I have the impression that a lot of people convert to religions while finding the doctrinal content of those religions to be almost an afterthought. They make the identity claim after clearing some threshold that sets the one religion apart from other live options, then find out what their new “we” believes and what their new “we” is supposed to do about it on a day to day basis, up to a lay member’s understanding without detailed theological contemplation of any kind. This serves a few purposes for the growth and stability of the religions:
1) Domino effect—if you get enough or a significant enough part of somebody’s in-group, it’s much easier to shift their “we”.
2) Marketability—if practicing the religion requires irritating practices or sacrifices, you can introduce them later after you’ve got commitment.
3) Some ability to operate as a bloc—whoever’s producing or interpreting doctrine can say “we believe X” without a thousand amateur theologians bikeshedding the details based on their own understanding.
4) Ability to appeal to the general population—if you look hard at even the most popular religions, they are complicated, detailed philosophies. Your IQ 100 and below run-of-the-mill followers, to say nothing of their small children, aren’t going to get it; there’s a numbers advantage to letting them wave your flag anyhow.
These advantages are real, significant, and probably even replicable for a more secular memeset—but I think if we tried it, we’d be missing our own point.
“These advantages are real, significant, and probably even replicable for a more secular memeset—but I think if we tried it, we’d be missing our own point.”
Interesting. I think that could be true of whatever our “point” is right now. But eventually, that point is probably going to have to involve something that people at the IQ 100 level can pick up and use with some success in their daily lives, the same way so many already do with religious principles. (Though LW principles can hopefully avoid most of the negative downsides that come with living religiously.)
I agree that we should aspire to eventually appeal to the IQ 100 population with as many of our concepts as we can. I don’t think we should use the identity-claim-but-no-deep-thought technique to do it.
When I use the Ned Flanders example, what I’m thinking is:
I know Christians who say that belief in Jesus and being determined to love others will make life better, and they express this better-ness in their incredible patience and kindness—to the point where I wish I were equally patient and kind.
I think we could get to a point where Less Wrong members can say “living with a strong awareness of your own biases and a desire to improve yourself will make your life better”, and express this better-ness by being good conversationalists, optimistic, and genuinely helpful to those with questions or problems—to the point where non-members wish they were equally cool/smart/fun/helpful, or whatever other values we hope to embody.
The point is to win, isn’t it? You can win with a long sword or you can win with a short sword. And to carry the analogy further, it doesn’t much matter what you’ve been stabbed with; you’ll still bleed.
Also, don’t the LW surveys consistently show that there isn’t a large IQ increase in less wrong readers? You definitely won’t get any normal people to get into the rationality tent if you refer to them as “IQ 100s” for pretty obvious reasons. One of the growth factors you didn’t mention is an atmosphere of acceptance once inside the ingroup, rather than the adversarial atmosphere of LW.
I wasn’t trying to make a complete list of growth factors. I was making a list of advantages yielded by the “prompt identity claim, only then introduce details of doctrine, if at all” order of operations. An atmosphere of acceptance has no direct relationship to that habit and it’s something we could adopt comparatively unproblematically. I have no idea what your stabbing analogy is supposed to get at.
They’re correlated; if your membership test is much more complicated than identity, you’ll get people that curry favor by calling out others for not being true believers. (This is the case in cults, but not so much in mainstream religions.)
Whatever the point is of the nascent social movement MIRI and affiliates are trying to launch, presumably the people executing it want to be successful. If lowered barriers to identification causes rationality to win, I’m not sure I care if that ordering matters.
To rephrase, would you rather live in a world where the only people who were signed up for cryonics were the less than one percent of the population who could both afford to, and had been convinced of the merits of cryonics on purely logical grounds; or in a world where everyone was signed up for cryonics from birth, as a standard part of medical care, because that’s what people who identified as Rationalists did and they didn’t think very much about it?
The latter world may have “missed the point,” but people are dying in the former world. Once you’re dead, it doesn’t really matter how you got there; conversely, it seems a little petty to refuse to use any tool you can to fight it.
Perhaps there should be two levels of membership. Membership in the outer group would only require people to accept the identity; and there would be a social pressure to do the rituals recommended by the inner group. Membership in the inner group would require hard work and proving one’s rationality by successfully completing some tests.
As usual, the religion already has it. The outer group is called “believers” and the inner group is called “priests”.
In a hypothetical world ruled by rationalists, the priests would do the rationality training and try to be as free of bias as possible, and the believers would be advised to sign up for cryonics.
I feel rather like you’re patronizing me; please take that as rebuke if you are and an attempt at helpful feedback on composing your communiques if you are not.
I would rather decouple cryonics from rationalism enough that it could be a standard practice without having to win over the population with an identity claim. Even if the identity claim → doctrine order of operations helps, that doesn’t make it foolproof, or whichever religion figured it out first would be universal by now.
Well, the secrets cults are dead, and the three religions that figured that out first in their respective regions captured pretty much the entire market to the point where there’s a stalemate. People tend to have ideas at around the same time, and ideas spread slower back then, but the religions of modernity are universal for precisely that reason.
don’t the LW surveys consistently show that there isn’t a large IQ increase in less wrong readers?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but if you mean ”… that there isn’t a large difference between the IQs of LW readers and those of the general population” then no, the surveys appear to show the exact opposite: so far as one can tell from these surveys, the LW population appears to be something like 3 standard deviations above average.
For the avoidance of doubt, this is perfectly consistent with its being a really bad idea to be dismissive about people with average IQs—though as it happens I don’t think Alicorn actually was, and in particular she didn’t refer to anyone as “IQ 100s”.
