I appreciate the perspective. Personally I don’t really see the point of a secular solstice. But frankly, the hostility to religion is a feature of the rationalist community, not a bug.
Rejection of faith is a defining feature of the community and an unofficial litmus test for full membership. The community has a carefully cultivated culture that makes it a kind of sanctuary from the rest of the world where rationalists can exchange ideas without reestablishing foundational concepts and repeating familiar arguments (along with many other advantages). The examples you point to do not demonstrate hostility towards religious people, they demonstrate hostility towards religion. This is as appropriate here as hostility towards factory farming is at a vegan group.
Organizations (corporate, social, biological) are all defined by their boundaries. Christianity seems to be unusually open to everyone, but I think this is partially a side effect of evangelism. It makes sense to open your boundaries to the other when you are trying to eat it. Judaism in contrast carefully enforces the boundaries of its spaces.
Lesswrong hates religion in the way that lipids hate water. We want it on the outside. I don’t know about other rationalists, but I don’t have a particular desire to seek it out and destroy it everywhere it exists (and I certainly wish no harm to religious people). I agree with you that too much hostility is harmful; but I don’t agree that good organizations must always welcome the other.
The community has a carefully cultivated culture that makes it a kind of sanctuary from the rest of the world where rationalists can exchange ideas without reestablishing foundational concepts and repeating familiar arguments (along with many other advantages).
and this bit
The examples you point to do not demonstrate hostility towards religious people, they demonstrate hostility towards religion. This is as appropriate here as hostility towards factory farming is at a vegan group. [...] Lesswrong hates religion in the way that lipids hate water.
are I think conflating rejection of religion and hostility to religion. There are plenty of contexts where it’s expected for people to follow one set of norms rather than another: if I want to publish in a physics journal, it’s expected that I follow the established research conventions and concepts of physics rather than, say, philosophy. And vice versa. Each field rejects the norms of the other—but this can be done without papers published in either field having random barbs against the other field.
One can reject religion without hostility to it, just as physics rejects the norms of philosophy without being hostile to it.
I’m also skeptical of the claim that the examples demonstrate hostility toward religion rather than religious people—tribal instincts are tribal instincts, and do not make such fine-grained distinctions. The “Brighter Than Today” bit is a pretty clear example: the people who want to silence the Prometheus are religious. As the OP points out, there’s no strong reason to expect prehistoric religions to act that way. (E.g. what we know of ancient religions is that they were mostly practical with doctrine derived from what worked, instead of practice being derived from doctrine.) So what’s that line doing in the song? Well, there’s a pretty obvious line of reasoning that would have created it: a thought along the lines of “well religious people are nasty and conservative, so probably they would also have opposed the invention of fire...”.
Even if that wasn’t the original generator, it’s still implicitly spreading that kind of message. I think that’s generally bad, because tribal instincts worsen people’s reasoning, so anything that feeds into them (including subtle barbs at outgroups) would generally be better off avoided.
I also somewhat disagree with this bit:
Lesswrong hates religion in the way that lipids hate water.
I’d say this is roughly accurate for religions that require belief in things without evidence. There’s a range of religions that don’t require that, I think including some mysticism/practice-based (rather than belief-based) versions of Christianity that make no strong claims about what God is, and allow for God to be interpreted in an abstract/metaphorical way while being based on evidence of the form “if you do these practices, you are likely to experience these kinds of effects”.
The distinctions you’re pointing out are subtle enough that it may be better to ask people instead of trying to infer their beliefs from such a noisy signal. I reject painting religious people as uniformly or even typically villainous, but it is probably fine to share a common frustration with some religions and religious institutions shutting down new ideas. I was not at secular solstice so I can’t say for sure which better describes it, but based on the examples given the former seems at least as accurate.
There’s another reason for openness that I should have made clearer. Hostility towards Others is epistemically and ethically corrosive. It makes it easier to dismiss people who do agree with you, but have different cultural markers. If a major thing that unifies the community is hostility to an outgroup, then it weakens the guardrails against actions based on hate or spite. If you hope to have compassion for all conscious creatures, then a good first step is to try to have compassion for the people close to you who are really annoying.
Christianity seems to be unusually open to everyone, but I think this is partially a side effect of evangelism.
I endorse evangelism broadly. If you think that your beliefs are true and good, then you should be trying to share them with more people. I don’t think that this openness should be unusual, because I’d hope that most ideologies act in a similar way.
Hostility towards Others may be epistemically and ethically corrosive, but the kind of hostility I have discussed is also sometimes necessary. For instance, militaristic jingoism is bad, and I am hostile to it. I am also wary of militaristic jingoists, because they can be dangerous (this is an intentionally extreme example; typical religions are less dangerous).
