Well a conspiracy is something where people conspire, that is in a hidden fashion. And you admit that businessmen do conspire and lobby. I think you’ve created a strawman here, “the secret lobby” that is ruling capitalist societies, but what most leftists and centrists believe is that capitalists run, or dominate, capitalist society. Which is as conspiratorial as believing that feudalists ran feudalism.
I too think that Douthat's "Bad Religion" was a very interesting read, and that American church history is probably a neglected topic, particularly given the exceptional uniqueness of American Christianity.
I've also had the thought that it's the logical endpoint of Protestantism. And I say this as a devout American Protestant, who concludes that at this particular moment in time our system looks like it's somehow, amazingly, the best one. While I also recognize the very apparent flaws that might lead people of other traditions -- Christian or not -- to conclude it's actually the worst one.
The difference between hardcore atheists and the “soggy middle” atheists isn’t belief in god, by definition. The former are generally angry anti-theists and the latter being just atheist or agnostic.
I don’t think the middle is where the conspiracy theories flourish either.
Yes, you are strawmanning. Let me remind you that people retiring today were 8 years old when Jim Crow laws stopped being enforced, so no one has ever claimed that unconscious bias is the only problem for blacks. Conscious, codified-as-law bias literally shaped generations alive today, which undoubtedly has substantial effects on today's youth as well. That's on top of not-legally-enforced racism, with unconscious racism being only a fraction of that. I would also remind you that, if you're going to accuse others of believing in mind-viruses, it would behoove you to make sure that you are not spouting one in the very same breath. A very, very common mind virus is "the out group believes [obviously false thing X]". Consider whether you have this virus. (In fact, I would hypothesize that you don't actually have this virus, are smart enough to know that your out group does not believe this, and are just making bad arguments online to score points with your in group. A thing I'm guilty of at times too!)
Per your last paragraph, the distinction here is that conspiracy theorists do actually endorse the beliefs you accuse them of having. SJWs would look at you cross-eyed if you said they believe that the only bias is unconscious bias.
Thank you for admitting to the straw man. I do think that knowingly strawmanning an opponent is a bad thing to do, and comes across particularly poorly when accusing others of bad, motivated reasoning and/or being brainwashed. I agree about the general point that debunking Bigfoot et al is basically mean and pointless, though I think I’m missing what you mean in this context.
No SJW will disagree with you on that one and I’m surprised you think otherwise. Did you know we paid the victims 20,000$ in reparations in 1988 and had even passed ineffective reparations in the 40’s? Given your other comment that SJWism is ineffective, then maybe you should join them in fighting for reparations for Jim Crow subjects? It’ll never make up for the actual abuse they suffered, but at least it’s a real action to try to help people.
I don't know why people should get more worked up about the fact that Japanese-Americans got forced into camps during WW2 than about the fact that non-Japanese-Americans got forced into the Army during WW2.
The US government violated everyone's rights during its involvement in WW2, not just those of Japanese descent. And if the government is going to be violating my rights anyway I'd rather that they send me to some crappy camp for a few years than that they send me to a crappy camp for a few weeks then drop me on the beaches of Normandy or Guadalcanal.
Why all the outrage about Japanese internment and not about conscription?
The objectionable belief isn't "Blacks are affected by prejudice", it's "*All* the negative outcomes in the black community are the result of prejudice" -- a much stronger, and less well-evidenced, claim.
I’m replying specifically to the claim the poster made, which was about unconscious bias only. A statement that is obviously and transparently not believed by anyone at all. In other words, a strawman!
You’ll note that the original poster’s writing implies something much closer to the exact opposite of what you said (that there are no prejudice effects whatsoever, since unconscious effects are clearly negligible) than to your statement. So if you want to claim that the other side is the one making extraordinary claims, then you’ll have a hard time.
I've personally experienced interacting with highly-educated young people who hold forth some pretty wacky levels of belief in systemic racism/sexism, gender and everything else currently popular. Racism Is In The Air We Breathe. I once knew a woman who insisted that her father was colluding with other powerful men to take away her rights. Her proof of this was that he got re-married to a woman from Thailand and was himself white.
They say we're killing the planet, to the point where one of them got emotionally angry at the ecological costs of...leaving garbage in an alley for a week because the landlords stopped paying for a dumpster, to force them to put the dumpster back. Just a garbage bag containing garbage briefly not being in a dumpster caused a conniption fit about plastic straws and all the People of Color being drowned.
As a white man married to an Asian woman, I can tell you from firsthand experience that there's a crazy amount of hatred in the air these days for such pairings.
How does this actually express itself in real life? Honest question, I'm not trying to make a point. Do people bring it up TO you, or do you notice it around you more?
I'm still confused as to how progressives can bring up crap like that without the heads exploding; isn't that...Criticizing a Woman Of Color's Life Choices? Doesn't that violate some woke rule or other?
Right, but the question is what actions are necessary/effective in the face of this history? Should you put your ancestors in the dock? Or make sure those alive today aren’t able to treat others differently based on race? I’d argue the SJW approach is not only ineffective, but it is doing more harm than good. Even if you accept that historical racism affects people in the present, an effective approach can only be based on actions. Trying to improve black lives by demonizing whiteness does not actually help either.
Apparently, Saudi housewives blame The Jews whenever a ceiling fan breaks down. A young Ayan Hirsi-Ali, who didn't know what a "Jew" was, assumed it was some kind of household mischief spirit, like a gremlin or kikimora.
It's also correlated with believing that masturbation drains cerebro-spinal fluid, that salt and fresh water don't mix (I'm not really clear on what this would even look like), and, amusingly, human fetuses get their souls at 4 months.
That last part was also the dominant Christian belief throughout most of the Middle Ages, at least if you assume that European Common Law was reflective of religious views.
That depends on what exactly you mean by "Freudian psychoanalysis". For example, I agree with the following things:
* Psychological problems that can be cured by hypnosis, can also be cured by talking to a therapist. (It may require more time.)
* Human mind does many things we are not consciously aware of. Some of those we may realize when we start paying attention. For example, you may be tapping your fingers without realizing it, but it's still your brain doing it.
* It is useful to model a human mind as a collection of agents with different goals. Some agents care about fulfilling desires, such as food, sex, addictions. Some agents care about social status, or approval by other people. There is also some mechanism that seeks to achieve a balance between the competing agents.
* Civilization requires a lot of self-control, which results in a lot of frustration. There are a few stereotypical ways how humans deal with emotions they are not allowed to act upon -- pretending that the emotion does not exist; redirecting the emotion to another target; attributing the emotion to another person; reshaping the emotion into e.g. an artistic impulse; (and perhaps some more I forgot).
* Suppressed emotions related to sexual desires are way more frequent than Freud's contemporaries would be willing to publicly admit. (Not necessarily true for our culture, because we have already updated on this fact, thanks to Freud.)
* Frustrated desires can appear in dreams, often in a coded (plausibly deniable) form. For example, a child who was not allowed to eat ice cream, may dream about walking in mountains of snow.
* Humans have a complicated love/hate relationship with authority. (This would require a longer explanation, I am not sure I could do it properly.)
This is roughly what I remember from Freudian psychoanalysis. On the other hand, here are my objections against it:
* Although I like the framework in general, when Freud goes into more specific details, he gets many of them wrong. (Not a fatal objection in my mind, as those details can be fixed later. Analogically, Darwin didn't discover genes, but that doesn't make evolution "debunked".)
* Missing from the picture are considerations of hereditary traits, hormonal imbalance, or simply brain damage. Not all things were caused by one's past experience; not all can be cured by talking.
* The psychoanalytical couch talk may be more efficient than hypnosis, but still less efficient than other therapeutic approaches. Psychoanalytic therapy is famous for literally taking years, that seems like a waste of time and money.
* The chance of a therapist projecting their thoughts on the patient is extremely high. Yes, it is a thing that Freud explicitly warned about, but the proposed solutions (such as: the therapist should first spend a lot of time in therapy himself) don't seem sufficient to me.
What about the consistent finding that all therapies are roughly as effective as each other? So, if following Freudian framework doesn't make you a more effective therapist, then it sure would seem that it doesn't have a better than chance correlation to reality (to the extent that it still says stuff that hasn't become conventional wisdom).
Is that “50% effective” stat just a statistical measurement across disciplines and the populace, or is it that if there’s only a 50% chance psychoanalysis works on me there’s only a 50% chance hypnosis will work? Might differing therapies have results dependent on the practitioner and the patient or are they all intrinsically a coin toss?
It's a statistical measure, and it says that all of them are somewhat better than 50% on average, which may or may not be a placebo effect. You wouldn't know before trying which will work better for you, but you probably can expect any of them to be better than nothing.
Well, if *all* therapies are roughly equally effective, isn't it curious why Freudian psychoanalysis is always singled out as an example of embarassing pseudoscience? (Why don't people say things like "haha, I wonder how many rationalists actually believe in crazy stuff like astrology or behaviorism"?)
But honestly, I don't know what to think about that finding. -- Scott, if you are reading this, please write a meta-review. The fate of thousand internet debates depends on it. -- I don't want to dismiss inconvenient evidence. I also wouldn't want to just take it on your word that the study was replicated and doesn't have obvious flaws. And I have neither time nor skills necessary to review it myself. So I can only provide a few guesses:
Guess #1: There might be some huge flaw in the study that proved that all therapies are similarly effective. The easiest way to prove that all therapies are the same would be to make a half-assed attempt at each of them. This would even be super easy to replicate! It doesn't require any bad intentions; it could happen naturally as a result of a limited budget.
Guess #2: Diagnosing a problem and fixing it are two different skills. I could recognize a broken leg, but it doesn't mean I could also heal it. Maybe it is similar in psychotherapy: better descriptions of human mind do not necessarily translate into more efficient therapies. Correct theories may be unactionable, and incorrect theories may benefit from the power of placebo effect.
It might also be that the mere act of talking about things that are bothering you with an authoritative and empathetic person and then having that person give you some generic advice and some ritualistic behaviors to do just makes a lot of people feel better about things, and let go of obsessions and such, and it doesn't really matter if it's a priest, a shaman, or a psychologist.
I think there is no controversy that talking to a high-status empathetic person makes you feel better.
The curious part is that either (1) all schools of psychotherapy are equally wrong about human mind, or that (2) being more right is not actually helpful for therapy.
What you said would suggest the option 1, but that just sounds too pessimistic. Like, if you say that a specific school of therapy is wrong (could also be Freudian, for the sake of this argument), that alone sounds very plausible. I mean, if they disagree with each other, then naturally some of them should be wrong.
The difficult part is that they are *all* wrong, and all *equally* wrong. Like, come on, there were so many different approaches. At least the parts like "Pavlov successfully made the dogs salivate" should be beyond any controversy. So how likely is it that they are all wrong to the *same* degree? Do we all really have literally *zero* valid insights into human mind? That sounds like a too strong statement.
The option 2 is also pessimistic, but it sounds to me more plausible. As an analogy, look at the anti-aging research. On one hand, we have tons of knowledge about human metabolism, and I would say that a large part of that knowledge is true. On the other hand, we still do not have the pill of eternal youth, and maybe we will never have it. So we have a precedent in medicine how tons of true knowledge fail to translate into efficient therapy, because things are just too complex, too interdependent, would require billions of tiny precise interventions, etc.
Maybe something like this is also true for psychology -- that when things go seriously wrong in the mind, it is not one belief or emotional reaction that needs fixed, but thousands of mutually reinforcing beliefs and emotions, that you would need to fix all, plus the therapy itself is a process that creates all kinds of reactions that also need to be noticed and fixed... but this against starts to sound like something that (steelman) Freud would say.
Noticing that something is wrong and knowing how to fix it are very different things. Physicians have known about cancer and plagues etc for millenia, and yet until quite recently average medical intervention had a negative expected value (and people like Robin Hanson say that it's still the case).
My understanding (which is largely an impression from a combination of this blog, a psychology class, and therapist friends) is that modern-day psychoanalysis/psychodynamic therapy is fairly different from what Freud himself was doing, basically taking the parts that actually worked okay and leaving aside the parts that were complete nonsense. When people lambast psychoanalysis, they’re thinking of psychoanalysis as Freud did it (this being the only version that many people learn about), and not of how it’s practiced currently.
> When people lambast psychoanalysis, they’re thinking of psychoanalysis as Freud did it (this being the only version that many people learn about)
Even this is too optimistic, I think. When I see people who are *not* professional therapists trying to do "psychoanalysis", it goes kinda like this:
The "therapist" makes the "client" talk, and keeps pushing their buttons, until the "client" starts crying. At that moment the "therapist" assumes that the problem is solved; that after a moment of crying, the "client" will suddenly feel better and say that their problem was magically solved. Except, that almost never happens; the "client" often feels even worse than before. So the "therapist" gets annoyed, and starts accusing the "client" of not cooperating and being in denial. The "client" starts crying more, then runs away from the room...
The actual therapists usually take the parts that work in their experience, and often add parts from other schools of therapy that work in their experience. Just like a good programmer is familiar with more than one programming language (even if they clearly prefer one of them), a good psychotherapist is familiar with more than one school of therapy (even if they clearly prefer one of them).
The version I heard was that hypnosis usually only provided a temporary relief for various symptoms, and had to be repeated regularly, indefinitely. Which made it a reliable source of income, of course!
I don't remember the source of the following story, and maybe it's made-up, like with the apple falling on Newton's head... anyway... the story says that Freud once had a patient who was unable to drink water from a glass cup, because for some mysterious reason it felt very repulsive to her. Before hypnotizing her, he asked her, out of curiosity, when did this symptom start. She said it was since her college age, then she reminisced about various things that happened at the college, and said that she had a classmate who had a dog, and how the classmate often let the dog drink water from a glass cup for humans, which she found extremely disgusting. And... after she mentioned this memory, suddenly the symptom disappeared, and she just poured herself a cup of water and drank it, no problem. So the hypnosis turned out not to be necessary that day, and the symptom didn't return even later. Since this experience, Freud started designing his "talking therapy" as an attempt to reproduce this effect.
I tried to find more info by google, but instead I mostly found insinuations that Freud invented "talking therapy" because he sucked at hypnosis, ha ha. I find this a bit unlikely (more like something the hypnotists of that era would have invented as an excuse why Freud's inventions should not make their methods obsolete), because Freud was actually a huge fan of hypnosis at the beginning of his career -- hypnosis was probably the thing that made him become a therapist. However, Freud dramatically changed his professional opinion on various things several times in his life, so I found it plausible he would also dramatically change his opinion on hypnosis.
> I read Freud stopped using hypnosis when a patient became embarrassingly familiar and a servant walked in with tea. I can find the quote if desired.
I never heard this version and find it amuzing. If it's not a big problem to find, I am curious about the source... but I suspect that this is probably also made up.
"Freud dramatically changed his professional opinion on various things several times in his life"
This is, IMO, an often glossed over complication of citing an 'authority.' Respected thinkers hold nuanced opinions that often change subtly or dramatically over their lifetime.
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"If it's not a big problem to find, I am curious about the source... "
Not at all - source at end:
'Early in his clinical experience Freud became aware of the process of transference, whereby a patient might develop romantic and sexual feelings toward the doctor. When he first began treating neurotic patients, he used hypnotism to help them bring unconscious thoughts into awareness. He found, however, that this method had certain limitations. First, not all patients could be hypnotized. Second, he realized that the success or failure of his treatment depended in large measure on the feelings of the patient for the doctor. These feelings could not be explored or controlled if the patient was under hypnosis. He noted that “the most brilliant results were liable to be suddenly wiped away if my personal relation with the patient became disturbed.” Finally an unexpected event pursuaded him to give up hypnosis: “. . . one day I had an experience which showed me in the crudest light what I had long expected. One of my most acquiescent patients, with whom hypnotism had enabled me to bring about the most marvellous results, and whom I was engaged in relieving of her suffering by tracing back her attacks of pain to their origins, as she woke up on one occasion, threw her arms round my neck. The unexpected entrance of a servant relieved us from a painful discussion, but from that time onwards there was a tacit understanding between us that the hypnotic treatment should be discontinued.” Freud quickly adds: “I was modest enough not to attribute the event to my own irresistible personal attraction, and I felt that I had now grasped the nature of the mysterious element that was at work behind hypnotism.” In a paper titled “Further Recommendations on Technique,...”'
Thank you! This actually sounds completely plausible to me.
I have almost no experience with hypnosis, but once I discussed the topic with a guy who does it professionally, and he told me the following, if I remember it correctly:
* Some people are easier to hypnotize, some are very difficult. A part of this is about who they are; specifically STEM students are often difficult to hypnotize. (Now that I think about it, could there be a possible relation to autism?)
* But another part is some kind of personal compatibility between the client and the therapist. It often happens that one therapist completely fails to hypnotize a client, and another hypnotizes the same client easily; and it is not necessarily about one therapist being generally better, because with another client it may be the other way round. So this guy had a mutual arrangement with a colleague next door, that if any of them fails to hypnotize a client on the first attempt, they will tell them to try the other colleague first, before trying something more complicated.
* Different clients are more susceptible to different techniques. Most therapists do the "your body is relaxed, your eyelids are heavy" way. But this guy told me that he knows some weird therapist who specializes on drug addicts, and he just screams at them "SLEEP!!!", and some of them immediately fall down "sleeping"; then he proceeds with hypnosis as usual. (This reminds me of "slaying in the spirit"; possibly the same mechanism.) Again, techniques that work well with some people will fail with others, and vice versa.
* Finally, it is sometimes possible to "tire out" a difficult client by repeated long sessions, making them watch huge rotating spirals, etc. So you could have like a 30-minute session every week, the first three sessions zero success, the next one the spiral starts rotating and you "sleep". Possibly a consequence of getting used to the situation, and therefore relaxing better.
* The stage hypnotists have a few tricks how to find the most susceptible individuals among the audience, which is why they have such high success rates so quickly. You should not base your expectations on stage performances, this is not how it works in the typical case.
I don't know much about hypnosis. It always seemed strange that people would volunteer to be hypnotized on stage for entertainment purposes. To give up basic control...
I do remember reading in Huxley's Brave New World Revisited(50's copyright) that while some people are resistant there is an injection that will overcome it. I think he wrote that as a caution not as a therapeutic recommendation!
My personal viewpoint is that we're inclined to want an easy, external fix to correct all our perceived shortcomings but in my reading and reflection I keep being brought back to the old adage: Know Thyself.
In my view, when people make statements like this now, they don't so much mean astrology and Q anon as they do wokery, with its Manichean religious elements.
It's worth noting that "religion", writ broadly, has an _awful_ lot of overlap with what many people would call woo and conspiracy theories. If you believe that Satan is orchestrating a grand design to corrupt the United States into secularism, is that a conspiracy theory or just evangelicalism? Is believing that visiting particular locations popularly associated with saints will bring you miraculous healing all that distinct from believing in crystal healing?
Yeah, I think this argument is used by two sets of people: actual believers, who would prefer people believe the true religion to false religions. And Jordan Peterson types who think that religion isn't necessarily true, but is a socially beneficial falsehood, and this is partly *because* it's productive against socially maladaptive falsehoods.
Part of what I'm saying is that the arguments by the latter set look much weaker if instead of lumping all "religious" belief together, you think of conspiracy and woo as optional add-ons to either religion or secularism.
The religious person who believes all of society is under assault by Satan may not be terribly different psychologically than the secular person who thinks that society is run by a pedophile cabal - they probably get along great on the QAnon Facebook page - but if you think of the latter as "conspiracy" and the former as just "religion", then sure, it'll look like religion defends against crazy beliefs.
You could say that religion has the advantage of dogma here, but I'm not sure that that's borne out by these data since Catholicism - the most hierarchical of the major religions - doesn't come out looking too good.
AFAICT there are more "cultural Catholics" -- people who identify as Catholic despite not believing and rarely if ever attending Church -- than there are cultural Evangelicals or whatever, so I expect that would skew the data quite a bit.
That's my take as well. I know a lot of cultural Catholics who rarely or never attend mass. They identify as Catholic, but may never read the Bible, attend services, pray, or any other outward expression of belief. I know some cultural Protestants (usually something specific like Methodist or Lutheran), but it seems to be far less common.
I think that while it's possible to have characteristics that may be typical of majority-protestant areas or countries, it's not necessarily conceptualized as being tied to religious practice in the same way by the people to whom such a description applies.
Speaking solely for myself, the first time I was told that it was possible to be "culturally Catholic" it struck me as a category error for precisely this reason--unlike being Jewish, where there's an ethnic component and a religious component such that one can be "culturally Jewish" without any baseline level of observance of Judaism, the entire content of Christianity (from a Protestant perspective, at any rate) is solely the religious prong, so (from the Protestant perspective) you can have a culture, and you can be Christian, and the culture can be (often quite strongly!) influenced by Christianity, but claiming to be "Culturally Christian" without actually engaging in religious observance seems like something that doesn't actually have any content, because the "Christian" part of it is literally all the specifically-religious parts of your life and everything else just falls under the general category of "culture."
I've since come to believe that, as you say, this is probably an asymmetry in worldview between Protestantism and Catholicism. I would presume it comes in part from majority-Catholic European countries being so overwhelmingly Catholic that the distinction between religious and secular practice dissolves away in the same way it does for the (large, in my experience) category of atheistic-but-kind-of-observant Jews, where even if you don't go to mass you still get your kids baptized because That's Just What People Do in (France / Italy / Poland / wherever).
I think there is caricature of what it means to be a believer or religious.
Should the atheists who "believe" in the transcendental idea of "love" have their non-believer materialist membership cards revoked?
That 31% percent of self-identified Catholics believe in astrology is pretty pathetic. Especially since the official church teaching is that astrology and superstition is nonsense and in fact sinful!
Well, I haven't checked what their beliefs in the last few centuries are, but Catholics used to believe that one shouldn't read the Bible, but instead trust the priest's interpretation. Reading the Bible is/was much more a Protestant thing.
Catholicism is the most hierarchical but I think in many ways the least dogmatic. As others say, what’s important to being Catholic is that you recognize the hierarchy and participate in the culture (including confessing your sins) more than not sinning or believing what it says in the Bible.
Have to disagree at least partially here. Catholicism seems like the ur-example of dogmatic Christianity - although on the ground what believers do relative to what they're nominally *supposed* to do has long differed. Catholic teachings on the use of birth control are pretty unambiguous, it's just that people ignore them anyway -- I think what you're referring to (relative to Protestant denominations that often place a bigger emphasis on a personal relationship with God and the importance of personal conscience) reflects a divide between theology and praxis rather than an an actual tabula rasa absence of dogma *per se.*
Relative to Protestantism, consider that papal infalliblity is not only a Catholic origination but wouldn't even mean anything in Protestantism inter alia because there is no pope. Granted this goes to your point regarding hierarchy, but the point is that the hierarchy is intrinsically tied to the promulgation of dogma, even if in practice it's often ignored.
AIUI regarding the Bible, a big difference is that in practice the RCC has not placed nearly as much emphasis on worshipper's studying the Bible itself because subsequent Church tradition and interpretation is accorded higher status than it is in Protestantism, and the mediation of the hierarchy between the faithful and the texts isn't considered intrinsically suspect (in this sense RCC tradition is more analogous than Protestantism to the rabbinical Jewish tradition including acceptance of midrash. AIUI the Karaites would be the rough Jewish analog of Protestantism vis a vis relation to text).
From the perspective of someone with a mainline Protestant upbringing, the RCC approach has the upside of nipping in the bud some of the absolutely bizarre stances of Evangelicalism via a vis biblical literalism and corollary beliefs like creationism, but the downside of an enormous amount of historical syncretism, ritual, and practices that come across as tantamount to idolatry (relics, the intercession of saints / literally directing prayer to entities other than God, the inscrutable emphasis on Mary far beyond what's in any of the Gospels,) that not only don't have any textual basis but seem to be against the direct spirit and letter of the Bible--most obviously Commandments One and Two, but also e.g. the teaching that Mary remained a virgin throughout her life despite no particularly compelling doctrinal reason to believe this and *literal reference to Jesus's brothers* in the Gospel of Luke. Also (albeit in this day and age I don't think anyone on either side really *cares* all that much) Transsubstantiation -- seems obviously metaphorical from the mainline Protestant perspective, taken as literal by the RCC in an inversion of the Catholic tradition successfully avoiding creationism by emphasizing a metaphorical rather than literal interpretation of Genesis.
