Now I do admit that I speak here primarily from the perspective of someone who goes around trying to herd cats; and not from the other side as someone who spends most of their time withholding their energies in order to blackmail those damned morons already on the project. Perhaps I am a little prejudiced.
But it seems to me that a reasonable rule of thumb might be as follows:
If, on the whole, joining your efforts to a group project would still have a net positive effect according to your utility function—
(or a larger positive effect than any other marginal use to which you could otherwise put those resources, although this latter mode of thinking seems little-used and humanly-unrealistic, for reasons I may write about some other time)
—and the awful horrible annoying issue is not so important that you personally will get involved deeply enough to put in however many hours, weeks, or years may be required to get it fixed up—
—then the issue is not worth you withholding your energies from the project; either instinctively until you see that people are paying attention to you and respecting you, or by conscious intent to blackmail the group into getting it done.
And if the issue is worth that much to you . . . then by all means, join the group and do whatever it takes to get things fixed up.
Now, if the existing contributors refuse to let you do this, and a reasonable third party would be expected to conclude that you were competent enough to do it, and there is no one else whose ox is being gored thereby, then, perhaps, we have a problem on our hands. And it may be time for a little blackmail, if the resources you can conditionally commit are large enough to get their attention.
Is this rule a little extreme? Oh, maybe. There should be a motive for the decision-making mechanism of a project to be responsible to its supporters; unconditional support would create its own problems.
But usually . . . I observe that people underestimate the costs of what they ask for, or perhaps just act on instinct, and set their prices way way way too high. If the nonconformist crowd ever wants to get anything done together, we need to move in the direction of joining groups and staying there at least a little more easily. Even in the face of annoyances and imperfections! Even in the face of unresponsiveness to our own better ideas!
In the age of the Internet and in the company of nonconformists, it does get a little tiring reading the 451st public email from someone saying that the Common Project isn’t worth their resources until the website has a sans-serif font.
Of course this often isn’t really about fonts. It may be about laziness, akrasia, or hidden rejections. But in terms of group norms . . . in terms of what sort of public statements we respect, and which excuses we publicly scorn . . . we probably do want to encourage a group norm of:
If the issue isn’t worth your personally fixing by however much effort it takes, and it doesn’t arise from outright bad faith, it’s not worth refusing to contribute your efforts to a cause you deem worthwhile.
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320
Can Humanism Match Religion’s Output?
Perhaps the single largest voluntary institution of our modern world—bound together not by police and taxation, not by salaries and managers, but by voluntary donations flowing from its members—is the Catholic Church.
It’s too large to be held together by individual negotiations, like a group task in a hunter-gatherer band. But in a larger world with more people to be infected and faster transmission, we can expect more virulent memes. The Old Testament doesn’t talk about Hell, but the New Testament does. The Catholic Church is held together by affective death spirals—around the ideas, the institutions, and the leaders. By promises of eternal happiness and eternal damnation—theologians don’t really believe that stuff, but many ordinary Catholics do. By simple conformity of people meeting in person at a Church and being subjected to peer pressure. Et cetera.
We who have the temerity to call ourselves “rationalists” think ourselves too good for such communal bindings.
And so anyone with a simple and obvious charitable project—responding with food and shelter to a tidal wave in Thailand, say—would be better off by far pleading with the Pope to mobilize the Catholics, rather than with Richard Dawkins to mobilize the atheists.
For so long as this is true, any increase in atheism at the expense of Catholicism will be something of a hollow victory, regardless of all other benefits.
True, the Catholic Church also goes around opposing the use of condoms in AIDS-ravaged Africa. True, they waste huge amounts of the money they raise on all that religious stuff. Indulging in unclear thinking is not harmless; prayer comes with a price.
To refrain from doing damaging things is a true victory for a rationalist . . .
Unless it is your only victory, in which case it seems a little empty.
If you discount all harm done by the Catholic Church, and look only at the good . . . then does the average Catholic do more gross good than the average atheist, just by virtue of being more active?
Perhaps if you are wiser but less motivated, you can search out interventions of high efficiency and purchase utilons on the cheap . . . But there are few of us who really do that, as opposed to planning to do it someday.
Now you might at this point throw up your hands, saying: “For so long as we don’t have direct control over our brain’s motivational circuitry, it’s not realistic to expect a rationalist to be as strongly motivated as someone who genuinely believes that they’ll burn eternally in hell if they don’t obey.”
This is a fair point. Any folk theorem to the effect that a rational agent should do at least as well as a non-rational agent will rely on the assumption that the rational agent can always just implement whatever “irrational” policy is observed to win. But if you can’t choose to have unlimited mental energy, then it may be that some false beliefs are, in cold fact, more strongly motivating than any available true beliefs. And if we all generally suffer from altruistic akrasia, being unable to bring ourselves to help as much as we think we should, then it is possible for the God-fearing to win the contest of altruistic output.
