I would dispute the (implied) part of this post that suggests removing religion would necessarily be a good thing. Besides being a way to explain rainbows and earthquakes and whatnot, it is also a “solution” to the prisoner’s dilemma. For explanations of physical phenomena, religion is no longer needed. But the “morality” problem is still there. Make everyone rational, and they will do the rational thing, i.e. defect when faced with a prisoner’s dilemma (or tragedy of the commons, or whatever). Getting rid of religion may certainly have its benefits, but I would not be too sure it would be an overall good thing.
Make everyone rational, and they will do the rational thing, i.e. defect when faced with a prisoner’s dilemma (or tragedy of the commons, or whatever).
Also, have you spent any time searching for a third alternative before deciding that religion is the only thing that can keep people from destroying each other?
I have wondered for many years what a good alternative would be, and have not been able to come up with one. Now that in itself doesn’t mean anything; just because I can’t think of one does not mean there isn’t one. But given the antipathy of most on this site to religion (as evidenced by my comment getting dinged 4 times for merely suggesting that religion, though irrational, may be socially beneficial), I would think there would be posts upon posts explaining better alternatives. I have not seen them.
It seems to me that many rationalists hate religion so much, that they are loathe to admit it has any benefits at all, even if those benefits have NOTHING to do with the original reason for the loathing. It reminds me of a few years ago when someone said something to the effect of “Hitler’s army had great uniforms” (I don’t remember the exact details). Of course, the person had to end up apologizing a million times over, lost her job, etc. even though she was in no way endorsing Hitler’s horrendous actions.
Again, I am not even saying that religion is necessarily worth keeping. But the unquestioned assumption that it would be desirable to get rid of it does not seem to get a lot of scrutiny around here.
If you are going to take religion’s effects into account as well as the truth of it, you need to look at both sides of the ledger, and weigh the ills it brings against the good. No cherry-picking.
Morendil, I absolutely agree. It may very well be that the ills outweigh the good (though I happen to personally doubt it). I’m just saying that the weighing should be done independently of the rationality of religion (which I think we can all agree is about 0). I just fear that it is too easy for there to be a negative halo effect around religion, which is understandable seeing that this is a forum about rationality.
We think that religions are false, and a shared priority of Less Wrong denizens is to believe things that are true instead. I’ll readily admit that religion has some good effects. Many people find it comforting; it’s inspired great works of art and music and architecture; it does a lot of work to funnel money to charitable causes, some of which are very helpful; it encourages community-building; and it has historically served as a cultural touchstone to enable the development of some very powerful iconography and tropes.
It’s still false.
If you like the good things about religion, there are alternatives (although most of them only work piecemeal). For instance, there’s Ethical Culture, which fills in the community gap a departing religion can leave.
We think that religions are false, and a shared priority of Less Wrong denizens is to >believe things that are true instead
You’ll get no argument from me that religions are false. You will get practically no argument from me that it makes sense to want to believe things that are true. What I question is, is it always rational to make others believe things that are true? If I leave my lights on when I leave the house so that would-be robbers think I am home when I am not, I am making a rational decision to make others believe something that is false.
If I am playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma with someone (just once, so no tit-for-tat or anything), and I have the choice of making my opponent either act rationally or irrationally, the rational thing for me to do is make him act irrationally.
Thanks; the Bayesians vs. Barbarians post is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. I’ll have to read some of the posts that it links to (as well as re-read the background posts you referred to; haven’t read them in a while), as the way it stands I still think the Barbarians would win.
If I am playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma with someone (just once, so no tit-for-tat or anything), and I have the choice of making my opponent either act rationally or irrationally, the rational thing for me to do is make him act irrationally.
is it always rational to make others believe things that are true?
This depends on your values. If chief among them is “honesty”, and you caveat the “make others believe things that are true” with a “for the right reasons” clause, then probably, yeah. If honesty has to compete with things like keeping your property, maybe not.
If I am playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma with someone (just once, so no tit-for-tat or anything), and I have the choice of making my opponent either act rationally or irrationally, the rational thing for me to do is make him act irrationally.
