventh-Day Adventist is “no worse off” than a rationalist. It’s the work of seconds to dream up a wide variety of situations and scenarios in which the religionist is obligated to make objectively bad concrete choices to preserve their self image, which a rationalist wouldn’t be forced to make. In exchange, the religionist gets some theoretical enhanced community support (not something I ever experienced when I was in a religion) and a nice, clean, settled ontology that comforts them regarding death. Still doesn’t seem worth the tradeoff to me.
Religion requires epistemic blindspots, but does religion require epistemic blindspots? That is, is requiring epistemic blindspots a property of religion itself, or is religion one among many subclasses of the type of thing that requires epistemic blindspots? In the former case, raising the sanity waterline to specifically eliminate religion would raise the sanity waterline; in the latter case, it might lower it.
What do you think would happen to the sanity waterline if all the Seventh-Day Adventists in America became atheists and joined an antifa group? Would it rise?
Seventh-Day Adventists’ epistemic blindspots (from the atheistic perspective) are things like “God exists” and “we’ll live forever in Heaven because we’re right about when the Sabbath is” and “eventually the Catholic Church, mainstream Protestant groups, and the US government will get together to pass a law requiring observance of a Sunday Sabbath, and we’ll be horribly persecuted for a while but it’s OK because Jesus will come back soon after that”. Antifa groups’ epistemic blindspots are things like “liberal norms serve fascists and must be eroded ASAP”, “mob violence is the most important form of political activism”, and “murder is good when it’s people we disagree with getting killed”.
And Seventh-Day Adventists are more prone to epistemic blind spots than religions that don’t share the unusual Christian innovation of elevating orthodoxy above orthopraxy, such as Shinto or mainstream American Judaism, both of which are clearly religions. (We have quite a few adherents of mainstream American Judaism in these circles; try asking a few of them about the utility of ritual, the upsides and downsides of religion, etc.)
Religion is one among many subclasses of the type of thing that requires epistemic blindspots, whatever that thing is. But there’s another problem, which is that religion doesn’t exist. The consensus in religious studies is that there’s no coherent way to define ‘religion’—the category exists for strange historical reasons that are particular to the pre-secularization West and certainly don’t hold everywhere. You can go to China or Japan or ancient Rome and ask, “is this religious? is this secular?”, and they’ll just look at you funny. (Admittedly, there’s a complication, in that contact between ‘pagans’ and Christians or Muslims occasionally results in the local variety of paganism adopting the Christian or Muslim idea of ‘religion’—see e.g. here.)
Is Confucianism a religion? It has rites, holy texts, a quasi-prophet (Confucius) and influential quasi-theologians, such as Mencius, Dong Zhongshu, and Zhu Xi. How about Communism, the Hotep movement, or LW? What makes Louis Farrakhan a religious figure and Maulana Karenga a secular one?
I have no interest in “targeting” religion for annihilation, or anything like that. I don’t disagree with anything you say here. Religion is just one subset of a class of failure mode that theoretically goes underwater when a society becomes saner. For the sake of defining my terms, I guess I’m just using “being religious” as a catchall for “possessing ontological beliefs that are not grounded in empirically knowable facts”, but I’m not really interested in defending the details of that definition. I think people know what cluster in thingspace I’m pointing to when I say “religion”.
Maybe I should have said something like this in the main post, but, consider a society that looks like ours except all school-aged children spend at least a semester studying the Human’s Guide to Words section of the Sequences. How many absolutely stupid thoughts, beliefs, conversations would just never happen in that world? A lot of those thoughts/beliefs/conversations would be religio-centric, and a lot wouldn’t be. The more “rationality interventions” you add, the fewer ostentatiously dumb things are permitted in the wider social milieu, and bad ideas “go underwater”. That’s the idea, anyway.
How are you defining ‘education’ here? Does homeschooling count? What about trade schools? Apprenticeships?
If a society had a college education rate of, say, 98%, would it have a higher or lower sanity waterline than a society with a college education rate of 30% where most of the other 70% went into employer-funded job training, apprenticeships, etc.?
And education depresses fertility. Until widespread genetic engineering or FAI, the values of populations whose fertility rate is above (replacement rate + defection rate) will gain support, and the values of populations whose fertility rate is below it will lose support. This especially matters in democracies, as anyone who follows Israeli politics can tell you. What this means is that, even if raising tertiary education rates raises the sanity waterline in the short term (which I’m not convinced of), it will likely lower it in the long run.
Why? Rationalists win. To the extent that awareness about world events helps you win, awareness about world events is rational. To the extent that awareness about world events does not help you win, you may as well be an anorak.