But though it is a motivated continuation, let us consider this question a little further.
Even the fear of hell is not a perfect motivator. Human beings are not given so much slack on evolution’s leash; we can resist motivation for a short time, but then we run out of mental energy (hat tip: infotropism). Even believing that you’ll go to hell does not change this brute fact about brain circuitry. So the religious sin, and then are tormented by thoughts of going to hell, in much the same way that smokers reproach themselves for being unable to quit.
If a group of rationalists cared a lot about something . . . who says they wouldn’t be able to match the real, de-facto output of a believing Catholic? The stakes might not be “infinite” happiness or “eternal” damnation, but of course the brain can’t visualize 3 ↑↑↑ 3, let alone infinity. Who says that the actual quantity of caring neurotransmitters discharged by the brain (as ’twere) has to be so much less for “the growth and flowering of humankind” or even “tidal-wave-stricken Thais,” than for “eternal happiness in Heaven”? Anything involving more than 100 people is going to involve utilities too large to visualize. And there are all sorts of other standard biases at work here; knowing about them might be good for a bonus as well, one hopes?
Cognitive-behavioral therapy and Zen meditation are two mental disciplines experimentally shown to yield real improvements. It is not the area of the art I’ve focused on developing, but then I don’t have a real martial art of rationality in back of me. If you combine a purpose genuinely worth caring about with discipline extracted from CBT and Zen meditation, then who says rationalists can’t keep up? Or even more generally: if we have an evidence-based art of fighting akrasia, with experiments to see what actually works, then who says we’ve got to be less motivated than some disorganized mind that fears God’s wrath?
Still . . . that’s a further-future
speculation that it might be possible to develop an art that doesn’t presently exist. It’s not a technique I can use right now. I present it just to illustrate the idea of not giving up so fast on rationality: Understanding what’s going wrong, trying intelligently to fix it, and gathering evidence on whether it worked—this is a powerful idiom, not to be lightly dismissed upon sighting the first disadvantage.
Really, I suspect that what’s going on here has less to do with the motivating power of eternal damnation, and a lot more to do with the motivating power of physically meeting other people who share your cause. The power, in other words, of being physically present at church and having religious neighbors.
This is a problem for the rationalist community in its present stage of growth, because we are rare and geographically distributed way the hell all over the place. If all the readers of Less Wrong lived within a five-mile radius of each other, I bet we’d get a lot more done, not for reasons of coordination but just sheer motivation.
I’ll write later about some long-term, starry-eyed, idealistic thoughts on this particular problem. Shorter-term solutions that don’t rely on our increasing our numbers by a factor of 100 would be better. I wonder in particular whether the best modern videoconferencing software would provide some of the motivating effect of meeting someone in person; I suspect the answer is “no” but it might be worth trying.
Meanwhile . . . in the short term, we’re stuck fighting akrasia mostly without the reinforcing physical presense of other people who care. I want to say something like “This is difficult, but it can be done,” except I’m not sure that’s even true.
I suspect that the largest step rationalists could take toward matching the per-capita power output of the Catholic Church would be to have regular physical meetings of people contributing to the same task—just for purposes of motivation.
In the absence of that . . .
We could try for a group norm of being openly allowed—nay, applauded—for caring strongly about something. And a group norm of being expected to do something useful with your life—contribute your part to cleaning up this world. Religion doesn’t really emphasize the getting-things-done aspect as much.
And if rationalists could match just half the average altruistic effort output per Catholic, then I don’t think it’s remotely unrealistic to suppose that with better targeting on more efficient causes, the modal rationalist could get twice as much done.
How much of its earnings does the Catholic Church spend on all that useless religious stuff instead of actually helping people? More than 50%, I would venture. So then we could say—with a certain irony, though that’s not quite the spirit in which we should be doing things—that we should try to propagate a group norm of donating a minimum of 5% of income to real causes. (10% being the usual suggested minimum religious tithe.) And then there’s the art of picking causes for which expected utilons are orders of magnitude cheaper (for so long as the inefficient market in utilons lasts).
But long before we can begin to dream of any such boast, we secular humanists need to work on at least matching the per capita benevolent output of the worshippers.
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321
Church vs. Taskforce
I am generally suspicious of envying crazy groups or trying to blindly copycat the rhythm of religion—what I called “hymns to the nonexistence of God,” replying, “A good ‘atheistic hymn’ is simply a song about anything worth singing about that doesn’t happen to be religious.”
But religion does fill certain holes in people’s minds, some of which are even worth filling. If you eliminate religion, you have to be aware of what gaps are left behind.