There is a difference between evangelizing community membership and evangelizing an ideology or set of beliefs.
Usually, a valuable community should only welcome members insofar as it can still maintain its identity and reason for existing. Some communities, such as elite universities, should and do have strict barriers for entry (though the specifics are not always ideal). The culture of lesswrong would probably be erased (that is, retreat to other venues) if lesswrong were mainstreamed and successfully invaded by the rest of the internet.
I generally agree that (most) true beliefs should be shared. Ideologies however are sometimes useful to certain people in certain contexts and not to other people in other contexts. Also, evangelism is costly, and it’s easy to overestimate the value of your ideology to others.
Usually, a valuable community should only welcome members insofar as it can still maintain its identity and reason for existing. Some communities, such as elite universities, should and do have strict barriers for entry (though the specifics are not always ideal). The culture of lesswrong would probably be erased (that is, retreat to other venues) if lesswrong were mainstreamed and successfully invaded by the rest of the internet.
Yes, but none of this require overt hostility to religion (as opposed to just rejection). I think that as long as religious people accept the conversational norms and culture on LW, them bringing in some new perspectives (that are still compatible with overall LW norms) ought to be welcome.
Many traits tend to be correlated for reasons of personality rather than strict logic. So if you select for people on atheism then you may also select for certain ways of thinking, and there can be ways of thinking that are just as rational, but underrepresented among atheists. Selecting against those ways of thinking can make the intellectual community more impoverished.
Take the author of this post. He has openly said that he’s religious; he has also written four posts with 70+ karma, including one that as of this writing has 259 karma and a Curated status, so LW seems to consider him a positive influence. (Not all of his posts have gotten a lot of karma, but then so neither have all of mine.) I don’t think it would have been a good thing if LW’s hostility to religion had driven him away so that he would never have participated.
Yes, but none of this require overt hostility to religion (as opposed to just rejection). I think that as long as religious people accept the conversational norms and culture on LW, them bringing in some new perspectives (that are still compatible with overall LW norms) ought to be welcome.
I think I agree with not going out of one’s way to be rude, I generally think politeness is worthwhile (and have worked to become more polite myself in recent years).[1]
I also welcome people who adhere to any religion sharing insights that they have about the world here on LessWrong.
At the same time, I am ‘hostile’ to religions — or at least, I am ‘hostile’ to any religion that claims to have infallible leaders who receive the truth directly from God(s), or that have texts about history and science and ethics that are unalterable, where adherents to the religion are not allowed to disagree with them.
I am ‘hostile’ in the sense that if (prior to me working on LessWrong) a group of devout Hindus were becoming moderators of LessWrong (and were intending to follow their ethical inside views in shaping the culture of the site) I would’ve taken active action to prevent them having that power (e.g. publicly written arguments against this decision, moved to collect signatures against this decision, etc). I also think that if I were hypothetically freely given the opportunity to lower the hard power that religion has in some ecosystem I cared about, such as removing a Catholic priest from having control over an existential risk grant-making institution, I would be willing to go out of my way to do so, and think that this was good.
Perhaps a better term is to say that I ‘oppose’ religions with (IMO) inherently corrupt epistemologies, and do not want them to have power over me or the things that I care about.
Apart from that, there are many interesting individuals who adhere to religions who have valuable insight into how the world works, and I’m grateful to them when they share such insights openly, especially here on LessWrong.
I want to mention that I don’t wish to entirely police other people’s hostility. I was not raised in a religious household, but I’ve met many who were and who were greatly hurt due to the religious practices and culture of their family and local community and I do not begrudge them their instinctive hostility to it when it appears in their environment.
You have pointed out some important tradeoffs. Many of my closest friends and intellectual influences outside of lesswrong are religious, and often have interesting perspectives and ideas (though I can’t speak to whether this is because of their religions, caused by a common latent variable, or something else). However, I do not think that the purpose of lesswrong is served by engaging with religious ideology here, and I think that avoiding this is probably worth the cost of losing some valuable perspectives.
As you’ve said, @Jeffrey Heninger does participate in the lesswrong community, at its current level of hostility towards religion. I have read some of his other posts in the past and found them enjoyable and valuable, though I think I am roughly indifferent to this one being published. Why does this suggest to you that the community needs to be less hostile to religion, instead of more or roughly the same amount? Presumably if it were less hostile towards religion, there would be more than the current level of religious discussion—do you think that would be better on the margin? I would also expect an influx of religious people below Jeffrey’s level, not above it.
I’m open to starting a dialogue if you want to discuss this further.
