I say this just to offer evidence that something about “rationality” works.
Rationality working is one possible explanation of this, but it’s not the only one or even the most likely.
There are all sorts of interesting sociological differences between actively religious people and the nonreligious, usually to the advantage of theists. They live longer, report greater happiness, are healthier by most measures of health, and I think have some protection against mental disease. Most studies investigating these advantages find they have nothing to do with the content of the religion and everything to do with the religion providing easy access to the religious community, a friendly and supportive social group to which other believers have an automatic “in”.
I have a feeling this works in more subtle ways than just the obvious; it’s not just about going to church and seeing people, but about slowly absorbing these people’s norms (which are usually pretty positive in practice even when the theory behind them is repulsive) and internalizing their conception of you as a genuinely okay person because you’re part of the in-group.
A lot of what you’re talking about sounds potentially mediated by the same factors. You are part of a large and active RL community of rationalists and may have internalized the idea of fellow rationalists as your in-group, which means you’re adjusting your behavior to conform to rationalist norms and values rather than the norms and values of whatever was your in-group before.
This is not to devalue the importance of the material—most of us would not fit into a religious community no matter how hard we tried and so the material deserves a lot of credit as the attractor around which a community of interesting non-religious people can form—but I think the value of the material is indirect rather than direct.
There are all sorts of interesting sociological differences between actively religious people and the nonreligious, usually to the advantage of theists. They live longer, report greater happiness, are healthier by most measures of health, and I think have some protection against mental disease. Most studies investigating these advantages find they have nothing to do with the content of the religion and everything to do with the religion providing easy access to the religious community, a friendly and supportive social group to which other believers have an automatic “in”.
This is not to devalue the importance of the material—most of us would not fit into a religious community no matter how hard we tried
FWIW, I just spent the last two years in a church in hopes of achieving such benefits. A few weeks ago I classified the experiment as a failure—I was more connected to others and generally happier in the one month I spent with the NYC rationalist community than at any time with the religious group, with which I had spent more time.
Thanks. I thought I would be metaphorically smacked in the head with a trout by most people here for trying something like that after all I’d read on OB/LW.
Edit: Part of why I had joined was because it’s the easiest way to get a social group in Waco. Now I don’t know whether to try to relocate my life; try to find other, more appropriate groups to join here; or go for broke and try to get a stable Waco LW meetup going.
Just to re-confuse you, jsalvatier would also say that, in the present environment, it would create positive externalities for me to counterfeit money and use it to be junk that I don’t want.
Your comment reduces my confidence that I understand the term “externality”. Until I read it, I tentatively believed that “X has positive externalities” means that X is an action taken voluntarily by a person (or firm) and has positive expected global utility. Most economic discourse assumes that all voluntary actions taken by a person (firm) have positive expected personal (organizational) utility. But in the present environment, counterfeiting money has according to my models negative global expected utility by reducing (by a small amount) the value of every asset denominated in the currency being counterfeited (e.g., cash and loans). (Counterfeiting is a member of the class or set of a diffuse harms, which by the way do not seem to get the attention they deserve here on Less Wrong.)
(Buying junk I do not want has negative global expected utility, too, under my models.)
The textbook definition of “externality” is where some activity has an effect (whether positive or negative) on people who are neither party to that activity, nor in a contractual relationship with those people.
So, creating a meetup group that other people will enjoy has a positive externality, but note if SilasBarta had been hired by those people to create that group there would be no externality (unless it also benefited some people who hadn’t hired him).
As for the reference to counterfeiting, that I believe is (based on previous discussions with SilasBarta) a sly reference to Keynesian economics, and you should probably leave it to one side if you’re still trying to get your head around externalities.
In the present environment, at least the in the US and most of Europe, it is conceivable that counterfeiting money has positive externalities. There is a very high unemployment rate, and low capacity utilization across most sectors of the economy. There is a fairly broad school of economists who believe that this is the result of a shortage of aggregate demand brought on by poor macroeconomic management due to an irrational fear of inflation—that the central bank can and should do more than it is doing to stimulate the economy, and failing that, central goverments not facing high or rising borrowing costs should be willing to run large short-term deficits. If this bunch of economists is correct, then these policies would be good for the global economy. Since counterfeiting money is essentially equivalent to monetary stimulus, it also would have positive externality. It would be much more likely to put some resources back to work and have little or no effect on the value of assets denominated in that currency.