>on the ground what believers do relative to what they're nominally supposed to do has long differed
It seems to me that the longer a particular denomination has been around, the mellower it becomes towards enforcing its dogmas, which of course is partly responsible for periodical fundamentalist schisms where the most extreme factions are most eager to separate and establish a much more rigorous practice.
"what believers do relative to what they're nominally supposed to do has long differed"
--
I recently read this and found it helpful:
”Turning to God without turning from self"—the formula is absurdly simple; and yet, simple as it is, it explains all the follies and iniquities committed in the name of religion."
--Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945
Not that we can completely turn from self but if we don't make a frequent effort we end up doing worse than without belief. Pascal had some choice words for this!
I think if you define "Catholic" as "someone that believes all the things that the church officially requires you to believe", then Catholicism probably does OK. If you define it as "someone who ticks the 'Catholic' box on a survey", then you get lots of Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans who last went to church on their wedding day.
Surveys don't require you to pass catechism to qualify as an official Catholic in their numbers, though.
One way to think about it is that both religion and conspiracy theories are ways of outsourcing the decision of what to believe in (as are all kinds of more sensible things, like reading the newspaper or listening to a famous scientist), but religious authorities tend to have much less perverse incentives than conspiracy-theorist authorities.
(Most of the time, anyway. Too bad if you were relying on the Peoples Temple to protect you against mind virii!)
How about the difference between the religious person who believes society is under assault by Satan and the rationalist who believes it's under assault by Moloch?
I mean, if you accept that low of a bar of proof, I can experimentally establish the existence of God!
There are dozens (at least) of possible explanations for any such single experimental outcome. Establishing that something your belief predicts will come true, does, isn't very strong evidence for your belief. Which is why the sequences recommend making predictions about what would definitely NOT happen if your beliefs were true. (This was actually the insight that made me leave religion; when I made predictions about what would happen if my beliefs were true, they nearly always came true. When I made predictions about what wouldn't happen, I found contradiction.)
"if you accept that low of a bar of proof, I can experimentally establish the existence of God!"
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An impersonal higher power is IMO, easy to figure due to tremendous amount of order(Systems Theory) and oddities like the properties of water. Beyond that a certain amount of faith is required to actively believe or disbelieve.
Moloch in the sense that Scott uses the term is not an actual agent, but rather a representation of all the forces that make coordinating large groups of people difficult. This is basically the exact opposite of a conspiracy theory.
If by "Moloch" you mean the actual child-eating demon from Carthaginian mythology, then this would indeed be basically the same thing, but I'm not aware of any rationalists who believe that.
> The religious person who believes all of society is under assault by Satan may not be terribly different psychologically than the secular person who thinks that society is run by a pedophile cabal
Believing that society is under assault by Satan and that society is run by a pedophile cartel aren't very different in their evidential support, but their social psych roles are very different. "Society is under assault by Satan" is a hoary, traditional belief. That specific form dates back a millenium or so at least as a mainstream element of the christian faith. There's a parchment from Martin Luthor with an ink blotch on it, and he says it's from when he thought he saw the devil and threw the ink well at him. It's taught in every evangelical sunday school and church as a simple fact of history and theology. It's accepted background context for most evangelicals and 80+% of their social groups. (Plus, it's fundamental archetype is "the avatar of corruption is constantly trying to corrupt society" which is old as stories, and completely tautological if you accept the existence of an avatar of corruption.)
It's traditional, accepted, and boring.
On the other hand 'cabal of pedophiles' is lurid, new and innovative. It's a secret truth of the world, kept under wraps. Very different socially, so very different psychologically.
Thank you. I was looking for a way to articulate this. These things may look the same from the outside to a Rational Observer, but they *feel* different from the inside. And that's crucial.
In addition, as someone who grew up very white evangelical, I can confirm at least anecdotally Scott's paragraph on "people with coherent worldviews already have strong opinions on what's true." As an evangelical child, I was taught specific things about some of these other beliefs. Astrology was *wrong*. It fell under the kind of "divination" that the Bible forbade, to the point where I read a spoof horoscope once and worried I might have sinned. The existence of aliens was very, very dubious, because trying to fit it with the Genesis account of creation, which we saw as geocentric thematically though not physically, just didn't work that well. So no, you're not going to find evangelicals believing in these things in large numbers. And Bigfoot doesn't seem to me to be the exception Scott thinks it is: isn't the exciting thing about Bigfoot that he's maybe-kinda-sorta sentient? If he were just a weird ape, wouldn't we leave him to Jane Goodall and her successors and go haring off after aliens instead? As with aliens, Bigfoot simply doesn't fit the revealed story: the Bible says God made a big deal of creating humans on the sixth day and giving them souls; if God had made a rough prototype first, the Bible would have *said.*
But if this were true, then wouldn’t we still expect to see religion being positively correlated with these conspiracies? Since accepting one conspiracy theory seems to make you more predisposed to accept others (people who believe Bush did 9/11 seem more likely to be Q-Anon) rather than negatively? If not, why do *these* theories protect people against other theories.
The Jordan Peterson angle on this is not really universal, though: what exactly constitutes a socially maladaptive falsehood is strongly culturally dependent. So the benefits of the falsehood may vary strongly with an observer's viewpoint.
A lot of these folks just want to give SJWs something to do, like traditional "feed the poor because Jesus" stuff, so they stop inventing new and annoying ways that child proof caps on tylenol are ableist and transphobic.
The probelm with SJWs (cringe name btw, wokies is the new deragotary label) types is that they're poisonous no matter what ideology tries to contain them. In the1000s their attitude-ancestors were the ones calling for the crusades, in the 1950s their attitude-parents were the ones freaking out about the commies in western countries. Their attitude-siblings are there in middle-eastern countries, freaking out because a pop-sci show doesn't mention the islamic god when discussing cosmology. As we speak right now there is probably a chinese kareen is gruelling a poor guy about how his book is offensive (or whatever word they use in china) toward the legacy of the great mao. Wokism is everywhere & forever. It's basically guaranteed by a certain mutation of ideologies, a mutation that ideologies often develop.
When you think about the ways to stifle and de-activate wokies, you will find pretty soon they are ideology-agnostic. Strong norms against busy-bodism and self-appointed-police, strong norms for standing up to yourself and defending oneself with evidence, strong norms against struggle sessions and for intra-group etiquette. Those are just general group hygiene. Religion isn't particularly anti-woke.
Actually, this is why Catholicism is superior as a religion. Monasticism removes the aggressively pious from society and diverts most of their energy into getting up for 3 AM prayers to show how morally superior they are to everybody else, with a small surplus of doing something productive for wider society. They can grouse all they want in there about how impious and immoral the normies are and everyone around them will agree with them, and they get to live in a much nicer house than the stupid peasants, all the while being completely controlled by church superiors who are never chosen from among the woke ("eh, Sister Assumpta could never become abbess, she's too... fervent in her faith. It makes her impractical").
(You're largely wrong about the Crusades: those were mostly set off by a surplus of regular old fighty lads who weren't going to inherit land because they were born second, yet had a significant capacity for violence. Better to use them to destabilize the Saracen's country than your own. Sure, Peter the Hermit was woke, but it only caught on because it was so useful.)
EDIT: I should probably clarify that I'm talking about culturally hegemonic Catholicism here – it doesn't work if you can just opt out.
Ha, good comment, even though I don't precisely agree with your take on monks, there's probably a lot of truth to it -- both humble and good people and unsufferable self-righteous snobs. I'm a Protestant but I've long been fascinated by the idea of monasticism. The Protestant reformers really disliked it, and I understand their objections (yes, Protestant monarchs had cynical motives, but I think Luther and Calvin were sincere), but I still wonder if it's better to have the monasteries around than not. Though you're also right that the benefit you describe only really works if it's hegemonic.
And you're correct about the Crusades. One thing I seldom hear called out is the far-reaching Norman explosion of the second half of the 11th century, and I really see the Normans as exemplifying the crusading spirit, but it was certainly present elsewhere.
Over the course of a few decades, adventuring warriors from that one section of France conquered and took for themselves England and Wales (as is much-discussed), but also Southern Italy, the Principality of Antioch, and extensive holdings within the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Aragon. They moved into Ireland and Scotland a bit later. That's quite a spread, and it represents quite a lot of aggressive energy that would be nice to direct towards one's enemies and away from one's friends.
This thing about the Normans is very true, and it's also interesting that they were only a couple generations removed from Viking ancestors – what really separates a Viking raiding army from a crusade? That one section of France was *also* conquered, not that much earlier, by the same people and in the same way as all the rest, and I don't think there's any *paradigmatic* distinction between conquering Normandy and the Holy Land.
I forget where I read this, but I've even seen a claim that there's documentary evidence of the Norman crusaders raising their old ancestral battlecry when they stormed the walls of Jerusalem – a cry whose words they no longer understood, and used because it was traditional, but which was in fact an invocation of Týr, left-handed battle god of the Danes, in Old Norse.
I dunno, people in modern Spain, Italy, Portugal and Mexico can opt out, and those countries are significantly less woke than the United States, Britain and (I think?) Germany.
I think there is an interesting evolutionary corollary to the JP take on religion, in that he doesn't take into account the potential confounding variable that the most devout religious are also the most intellectually incurious. It seems probable that they are less susceptible to conspiracies and woo because they are simply uninterested in ideas and more closed-minded than the average person.
Interesting to note that Catholicism seems broadly accepting of some of the woo - according to the graphs above that's 31% believe in astrology and 61% in UFOs - more than any other religious / non-religious affiliations listed. As a teenager in the 1980s I transitioned from Irish Catholic childhood to Fortean mystic then via a degree in biology with Dawkins et. al. to hard-core evolutionist / born-again atheist. Several peaks and valleys beyond, I'm feeling much better now, thanks...
That really surprised me because, as you point out, belief in astrology is contrary to dogma. However, I suspect that a great many Catholics *don't know that*, because (a) only a small proportion of churchgoers read the Cathechism, and (b) you don't really get many homilies on astrology (perhaps we need them).
People suggest the Galilean debates was about science and religion, but it was really more about preserving the Aristotlean paradigm.
I think John the Grammarian, 5th century, a Christian, was the first to attack Aristotle. One of the important things he proposed was that what is UP there is the same substance of what is down here.
People from Catholic backgrounds are more likely to self-identify as Catholic despite not/no longer going to Church, so I expect they'd skew the data somewhat.
Evangelicalism in practice has a sort of skepticism around magic that's justified without materialist reasoning. Occult and witchcraft is the worst because you could be communicating with demons. They snark at certain Catholic rituals because "uhh... saints' relics? gross, guys, and those things aren't magic anyway, just pray to God."
Miracles, prophecy, angels, etc., all cool though, as long as it's God who's sending them.
St. Bonaventure, a doctor of the church, wrote about "extraterrestrials" - in fact, it is another word for "angels". The possibility of life and intelligent life beyond this planet has never by excluded. You might investigate Michael Crowe from Notre Dame, a specialist in the history of modern physical science and pretty nice and thoughtful fellow, "The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750–1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell". https://reilly.nd.edu/people/faculty/michael-crowe/
I'll admit that part of the arguement basically boils down to "if you have religion, conspiracy theories and woo don't really provide much extra" - the Illuminati, the healing power of crystals and the guidance of the stars are all a bit redundant when Satan, prayer and the divine plan of God are already part of your worldview.
I don't think so. Religions (as the combination belief system, culture and sometimes organization) have immune systems against new beliefs, and the strength of those immune systems varies a lot. Some polytheistic systems, like Rome's, had an adopt-and-corrupt approach; you can easily and happily add a new pantheon, provided they bow to Jupiter or your head god is actually just Jupiter as worshipped by different people. Others, like Christianity, have rather strong immune systems. The successful attempts to mutate the faith largely ended in schisms (see LDS, seventh day adventists, gnostics, unitarians, etc.) Even *relatively* minor points of faith like when people should be baptized have led to multiple schisms.
Most 'woo' belief systems have very weak immune systems. You can believe in Wicca, Astrology, the Flat Earth, Ley Lines and Auras all at the same time, and noone will think anything of it. If you add on that you believe in Jesus Christ as well, and have it all worked out in your head how he fits in your worldview, they largely won't care.
In so far as Christianity is protective against woo, it's because of its strong immune system. If you are a Christian (socially+belief+organization), and you tell another Christian that you ALSO believe in Wicca and think that crystals have auric power to heal, they'll tell you that you're sinning grievously, and probably try to stage an intervention. Or at least, tell everyone in the church to keep their kids and impressionable youth away from you. There will be serious consequences, so those who might be tempted to add to the faith generally don't.
Edit: It's also worth noting that on this level ("beliefs + culture + organization?") it's completely fair to include New Atheism as a religion. And if you think about it's immune system, it's really strong. If Dawkins comes out and says he doesn't believe in any God or supernatural forces because he can't observe them, but there are hundreds of barely observed giant hominids in the world, he will be WIDELY rebuked and admonished. New Atheism is not tolerant of those who deviate in any particular. Which is probably why there are very few people who identify as atheist and also believe in woo.
I mean, technically that was the Bavarian Illuminati's stated goals:
"The society's goals were to oppose superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life and abuses of state power."
I will concede that Christians are uniquely vulnerable to complimentary conspiracy theories and woo - a satanic/atheist conspiracy (what's even the difference, am I right?) is more plausible if you already believe Satan is plotting against the Church, but you don't actually need the Illuminati for that unless you want to get more specific.
I guess the point is that if you test for religious conspiracy theories you're basically doing the same as the guys testing right-wing conspiracy theories. Of course, you're free to skip the whole discussion by classifying all religions as conspiracy theories, but then that strategy works both ways...
How are you using "conspiracy theory" here? It doesn't seem like anyone would have to conspire for Satan to be corrupting the US. And even if it did require a conspiracy, why would that let you dismiss it out of hand?
Imagine if you could use that in court. "Ladies and gentleman of the jury - yes, the prosecution has DNA evidence, fingerprints on the murder weapon that match my client, and 4K video of my client committing the murder. However, one of the charges against my client is 'conspiracy to commit murder'. That makes it a conspiracy theory, so it can't possibly be true. I rest my case."
The first step in understanding is actually ATTEMPTING to understand...
There are many ways to interpret the relationship between Evangelicals and Satan, and the one you presented is a strawman.
A better interpretation is that Satan represents the part of ourselves that wants something different from what our "concious" or "primary?" self wants. In other words it represents an acceptance of the divided self, as opposed to the standard social sciences model (paging Gary Becker...) of the unitary self.
Now you can look at this and say "stupid evangelists, there's no such thing as a red anthropoid with cloven hooves living at the center of the earth". Or you can say "stupid social scientists, obviously the lived reality of every person is of a divided self, and to pretend otherwise is hardly a great starting axiom for your cargo cult 'science'". Which is the greater degree of woo?
I say all this not because I'm an evangelist (I'm not, I'm hardcore atheist) but because I think, not to toot my own horn, there's an easy explanation for this bimodal distribution, namely consilience, as I described in a previous comment:
The median strongly religious person, like the median atheist, may be dumb by themselves, but they both feel that they are part of a tradition that has attempted hard to connect multiple cross-cutting pieces of data to multiple cross-cutting theories, and in both cases the result is a degree of skepticism to anything that doesn't link very well with that pre-existing background.
The alternative of a self-created culture is every bit as lunatic as you would imagine, whether on the right (QAnon) or on the left (humans are blank slates on which we can impose whatever gender, sexual and other preferences we like). In both cases there are pseudo-links between factoids, but in both cases the primary goal of the infrastructure is to define and demonize an Other, it's not to approach Truth (hell, on the left it's an article of faith that Truth does not exist...), so inconvenient facts are ignored, analogies are cherry-picked, and incompatible arguments are papered over. (A very obvious version of this happening before our eyes is as we see Team Trump and Team Hillary [with a small admixture of Team Hunter Biden] each asserting the exact same arguments that they mocked four years ago.)
With enough time, it's possible that a self-constructed culture can grow rich enough and self-critical enough to start caring somewhat about truth. I suspect this has been the case for all the large religions; to last a few thousand years and not be conquered, you need a set of policies that are, at least in practice, somewhat conformant with physical and social reality even if the words used to describe those policies are nonsensical. But neither the hysterical left nor the know-nothing right have been around for nearly long enough for that to happen. Most people get sick of the fights, the finger pointing, the crazy attacks and struggle sessions and the rest of it, the use of everyday life as a weapon.
The Mormons seem to have reached that point today. The Russian seem to have given up the serious crazy around the 60s, likewise the Chinese around the 1990s. Of course in the past things move slower. The seriously Christian Crazy flared up on and off till Nicaea, then again with Iconoclasm; the seriously Protestant Crazy lasted about 100 years.
Perhaps today's crazy can last about 50 years before enough people either get sick of it (specifically the constant, on-going use as a weapon against anyone part) or see through its hypocrisies and lies (there comes a point at which you simply cannot paper over the inconsistencies any longer)...
But right now we're really only about ten years into the true crazy; quite a few more to go...
And meanwhile, well, you can choose to embrace one of the sides – and live with the consequences. Or you can, as the kids say, Touch Grass. Anchor your belief system in something that wasn't put together by some seriously disturbed individuals over the past twenty years, and ignore everything that either does not fit that belief system, or is simply not important even where it may fit.
A conspiracy requires two or more members, so if you believe *Satan* is orchestrating a grand design, then that doesn't count. If you believe that Satan, Barack Obama, the Queen of England, and Lady Gaga are all deliberately acting in concert, then yes.
And pedantry about the definition of "conspiracy" aside, that's a real difference. The belief that Satan is orchestrating a grand design is not actionable, except maybe as an excuse to not be evil. It's a bit of generic cosmology mixed with a bit of generic morality. The belief that specific living human beings are a part of that conspiracy, whether you are then called upon to kill them or just to denounce them and vote against them, is something very different.
But the latter version is very similar to the belief that Obama, Lizzie II, and Gaga are all secretly secular lizard people, or Illuminati or whatnot. So it would be interesting to know whether that sort of conspiracy, independent of whether L. Morningstar is assumed to be a member, is more prevalent among the religious or irreligious (and again whether hardcore atheists are their own category).
Atheism has overlap with conspiracy theories as well. The many atheists who write off the early accounts of the life of Jesus and the early church as having been fabricated by later believers are literally engaged in a conspiracy theory.
One way to interpret this data is just to look at where people source their beliefs. Which of the following talks about Bigfoot most often: a pastor (religious Christians), your social circle (less-religious Christians/agnostics), or public atheist intellectuals (atheists)? I think this heuristic maps pretty well to all of the examples here. Non-believers will believe anything that their preferred source of truth prescribes. One thing that's perhaps nice about having a specific religious belief system is that it is seemingly less "hackable" than the other alternatives, e.g. social knowledge can seemingly easily be modified via a small but dedicated Twitter campaign, so if this is someone's primary source of truth, it's easy to manipulate them.
I'm basically claiming "willing to believe anything" is a description of people whose beliefs are acquired primarily socially, because those are the people whose beliefs are easiest to modify; it seems reasonable that this is less true of both religious people and hard-core atheists, though for somewhat different reasons.
I think the distinction of socially acquired beliefs vs other beliefs is less clear-cut than you make it out to be.
While there are probably some people who pick up a bible or Dawkins and become religious or atheists, even for these a socialization where the new belief is acceptable is probably helpful. I would estimate that the vast majority of church-goers was baptized during childhood. Does not get much more "socially acquired" than that.
I can however imagine that there are people with a preference for a fixed, coherent(ish), closed world view and people who are willing to engage with all sorts of conflicting theories on a provisional, perhaps even Bayesian basis.
This is also a function of the social environment, of course. In a heterodox environment, the social costs to subscribe to a minority belief (e.g. Bigfoot) is vastly smaller than an orthodox one. (Does Bigfoot have a soul? Are they structurally oppressed?)
Furthermore, while the coherent world views preclude most smaller conspiracy theories (if the devil is corrupting the US through the Democrats, Bigfoot can be a diversion at best), smaller, domain-limited conspiracy theories actually support each other some of the time (if "they" can cover up Bigfoot, they can also cover up UFOs, fake the moon landing etc).
from random sources. I think the solution here is that religious people and skeptics alike have beliefs determined by very well defined algorithms, whether that be Bayesian probability or just doing whatever the Bible says, both of which are hackable with only a lot of work. If you have no beliefs in particular to guide you, then why not believe whatever random thing comes across your plate.
IF the beliefs have been around for a "long" time, then they pretty much have to be smoothed and shaped to match reality. The words stay the same but the interpretations change: the words are allegories of this that or the other.
This pretty much has to be a multi-generational thing because the generation that adopted the first round of craziness is more or less immune to ever admitting they were wrong. The kids grow up seeing the pathologies and hypocrisies, but maybe not enough so (especially since generations don't have smooth boundaries). It takes about two generations at least before there's enough general disillusion that no-one takes the words too literally or seriously any longer, and the whole thing morphs from cult to religion. It will be interesting to see what happens to Scientology after David Miscavige dies...
So: point is not where did the beliefs come from.
It's: have the beliefs survived in the real world long enough to have to adapt to reality.
(And of course beware of names, especially when they're being used as weapons.
Protestantism was something different from "Christianity" (ie western european catholicism) even if you claim the same name, and had to go through its generations of being molded to sanity. I suspect "Militant Islam" or whatever their preferred term for it is the same sort of thing – superficially it's Islam, but in terms of understanding the appeal and the crazy, it's something new that glommed onto (some of) the pre-existing Islamic infrastructure.)
I think "hack" is the wrong word here, or at least misleading, because it implies too much intent. I think it's difficult for any one individual to intentionally set out to influence the twitter conversation and succeed, yes. But it's self-evidentially true that a single person can *accidentally* influence the whole of twitter for a day, as the concept of "twitter main characters" shows. Evocative memes (in the original sense) spread more easily and rapidly on twitter, where the only gatekeeper is what people find engaging, than in the church, where there are specific appointed gatekeepers with strong predetermined dogma who are focused on spreading memes that are thousands of years old.
You do get ideological capture though - if Jerry Falwell chooses to embrace a political party, then that will bring his whole movement over, in a way that a less centralized group won't.
I think arguably we can see precisely this sort of thing happening with the Republican party, where Donald Trump has nearly single-handedly changed a lot of official party viewpoints in a way that couldn't happen through any single individual to the much less centralized Democratic party.
I don't think Trump is a good analogy here. The Republican Party wasn't actually all that centralised until he showed up, and he was an outsider who brought in his own viewpoints rather than an existing leader.
This wasn't "the Pope was convinced of [stuff] and took the faith with him", this is more like "a messiah candidate came in and stole the congregation out from under the priests".
As someone who has attended several Churches of Christ and also become an atheist, no, they do not. This is just a weird gotcha that honest consideration of both groups pretty much annihilates.
Lutherans do put a lot of stuff in my mailbox unasked, though. It's true that evangelism isn't the defining feature, though.
The real difference is that said Lutherans have a particular doctrine, a particular supernatural worldview, holy scripture, particular ceremonies and sacraments, a moral system that believers are at least supposed to adhere to, particular views about the future of the world, sacred buildings, professional clergy, and so on, and so on. Atheism doesn't have anything like that.
Yes, most atheists reject the idea that they sound or behave like true believers, but the rest of us, from the outside looking in, find it a pretty accurate description.
