Is Atheism a failure to distinguish Near and Far?
See Reason as memetic immune disorder.
I was reading a fairly convincing article linked from a comment here about how theistic beliefs are so scantly supported, when not outright contradictory, that it's a doubtful whether anyone truly holds them at all.
See No, Really, I've Deceived Myself, Belief in Self-Deception.
Robin Hanson greatly overuses the "less/far" model. It's his hammer, and so he starts seeing the whole world like nails.
It's not a hammer, it's something he explores by testing intuitions about how it could conceivably apply to various contexts. From such exploration, a few more robust themes would emerge, if the idea is any good, even if most of applications considered were arbitrary, with very little explanatory power conferred by the idea.
If so, could you, or anyone, finally explain to me what the hell it actually means? Last I checked, the LW wiki on it read like gibberish.
But given that most people are happy living productive lives while simultaneously nominally carrying around massively conflicted worldviews, what is it that makes certain individuals not capable of this fairly common human feat?
I do think this is a bit of self-flattery. All people carry massively conflicted worldviews, not just most. And thus there are no individuals incapable of this feat. I would argue that the only people who don't carry conflicted worldviews are those who are incapable of carrying worldviews at all. The question should be: what causes some people to focus on correcting this particular conflict, while others let it pass and focus on some other conflict (or, in some cases, don't bother resolving conflicts at all).
Is Atheism a failure to distinguish Near and Far?
Very crudely speaking that depends on whether professing Atheisim helps or hinders you in getting laid. Slightly less crudely, whether it would increase or decrease your status in your tribe.
Concisely put. I've found the most instrumentally rational religious and political beliefs can be described as "politically and religiously uninterested agnostic with some mostly unmentioned interest in non-wooey spirituality".
The ideal religious and political beliefs for signaling are presumably highly contingent on what community and culture you find yourself in. For young, white, educated, urban living in the US that seems about right, though.
I'd love to see a study on the relation between expressed political and religious affiliation and mate selection.
I think it would be more useful to frame such matters as whether they improve or damage your chances of creating children who reproduce. [1]
For the most part this involves getting laid, but also a great deal more, including status.
[1] Now that I think about it, I don't think I've ever seen a grand overview of what most increases the odds of having grandchildren.
I think it would be more useful to frame such matters as whether they improve or damage your chances of creating children who reproduce. [1]
Just to clarify- this isn't literally the case. The extent to which we have different thinking paradigms for near and far is due to evolution- which maximized the chances of large numbers of people who share a large fraction of the organism's genetic material (perhaps by increasing the number of grandnephews as well as grandchildren). But the effect this feature of our psychology has on us in the current era doesn't necessarily correspond to evolutionary fitness. It seems at least possible that those who are excellent at signaling aren't the people who are having the most grandchildren (due to social and technological changes). It seems more likely that those with the best signaling fitness are still having sex with the highest-status members of the opposite sex but even that might have been undermined by modern culture or technology.
Whether or not the near/far distinction is A Real Thing, it doesn't seem to me that atheists are, on any other matter, less far-oriented on average. If anything I suspect that they're significantly more likely to hold (e.g.) strong abstract political beliefs, though that correlation might disappear if you control for education and maybe a few other variables.
Maybe I'll take a look at the GSS later today. Can anyone think of variables that would serve as an especially good proxy for Hansonian far-thinking?
Very serious Christians (e.g. those who deny science on the grounds that it contradicts the Bible) and very serious atheists (e.g. those who deny religion on the grounds that religious books contradict science) both tend toward the high end of the Buxton Index. The people who ignore the contradiction and are only religious on Sundays tend toward the low end.
I don't think this is as symmetric. Denying religion on the grounds of contradictions with logic and science is an extremely common position between atheists, probably damn close to universal in the west. Denying science altogether (prayer instead of medicine, flat earth, etc.) is fringe, even amongst fundamentalists. That said, I have always said I respect fundamentalists more because at least they take their ideals seriously. So, yes, you might be right. Those that refuse science have resolved the contradiction the other way around, but ultimately may be suffering of the same 'condition'.
I have, incidentally, encountered fundamentalists who perform the odd contortion of denying science as an enterprise while embracing all of its actual products (e.g., medicine and accurate cartography).
I don't entirely understand this position, but as near as I can figure it out, they have decided that because those things are reliable, they aren't actually the result of science; rather, they are the result of God and science merely takes credit for them.
Hanson seems to tend to think that humans have disparate near and far modes because they're rewarded for the hypocrisy. Are there other (less social?) hypotheses for the origin of near/far? Would there be any way to find near/far differences in chimps?
It seems to me that a simpler theory than Hanson's would simply be that integrating all of our neural sub-systems in a fully coherent way is hard. We know that a lot of compartmentalization probably happens simply because actively seeking out all connections between everything would be too time-consuming, and near/far seems like a special case of compartmentalization. Such integration is also not necessarily very useful in an evolutionary sense.
It would also be plausible to assume that far-mode systems, often dealing with more abstract issues, are a relatively recent development and there hasn't been much time to completely integrate them. I'm not convinced that "near/far is for hypocrisy" is a hypothesis that's been supported adequately enough to outweigh the complexity penalty it gets when compared to "coherence is hard".
Of course, "which of these hypotheses is the correct one" may be a somewhat confused question. It could very well be that near/far started out as separate systems simply because coherence is hard, and then hypocrisy being useful worked to counteract selective pressure that would've integrated them in a more complete manner. There may also have been other functions. See the debate on what did language/bat echolocation evolve for.