If all economic actors are perfectly rational, and none suffer from money illusion, hyperbolic discounting, or other effects, then you would be right in all times, not just in normal times of close to optimal fed policy and near full labor and capital usage. That would also mean that the economists to which I refer would be wrong about the current state of events.
I agree, though, that buying junk you do not want would destroy most of any utility gained by counterfeiting. It would be far better to buy things you do want, or failing that, to simply give the money away.
The disagreement here isn’t about the term “externality”, it’s about the consequences of counterfeiting.
Right now, the U.S. economy is in such a screwed-up state that injecting more currency into the economy (regardless of whether it’s done legally by the Federal Reserve or illegally by counterfeiters) may indeed have net positive effects instead of net negative effects.
According to my preferred expert, the best macroeconomic model for our current situation is that of a demand shock brought on by the recent financial crisis: people lost a lot of money, which has led to a fall in aggregate demand (people are buying less stuff), which has led to a drop in output (people are making less stuff), which has led to higher unemployment (you don’t need as many employees when you’re making less stuff), which has led to a fall in aggregate demand (newly unemployed people no longer have the money to buy stuff)...
We don’t seem to be in a downward spiral any more (unemployment stabilized at around 10%), but business investment is extremely low; corporations are sitting on cash instead of spending it to expand production because nobody is buying. Right now, the bottleneck to economic growth in the United States isn’t productive capacity, but people’s desire and ability to purchase finished products. We’re at the point where having the government hire people to dig ditches and fill them up again, or even dropping cash from helicopters, would actually improve the economy.
It costs you almost nothing to post a meetup for a Waco group up here, and only an afternoon reading/on your laptop to wait at a failed meetup. Just because a course of action has a very high payout doesn’t mean that trying it has a high cost. The universe isn’t fair, and sometimes that’s a good thing.
To compare to moving, you would need to factor in the benefits of each as well, and I’m iffy on the upside … Waco isn’t a very intellectual town. Still planning to do it, just saying.
I’m a member of my local Unitarian Universalist church (in El Paso, just down the street from Waco by SW standards), and it is very friendly to atheists and skeptics—I would say 15% to 20% of the membership would identify as “agnostic” or more skeptical. However, it is also friendly to an array of other, much less evidence-based views. I’d say a UU church would definitely be worth a look, and would almost certainly be a better fit for a LW denizen than a
“non-denominational Christian” one. But one might need to be tolerant of some rather silly beliefs. OTOH, I’m starting to take it as an opportunity to learn to “evangelize” (gently).
I said “mainstream” because I’m assuming that the statistical good effects from religion require a social infrastructure that neo-paganism doesn’t tend to have.
Having been to a pagan convention in San Jose, this seems most likely false. I’d have to attend some local, routine meetups to be sure, but I get the feeling there’s an excellent social infrastructure in place.
Mainstream religions have people get together every week, with stuff going on between the major services. I don’t know of pagan groups which have that much going on.
Fair enough—I’ve had some involvement with Neo-pagan groups in Philadelphia and Delaware, though I’m not expert even for those regions, and I recently saw some discussion of Philadelphia being a dead spot for Neo-paganism compared to other regions.
Most worthwhile thing I’ve read by someone (ESR) who has written a lot of worthwhile things even though I will concede that he is a little full of himself sometimes.
ADDED. Actually, “Sex tips for geeks” is also in the running for most worthwhile thing written by ESR.
That was a very interesting article; I had not previously encountered such a perspective on the subject.
I don’t agree with all of it, though:
And as long as you stick with the sterile denotative language of psychology, and the logical mode of the waking mind, you won’t be able to—because you can’t reach and program the unconscious mind that way.
...
Only...that cold and mechanistic a way of thinking about the Gods simply will not work when you want to evoke one. For full understanding, the Apollonian/scientific mode is essential; for direct experience, the Dionysian/ecstatic mode is the only way to go.