I’m not sure what the content of “making your opponent behave (ir)rationally” is supposed to be. It’s certainly not an uncontroversial tidbit of received wisdom that the rational thing to do in the Prisoner’s Dilemma is to defect, which is what you seem to imply.
I’m not sure what the content of “making your opponent behave (ir)rationally” is >supposed to be. It’s certainly not an uncontroversial tidbit of received wisdom that the >rational thing to do in the Prisoner’s Dilemma is to defect, which is what you seem to >imply.
Exactly, if I was able to make him act irrationally, he would not defect, whereas I would. And if the definition of rationality is that it makes you win, then it can be perfectly rational to have others act irrationally (i.e. believe wrong things).
If you both cooperate, instead of you both defecting, you’d both be better off, which is a more rational (more winning) outcome. Thus, making “cooperation” a synonym for “irrational” will irk people around here. (Of course if you defect and the other player cooperates, you’d have the best possible payoff.)
Russ Roberts’ latest podcast with Dave Rose touches on this. My paraphrase: utilitarian morality does not lead to the greatest good. It works well in small groups (they used 25 people as a guideline) but fails in very large groups. This makes sense: for large group cooperation, coordinators need to correctly predict motivations of the people involved. If people can be made “mechanical” in the sense that they will do what they are told reliably (because they have a rule morality that tells them to), then larger organized efforts can succeed. If people defect locally from prioners dilemmas, the rate at which this happens creates an upper limit in the size of effective cooperative organizations.
I would say that religion is certainly a source of rule based morality on net. Rationalists (tm) pursuing their personal utility are often ready to defect from rules that they conclude come from outside their utility functions, or are at odds with their utility functions. Since we have a rather larger group of us on the planet than ever before, a path for removing religion might need to be carefully designed to not bring about the collapse of a lot of cooperative endeavors, to not bring about a collapse from rule-based to Rational (tm) utilitarian behavior on the parts of broad subpopulations.
Since I may not comment on the David Rose Russ Roberts podcast anywhere else, I will say here that I sure think it is at minimum ironic that the argument against utilitarianism as a moral system is that it is not as productive as rule-based moral systems can be. That is, the argument against utilitarianism is that it does not produce maximum utility. That is pretty much the only kind of argument against utilitarianism that might ever succeed with me.
I would dispute the (implied) part of this post that suggests removing religion would necessarily be a good thing. Besides being a way to explain rainbows and earthquakes and whatnot, it is also a “solution” to the prisoner’s dilemma. For explanations of physical phenomena, religion is no longer needed. But the “morality” problem is still there. Make everyone rational, and they will do the rational thing, i.e. defect when faced with a prisoner’s dilemma (or tragedy of the commons, or whatever). Getting rid of religion may certainly have its benefits, but I would not be too sure it would be an overall good thing.
You assume too much.
Also, have you spent any time searching for a third alternative before deciding that religion is the only thing that can keep people from destroying each other?
I have wondered for many years what a good alternative would be, and have not been able to come up with one. Now that in itself doesn’t mean anything; just because I can’t think of one does not mean there isn’t one. But given the antipathy of most on this site to religion (as evidenced by my comment getting dinged 4 times for merely suggesting that religion, though irrational, may be socially beneficial), I would think there would be posts upon posts explaining better alternatives. I have not seen them.
It seems to me that many rationalists hate religion so much, that they are loathe to admit it has any benefits at all, even if those benefits have NOTHING to do with the original reason for the loathing. It reminds me of a few years ago when someone said something to the effect of “Hitler’s army had great uniforms” (I don’t remember the exact details). Of course, the person had to end up apologizing a million times over, lost her job, etc. even though she was in no way endorsing Hitler’s horrendous actions.
Again, I am not even saying that religion is necessarily worth keeping. But the unquestioned assumption that it would be desirable to get rid of it does not seem to get a lot of scrutiny around here.
If you are going to take religion’s effects into account as well as the truth of it, you need to look at both sides of the ledger, and weigh the ills it brings against the good. No cherry-picking.
