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.

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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... (read more)

9SoullessAutomaton
Maybe Eliezer needs to start that Bayesian conspiracy for real, eh?
4TheOtherDave
My suggestion would be to come together to do something, something that is in and of itself valuable, and allow the community rituals and the social bonding to form around that, rather than to come together with the goal of togetherness. The latter has a way of disappearing into its own navel.
0Armok_GoB
the "feasts, celebrations, rituals" thing is a rather good point. Discusing a text (usualy a post from the sequences) each meetup seems to be somehting common enough that it may develop into somehting ritual like, but otherwise it's an area of deficiency.
0MicahMcC
I agree with much of what you posted here. I'm not sure rituals would be a good idea, but a rationalist's version of Christmas would be nice. And of course, meeting in person, perhaps even hosting talks by various speakers from the local area and beyond might be of use too. That would require a more coherent definition of secular humanism than seems to be in vogue with the masses at large at present, though. I imagine something similar to the Singularitarian movement envisioned by Ray Kurzweil.
8[anonymous]
What's so irrational about just celebrating Christmas?
0Desrtopa
My family has always celebrated Christmas and Hannukah. My father comes from a Christian family (although I've never even known him to talk about religion) and my mother is a non-practicing Jew. They don't regard it as their duty to observe the religious celebrations, they just take the excuse.
3NancyLebovitz
It would be possible to do ornaments based on Newton's work-- planets and prisms and rainbows.

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... (read more)

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?

5pjeby
Step 1. Some one person decides they will do whatever it takes to ensure that X will be done (including convincing others to assist). Step 2. ??? Step 3. Profit! ...uh, utility. ;-)
2isle9
I know that I'm very very very late to this, but has something like this ever been tried?
0Viliam_Bur
I think an important part would be separating the "decision phase" from the "action phase". In the decision phase, it is OK to speak whether it is a good idea or not, and even if it seems like a good idea, whether you expect yourself to do it or not. If almost everyone agrees that it is a good idea, and if enough people declare they would do it, the community consensus is published and we move to the action phase. In the action phase, the decision is already made. People are encouraged to report "yes, I did it" and receive some special "action karma". Action karma would be a system for immaterial rewards to LW members. It is only possible to achieve action karma by doing things that have reached community consensus. Action karma is remembered forever. The essence of my proposal is that we should have some "action karma", and the only way to reach it would be to do clearly defined goals. The goals must be declared as important, desirable and realistic by rationalist community by some mechanism that makes a yes-or-no decision.
9Paul Crowley
Yes, we know that churches and cults thrive by exploiting well-understood cognitive biases, but you're sort of sidestepping the central thrust of what EY is getting at in this, which AFAICT is simply: Isn't there some way we could make use of the power of collective action because it's actually a good idea, rather than relying on cognitive bias to cohere us? Rather than hanging onto the biases that bring us together, couldn't we get there by fighting the biases that keep us apart?

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... (read more)

6Paul Crowley
I think using bias to fight bias is an extremely risky technique, since it must surely call for self-deception on some level. I'm not a fan of marriage or monogamy either so those examples don't ring bells for me.
2cousin_it
Yvain, what's the website? I'm not skilled enough to find it from those clues. Asking because I outlined the exact same idea in a blog post in Russian about a year ago, thinking it was original, and now am curious to see the implementation.
6Scott Alexander
Hmm...got it bookmarked somewhere...ah! http://www.stickk.com/
1byrnema
I like your points about what makes an organization have influence over its members, and I think you are spot-on about the different ways that are effective in creating group cohesion. However, I don't think that Catholic charity is so much mandated by the church as a rule or even an expected behavior as it is a product of the culture. When Catholics give to charity, it feels like an individual and optional choice. Whereas going to church and not using birth control may feel more like following the rules. I think there is a difference between behaviors that are done to identify with a group verses behaviors that done because you identify with that group.. The analogy would be rationalists doing something rational not because they're told to, but because they believe in rationality. That's why they're in the group in the first place.

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.

3MBlume
how does one contribute as part of a group on Kiva? I didn't see this.
[-]Roko100

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...