The thing is that many atheists like to draw themselves into a category with ‘apatheists’—people who don’t care about the existence of God, don’t see any reason to believe, are as unmoved by the subject as I am unmoved by late-night commercials for the Slap Chop. But these people don’t really resemble atheists, despite being atheists technically. The biggest difference is obvious: they would not read this article—it would be boring. They would not care what is said about atheists—that’s somebody else’s problem. When somebody implies that atheists believe in materialism which is very much faith, they don’t type any response into the comment field because they don’t care and they’re not there.
I stipulate that these people are, in fact, atheists of a kind. But if you quiz them about God they are likely to shrug and say that God might be out there, who knows? These are the true nonbelievers in that they cannot muster any passion about the subject whatever.
There’s a huge behavioral gulf between these people and the usual sort of people who call themselves atheists. The usual sort of atheist is not apathetic about religion. He may define himself as ‘lack of belief in a God or gods,’ just like the apatheist. But he is deeply interested in religious matters, contrary to the apatheist: he usually finds religious matters quite stupid and worthy of contempt; sometimes this extends to finding religion a social ill, or accusing it of thwarting scientific progress or starting wars. He shows up in debates about whether God exists to complain of the lack of proof: he’s usually convinced that the proofs for God are poor. He *may* aver strong atheism, but more frequently says that he doesn’t *disbelieve* in God, he just doesn’t see any *evidence* for God and therefore fails to believe (he has fine-grained epistemology and is sensitive to accusations of counter-belief). Many do, in fact, proselytize. They don’t go door to door as Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses do, but then most Christians don’t do that either: they do start YouTube channels. For the most devoted and passionate there are things like Street Epistemology or Pastafarianism.
There are of course many differences between e.g. Christians and devoted atheists under the hood. It would be a very poor look for Christianity if there were not! But the usual sort of *avowed* atheist usually reminds others of a true believer for good reason.
People who believe in homeopathy and people who actively work to disconfirm homeopathy (who, btw, are not *most people* who do not believe in homeopathy, or who strongly disbelieve in homeopathy - the same is true of atheists) are also exactly the same by this inane logic.
The difference is that the homeopath goes to take his 9C pills when he feels poor, and the anti-homeopath does whatever medicine he actually believes works instead (probably going to the doctor, but also possibly exercise, CBT, multivitamins, keto, or some other woo besides homeopathy). This is, similarly, the vast and enormous difference between even the most obnoxious atheist and the Christian.
“People who believe in homeopathy and people who actively work to disconfirm homeopathy (who, btw, are not *most people* who do not believe in homeopathy, or who strongly disbelieve in homeopathy - the same is true of atheists) are also exactly the same by this inane logic.”
Weird, not sure who you’re replying to: I explicitly said that atheists and theists were not ‘exactly the same.’ I don’t think you understand the argument, unless you meant to post this elsewhere.
No, but on the other hand, you do have the Eliezer Yudkowskys of the world, who prophesy that with certainty the end of this age is at hand; even now, brothers and sisters, our wickedness hastens the coming of the Adversary, who shall blot out the kings of the earth and punish every man according to his misdeeds, even after death.
That there are differences between atheists and the religious is undeniable. What is in question are whether there are distinct similarities in behavior, and I’m not seeing an argument against that.
This seems to boil down to "atheism is a religion because atheists have opinions on religion". I have strong oppositional opinions on fundamentalist Islam; does that make me a Muslim?
"I stipulate that these people are, in fact, atheists of a kind. But if you quiz them about God they are likely to shrug and say that God might be out there, who knows?"
That's the very definition of an agnostic, not an atheist.
Atheism isn’t a religion and I am not arguing that it is. What I am arguing is that atheists share a tremendous amount of social behavior and intellectual features with committed believers in religion.
“That's the very definition of an agnostic, not an atheist.”
Not according to many atheists!
(Incidentally, I agree with you, to an extent. Agnosticism is compatible with atheism.) But many atheists aver that having no belief in God is not a belief, and therefore that the definition of an atheist is not *disbelief* in the existence of God/gods, which is equivalent to *belief* in the nonexistence of God/gods, but rather the *absence* of a belief in God/gods.
I don’t really care about this. Obviously unqualified atheism is the active disbelief in the existence of God. However, if we choose to go with atheism-as-many-atheists-define-it, then we must include people I would term apatheists, agnostic atheists: people with no belief in God because they don’t care about the question and don’t know the answer. If we say these people are *not* atheists, then the atheists who claim that ‘absence of belief makes one an atheist’ are themselves not atheists: they’re agnostics.
This is a semantic battle; I insist on rigor but don’t really care if the answer is that atheists must disbelieve in God or that atheists are anybody who don’t know or care. I just won’t let them have it both ways, motte-and-bailey.
Also, there's nothing about atheism that orders your experience, worldview or stance on the supernatural. There's no moral or ethical teaching in it. Atheism is a _state of mind_, the state of not actually believing in any gods.
This doesn't mean that something like this can't be created that is also atheist - Communism for instance looks a *lot* like a religion apart from excluding the supernatural. There, you have Holy Writ, Heresies and Excommunication, prophecies about the future (and inevitable) paradise, organizations that take on a lot of of the properties of churches, and so on, and so on.
But not believing in god doesn't actually lead you to *anything*. There are plenty of atheists that believe in other nonsense anyway, any number of ethical systems that might attract them, and a lot aren't even physicalists.
We can coin a term "Azeusist", person who don't believe in Zeus. Is Azeusism a religion? Of course not, that's obviously ridiculous. Do azeusists in fact have *anything* in common apart from not believeing in Zeus? No. Expand that to not believing in any other god either, and the same conclusions obtain.
Taboo the question as to whether atheism is a religion, and talk about whether atheism has the particular characteristics you are interested in in this instance.
The reason athieism is not a religion, even incu luding people actively skeptical of religion: religions put great stress on beliefs that are unverifiable like the existence of a diety, effectiveness of prayer, life after death. There are a lot of arguments against religion, but probably the most salient that an acceptance of unprovable assertions is for suckers.
Religious people do say many things that are true and that can be verified, or that are intuitively reasonable. Thou shalt not kill, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. But they mostly also say stuff that a martian psychologist would say is plainl y delusional. The reasonable stuff is available in lots of ways that dont sound nuts.
If you want to go by that definition, then atheism is definitely a religion.
How does the atheist worldview answer "What created the universe?"
Monotheism has an easy answer to that - the unmoved mover.
Atheists will either say "I don't know" or mumble something about the big bang, but if you ask them what caused the big bang, they still don't know what came before it. Sometimes they'll say that the big bang created time itself, but how could the big bang have "happened" or "started" or "banged" without the concept of time already existing? Those words only have a coherent meaning in the context of an existing timeline. 13.7 billion years ago, the universe "started", but how could it have started at the exact "moment" that it did when there was no such thing as a "moment"?
The atheist worldview must accept on faith that "something created the universe, and I have absolutely no idea what or why, but it definitely wasn't God."
Possible selection bias? If there is a hardcore atheist who never talks about, you are unlikely to find out. The hardcore believers usually have to do some observable things.
If it's about the social behaviour, presumably that implies that a committed Christian who doesn't like to publicly discuss their faith isn't actually religious.
You are trying to use definitions to draw conclusions. It doesn't work that way - you just find out that words are ambiguous as they usually are.
The point here is that the two groups, although in firm disagreement, exhibit similarities in social behavior (that other groups, such as agnostics, do not).
If the definition of the word "religion" is so ambiguous that it is not worthwhile to discuss whether a particular belief is or is not religious, then your original comment ("This data simply supports the claim that ideological atheism is a religion") was not worthwhile.
It is worthwhile as long as we don't try to mix different meaning of the word. And the meaning is explained in my previous comment: this is just one more common behavior, so it is useful in many cases to bundle those groups together (call it religion or anything you'd like). Not always - but it's also not always useful to bundle Shia and Sunni together.
And what's the significance of the similarity in social behavior? Is it supposed to discredit atheists, or the religious? Unless the similarities are precisely what atheists object to in religion, they are curious but inconsequential, and vice versa if the similarities are supposed to discredit religion.
I'd agree that some atheists can behave like evangelists in the sense of aggressively trying to persuade, but I don't think that makes atheism "a religion."
You can be an evangelist for lots of things, it's basically just (at least as I define it) a particularly aggressive and irritating form of attempted persuasion - people are evangelists for less oil drilling/more oil drilling, for "natural" birth, for particular views of history, etc etc, but it doesn't necessarily make all those things into religions.
Yeah, whether atheism is a "religion" depends entirely on exactly what you mean by "Religion" and "Atheism." It's a disguised query. Sure, New Atheism had evangelists, a social structure, a common set of beliefs, and a set of informal thought leaders. It even had congregations in some places who did meetups occasionally.
If you're discussing religions purely as social phenomena, sure, New Atheism is a religion for the purpose of the discussion. That's quite distinct from discussing what's likely to be true, or discussing the beliefs in general. New Atheism's beliefs are very different from any religions, so it doesn't make sense to group it with them when talking about beliefs.
But when people evangelise for those other things, they generally don't claim that they entail you renouncing your religion. Because talking (and sometimes more extreme measures) people out of their religions pattern-matches to religious behavior, it's not hard to see why this meme is so persistent.
Maybe its jsut my age, but my friends and I were mostly atheists who were in college 10 years before "new atheism" and while in college there was some mild "evangelizing(we had a non-religious students club where we talked about the history of religion, and ethics and whatnot). But by say 2005 we were all mostly done talking about atheism, none of our beliefs change, but once you are out of college it just doesn't really come up ever.
So many people seem to characterize atheists by the 1% of them that are really outwardly performative about it, but a huge number of us are totally invisible other than you know glancing around at each other during a funeral prayer when everyone has their heads down praying.
This is primarily because atheism was subsumed by leftism. I can think of two reasons why:
1. The vast majority of internet atheists are white men. Leftism told them that their slight annoyance at being evangelized at is irrelevant compared to the struggles of "people of color".
2. While many whites have become apatheists in recent decades, a lot of black people are still religious, so it's now considered passé to talk about religious people as being stupid and ignorant because the archetype of a "religious person" is more black-coded than it used to be. It's only acceptable to criticize "religious people" if you make it very clear that you're talking about white southern evangelicals. (A similar phenomenon could be observed recently with media coverage of vaccines: whites are "anti-vax, anti-science conspiracy theorists" while blacks have "vaccine hesistancy" or "mistrust").
That seems to lump together people who self-identify as atheists, people who self-identify as agnostics, and people who self-identify as “nothing in particular”, who behave very differently when they are broken out here.
"Not collecting stamps" is clearly not a hobby, but "trying to convince stamp collectors to quit collecting stamps" certainly can be.
So I suppose it really depends on the atheist in question. Most are just living their own lives, completely un-invested in the religion question, but it's hard to deny that there aren't a loud minority that behave more like evangelists for the cause.
To be fair, though that doesn't make atheism a "religion" though, you can be an evangelist for lots of causes.
*edited - wow, that was a rather important "doesn't" I left out.
Sounds about right. I think the whole “atheism is a religion” thing is really confusing religion and evangelism.
You can evangelize about pretty much anything, religion and atheism included, but just doing that doesn’t make the thing a religion - it just makes the evangelist in question a bit annoying.
"Religion is usually defined as a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements"
It's blatantly obvious that this doesn't apply to atheism. It might be possible to construct an atheistic religion that includes these things without in fact having a god (some forms of Buddhism could even be said to already do so), but this clearly isn't the mainstream.
Oh? Then tell me more about this moral system, worldview, ethics, and organization that all (or even just most) atheists share in? And just what the supernatural, transcendental and spiritual elements are?
Nope. A religion has one or more deities (or at a very minimum, elements of metaphysics). Being vigorous, restrictive, or prescriptive about an ideology - even *way too vigorous* as some atheists are - does not satisfy that very basic definition.
I think the eastern Germany case is best explained by the fact that if you've grown up with the Powers that Be lying to you all the time about everything, often quite brazenly defying you to call them out on it (and bringing the full might of the State down on your head if you did), you will naturally expect the next set to continue doing so, because - why wouldn't they?
To be fair, this is hardly an absurd thing to believe, given the number of corruption, incompetence, and other scandals that emerge on a depressingly regular basis. I mean, look at what's happening with Olaf Scholz as we speak.
Trust is an easy thing to lose and very difficult to regain.
Yes the problem with any academic or journalistic attempt to study "conspiracy theories" is that they invariably pick beliefs that satisfies their own ideology and ignore any conspiracy theories by their own side.
E.g. here the Economist picks "illegal votes" as a "conspiracy theory" but ignores Russiagate, which is by far the bigger and more influential conspiracy theory. It also ignores things like the COVID lab leak - a conspiracy theory that by now anyone familiar with the evidence accepts is an actual conspiracy - a the meta-conspiracy surrounding it that tried to suppress all discussion of the possibility of a conspiracy.
Oh yeah - illegal votes in 2020 isn't some right wing evangelical conspiracy theory. I live outside the USA and had forgotten what day the US election was. I was reminded by friends (local friends!) suddenly starting to text me, asking if I was "watching what's happening". I was like, um, no, why, what's going on? Is something on fire in the city? No no, the US election. I said no, I'm busy, I'll see what the results are tomorrow in the papers. Then they started to tell me they were seeing people post crazy evidence of vote stealing. These people were NOT right wing, or at least mostly were not at the time (COVID countermeasures changed their politics for some of them). Only one was even American (an ex-pat). But they were convinced bad things were happening and they were seeing it in real time. So the idea that nobody on the left had these beliefs is just wrong.
Incidentally, it's so sad what a rag the Economist has become. I stopped subscribing a few weeks after ZMB became editor because the quality nosedived massively and immediately. I was shocked how much difference a single chief editor could make.
I guarantee that belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from the rightwing candidate via mass voter fraud was far more widespread among rightwing people than among leftwing people both on election day and on every subsequent day. This is why people call these theories rightwing.
Some of Bernie Saunders' supporters claimed that Hillary Clinton's supporters committed voter fraud to get Hillary elected as the Democratic Nomination for President.. I don't live in North America, but I think 'distrust in polling results' is already a bipartisan problem in the USA
Um, yes. Your phrasing sounds sarcastic, but why *wouldn't* "my preferred left-wing candidate is being targeted by a shadowy cabal to have the election stolen from him/her" be a left-wing conspiracy theory?
No sarcasm meant at all. I am just not finding anything particularly left wing or right wing about the notion 'we do not believe we can trust our election results'. Seems to me that it is bipartisan belief. EDIT: ah, I see now that you weren't replying to me but to Philo Vivero, sorry.
But your reply is exactly what I would have written.
I don't get how voter fraud is a conspiracy when applied to USA elections. Whether it was Bernie vs Hillary, or Trump vs Biden isn't really important. There's no "wing" on this thing, left or right.
In America maybe? But I don't see how that applies the people I know. The idea that this is a "right wing" concern is false. People who aren't really into politics, who aren't American and don't live in America were sounding the alarm to me about it.
Re: the votes thing, it probably doesn't help that US election security is shockingly bad compared to almost any other Western country. I don't know whether the Trump vs. Biden election actually was hacked, but I do know it would be considerably easier to hack than an election in France or the UK.
Something like 10-15% of the eligible voter population doesn’t have a valid ID, because most of the population doesn’t travel internationally, and some populations (particularly old and poor) don’t drive, and those are the contexts for which ID is given out.
I’m not sure why you’re saying people who care about the poor being able to vote don’t care about the poor being able to access banking. This is a major issue, but not one that is easily fixed.
If you look old enough (and being poor can make you look older), people at stores often don't bother to check IDs. Bank accounts aren't necessary. Cash cards can be used in place of credit cards where cash isn't accepted (I used one when subscribing here!). The definition of "ID" necessary for work can mean a lot of things, which may not overlap with ID necessary to vote, and that's putting aside "informal" (illegal) employment, as well as situations where the employer tacitly overlooks obvious falsehoods. I'm not aware of ID being legally required to rent an apartment (although it probably is required by the owner for any apartments where either of us would want to live).
Most of all that stuff can be done by just showing up in person and presenting a familiar face, which has the extremely important advantage of working after someone just stole all your stuff, including the ID. IMO, any identification requirement that isn't robust to frequent changes of address and frequent "someone stole all my stuff" incidents, isn't going to function for an unfortunately large number of people.
Yeah but so what? Large parts of Europe have an ID card system and everyone gets such a card whether you travel or not. It's not for any specific purpose, it's for every case where ID is needed. You're explaining what the present situation in the USA is, but that doesn't make it easier to understand, or why people claim fixing the ID situation would be racist.
They tried to fix the ID card system in the 1990s by creating a national form of identification that isn’t a passport, but it was criticized from both the right and the left as government intrusion in privacy. It’s weird that there are groups that are against national ID but for a requirement to show ID to participate in national elections, but that’s how it is.
Huh? That would void the point of having ID cards in the first place. Who do you mail them to exactly? Implementing schemes like that does involve a bit of up front work by each person who gets the card to prove who they are to a sufficient standard, although of course that can be just presenting a passport. But if you just mail them to anyone who asks lots of your ID cards will be faked and nothing was solved.
No idea about France, but the UK has more-or-less no election security. I've had someone go and cast my vote twice now (both by people I was living with who picked up the wrong polling card and were very apologetic about it). The polling card itself is something you could easily make if you knew someone's name and address. Postal voting has even less security, and no-one checks the electoral register to see if you're just making people up when you fill in the form.
And note that some Conservatives, especially ones in close seats with high immigrant populations (which unfortunately have correlated in the past with caught election fraud) have requested that election security be tightened for those exact reasons.
Unfortunately, the Conservatives haven't done anything about it for the usual reasons.
British election security is indeed dire, but at least the vote counts are generally finished by the morning after the election, making it harder to conveniently "discover" ballot boxes filled with just enough votes to put your preferred candidate in the lead.
...the polling card in UK elections is just a reminder to vote, it's not a document you have to take to the polling station to 'claim' your vote. That's why it's not difficult to forge, and also why you can bin it them moment it turns up if you like and still go and vote without a problem.
When you go to the polling station you are asked to give your name and address and those are manually crossed off a list of voters registered at your address. I suppose if, instead of replying, you handed over a polling card with somebody else's name printed on it, the election worker might cross their name off instead of yours; I think they are supposed to confirm who you are directly, though (they always have done when I've voted, whether I had the polling card with me or not).
When you register to vote the info you are asked to provide includes your name and date of birth as well as your NI number and your main place of residence. That is enough information for your identity to be checked against eg birth, tax, employment, and passport databases (reference: the paper registration form for those who don't want to do this online: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/931882/Register-to-vote-if-youre-living-in-England.pdf). You couldn't 'just make someone up', you would have to find an unregistered eligible voter and register them. Note that the form explicitly says that giving less information is fine but might mean you get contacted and asked for more evidence - if you can't give the electoral registry office enough to check up on your existence then that's when they come asking for ID.
Since the 'just make someone up' route is blocked any widespread voter fraud would be something of a logistical challenge. You'd have to get hold of the names and details of a large number of people who are eligible but unlikely to vote, and since one piece of information held (for example) in tax and employment records (which can be searched with the NI number) is primary address, you would really need to know where they all lived. Then you'd need to register them for postal voting, and make sure that none of them receive the letter confirming that they're registered for postal voting as that would rather give the game away.
Not saying that the system is perfect, or even particularly good, but it's not quite as doors-wide-open as your post implies. Just because there's not much security theatre doesn't mean there's no security.
Out of curiousity, what did you do when someone went and cast your vote accidentally? Did you get the vote back?
Both times, I decided that the joy I could get for sanctimoniously chiding them about how using their vote would be fraud and I was now disenfranchised was worth more to me than voting was.
In theory if you had gone to the polling station - assuming the election worker checked the name of the person voting as they're trained to - you would have found that it was the other person's name and not yours that had been checked off and your vote was still available for you to cast.
Belief in conspiracy theories probably correlates inversely with wealth and education, in which Eastern Germany hasn't fully caught up. Having had freedom of thought and speech for multiple generations might also be something of a cultural advantage for Western Germany.
I think the German Democratic Republic period oversaw both a decline in religion (which was not really compatible with the state ideology) and economic power (relative to West Germany).
(I am unsure why the long term effects on religion were so much higher in East Germany than in neighboring Poland, though. Perhaps in post-communist Poland, Christianity was seen as a Polish thing (setting them apart from the Soviets) while in East Germany, it was seen as a West German thing instead?)
I would mostly blame the economic situation for any excess anti-establishment ressentiments in eastern Germany.
Can't really speak for Germany, but in Poland Christianity was absolutely a Polish thing setting us apart from the Soviets.
Only, it was Catholicism and it set us apart from the Russians.
In fact, both approaches work just as well, because Poland had well over a hundred years of prior beef with Russia over (at the time) preferred flavours of Christianity. When the Soviets rolled in after WWII with their brand new ideas about religion (atheism, this time), it was merely a case of "not this shit again".
People who come from former Soviet states are super conspiratorial IME. I think it's more likely a result of growing up in a place where conspiracies were commonplace.
Yeah, I agree...I know many people from former "Eastern Block" countries, and they are really the "Trumpy" type quite often (at least the older ones)...
Saw this the other day but didn't really know what to make of it. Authors conclude that "spiritual understanding of life in the absence of a religious framework are vulnerable to mental disorder". I know the type, so to speak, but still seems like a wild conclusion.
I combed through the whole comment section to see if anyone else recognized that somewhere along the line the original sense of the aphorism had been lost and had been nonsensically redirected to things like UFOs and conspiracy theories.
Sure, Chesterton never said the words exactly but his obvious point about the atheism of his day predicted things like "my girlfriend's penis is bigger than mine", not "atheists think UFOs are real". "Believe any old damn thing" includes (from Chesterton's point of view) every single fence-tearing-down that has happened in the last century, including a large number of things that everyone in this comment section thinks are good: socialism, legalizing abortion or gay marriage, contraception, perhaps even giving women the vote -- and no, don't quibble with me that religious people like these things now, they mostly didn't in 1920 and Chesterton was speaking specifically about a traditional Catholic belief in God anyhow. Understood in this original sense, the aphorism is so tritely true as to not even be worth talking about.
I hope you're right. Why does it seem like the only people willing to say they find these statements absurd and destructive are either right-wingers, religious fundamentalists, or iconoclasts? Is that me not paying attention or is there a large contingent of people who just won't say it even though they believe it?
One datapoint (me) does not a conclusion make, but I think there is a large contingent of people who, like me, rarely find ourselves in a place where such things would be said at all. I only discovered this substack a few days ago, by the usual practice of finding it as something somebody who wrote something I like also reads. Upon examination, it is clear that this is a continuation of something that has been going on for a very long time, but still is new to me.
This particular thread is one that would, normally, be one I skipped as not interesting. I think it skews American. American atheists are far more likely to have grown up in a religious home than not, simply because America, at least until very recently, was that religious a society. People who have actively renounced their religious upbringing because they 'are too clever to believe that nonsense' and who hang out with people who believe the same, will quite naturally avoid other things their peers will chide them for as being nonsense. 'God - No. Astrology and Bigfoot - Yes.' does not play well in rationalist circles.
But the question is what does this say for their children and grandchildren? Unbelievers who come from 3 generations of unbelief will have different answers, I predict. 'God -- No. Bigfoot Yes!' 'Huh? Bigfoot -- really? Why is that?' 'I get to go hiking weekends with my friends in the Pacific North West looking for evidence, and drive my rationalist father into apoplexy at the same time! Win/Win! ' ' But do you _really_ believe? Oh, really believing is so 20th century, wouldn't you say? Who really believes in anything today!"
So, the only reason I am here is because I wanted to see how the conversation went here on a topic that could be predicted to be polarising. I was doing a 'civility test'. (Seems pretty civil, so far.)
Well, the "covid lab leak" was a "conspiracy theory" until we found out that scientists really were experimenting with gain of function research and tried to hide it. At that point it became a conspiracy (to hide it.)
