This argument primarily comes down to arguing that because a certain category has blurry boundaries that we shouldn’t use it. This confuses having blurry boundaries with being useful. There seems to be a fair bit of implicitly arguing over definitions also which isn’t helpful.
The only marginally interesting section is:
The Allies invaded Nazi Germany and completely suppressed Nazism. To this day in Germany it is illegal to teach National Socialism. I think most Americans, and most Germans, would agree that this is a good thing.
But if we make this one trivial change, turning Nazism into Thorism and making it a “religion,” which as we’ve seen need not change the magnitude or details of Nazi crimes at all, the acts of the Allies are a blatant act of religious intolerance.
But even this is word games. Among other problems, it assumes that one actually supports the current German law against Nazis. One can be against or in favor of this whether or not one treats it as a religion.
This argument primarily comes down to arguing that because a certain category has blurry boundaries that we shouldn’t use it. This confuses having blurry boundaries with being useful.
The problem is not with the category having blurry boundaries, but with the fact that it (arguably) leads to grossly miscalibrated heuristics for evaluating beliefs. Such bad heuristics then end up being not just widely used by individuals, but also built into the system of government.
There is one especially common pattern in ideological disputes where such heuristics can be catastrophically bad. Suppose side A in a dispute claims a religious basis for its beliefs, which are however not derived from the religious axioms in some strict logical manner, but in fact the religious stuff serves only as the supporting narrative for what is just accumulated conventional wisdom and tradition. Suppose then that the opposing side B claims that its beliefs are a product of pure rational thinking, whereas in reality their supposed “rational thinking” or even “science” is a mere rationalization for their ideology—which is, at bottom, just another collection of human biases and metaphysical beliefs, although the latter are not about any anthropomorphic entities.
In situations of this sort, it is not at all unusual that the beliefs of the side A about practical issues are in fact reasonably close to reality, while the beliefs of the group B are grossly delusional and incredibly destructive if applied in practice. But the “religion” heuristic can make a wannabe rational thinker side with B for the ultimately silly reason that their metaphysics doesn’t involve anthropomorphic entities. (Even if the entities it does postulate are just as fictitious, the resulting reasoning equally fallacious, and the ultimate practical implications far crazier.)
Now, of course, contemporary examples of this pattern are likely to be ideologically charged to an extreme degree. But for a distant and hopefully uncontroversial example, imagine living in some country circa 1930 where there is an ongoing struggle for power between, say, some run-of-the-mill Christian conservatives and Communists. The religion heuristic might tell you that the latter, whatever their faults, are at least attempting to base their worldview on rational thinking, so they can’t possibly be the worse choice—even though they are in fact, by any reasonable measure, the more insane side by orders of magnitude. (And unsurprisingly, around that time plenty of purported rational thinkers did end up supporting the crazier side in disputes of this sort.)
Also, to end this comment on a more controversial note, what I find really scary is that the modern “separation of church and state” principle, which uses the “religion” heuristic for determining who is allowed to influence the workings of the government, is actively selecting for ideologies that are most adept at hiding their metaphysics below layers of purportedly pure rational (or even “scientific”) thinking. While this is admittedly a controversial view, it seems to me that these are quite possibly the most dangerous sorts of delusions.
This argument primarily comes down to arguing that because a certain category has blurry boundaries that we shouldn’t use it. This confuses having blurry boundaries with being useful. There seems to be a fair bit of implicitly arguing over definitions also which isn’t helpful.
Not at all. It tries to expose the mental dissonance of many people who would support cracking down on and wiping out Nazism the ideology, but as soon as there was a supernatural element to the belief system such as the god Thor, they wouldn’t and would talk only about dealing with Nazi “extremists”.
Why in the world should we care about metaphysical entities in people’s heads to the point of changing our ethical judgements on them? Crazy is crazy. If its transmitted like a religion, if it often springs from and back into religion, it causes as much change in political arrangements and personal behaviour as religion, people use the same rationalizations… if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, isn’t the rational thing to just consider it a duck?