7sketerpot
Hey, that's fine. You certainly don't have to try to justify your basic utility function. But for people who want to do more to help the rest of the world (even if we prioritize ourselves first), it can be hard just to get ourselves to act rationally in pursuit of this goal. That's the issue at hand.
2Roko
Right, so everyone has their own level, their own line of "this much is for me, this much is for everyone else", and each of us has to make that choice and live with it. My choice is biased towards (a) my culture (b) my friends and family and (c) myself. Other people may put "the rest of the world" higher than me, though I expect that most people in this country and the US put it lower.
6Eliezer Yudkowsky
It would seem that Greene has deconverted you away from objective morality along different lines than I was trying for myself. Anyway, your comment suggests that FAI should take its funding primarily from the most selfish of rationalists who still have a trace of altruism in them, since FAI would be the only project where expected utilons can be purchased so cheaply as to move them; and leave more altruistic funding to more mundane projects. Now, what are the odds that would work in real life? I would think very low. FAI is likely to actually need those rare folk who can continue supporting without a lot of in-person support and encouragement and immediately visible concrete results, leaving the others to those projects which are more intuitively encouraging to a human brain. It seems to me that no matter what people claim about their selfishness or altruism, the real line is between those who can bring themselves to do something about it under conditions X and those who can't - and that the actual payoff in expected utilons matters little, but the reinforcing conditions matter a lot. But perhaps I am mistaken.

Shhh.
No saying the F-acronym yet.

2Roko
I think that this is because, in the world of antirealism, there is a lot of room for arbitrary disagreement based on unjustifiable personal preferences. I think that you're a more altruistic person than me, and this shows, but the difference is perhaps smaller than you think. It would be easier to iron this out in person than by text. Most people don't even give 1% of their wealth to charities... that would be about £500 per year for most people in the UK, most people don't give anything like that much. Speaking of which, I think I have a donation to make... Yep. I agree completely. If I was surrounded by people who were all giving 50% of their wealth to the third world, I'd probably want to do the same. But we now know that different circumstances bring out different aspects of people I agree with this too - I think that you have to have a very specific self-image to want to work on FAI. The self-image of being either a very good person, or a very important person, or a combination of both. I think that I'm a combination of the two. I do feel a certain amount of duty towards others, especially those who are close to me, and the people in this world who I admire. I am more motivated by the thought of the 0.001% of people on the planet who I think are really awesome getting turned into paperclips than the others.
1Roko
No, I'd say that at the moment all money one has power over should go to FAI, until it is funded at a level of about 0.1% of world GDP, or about a billion a year. That includes the funding of true altruists, and of "trace" altruists who are (say) prepared to donate 1% of their effort to help others. At that point, you'd have to do a more careful analysis which I don't have time or knowledge for.

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... (read more)

5MichaelVassar
Individual rationalists simply CAN be aimed at charities. Action with incomplete information IS possible or you would never do anything and the analyses that many rationalists routinely give are far better information than most people normally act upon.
1[anonymous]
Absolutely. People who consider themselves their own highest authority are a nuisance like that!

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?

7Eliezer Yudkowsky
I confess I hadn't thought of that particular aspect of a canned goods drive - which may or may not be true, e.g., donated cars are sold rather than given to the poor. I had written it off as a desire to purchase moral satisfaction. But anyone who works in the nonprofit industry knows this fact, sad but true: Volunteering money is much more helpful than volunteering time. Unless you're a professional and you're willing to volunteer large blocks of concentrated time with high work priority. The power of work concentration and specialization is the elementary reason why the whole economy runs that way.
2whpearson
The young idealistic people don't have enough money to devote large chunks of time. I'm not sure what the organisation that must not be named actually needs to be done at the moment, why it needs more funding. If you are looking for people to do things you might be able to get people newly out of university to work for you for a couple of years for a living allowance. Which would be the equivalent of donating the difference between the living allowance and the market rate for their skills. People do sacrifice potential earnings for experience all the time, PhDs for example or getting minimal wage working somewhere exotic, What people don't like doing so much is going backwards...
3JulianMorrison
I think E's point was that, contrary to charitable instinct, they would be better off working and tithing, in terms of charitable results.
2whpearson
Is one or two years not large enough blocks of time or are graduates not professional enough? I agree that donating an hour or two a week is not efficient, I was trying to point out that there are groups of people that can donate large amounts of time/skills, iff they are given minimal money to support themselves.
1Emile
Such as for example asking for open-source volunteers to help improve a website? (ok, ok, he's not using that in his rhetoric as an example, your point stands)
[-]Alan70