How do you square this with the scientific consensus? Again, rationalists win. If you interpret the relevant studies as saying that religious people accrue benefits (social capital, a sense of meaning, a support network, etc.) from religion (rather than irreligion selecting against the personality traits that provide those things), you have to make the case that the epistemic rationality gains outweigh the instrumental rationality losses to the median human in the society you’re trying to affect, and that either these gains outweigh the losses from changing religion/engineering new religions or ‘saner’ religions can’t be created and our only choice is between Richard Dawkins and Creflo Dollar.
I would expect a society where 18-year-olds are financially and morally (and… wisdom-ly?) capable of raising children to have a higher sanity waterline than a society where, for financial, moral, and… wisdom-al? reasons, reproduction has to be deferred to one’s early thirties, unless the simplest way to raise the sanity waterline is to increase the rate of autism.
The UN statistics that I linked only record what we could consider to be mainstream education—school, university, graduate school/professional degrees. A truly comprehensive sanity metric would go beyond this.
That’s true. One has to be on the lookout for pathological social trends masquerading as widespread rationality. For example, the current US attitude that you have to go to college is looking less and less rational by the day. That said, in some other country with 10% high school graduation rates and zero universities, I would consider any increase in those numbers to be a sanity improvement.
There are a lot of complicated things going on with fertility rates. As a society becomes more sane, it also becomes more stable, and its overall fertility rate declines to the level of “elective” reproduction. In a truly sane society, one might imagine fertility rates ticking back up again, as overeducated adults actually obtain comprehensive financial security and feel comfortable having more children. I see myself as a possible example of this. My wife and I both have advanced degrees, but we chose to have three children because we can actually expect to provide three children with the kind of life that overeducated adults like us think they deserve.
I see “more knowledge about the world state” as being implied within the Omohudro drives. I agree that there is a saturation point. It is useful to know that there is a really bad war in Syria. It is not useful to know that parking fines in Singapore have increased by 4% in the last quarter. Unless you’re traveling to Singapore. One must diligently balance gathering information versus utilizing information.
I think knowing a basic slate of facts about current events would be well correlated with sanity. What goes on this slate would be flexible and subjective, but that doesn’t imply it would be useless as a measure.
We’re sitting at a weird point in history where we have dynamited all our social institutions except religion, so it makes religion look artificially appealing. I don’t think statement “epistemic rationality gains outweigh the instrumental rationality losses to the median human” is true. I think 95% of religious people have never even been exposed to even a basic level of rationality and don’t even know what it could do for them, much less for society.
Regardless of that, I think it is demonstrably true that countries with lower religiosity are, on the balance, more sane. It’s not always the case, because there are other bad ideas that can take the place of religion. Thus, the need for many aggregated metrics in coming up with a final “sanity score”.
I don’t think 18-year-olds can be wisdom-ly capable of raising children. But, 18 is not really adolescent. It’s uncontroversial to say that a well-structured society has fewer pregnant 13-year-olds.
This sounds like an exploration/exploitation problem. If every society heads for the known maximum of sanity, it’ll be much more difficult to find higher maxima that are yet unknown. If the USA had headed for the known maximum of sanity after seceding from the British Empire, we’d have a king.
Just as it seemed clear to the revolutionaries that the known maximum of sanity in government was suboptimal, it seems clear to me that the known maximum of sanity in education is suboptimal. High school on the Prussian model is about burning years of life in order to be socialized into government-promoted cultural norms and be prepared for work where discipline matters more than thought—e.g. industrial jobs and the military. College on the American model is about burning years of life (and taking on massive amounts of debt) in order to be socialized into academia-promoted cultural norms and obtain a certificate that says, essentially, “this person is allowed to work”. Although it’s probably true that most existing societies with 10% high school graduation rates and zero universities rank lower in sanity than the USA, it’s also probably true that the USA is, modulo technological improvement and the increase in conceptual vocabulary that flows from that, less sane now than it was before the GI Bill, Griggs v. Duke, etc., because it’s completely viable and even promoted for 22-year-olds to have no work experience, a mountain of debt, and a head full of nonsense. If people could, say, test into paid job-training programs—internships, apprenticeships, etc. -- at the age of 16, and if this were the mainstream life path, this would be a sanity improvement: the resulting 22-year-olds would have financial stability, six years of work experience, markedly less political indoctrination, and no mountain of debt taken on to pay parasitic political radicals for a “see, I’m not banned from working!” certificate.
The only downside I can see is the potential effect on basic research, but I’m not sure how significant that would be.
What could it do for them? If, say, health and an extended lifespan are saner, how do the downsides of being, say, a Seventh-Day Adventist outweigh the known upsides? (Remember that most people are much better at compartmentalization than most LW posters, and that decreases in religion don’t mean decreases in folk magic—if anything, the atheistic communities I’ve seen outside LW are heavier on folk magic than the religious ones I’ve seen. The other side of that, however, is that some folk magic can be legitimately useful—but astrology and MBTI don’t strike me as falling inside that category.)