I think a much more fruitful distinction is between everyday conspiracies - that happen _all the time_ - and grand conspiracies, which require hugely impressive efforts. When we talk about "conspiracy theories", we typically mean the latter.
The idea that Covid leaked accidentally from a lab and the Chinese government is doing its best to cover it up due to embarrassment is just a typical conspiracy - it might or might not be true (it very likely isn't, going by recent findings), but there's nothing insane about it, and it shouldn't be labeled a conspiracy theory. Believing that Covid is a world-wide conspiracy orchestrated by Bill Gates to inject us all with 5G "vaccines" that also turn us gay... is.
The truth is that "grand conspiracies" actually don't need huge efforts. For instance, were 9/11 an actual conspiracy, the simplest explanation would be that the CIA simply "let it happen." This would require the complicity of only one team within the agency. It's easy enough to dismiss it as a case of incompetence, and costs zero dollars. In fact it's suspicious that the theorists created elaborate scenarios involving additional explosions, as though Occam handed them a hammer.
That's only the case if that one team at CIA is the only one to get the early warning. Why is there one team that is both ok letting terrorism happen and is the only one who got the warning?
The obvious explanation would be that there is a supporter of Islamic terrorism inside that team in the CIA, ie one member of that team was an Al-Qaeda supporter, which is both why they knew and why they didn't do anything about it.
But 9/11 as a conspiracy in the conspiracy theory sense is: the Bush administration realised that 9/11 would enable them to invade Iraq, which they wanted to do and couldn't otherwise justify; jet planes crashing into the towers but not destroying them would be insufficient, and jet fuel can't melt steel beams, so they set explosives in the towers to demolish them, intentionally killing thousands of Americans, while also arranging for the planes to be flown into the towers because that enabled the hijackers to be clearly idenfied as Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda had nothing to do with it, it was entirely done by a covert arm of the US government who intentionally sacrificed a number of their own operatives, those being the actual hijackers.
That's a conspiracy theory explanation (one of many), and the problem is that there are a hell of a lot of people who would have known and they would leak; there are too many people who would know.
Big secrets, known by a lot of people, can hold for a long time, but only if the result when the secret does get out is that the wider society agrees that it was reasonable to keep it secret: for instance, the secret that the Allies had broken the German Enigma codes was kept for about 30 years after WWII. But it was uncontroversial when it was revealed that it was correct to have kept it secret for a long time.
Or even ”we use our security services to secure blackmail material to help one of our nation’s companies gain that contract” (a French specialty, as I understand it), ”we illegally surveil our own citizens”, ”our company utterly and deliberately fails to follow our own public privacy policy when there’s money to be made” or ”we secretly support certain artists to score points against the Soviets”.
Yup, somewhat larger scale, and I'm not personally familiar with the first case, but the latter three are NSA, Facebook, and CIA, IIRC, all well documented.
So you're saying we should describe things as "conspiracy theories" if we think they are "insane"? With the implication being that it's just absolutely crazy to suggest that people engage in the act of conspiracy, one of the most basic human behaviors? I guess the jig is up.
"[X] is just a typical conspiracy - it might or might not be true (it very likely isn't, going by recent findings), but there's nothing insane about it, and it shouldn't be labeled a conspiracy theory."
Are you using some nonstandard dialect of English where this means something different than what it means in my dialect?
It may be that your confusion stems from thinking "conspiracy theory" simply means "I think there's a conspiracy", but that's not the case at all. Let's say you have good reasons to believe that, say, the police falsified evidence and did a cover-up in some certain case. While that would be a conspiracy on their part, there's no "conspiracy theory" here. A "conspiracy theory" is something else.
Wikipedia: "A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation,[3][4][5] when other explanations are more probable.[3][6][7] The term has a negative connotation, implying that the appeal to a conspiracy is based on prejudice or insufficient evidence.[8] A conspiracy theory is not the same as a conspiracy; instead, it refers to a hypothesized conspiracy with specific characteristics, such as an opposition to the mainstream consensus among those people (such as scientists or historians) who are qualified to evaluate its accuracy.[9][10][11]
Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular reasoning: both evidence against the conspiracy and an absence of evidence for it are re-interpreted as evidence of its truth,[8][12] whereby the conspiracy becomes a matter of faith rather than something that can be proven or disproven."
So, the notion that Covid did a lab escape because of sloppy procedures and there was a cover-up attempt isn't a Conspiracy Theory. It could reasonably have been true, and as long as we let factual evidence decide, no-one in engaging in Conspiracy Theory. It just so happens that now that the science is in, it looks very unlikely that such a lab leak actually was involved. Only if you start rejecting this evidence to stick to the lab leak theory are you risking to move into such intellectual terrain, as you need increasingly convoluted explanations and larger and larger groups of conspiracists. If you decide that the scientists doing the study were also just part of the cover-up, then things are starting to look dubious, because now you have immunized yourself against any evidence.
Take the "elite pedophile rings" proposition, for example. Pre-Epstein that might've been called a conspiracy theory; post-Epstein, it seems like there just IS a conspiracy. I realize this is a misuse of the word theory, but that's how most people understand the difference.
An intel asset pimping 16 and 17-year-olds to wealthy targets doesn't satisfy to me the definition of an elite pedophile ring. Especially since it seems to me that they wanted us to know about it.
Idk, seems like splitting hairs to me. Obviously that’s not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “elite pedophile ring”--we probably all think of something more cultish--but if you showed me a bird’s eye view of Epstein and Maxwell’s activities and asked me if I was looking at an elite pedophile ring, I’d be hard-pressed to say no.
As I understand it, there was very little overlap between the theory of the elite pedophile ring and the actual pedophile ring though: The evidence for the original theory doesn't point at the actual pedophile ring and the people actually involved are mostly not the people who were accused.
There were (and are) a lot of different theories pointing at a lot of different elites, granted. As we still don’t know the full extent of who was involved with Epstein and to what degree, I’m reserving judgment. Personally, I would be surprised if at least one current or ex president hadn’t been tangled up with Epstein.
I think that CS Lewis had it right. He talked about critical thinking on advertisements and pointed out you could both be above and below an advertisement. So, for example, imagine you see an advertisement for a great vacation that's to what's actually a mediocre resort. You can, through dissecting the ad and outside knowledge, arrive at the idea the ad is probably lying to you. Or you can through British patriotism sneer at the ad's idea of going abroad and just ignore it. And in both cases you come to the correct conclusion.
It was only the middle that were too clever by half who'd be taken in. He then makes the point that the ad's deception works mainly through the sin of pride. The person who understands the ad is not being prideful in thinking they understand the ad. The person who doesn't understand the ad is not being prideful in ignoring what they don't understand. Only the person PRETENDING to understand gets taken in. And I wonder if that's what's going on: a lot of people leave religion not so much out of atheistic conviction but anti-religious sentiment and so get taken in by the next semi-religion that comes along.
Anyway, being CS Lewis, he sees the atheists as sneerers and the educated religious as the people capable of such dissection. But I think the point stands regardless of your preferences. (Ironically for the staunchly Protestant and somewhat anti-Catholic Lewis this was one of the points Catholics made against the Reformation.)
I'd be curious to hear a rationalist take on his concept of the sublime, actually.
I tend to think of it as intellectual outsourcing. In a world where you can't know everything you need to choose to put your trust somewhere on topics you don't have the time to understand. Some religious authorities are good at this and others are bad. But I'd say, in general, widely respected traditional authorities tend to be selected to be above average (if not great). So when you toss them out (possibly for very good reasons) you need to be VERY CAREFUL with what you replace them with. And it's a bit of a trap to think you won't need outside authorities at all. The biggest trick the devil played etc.
I think this is the “right” distinction here. The content of a person’s beliefs isn’t as important as the method by which they modify or change their beliefs.
The argument that religion protects you from bad beliefs is, I think, only true if you restrict “religion” to require a combination of “belief that there is one reality following consistent rules and conscientiousness in attempting to understand what those rules are and what is consistent with them.”
This is essentially the same value system as rationality.
Of course for “religious people” there may be some bit about God in there but really this is just a name for the top-most predictive node in the DAG. Committed atheists call it “material reality” and say it’s valence neutral. Religious people call the topmost node “god” and say it has positive valence.
But the phenomenon of plastering celebrity faces on things is consist with what the article calls “cultural inception,” and the people I know who care a lot about what celebrities think are all very status-minded and would probably be very susceptible.
Did you read the link? It argues that advertisers know exactly what they're doing.
Thaler & Sunstein hyped Brian Wansink's research in their book, and it all turned out to be worthless. Kahneman also said people had "no choice" but to believe in priming in one of his books, but after the replication crisis now admits he was wrong about that. I also remember when Dan Ariely was one of the people leading the behavioral econ "revolution" & I read one of his books. I recommend searching Andrew Gelman's blog for how to think of his work now.
I would be curious how religious millenarians overlap with AGI millenarians, since the basic views have so many similarities. Presumably if you already believe the Rapture is coming in a decade you’re not going to spend much time worrying about AGI takeoff.
I see this comparison made in the comments here several times per month. Perhaps Scott will write about it. Or has he already?
Imagine it's 1930. Someone says, 'Spinning uranium in a circle, so that more and more of it has fewer neutrons, will create weapons that could wipe out most of humanity.' What is more similar to belief in a high x-risk from AI, this hypothetical nuclear worry or religious millenarianism?
(I mean, they might be religious in a different way, but the concern about igniting the atmosphere is not a religion. The debate is whether believing an unusual thing is necessarily a form of religion.)
Anything can be anything, if you generalize too much. If donating money is religion (because guess who else donates money? the religious people!), then of course effective altruism is a religion. If thinking that "superintelligence" means "smarter than humans" makes you religious, then I guess a proper atheist must believe that "superintelligent" actually means "pretty dumb".
These are silly verbal games that can prove anything. Liberalism is a religion, because they believe that state is a benevolent power stronger than humans. Conservatism is a religion, because they believe in tradition, which is a invisible force that guides human lives (and they often also believe in some religion in the ordinary meaning of the word). Libertarianism is a religion, because they believe in the invisible superpower of free market... oops it's actually an invisible *hand* of market, clearly an anthropomorphic concept. Even mathematics is a religion, because mathematicians contemplate infinity, and they also pay money to buy scientific journals which is exactly like religious people buying indulgences. Software developers finding bugs and fixing them are like priests finding sins and exorcising them. Medicine is a religion, because it protects you from the invisible evil forces of viruses, by performing rituals such as washing your hands. Sitting on a sofa and watching TV for hours is suspiciously similar to Buddha meditating, so that's probably a religion, too.
Two things are allowed to have several traits in common, without necessarily being the same thing -- "abstract thinking", "reading books", "meeting in groups", "thinking about the future, which can be very good but also very bad", "donating money", "trying to change the world", "having thought leaders", and probably many more, are traits shared by religions and rationality / AI safety. It seems like they could be split into two groups: the logical consequences of discussing a nontrivial topic, and the logical consequences of trying to achieve some change in the real world. (For example, when a debate gets complicated, someone is probably going to write an article or a book summarizing their position. Or if someone wants to do a project, they will probably need money, so if you approve of the project, you might donate.)
Can you imagine a large group of people trying to achieve something difficult that *wouldn't* be a religion by your definition? (If not, does it mean that the only way to avoid the accusation of being a religion, is to never try doing something difficult together?)
Yes, there's something to this, having to do with traditional religious societies being happier than modern secular ones. It doesn't follow from this, of course, that religious achieved global maximum, just a local one that secular culture so far hasn't managed to find a better alternative to.
It could be the case that zealots, of any stripe, tend to subscribe to a single belief system with a reasonably clear and well-defined message (be it "Jesus saves" or "there is no God"). Such a system leaves no room for competing beliefs, which the zealot automatically treats as hostile, and will likely seek to eradicate.
Meanwhile, people with weakly held beliefs are open to pretty much anything, which they will believe in -- weakly. To a zealot, Bigfoot is a terrible lie which must be resisted and eradicated at all cost; to an ordinary person, it's something to mull over while having a brew with your buddies.
I was raised catholic. I remember being told many times that believing in astrology is wrong, magic is evil, less frequently that I shouldn't believe in UFOs. So maybe if you go to church more you're exposed to authority telling you to not believe those things more so you're more likely to not believe them / say you don't?
Interesting to note that Catholicism seems broadly accepting of some of the woo - according to the graphs above that's 31% believe in astrology and 61% in UFOs - more than any other religious / non-religious affiliations listed. As a teenager in the 1980s I transitioned from Irish Catholic childhood to Fortean mystic then via a degree in biology with Dawkins et. al. to hard-core evolutionist / born-again atheist. Several peaks and valleys beyond, I'm feeling much better now, thanks...
It's fairly common to find "cultural Catholics", who identify as Catholic despite not/no longer attending church and not knowing much about Catholic beliefs, so I'd guess that a lot of the "Catholic" responses on the survey would be more accurately classified as "Agnostic". OTOH, it's comparatively rare to find cultural Protestants, so they'd skew the data for Protestants less.
I suspect this is because Catholicism in the U.S. is incredibly ethnically diverse and many U.S. Catholics are first or second-generation Hispanics. Many Hispanic cultures are less materialist than the U.S. and more likely to believe in not only religion but the supernatural more broadly.
I'm a little wary of making such a claim strongly because it's very very close to stereotyping. But it was still my first thought on seeing this.
Yes. I think this person is into something. Evangelicals are less likely to believe in alien visitation because they’re more likely to believe that UFOs are demonic.
I was also raised Catholic - I feel like a telling aspect of this is that I wasn't taught that these things are *fake* but that they are *evil and dangerous* - implying that they're real.
I don't know about CS Lewis but I think this piece doesn't address Amjad Massad's argument. My interpretation of that argument is that as people go less to Church and are less connected to their community they're more likely to adopt alternative "religions" like QAnon or wokeism. Maybe that just means that Massad's argument isn't the same one as the argument addressed in this post.
Right, I think the real argument is that beliefs can come from different sources:
A (the gold standard) faith in a consistent stable reality outside your mind, plus accumulation of evidence that alters Bayesian probabilities. You use humility to limit your confidence to where it’s actually warranted, and introspection to assess slight inconsistencies in your world model. You see yourself as being flawed and know you’ll never be perfect but you strive for it anyhow. Probably nobody pulls this off perfectly, and only a small minority of weirdos makes an effort to pull this off, with varying degrees of success.
B - you’re part of a community whose leaders tell you what you should and shouldnt beleive. The community has good type A leaders, and you get most of the benefits while paying a fraction of the cost. Your beliefs are a fuzzy approximation of what the gold standard would produce.
C - you’re part of a community whose leaders tell you what you should and shouldn’t believe. The community does not have type A leaders. Your beliefs are an incoherent mishmash, a weighed average of the beliefs of the people around you.
I think people who identify as religious and strive for A would often see rationalists as fellow travelers who simply believe in a “god of physics”, like deism but with no positive valence attributed to the deity.
The problem with the "gold standard", that rationalists usually sweep under the rug, is that it makes no obvious normative claims. They have endless criticism for religious ones, of course, and then turn around and just quietly try to adopt total utilitarianism, or whatever.
Goddammit, I just wrote a whole long response above and now see you beat my to it by 6 hours.
Yeah, I think the Amjad tweet is the far more interesting conversation. Conspiracy theories are stupid and not especially viral. But wokeism is super viral and it's issues far more subtle.
Thank you for raising the source of that quote. I admit I'd always trusted that attribute to Chesterton, largely because it is *so very much like something he would have said* - and, as your Chesterton.org link points out, it is in fact very similar to a number of lines in his short stories. I think those extracts make it pretty clear that Chesteron would see the active mechanism as "people with coherent worldviews already have strong opinions on what’s true, making them closed-minded against conspiracy theories.".
The CS Lewis connection is harder to source at first glance. The first/best conceptual fit I could think of was the opening to the Screwtape Letters:
"I note what you say about guiding your patient’s reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naif ? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” or “false”, but as “academic” or “practical”, “outworn” or “contemporary”, “conventional” or “ruthless”. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. "
(for those who haven't read it, the entire book is advice from a senior to a junior devil on how to corrupt the junior's 'patient' and guide him to Hell).
This would appear to be a better fit for the "people with any coherent worldview are smarter or at least more intellectual than people who don’t care" as a mechanism.
From the examples you give, I suspect that there may be a number of different mechanisms at play for different conspiracy theories and groups - for example, a strict Catholic ought to disbelieve in astrology (as belief in superstitions - the unkind would say 'other' superstitions is prohibited; the only power is God), but would be open-minded towards Bigfoot. However, they may then be unlikely to believe in Bigfoot for completely unrelated and perhaps 'irrational' reasons such as it being heavily coded in pop-culture with nutters and rednecks, which our imaginary Catholic views as an outgroup. They could therefore reach the correct opinions via a mixture of dogma, native reason, and social snobbery.
Conclusion reminds me of a joke you'll sometimes hear among Muslims: the atheist is closer to Islam than most, because she's got the "there is no God" part of the shahadah down, now she just needs the "but God" bit. The shahadah, of course, is the Muslim profession of faith.
I say joke, but people say it in a serious sense too.
Yeah. It's sometimes (mostly jokingly) said that the monotheist is *almost* there. They already disbelieve in all gods except for one, so there's just one more to go...
Hinduism isn't really different from Christianity in that regard. It's only polytheistic if you consider each of the thousands of divine manifestations of Brahman to be its own distinct god, in which case the three coequal members of the Holy Trinity should really count as separate gods too.
If the members of the Trinity are actually distinct entities and not just different manifestations of one entity, then it makes even less sense to count them all as one god while counting each of Brahman's manifestations separately.
If you have a preferred truth mechanism, it's easy to reject weird ideas that fail the mechanism.
That's true whether your Truth Mechanism is "it's in the Bible" or "it's shown by science."
If this is the explanation, then atheists should be more vulnerable to scams that sound scientific, evangelicals should be more vulnerable to scams that invoke witchcraft or demons, and the wishy-washy middle is left to believe in astrology.
I think this is missing an important source of supernatural belief: hyperactive pattern recognition is often what makes people believe in supernatural explanations. So if you have high hyperactive pattern recognition, then being religious may prevent you from believing in other supernatural explanations, and when such a person leaves their religion, they will replace their religious belief with different beliefs.
But if you're not a hyperactive pattern recognizer, and you were born into a religion, you'll most likely leave it at some point, and become an atheist, at which point you have no need to believe in other supernatural explanations.
So for one type of person, leaving religion opens them up for belief in other supernatural explanations. But for another type of person, it does not.
I've always assumed this phenomena was about different people's varying drive for detail/clarity in their map of the territory (note: this is distinct from accuracy).
Most of the things you mention here take very little looking into to find they aren't coherent and don't make much sense, that the evidence generally discussed is terribly low quality, etc. People who are strongly, actively religious and people who are definite atheists are more likely to look at a statement (e.g. "astrology works") and want to a evaluate it's accuracy, spending the half hour or so to reach the conclusion "probably not". While certainly some agnostics and casually religious folks function similarly, they're washed out by people who don't have a strong compulsion to answer "does God exist, and if so, which one?". Those people are also less likely to feel any need to answer "does astrology work", and therefore remain at "well, lots of people believe in it, so maybe? Who knows?", having put no effort into finding or evaluating evidence.
Note that this doesn't cover passionate followers of various conspiracy theories who often build both their social life and worldview around weird views, but I tend to assume that's a small minority of nominal believers in most cases.
One thing I try to remind people of re: Christians who never go to church is that they are basically just saying they are Republican/Anti-coastal-culture, or similar. This makes a lot of this weird partially because a lot of things that get labeled conspiracy theories are kind of anti-education-anti-government oriented, as well as just plain "low education" oriented.
If actual churchgoing is going to help as an isolated factor, it probably has to not only be positive but actually so positive as to overwhelm all of that.
TBH this essay feels like it's missing the point somewhat. When people quote the "People who stop believing in religion start believing in anything" line, they usually do so with reference to beliefs like critical race theory, patriarchy theory, and other such belief systems. (The question of why these don't usually get described as conspiracy theories is left as an exercise to the reader.) So to really refute the argument, you'd have to show that religious believers are equally or more likely to believe in things like CRT.
Seems like the mirror image of the "churchgoers are more likely to believe QAnon" complaint, unless paired with a look into more neutral conspiracy theories.
Doesn't it fundamentally shake out to "people who stop believing [my religion], will believe [other religion]"?
I think this is a valid question to ask.
To a first approximation, it doesn't particualarly matter if bigfoot exists nor if you believe that he does. If the press were to announce that scientists working in the Amazon discovered a new species of tree frog, I bet you'd neither be surprised, nor skeptical of the claim.
The main thing about bigfoot (apart from striking build; also true for Nessie, but in a different way) is that we have some low-quality evidence in favour, and have failed to produce better quality evidence, despite no lack of trying. So, while it is *possible* bigfoot might exist, it also appears rather *unlikely*, and your choice boils down to whether you lean towards *possible* or *unlikely*.
Religions, CRT, gender theory et al. aren't merely academic questions. They carry very real consequences that affect your everyday life. The answer to "was the 2020 Presidential Election rigged?" may not directly impact your day-to-day, but it does carry significant implication regarding the socio-political environment you live in.
Therefore, I do get the impression that measuring "belief in some poorly-evidenced but otherwise neutral phenomena" and measuring "belief in poorly-evidenced, politically divisive statements" is actually measuring two very different things.
If you want to study belief in QAnon, you might do better to take something like Russiagate as a control.
Sloppy language aside, it's not intended as a sweeping sociological statement about the nature of belief. It's simply an attempt to lay the excesses of left wing social ideologies at the feet of atheism. I happen to think its all just confounded, and its uncharitable outgroup swipes etc but its different to what you're arguing against.
By definition, all conspiracy theories that don't involve supernatural forces are 'atheistic', but to be fair we would have to define most religions as 'theistic conspiracy theories'.
I understand this concern, but in this case I think it's misplaced on both sides - The quote intends to say "people who stop believing in God are unable to critically evaluate flash-in-the-pan ethical and truth-finding movements the way we can (because the correct ethics are ours, and the truth is there's a God)."
It's therefore fair to point out that religious folks have empirically failed at truth-finding, just as it's fair to point out that the non-religious still participate in quasi-religious behavior, just as it's fair to determine that the quote means "If people don't believe what I believe, they'll believe something else," and that that's not very interesting.
I think there a bunch of things unique to the contemporary west(and Americans in particular) which make looking at the data worse than useless(noting that churchgoing can be divorced from seriousness of belief is a start). To suggest a few:
- Irony. For bigfoot and aliens in particular, the existence of people who think these things is a recent cultural phenomenon which is understood to be dubious. The fact that the beliefs are understood as conspiracy theories distorts adoption. Beliefs which take the place of religion have to be more mundane, like the law of attraction or astrology, which have had serious take-off “recently”.
- Realignment. People haven’t finished resolving their identities in the wake of secularisation. There are multitudes who claim group identification over integral belief(I think reform jews do this explicitly, catholics implicitly). If you really sat down and questioned them, I think catholics in particular include a whole bunch of recent-ish immigrants who could probably be convinced to change their answer to agnostic.
- Interesting Times. The internet, and more particularly COVID lockdowns, have simply broken people’s ability to understand the world. All of us have been at least initially conned by outright fakery by now, and untangling how influence works online will take a while to settle. I think partisan fever probably falls
under this too, if you can go from concern about the NWO to being convinced satan is at work and attending church services, a no religion->crazy beliefs effect can’t be discerned after the fact, if that’s what it is. Some libertarian friends would probably want me to mention hysterical hygiene theatre and disproportionate fear of death “instilled by the media” here.
I think a better example of the phenomenon would be something like a political movement taking on religious overtones and holding revivals with outpouring professions of obviously absurd beliefs. Qanon is a good example of this with the resurrection of JFK Jr., but it’s hardly unique. In my experience these sorts of things are independent of “religious identity”, but are pretty obviously to do with filling that void.
