It’s not at all obvious to me that religions are built on affective death spirals in the general case, more than anything other generic class of institution (such as a self-help organization running inspirational workshops) is. This seems like a claim worth fleshing out.
ETA (since the discussion below is currently hidden by default):
Religions differ in important ways from other institutions. This includes differing in how they relate to affective death spirals. I’m not saying everything’s completely the same, or that religions don’t have a worse track record in some respects. I’m saying that so far I’m unpersuaded by the case that religion’s uniquely generically bad on this score.
Affective death spirals and other self-validating narratives are pretty common, and I can think of lots of different reasons you might notice them most prominently in religion, e.g. religion is trying to solve particularly difficult social coordination problems, or modern religion is more honest about the extent to which it is talking nonsense, or you’re not a member of a religion but you are a member of various other types of social organization and affective death spirals are hard to see from the inside.
I’ll try to explain my side here. It seems to me like quite a lot of institutions reaffirm narrative at the expense of tracking reality. The startup world is full of this, for instance. So are political movements like Communism. This is unusually easy to notice in the case of religion, for two reasons. First, Christianity in particular tends to spin narratives about things “outside the world” in some way, whereas e.g. startups or political movements organize around ideologies that can pass for an honest model of the world we live in at casual inspection, especially if you’re willing to commit the occasional fraud. Second, people in a liberal, skeptical, cosmopolitan subculture, like us, have social permission to notice when religion is a fraud and not just honestly mistaken, but don’t have social permission to notice when other governing institutions are frauds.
That seems like the fallacy of grey to me. Yes, it’s easier to notice when a church is cultish than a startup or political movement. Yes, there is significant incidence of cultish startups and political movements. That doesn’t mean that churches aren’t much worse. Fairly few churches are not cultish; fairly few of the rest are.
Most good startups are very cultish (citation: Zero to One says this explicitly). I appreciate that you’re taking the obvious position and properly acting on it, but I’m interested to hear what insights Benquo comes up with (his Sabbath post was super interesting), and generally do expect our bias to be not noticing the valuable insights and coordination effects of religion. I can imagine being sufficiently wrong such that over history religions been net positive relative to what society would’ve done otherwise.
I would say something more like, most religion is badly wrong for the same reason most philosophy is badly wrong—you’re working on a really hard problem! The problem being really hard doesn’t make it something you can get away with not doing, it just makes you get wrong answers most of the time.
I’m happy to admit that there can be differences in degree. But because of the independent differences in perception, and because I’ve only recently started to be able to see past that, I’m not at all sure “religions” are worse generally, or even how you’d measure that. Most arguments I’ve seen on this particular subject completely miss the fact that the liberal frame makes religion’s flaws easier to see.
(Note that in this case I’m making an “I don’t know and for the most part don’t trust others to know” argument, not a “no one can possibly know” argument. There’s a fact of the matter!)
Specifically being narratives about things outside the world rather than inside it is deliberately disconnecting yourself from correction.
An ideology that may pass for an honest model of the world can be corrected by treating it as an honest model of the world and seeing whether it fails in that regard. If it is honest, this provides chances for it to be exposed as a self-sustaining ideology. If it is dishonest, deliberate work must be done to restrict it to the space of things that can withstand that inspection, scaling with the degree or scrutiny it may receive.
An ideology which has its grounding outside the world (all Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, every folk religious tradition I’m familiar with, debatably Buddhism, etc.), has neither of those good properties.
Or in short: Non-religious cultish ideologies are constrained to mimic the form of honesty to be considered honest, while religious ones are not.
It’s not at all obvious to me that religions are built on affective death spirals in the general case, more than anything other generic class of institution (such as a self-help organization running inspirational workshops) is. This seems like a claim worth fleshing out.
ETA (since the discussion below is currently hidden by default):
Religions differ in important ways from other institutions. This includes differing in how they relate to affective death spirals. I’m not saying everything’s completely the same, or that religions don’t have a worse track record in some respects. I’m saying that so far I’m unpersuaded by the case that religion’s uniquely generically bad on this score.
Affective death spirals and other self-validating narratives are pretty common, and I can think of lots of different reasons you might notice them most prominently in religion, e.g. religion is trying to solve particularly difficult social coordination problems, or modern religion is more honest about the extent to which it is talking nonsense, or you’re not a member of a religion but you are a member of various other types of social organization and affective death spirals are hard to see from the inside.
It is extremely obvious to me and I don’t understand how it could seem otherwise.
I’ll try to explain my side here. It seems to me like quite a lot of institutions reaffirm narrative at the expense of tracking reality. The startup world is full of this, for instance. So are political movements like Communism. This is unusually easy to notice in the case of religion, for two reasons. First, Christianity in particular tends to spin narratives about things “outside the world” in some way, whereas e.g. startups or political movements organize around ideologies that can pass for an honest model of the world we live in at casual inspection, especially if you’re willing to commit the occasional fraud. Second, people in a liberal, skeptical, cosmopolitan subculture, like us, have social permission to notice when religion is a fraud and not just honestly mistaken, but don’t have social permission to notice when other governing institutions are frauds.
That seems like the fallacy of grey to me. Yes, it’s easier to notice when a church is cultish than a startup or political movement. Yes, there is significant incidence of cultish startups and political movements. That doesn’t mean that churches aren’t much worse. Fairly few churches are not cultish; fairly few of the rest are.
Most good startups are very cultish (citation: Zero to One says this explicitly). I appreciate that you’re taking the obvious position and properly acting on it, but I’m interested to hear what insights Benquo comes up with (his Sabbath post was super interesting), and generally do expect our bias to be not noticing the valuable insights and coordination effects of religion. I can imagine being sufficiently wrong such that over history religions been net positive relative to what society would’ve done otherwise.
I would say something more like, most religion is badly wrong for the same reason most philosophy is badly wrong—you’re working on a really hard problem! The problem being really hard doesn’t make it something you can get away with not doing, it just makes you get wrong answers most of the time.
I’m happy to admit that there can be differences in degree. But because of the independent differences in perception, and because I’ve only recently started to be able to see past that, I’m not at all sure “religions” are worse generally, or even how you’d measure that. Most arguments I’ve seen on this particular subject completely miss the fact that the liberal frame makes religion’s flaws easier to see.
(Note that in this case I’m making an “I don’t know and for the most part don’t trust others to know” argument, not a “no one can possibly know” argument. There’s a fact of the matter!)
Specifically being narratives about things outside the world rather than inside it is deliberately disconnecting yourself from correction.
An ideology that may pass for an honest model of the world can be corrected by treating it as an honest model of the world and seeing whether it fails in that regard. If it is honest, this provides chances for it to be exposed as a self-sustaining ideology. If it is dishonest, deliberate work must be done to restrict it to the space of things that can withstand that inspection, scaling with the degree or scrutiny it may receive.
An ideology which has its grounding outside the world (all Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, every folk religious tradition I’m familiar with, debatably Buddhism, etc.), has neither of those good properties.
Or in short: Non-religious cultish ideologies are constrained to mimic the form of honesty to be considered honest, while religious ones are not.