I suspect, at a moderate level of certainty, that epistemic blindspots of the type that religion requires are highly toxic to both individual and society-level rationality.
But let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that a Seventh-Day Adventist in modern times is precisely no worse off in their day-to-day life due to their religious beliefs. That Seventh-Day Adventist still has to live in a world where “we respect the beliefs of everyone”, which is code for “fantasy and magical thinking centered on ancient books have to be continuously considered in a wide variety of public policy discussions”.
If the sanity waterline were truly raised to the point that religion “goes underwater”, then we would only have to deal with the normal human failure modes of discourse that occur on a civilizational level, which are already pretty bad, without having to also juggle the policy desires of religionists. So, choosing a saner civilization means you accrue the benefits of a saner civilization.
Of course, I don’t actually think that an individual Seventh-Day Adventist is “no worse off” than a rationalist. It’s the work of seconds to dream up a wide variety of situations and scenarios in which the religionist is obligated to make objectively bad concrete choices to preserve their self image, which a rationalist wouldn’t be forced to make. In exchange, the religionist gets some theoretical enhanced community support (not something I ever experienced when I was in a religion) and a nice, clean, settled ontology that comforts them regarding death. Still doesn’t seem worth the tradeoff to me.
Religion requires epistemic blindspots, but does religion require epistemic blindspots? That is, is requiring epistemic blindspots a property of religion itself, or is religion one among many subclasses of the type of thing that requires epistemic blindspots? In the former case, raising the sanity waterline to specifically eliminate religion would raise the sanity waterline; in the latter case, it might lower it.
What do you think would happen to the sanity waterline if all the Seventh-Day Adventists in America became atheists and joined an antifa group? Would it rise?
Seventh-Day Adventists’ epistemic blindspots (from the atheistic perspective) are things like “God exists” and “we’ll live forever in Heaven because we’re right about when the Sabbath is” and “eventually the Catholic Church, mainstream Protestant groups, and the US government will get together to pass a law requiring observance of a Sunday Sabbath, and we’ll be horribly persecuted for a while but it’s OK because Jesus will come back soon after that”. Antifa groups’ epistemic blindspots are things like “liberal norms serve fascists and must be eroded ASAP”, “mob violence is the most important form of political activism”, and “murder is good when it’s people we disagree with getting killed”.
And Seventh-Day Adventists are more prone to epistemic blind spots than religions that don’t share the unusual Christian innovation of elevating orthodoxy above orthopraxy, such as Shinto or mainstream American Judaism, both of which are clearly religions. (We have quite a few adherents of mainstream American Judaism in these circles; try asking a few of them about the utility of ritual, the upsides and downsides of religion, etc.)
Religion is one among many subclasses of the type of thing that requires epistemic blindspots, whatever that thing is. But there’s another problem, which is that religion doesn’t exist. The consensus in religious studies is that there’s no coherent way to define ‘religion’—the category exists for strange historical reasons that are particular to the pre-secularization West and certainly don’t hold everywhere. You can go to China or Japan or ancient Rome and ask, “is this religious? is this secular?”, and they’ll just look at you funny. (Admittedly, there’s a complication, in that contact between ‘pagans’ and Christians or Muslims occasionally results in the local variety of paganism adopting the Christian or Muslim idea of ‘religion’—see e.g. here.)
Is Confucianism a religion? It has rites, holy texts, a quasi-prophet (Confucius) and influential quasi-theologians, such as Mencius, Dong Zhongshu, and Zhu Xi. How about Communism, the Hotep movement, or LW? What makes Louis Farrakhan a religious figure and Maulana Karenga a secular one?
I have no interest in “targeting” religion for annihilation, or anything like that. I don’t disagree with anything you say here. Religion is just one subset of a class of failure mode that theoretically goes underwater when a society becomes saner. For the sake of defining my terms, I guess I’m just using “being religious” as a catchall for “possessing ontological beliefs that are not grounded in empirically knowable facts”, but I’m not really interested in defending the details of that definition. I think people know what cluster in thingspace I’m pointing to when I say “religion”.
Maybe I should have said something like this in the main post, but, consider a society that looks like ours except all school-aged children spend at least a semester studying the Human’s Guide to Words section of the Sequences. How many absolutely stupid thoughts, beliefs, conversations would just never happen in that world? A lot of those thoughts/beliefs/conversations would be religio-centric, and a lot wouldn’t be. The more “rationality interventions” you add, the fewer ostentatiously dumb things are permitted in the wider social milieu, and bad ideas “go underwater”. That’s the idea, anyway.