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... (read more)

2Annoyance
"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."" Why do people go to Overcoming Bias meet-ups? I doubt that those meetings in restaurants are very productive from a becoming-more-rational perspective.
1Loren
Motivation doesn't come mainly from fear of eternal damnation, or even from meeting with people that have a common cause (although that is closer to the truth). I think the main reason people are religious is because they have a desire to live in integrity, rather than caving in to the insticts of the reptilian and paleomammalian parts of our brain, instincts which are usually conter-productive in our current social environment. Of course, religious people don't talk like this. They call it "sinning" instead. But it means the same thing. People are especially concerned that their children join a group that encourages the avoidance of counter-productive reptilian and paleomammalian behavior (a.k.a. sin). In almost any church, there's always a significant number of new members who have children that have just reached Sunday School age. Prior to that, they were unchurched since graduating from High School. How can rationality help people achieve their desire to live with more integrity, and have their children live with more integrity? That's the question we need to be asking. Reading blogs and books isn't going to do it. Integrity is not a solo sport. It takes strong support from other human beings to overcome our sinful instincts.

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

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 ... (read more)

4MichaelGR
I agree. The effect would probably be pretty big, in fact. Even with something fairly low-tech (webcams, you look at your screen and you see little stamp-sized videos of the faces of everybody), a weekly videoconference to discuss all things rational would be a big motivator, IMO. Just imagining it feels motivating, possibly because right now when I think of the people here, I mostly see screennames (except for Eliezer, but that's because I've seen videos of him), and for obvious evolutionary reasons that doesn't generate the same response as seeing human faces (f.ex. over the past few weeks I've been asking myself: Who's Yvain? Where is he from? What does he do? How old is he? What does he look like? Even if I know that this shouldn't, in theory, be important for the purpose of reading his stuff). Maybe just a voice conference call could be useful (http://www.freeconferencecall.com/ ?). It probably can't replace the written word for the purpose of teaching rationality, but it can certainly help make all of this more real from a human point of view, and thus motivate us. And like a religious gathering, not everybody has to speak to feel part of it. Real life example: For the past 3-4 years I've been working from home (in Canada) for a US company. At first we did almost everything via email and text chat. Then we started doing a few conference calls and that helped make it more real and improve esprit de corps a lot. But the game-changer was really when they flew all of us to New York to meet face to face. The effect of that is still felt; even more than a year later there's a different rapport with the people I met face to face than with those that joined after that meeting.
5Paul Crowley
...suggesting that the single thing I could do to make the biggest improvement to the world with the least effort would be to fix this bug: http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/detail?id=108 Maybe we should make video of ourselves available, just so we seem more real? Maybe we should be doing promiscuous bloggingheads.tv-style conversations?

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... (read more)

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)?

7MBlume
I have seen people form strong attachments of responsibility to groups while playing World of Warcraft. A friend of mine will frequently beg off social engagements because of scheduled in-game events to which he needs to contribute. Something about the 3-D avatars seems to do the job. In fact, I'd start even simpler. We need profiles. I'm not saying we turn LessWrong into Facebook, but our brains are wired to track humans, and specifically to respond to faces. I think if we simply had a photo of each LessWrong member appearing next to their submissions (as Emile has also suggested), it would help to excite those faculties. In addition, if each member had a place to write about themselves for a line or two, or link to a personal website, that might help.
4Tom_Talbot
Or start a LessWrong group on Facebook.
3MBlume
done -- comment here if you'd like to be an admin.
2whpearson
Faces and voices are also not needed. I've played browser based games such as pardus and felt committed, if only briefly before realising real life is more important. What I need is to be mentally committed to a project. Someone says we need to do X and asks how do we go about doing X. Discussion ensues. If the discussion ends up we need to raise Z amount of money or Y people to be on at a certain time I am likely to contribute to that or try and be that person. Contributing to an anonymous pot won't get people committed as a specific project. A bit like what pjeby talks about with envisaging actions, push and all that.
1[anonymous]
The less effort required to participate, the more that will come. Something web based seems the most appropriate idea, and since we are all logged in already so we are almost there!
3CannibalSmith
Second Life?
2AndrewH
Ease of entry and exit is really important. I want to be able to enter the world and enter a discussion asap, but I don't want to feel compelled to stay for long periods of time. So I think a browser based program would be best, rather than Second Life. But I think having a place such as Second Life would be good addition compared to what we have now with LW. Having a a place where people like ourselves can discuss things in practically real time, would, I think, be useful in helping to create this community of Rationalists. Mechanisms that make it feel like we really are living together, such as a detailed virtual world, and even virtual houses, could help in making the community and keeping people participating in it. And of course, the added benefit of this is that we don't need to be physically close to each other but we could get the benefits as if we were (given a detailed enough environment).
2thomblake
According to studies done by Yale's Brian Scassellati, embodiment is necessary for real social interaction. People respond differently to someone in the room than they do to someone on a screen, even if it's the same person.
1Emile
That's interesting - a previous community I was involved in also considered using Croquet for rich interaction, but at the time the technology barriers were high (they probably still are, no ? I haven't checked it out recently). What we did (well, they did mostly - I was in the wrong timezone and couldn't take part most of the time) - was simultaneous voice chat and collaborative document editing (with an application that allowed to work at several on a text file with different colors for each user).
2Paul Crowley
A colleague of mind created this collaborative editing environment, if you think something like that would be useful: http://www.lshift.net/blog/2009/03/02/evserver-part3-simplified-etherpad-clone

