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.
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.