Rituals are system 1 techniques, usually group-based. They are means of bypassing analytical filters to work directly on alief.
Some amount of ritual is needed to make a larger ceremony work, but referring to the large ceremony as a ritual is more of a synecdoche than a clear description.
BTW I agree with you that rituals are really dangerous—in the sense that they’re powerful, and anything powerful is dangerous. I disagree with what I take to be the tacit claim that we can get away with mostly not doing them.
Not intentionally doing rituals doesn’t mean you don’t get mind-hacked—it means you get mind-hacked by the dominant culture. For much of US history, a lot of the practical role of religion has been to organize resistance to obviously unfriendly mindhacks like hard liquor and gambling. Facebook is going to respond in kind if we unilaterally disarm.
Of course, most religions are perfectly happy to eat up all the energy they free up from other mindhacks. One of the things that’s so cool about Quakerism is that it seems to devote most of its ritual optimization to protecting individuals against mindhacks, and comparatively little to exploiting them.
I would be much more sympathetic to an argument along the lines of “Wait, before you consider starting a Rationalist religion, you should really start a minimum viable Rationalist antireligion, so you have some room to think.”
OK, Bryan Caplan is actually pretty impressive on this account, and doing things that are very clearly pointed in the right direction. I agree that that is a pretty good thing to try and do. It’s pretty hard to do while living in community with people unless there’s a shared understanding of what the thing is, and that it’s valuable—so I think we should prioritize building that understanding.
Regardless of whether you call it a religion, I claim that it would be very useful to do the work of building a shared and accurate narrative that such a thing is difficult but attainable, embedding into the narrative information about what the high-value practices are that point towards achieving Bryan Caplan’s state, and creating the social institutions that allow people to hold onto that narrative despite pervasive outside pressure to do otherwise.
It seems to me that your definition is sufficiently broad that it would include all cases of presenting intuitively compelling evidence, and especially evidence about common knowledge and intent.
I think “community values affirmation” falls pretty clearly in this category. It’s just an obviously epistemically valid instance—it’s a case of social proof being applied to exactly the circumstance our social proof detectors were designed for. Of course, you can mislead with ritual, just like you can mislead by lying. But I don’t think I could or should get away with saying something like “saying words is really dangerous” and leave it at that, as an argument against some particular instance of saying words, or even general advice to talk more.
Saying that something is a community values affirmation is not saying much at all. That doesn’t give you enough information to make a judgment. How and why you are affirming shared values, and the shape of the event in which you do it, can range from “bland expression of allegiance to the Unitarian Applause Lights” to a coercive public session of a personality cult. The details, not the broad goal, are the important thing.
How are the details important? In what way do they affect whether community values affirmation is a group-based system 1 technique for bypassing analytical filters to work directly on alief?
You can do a values affirmation entirely with system 2. As much as possible, if you want to avoid being epistemically toxic, you should. The Unitarian hypothetical probably does; the personality cult certainly does not.
I think you’re using “system 1” and “system 2″ to mean things very different from Kahneman’s usage. In particular, I think you’re using “system 2” to mean something in the direction of Sattva. Unfortunately, it seems like nearly everyone around here equivocates in this way.
Can you try again to tell me what a ritual is, tabooing “system 1”?
Uh, replace ‘system 1’ with ‘instinct-harnessing’? It’s pretty integral.
Also, you keep using words in really weird ways, which has made this discussion extremely frustrating. I still don’t know what you have meant by most of your statements. So I’m disengaging now.
Also, you keep using words in really weird ways, which has made this discussion extremely frustrating. I still don’t know what you have meant by most of your statements. So I’m disengaging now.
I am curious what could have been different about this conversation (primarily on your end, since that’s easier for you to control) that would have made this conversation less frustrating for you.
EDITED TO SAY: I feel frustrated that you’re only mentioning that there were specific word usages that were unclear to you now, concurrent with expresing intent to disengage, that you didn’t bother to ask clarifying questions earlier, and that you still aren’t bothering to tell me what usage specifically was unclear to you.
It’s an honest expression of frustration. I’ve put in a substantial amount of work to try and bridge a communication gap, but ultimately that’s not going to be possible without some amount of help from you. So it’s really frustrating to me when you don’t ask about any specifics, and only mention the mere fact that I’m using some words in ways you consider weird concurrent with intent to disengage.
Sorry for the tone, though, it seems unhelpful in hindsight. I’ve edited the comment to be more forthright and less emotionally loaded.
“Substitute a short synonym” is really, really not what tabooing a word is:
When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all. Or any of their short synonyms. And be careful not to let yourself invent a new word to use instead. Describe outward observables and interior mechanisms; don’t use a single handle, whatever that handle may be.
Rituals are system 1 techniques, usually group-based. They are means of bypassing analytical filters to work directly on alief.
