The SSC sequence (plus a whole bunch of other things) inspired me to think of deities as mythic representations of cultural collective intelligence. The God-shaped hole could then be understood as a psychological adaptation for collective intelligence, and religions as collective intelligence operating systems.
There's a lot more that could be said on this topic but it seems to deserve its own sequence. Perhaps I should write one.
The trouble is that tradition is undocumented code, so you aren't sure what is safe to change when circumstances change.
I can't think of any examples where religion recommends randomization. Also, randomness in physics is cheap, and nature uses randomization in many rock-paper-scissors games without requiring religion or even brains.
You got it backwards. Faith never recommends randomization, it justifies it. Like trusting the tea leaves to predict the future.
randomness in physics is cheap, and nature uses randomization in many rock-paper-scissors games without requiring religion or even brains.
Yes, randomness in physics is cheap, but I have a hard time finding examples of, say, a uniform or exponential distribution in the behaviors of higher animals. Just because something is cheap at a lower levels (e.g. quantum processes), it does not mean that it is cheap at the higher levels. I welcome examples of higher-levels rock-paper-scissors type of behavior.
Faith never recommends randomization, it justifies it. Like trusting the tea leaves to predict the future.
Don't know about other faiths, but Christianity is pretty strongly against divination in practice.
I guess my point got lost in the shuffle. It's right there in the OP, though. The adaptation is looking to an external higher power for answers. Initially it would have been where to hunt, but eventually Goodharted into praying and so on.
This post is inspired by the SSC Book Review: The Secret of Our Success. To (double- or triple-)quote the relevant parts:
the best hunting strategy requires randomizing
and
If you’re generally predictable – and Scott Aaronson says you are – then outsourcing your decision to weird birds might be the best way to go.
This is a somewhat general pattern: to deal with smart adversaries effectively, randomization is, on average, the best strategy. Matching pennies and Rock/paper/scissors are some classic examples. Also, humans (and probably animals in general) are apparently poor randomizers. I assume because a built-in biological random number generator of adequate quality is expensive. I don't know if this is a good assumption. A quick online search does not refute or confirm this, and randomness is everywhere at the cellular level, but maybe not at the level of the single organisms.
Fortunately, true randomness is everywhere outside in the physical processes, and is cheap to access, and the augury and divination mentioned in the reviewed book are good examples of that. So, relying on external randomness might be an evolutionary adaptation that improves survival. (Is this so? Then we would see similar behavior in other animals' strategies for dealing with adversity, be it hunting, gathering or something else. Do we?)
Of course, the next step, consciously understanding what randomness is and why it is useful, is borderline impossible for any animal but a rather advanced human, and even then it's iffy: even statisticians are not immune to behavioral rituals. And given our awesome powers of rationalization, we justify the randomization rituals as predictive, not just useful.
And so we have a Goodhart-like situation, where a proxy becomes the goal, and is no longer a useful proxy:
The above is largely a speculation and is missing a fair bit in order to become a quality model of how the need to believe in the supernatural may have been selected as an evolutionary advantage. But I don't see anything immediately wrong with it. It also immediately makes a number of predictions, such as some non-human animals using external random events to guide their behavior, instead of basing it on more deterministic factors, or on an internal generator of randomness.
It is worth noting that this might not truly be a Goodhart-like situation, since the proxy is still useful in its original context, and, potentially, in other contexts, such as community building.
I have not put any research into whether this has been discussed before, here or elsewhere, my apologies if this is a repetition of something already well known.