If you suddenly deleted religion from the world, the largest gap left would not be anything of ideals or morals; it would be the church, the community. Among those who now stay religious without quite really believing in God—how many are just sticking to it from wanting to stay with their neighbors at the church, and their family and friends? How many would convert to atheism, if all those others deconverted, and that were the price of staying in the community and keeping its respect? I would guess . . . probably quite a lot.
In truth . . . this is probably something I don’t understand all that well, myself. “Brownies and babysitting” were the first two things that came to mind. Do churches lend helping hands in emergencies? Or just a shoulder to cry on? How strong is a church community? It probably depends on the church, and in any case, that’s not the correct question. One should start by considering what a hunter-gatherer band gives its people, and ask what’s missing in modern life—if a modern First World church fills only some of that, then by all means let us try to do better.
So without copycatting religion—without assuming that we must gather every Sunday morning in a building with stained-glass windows while the children dress up in formal clothes and listen to someone sing—let’s consider how to fill the emotional gap, after religion stops being an option.
To help break the mold to start with—the straitjacket of cached thoughts on how to do this sort of thing—consider that some modern offices may also fill the same role as a church. By which I mean that some people are fortunate to receive community from their workplaces: friendly coworkers who bake brownies for the office, whose teenagers can be safely hired for babysitting, and maybe even help in times of catastrophe . . . ? But certainly not everyone is lucky enough to find a community at the office.
Consider further—a church is ostensibly about worship, and a workplace is ostensibly about the commercial purpose of the organization. Neither has been carefully optimized to serve as a community.
Looking at a typical religious church, for example, you could suspect—although all of these things would be better tested experimentally, than just suspected—
That getting up early on a Sunday morning is not optimal;
That wearing formal clothes is not optimal, especially for children;
That listening to the same person give sermons on the same theme every week (“religion”) is not optimal;
That the cost of supporting a church and a pastor is expensive, compared to the number of different communities who could time-share the same building for their gatherings;
That they probably don’t serve nearly enough of a matchmaking purpose, because churches think they’re supposed to enforce their medieval moralities;
That the whole thing ought to be subject to experimental data-gathering to find out what works and what doesn’t.
By using the word “optimal” above, I mean “optimal under the criteria you would use if you were explicitly building a community qua community.” Spending lots of money on a fancy church with stained-glass windows and a full-time pastor makes sense if you actually want to spend money on religion qua religion.
I do confess that when walking past the churches of my city, my main thought is, “These buildings look really, really expensive, and there are too many of them.” If you were doing it over from scratch . . . then you might have a big building that could be used for the occasional wedding, but it would be time-shared for different communities meeting at different times on the weekend, and it would also have a nice large video display that could be used for speakers giving presentations, lecturers teaching something, or maybe even showing movies. Stained glass? Not so high a priority.
Or to the extent that the church membership lends a helping hand in times of trouble—could that be improved by an explicit rainy-day fund or contracting with an insurer, once you realized that this was an important function? Possibly not; dragging explicit finance into things changes their character oddly. Conversely, maybe keeping current on some insurance policies should be a requirement for membership, lest you rely too much on the community . . . But again, to the extent that churches provide community, they’re trying to do it without actually admitting that this is nearly all of what people get out of it. Same thing with the corporations whose workplaces are friendly enough to serve as communities; it’s s
till something of an accidental function.
Once you start thinking explicitly about how to give people a hunter-gatherer band to belong to, you can see all sorts of things that sound like good ideas. Should you welcome the newcomer in your midst? The pastor may give a sermon on that sometime, if you think church is about religion. But if you’re explicitly setting out to build community—then right after a move is when someone most lacks community, when they most need your help. It’s also an opportunity for the band to grow. If anything, tribes ought to be competing at quarterly exhibitions to capture newcomers.
But can you really have a community that’s just a community—that isn’t also an office or a religion? A community with no purpose beyond itself?
Maybe you can. After all, did hunter-gatherer tribes have any purposes beyond themselves?—well, there was survival and feeding yourselves, that was a purpose.
But anything that people have in common, especially any goal they have in common, tends to want to define a community. Why not take advantage of that?
Though in this age of the Internet, alas, too many binding factors have supporters too widely distributed to form a decent band—if you’re the only member of the Church of the Subgenius in your city, it may not really help much. It really is different without the physical presence; the Internet does not seem to be an acceptable substitute at the current stage of the technology.
So to skip right to the point—
Should the Earth last so long, I would like to see, as the form of rationalist communities, taskforces focused on all the work that needs doing to fix up this world. Communities in any geographic area would form around the most specific cluster that could support a decent-sized band. If your city doesn’t have enough people in it for you to find 50 fellow Linux programmers, you might have to settle for 15 fellow open-source programmers . . . or in the days when all of this is only getting started, 15 fellow rationalists trying to spruce up the Earth in their assorted ways.
Rationality- From AI to Zombies Page 152