Some amount of ritual is needed to make a larger ceremony work, but referring to the large ceremony as a ritual is more of a synecdoche than a clear description.
BTW I agree with you that rituals are really dangerous—in the sense that they’re powerful, and anything powerful is dangerous. I disagree with what I take to be the tacit claim that we can get away with mostly not doing them.
Not intentionally doing rituals doesn’t mean you don’t get mind-hacked—it means you get mind-hacked by the dominant culture. For much of US history, a lot of the practical role of religion has been to organize resistance to obviously unfriendly mindhacks like hard liquor and gambling. Facebook is going to respond in kind if we unilaterally disarm.
Of course, most religions are perfectly happy to eat up all the energy they free up from other mindhacks. One of the things that’s so cool about Quakerism is that it seems to devote most of its ritual optimization to protecting individuals against mindhacks, and comparatively little to exploiting them.
I would be much more sympathetic to an argument along the lines of “Wait, before you consider starting a Rationalist religion, you should really start a minimum viable Rationalist antireligion, so you have some room to think.”
I don’t agree at all. In an atomized society, a zero-tolerance policy for getting mindhacked can and should be adopted.
I don’t know how I would begin to implement such a policy. Do you?
I think Bryan Caplan has succeeded.
OK, Bryan Caplan is actually pretty impressive on this account, and doing things that are very clearly pointed in the right direction. I agree that that is a pretty good thing to try and do. It’s pretty hard to do while living in community with people unless there’s a shared understanding of what the thing is, and that it’s valuable—so I think we should prioritize building that understanding.
Regardless of whether you call it a religion, I claim that it would be very useful to do the work of building a shared and accurate narrative that such a thing is difficult but attainable, embedding into the narrative information about what the high-value practices are that point towards achieving Bryan Caplan’s state, and creating the social institutions that allow people to hold onto that narrative despite pervasive outside pressure to do otherwise.
It seems to me that your definition is sufficiently broad that it would include all cases of presenting intuitively compelling evidence, and especially evidence about common knowledge and intent.
I think “community values affirmation” falls pretty clearly in this category. It’s just an obviously epistemically valid instance—it’s a case of social proof being applied to exactly the circumstance our social proof detectors were designed for. Of course, you can mislead with ritual, just like you can mislead by lying. But I don’t think I could or should get away with saying something like “saying words is really dangerous” and leave it at that, as an argument against some particular instance of saying words, or even general advice to talk more.
Saying that something is a community values affirmation is not saying much at all. That doesn’t give you enough information to make a judgment. How and why you are affirming shared values, and the shape of the event in which you do it, can range from “bland expression of allegiance to the Unitarian Applause Lights” to a coercive public session of a personality cult. The details, not the broad goal, are the important thing.
How are the details important? In what way do they affect whether community values affirmation is a group-based system 1 technique for bypassing analytical filters to work directly on alief?
You can do a values affirmation entirely with system 2. As much as possible, if you want to avoid being epistemically toxic, you should. The Unitarian hypothetical probably does; the personality cult certainly does not.
I think you’re using “system 1” and “system 2″ to mean things very different from Kahneman’s usage. In particular, I think you’re using “system 2” to mean something in the direction of Sattva. Unfortunately, it seems like nearly everyone around here equivocates in this way.
Can you try again to tell me what a ritual is, tabooing “system 1”?
Uh, replace ‘system 1’ with ‘instinct-harnessing’? It’s pretty integral.
Also, you keep using words in really weird ways, which has made this discussion extremely frustrating. I still don’t know what you have meant by most of your statements. So I’m disengaging now.
I am curious what could have been different about this conversation (primarily on your end, since that’s easier for you to control) that would have made this conversation less frustrating for you.
EDITED TO SAY: I feel frustrated that you’re only mentioning that there were specific word usages that were unclear to you now, concurrent with expresing intent to disengage, that you didn’t bother to ask clarifying questions earlier, and that you still aren’t bothering to tell me what usage specifically was unclear to you.
[DELETED]
It’s an honest expression of frustration. I’ve put in a substantial amount of work to try and bridge a communication gap, but ultimately that’s not going to be possible without some amount of help from you. So it’s really frustrating to me when you don’t ask about any specifics, and only mention the mere fact that I’m using some words in ways you consider weird concurrent with intent to disengage.
Sorry for the tone, though, it seems unhelpful in hindsight. I’ve edited the comment to be more forthright and less emotionally loaded.
Pretty much all of it.
“Substitute a short synonym” is really, really not what tabooing a word is:
You basically asked me to define “good” while tabooing morality.
That’s basically the sort of thing the concept of tabooing was invented for, though.
To prove when two words are closely connected enough that it’s impossible to define one without the other? I don’t agree.
The point is to stop talking about words, and start talking about reality.