Feel free to have different words for white, purple and yellow ducks, but don’t thinks surface features will give you great predictive value beyond people considering yellow ducks lucky and purple ducks more yummy, even though there dosen’t seems to be any evidence of this.
You claim the distinction is very useful and that there is no gain to be had by thinking just about ducks in general most of the time, shouldn’t you be the one at least come up with some reasons why this is so? The only reason I can think of is that “religion” is formally protected against persecution with legislation. But I don’t let law affect my personal ethical judgement elsewhere to a great extent, why should it do so here?
But even this is word games. Among other problems, it assumes that one actually supports the current German law against Nazis. One can be against or in favour of this whether or not one treats it as a religion.
But why do you think some people wouldn’t be changing their view on the laws if Nazism was perceived as a religion?
Why in the world should we care about metaphysical entities in people’s heads to the point of changing our ethical judgements on them?
Following the insights of Max Stirner, I would go still further and claim that the difference is not between belief systems that involve metaphysical entities and those that don’t, but merely between different kinds of metaphysical entities. This means that the issue at hand is whether the antropomorphic quality of these entities is by itself such an important difference for the worse.
The really scary thing is that humans seem incapable of establishing a workable system of Schelling points that would be capable of serving as the basis for organized society, and which wouldn’t base its Schelling points on some kind of shared metaphysical fictions. An objective evaluation of different belief systems that are capable of filling this role would be a fascinating project. (Unfortunately, it would also be a project of immense difficulty, not just because of the sheer complexity of the problem, but also because all sorts of biases would interfere with it—not least since it would likely make the current reigning ideologies look quite bad in comparison on at least some important metrics.)
Not at all. It tries to expose the mental dissonance of many people who would support cracking down on and wiping out Nazism the ideology, but as soon as there was a supernatural element to the belief system such as the god Thor, they wouldn’t and would talk only about dealing with Nazi “extremists”.
Do we have any real evidence that these people exist to a large degree and are at all common?
You’re too kind by far. A category which is cognitively economical but classes a few non-dangerous items into a largely dangerous category, or vice versa, can still be extremely useful. So a criticism which points to such an instance (Marxism) is weak. But a criticism which invents such an instance (Nazism a la Thor) is beyond weak. Categories prove their usefulness is the real world.
The problem is—to paraphrase pragmatist’s summary of the Hanson-Moldbug debate—Moldbug is thinking like a(n old-school analytic) philosopher. We need to think like social scientists on this one.
This seems reasonable on its face except for the implicit claim that Marxism isn’t dangerous. The history of the 20th century seems to indicate otherwise.
This argument primarily comes down to arguing that because a certain category has blurry boundaries that we shouldn’t use it. This confuses having blurry boundaries with being useful. There seems to be a fair bit of implicitly arguing over definitions also which isn’t helpful.
The only marginally interesting section is:
But even this is word games. Among other problems, it assumes that one actually supports the current German law against Nazis. One can be against or in favor of this whether or not one treats it as a religion.
Overall, I’m unimpressed.
The problem is not with the category having blurry boundaries, but with the fact that it (arguably) leads to grossly miscalibrated heuristics for evaluating beliefs. Such bad heuristics then end up being not just widely used by individuals, but also built into the system of government.
There is one especially common pattern in ideological disputes where such heuristics can be catastrophically bad. Suppose side A in a dispute claims a religious basis for its beliefs, which are however not derived from the religious axioms in some strict logical manner, but in fact the religious stuff serves only as the supporting narrative for what is just accumulated conventional wisdom and tradition. Suppose then that the opposing side B claims that its beliefs are a product of pure rational thinking, whereas in reality their supposed “rational thinking” or even “science” is a mere rationalization for their ideology—which is, at bottom, just another collection of human biases and metaphysical beliefs, although the latter are not about any anthropomorphic entities.