Hanson writes:
I have been collecting and present evidence for my view here at this blog, and I’ll continue to do so.
I'm a bit sceptical about this claim. I don't think he has actually been presenting much evidence in favor of the adaptation hypothesis. Yes, he's done a great job of presenting a variety of behavior and demonstrated that there are more plausible explanations for those behaviors than the commonly acknowledged ones. So he has demonstrated that humans are hypocrites. This is different from presenting evidence in favor of hypocrisy being an evolved adaptation.
The more detailed and sophisticated seem our capacities for subtle self-benefiting hypocrisy, the less plausible becomes the view that hypocrisy is mostly accidental, or the result of a few small hypocrisy modules.
Compare:
"The more detailed and sophisticated seem our capacities for using computers in various and subtle ways, the less plausible becomes the view that our computer-using skills are mostly accidental, or the result of a few small computer use modules."
I'm a bit sceptical about this claim. I don't think he has actually been presenting much evidence in favor of the adaptation hypothesis. Yes, he's done a great job of presenting a variety of behavior and demonstrated that there are more plausible explanations for those behaviors than the commonly acknowledged ones. So he has demonstrated that humans are hypocrites. This is different from presenting evidence in favor of hypocrisy being an evolved adaptation.
I haven't seen a lot of this, either. This account is moderately persuasive, however.
The more detailed and sophisticated seem our capacities for subtle self-benefiting hypocrisy, the less plausible becomes the view that hypocrisy is mostly accidental, or the result of a few small hypocrisy modules.
Compare:
"The more detailed and sophisticated seem our capacities for using computers in various and subtle ways, the less plausible becomes the view that our computer-using skills are mostly accidental, or the result of a few small computer use modules."
Not sure I understand your point here. I think the difference is that Hanson doesn't consider human hypocrisy to be a conscious act in the way that computer use is. Do you dispute that?
What you said before
Of course, "which of these hypotheses is the correct one" may be a somewhat confused question. It could very well be that near/far started out as separate systems simply because coherence is hard, and then hypocrisy being useful worked to counteract selective pressure that would've integrated them in a more complete manner. There may also have been other functions.
is probably right.
I'm not sure how to evaluate the complexity penalties associated with these hypotheses.
I haven't seen a lot of this, either. This account is moderately persuasive, however.
Thanks - I had either missed that or forgotten it. You're right, it does seem somewhat persuasive, though still rather speculative.
Not sure I understand your point here. I think the difference is that Hanson doesn't consider human hypocrisy to be a conscious act in the way that computer use is. Do you dispute that?
I don't dispute that.
My point is that we have a variety of complex, subtle behaviors driven by modules that were originally evolved for completely different purposes. Nobody would claim that because we can use computers well, we must have evolved to use them. It's a given that we've simply co-opted existing modules for entirely new purposes. But "our computer-use skills prove that we evolved to use computers" is of the same logical form as "our hypocrisy skills prove that we evolved to be hypocrites" - if one is fallacious, then the other must be as well. (Though it could probably be made non-fallacious with more supporting arguments.)
Overall, though, I feel like speculating over the evolutionary origin of a specific behavior is something of a red herring, for reasons I've covered before. We can never really know for sure what the real evolutionary reason for something was. Even if we could, knowing it constrains our anticipations much less than actually studying how the thing behaves in a modern-day environment.
It seems to me that there are a lot of examples where belief diverges from belief-in-belief and when that happens, one should say so. This may be because of near-far divergence, but that is additional detail and one should treat it as such. There certainly are near-far issues that do not involve belief-in-belief failures. Maybe the opposite situation is rare. If so, then it is reasonable to jump from belief-in-belief to near-far. But first one should establish this. Until then, when one has a belief-in-belief situation in hand, one should distinguish between the hypothesis that it is the result of near-far divergence and the hypothesis that it is not. And one should ask how these hypotheses differ.
The terms Near and Far are to be taken in the context of Robin Hanson's Near/Far articles.
I was reading a fairly convincing article linked from a comment here about how theistic beliefs are so scantly supported, when not outright contradictory, that it's a doubtful whether anyone truly holds them at all. Of course there is a whole battery of explanations around the self-deception, signalling and belief-in-belief cluster, but the question that got in my head was about the kinds of people that can or cannot profess to hold these beliefs.
A common thread in many a 'deconversion' story is that some inconsistency in a person's worldview comes to their attention, and they can't let go until they have undone the whole fabric of their belief system. But given that most people are happy living productive lives while simultaneously nominally carrying around massively conflicted worldviews, what is it that makes certain individuals not capable of this fairly common human feat?
So the hypothesis that I'm considering is that the people who came to atheism this way, are those who demand detailed consistency of their Far ideals. Alternatively, they could be those for who what is normally considered Far is actually Near, in other words those with an unusually high Buxton Index. Combining the two, perhaps for people with a high Buxton Index, Far simply evaporates, as it comes under the scope of things that are relevant to a person's planning. (Edsger W. Djikstra, when introducing the Buxton Index, says that "true christians" have a Buxton Index of infinity. I think that couldn't be more wrong. Perhaps it is the case for singularitarians though.)
The obvious reason to be suspicious of this idea is that it's very flattering for those that fall in this category, which includes myself. Rather than dithering about it, I'd rather expose it to the community and see if it seems to have legs in the eyes of others.