When I first read that, it seemed slightly odd that he would place so much trust (provisionally?) in this particular psychological explanation. Later I read The Jung Cult, which includes a persuasive argument against the validity of the evidence for a collective unconscious. (And I guess the author had to fill the rest of the book somehow.) You’ll have to decide if you think the prior probability suffices.
Mind you, I doubt this argument would make all the phenomena go away.
My grandparents were Quakers. I’ve been to a few of their meetings. A Quaker meeting consists of everyone in the congregation sitting silently in a room, with individuals standing up to speak at irregular and unplanned intervals. In my experience, when people stand up to speak, they talk about the things that are important in their “spiritual” lives, which, in practice, means their emotional/moral lives. God was mentioned only in passing, and, aside from these mentions of God, I don’t remember anything mystical.
I’d say that, depending on the congregation, Reconstructionist Judaism is quite compatible with LW-rationality. Granted, Reconstructionist Jews are a tiny minority of a tiny minority, but it still qualifies as a mainstream religion in the way that term is usually employed. I’d likely belong to a congregation if there were actually one located closer to me.
Most people stumble in with their friends. Your friends are the people you happen to sit next to at the first day of class, people who work in the same office as you, people who belong to the same clubs as you, people who go to the same bars as you. This is usually local because as the search radius increases, the amount of new data you have to deal with (people to filter out) becomes excessive.
It takes a strong sense of purpose to travel and hour and a half by train to meetup with strangers at an apartment in order to find a community, all based on the fact that you read the same blog. That is a very small part of search space.
There are many things that are claimed to give people large amounts of happiness. Most don’t work, and many that work won’t work for a given person. Quickly identifying what works for you, and making a beeline towards it is one of the largest benefits rationality can give a typical person. People see this and focus on the “it” (in this case finding a community) and say “of course that made you happy.” This feels like hindsight bias. If you had met SarahC a year ago, would you have said to her “Oh, you obviously need to meet us with these really awesome rationalists in NYC”? Finding that option is where the rationality comes in.
Generally, people who try to lose weight don’t actually lose weight, and when they do lose some weight, they put it back on later (yo-yo dieting). Zvi, a NYC rationalist, recently posted about how he lost weight using TDT style thinking. He lost a considerable amount, and has kept it off for many years. He is not alone in the NYC group. Many of us have done this relatively simple task, and kept the weight off for years. We all used different methods to change our behavior, but we each picked one that worked for our specific problems.
Rationality helps you CHOOSE one option out of many. The option you choose isn’t “rational” in any special sense, but in some cases the choice would be unlikely. Maybe as unlikely as traveling 63 miles to hang out in a strangers apartment. Noticing that option exists is a superpower, even if taking it is obvious afterwards.
Some of it is just community belonging, but not everything.
Some of the changes I’ve made are explicitly related to becoming more rational: getting better at probability estimates, being more likely to make decisions based on evidence instead of convention, getting in the habit of making changes to my behavior in response to real-world results.
Some of what’s changed about me is just the effect of being friends with people who aren’t students or academics—I knew very little about life as a 20- or 30-something with a private-sector job. And some of it is just the techie counterculture (which I enjoy quite a bit.) You know, vibrams/ancap/science fiction/burning man/crossfittery/self-quantification/hacker ethos.
I agree with this. I sought out the NYC group for precisely this purpose. But there’s definitely a benefit to having such a community that DOESN’T come with other norms that make you believe wrong things (sometimes to the detriment of either yourself or society).
Rationality working is one possible explanation of this, but it’s not the only one or even the most likely.
There are all sorts of interesting sociological differences between actively religious people and the nonreligious, usually to the advantage of theists. They live longer, report greater happiness, are healthier by most measures of health, and I think have some protection against mental disease. Most studies investigating these advantages find they have nothing to do with the content of the religion and everything to do with the religion providing easy access to the religious community, a friendly and supportive social group to which other believers have an automatic “in”.
I have a feeling this works in more subtle ways than just the obvious; it’s not just about going to church and seeing people, but about slowly absorbing these people’s norms (which are usually pretty positive in practice even when the theory behind them is repulsive) and internalizing their conception of you as a genuinely okay person because you’re part of the in-group.