Another example could be the emergence of sui-generis cults fleshing out previously uncommon philosophies. Churchmen thought marxism did this with urban workers uprooted from their homes, maybe post-industrial workers are adopting philosophers more recent than Hegel.
You're strawmanning the people you're arguing with. The tweet doesn't say "conspiracy theories", it says "mind viruses".
When people use this phrase, they don't mean *literally* anything. It's a highly contextual and nuanced statement that boils down to, if you don't believe in one of the formal organized religions, then you will find something similar to those religions to believe in instead.
All your examples (and the Economist's, eyeroll) miss this nuance and just start picking random "obviously" wrong beliefs and then correlating them with Church attendance. But none of those beliefs you picked are in any way substitutes for religion. Belief in Bigfoot really can't be described as a mind virus by any reasonable definition, for example.
Another comment in this thread points out what this "mind viruses" or "believe anything" claim is actually about in the modern day context: pseudo-religions like wokeism/CRT, which is often understood to be a mutation of Marxism, itself a belief system with quasi-religious components. But there are others. We could pick obvious examples like Scientology, or less obvious examples like AI risk (which seems to involve obsession with a hypothetical all powerful, unknowable being).
I'd argue the key sub-claims underlying the wider claim are:
1. People need to believe in a religion-like thing. If they stop believing in classical religions then they start to re-invent it, probably without realizing that's what they're doing.
2. The most important example is Leftism, which is typified by fundamental beliefs that can be rephrased to sound almost quasi-Christian if you want to.
3. Implicitly, that these ad-hoc reinvented beliefs are worse than the classical religions they seek to displace, and thus that it's a good idea to be religious (n.b. I am not personally religious, but I'm open to this argument).
Leftist beliefs being a pseudo-religion, really? Sure. Marx insisted strongly on suppressing the Church ("no false idols"), that the population could be divided into two categories of pure evil and pure good ("sinners", "saints"), he had an axiomatic belief that human nature is fundamentally good but corrupted by external badness ("man was created pure in the Garden of Eden"), that virtually any challenge can be overcome through application of collective will ("we are made in God's image") and so on. Now over time what happened is that Christianity evolved and some of these rather destructive Marx-like elements got retconned out, such as when the core concept became "We are all sinners" i.e. stop dividing everyone into good and bad all the time please.
Regardless of where the aphorism originates exactly, it was made famous by Chesterton, a man who lived in time when people were starting to realize that God was dead, that lots of people no longer truly believed in him. It was also a time of violent, revolutionary ideas - the French revolution was still quite a recent event, and Marx was busy penning his ideas of how to create a godless utopia. So this idea that without God you'd end up worshipping Man, would have been a contemporary one regardless of who came up with each formulation.
Yes, of course. I don't think I claimed that the timeline of the evolution of Christian belief overlaps with the timeline of Marxism? Leftism as a concrete, nameable thing didn't really start to appear until the late 1700s by most accountings, and by then Christian beliefs had been stable for nearly two millenia.
I don't quite see the connection, sorry. The argument above is all relative. That is, yes, religion led to the 30 years war, but not anything like the Great Leap Forward or the French Revolution.
I did not intend to make an argument about relative badness of tragedies. My focus was narrower:
Modern Christian doctrine had not sprung fully formed into the world 2000 years ago. Just the opposite, it evolved a lot over time. The Reformation (and counter reformation) was a sign of some of these changes. But far from the only one.
Christian beliefs had NOT been stable for nearly two millennia.
(Christian beliefs are about as stable as US constitutional law. Ie they nominally have an unchanging document they base everything on, but in practice things change.
For the US, in the early 20th century they thought they needed a constitutional amendment just to ban alcohol at the federal level. Later the later federal war on drugs was fought with just regular laws, and people didn't think a constitutional amendment was necessary anymore to authorise them, because 'obviously' the federal government is meant to regulate drugs.)
Yes, that's true, when I said "stable" I didn't mean totally unchanging. Obviously Christianity continued to evolve. But those evolutions didn't change its fundamental nature. The Bible wasn't changed in any major ways due to the 30 years war for example.
I took "Christianity evolved and some of these rather destructive Marx-like elements got retconned out" as indicating that this process happened after and as a response to Marxism, if that's not what you were claiming then I'll happily own my error.
Ah no, sorry. What I meant was that you can trace the evolution of Christianity throughout the Bible (including the old testament), and certain traits like the obsession with angels and demons are clearly more in evidence in the older parts of the book than in the newer parts. If you keep tracing that evolution past the Bible then you see angels and demons basically disappear, saints become way less prevalent/important, and there's an increased understanding that everyone is corruptible, everyone has capacity for evil, that the world isn't divided into fundamentally good and fundamentally bad people.
Marx tossed God to one side and ended up right back at the start, with Genesis. Man is born fundamentally pure and is then corrupted by the tempting serpent of capital. To create utopia (communism) and restore Eden we just need to get rid of Satan and everything will be great again. The irredeemably corrupted bourgeoisie capitalists are the fallen angels, who cannot be saved, only conquered.
Modern wokeism has hardly evolved beyond that, beyond switching from class to race/gender/sexuality. If you're a straight white man there's no hope for you, you're born with original sin and just have to suffer for it. Other people are pure, near perfect angels.
The most obvious religious example on the atheist left is the idea that doctors “assign” gender rather than recognise biology. This is the idea of a soul above biology.
On the atheist right it’s AI, which has all the hallmarks of a god or demon.
You seem to be confused about what gender assignment means.
It definetely doesn't mean that genders are assigned at random, uncorrelated to actual biological evidence that doctors can observe. But doctors can't observe all necessary biological facts regarding a newborn to know for sure what is their gender. Mistakes and even deliberate falsehoods can and are made all the time. So the idea of assigned gender instead of actual true gender is the acknowledgement of our uncertanity. No souls, just the virtue of precision.
That's clearly a religious belief, sorry. Knowing the gender of a baby is the easiest thing in the world. The idea that mistakes are made all the time is for the birds, it has no more validity than a belief in turning water into wine.
While you sure can use such bizzare definition of religios beliefs and gender so that you statement would be technically correct, I find this way to draw category borders completely unhelpful.
It's not obvious even what sex the child has, because you would have to check the chromosomes. And gender is an even more complex category and our neuroscience isn't there yet to have close to 100% f1-score predicting the gender identity of a newborn with any kind of diagnostic.
So, if you're really curious, I can dig around for the article. But I remember a while ago in the National Geographic they did an article on a group of people (predominantly in Africa it seemed) who were born with female genetalia, but upon reaching puberty, the genetalia changed to be male genetalia. I don't remember reading about any clear hallmark of this effect, and it strikes me as a pretty clear counterexample to "the baby's gender is clear," albeit one perhaps a little removed from the transgender debate
Güevedoces were already named elsewhere in the thread and also occur in (one village in) the Dominican Republic, are extremely rare, clearly a case of the exception that proves the rule, and totally irrelevant to transsexuals, who don't have 5-alpha-reductase deficiency and therefore don't pop male genitals suddenly at puberty. (Especially irrelevant to men wanting to be women, since this syndrome only affects men, making them look like girls in their childhoods.)
Also, güevedoces form an interesting counterproof to the concept of an internal sense of gender, since there are no reports of them complaining about being considered girls or knowing that they're really boys prior to puberty making it clear.
> But doctors can't observe all necessary biological facts regarding a newborn to know for sure what is their gender.
That would make doctors truly unusual, since it is trivially easy for any layperson to observe all the facts necessary to know a newborn's gender. Any mistakes or falsifications would be quickly corrected by the first person to change the child's diaper.
Claiming otherwise isn't an "acknowledgement of our uncertainty." It's a spurious assertion of uncertainty where none actually exists.
Sigh. You do not seem to even try to understand what I'm talking about.
Sure, you can say that gender=sex and is solely based on the genitals of the people. It's ant easy definition, which our society been using for quite some time. The problem however, that this definition is not accurate. It ignores a chunk of reality, lots of scientific data and millions of people. We now know much more about chromosomes, hormones, related medical conditions and gender identities. So now we are using more accurate definitions which explains reality in more nuanced ways and captures more of it. And in a thousand years we may have an even better model.
This is the way the accumulation of knowledge works in every sphere. We start from the primitive models and then go to more accurate ones when we develop them. Were people throwing similar tantrums when Neutonian mechanics was replaced by Relativity? Or it's just this topic as something more personal and down to earth that more people can partisipate in?
The way I understand it, "sex" refers to the physical fact of differentiation into male and female, and "gender" to the social meaning attributed to that physical fact at a given place and time, as well as to the subjective experience of that social meaning as it relates to one's own embodied existence.
Gender is thus logically subsequent to sex, insofar as classification by gender necessarily *refers* to classification by sex. (There are lots of systems of social classification that have nothing to do with sex differences, and we call those systems caste or class or race or whatever, not "gender.")
And in the case of a newborn, it's hard to see what gender could possibly mean *besides* biological sex, as the newborn is wholly ignorant of society and has no subjective notion of him/herself as male/female whatsoever. Either the baby has no gender at that point, in which case gender can't be the thing being "assigned," or else the baby's gender is simply identical to its sex, in which case there's no "assignment," just a simple empirical observation.
I take it you're saying that in some instances that observation might be wrong, in ways we couldn't have realized in the past because we lacked knowledge of the biological basis for sexual differentiation. That is, a person born with a penis might nonetheless actually, at that moment, be female -- presumably because her hormonal and/or chromosomal makeup was such that in the normal course of development she'd develop certain objectively female characteristics that would, on some sort of scale, outweigh the fact of her genital anatomy.
I don't know if I agree with that proposition. But if I did, then I guess it'd make sense to say, *in that specific scenario*, that this was a person who'd been "assigned male at birth" but subsequently turned out otherwise. But it doesn't make sense to me to say so about human beings generally.
Thank you for properly engaging with my position. I appreciate it, truly.
> Either the baby has no gender at that point, in which case gender can't be the thing being "assigned,"
Not sure I follow your logic here. If the baby had no gender and then doctors wrote in the papers that baby's gender is male, that would be an obvious example of gender assignment.
> That is, a person born with a penis might nonetheless actually, at that moment, be female
Here is how I think about it. People are not blank slates. There have to be some kind of tangible biological reason, why some people've experienced gender dysphoria throughout the history. Something has to be different about them. And indeed modern science has very interesting data, regarding brain scans of trans people and other kinds of bodily dysphoria, like wanting to amputate a limb after suffering a brain injury. Correlation with autism, consequences for motor control, optical illusions etc. We do not know everything, but what we know hints in this direction.
> I don't know if I agree with that proposition. But if I did, then I guess it'd make sense to say, *in that specific scenario*
It would make sense in that specific scenario to say that she was *incorrectly* assigned male at birth, and in more common scenarios where a person born with the pennis actually turned out to be a man, it would make sense to say that he was *correctly* assigned male at birth. But in any case the act of declaring baby's gender based on not full information is gender assignment. It's a neutral term.
Is actually good science possible in this hyper-politicized issue? Somehow I doubt that if your study comes to a unfavorable conclusion to certain ideologies that your career survives its publication.
Notice that this is a universal antiepistemological argument.
In hyper politicized environment if one side is unhappy with your conclusion the other would be very happy. Up to the point where some people manage to build fortune on ridiculously obvious lies, no matter how cancelled they are.
> Sure, you can say that gender=sex and is solely based on the genitals of the people. It's ant easy definition, which our society been using for quite some time. The problem however, that this definition is not accurate. It ignores a chunk of reality, lots of scientific data and millions of people. We now know much more about chromosomes, hormones, related medical conditions and gender identities.
I must have missed the scientific study which points to chromosomal/genetic basis for gender identity, or for the condition known as gender dysphoria.
Where is it?
Is it easier, or harder for a pregnant mother to test their fetus for than, say, Downs or Trisomy-18?
I have heard of genetic variants that are chromosomally-male, and phenotypically-female. Typically described as female at birth, and transforming into male at puberty. In the one town in the Dominican Republic where this genetic abnormality is common, the children are called 'guavedoches'.
However, this example is far afield from 'assigned gender at birth' as it is usually discussed in relation to transgender individuals, and the society that deals with it the most appears to not confuse it with the condition for gender dysphoria.
We do not know everything yet, but there are a lot of evidence from twin studies, brain scans etc. and we can see which direction the evidence is pointing to.
> I have heard of genetic variants that are chromosomally-male, and phenotypically-female.
Well yes, intersex people are much better accounted for when we are using "assigned gender at birth" category. The fact that people are usually talking about it in regards to transgenders doesn't change this fact at all.
I suspect that trans people are a more specific case of broader intersex spectrum. Some people have weird chromosomes, some weird genitals and some weird brain chemistry. We separate them in two distinct categories due to historical reasons, not because it's a really sensible way to make category borders.
But anyway, let's imagine that no trans people actually exist. That there are male, female and different kinds of conventional intesex people. Wouldn't you a agree that in that world "gender assigned at birth" would be a more careful and accurate wording?
"Sure, you can say that gender=sex and is solely based on the genitals of the people."
I mean, that's literally what it means, gender has always been a euphemistic synonym for sex ever since it was taken out of the realm of purely grammatical terms. It's only very recently that there's been a (politicized, ideological) push to change the meaning of the word to something else in order to create a false distinction. "Gender" as separate from sex does not exist.
As I said it was what it used to mean when we didn't know better. And recently scientific consensus changed and a new, more accurate model was adopted.
The fact that some people post factum felt offended for whatever reason and started creating controversy, thus making a rallying flag for political divide doesn't change this.
We use none of this "science" in adults to decided whether some is in the incorrect gender. In fact lobbyists tend to oppose any medical decisions, or indeed psychiatric treatment to determine if someone is in fact trans, which indicates there isn't much science there.
Right when I think of "mind viruses" I don't think of stuff like Bigfoot or UFO's. Maybe QAnon.
I think more of morality stuff like embracing nihilism or trying to build up an ethical system from a handful of axioms and following it rigorously wherever it leads.
Or stuff like our modern sexual/gender type explosion. Religion sets guardrails and say "no don't do that thing" and without that Chesterton Fence there is no telling where where the new equilibrium lands if there is a new equilibrium at all with what seems to me to have bad consequences for many individuals. Of course the guard rails also had bad consequences for some as well.
I'd say that it's a somewhat different statement. It's one thing to claim that everybody has some kind of ideology, vague religion-like. It's the other thing to claim that without religion people people are vulnerable to all kind of ridiculous beliefs. Both statement deserve to be explored, I think.
> 3. Implicitly, that these ad-hoc reinvented beliefs are worse than the classical religions they seek to displace
I struggle to understand how this claim can withstand a scrutiny when made explicit. Do you really claim that, say, Christianity is less wrong than social justice? Christianity may seem tamer than wokism, for sure, but it has little and less to do with its long evolution - memetic cross polination transfered the"We are all sinners" to woke "We are all racists/sexists/homophobes" long time ago. No, the real difference is that people actually believe in woke ideas, instead of mere belief in belief in Christianity which is mostly just culture nowdays.
Subcultures made up of people who genuinely believe in Christianity tend to be less dysfunctional than subcultures made up of people who genuinely believe in social justice.
This is probably due to a couple of Christian principles that are deeply baked in:
1. Lying is a sin that sends you straight to hell
2. When you are wronged, turn the other cheek (in both the current sense of work with it, or the original sense of nonviolent protest)
3. People can repent and become good with God again.
4. Eye-for-an-eye: the punishment should fit the crime.
These principles, and a few others I find less important, are strikingly absent in the Woke/CRT pseudo-religion.
It is totally okay to lie, cheat, steal, and otherwise destroy the lives of the sinners. It is totally OK to meet a microaggression from a sinner with completely destroying their career and putting their entire family into homeless shelters. If you're a cis-gender white male, you cannot possibly ever do right, for you are permanently a sinner. The best you can do is "be an ally," as in, become the fetch-boy for someone higher on the oppression hierarchy.
I'm really not sure about that, actually. Woke believers managed to take control over major institutions in the modern West. While christianity believers managed to take control over major institutions in the medival west. I'd say the former achievement is more impressive.
I'm not sure how you'd determine which is more impressive really. Nor do I think it's relevant: it's quite possible for a subculture to be good at taking over things but bad at running them once it's got control, or good at taking over things but bad for it's actual members.
Medieval people were much less sofisticated and experienced regarding memplexes, didn't have propper scientific method. Spreading a meme among them seems much less impressive than among modern people.
> it's quite possible for a subculture to be good at taking over things but bad at running them once it's got control
While possible I don't see why we are supposed to prioritise this hypothesis all things being equal. Wokeness isn't even as optimised for easy replication as christianity with its "believe this and tell everyone and be infinitely rewarded or be infinitely punished".
<i>Medieval people were much less sofisticated and experienced regarding memplexes, didn't have propper scientific method. Spreading a meme among them seems much less impressive than among modern people.</i>
Given that the modern, post-scientific world saw the rise of (among other things) communism, fascism, eugenics, scientific racism, and the use of lobotomy as an accepted treatment for mental disorders, I don't think we're really in a position to sneer at previous ages for their ignorant gullibility.
<i>While possible I don't see why we are supposed to prioritise this hypothesis all things being equal. Wokeness isn't even as optimised for easy replication as christianity with its "believe this and tell everyone and be infinitely rewarded or be infinitely punished".</i>
We have plenty examples of woke spaces becoming riven with infighting and purity spirals, indicating that wokeness isn't actually very good at maintaining healthy communities.
I think Philo's argument has merit here. That is, something like Christianity (it doesn't have to be Christianity) has evolved over a long period of time, whereas hard left wokeism bears more resemblance to the sort of thing you find in the Old Testament except that it's missing big chunks.
It's easier to see examples of this at the margins. If you look into the black depths of academia to learn what surprises they're cooking up for us next, you can find the idea that incest should be legit and accepted, because if you're against incest you're a fascist "ableist" who wants to rid the world of disabled people, which is the same thing as eugenics. The logic is easy to follow but it ends up at an obviously stupid and absurd place, because it's missing some axioms.
People who follow the Bible are immune to degenerate reasoning failures like that because they don't try to reason about incest from first principles to begin with. The Old Testament says "incest is bad, stone to death people who do it" and helpfully lists out lots of combinations of relationships that count. Later Jesus amended biblical punishments to be less harsh, and you don't get him constantly telling his followers to stone people for things, but the prohibition remained. Interestingly, this prohibition evolved at some point between the oldest and newest books being written because in the oldest parts of the bible incestuous relationships do occur and aren't remarked upon as being wicked, even though later on that taboo appears.
If your entire belief system revolves around the singular belief that sin = "any claim that intersectional group X is better at anything in any way than intersectional group B", then you inevitably end with a quasi-religious conviction that incest is best. But you'd be wrong. Religion saves people from this by listing out a whole lot of moral rules that are "obviously" correct and then assigning them all to God, which avoids the need to try and present arguments for every rule from first principles. The word of God is itself the first principle.
> I think Philo's argument has merit here. That is, something like Christianity (it doesn't have to be Christianity) has evolved over a long period of time,
This reasoning falls apart as soon as you account for the fact that new memeplexes do not need to reinvent the wheel every time and can actually use the already successful memes. Memetic evolution is even more flexible here than biological one, because memplexes do not even have to directly descend from one another to inherit adaptations.
> If you look into the black depths of academia
The level of strawmanning you use here is well above my tolerance level. The fact that you really think that you are describing the thinking process of your outgroup means that you completely don't understand it and shouldn't try to deduce things based on this kind of (mis)understanding.
I don't even know how to explain how much off the mark you are. I don't think that even taking the words of the most fringe radical out of context and assuming with all confidence that it's the median christian beliefs and then deducing stuff about christianity as a whole based on this false premise would do the trick.
<i>This reasoning falls apart as soon as you account for the fact that new memeplexes do not need to reinvent the wheel every time and can actually use the already successful memes. Memetic evolution is even more flexible here than biological one, because memplexes do not even have to directly descend from one another to inherit adaptations.</i>
"Memeplexes" don't do anything, because they aren't agents. In fact, I'd say that treating memeplexes as agents and humans as passive carriers is a good example of irreligious woo of the sort Lewis or Chesterton would call out if they were still alive.
Sigh. At this moment we can start calling any metaphor to be woo, thus comparing ideas to each other to be woo and thus everything is religion which is itself a metaphor and a woo.
Critical race theory and Marxism really are pretty opposed to each other, and definitely don’t have any connections, other than that they’re both embraced on the left, just as fascism and laissez-faire capitalism are pretty strongly opposed to each other and don’t have any connections, other than that they’re both embraced on the right.
Leftism is much better defined than the right, which is a mishmash of all sorts of things.
CRT and Marxism seem pretty similar which is why so many draw the comparison. They're both about dividing the world into exactly two groups of oppressors and the oppressed. People can't move between these groups, they are born into them. To bring social justice to the world the oppressors must be overthrown and generally ground into the dust. And unfortunately, they both teach an "ends justify the means" approach that boils down in practice to lots and lots of lying, nasty tactics and general unpleasantness.
Huh, this bit about the left being one and the right being many seems entirely backwards to me. The right seems to be unified (it’s about supporting the traditional hierarchies and single majorities in all axes) while the left is completely disunified (it’s about any change from tradition and any minority group, each of which is different).
CRT and Marxism are completely opposed - CRT says that race, which is externally and socially imposed, is the important organizing force of society, and that this is a cultural phenomenon; Marxism says that the organizing force of society is not at all cultural but is the boring material thing about whether you have control of the means of production or not. For a Marxist, moving between the bourgeoisie and proletariat is as simple as gaining or losing control of the means of production, while changing races requires changing how you are perceived by society. Marxism and CRT both have strands that are utilitarian (where the ends justify the means) and strands that are deontological (where there are purity requirements that must never be violated no matter how bad the result is).
In terms of bringing Justice, overthrowing oppressors, and lying/nasty tactics, they are no different from any other totalizing beliefs at any point on the spectrum, ranging from blood and soil nazism to free market Pinochetism.
It's interesting to read your left-wing perspective on this. I've always agreed with the grandparent that the right is far more diverse than the left, it's interesting to see how this looks from the other side.
It seems to me like Marxism and CRT agree on just about everything (people are divided into groups, certain less powerful groups are unfairly oppressed by certain more powerful groups, this imbalance should be overthrown) and only disagree on exactly what distinguishes those groups (race vs class). I think you only see these as somehow significantly different because you're so close to all the other in-built assumptions of the left (e.g. that people should be considered as part of groups) that you don't really see them as optional.
(To be fair, some of those assumptions are shared by some groups on the right too; the White Nationalist types have the same underlying assumptions as the CRT types, they just disagree on who is getting oppressed..)
Similarly your characterisation of the right couldn't be more foreign to my own. When you talk about "it’s about supporting the traditional hierarchies" that doesn't sound right; it's only the left who thinks in terms of hierarchies, and they see them where others don't... for instance the left seems to think of the employer-employee relationship as somehow being "hierarchical" whereas I, on the right, see it as a free exchange between equals. I don't support traditional hierarchies because I don't really see hierarchies all over the place.
I can't really respond to the "and single majorities in all axes" part because I don't know what you mean by it.
When I talk about the majorities, I’m specifically talking about the demographic groups that support Republicans vs Democrats. A majority of white people support the Republicans, while a majority of every other racial group supports the Democrats. A majority of Christians support the Republicans, while a majority of every other religious group supports the Democrats. I don’t think a *majority* of straight people support Republicans, but a plurality do, while majorities of all other orientations support the Democrats.
