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.
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.