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.

5Vladimir_Golovin
Reading the key paragraph in pjeby's article The Hidden Meaning of "Just Do It" has helped me to break through a 2-month-long round of procrastination. Also, the 80/20 elimination techniques in Timothy Ferris' "4-Hour Workweek" seem to work surprisingly well for me -- especially in combination with pjeby's secret meaning of "just do it". I'm about halfway through Ferris' book, and I haven't read other pjeby's articles, but so far, this combo does wonders.
7pjeby
Btw, that article is embarrassingly out-of-date relative to my current methods. This video is a much better introduction to a more current method of "just doing it". In particular, it gives step-by-step instruction and is ridiculously easy to test.
7Kaj_Sotala
Blink. Blink. Blink. I watched that video and did what it told me to. Since I happen to have a rather messy desk, I could just apply that example directly. For the last three or four minutes of the video, I couldn't wait that it'd finish so I could get around to cleaning my desk. Then I did, and it's clean now. For the record: even when I clean the rest of my room, I never get around cleaning my desk. When I did it now, I found an old receipt, dated December 2006. I hadn't really cleaned my desk after that. And now I'd done it, after watching a ten-minute video and done some simple exercises for about five minutes. Because it had made me feel I wanted to. I don't know how much of it was me just wanting the technique to work, and if the effectiveness of the technique will wear off with time (as has often been the fate with my previous anti-procrastination techniques), but if it does work consistently... this will so change my life. I will be eternally in your debt if it will. If anybody here has any kinds of problems with procrastination, go watch that video right now. I mean that.
2pjeby
A note of caution: that technique will only work if you aren't under any pressure to perform the task. If you try to use it on something like doing your taxes because you're freaking out at how little time you have left, it's probably not going to work, because you'll have conflicting somatic markers activated. In other words, you won't be able to pass the "mmmm" test in the steps. Most chronic procrastination takes the form of pressuring yourself to do something and thereby engaging somatic markers for "life-threatening situation" -- making it damn near impossible to do anything useful in a systematic, sustainable, or rational way. So, you'll need to use other techniques to switch off those markers if you're going to use this technique for something like that. In other words, the technique in that video is NOT an anti-procrastination technique per se, and it's better that you don't try to use it as one. It's a demonstration of the link between somatic markers and motivation, and I specifically chose desk-cleaning as the target activity because most people are not under an urgent deadline or major pressure to clean their desk. Now, as long as you pass the "mmmm" test for an activity, the method will work and it will work every time. The only way it will stop working is if you stop checking for the somatic marker and try to just push through without passing the "mmm" test. It's just that for "under pressure" activities this may be difficult or impossible unless you first disengage the threat response. (It's hard to do a relaxed "mmmm" or "ahhh" when you're freaking out.)
1Kaj_Sotala
Alright, thanks for the warning. Actually, I just finished reading "Why Can't I Change", and I see what you're talking about. You're sure you want everybody to sign up with their e-mail addy before downloading it? It made me feel like everybody should read it and made me want to share the link as widely as possible, but the sign-up requirement will considerably reduce the amount of people who'll bother giving it a look...
3[anonymous]
Thanks Pjeby. That video is brilliant. I noticed that it closely matched one of the most useful techniques that I've found in the NLP subculture (hidden amongst the nonsense). I'll be sure to take a look at anything your upcoming book has to say about eliminating irrational beliefs that interfere with the motivation process.
0pjeby
The book is still being worked on, but in the meantime, there are two excellent books that might be considered CBT for the layman: "Loving What Is" by Byron Katie, and "Re-create Your Life", by Morty Lefkoe. Both are about identifying inconsistencies between your (emotional) beliefs and reality, and work well as long as you ask the questions from a state of genuine curiosity and wondering -- that is, if you don't treat the questions as rote or things you already know the answers to. The trick is, the purpose of the questions isn't for you to answer them, it's to draw out the memories that form the evidence for your belief, and connect them to counterexamples or alternative interpretations at the sensory/emotional "near thinking" level, rather than merely at the logical "far thinking" level. (Otherwise you can end up "not believing in ghosts" but still being afraid of them.)
1Vladimir_Golovin
I guess I was right to just skim the article through -- I admit, I fully read only the "meaning" section, then interpreted it with my own twist and went with that interpretation. BTW, one of the side effects was a clean desk -- actually two clean desks :) I spent a good chunk of my career in Photoshop, so I visualized your step 3 as having two 'reality layers', "Current State" and "Goal State", where the latter has 50% transparency :) The approach you've shown seems to be in sync with the concept of steering the reality into a specified region -- it involves visualizing the starting point (the current state of reality) and the target region to steer the future to. However, I'm still not sure whether this way of visualizing target states and letting our built-in planner to do it will work on tasks involving more creativity than cleaning a messy desk, or on goal states that are hard to imagine visually. In any case, very interesting video -- tricking my motivation/planning/execution system into doing things for me definitely looks like something I should explore. (Also, I'd be cool to have a text version of the video, for quick reference and re-reading.)