However, I do not think that the purpose of lesswrong is served by engaging with religious ideology here,
I didn’t say we should engage with it! I was still speaking within the context of barbs at religion at the Solstice. I agree we should continue to reject (epistemically unsound versions of) religion, just not also be needlessly hostile to it in contexts where it could be avoided with some small tweaks and without compromising on any principles.
Why does this suggest to you that the community needs to be less hostile to religion, instead of more or roughly the same amount?
Usually if a group signals hostility to X and some X-people are thick-skinned enough to participate anyway, there’ll be a much greater number of X-people who are less thick-skinned and decide to stay out. Even if the X-people could make good contributions, as they empirically can.
And if their contributions are bad, they’ll just be downvoted on their own (lack of) merits, the same as any other bad post.
I appreciate the perspective. Personally I don’t really see the point of a secular solstice. But frankly, the hostility to religion is a feature of the rationalist community, not a bug.
Rejection of faith is a defining feature of the community and an unofficial litmus test for full membership. The community has a carefully cultivated culture that makes it a kind of sanctuary from the rest of the world where rationalists can exchange ideas without reestablishing foundational concepts and repeating familiar arguments (along with many other advantages). The examples you point to do not demonstrate hostility towards religious people, they demonstrate hostility towards religion. This is as appropriate here as hostility towards factory farming is at a vegan group.
Organizations (corporate, social, biological) are all defined by their boundaries. Christianity seems to be unusually open to everyone, but I think this is partially a side effect of evangelism. It makes sense to open your boundaries to the other when you are trying to eat it. Judaism in contrast carefully enforces the boundaries of its spaces.
Lesswrong hates religion in the way that lipids hate water. We want it on the outside. I don’t know about other rationalists, but I don’t have a particular desire to seek it out and destroy it everywhere it exists (and I certainly wish no harm to religious people). I agree with you that too much hostility is harmful; but I don’t agree that good organizations must always welcome the other.
This bit
and this bit
are I think conflating rejection of religion and hostility to religion. There are plenty of contexts where it’s expected for people to follow one set of norms rather than another: if I want to publish in a physics journal, it’s expected that I follow the established research conventions and concepts of physics rather than, say, philosophy. And vice versa. Each field rejects the norms of the other—but this can be done without papers published in either field having random barbs against the other field.
One can reject religion without hostility to it, just as physics rejects the norms of philosophy without being hostile to it.
I’m also skeptical of the claim that the examples demonstrate hostility toward religion rather than religious people—tribal instincts are tribal instincts, and do not make such fine-grained distinctions. The “Brighter Than Today” bit is a pretty clear example: the people who want to silence the Prometheus are religious. As the OP points out, there’s no strong reason to expect prehistoric religions to act that way. (E.g. what we know of ancient religions is that they were mostly practical with doctrine derived from what worked, instead of practice being derived from doctrine.) So what’s that line doing in the song? Well, there’s a pretty obvious line of reasoning that would have created it: a thought along the lines of “well religious people are nasty and conservative, so probably they would also have opposed the invention of fire...”.
Even if that wasn’t the original generator, it’s still implicitly spreading that kind of message. I think that’s generally bad, because tribal instincts worsen people’s reasoning, so anything that feeds into them (including subtle barbs at outgroups) would generally be better off avoided.
I also somewhat disagree with this bit:
I’d say this is roughly accurate for religions that require belief in things without evidence. There’s a range of religions that don’t require that, I think including some mysticism/practice-based (rather than belief-based) versions of Christianity that make no strong claims about what God is, and allow for God to be interpreted in an abstract/metaphorical way while being based on evidence of the form “if you do these practices, you are likely to experience these kinds of effects”.
The distinctions you’re pointing out are subtle enough that it may be better to ask people instead of trying to infer their beliefs from such a noisy signal. I reject painting religious people as uniformly or even typically villainous, but it is probably fine to share a common frustration with some religions and religious institutions shutting down new ideas. I was not at secular solstice so I can’t say for sure which better describes it, but based on the examples given the former seems at least as accurate.
There’s another reason for openness that I should have made clearer. Hostility towards Others is epistemically and ethically corrosive. It makes it easier to dismiss people who do agree with you, but have different cultural markers. If a major thing that unifies the community is hostility to an outgroup, then it weakens the guardrails against actions based on hate or spite. If you hope to have compassion for all conscious creatures, then a good first step is to try to have compassion for the people close to you who are really annoying.
I endorse evangelism broadly. If you think that your beliefs are true and good, then you should be trying to share them with more people. I don’t think that this openness should be unusual, because I’d hope that most ideologies act in a similar way.
Hostility towards Others may be epistemically and ethically corrosive, but the kind of hostility I have discussed is also sometimes necessary. For instance, militaristic jingoism is bad, and I am hostile to it. I am also wary of militaristic jingoists, because they can be dangerous (this is an intentionally extreme example; typical religions are less dangerous).