A lot of what you’re talking about sounds potentially mediated by the same factors. You are part of a large and active RL community of rationalists and may have internalized the idea of fellow rationalists as your in-group, which means you’re adjusting your behavior to conform to rationalist norms and values rather than the norms and values of whatever was your in-group before.
This is not to devalue the importance of the material—most of us would not fit into a religious community no matter how hard we tried and so the material deserves a lot of credit as the attractor around which a community of interesting non-religious people can form—but I think the value of the material is indirect rather than direct.
FWIW, I just spent the last two years in a church in hopes of achieving such benefits. A few weeks ago I classified the experiment as a failure—I was more connected to others and generally happier in the one month I spent with the NYC rationalist community than at any time with the religious group, with which I had spent more time.
I’m impressed that you did the experiment.
Thanks. I thought I would be metaphorically smacked in the head with a trout by most people here for trying something like that after all I’d read on OB/LW.
Edit: Part of why I had joined was because it’s the easiest way to get a social group in Waco. Now I don’t know whether to try to relocate my life; try to find other, more appropriate groups to join here; or go for broke and try to get a stable Waco LW meetup going.
I’ll note that creating a stable Waco LW meetup group would have positive externalities.
Thanks for helping me understand the term “externality” by providing a comprehensible example of its use.
Just to re-confuse you, jsalvatier would also say that, in the present environment, it would create positive externalities for me to counterfeit money and use it to be junk that I don’t want.
Your comment reduces my confidence that I understand the term “externality”. Until I read it, I tentatively believed that “X has positive externalities” means that X is an action taken voluntarily by a person (or firm) and has positive expected global utility. Most economic discourse assumes that all voluntary actions taken by a person (firm) have positive expected personal (organizational) utility. But in the present environment, counterfeiting money has according to my models negative global expected utility by reducing (by a small amount) the value of every asset denominated in the currency being counterfeited (e.g., cash and loans). (Counterfeiting is a member of the class or set of a diffuse harms, which by the way do not seem to get the attention they deserve here on Less Wrong.)
(Buying junk I do not want has negative global expected utility, too, under my models.)
The textbook definition of “externality” is where some activity has an effect (whether positive or negative) on people who are neither party to that activity, nor in a contractual relationship with those people.
So, creating a meetup group that other people will enjoy has a positive externality, but note if SilasBarta had been hired by those people to create that group there would be no externality (unless it also benefited some people who hadn’t hired him).
As for the reference to counterfeiting, that I believe is (based on previous discussions with SilasBarta) a sly reference to Keynesian economics, and you should probably leave it to one side if you’re still trying to get your head around externalities.
Thanks.
Happy to help, I like to contribute my economics knowledge to the group when its germane.
In the present environment, at least the in the US and most of Europe, it is conceivable that counterfeiting money has positive externalities. There is a very high unemployment rate, and low capacity utilization across most sectors of the economy. There is a fairly broad school of economists who believe that this is the result of a shortage of aggregate demand brought on by poor macroeconomic management due to an irrational fear of inflation—that the central bank can and should do more than it is doing to stimulate the economy, and failing that, central goverments not facing high or rising borrowing costs should be willing to run large short-term deficits. If this bunch of economists is correct, then these policies would be good for the global economy. Since counterfeiting money is essentially equivalent to monetary stimulus, it also would have positive externality. It would be much more likely to put some resources back to work and have little or no effect on the value of assets denominated in that currency.
If all economic actors are perfectly rational, and none suffer from money illusion, hyperbolic discounting, or other effects, then you would be right in all times, not just in normal times of close to optimal fed policy and near full labor and capital usage. That would also mean that the economists to which I refer would be wrong about the current state of events.
I agree, though, that buying junk you do not want would destroy most of any utility gained by counterfeiting. It would be far better to buy things you do want, or failing that, to simply give the money away.
The disagreement here isn’t about the term “externality”, it’s about the consequences of counterfeiting.
Right now, the U.S. economy is in such a screwed-up state that injecting more currency into the economy (regardless of whether it’s done legally by the Federal Reserve or illegally by counterfeiters) may indeed have net positive effects instead of net negative effects.
