So inasmuch as possible, we'll need real world meetings : humans are social beings, and it was customary to see, hear, touch, smell even, people who'd be in your group in the environment of adaptation. Do we have any rationalist bonfire in preparation ? Excursions ? Doing sport together ? Watching films ?
It's pretty difficult to bond as strongly - and more importantly, as richly - to other people if you don't meet them in real life. That bond is what makes us work together so well, what can oil a well working machine. Families, groups of - real life - friends, are not uncommonly the starting point for successful ventures.
And I think it's not just the meeting in real life part. We need to build up a link, to feel the presence of the other, as another human being, as we would a friend. We need to share activities outside of just meeting an planning stuff.
We need to get to know and like each other on that fundamental level, by using the goddamn social machinery that's in our head. We're human beings before being rationalists, and we need to use that to our advantage, down to the last bit of it, rather than constantly forgetting about that fact. We run on corrupt hardware, we aren't r...
Like, non religious monasteries where people would study, work together, live together ? The closest thing I can think of is the academia, but the academia doesn't seem like what I have on my mind.
Maybe Eliezer needs to start that Bayesian conspiracy for real, eh?
And I do care strongly about victims of torture and war. I care about those trapped in dead-end countries or existences, who can't move to seek a better life. I care about the future of myself and the rest of humanity.
Corny to say it, but it's true.
The reason Catholics are better organized than humanists is that they're official, communal, and hierarchical and we're not. The reason cults are better organized than Catholics is that they're even more official, communal, and hierarchical.
If the Pope says "Donate ten percent of your money to me," then there's an expectation that ordinary Catholics will obey. They've committed to following what the Pope says.
If you, Eliezer, posted on this forum "Please donate ten percent of your money to the Institute That Must Not Be Named", well...actually, I don't know what would happen. A few rare people might do it to signal that we liked you. But although we often follow you, we are not your followers. We haven't made a committment to you. We associate with you as long as it's convenient for us, but as soon as it stops being convenient, we'll wander off.
If you really want to get an infrastructure as powerful as the Catholic Church, you need to ask us to officially swear loyalty to you and start publically self-identifying as Rationalists with a capital R (the capital letter is very important!) You need to put us through some painful initiation ritual, so we feel a commit...
That's the way they do it. I'm asking if there's a different way to do it.
Point A: A lot of rationalists think wistfully that it would be a good thing if X got done.
Point B: X gets done.
How do you get from Point A to Point B?
No, I'm not saying they thrive by bias, exactly, or at least not the simple kind of bias. They thrive by having a hierarchy and being official. They thrive because they've made a commitment.
Consider marriage. In an ideal world, two people would stay monogamous purely because they loved each other. In reality, that monogamy is going to be tested, and there's going to be some point at which they don't want to keep it. When they're rational, they know the best thing for their future and their children is to stay together, but they realize that they might be too short-sighted to do so later. So they use the institution of marriage to make it socially, financially, and theologically impossible for them to split up later. It's the present self binding potentially irrational future selves. Not only is it not a bias, but if it's done right it's an antidote to bias.
There's that one website, whatsitsname, where you send them money and a resolution. Maybe it's "I will go to the gym every day for a month", and you send them $100. At the end of the month, if you went to the gym every day, they send your money back; if you didn't, they keep it. I wouldn't say you were biased into going...
We should not underestimate the power of rational thinking for getting the most out of each charity dollar (or unit of effort). Maybe you've heard of charities that give people's old clothes to poor parts of Africa; while this makes people feel good, it has flooded the markets with dirt-cheap clothing, destroying the local textile industry and contributing to the very poverty that the well-meaning donors seek to alleviate.
This is what impresses me about groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: they focus on things that are less glamorous but probably more useful, like providing basic financial services in poor areas, or doing R&D on how to make good public health cheaper. This is the kind of thing that can make a difference in the long term, and lead to exponentially growing ripple effects. Charity can be a lot more effective if you spend your resources with your head, not your heart.
On Kiva the group that has donated the most money is the "Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious" group.
I don't want to become a "cleaning up this world"-bot. I have my own goals and aims in life, and they are distinct from the goal of "producing as much positive utility for humanity" as possible. I'd rather spend £99 out of every £100 on myself than give it to a random poor person in the third world, because I am more important than s/he is (more important in the subjective, antirealist sense). If anyone here really is a totally dedicated altruist, (in the sense of weighing the welfare of the other 6*10^9 people on the planet equally to your own) then I pity you, but I'm glad you exist.