I feel like you're moving the goalposts here. You originally indicated that the left was more ideologically diverse, but now you've shifted to the (obviously true, but boring and irrelevant to this topic) claim that the left merely has more demographic diversity. Maybe you believe the the latter implies the former, but I think that's a mistake: https://balioc.wordpress.com/2017/08/10/fractal-diversity/
Really, I think both sides of this discussion are misguided. The whole notion that "our side is many, but their side is one" is just a coded way of saying "we're open-minded and flexible, while they're rigid and blindly dogmatic," which itself is just a coded form of "we're real people, while they're robotic P-zombies." There are many lefts, and many rights: Free-market libertarianism and revolutionary fascism and theocratic monarchism are all as different from each other as they are from any leftist ideology; Orthodox Marxism and progressive identity politics and trade unionism are likewise as different from each other as they are from any rightist ideology.
Not expressing any opinion on the Marxism/CRT issue, but I agree with others in sharing the basic "left is one, right is many" intuition.
The basic idea is that left social movements tend to resemble each other more than right social movements do, for the same reason that competing plans for a new model city tend to resemble each other more than Houston resembles Venice.
Huh, the analogy seems backwards to me. Houston seems to resemble Venice much more than competing plans for new model cities, because plans for a new model city just aren’t tied down by the past in any way!
I mean, just looking at examples that Scott has described, NEOM and Prospera are just so much more different in fundamental ways than Houston and Venice!
Maybe it's a bad analogy. The idea I was trying to convey is that conservatisms are inherently different from one another to the extent that what's traditional varies from society to society.
In countries with a long tradition of monarchy, the right may be very much identified with the project of preserving the monarchy. In countries like the US that have never had a monarchy, that project forms no part of mainstream conservative politics whatsoever. The US has, at least notionally, a historic tradition of laissez-faire capitalism, so US conservatives tend to be very into that, much more so than conservatives in places where laissez-faire capitalism can't really be presented as a form of "traditional values."
It seems like Marxists who actually oppose critical race theory like Freddie de Boer are much more the exception than the rule, though. In fact, most people on the left seem to dislike FdB, whether they're explicit CRT adherents or not. I think this is mostly a reflection of "you don't criticize your 'team' too vociferously," which applies at the broader level. In theory the old Marxist class struggle set and the CRT race-obsessed equality of outcome types have competing goals. In practice, they cooperate quite readily, with rare exceptions.
You probably don't read a lot of left media. But if you look at the more Marxist left (people who write at Current Affairs or Jacobin for instance) you'll often see them criticize identity politics or bourgeois feminism as distractions from the real goal of class struggle. They'll occasionally defend CRT from the right-wing critics that think it's the same thing as Marxism, but they won't say anything that suggests that race or gender is a helpful additional lens through which to view the real fight. Conversely, if you look at Ibram Kendi or Robin DiAngelo or any of the other central CRT figures, you won't see them centering class in any way. I think there's a populist Teen Vogue or Vox type of leftism that pays lip service to both sorts of things, but they generally only accept a "smash capitalism" view rather than any of the Marxist stuff about class, while treating race and gender and other identities as things to think and care a lot about.
That's basically what I said: they might criticize it as a distraction (ie, they want to de-emphasize it). They won't criticize it as unworkable, ethically dubious, or factually wrong, which is what actually opposing it would look like.
I wonder how many of the respondents to that poll were right-thinking Bayesians who thought "yes, indeed, UFO sightings are very weak evidence of extraterrestrial life".
Even it were true...now what? If there were some effective way of converting millions of people, religious people would likely have discovered it long ago, or at least it's unlikely to be discovered by these particular twitter people.
But I think you're misrepresenting the argument here, it's not that people will believe in literally anything, what is meant is mostly left-wing ideologies. They are perhaps using sloppy and uncharitable language, but they're saying something very different than what you're arguing against.
To the extent that the non-religious are the ones believing in loony wokeness the most though, it seems overwhelmingly more likely that both of these things are caused by the same broad cultural trends (and a predisposition to be influenced by them) rather than the former causing the latter.
Also, note how other than atheists, old southern white men are basically the least likely to believe in astrology. If this became widely known, rather than being an obvious datum against the stereotype of this demographic being ignorant, I imagine this would lead to criticism of astrology being considered "racist".
>religious people would likely have discovered it long ago
They have, and it historically was extremely effective, the "convert or die" approach. It would be curious to see a poll on how popular it would be these days.
Well, conversion by the sword was certainly... rapid. I'm not entirely sure if "effective" is true.
Regardless, we do have other examples of religions rapidly spreading and earning converts without violence; Christianity ate the Roman Empire from the inside whilst getting executed and purged every few decades.
I'm skeptical of conclusions to be drawn from this. It looks a bit like "white americans most likely to subscribe to these specifc conspicracy theories that originated/took hold in white american populations". UFOs, moon landin, vaccine/autism & Qanon are a curiously specific slice of conspiracy theories
I'd predict "spiritual but not religious" blows everything else out of the water. If true, this suggests there is a dimension distinct from religious/atheist, probably related to openness to experience. Neither Big Foot nor UFOs are an "already established world view". However you get to yours (family, personality, context, pure accident), the more conservative you are with keeping that world view, the less likely you are to believe in weird stuff.
A lighthearted palate-cleanser piece, pleasant as far as it goes...I don't think it's strenuous enough that it's worth particularly updating on, beyond Yep That Sure Looks Like Lizardman's Constant and Lots Of People Sure Say They Believe In Weird Things. All the standard confounders for extrapolating from poll results come to mind, not least of which the difference between socially mediated poll-beliefs and actual action-beliefs...though I guess it's a lot harder to get concrete revealed preferences for stuff like belief in Bigfoot.
I'm reminded of a post you wrote long ago about more than 50% of Americans apparently believing in Young Earth creationism (or was it flat-earth?), despite no evidence of this whatsoever in your personal life, and how that was statistically improbable. People can cop to believing all kinds of stuff but not really have that influence reality...QAnon is sort of a weird example in this mix, since it gets lots of media airtime (like here!) and has had some meaningful impact, but is actually pretty unpopular[1].
The more interesting question would be: __why__ do people seem to have a need for some sort of coherent beliefs pre-package, such that religion and its woo substitutes get reinvented over and over and over? (Granted that some types of woo are higher-quality than others. Rationalism is a pretty nice vintage of woo, I think.) I think diving more narrowly on that topic would be interesting...the consequences, positive and negative, of not picking up any particular beliefs pre-package to fill the God-shaped hole. If it exists in the first place.
Yes. Scott’s as smart as they come but it does read like a rationalist understanding of belief as something that you nod your head to, rather than build your life on.
I wouldn’t disagree but I’d argue that the people who think it means the former haven’t understood the place religion has in the lives of adherents. It’s not a set of things they agree are true, it’s their whole worldview
No, I mean that there actually is a significant amount of "cultural Catholics" or whatever, who were maybe raised religiously, but were mostly nodding along to that stuff, have long since stopped going to church, but still identify and are counted as Catholics.
A very interesting essay but, as others have pointed out, it misses the point of the tweet, which is really to disparage belief in things like radical gender theory and systemic racism - few would dispute that white US evangelicals are less susceptible to these ideas than the average American.
Maybe it should include those as well, but it's a bit silly to write a post about the embedded tweet and focus on them, without even touching on what the tweet is clearly referring to. Scott has a long record of being strongly pro-trans &c. so maybe he would've felt a bit awkward comparing it to belief in QAnon, but without doing that you can't really come to a good conclusion on the veracity of the tweet.
I think the tweet uses the phrase “mind virus” for a reason. If it were just about one or two sets of beliefs, then it would clearly be an ad hoc theory that makes no sense. It has to be claiming something about a broader type. So tests of that broader type are the relevant ones.
> Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they *adopt dangerous secular beliefs in order to signal group membership*.
There is this idea - not mine - that people signal membership by believing unlikely things, specifically things other people would be unlikely to randomly believe. The point about these beliefs is that they are *supposed* to be unlikely otherwise they wouldn't signal membership.
Classic examples include: Roman Catholics who are monotheists who believe in the Holy Trinity; certain hard leftists who believe 3rd world dictators are automatically still morally better than western governments; and conservative radical free marketeers. I think it's probably why political slogans always seem unpersuasive - people use them to signal membership, and thus embrace the stupid-sounding ones.
Most modern core religious Membership Signalling Unlikely Beliefs are pretty harmless: illogical theological/metaphysical ideas and weird lifestyle rules. They don't generally prevent a religious tradition from evolving morally, or from embracing changing knowledge of the material world. For example, the RC church still believes in the Holy Trinity etc, but no longer supports slavery (as it once did), and actually has astronomers on its payroll. Many Protestant churches are OK with homosexuality, when, back in the 17th century, their response was... nasty.
The (tragic) problem is that Unlikely Beliefs held by Atheists have to be secular ones, at best causing reputational damage to their movement - whatever it is - and at worst impacting on bystanders.
Hence the different flavours of modern "wokism", and also the fiercely held Marxist views of yesteryear's left. Either way, they are locked into these views regardless of changing political landscape or technical knowledge.
Religious folk can *also* have Secular Unlikely Beliefs - usually rightist ones - but don't need them in order to belong somewhere.
Unfortunately, to test this hypothesis, you'd have to have a politically unbiased way of deciding what views are "unlikely"...
This is a difficult thing to analyse as the number of beliefs that are wrong are essentially infinite, and limiting the data to a few culturally and temporally specific cases doesn't even scratch the surface.
FWIW The transgender craze seems to have elements of atheistic religious enthusiasm, with adherents demanding the recitation of catechism, an apparent urge to convert others to the belief, extreme anger against apostates and persecution of those who reject the faith. An analysis of the traditional religious beliefs of the cult members would be interesting.
“I would have liked to look into JFK and 9/11 conspiracies, but I couldn’t find great data.”
This is particularly unfortunate, as it means that all of the (not overtly political) “conspiracy theories“ being examined are not beliefs in literal conspiracies per se, but beliefs in the supernatural. there is an obvious confound here: beliefs in the supernatural may be more highly correlated did with religion than non-supernatural conspiracy theories.
>If you’re making strong claims about how everybody except you is gullible, you should at least bother to double-check the source of your quote.
That, in its essence, *is* a GK Chesterton quote:
"The nineteenth century decided to have no religious authority. The twentieth century seems disposed to have any religious authority." [Illustrated London News, April 26, 1924]
More precisely, it is a bog standard transformation of that quote, a transformation which regularly happens in all kinds of retellings that aim to increase memetic spreading by trading off subtlety for catchiness.
Such as the "increased catchiness" that was already infused into Scott's sentence above, "claims about how everybody except you is gullible". That fragment is a strawman in itself -- strawmanned for catchiness -- as opposed to the very subtle analysis which had followed in the rest of the article.
I feel like the obvious explanation here is that people who are wishy-washy on religion are also wishy-washy about belief in general. Does God exist? Maybe. Does bigfoot exist? Maybe. Does astrology have significance? Maybe. Is the moon landing fake? Maybe.
The kind of person who isn't strongly opinionated and decided about truth of things. They're not sure they know.
Well, I'm a "vague agnostic" myself and I don't feel even remotely inclined to believe in Bigfoot or astrology or crystal healing or Q-Anon or any of that stuff. But I could just be an outlier. My take is basically that, when it comes to things here on Earth that are observable and make a difference in people's day-to-day lives, the secular materialists are correct on all counts. I just don't think we know enough about the origins and nature of the universe to rule out a Creator and/or Universal Consciousness of some kind.
I would argue that scientific materialism militates against the Bigfoot. We know from evolutionary biology that very small populations are prone to inbreeding and accumulation of genetic damage which often dooms them to extinction after they fall below a certain number of breeding pairs. The absence of ape fossils in the Northwest is a strong paleontological argument against the existence of large sustained populations of apes in the region's prehistory. If there were no plausible common ancestral species for Bigfoot and any small populations that could have been missed by fossil hunters would have been long since extinct, then where does Bigfoot come from? The Himalayas, as an offshoot of the Yeti lineage? Or one of original apes that idolized the Black Monolith and was made immortal by the Aliens?
In short, scientific materialism as focused through the lens of biological science does make Bigfoot very, very implausible, although not completely ironclad impossible.
Interestingly, as of 2005, there had been no fossils of chimpanzees ever discovered! There are some ecosystems from which it’s very difficult to get fossils, either because the ecosystem is naturally erosional (like tall mountains) or because the current ground cover obscures the soil (recent tropical rain forests). I don’t know that there’s any case for Bigfoot’s supposed environment to be like this, but there are definitely species that we know full well to exist, for which fossil evidence is missing.
Another example is the coelacanth, which was thought to be extinct because the most recent fossils are a hundred million years old, though again, deep ocean ecosystems are different from the Pacific Northwest.
The problem with the Bigfoot's ancestry is that there are no ape fossils of any kind in the Americas, anywhere. Missing one species in the fossil record, like the chimpanzee, is of course possible and in the case of relatively low-density populations in the rainforest or somewhere deep in the ocean, quite easy but you are much less likely to miss a whole terrestrial lineage lasting for 25 million years (as the apes did in the Old World).
Similarly, nothing could be less surprising that people who are actively skeptical about religion (unlike merely not wanting to take a stance) will also be more skeptical about other supernatural claims. While skeptics frequently do have the occasional blind spot, the correlation seems an obvious theory.
The strongly religious person perhaps already has one systematic (but incorrect) belief system crowding out all supernatural claims that doesn't fit it? But this is hardly a good thing - they already believe in crazy stuff, and the objective is to *not* believe in crazy stuff, not in selecting one all-encompassing system of crazy above others.
I think the issue is that relatively few people disbelieve in religion because of skepticism. Most believe it for the same reason they vote a particular way, because their parents told them.
My parents have different political views, and the idea of being brought up in a household where both parents had the same views sounds terrifying. Sometimes I forget that this is the norm.
It sounds terrifying because you'd have to choose either to go along with your parents' politics or to reject it. If you rejected it, how would they react?
"the objective is to *not* believe in crazy stuff, not in selecting one all-encompassing system of crazy above others."
_Mostly_ agreed, but, from a harm reduction standpoint, if they've managed to pick a relatively benign delusion, that's better than if they start burning heretics, join jihadists, or help implement Mao's great leap corpseward. Of course, there is always the question of whether their system of crazy will _stay_ relatively benign. ( Hmm... I don't recall a case of astrologers killing skeptics of astrology... How's their body count? )
"if people actually take their advice, this would create widespread but mostly low-level anti-utility"
That sounds plausible. It seems _comparatively_ harmless, if it were to act as an alternative to more virulent alternatives.
On reflection - one of the comments on this post mentioned that astrology co-existed with religion, which, besides being evidence that religion doesn't innoculate against astrology, is also evidence that astrology doesn't innoculate against religion. Insofar as most people have a god-shaped-hole, perhaps we need better measurements of the shape of the hole to search for the least damaging thing to stick in it?
One of the comments mentioned the animistic gods of our hunter-gatherer past. They argued against reviving them, on the grounds that they got displaced by agricultural pantheons for a reason. Maybe the reason was an advantage for the rulers, rather than for the population as a whole? Perhaps something like genii locorum might be both closer to what we evolved with and less lethal than more recent deities?
Perhaps similarly, it would also help if our current early Iron Age agricultural gods were replaced with ones more fitting to modern life? Ones not reveling in war, genocide, slavery, patriarchy and eternal torture in cosmic concentration camps?
I think Shinto is pretty cool, too - it seems to give people the traditions and aesthetics they like, without trying to take charge of the political system or get people murdered.
"Ones not reveling in war, genocide, slavery, patriarchy and eternal torture in cosmic concentration camps?"
Agreed!
"I think Shinto is pretty cool, too - it seems to give people the traditions and aesthetics they like, without trying to take charge of the political system or get people murdered."
Uhm, could we please avoid at least the most blatant strawmanning? No one believes it is "magically", and I think most people don't believe it is a "decision" or "transformation".
If your argument depends on using such verbal tricks, please consider the possibility that you might actually not have a good argument, or at least not as good as you believe.
Setting aside what exactly "most people" means in this context, I gather it's true that supporters of transgender rights generally believe *as a descriptive matter* that being transgender is a reflection of an antecedent unchosen state of being and not a consciously willed "decision" to "transform."
But it's also true, AFAICT, that their prescriptive beliefs commit trans rights supporters to the position that *if* a man did decide, by an act of pure fiat, to become a woman, there would be no legal, moral, or social basis for asserting that he was deluded or lying and not, in fact, a woman.
Maybe trans rights people don't believe that -- it seems to me that they do, but I don't keep close tabs on the movement, and would appreciate it if anyone can correct me on this.
But insofar as they believe that, it follows that they believe a man *can* transform into a woman because he decides to -- irrespective of whether they think this is the typical scenario, and irrespective even of whether they think it has ever empirically happened.
That's not a strawman: it's what they actually believe, or at any rate purport to believe. And it strikes me as not inaccurate (though perhaps uncharitable) to describe the belief as "magical," insofar as it appears to posit a capacity to affect the material world by sheer force of will.
They seem to be in their own kafka trap where even if they don't truly believe that men "magically" become women through legal registration, surgery, or verbal declaration, it's necessary (to "save lives") to pretend that they do believe this, and to hold forth to the absolute factuality of the person's gender to such a degree, the word "magic" begins to become appropriate.
So someone insisting that trans men are men is more like saying "I didn't see nuffin," but with moralistic social threats backing it up. They're at least similar in the sense that you can't argue the speaker around by saying "Aha, that's a double-negative, actually you DID see something! Or are you claiming to be blind?"
To me, this sounds like all of society being held hostage to one mentally fragile person that can't stand being reminded that she used to have a penis, and she'll kill herself if everyone else doesn't play along.
It’s no more magical than the belief that a person can transform from an architect to a baker, or from a millionaire to a poor person, just by deciding to.
In those cases, there are presumably mind-independent criteria that would allow us to determine from the outside whether the person had in fact become a baker or a poor person, or whether he had merely decided to do so without the transformation having actually taken place.
(Suppose the millionaire tells a trustee to give away all his money to charity, but the trustee secretly doesn't do it. The millionaire has decided to become a poor person, believes he's become a poor person, and may well be making significant life changes consistent with his belief that he is now poor. But if the trustee tells the millionaire's children, "don't tell your dad, but he's actually still a millionaire," the trustee is making a true statement.)
Are you saying that such mind-independent criteria exist in the case of a man deciding to become a woman? Such that he could believe he'd become a woman, but in fact be wrong about that? If so, it seems to me -- and again, I may be misunderstanding their position -- that your view isn't the one that's predominant in the trans rights movement.
I don’t think there are any kind independent criteria or being an architect or a baker. They are about what you decide to be attempting to do with your time. You might be an unemployed baker, who isn’t very successful, which would be analogous to a trans person who doesn’t succeed in passing at all. Or you might become a successful baker who is recognized for the quality of your baking, which would be analogous to a trans person who succeeds in passing and becomes an icon of their gender.
The case of ownership of money is perhaps a less similar one for some reasons that you mention.
But the claim is that gender is about identifying with a social grouping that one then does or doesn’t get recognized as by others, seems very much to me like much ordinary ideology about profession/career. It’s not nice to tell the waiter who thinks of himself as an unemployed actor that he’s not really an actor, and in an important sense it’s wrong to deny that the person is an actor (though it’s right that they don’t do acting well enough to be paid for it).
If I decide to become a baker because I identify with the social grouping of bakers, but carry on designing buildings all day and never do any baking, I wouldn't be deemed an unemployed baker moonlighting as an architect. I'd be an architect who happens to identify with bakers.
Similarly, say I've been an architect my entire working life and I decide to quit that job. On Monday I go apply for jobs as a hedge fund manager, on Tuesday I change my mind and apply to be a rodeo clown, and on Wednesday I change my mind again and apply to be a cryptographer. Am I therefore an unemployed hedge fund manager on Monday, an unemployed rodeo clown on Tuesday, and an unemployed cryptographer on Wednesday?
But even that scenario actually involves an independent criterion, i.e., that I'm at least putting in applications for those jobs. What if instead I decide to identify with the social grouping of hedge fund managers, and spend all of Monday searching the local public library for a book about how to apply to be a hedge fund manager? What if I happen to be quarantined with Covid and spend Monday making a plan for how I *would* search the library once I'm able to go there? What if I'm too sick even to that, so I spend Monday in bed thinking about how good it would be to make a plan for searching the library for a book on applying to be a hedge fund manager, once I have the mental energy for it?
In all of those scenarios, am I still a hedge fund manager on Monday, and then something else on Tuesday?
There is something wrong about the argument: "You say that you believe A. I believe that A implies B. Therefore, you believe B."
(By the way, I have no strong opinion either way on this issue. I just wish for a higher quality of debate. Like, less sneering, more empathy to the ideological opponents, etc.)
I agree that there's something wrong with that argument. I maybe shouldn't have used the phrase "follows from," which may have given the impression I was making an argument of that form. That wasn't my intention.
What I meant to say was that the position described in the sentence beginning "But it's also true..." and the position described in the sentence beginning "But insofar as they believe that..." are logically identical, not that one deductively follows from the other.
I might be wrong about that -- wrong that the two propositions are logically identical -- but I don't think there's any general problem with an argument of that form.
"their prescriptive beliefs commit trans rights supporters to the position that *if* a man did decide, by an act of pure fiat, to become a woman, there would be no legal, moral, or social basis for asserting that he was deluded or lying and not, in fact, a woman"
This is just the principle of charity applied to trans issues. It's more that I think it's highly unlikely that someone would lie about this, absent the very rare case where they would have a specific motive for doing so (and no, I don't think something as broad as "being trans is trendy now and gets you lots of SJW points" counts as a motive here). Furthermore, just in the interest of good faith, I'd prefer to act as though they're telling the truth unless there was very strong evidence to indicate that they were lying (e.g. a screenshot of a text message where a guy says that he's using they/them pronouns just to sleep with progressive bisexual girls), rather than the other way around. But that's a heuristic, not a positive claim that no one is ever mistaken or lying about their gender identity, and it's a strawman to conflate the two.
The principle of charity isn't a presumption that someone's factual assertions are factually true. It's the idea that, as between more and less reasonable possible constructions of someone's words, we should presume that they mean the most reasonable one. So, if someone with an obviously male-presenting gross anatomy says "I'm a woman," I should assume them to mean not "I have a vagina" (under the circumstances, quite likely false), but rather "I'm a woman within the meaning of that word as used by people who believe gender is at least partly a matter of subjective self-identification" (much more likely to be true).
Applying the principle of charity to the extent of situating someone's assertions within a paradigm of gender in which they make plausible sense, as opposed to one in which they don't, doesn't preclude me from disputing with them whether the former paradigm is in fact false and the latter in fact correct.
The screenshot hypothetical seems to be about someone who hasn't actually decided to become a woman, but is instead pretending to have done so. The screenshot revelation, I take it, is that all along he's really thought of himself as a man carrying out a ruse for purposes of sexual adventurism. Of course a subjectivist theory of gender would have no problem accepting the possibility of lying about *that.*
That's not what I'm talking about, as I think is exceedingly clear if you re-read the sentence you quoted. I'm talking about people who actually have the property of having genuinely, sincerely, on every conceivably relevant level decided to become a woman (and haven't subsequently renounced or gone back on that decision).
The question is whether contemporary transgender theory would allow for the possible falsity, not of the assertion that they made the decision -- which we stipulate to be true, along with whatever accompanying mental states might be required to make the decision "real" -- but of the assertion *that they are a woman.*
("Deluded or lying" was really just a verbal formula for covering the two basic logical categories of falsity. I agree that both conceptually and empirically mistake is the more relevant issue here than mendacity, by a ratio of about 99:1.)
Granted that 'magically' is a loaded word which clearly betrays the author's bias, you have to admit there's a more-than-superficial similarity between "this cracker, despite all evidence to the contrary, does in fact turn into the flesh of a dead Jew after it passes into a realm beyond easy observation" and "this penis-having XY individual is a woman based on non-objectively verifiable data."