1pjeby
Creativity, oddly enough, is precisely what your built-in planner is good at. It's not that you have to be able to imagine the end result in perfect detail, but that you be able to know whether or not the current state matches the desired end-state. In fact, Robert Fritz calls this "the creative process". If you read any of his books, it's all about end state vs. current state comparison -- whether you're creating a painting, music, or a business. The only thing I've added to his work in this method is the somatic marker check (aka the "mmm" test), as it's the thing that engages the planner. Without the check, people find it a lot more hit-or-miss of an affair. Also, remember that this technique will not work if you don't engage the correct somatic marker; so don't be disappointed if you find it doesn't work on something you're stressed about, and you don't succeed in relaxing enough to pass the somatic marker check.
1Vladimir_Golovin
The technique I build for myself based on the article you consider outdated, "the meaning of just do it", works for me under stress perfectly well. ("Stress" here means a final release, with a clear deadline, of a software product that has been 2 years in development.)
3pjeby
By stress I mean that you have a "my life (or status) is in danger if I do not succeed" somatic response. Some people would have that response to the conditions you mention, others would not. I work a lot with people who are in chronic procrastination about things that will result in serious loss of money, status, or both, if they don't complete them... and they're not always able to even do the steps of "just doing it" until I teach them to disengage the negative markers. However, if you're saying you have a significant negative somatic marker and you have a procedure that works repeatably in that context, I'd definitely be interested in hearing about it. Sometimes, people's enthusiasm for a new idea distracts them sufficiently to avoid engaging the negative marker... but then the effect goes away once the technique is no longer novel. (This used to drive me nuts when I was starting out, before I got the idea of making sure I could reliably reproduce the stress condition before testing a technique to alleviate it.) Anyway, if you find that your method works consistently under stress conditions -- as defined by active somatic markers of life- or status-endangering threat -- then I would be very interested in finding out what, specifically, you're doing, as it would be a real improvement. To be clear, that means you would need to have identified a thought about the project that induces an observable somatic marker of (di)stress... and then show that your method replaces it with a marker of motivation. If you can do that, I'll definitely want to see if I can reproduce the effect myself and on my clients. Presently, I'm not aware of any such technique that does not involve first deactivating the stress marker in some fashion... which is why I suspect that either you are deactivating it in some way, not experiencing it in the first place... or else have developed a new technique that I should learn. ;-) (Or are distracted by novelty that will wear off, have a weak e
2Vladimir_Golovin
I'm not sure if this applies to my situation. Was the situation life-threatening? Definitely not -- and I don't think that my mind unconsciously deemed it to be so. Was my status threatened? Perhaps yes, but I'm not sure, and I don't think that status is particularly valuable to me at this point. The key factor was that the failure to complete that task would result in a monetary loss (or, more precisely, my company would lose several possible revenue streams.) The economic climate is not exactly warm these days, the revenues are declining despite growing website traffic (not just my case, other software firms I know experience this decline as well) -- so yes, I think money was the primary issue. Does this count as a stress marker?
2pjeby
As I said, it's the physical response that counts. Did you feel stuck, paralyzed, frozen? A desire to run away? Terror? Shame? Guilt? Embarrassment? (Those last three are what I mean by "loss of status".) If you're not actually afraid of losing money then you're not going to have a somatic marker for life- or status-threatening stress. If you were afraid of losing your job, not being able to support your family, and that you'd be an utter failure as a spouse and parent, yet you felt paralyzed and unable to move forward, then that would count. That's the kind of stress responses I mostly work with, not inconveniences or mere preference for a different state of affairs. People who are under that kind of (self-generated, but usually unaware) stress don't respond well to being told to "just do it". ;-) (Aside from not helping, it tends to enhance the shame or guilt of not being able to.) However, for the most part, your comment sounds like analytical "far" thinking, and most often our actual motivations are unrelated to our "far" analyses of them, when you check the "near" thinking that goes on under the hood. A minor and more common form of stress response to a situation like you describe might be an internal prediction like, "the boss is gonna be livid if we don't get this done" -- associated with apprehension and discomfort at that prospect. And if the associated somatic marker is mild, you might be able to overcome it or just ignore it... especially if you also have novelty/excitement linked to the technique you're trying. Note that human beings always act for concrete reasons, not abstract ones... we can take our abstract rules and apply them to situations to create concrete reasons, but if we don't, then we don't actually act! Conversely, the real reasons we avoid doing things are also concrete, not abstract. We don't get stressed about a project because "the company will lose money", but because of what that means in real-world events like, "I get yelled at
2Vladimir_Golovin
Bingo. My case was "my application will get rejected, and I will not pass the approval". The stress level wasn't that high -- it was an inconvenience. I didn't feel "stuck, paralyzed or frozen" -- I just felt like a dumb moron who for some stupid reason is unable to follow his own plans.
2[anonymous]
Tim writes the best productivity porn out there!