According to my preferred expert, the best macroeconomic model for our current situation is that of a demand shock brought on by the recent financial crisis: people lost a lot of money, which has led to a fall in aggregate demand (people are buying less stuff), which has led to a drop in output (people are making less stuff), which has led to higher unemployment (you don’t need as many employees when you’re making less stuff), which has led to a fall in aggregate demand (newly unemployed people no longer have the money to buy stuff)...
We don’t seem to be in a downward spiral any more (unemployment stabilized at around 10%), but business investment is extremely low; corporations are sitting on cash instead of spending it to expand production because nobody is buying. Right now, the bottleneck to economic growth in the United States isn’t productive capacity, but people’s desire and ability to purchase finished products. We’re at the point where having the government hire people to dig ditches and fill them up again, or even dropping cash from helicopters, would actually improve the economy.
(Note that in spite of the 2009 stimulus bill, government spending in the United States has actually decreased because spending by state and local governments has dropped more than federal spending has increased.)
On the bright side, at least the developing world is indeed continuing to develop, in spite of the mess the developed world has gotten itself into.
It costs you almost nothing to post a meetup for a Waco group up here, and only an afternoon reading/on your laptop to wait at a failed meetup. Just because a course of action has a very high payout doesn’t mean that trying it has a high cost. The universe isn’t fair, and sometimes that’s a good thing.
True; I was referring to the full cost of getting a stable one going, which is not the same as making one attempt of that type.
Getting a stable meetup in Waco doesn’t sound like more work than moving. Am I missing something?
There’s a Unitarian church in Waco which might be worth a look.
Just visited the UU church in Waco and went to their three hour intro. Looks to be compatible with me, something I don’t have to put a mask on for.
Upvoted for Just Trying It.
Didn’t know that was upvoteworthy now. A reference to me not having tried a Waco meetup yet?
I’m guessing that this is in reference to willingness to try low-risk activities which have a reasonable chance of paying off.
To compare to moving, you would need to factor in the benefits of each as well, and I’m iffy on the upside … Waco isn’t a very intellectual town. Still planning to do it, just saying.
You’re welcome.
What religion or denomination was it?
It was the non-denominational Antioch Community Church, a pretty large one, especially given the metro area’s size.
Offhand, I’d think that the only mainstream American religions which could be compatible for most LessWrongians would be Unitarianism and the Quakers.
I’m a member of my local Unitarian Universalist church (in El Paso, just down the street from Waco by SW standards), and it is very friendly to atheists and skeptics—I would say 15% to 20% of the membership would identify as “agnostic” or more skeptical. However, it is also friendly to an array of other, much less evidence-based views. I’d say a UU church would definitely be worth a look, and would almost certainly be a better fit for a LW denizen than a “non-denominational Christian” one. But one might need to be tolerant of some rather silly beliefs. OTOH, I’m starting to take it as an opportunity to learn to “evangelize” (gently).
Naturalistic Neopaganism (HT Nick Tarleton)
I said “mainstream” because I’m assuming that the statistical good effects from religion require a social infrastructure that neo-paganism doesn’t tend to have.
Having been to a pagan convention in San Jose, this seems most likely false. I’d have to attend some local, routine meetups to be sure, but I get the feeling there’s an excellent social infrastructure in place.
Mainstream religions have people get together every week, with stuff going on between the major services. I don’t know of pagan groups which have that much going on.
If there were pagan groups that have that much going on, would you know about it?
Maybe. Do you know of any?
I am not familiar with any pagan groups at all. I was just wondering how much evidence against a thing existing your non-observance of that thing is.
Fair enough—I’ve had some involvement with Neo-pagan groups in Philadelphia and Delaware, though I’m not expert even for those regions, and I recently saw some discussion of Philadelphia being a dead spot for Neo-paganism compared to other regions.
Most worthwhile thing I’ve read by someone (ESR) who has written a lot of worthwhile things even though I will concede that he is a little full of himself sometimes.
ADDED. Actually, “Sex tips for geeks” is also in the running for most worthwhile thing written by ESR.
That was a very interesting article; I had not previously encountered such a perspective on the subject.
I don’t agree with all of it, though:
Needs more joy in the merely real, and maybe some how an algorithm feels from the inside. But still, very interesting.