There is a difference between evangelizing community membership and evangelizing an ideology or set of beliefs.
Usually, a valuable community should only welcome members insofar as it can still maintain its identity and reason for existing. Some communities, such as elite universities, should and do have strict barriers for entry (though the specifics are not always ideal). The culture of lesswrong would probably be erased (that is, retreat to other venues) if lesswrong were mainstreamed and successfully invaded by the rest of the internet.
I generally agree that (most) true beliefs should be shared. Ideologies however are sometimes useful to certain people in certain contexts and not to other people in other contexts. Also, evangelism is costly, and it’s easy to overestimate the value of your ideology to others.
Yes, but none of this require overt hostility to religion (as opposed to just rejection). I think that as long as religious people accept the conversational norms and culture on LW, them bringing in some new perspectives (that are still compatible with overall LW norms) ought to be welcome.
Many traits tend to be correlated for reasons of personality rather than strict logic. So if you select for people on atheism then you may also select for certain ways of thinking, and there can be ways of thinking that are just as rational, but underrepresented among atheists. Selecting against those ways of thinking can make the intellectual community more impoverished.
Take the author of this post. He has openly said that he’s religious; he has also written four posts with 70+ karma, including one that as of this writing has 259 karma and a Curated status, so LW seems to consider him a positive influence. (Not all of his posts have gotten a lot of karma, but then so neither have all of mine.) I don’t think it would have been a good thing if LW’s hostility to religion had driven him away so that he would never have participated.
I think I agree with not going out of one’s way to be rude, I generally think politeness is worthwhile (and have worked to become more polite myself in recent years).[1]
I also welcome people who adhere to any religion sharing insights that they have about the world here on LessWrong.
At the same time, I am ‘hostile’ to religions — or at least, I am ‘hostile’ to any religion that claims to have infallible leaders who receive the truth directly from God(s), or that have texts about history and science and ethics that are unalterable, where adherents to the religion are not allowed to disagree with them.
I am ‘hostile’ in the sense that if (prior to me working on LessWrong) a group of devout Hindus were becoming moderators of LessWrong (and were intending to follow their ethical inside views in shaping the culture of the site) I would’ve taken active action to prevent them having that power (e.g. publicly written arguments against this decision, moved to collect signatures against this decision, etc). I also think that if I were hypothetically freely given the opportunity to lower the hard power that religion has in some ecosystem I cared about, such as removing a Catholic priest from having control over an existential risk grant-making institution, I would be willing to go out of my way to do so, and think that this was good.
Perhaps a better term is to say that I ‘oppose’ religions with (IMO) inherently corrupt epistemologies, and do not want them to have power over me or the things that I care about.
Apart from that, there are many interesting individuals who adhere to religions who have valuable insight into how the world works, and I’m grateful to them when they share such insights openly, especially here on LessWrong.
I want to mention that I don’t wish to entirely police other people’s hostility. I was not raised in a religious household, but I’ve met many who were and who were greatly hurt due to the religious practices and culture of their family and local community and I do not begrudge them their instinctive hostility to it when it appears in their environment.
You have pointed out some important tradeoffs. Many of my closest friends and intellectual influences outside of lesswrong are religious, and often have interesting perspectives and ideas (though I can’t speak to whether this is because of their religions, caused by a common latent variable, or something else). However, I do not think that the purpose of lesswrong is served by engaging with religious ideology here, and I think that avoiding this is probably worth the cost of losing some valuable perspectives.
As you’ve said, @Jeffrey Heninger does participate in the lesswrong community, at its current level of hostility towards religion. I have read some of his other posts in the past and found them enjoyable and valuable, though I think I am roughly indifferent to this one being published. Why does this suggest to you that the community needs to be less hostile to religion, instead of more or roughly the same amount? Presumably if it were less hostile towards religion, there would be more than the current level of religious discussion—do you think that would be better on the margin? I would also expect an influx of religious people below Jeffrey’s level, not above it.
I’m open to starting a dialogue if you want to discuss this further.
I didn’t say we should engage with it! I was still speaking within the context of barbs at religion at the Solstice. I agree we should continue to reject (epistemically unsound versions of) religion, just not also be needlessly hostile to it in contexts where it could be avoided with some small tweaks and without compromising on any principles.
Usually if a group signals hostility to X and some X-people are thick-skinned enough to participate anyway, there’ll be a much greater number of X-people who are less thick-skinned and decide to stay out. Even if the X-people could make good contributions, as they empirically can.
And if their contributions are bad, they’ll just be downvoted on their own (lack of) merits, the same as any other bad post.