I feel like you are not address OP’s main point. Yes, rationality is hard, but it’s hard for everyone. If for some reason LW community consisted primarily from Japanese females, I would feel a lot more out of place. I would still join, but it would be a wholly different experience. OP is suggesting we need to diversify LW group, particularly by recruiting older people.
OP is suggesting we need to diversify LW group, particularly by recruiting older people.
In that sense I completely agree with the OP. My concern is that religion and rationality are not interchangeable—rationality is not a religion substitute in the sense that the act of rational thought itself doesn’t give too many fuzzies. (At least, that’s how it looks to people on the outside.) To clarify further: my argument is that rationality itself, not rationalist communities, is lacking in emotional appeal. Because of this, you can’t always expect people looking for a belief system that will give their children comforting thoughts to pick rationality over religion.
My concern is that religion and rationality are not interchangeable
I agree, we should no more expect them to be interchangeable than we should expect a random building built for a random purpose to be interchangeable with a church optimized for a religion.
Exactly how far are we from interchangeability, though? A gas station isn’t at all like an office building, as random buildings go, but it’d be easier to remodel each to the other purpose than to remodel a termite mound or bird’s nest to accommodate human use.
How much can we learn from the models of religious organizations? It is hard to even know how much people are disagreeing about the answer to this question, because all answers resemble “some, but not too much”; I can’t sensibly give a measure such as “We should learn 74kg worth from them, and discard the rest.”
A gas station is more like an office building than it is like a bird’s nest… sure.
That said, if I want a gas station, I might still be better off starting with a plot of land that contains only a bird’s nest (which I can destroy or relocate before I start building my gas station) than with one that contains an office building.
That said, I’m all in favor of learning stuff about organizations from studying organizations, including (but not limited to) religious ones. But there’s a big difference between “learn stuff from studying X that I might use in constructing Y” and “model Y on X”.
And yet, I know plenty of people who seem to derive emotional satisfaction from thinking of themselves as rational, and from signaling their rationality to others.
I feel like you are not address OP’s main point. Yes, rationality is hard, but it’s hard for everyone. If for some reason LW community consisted primarily from Japanese females, I would feel a lot more out of place. I would still join, but it would be a wholly different experience. OP is suggesting we need to diversify LW group, particularly by recruiting older people.
In that sense I completely agree with the OP. My concern is that religion and rationality are not interchangeable—rationality is not a religion substitute in the sense that the act of rational thought itself doesn’t give too many fuzzies. (At least, that’s how it looks to people on the outside.) To clarify further: my argument is that rationality itself, not rationalist communities, is lacking in emotional appeal. Because of this, you can’t always expect people looking for a belief system that will give their children comforting thoughts to pick rationality over religion.
I agree, we should no more expect them to be interchangeable than we should expect a random building built for a random purpose to be interchangeable with a church optimized for a religion.
Exactly how far are we from interchangeability, though? A gas station isn’t at all like an office building, as random buildings go, but it’d be easier to remodel each to the other purpose than to remodel a termite mound or bird’s nest to accommodate human use.
How much can we learn from the models of religious organizations? It is hard to even know how much people are disagreeing about the answer to this question, because all answers resemble “some, but not too much”; I can’t sensibly give a measure such as “We should learn 74kg worth from them, and discard the rest.”
A gas station is more like an office building than it is like a bird’s nest… sure. That said, if I want a gas station, I might still be better off starting with a plot of land that contains only a bird’s nest (which I can destroy or relocate before I start building my gas station) than with one that contains an office building.
That said, I’m all in favor of learning stuff about organizations from studying organizations, including (but not limited to) religious ones. But there’s a big difference between “learn stuff from studying X that I might use in constructing Y” and “model Y on X”.
And yet, I know plenty of people who seem to derive emotional satisfaction from thinking of themselves as rational, and from signaling their rationality to others.
Agreed. I’m guilty of both.