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.

0amitpamin
No need to invest a few thousand bucks - a few books and self-discipline is all that's needed (not that self-discipline is easy to arise & invest). re: zen meditation, I recommend reading Search Inside Yourself. It's a book about meditation written by a google employee. It contains a decent number of citations.

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... (read more)

6MBlume
This idea is the very first thing that any rationalist practice of altruism must eliminate.

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... (read more)

0grobstein
"Passing out condoms increases the amount of sex but makes each sex act less dangerous. So theoretically it's indeterminant whether it increases or decreases the spread of AIDS." Not quite -- on a rational choice model, passing out condoms may decrease or not impact the spread of AIDS (in principle), but it can't increase it. A rational actor who doesn't actively want AIDS might increase their sexual activity enough to compensate for the added safety of the condom, but they would not go further than that. (This is different from the seatbelt case because car crashes result in costs, say to pedestrians who are struck, that are not internalized by the driver.)
5Paul Crowley
We might suppose that condom promotion has two effects: a replacement effect and an encouragement effect. So there will be instances where what would have been unsafe sex at all becomes safe sex, and some instances where no sex at all becomes safe sex. Safe sex is so vastly less likely to transmit HIV that the latter effect would have to be hundreds of times larger than the former for condom promotion to have an overall increasing effect on HIV transmission; that doesn't seem plausible to me and no evidence to support it has been presented. If you could show that condom promotion caused a lot of instances where no sex becomes unsafe sex that would change the picture, but AFAIK there's no reason or evidence to suppose that. It's pretty clear in this instance that the desire to bash the Pope-criticising liberals came first, and the arguments second.
3Eliezer Yudkowsky
In theory - I say nothing of practice - this need not be true. If people get ten times as much sexual pleasure per unit risk, they may pay out more total risk. As a general principle of resource consumption this has an official name, but I forget it.
0grobstein
Obviously we can construct an agent who does this. I just don't see a reasonably parsimonious model that does it without including a preference for getting AIDS, or something similarly crazy. Perhaps I'm just stuck.
0Paul Crowley
Are you talking about the idea of a Giffen good, where bread becomes more costly, reducing your household budget, forcing you to get more of your calories from cheaper goods such as bread, meaning you buy more bread? If so I'm not sure I see how that applies in this instance. In general I don't mean to make an argument that it's impossible for harm reduction strategies to be counterproductive, but that condoms in particular are so very effective at reducing HIV transmission that it's simply implausible to posit that any countervailing effect could do so much as to make the overall outcome worse - such an idea would need very strong evidence, which plainly isn't here.
0Paul Crowley
I can't find any evidence that Epstein endorses TAC's conclusion that handing out condoms can actually do harm, even though her work is the sole evidence they cite, and frankly it's pretty implausible on the face of it.