Morendil, I absolutely agree. It may very well be that the ills outweigh the good (though I happen to personally doubt it). I’m just saying that the weighing should be done independently of the rationality of religion (which I think we can all agree is about 0). I just fear that it is too easy for there to be a negative halo effect around religion, which is understandable seeing that this is a forum about rationality.
We think that religions are false, and a shared priority of Less Wrong denizens is to believe things that are true instead. I’ll readily admit that religion has some good effects. Many people find it comforting; it’s inspired great works of art and music and architecture; it does a lot of work to funnel money to charitable causes, some of which are very helpful; it encourages community-building; and it has historically served as a cultural touchstone to enable the development of some very powerful iconography and tropes.
It’s still false.
If you like the good things about religion, there are alternatives (although most of them only work piecemeal). For instance, there’s Ethical Culture, which fills in the community gap a departing religion can leave.
You’ll get no argument from me that religions are false. You will get practically no argument from me that it makes sense to want to believe things that are true. What I question is, is it always rational to make others believe things that are true? If I leave my lights on when I leave the house so that would-be robbers think I am home when I am not, I am making a rational decision to make others believe something that is false.
If I am playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma with someone (just once, so no tit-for-tat or anything), and I have the choice of making my opponent either act rationally or irrationally, the rational thing for me to do is make him act irrationally.
See Bayesians vs. Barbarians. You may need the following posts for the background:
Newcomb’s Problem and Regret of Rationality
Newcomb’s Problem standard positions
The True Prisoner’s Dilemma
Thanks; the Bayesians vs. Barbarians post is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. I’ll have to read some of the posts that it links to (as well as re-read the background posts you referred to; haven’t read them in a while), as the way it stands I still think the Barbarians would win.
Rationalists should win.
This depends on your values. If chief among them is “honesty”, and you caveat the “make others believe things that are true” with a “for the right reasons” clause, then probably, yeah. If honesty has to compete with things like keeping your property, maybe not.
I’m not sure what the content of “making your opponent behave (ir)rationally” is supposed to be. It’s certainly not an uncontroversial tidbit of received wisdom that the rational thing to do in the Prisoner’s Dilemma is to defect, which is what you seem to imply.
Exactly, if I was able to make him act irrationally, he would not defect, whereas I would. And if the definition of rationality is that it makes you win, then it can be perfectly rational to have others act irrationally (i.e. believe wrong things).
If you both cooperate, instead of you both defecting, you’d both be better off, which is a more rational (more winning) outcome. Thus, making “cooperation” a synonym for “irrational” will irk people around here. (Of course if you defect and the other player cooperates, you’d have the best possible payoff.)
He didn’t claim that religion isn’t false.
I didn’t say that he so claimed.
Yes you didn’t, but the discussion is at cross-purposes.
Russ Roberts’ latest podcast with Dave Rose touches on this. My paraphrase: utilitarian morality does not lead to the greatest good. It works well in small groups (they used 25 people as a guideline) but fails in very large groups. This makes sense: for large group cooperation, coordinators need to correctly predict motivations of the people involved. If people can be made “mechanical” in the sense that they will do what they are told reliably (because they have a rule morality that tells them to), then larger organized efforts can succeed. If people defect locally from prioners dilemmas, the rate at which this happens creates an upper limit in the size of effective cooperative organizations.
I would say that religion is certainly a source of rule based morality on net. Rationalists (tm) pursuing their personal utility are often ready to defect from rules that they conclude come from outside their utility functions, or are at odds with their utility functions. Since we have a rather larger group of us on the planet than ever before, a path for removing religion might need to be carefully designed to not bring about the collapse of a lot of cooperative endeavors, to not bring about a collapse from rule-based to Rational (tm) utilitarian behavior on the parts of broad subpopulations.
Since I may not comment on the David Rose Russ Roberts podcast anywhere else, I will say here that I sure think it is at minimum ironic that the argument against utilitarianism as a moral system is that it is not as productive as rule-based moral systems can be. That is, the argument against utilitarianism is that it does not produce maximum utility. That is pretty much the only kind of argument against utilitarianism that might ever succeed with me.