In general, this problem is not soluble, i.e. you can't get a pound worth of altruism from a penny worth of desire to help strangers, at least without the kind of mind-control strategies that religion employs. But we've already decided we don't want to do that.
However, in the special case of accelerating technology and the singularity, the problem is soluble, because even 1% of the optimizing ability of an FAI is enough to lift the third world from poverty to paradise.
Apologies for going off topic - but I couldn't really avoid it...
Perhaps part of the reason rationalists can't be "aimed" at certain charities even by our self-chosen objects of admiration is that we consider their instructions overrideable without moral cost. If Random Catholic X believes that the Pope delivers the infallible will of God, then anything Random Catholic X does that disobeys the Pope - regardless of his specific situation, assuming the Pope doesn't explicitly exclude people in that situation - is wrong. It's not necessarily that Random Catholic X is thinking occurently about the possibility th...
I apologize for the criticism, and I agree with a lot of what you're saying.
However, I want to point out that donating money (and therefore, asking for money) is a somewhat dangerous habit to get into, because it is so very, very fungible (the very essence of fungibleness). I think this is why people sometimes do canned-food drives - even with the weird inefficiencies of collecting and sending canned food instead of money, there's more trust that the money isn't being quietly (or accidentally) diverted into "self-sustaining" efforts - like asking for more money.
In your rhetoric, could you please use more variety - not just money, but also other goods like volunteering time, or a mix of time and money?
Eliezer wrote, "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."
I think this observation strikes very close to the heart of the matter. People will tell you they attend Catholic mass, for example, for any number of reasons, most of which are probably not available to introspection, but which actually relate to our functioning as social animals. People are motivated to meet other peop...
The Mormon Church has much higher compliance rates on tithing and gets a lot more out of its followers than Catholicism. They have Church-only welfare systems and other practical benefits conditional on membership, require spouses and family to turn their backs on those who leave, censor/forbid 'dangerous' information, have followers go on long missionary trips to make belief more of their identity, etc.
In general, I don't think you should view tithing in the face of strong Dark Side techniques as really voluntary charitable giving: people give more becaus...
On the Wiki page for Ego Depletion linked above, there's an interesting aside. A "positive mood stimulus" like an unexpected gift or a comedy movie clip seems to be able to restore people's depleted self control reserves.
One short-term solution I can see helping with this problem is to have rationalists cluster closer together. This already happens indirectly, when geographic locations are occupied by organizations and cultures that attract or require people with a higher-than-average rate of rationalism. We could encourage this on different scales, clustering in cities, regions, or even in neighborhoods and houses. My housemates and I are already doing this. We collect the more interesting, motivated, insightful people we meet, mostly from the university, and integrate th...
As to meeting - one thing the various religious meetings aren't, is one big argument. If you're going to have rationalists meet to develop a community, there ought to be a driving purpose, something to achieve with the time besides disagree with each other. Perhaps a "virtual dojo"? Someone has to start building the "martial art", it isn't going to invent itself.
If you're going to do that, though, charge money. You said it yourself elsewhere: if you aren't prepared to pay for it, you don't care.
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.
I am almost certain the answer is "at least a little bit".
More generally, I know that Aumann's Agreement Theorem means that it should be possible for a group of self-described rationalists to agree on what they should do next, but in practice I think that any choice of subgoal would reduce the number of rationalists who would want ...
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.
Agreed. As I've discussed on OB, I spent an hour a week of my first 18 years in a Catholic church, and this rings very true. When I think back to the social exchanges between the clergy, I'm struck by how comfortable they [ahem, we] all strove to make one another. All the usual ins-and-outs and cliquey elements of any close-knit group were presen...
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.
How about trying to use Croquet (or some other 3D collaborative environment, with voice chat)?
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.
It probably would a little bit, but it would be such a hassle to set up that only a small fraction of people would do it.
A smaller but easier step in the same direction would be to use real names and real photos on this site.
As for solutions to akrasia, pjeby may have some, you have mentioned meditation, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and other posters mentioned yoga and (some) drugs. Something in there ought to give interesting results.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy and Zen meditation are two mental disciplines experimentally shown to yield real improvements.
Does anyone have a link or citation to actual research that supports this claim? It sounds plausible, I just want to check and see exactly how strong the evidence is before investing dozens of hours and/or a few thousand bucks.
Various themes in the culture of Catholicism make it easier to be charitable because they help Catholics avoid the rational arguments that would discourage them.
The most difficult hurdle to giving to a charity is determining if the charitable gift is worthwhile. Will the gift do enough good? Is the charity deserving? Are you just enabling poor people to stay poor? Catholicism by-passes all of these rational arguments with irrational beliefs*. These beliefs may not be universally held, but I believe they are part of the culture:
(1) Sacrifice is a good thing...