"this penis-having XY individual is a woman based on non-objectively verifiable data."
are really saying
"the word woman is being redefined to include this penis-having XY individual"
Whereas the Catholics are not simply using the proper noun "Jesus" to refer to "the set of a particular dead Jew and a bunch of crackers" , rather they are literally believing that the cracker is flesh. Or, at least some of them do. Honestly I'm not sure what it means to say the cracker is flesh. Meaning, are they saying the cracker is chemical equivalent to Jesus' flesh? Are they saying the matter that composed Jesus's flesh is transported to the cracker so that you are eating the flesh that was once in Jesus's body? Or are they saying that nothing was transported but that at some point after Jesus's death the cracker became part of his flesh in a purely formal sense such that an eater of the cracker is considered to be eating Jesus' flesh.
My guess is different Christians disagree. Some of the explanations of what it means might be similar to the redefinition of the word women in that they are just redefinitions of the word "Jesus's flesh". But some of the explanations are decidedly not that.
With transgender issues, however, no claim is being made about biological facts or any kind of facts really. It is purely a linguistic claim that the word "woman" and "man" have new meanings.
Calling the TG movement a purely linguistic endeavor seems ... more than a little disingenuous to me. Otherwise you should expect them to be just as happy adopting the term "breeble" as they would be with "woman" and I suspect you wouldn't.
I never said the movement was purely linguistic. I said the claim is purely linguistic.
Meaning the claim "Soandso is a man" or "soandso is a woman" is best understood not as making any claim about biology. Indeed, it's not as though they believe that people born male can now become pregnant. Rather the *claim* is a linguistic one. That the words man and women no longer refer to "adult male" and "adult female".
But there reasons for making this linguistic claim are indeed based off of other, nonlinguistic factors.
I imagine that age & education level are significant confounders of what nutty notions a person might have, and would have thought that would have been mentioned.
Some people believe that Monsanto/others create seeds that grow into plants that don't themselves give fertile seeds (the "terminator gene"). This belief is false, and has some hallmarks of a conspiracy theory:
-Spread by word of mouth - mainstream newspapers don't talk about it
-Involves powerful people wielding control over less powered, through misfortune that has been "engineered" ("conspired")
-Disproven within 30 seconds of looking it up on Wikipedia, but is nevertheless quite a widespread belief
-Integrates into some other ideologies
The ideologies that it is integrated into (anti capitalism, anti-science, anti-GM) are anti-correlated with being religious, so I would expect it to be anti-correlated with that too?
Interesting! I had heard that terminator gene stuff. I believed it, but just figured it wasn't a terribly common plant/food since most everything I get at the grocery store and plant, seems to grow into at least something (often not as good as the fruit I had retrieved the seeds from).
Thanks for bringing this up. I've learned something today.
Not sure that rises to the level of conspiracy theory or even being like a conspiracy theory. Terminator genes (GURT) *were* developed, just not deployed for real, so all it takes to believe this is to mix up "was planned" with "actually happened". I don't think anyone asserted the genes were being covered up.
And BTW one of the first hits I get when searching for the topic is the Guardian, so the idea newspapers didn't talk about it is wrong.
This is really interesting - I had believed this too, but thought it was because of using first generation hybrids to achieve the effect, but it looks like I was wrong.
Most of those criteria apply to the actual absurdity of Monsanto stuff, that they maintain "copyright" on their seeds which you can't re-seed for "free". People would probably agree that this is at least as morally wrong as the "terminator gene", and so don't particularly care about which of those is the correct belief, when Monsanto=evil clearly follows either way.
No? The grown seeds are functional, the point is that Monsanto entirely "owns" them, so as far as you're concerned they might as well not be there at all. Or, for an even bigger absurdity, if the wind happens to blow them onto a third party's field, the owner of it becomes indebted to Monsanto without having done anything!
I don’t see a conspiracy there. Monsanto and several other companies did indeed develop these technologies, or purchased the technology through acquisitions. There was a massive controversy that led to UN and national bans on it in several countries. Because of these controversies the technology was never deployed, but it certainly exists and might be deployed in the future.
Please feel free to correct the post with useful and relevant information. The seed was developed by Delta and Land Pine company, which Monsanto attempted to acquire. As a result of the controversy thrown up by the acquisition attempt they agreed not to deploy the tech. The acquisition failed in 1999 due to antitrust concerns, and then completed in the 2000s after Monsanto had agreed not to deploy or further develop the tech. It’s possible that following the very public debate, Monsanto also divested itself of the patent (or failed to acquire it.) None of this means that public reporting around the Terminator gene was a “conspiracy theory”.
First of all, the quotation attributed to Lewis/Chesterton has nothing particularly to do with conspiracy theories. They were reacting to the tradition of nineteenth-century materialist rationalism and its aspirations to sweep away all superstition, and to replace it with a purely rational, scientific, atheistic world-view, where there was no question of "belief", but only of firmly established scientific truth. The criticism was that science had failed to provide this expected certainty anyway, but that in addition other forms of belief (political, social, even economic) had replaced formal religion, and non-formal religious beliefs hadn't gone away. It was a fair (in my view) criticism of the wildly ambitious expectations of people like Huxley and Saint-Simon.
Second, a number of these stories are not "conspiracy theories." Conspiracy theories are theories about the existence of a conspiracy. The idea of the existence of aliens which has been debated (at least by the Catholic Church) since the time of Giordano Bruno, is not a conspiracy theory. It's only a conspiracy theory if you believe that someone is conspiring to cover it up. Russia!Russia!Russia! is a conspiracy theory because it posits the existence of a conspiracy.
Third, I'm not sure "belief" is the word here. How about "convinced by evidence" vs "unconvinced by evidence"? "Belief" is precisely what you have when you can't reach an opinion by weighing evidence. People who use acupuncture, for example, are not expressing a "belief", but generally either basing themselves on evidence that it has done them good in the past, or on assurances from others they trust. It's quite a different process from "belief" that a pill prescribed by a doctor, whose name they can't pronounce, will do them good. Likewise, astrologers (I have one in the family) are intensely pragmatic, and financial astrologers, for example, make very good livings in a climate that doesn't not easily reward failure. There's an argument that a certain sort of mindset is more open to new ideas, and less conformist with the dogmas of the day. This is an attitude more than anything else, and means people are prepared to critically examine ideas that others would just dismiss. Witness the famous scene in Brecht's Galileo, where the Cardinal refuses to look through Galileo's telescope on the basis that it is alleged to be showing things that he knows can't exist. I've always seen this as the classic take-down of nineteenth century materialist scientism.
Finally, religion is the original conspiracy theory. This applies even in the Iliad, where the gods decide everything, but is particularly strong with monotheistic religions. I knew a diplomat in an Arab country who had long arguments with his chauffeur who routinely drove through red lights. The chauffeur argued that, if he was meant by Allah, to have an accident, he'd have an accident. If not, not. I've had Muslim students who regard success or failure in examinations as outside their control. We live in a more secularised world, but we long to recapture the world-view of our ancestors (Lewis was an expert on this) when the whole world was magical and full of signs and everything was connected. Since then, we've had what Weber called the "disenchantment of the world" - see Charles Taylor's mighty tome for how this happened. As the quotation says, science once promised to provide an explanation for an otherwise meaningless world, but hasn't done so. People seek it elsewhere.
<i>Second, a number of these stories are not "conspiracy theories." Conspiracy theories are theories about the existence of a conspiracy... Finally, religion is the original conspiracy theory.</i>
I'm not sure these statements really go together -- "Things happen as God wills, and there's nothing we can do to affect the outcome one way or the other" doesn't actually posit any conspiracy.
>financial astrologers, for example, make very good livings in a climate that doesn't not easily reward failure
Do they ever predict anything which could be clearly contradicted by later observations? If not, then they can't fail, and thus prove themselves to be cunning enough to earn good living, I guess.
My impression is that they work for the kind of organisation (hedge-funds etc) that don't reward failure, bearing in mind that astrologers see themselves as something akin to weather forecasters rather than fortune tellers. But my wider point, irrespective of the specific subject, is that the word "belief" is a very tricky one. You can "believe" that the theory of evolution is solidly established, having looked at the evidence. You can "believe"that a given healing system works (I mentioned acupuncture) if it has a solid theoretical foundation and works on a significant number of people you know in predictable ways. You can "believe" that Jesus is your saviour, which is an internal conviction. In he case of astrology, it's reasonable to "believe" it provides useful results (ie the second sense) if someone has explained how the calculations are done, shown you the results of the calculations and the results seem borne out by experience or can be independently verified. In general I don't like the word "belief."
Well, my impression is that when people are consciously aware of having a particular belief, they feel that they have adequate evidence to justify is. The problem here is that people have a pretty weak intuitive grasp of epistemology, and our civilization happens to be immature enough that formal education in it isn't even considered to be a necessary part of general curriculum.
How the heck can you, despite noticing the Economist/YouGov sneaky trick of mostly choosing right-coded conspiracy theories, fall for the other sneaky trick of calling the “millions of illegal votes” theory a “conspiracy theory” in a context which makes it clear that the term denotes a *false and disproven* theory?
Be honest, Scott, WOULD YOU HAVE made this mistake if they, in the poll, called “COVID-19 was created in a laboratory” a “conspiracy theory” of this type?
In both cases, we have a not-yet-proven theory with shocking political implications *investigation into and discussion of which has been very strongly resisted and censored without ACTUAL DISPROOF or anything approaching it having been provided*.
Be honest. Would you have made this mistake if the switch I proposed had been made?
“Millions of illegal votes” and “COVID was created in a lab” are both theories that can’t be fully ruled out, but that do posit something for which there should be ample evidence that we don’t find. They’re a lot like claims that ufo sightings are best explained by extraterrestrial aliens that way.
I disagree strongly with you about the existence of evidence for both those theories, but this is not the place to discuss that; the point is that they are both “live” theories which have in no way whatsoever been DISproved or shown impossible, so don’t belong on a list of false “conspiracy theories.”
You weren’t paying attention. It’s not necessary for it to be disproved or shown impossible, I also allowed a theory to be dismissable if there was much less evidence for it than one would expect if it were true.
In the case of 9/11, it seems very unlikely indeed that Bush tried to make it happen, but there’s plenty of evidence that various entities knew it was coming and kept quiet about it
I don't think Scott's sneakily implying that the "Millions of illegal votes" theory is false and disproven. I think he's blatantly implying it, and would explicitly state as much if asked directly. For what it's worth, I agree with him that it's a laughable theory, not a "live option".
Are you proposing that Scott must remain agnostic on any issue that remains contentious, and faces "Censorship" (however nebulously defined)? *Creationism* remains contentious, in that nearly half of Americans believe in it, and "censored" (in that it won't be taught in public schools or published in academic journals), but I'd still expect Scott to offhandedly dismiss it.
For some reason my reply disappeared from my browser; in case it is truly gone, the gist is:
Of course I am not proposing that, I am talking about evidence not contentiousness, and distinguishing not only between absence of evidence and evidence of absence, but between true absence of evidence and a situation where there is extreme discouragement of investigation and suppression of discussion of evidence so that those making less than a serious effort conclude both that evidence is much more absent than would be expected, and, if they are especially stupid, that "debunking" and "disproof" have actually occurred despite themselves being unable to reproduce such disproofs.
The “millions of illegal votes” theory deserves attention in proportion to its intrinsic plausibility, evidence, and credibility of its proponents. The COVID lab leak hypothesis and illegal votes theory aren’t comparable in this regard, IMO.
A good many atheists seem largely motivated to become atheists in order to flaunt their intellectual superiority over the credulous. This leads them to pre-sort new beliefs that come their way into "will I look credulous if I believe this or will it make me look smart" while maintaining that this is part of their deep intellectual sophistication. "I cannot believe in Bigfoot because I would look like a fool" will protect against believing in Bigfoot. But it won't do you any good against things that your social group wouldn't mock you for believing. So, if you look at the past, you will find atheists whose deep faith in science caused them to embrace phenomenology, behaviouralism, and lobotomy as a mental health procedure, who fought Ignaz Semmelweis' hygenic efforts because to believe that invisible poisions were causing childbed fever was irrational, and who thought that dialectical materialism was proven, and we are destined to the promised Socialist Paradise on Earth. I think you need to look at bad science when you want to measure the credulousness of atheists.
My suspicion is that anyone who still identifies as "Atheist" instead of "agnostic" or "no religion" these days is also the kind of person who self-identifies as a skeptic, and sort of gets off a little bit on disbelieving things like bigfoot and astrology.
I identify as an atheist despite acknowledging that there is a nonzero but <1% chance that God exists. I just think it's more intellectually honest to say "therefore I don't believe in God" rather than pretending to be undecided. In my experience it's the self identified agnostic who seems to be getting off on the idea of "but we dont really *know*"
God of any religion in particular, or simply a creator of the Universe in general? I've never seen good arguments for either that the first chance shouldn't be absurdly low, or the second pretty substantial.
Hmm... If this allows creators with arbitrarily low IQs, this can more-or-less reduce down to "physics still worked around the time of the big bang", just labeling the explosion as the creator.
Or it was just _there_, a brute fact, with no separate creator. Or one can relabel the stuff that exploded as the creator, if arbitrarily low IQ creators are possible.
<i>Or it was just _there_, a brute fact, with no separate creator.</i>
You can say that, but it's an intellectually lazy cop-out which violates the PSR and throws the whole foundation for science and logical thought in doubt.
<i>Or one can relabel the stuff that exploded as the creator, if arbitrarily low IQ creators are possible.</i>
Creation, by definition, involves making something different to oneself. A bunch of matter rearranging itself from Form A into Form B wouldn't count.
The point is that we have no good explanation for that fact, but are for some reason still supposed to confidently rule out a not-particularly-satistactory one.
What could be more absurd and untrue too than believing that you are "saved" from having to intelligently dealing with the fact that your body is going to die (and indeed intends to) by believing in the brutal murder of the God-man Jesus, or that the pope is the vicar of christ and that his "authority" is based on "apostolic succession" - never mind that some many popes were essentially psychotic and/or not fit for human company. And that monstrous "catholic" magisterium is binding on all human being, and that the Bible is the "word of god". Or in the case of amerika that it has some kind of divine dispensation or unique role in the fulfillment of "god's plan" for humankind. Or that you go to "heaven" when you die, if you are/were a good-two-shoes true believer.
Which is to point out that anyone who believes in such garbage is in fact completely deluded, and will both individually and collectively perpetrate all kinds of monstrous crimes against both "heretical" individuals and collectives.
Some people when you ask them if something weird is true, go “yeah, maybe. It’s a big world out there.”
Those people are likely to say yes/possible to conspiracy theories and astrology and think God is maybe real hard to say (so agnostic or religious but rarely go to church depending on where they fall on the likelihood).
Intriguing Post! Perhaps one explanation for the data is that the average person has a set limit to the amount of socially challenging or weird beliefs they are comfortable holding at any one time, and thus people with strong coherent beliefs outside the norm (atheists and evangelicals) are less inclined to believe in assorted woo than those who have the social credit and thought space to spare?
I think others here are onto this too. It’s easier to believe anything if lots of other people do. Social proof is real. It seems impossible for something to be false when everyone you know believes. But I think the real question is whether there is some wiring - or some function - that the ability to believe without evidence serves. That would explain the replacement of religion by other belief systems. Do we “need to believe?” Why?
I don't think they are talking about believing in UFOs. I'd guess what they are referring to is (or at least includes) social positions like "men can have periods".
I don't consider myself to be on the autism spectrum in any way. (I don't think "suffer" is the general term that people like to use.)
I'm not sure which "clown in biotech" you're talking about. I think there are several people involved with problematic viral research that are opposed to further investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology because they don't want people shutting down their legal research that probably (though not certainly) didn't cause this pandemic but does pose risks of future ones.
I believe your comment may violate some of Scott's comment policies.
There are, in fact, several climate tipping points such as a methane clathrate release or cloud feedback effects that could cause sudden 8-10°C warming this century, with corresponding devastating effects on agriculture and society. I don’t think “climate change will end the world in my lifetime” is a precise formulation of this, but “there are tail risks we don’t really understand and can’t rule out that could cause global civilizational collapse within our lifetimes” certainly is something one might reasonably be worried about.
"cloud feedback effects that could cause sudden 8-10°C warming this century"
Yup, I've read of that possibility. A normally-4 C rise could actually give us 12 C. It comes down to one computer model, and it isn't obvious if the effect is empirically testable short of triggering the full effect... If the conclusion of the paper has, say, 25% odds of being right (new research is a chancy thing...), and if there are, say, 20% odds of screwing up decarbonization badly enough to get the normally 4 C rise by 2100, then I could guess there could be 5% odds of humans being reduced to a few million hard scrabble subsistence farmers in a thawing Antarctica.
This basically is traceable to one paper about possible cloud instability. Of course, this is mostly from simulations (and some historical evidence from the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum). I take it with a large grain of salt... As I had written earlier "(new research is a chancy thing...)" Personally, I would not phrase it as "quite likely"
I would argue religion, or other belief system is not so much an "anti-virus", as a whole OS. It might be less vulnerable to mind-viruses developed for the older platform, unless they manage to adapt, but it's not inherently much more secure. Some flaws lie in our lower-level cognition processes (BIOS, if we continue with computer analogies), so they can be exploited no matter other mind-software, but really - every OS just needs to get more popular to have more viruses targeted specifically to it.
Already 10% of *atheists* believe in astrology, while there is maybe just 10% atheists in population. I wonder how many young atheists believe in it - it seems that youth is almost as good predictor of this belief as religiosity? And there are more atheists among Millennials (according to the same page). Unless these people grow out of this belief en masse, they will probably pass it on to their children, and we will see more astrology-believing atheists in future. Which means that this particular virus have adapted to the new circumstances - new software architecture, if you will.
I'd imagine as the percentage of atheists grows (if it does), we will find them as willing to believe in impossible stuff as the current, more religious population. Though probably in slightly different stuff, for entirely different reasons.
As someone else mentioned, flirting with astrology and the like is probably more about openness as a personality trait. I don’t “believe” in astrology but I like to read my horoscope sometimes. Given it’s been around for a very long time, perhaps there is some value in it we moderns don’t understand.
I think it would be helpful to get some non-US data on this before drawing any conclusions. Religion in America, particularly evangelical Christianity, is a pretty unique beast in a global context.
UFOs don't really fit with the other ones because "of all the hundreds of trillions of planets in the universe, Earth is the only one with life" is more of a woo article of faith than allowing for the possibility of extraterrestrials. A better "conspiracy theory" of this vein is the question of whether the government is keeping alien equipment in Area 51.
I think it would be more informative to have all of this broken down by sex. Women are more likely to go to church and also more likely to believe astrology (per the one chart that includes sex). This might explain the difference between religion and church attendance.
I speculate that if you could segment the data you'd see a clearer pattern: there's a subset of Americans who will believe in either 1) religion or 2) conspiracy theories and if you take away religion, then they will believe in conspiracy theories.
The question is can you believe in nothing? An affirmative belief that there is no god puts one in the believer category. It’s difficult for humans to dwell in a state of not knowing.
There is still a sufficient number of extant religions in the world that I strongly suspect the number of religious claims you reject vastly exceeds the number you accept (if any), for the simple reason that you've never encountered these claims.
You exist without the slightest inkling of the religious convictions of the Sentinelese, say, with no problem whatsoever.
You might argue that not knowing a claim is somehow different from knowing and actively rejecting it, but at the end of the day you will still act as if you held a particular claim to be false. You won't be celebrating the Sabbath until you know you are supposed to celebrate the Sabbath.
Thus the symmetry between theists and atheists is illusory. What is happening instead, is that both groups are faced with a claim and some measure of supporting evidence and one group (the theists) changes their belief based on the evidence, while the other (the atheists) does not.
It bears restating: not believing any particular religious claim - that is, acting as if the claim was false - is the default. You must first encounter the claim and evaluate the evidence for it before you can start believing it.
It only looks like atheists are doing the same thing - but only with regards to a small subset of all extant religious claims - because we live in societies where certain religious claims are taken as social default and are adopted without examination. If we take a wider perspective and consider *all* religious claims being made around the world, we find the theists and atheists to be mostly on the same page - in a state of ignorance or active disbelief.
This is what is meant by: "I merely believe in one God fewer than you do".
It's also worth pointing out that this has nothing to do with the question of beliefs or knowledge in a more general sense. If God was subject to the sort of empirical testing that our everyday knowledge is (say, "what goes up must come down"), we wouldn't be having this conversation.
There is research to show that belief precedes knowledge. In other words, even to entertain an idea you must be open to its validity. The default switch is belief (hmm, wonder if so and so is true) not the disinterested weighing of evidence. Therefore I’d say back to you: that’s not how it works.
Absent survey data on things like “communism” or “critical race theory”, we don’t get to see the more interesting stuff.
My guess would be that for most people, they aren’t particularly conscientious about their beliefs; it’s a bag of stuff that more or less feels good when you say it. A smaller subset probably cares about “does my tribe allow/mandate this belief”, and then a tiny tiny tiny subset probably tries to make their beliefs coherent and consistent.
Interesting. I do agree with claims that one of our evolved brain's most distinguishing features is conceptualization, but i don't align with either of the quoted refrains you used to exemplify the attitudes you would associate with a post-rationalist. I'll note I don't identify as a post-rationalist nor a rationalist either.
It is a subculture of people that seem to admire some aspects of the rationalist community (the culture of trying to be reasonable) but reject some other aspects (atheism, Yudkowsky). Their favorite blog is Ribbonfarm.
They admire writings of David Chapman, because he criticizes rationality a lot -- but later Chapman said that when he writes "rationalist", he does not actually mean the rationalist community, but rather something that Buddha criticized long ago, and that the rationalist community does not seem to fit his definition of "rationalists".
Their favorite claim to superiority over rationalists is that the rationalists are stuck at Kegan's level 4, while themselves are at Kegan's level 5, because they realize that rationality is just one of many possible approaches to understand the world (religion would be one of the alternatives).
Thank you for the thorough reply. Reading through those added to the confusion I have around all of this labeling and conceptualization within these communities. Seems like its inherently messy as this quote highlights (it makes me think of the spider man pointing at spider man memes).
> I think it's lovely and useful that we have labels, not just for rationalist, but for rationalist-adjacent and for post-rationalist. But these labels are generally made extensionally, by pointing at people who claim those labels, rather than intensionally, by trying to distill what distinguishes those clusters.
My gut has long felt like there's a degree of unnecessary overthinking amongst people trying to define an identity. I like labels for conceptualization, but I don't like labels that oversimplify. We're all people and people are complicated... I don't think a 'rationalist' exists just like I don't think a 'narcissist' exists. These labels categorize traits that can present in any person. Even at the extreme end, someone who uses 100% rational approaches or 100% narcissist approaches is still a human and could shift the paradigm if they choose to. I stay open to a possible value in these types of labels, but in my personal experience I have yet to find value or hear an argument that convinced me.
Two follow up questions:
1) Is there an empirical basis for "post-rationalists" being more subjected to woo? Is it based on the anecdotal and subjective relationship between the communities? Or is it simply a playful jab at them?
2) Is there a counter claim to the Kegan's level claim?
Post-rationality used to be a hot topic a few years ago, but I didn't hear about it about since covid (maybe I just wasn't paying attention), so my memory is not fresh here...
> Is there an empirical basis for "post-rationalists" being more subjected to woo?
Many of them approve of Buddhism (beyond mere "meditation is healthy"), so if you consider Buddhism a woo (I do), this would be the most obvious example. If I understand it correctly, David Chapman is a leader of some local Buddhist group.
I think there are more examples, but nothing specific comes to my mind now.
> Is there a counter claim to the Kegan's level claim?
Finding a vaguely defined hierarchy of "psychological maturity", putting myself on the top, and people I didn't like below me, is something I used to do in my 20s, and afterwards I felt quite ashamed of it, because it was very immature. -- See? Two can play this game. Now I have cleverly sketched a new hierarchy of psychological development that puts my current self on the top, and the post-rationalists below me. This is a cheap move that proves nothing.