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:

  • Enjoyed rationalist parties with dozens of people.
  • Went to over 20 weekly rationalist gatherings.
  • Ran an EA charity research meetup.
  • Got 3 other people hooked on the sequences.
  • Am taking my girlfriend to Sol
... (read more)

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... (read more)

[-][anonymous]20

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... (read more)

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.

7CannibalSmith
A game of Dungeons & Discourse, anyone?

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

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 ... (read more)

1Amaroq
I feel I must reply to my own post to update a bit as what I believe has changed a little. By the nature of humans, every individual human is potentially valuable to you unless they prove themselves otherwise. Humans are capable of reason, productivity, trade, etc. Just don't go sacrificing the actual (yourself) to the potential (the usefulness of a stranger). If you can aid someone in an emergency without risking yourself, there is a selfish justification for doing so.
[-][anonymous]10

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... (read more)

[-]taw10

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... (read more)

4MichaelVassar
Look into www.givewell.com
9Bleys
Worth noting, it's givewell.net. givewell.com links to a Visa card program, givewell.net is a site which aims to answer "Where should I donate?"

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)?

1SoullessAutomaton
Emphasis here on "most deserving". It's probably easier to get people to agree on which causes are good than on which causes are high priority.
3cousin_it
Worse. How many rationalists can honestly say, "my own life is as bright and happy as I could make it"? Why go for holy causes when you can't fix your own life - maybe it's a compensation mechanism, as Eric Hoffer suggested? Honestly the seduction community comes out looking better in this respect.
5Sebastian_Hagen
If you're an egoist, the answer is "don't". For altruists, the answer is shut up and multiply. You can get many more utilons if you buy them where (and while) they're cheap. If you are unhappy now, this may be very hard to change. You can probably get better mileage - in terms of expected utilons per unit of effort - if you concentrate on promoting developments that will permanently improve the human condition. Failing that, assuming your own life is not severly messed up, you can likely still do better than by improving it further by finding people significantly less well-off than you are, and helping them. Research suggests that this is typically not as simple as giving them money, but even so it should be possible to make such help scale significantly better than attempts to significantly improve your own subjective well-being. I don't care what you label it. I'm a bounded rationalist, and more so a bounded altruist - akrasia is a major issue for me. I will take all help from any of my mental modules to act in a more rational and altruistic manner I can get.
1CannibalSmith
If you donate money to a cause then obviously it's an important part of your life and you believe that the donation makes it brighter and happier.
3Eliezer Yudkowsky
Not so.
1[anonymous]
Here's an intentionally bleak counterpoint to your point: you could donate under the influence of texts like the original post, or "just do it for the checkmark" (Russian bastardization of the Nike logo/slogan). Your donation could stop you from other worthwhile activities - a compensation mechanism like I said. IMO when willpower is scarce it's best to spend it on your own life, and only start giving when you have plenty to spare. But many people give to others only to give meaning to their empty lives.
1Paul Crowley
My rationality is responsible for a lot of the good things in my life. Contrary to what the seduction community seem to believe AFAICT, being rational about sex can help get you laid, and without deception or dishonesty.
2Eliezer Yudkowsky
Clarification: "Rational" or "honest"? (That is, truth-believing or belief-telling?)
1Paul Crowley
I think I'm being both, though I'm not sure if that's your question. The writer who most closely represents the way I think about the subject is Greta Christina, who you may know of for her excellent atheism/skepticism posts.

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.

4Eliezer Yudkowsky
Hence my specification "per capita".