You wrote "True, the Catholic Church also goes around opposing the use of condoms in AIDS-ravaged Africa. "
This might be the right rationalist position:
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2009/03/18/a-dead-debate/
"That aside, the good news for the Catholic Church’s supporters is that–even if, inevitably, the Pope’s counterintuitive suggestion enraged the liberal establishment–many editorialists now accept at least part of the Catholic position that the best solution to AIDS in Africa is fundamental behavior change, rather than condoms."
Passing...
Having just read this post for the first time has made me so happy!
Let me explain: Eliezer doesn't sound optimistic at all in this essay, especially compared to the gung-ho "we got this!" spirit of almost every other call to action post. And here I am, someone who's so new to LW I only just got to this post, and yet in the last year I have:
I don't have time to construct a full response, but I would like to hit a couple of points.
Catholics vs. rationalists: An analog seems to be large institutional investors (market makers) vs. small or independent investors. Clearly both kinds of market players (the very big vs. the small) play important roles, but the market makers, well, they have the ability to move the market in different directions because of the strength of their market position. "Following" the market makers is often viewed as a safe bet (i.e. a cheap risk computation) for...
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).
I can see both the irony and benefit of promoting a group norm of tithing however that sort of social engineering is just not...
Businesses have team building events which, for all the mockery they generate, seem to work.
Is there a case to organise rationalist paintball or games nights? Maybe during conferences or major gatherings.
1)"purposes of of motivation" is a typo, I presume.
2)Don't use abbreviation CBT. It brings BDSM readings, and it is not even THAT unreasonable to read the idea that males will be more motivated if threatened (or offered pleasure, for certain types) with CBT. ;)
The Catholic Church isn't quite as bright and shiny as it used to be. If it's losing ground in Ireland, this is remarkable.
Your link doesn't prove anything about what Catholic theologians believe.
I'm not sure that Catholics actually tithe, even though they're supposed to. Does anyone have information?
More generally, trying to build irrational loyalty may have non-obvious costs.
As for rational loyalty, a while ago, I went to a workshop hosted by Unitarians about the people's long term relationship with their religion. The thing that struck me was the amoun...
Interesting article, and one of the few I've seen that has bothered with this idea. One of the big problems (as noted elsewhere) is that there is precious little that holds secular humanists together in a coherent, close knit society like religion does. In fact, that's probably why the vast majority of the planet's population professes faith in God/holy book/enlightened savior. I have never considered it likely that the average Catholic, for instance, really believes in the doctrone of transubstantiation. What is so obviously not a miracle (bread remai...
Your article is based on the premise that it is important for us to help complete strangers who don't mean anything to us. That sacrifice is a constant of righteousness regardless of a person's beliefs or lack thereof.
From an objective viewpoint, sacrifice is wrong. Why should we have to give value in return for lesser value, or no value at all? We should help people because they have value to us, not because they are unable to be valuable at all.
"The man with guilt is the man who will do whatever you tell him to." The reason religious people do ...
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.
Agreed. As I've discussed on OB, I spent an hour a week of my first 18 years in a Catholic church, and this rings very true. When I think back to the social exchanges between the clergy, I'm struck by how comfortable they [ahem, we] all strove to make one another. All the usual ins-and-outs and cliquey elements of any close-knit group were presen...
I don't agree with anything about your post, from assumptions to conclusions.
I'd say it's highly irrational money to give to any charitable cause. As far as I can tell most charities have laudable goals and don't even keep track record of meeting them. The best they can tell is that they actually spent some high percent of their money taken on some efforts vaguely related to the goal, not on the most cost effective means of meeting their goals. That's assuming we know what goals to donate to, what's not really true.
Well, I know for sure that an extremely e...
The catholics like most other religious/political/humanitarian organizations tend to agree among themselves about the causes they care about. Can you make rationalists to agree on what projects are most deserving of their money and effort (aside from preaching their own views)?
I've been part of an attempt at a virtual meetup using skype, it did seem a fair bit more involving than text chat so it might indeed be a workable path. We certainly had great fun and will do it again.
"then we run out of mental energy"
No. This is bullshit. There is no(t sufficient) good evidence of ego depletion.
Nonsense is generally easier to generate than sense.
Humanism, while fairly nonsensical itself, makes more sense than most world religions. Thus, any measurable 'output' of Humanism is likely to be less than that of any other religion you might choose.
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. &c.
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 (HT: 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 this blog lived within a 5-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 post tomorrow 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—not for purposes of coordination, just for purposes of 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.