When I first read that, it seemed slightly odd that he would place so much trust (provisionally?) in this particular psychological explanation. Later I read The Jung Cult, which includes a persuasive argument against the validity of the evidence for a collective unconscious. (And I guess the author had to fill the rest of the book somehow.) You’ll have to decide if you think the prior probability suffices.
Mind you, I doubt this argument would make all the phenomena go away.
Quakers? What about the God and mysticism stuff? (I was going to mention technology, but I may be incorrectly equating them with the Amish.)
Edit: Also, don’t forget the Church of Bayes.
My grandparents were Quakers. I’ve been to a few of their meetings. A Quaker meeting consists of everyone in the congregation sitting silently in a room, with individuals standing up to speak at irregular and unplanned intervals. In my experience, when people stand up to speak, they talk about the things that are important in their “spiritual” lives, which, in practice, means their emotional/moral lives. God was mentioned only in passing, and, aside from these mentions of God, I don’t remember anything mystical.
Quakers run the gamut from very conservative to explicitly atheist.
Thanks for the information—I just assumed that the inner light could be interpreted as a neurologically based reward of meditation.
As with Unitarians, there are apparently some groups of Quakers that have relinquished belief in God.
I’d say that, depending on the congregation, Reconstructionist Judaism is quite compatible with LW-rationality. Granted, Reconstructionist Jews are a tiny minority of a tiny minority, but it still qualifies as a mainstream religion in the way that term is usually employed. I’d likely belong to a congregation if there were actually one located closer to me.
Could that be in part due to your inability to buy into the church’s claims, rather than the NYC rationalist community being that much more awesome?
When my father manages to get me to go to church I can never shake the feeling that I don’t belong, no matter how nice they are.
I’d be interested in hearing about the details of your experiment as well as exploring the reasons for the failure of the experiment.
How about an article on the matter?
that would be great!
It’s possible, but I worry that our friendly local countersignalers are underestimating the power of being sane.
Most people stumble in with their friends. Your friends are the people you happen to sit next to at the first day of class, people who work in the same office as you, people who belong to the same clubs as you, people who go to the same bars as you. This is usually local because as the search radius increases, the amount of new data you have to deal with (people to filter out) becomes excessive.
It takes a strong sense of purpose to travel and hour and a half by train to meetup with strangers at an apartment in order to find a community, all based on the fact that you read the same blog. That is a very small part of search space.
There are many things that are claimed to give people large amounts of happiness. Most don’t work, and many that work won’t work for a given person. Quickly identifying what works for you, and making a beeline towards it is one of the largest benefits rationality can give a typical person. People see this and focus on the “it” (in this case finding a community) and say “of course that made you happy.” This feels like hindsight bias. If you had met SarahC a year ago, would you have said to her “Oh, you obviously need to meet us with these really awesome rationalists in NYC”? Finding that option is where the rationality comes in.
Generally, people who try to lose weight don’t actually lose weight, and when they do lose some weight, they put it back on later (yo-yo dieting). Zvi, a NYC rationalist, recently posted about how he lost weight using TDT style thinking. He lost a considerable amount, and has kept it off for many years. He is not alone in the NYC group. Many of us have done this relatively simple task, and kept the weight off for years. We all used different methods to change our behavior, but we each picked one that worked for our specific problems.
Rationality helps you CHOOSE one option out of many. The option you choose isn’t “rational” in any special sense, but in some cases the choice would be unlikely. Maybe as unlikely as traveling 63 miles to hang out in a strangers apartment. Noticing that option exists is a superpower, even if taking it is obvious afterwards.
Some of it is just community belonging, but not everything.
Some of the changes I’ve made are explicitly related to becoming more rational: getting better at probability estimates, being more likely to make decisions based on evidence instead of convention, getting in the habit of making changes to my behavior in response to real-world results.
Some of what’s changed about me is just the effect of being friends with people who aren’t students or academics—I knew very little about life as a 20- or 30-something with a private-sector job. And some of it is just the techie counterculture (which I enjoy quite a bit.) You know, vibrams/ancap/science fiction/burning man/crossfittery/self-quantification/hacker ethos.
I agree with this. I sought out the NYC group for precisely this purpose. But there’s definitely a benefit to having such a community that DOESN’T come with other norms that make you believe wrong things (sometimes to the detriment of either yourself or society).