In situations of this sort, it is not at all unusual that the beliefs of the side A about practical issues are in fact reasonably close to reality, while the beliefs of the group B are grossly delusional and incredibly destructive if applied in practice. But the “religion” heuristic can make a wannabe rational thinker side with B for the ultimately silly reason that their metaphysics doesn’t involve anthropomorphic entities. (Even if the entities it does postulate are just as fictitious, the resulting reasoning equally fallacious, and the ultimate practical implications far crazier.)
Now, of course, contemporary examples of this pattern are likely to be ideologically charged to an extreme degree. But for a distant and hopefully uncontroversial example, imagine living in some country circa 1930 where there is an ongoing struggle for power between, say, some run-of-the-mill Christian conservatives and Communists. The religion heuristic might tell you that the latter, whatever their faults, are at least attempting to base their worldview on rational thinking, so they can’t possibly be the worse choice—even though they are in fact, by any reasonable measure, the more insane side by orders of magnitude. (And unsurprisingly, around that time plenty of purported rational thinkers did end up supporting the crazier side in disputes of this sort.)
Also, to end this comment on a more controversial note, what I find really scary is that the modern “separation of church and state” principle, which uses the “religion” heuristic for determining who is allowed to influence the workings of the government, is actively selecting for ideologies that are most adept at hiding their metaphysics below layers of purportedly pure rational (or even “scientific”) thinking. While this is admittedly a controversial view, it seems to me that these are quite possibly the most dangerous sorts of delusions.
Not at all. It tries to expose the mental dissonance of many people who would support cracking down on and wiping out Nazism the ideology, but as soon as there was a supernatural element to the belief system such as the god Thor, they wouldn’t and would talk only about dealing with Nazi “extremists”.
Why in the world should we care about metaphysical entities in people’s heads to the point of changing our ethical judgements on them? Crazy is crazy. If its transmitted like a religion, if it often springs from and back into religion, it causes as much change in political arrangements and personal behaviour as religion, people use the same rationalizations… if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, isn’t the rational thing to just consider it a duck?
Feel free to have different words for white, purple and yellow ducks, but don’t thinks surface features will give you great predictive value beyond people considering yellow ducks lucky and purple ducks more yummy, even though there dosen’t seems to be any evidence of this.
You claim the distinction is very useful and that there is no gain to be had by thinking just about ducks in general most of the time, shouldn’t you be the one at least come up with some reasons why this is so? The only reason I can think of is that “religion” is formally protected against persecution with legislation. But I don’t let law affect my personal ethical judgement elsewhere to a great extent, why should it do so here?
But why do you think some people wouldn’t be changing their view on the laws if Nazism was perceived as a religion?
Following the insights of Max Stirner, I would go still further and claim that the difference is not between belief systems that involve metaphysical entities and those that don’t, but merely between different kinds of metaphysical entities. This means that the issue at hand is whether the antropomorphic quality of these entities is by itself such an important difference for the worse.
The really scary thing is that humans seem incapable of establishing a workable system of Schelling points that would be capable of serving as the basis for organized society, and which wouldn’t base its Schelling points on some kind of shared metaphysical fictions. An objective evaluation of different belief systems that are capable of filling this role would be a fascinating project. (Unfortunately, it would also be a project of immense difficulty, not just because of the sheer complexity of the problem, but also because all sorts of biases would interfere with it—not least since it would likely make the current reigning ideologies look quite bad in comparison on at least some important metrics.)
Do we have any real evidence that these people exist to a large degree and are at all common?
You’re too kind by far. A category which is cognitively economical but classes a few non-dangerous items into a largely dangerous category, or vice versa, can still be extremely useful. So a criticism which points to such an instance (Marxism) is weak. But a criticism which invents such an instance (Nazism a la Thor) is beyond weak. Categories prove their usefulness is the real world.
The problem is—to paraphrase pragmatist’s summary of the Hanson-Moldbug debate—Moldbug is thinking like a(n old-school analytic) philosopher. We need to think like social scientists on this one.
This seems reasonable on its face except for the implicit claim that Marxism isn’t dangerous. The history of the 20th century seems to indicate otherwise.
Huh? Did you miss the “or vice versa”?
Hmm. I think I did. Sorry about that.