I have the impression that a lot of people convert to religions while finding the doctrinal content of those religions to be almost an afterthought. They make the identity claim after clearing some threshold that sets the one religion apart from other live options, then find out what their new “we” believes and what their new “we” is supposed to do about it on a day to day basis, up to a lay member’s understanding without detailed theological contemplation of any kind. This serves a few purposes for the growth and stability of the religions:
1) Domino effect—if you get enough or a significant enough part of somebody’s in-group, it’s much easier to shift their “we”.
2) Marketability—if practicing the religion requires irritating practices or sacrifices, you can introduce them later after you’ve got commitment.
3) Some ability to operate as a bloc—whoever’s producing or interpreting doctrine can say “we believe X” without a thousand amateur theologians bikeshedding the details based on their own understanding.
4) Ability to appeal to the general population—if you look hard at even the most popular religions, they are complicated, detailed philosophies. Your IQ 100 and below run-of-the-mill followers, to say nothing of their small children, aren’t going to get it; there’s a numbers advantage to letting them wave your flag anyhow.
These advantages are real, significant, and probably even replicable for a more secular memeset—but I think if we tried it, we’d be missing our own point.
“These advantages are real, significant, and probably even replicable for a more secular memeset—but I think if we tried it, we’d be missing our own point.”
Interesting. I think that could be true of whatever our “point” is right now. But eventually, that point is probably going to have to involve something that people at the IQ 100 level can pick up and use with some success in their daily lives, the same way so many already do with religious principles. (Though LW principles can hopefully avoid most of the negative downsides that come with living religiously.)
I agree that we should aspire to eventually appeal to the IQ 100 population with as many of our concepts as we can. I don’t think we should use the identity-claim-but-no-deep-thought technique to do it.
I agree with avoiding identity-claim aspirations.
When I use the Ned Flanders example, what I’m thinking is:
I know Christians who say that belief in Jesus and being determined to love others will make life better, and they express this better-ness in their incredible patience and kindness—to the point where I wish I were equally patient and kind.
I think we could get to a point where Less Wrong members can say “living with a strong awareness of your own biases and a desire to improve yourself will make your life better”, and express this better-ness by being good conversationalists, optimistic, and genuinely helpful to those with questions or problems—to the point where non-members wish they were equally cool/smart/fun/helpful, or whatever other values we hope to embody.
The point is to win, isn’t it? You can win with a long sword or you can win with a short sword. And to carry the analogy further, it doesn’t much matter what you’ve been stabbed with; you’ll still bleed.
Also, don’t the LW surveys consistently show that there isn’t a large IQ increase in less wrong readers? You definitely won’t get any normal people to get into the rationality tent if you refer to them as “IQ 100s” for pretty obvious reasons. One of the growth factors you didn’t mention is an atmosphere of acceptance once inside the ingroup, rather than the adversarial atmosphere of LW.
I wasn’t trying to make a complete list of growth factors. I was making a list of advantages yielded by the “prompt identity claim, only then introduce details of doctrine, if at all” order of operations. An atmosphere of acceptance has no direct relationship to that habit and it’s something we could adopt comparatively unproblematically. I have no idea what your stabbing analogy is supposed to get at.
They’re correlated; if your membership test is much more complicated than identity, you’ll get people that curry favor by calling out others for not being true believers. (This is the case in cults, but not so much in mainstream religions.)
Whatever the point is of the nascent social movement MIRI and affiliates are trying to launch, presumably the people executing it want to be successful. If lowered barriers to identification causes rationality to win, I’m not sure I care if that ordering matters.
To rephrase, would you rather live in a world where the only people who were signed up for cryonics were the less than one percent of the population who could both afford to, and had been convinced of the merits of cryonics on purely logical grounds; or in a world where everyone was signed up for cryonics from birth, as a standard part of medical care, because that’s what people who identified as Rationalists did and they didn’t think very much about it?
The latter world may have “missed the point,” but people are dying in the former world. Once you’re dead, it doesn’t really matter how you got there; conversely, it seems a little petty to refuse to use any tool you can to fight it.
Perhaps there should be two levels of membership. Membership in the outer group would only require people to accept the identity; and there would be a social pressure to do the rituals recommended by the inner group. Membership in the inner group would require hard work and proving one’s rationality by successfully completing some tests.
As usual, the religion already has it. The outer group is called “believers” and the inner group is called “priests”.
In a hypothetical world ruled by rationalists, the priests would do the rationality training and try to be as free of bias as possible, and the believers would be advised to sign up for cryonics.
I feel rather like you’re patronizing me; please take that as rebuke if you are and an attempt at helpful feedback on composing your communiques if you are not.
I would rather decouple cryonics from rationalism enough that it could be a standard practice without having to win over the population with an identity claim. Even if the identity claim → doctrine order of operations helps, that doesn’t make it foolproof, or whichever religion figured it out first would be universal by now.
Well, the secrets cults are dead, and the three religions that figured that out first in their respective regions captured pretty much the entire market to the point where there’s a stalemate. People tend to have ideas at around the same time, and ideas spread slower back then, but the religions of modernity are universal for precisely that reason.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but if you mean ”… that there isn’t a large difference between the IQs of LW readers and those of the general population” then no, the surveys appear to show the exact opposite: so far as one can tell from these surveys, the LW population appears to be something like 3 standard deviations above average.
For the avoidance of doubt, this is perfectly consistent with its being a really bad idea to be dismissive about people with average IQs—though as it happens I don’t think Alicorn actually was, and in particular she didn’t refer to anyone as “IQ 100s”.