Using the definition from Wikipedia, how would you even know whether a stranger on internet "has their sense of self determined by a set of values that they have authored for themselves" or "is free to allow themselves to focus on the flow of their lives"? (The former is level 4, the latter is level 5.) If you ask dozen different people WTF this means, they will give you dozen different answers. Is there even a contradiction? Is having values incompatible with perceiving the flow of your life? Is going with the flow really superior to having values... and isn't this a value statement itself?
Another explanation that post-rationalists use is that people at level 4 think in "systems", while people at level 5 think in "systems of systems". Again, feel free to guess WTF this means, and how specifically you would diagnoze a stranger on internet. My interpretation, using the LW lingo, would be that people at level 4 mistake their map for the territory (have only one perspective for looking at things), while people at level 5 are using multiple maps (multiple perspectives) flexibly.
But saying that rationalists are incapable to see things from multiple perspectives is in my opinion just a map/territory confusion. Yes, I believe that there is ultimately only one reality, but "a map is not the territory", i.e. you can still have multiple imperfect perspectives of the same underlying reality. It's precisely the awareness of the imperfection that allows me to use multiple perspectives without believing in multiple realities. So in my opinion, the post-rationalists have this backwards. They are not "beyond" the (Less Wrong style) rationality; they just fail to understand its finer points. (But if you ask them, it's the other way round, and it's me who fails to understand their finer points. Again, two can play this silly game.)
...sorry if this was too abstract and confusing. The short version is that all this Kegan-something seems like a superficially polite way to make a rude statement "if you are an atheist and materialist, you are a dumb person incapable of considering things from multiple perspectives". (To clarify, this is not something that Kegan says. It is something that post-rationalists imply when they smugly insist that all rationalists are at Kegan level 4.) First, if that's what you believe, at least have the decency to state your accusation openly. Second, I don't think it's true; it's a strawman.
> Many of them approve of Buddhism (beyond mere "meditation is healthy"), so if you consider Buddhism a woo (I do), this would be the most obvious example. If I understand it correctly, David Chapman is a leader of some local Buddhist group.
Anecdotal and not emperical? Arguably any spiritual practice can be viewed as having "woo" by someone else... and this article gave some good data to suggest that it is hard to evaluate religious woo, though it didn't touch on Buddhism as it was western-centric.
> Finding a vaguely defined hierarchy of "psychological maturity"...
The wikipedia article has a lot of detail and I see there is some research to back it. Interpretation of some of the phrasing is odd but I understand the idea and naturally it mirrors other developmental frameworks. I do agree with is the difficultly of categorizing someone based on limited online interactions. I'd have to look at how actual psychological assessments are done (I don't focus on this kind of MH work I focus on trauma recovery and healing), but either way the idea of psychologically assessing two similar online communities is simply foolish in my opinion. This isn't to say that, under the lens of this concept, they are right or wrong... rather to ask "what is the actual value of this?" Concepts aren't something to hold onto... leading to
> Another explanation that post-rationalists use is that people at level 4 think in "systems", while people at level 5 think in "systems of systems". Again, feel free to guess WTF this means, and how specifically you would diagnoze a stranger on internet. My interpretation, using the LW lingo, would be that people at level 4 mistake their map for the territory (have only one perspective for looking at things), while people at level 5 are using multiple maps (multiple perspectives) flexibly.
I have no doubt someone at level 4 and level 3 (perhaps not level 2) could assess an external situation from more than one perspective. I understand the differentiation as an internal level... I might try to reframe 4 as having a concept of the self and 5 as letting go of a concept of the self. In that case, both rats/post-rats could be at level 4 or 5 and we both seemingly agreed, this isn't an armchair activity.
> ..sorry if this was too abstract and confusing.
No need to apologize!! I appreciate you taking the time to entertain my questions, step back in time, and try to explain things for me. I feel like I've gotten a good taste of these ideas and how the communities are conceptualizing themselves. The Kegan levels are as ephemeral as any ideas about the self, id, ego, buddha nature, natural spirit, etc, all of which can be reasoned about in limited fashion as language is a clumsy vehicle for communicating the internal human experience that underlies this. And the rat/post-rat debate idea. Hard pass. I like thoughtful people and thoughtful ideas, every community has its mix imo. Even the one with the "most developed" people... whatever that means lol
On the side of religious people, there's a bunch of neat measures for degree of religiosity (church attendance, prayer, and what not), but I would like to point out that atheists are hardly a homogeneous group in their own right. On one hand you have atheistic leity, people who are atheists because their parents raised them as one or because evolution debunks the existence of God (while their understanding of evolution bears more resemblance to Pokemon than the modern theory), and on the other hand you have people who are committed.
I would suspect belief in conspiracy theories or astrology largely comes from people's surrounding cultural environment/memes and that the self-identified atheists are unlikely to believe in bigfoot or moon landing hoaxes even if they "believe in science" in just about the same way as most non-church-going religious people do in their religion. Perhaps this is somewhat different in the States where I could see atheists being more likely to be independent thinkers of one kind or another, but by my reckoning most atheists aren't anything like that, and these people either dominate or at least strongly influence the polls: one would expect committed atheists familiar with natural sciences, naturalistic philosophy, epistemology, etc, to be even less likely to believe in these specific conspiracies and falsehoods asked about in the polls. I would like to think this isn't the case, but I do however concede the possibility that committed naturalists might be more likely to believe in some other kinds of bunk (or things that will turn out to be bunk, while in principle being knowable as bunk right now), just like the final graph in the post would show for post-rationalists.
Some of the charts break out “atheist”, “agnostic”, and “nothing in particular”, which sound sort of like three levels of commitment to atheism, and do in fact pattern in some similar ways.
I’m surprised none of you smart people questioned a sub-premise of this article: that UFOs are a conspiracy theory. There is now emerging evidence that UFO/UAP are indeed real, although not clear what they are or where they are from. But all you Bayesians should update your priors on this one, because the evidence is piling up that something real is definitely being seen by sensors and military pilots (and congressmen).
We should do a meta-poll within this group of religious conviction vs belief in anything Scott writes.
The ufo one is the belief that ufos are visits from extraterrestrial intelligences, not the belief that there are some systematic patterns of aerial phenomena that haven’t been identified and look a lot like flying objects.
I would argue that assuming this is not in fact the case is more cognitive shortcut than the other way around. Given the existing evidence of flight characteristics as well as the sheer size of the known universe, it seems strange that the default position should be anything other than: “it’s extraterrestrial”. But even ignoring the Drake equation aspect, the evidence, and especially the reaction from military pilots and congress people with access to black projects seems to indicate these flight characteristics are potentially hundreds of generations above what we have, and likely require new physics. So all told, I’m not saying someone hasn’t cracked the origins of gravity and unified physics and then engineered a craft based in this and is flying it around for fun around our military….but that seems an extremely high bar given what we know of the science and what we see happening with other major superpowers. Just sayin
I think it’s clear that it’s not flying objects created by humans. But “extraterrestrial” rules out strange meteorological phenomena (when we know there are strange meteorological phenomena we only discovered in the past few decades, like many different forms of lightning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning) ) as well as unknown aerial microorganisms and the like, and “intelligence” rules out all forms of weird physics that we don’t understand.
I think that concluding it’s extraterrestrial intelligence is very restrictive, and that what we can conclude is just: there are real phenomena, and they aren’t made by humans.
Yes I think this is a good summary given what we know. Just one extra data point, which is not enough but does exist: recent interview with Tucker Carlson (ugh I know but still) and Dr. Gary Nolan describes that some people have touched these “craft” and then suffered health effects that seem related to radiation damage. But I guess it’s a data point moving away from weather phenomenon and more towards physical object with conscious control (it reacts to humans)
I think it’s important to examine every possible explanation, including the most likely earthly ones. However, most of Mike West’s debunking struggles against Occam’s Razor. If you have to twist yourself into a pretzel to explain away something, it’s probably not the likely explanation. That said, I would check out the pentagon report that came out. They are hardly prone to overstating something of this magnitude. And they don’t use the “A” word…but to quote: “
In 18 incidents, described in 21 reports, observers reported unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics.
Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion. In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings.
The UAPTF holds a small amount of data that appear to show UAP demonstrating acceleration or a degree of signature management. Additional rigorous analysis are necessary by multiple teams or groups of technical experts to determine the nature and validity of these data. We are conducting further analysis to determine if breakthrough technologies were demonstrated. “
"However, most of Mike West’s debunking struggles against Occam’s Razor. If you have to twist yourself into a pretzel to explain away something, it’s probably not the likely explanation."
Wow! I don't see it that way at all! All his debunking seems completely mundane and plausible to me. (As there wasn't enough time for you to review the link, I'll assume that you were familiar with West's work from before.)
The report predates West's stuff. As far as I'm concerned, West leaves the evidence in complete tatters.
Philip Mason does a pretty good job of debunking as well, if you can get past his speech impediment...
Just watched the video link. I think in general, the videos of the UAP definitely don’t show anything that couldn’t fit known flight characteristic s. They don’t seem to be all the weird, from my non-military perspective. However what gets me is all the evidence that’s being cited from many eye witnesses of the radar returns, as well as the pilot interviews. When you put it together, what seems to come out is: 1) they are solid, 2) they can come from above 80,000ft. 3) they can drop from 80,000ft to 2ft in a few seconds (~27,272 mph) and hover 4) they can enter water, air and space 5) they don’t have traditional propulsion 6) they can outlast anything we have in the air by hours 7) they’ve been around since at least WW2.
Huge caveat: it’s all heresay until we can see the radar returns and the pilot GoPro and the FLIR and the satellite footage simultaneously. But again what’s more likely: massive delusion across multiple people, organizations and timescales, or what seems more likely: when a bureaucratic military is faced with ultra powerful foes that they don’t understand, the org just freezes up and decides to not talk about it. Seems like a natural reaction to me. That’s the case for the non-ordinary explanation. This is just my opinion here but I also think there is a strong argument in the positive as well. Basically, this form of behavior is very well predicted by someone who is able to negate the effects of gravity. Since we know gravity warps space-time, traveling this way would make matter itself bend around you. No need for propellant, and no difference between air, space or water. All matter bends around you. This also would allow signature reduction through the same mechanism. Ultra high speed sharp turns wouldn't create crushing G forces, because G is effectively rendered to 0. Finally, the one area of physics we truly have not fully understood is gravity. It’s a key missing link between the two major theories and hasn’t been unified into one cohesive theory. Any advanced civilization would likely have to solve this question at some point. And just like you and I are communicating through manipulated electromagnetic energy, who knows what that level of control would look like for gravitational force. No idea. Finally, current theory of relativity forbids faster than light travel, which a major loophole: if you can manipulate the space-time fabric itself, you could accelerate to faster than light travel, without braking relativity in the local frame of reference. An existing framework for this is called the Alcubierre drive. We don’t have the technology to implement it, but the math checks out if we could. So now, the true question becomes, out of the estimated 100-200 billion galaxies in the universe, is it possible than any other life emerged and it evolved long enough to build these types of drives? If so, they would unlock access to the whole universe, since the distance no longer become constrained by light years. And if they did invent it and travel, why wouldn’t they come to say hi? They probably wouldn’t land, and they probably don’t care enough to destroy us. They probably would just check out our early nuclear technology (directly related to our understanding of physics) and would play cat and mouse with our big lumbering flying machines. Given the statistical odds and how well this fits the stated evidence, is it so hard to believe? Seems like to think the opposite is tantamount to being pre-Copernican.
The problem with all of your examples is that they're academic. Whether or not you believe in bigfoot -- in itself -- has no influence over your life. I suspect that atheists are more likely to believe in scientific racism, eugenics, Marxism-Leninism, neo-reaction, "wokism" (stop saying "blacklist"!!), etc.
> Strongly religious people and outright atheists were usually less likely to believe in conspiracy theories.
This makes a ton of sense to me. Both atheists and church-goers belong to identity groups centered around belief. Believing anything that isn't explicitly condoned threatens to put you in the outgroup.
The unaffiliated are susceptible because they have no fear of believing the (morally/socially) wrong thing.
Edit: This also explains why church-going is such a strong predictor of resilience to conspiracy theories--churchgoers explicitly belong to a belief-oriented community. The religious-but-non-church-going people wouldn't lose many friends if they recanted (or said they believe in bigfoot).
I think you're incorrect on why most people go to church, if we're talking about the regular attendance group. You state that they do it for family or cultural reasons, but those are the people who are infrequent and fill the middle role. Those who regularly attend generally have stronger beliefs in God and more strictly follow the beliefs of the religion.
Always amazes me how thoroughly secular thinkers refuse to believe that religious folks believe the things they say they believe. I've seen my religious friends have this conversation with folks *who also grew up religious* repeatedly to no avail:
"Why do you believe X?"
"Because my church's leadership says that's what God wants me to believe."
"Haha, no seriously why?"
"...I...I told you."
"Okay but really"
There actually are people who believe God speaks to them, or speaks to their leaders, and who base most of their life decisions on that premise. They make up a large minority of the country.
Reminds me of historians arguing that some medieval theological controversy was *really* about political power, or economics, or pretty much anything apart from what the actual participants said it was about.
Things can be about more than one thing. Important things usually are about more than one thing! The fact that some internecine conflict within the medieval Catholic Church started as a dispute over actual theology does not preclude it from *also* being a conflict over politics or economics or culture.
I always understood the quote (whether its Chesterson or Lewis) to be more of a reference to the idea that the human mind seems to be prewired for religiosity. What Christians in particular mean when they say this is something like "you are going to believe in something. If not a Christian worldview and man's purpose in the universe, what?"
So likelihood of belief in things like UFOs and Bigfoot strikes me as (at least) one off from the real question. It may serve as a proxy for a particular predisposition of susceptibility to odd beliefs, but I am not sure.
I am a believer, so it is really hard for me to step outside the paradigm. I do, however, relate well to cultural Christians like Theodore Dalrymple and Christopher Degroot. The coherence and the second order outcomes of Christendom, which evolved into what we now call "western civilization" are pretty hard to ignore. In short, you don't have modern society without it, even if you think the Christian idea of God coming down in the form of a man to save the world from itself is really cooky (or off-the-charts improbable).
The far-left looks likes a religion to me. They have dogmas, sacraments, clergy, prophets, etc. They just don't call them that. I think that's the point of the quote.
To be fair, if you accept the "Wokeism, leftism, liberalism, etc., is a kind of religion" framing, I think it's fairly clear that we *do* have our own holy wars and inquisitions -- "Defending/spreading democracy/freedom" is a stock justification for modern wars, and lots of countries have laws against hate speech. So I'd say the question is less "Do we have to accept holy wars and the inquisition?" than "What sort of holy wars and inquisition do we have to accept?"
Agreed. "Americanism" is a religion too. It cloaks itself in something like Christian principles (some say "Judeo-Christian" as if that is a thing).
The bottom line is, I could see myself reaching a point where I walk away from faith-based world view. What I would look like as a member of society is a mystery from this vantage point. I am not sure what I would replace it with.
'To be fair, if you accept the "Wokeism, leftism, liberalism, etc., is a kind of religion"' then you have completely redefined the word religion so as to be meaningless.
Even if those ideologies are not religions by the book definition, they share enough in form, function and outcomes for the analogy to hold up fairly well. I am not sure that makes the word religion meaningless.
It is possible to believe in anything religiously. The vast majority of people with left, liberal and anti-discrimination views do not believe in them religiously. If you are going to call all of those religions then you might as well call pet-ownership, football-viewing and BBQ-ing religions.
I guess I would argue that you don't have to believe in anything "religiously" when it is the dominant, ambient, legally binding air we breathe. Try gently turning away a gay couple wanting to have a wedding cake made (and even refer them to another bakery) and watch what happens.
People are quite happily calling Buddhism a religion, even though under some definitions, it arguably doesn't count as a religion. Likewise Confucianism, although that's less common.
Buddhism as created by Buddha may not have been a religion. After he died it adapted a bunch of Hinduism to improve salability. Then as it added on a ton of mysticism as it traveled around to various asian countries. Virtually every flavor now has gods and spirits and prayers. A bit along the lines of, wtf would Jesus think if he ran into a Hare Krishna in the airport.
I think there might be a misunderstanding here regarding the meaning of the original quote. In the context in which it is commonly used, the statement “will believe in anything” does not usually refer to a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, but rather to a need to look for an alternative overarching worldview that will provide a similar sense of belonging to something bigger than oneself, as traditional religion had in the past for many people.
A number of commentators have made such a point with regards to “wokeism” - and also pointed out the parallels between it and traditional religion (a high priesthood who may not be argued with, a concept of original sin, dogma that may not be questioned etc). A recent New Yorker article on William MacAskill makes very similar claims regarding some passionate adherents to EA.
The point I think those who use this “quote” are trying to make is that people in general have a fundamental need for an overarching belief system, and the abandonment of traditional religion has seen a not-unrelated-rise in other “religions” that provide a similar sense of meaning and purpose for adherents
At risk of derailing conversation, I don't think replying to any comment here with a single word "Yes" as you've done a number of times... adds anything. Maybe you could amplify the aspect or point you found useful in the parent comment instead?
At the very least, can you at least identify which part of the comment you are saying "yes" to? In all cases I've seen you reply "yes" it is not at all obvious that the comment could be replied to with "yes" and allow us to infer anything about what you mean. The comments aren't yes/no questions.
It’s an expression that I found the comment particularly useful. As such meant for the person who made the initial comment. But you are correct, it doesn’t add to the conversation. There is no like button so this was my equivalent. I don’t know whether it’s useful or not for the original commenter to get this feedback, but I in general I think it’s useful to know what ideas resonate with people.
I think the "will believe anything" statement isn't really about specific facts or theories that can be verified or falsified. It's about how one navigates the moral universe, how one discerns right and wrong and acts on that discernment. People who make the "will believe anything" claim seem to be arguing that non-believers just cobble together whatever bits of morality they can find and paste them together as it suits them in any given time or place.
Though that meaning of the statement rings true to me, I'm still not sure I really agree with that statement. I'm not sure how I'd go about proving or disproving it, or what sorts of epicycles I'd have to invent in order to do so.
I am in agreement with your notion that its about coherence. My mental model for people is that we are all future predictors, and that it’s hard to predict another future predictor who could do literally anything, so we try to align on assumptions as a means of cooperation.
All the responses here of the form “but what about communism, etc” are begging the question. The point is that if, as the claim goes, we’ve uninstalled an antivirus, then we should expect more viruses. The viruses like astrology are tests for that, and ones that can be agreed upon as viruses. Communism or CRT doesn’t fit that bill because they can’t be agreed open, and particularly won’t be agreed upon as viruses for the people that this matters most to: the non-religious. The only way to persuade me that religion is an antivirus is to demonstrate that it prevents things that I think of as viruses! Astrology is the test for that.
"The organizations that the KKK targeted for bloc recruitment were usually fraternal lodges and Protestant churches. Protestant ministers were offered free membership and powerful Chaplain status within the KKK."
"I haven't seen any data on the devoutness of white supremacists of the last say ten years."
Sorry, neither have I. And, as you noted, the klan has gone through three versions, so their 2.0 recruiting may not say anything useful about the 3.0 version.
"a lot of white supremacists and far right types have started gravitating to Orthodoxy and specifically Russian Orthodoxy in recent years" In the United States? That is an interesting and odd development. ( There has to be some way to make a bad joke about Trump and Putin out of this... )
I think it's pretty much incontestable that things like Communism and CRT are what the original quote was about. Unsurprisingly, many of the responses here reflect the sense that talking about astrology and Bigfoot seems like oddly changing the subject to other phenomena that aren't in any obvious way the same sort of thing.
If the claim is that the waning of traditional religious belief leads to the rise of a variety of modern substitute religions, then what we'll ultimately need to be looking at are things that large numbers of smart, sophisticated people at a given time believe are fundamentally right and true. We'll specifically need to be looking at belief systems that appear outwardly "religious" insofar as they involve metaphysical claims that aren't easily susceptible of empirical disproof -- like that white supremacy pervades every aspect of society or that the logic of history leads inexorably to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
You seem to be assuming that astrology is a reasonable proxy for those kinds of belief. But I just don't see why that would be so. Astrology is older than virtually all the major world religions and has existed alongside them for centuries. It doesn't strike me as relevant to the question of whether post-religious people end up being attracted to new ideologies that are essentially religions, albeit of an implicitly rather shabby sort.
Let me put it this way. If I claim that atheism is an antivirus and point to the fact that religious people believe that God exists, wouldn’t I be begging the question? And would it convince any religious person that atheism is an antivirus by showing that? No, but if I showed that religious people believe in astrology but atheists don’t (hypothetically), then that would perhaps convince some religious people that atheism was an antivirus. And if I failed to show that atheism defended against astrology, then I would have a hard time claiming it is an antivirus as even this really simple one got past its defenses! The reason that astrology works is that we both agree it’s nonsense.
Once I have an established that atheism is an antivirus I can then use it to argue about religious beliefs being viruses, evidence of the frailty of religious thinking, or whatever. But those aren’t what you use to demonstrate that it is an antivirus in the first place. That’s why Scott needs to talk about astrology and not about CRT even if those claims were about CRT in the first place!
Yeah, but if the quote means "People who don't believe the stuff I believe are likely to believe other stuff (which obviously I think is incorrect by definition)" then we're having a completely irrelevant discussion here.
American Christians don't believe in astrology because their interpretation of the Bible decries astrologers. They don't believe in communism because communist theory is often explicitly anti-religious and also something something protestant work ethic. We might draw a distinction, but we're not saying the thing. It's kinda begging the question to say "okay well we'll say the quote is true if Christianity protect Christians against believing obviously wrong things by our definition of obviously wrong, ignoring their definition of obviously wrong."
Maybe it's done in the spirit of intellectual charity, i.e. would becoming religious make us less likely to believe wrong things. Except...the writer and most of the commenters think Christianity is a wrong thing, so definitionally no. It's fake intellectual charity - we were never going to be convinced by this, which makes sense because it's not for us.
"If I claim that atheism is an antivirus and point to the fact that religious people believe that God exists, wouldn’t I be begging the question? And would it convince any religious person that atheism is an antivirus by showing that?"
No, but then I don't think the original quote was aimed at people who think that CRT is true. If it's trying to convince anyone (as opposed to giving a boost to people who already agree with the tweeter), it's likely atheists/agnostics who already agree that CRT is a mind virus, and who might therefore be amenable to an argument along the lines of "If religion immunises people against this thing we both agree is a mind virus, maybe there's something to be said for it."
I suppose that’s possible. The other obvious audience is the already religious. But Scott’s audience includes nearly 100% who will reject astrology and so that makes the most sense to use for the argument here. And again, if religion doesn’t cure astrology, how can you claim it’s an antivirus? This seems a necessary condition and also a neutral topic to base it off.
I think the other difficulty if you hinge on CRT etc as being the obvious mind virus, then you have to cope with other things that are highly religiously biased and even more obviously mine virus, like Qanon. Why doesn’t religion stop that virus? PRRI poll finds that born again and evangelicals are more likely to be Qanon even after controlling for all the obvious stuff - that doesn’t mean a lot but it does mean religion isn’t effective against this obvious virus. It’s totally a death knell for the theory in my books. If you include CRT, I think you doubly have to include those, so the only way this theory has weight is if you stick to the boring neutral virus of astrology.
<i>But Scott’s audience includes nearly 100% who will reject astrology and so that makes the most sense to use for the argument here.</i>
Only in the sense that, since the drunk guy can see most clearly under the lamppost, it "makes sense" for him to look for his car keys there, regardless of where he last saw them.
No, I’ll actually make the opposite claim: CRT is exactly the wrong test for this. One group has claimed to have an antivirus. To disprove that, you don’t need to look at whether others have viruses. You need to look at whether the people with the “antivirus” have viruses. And for that, you look at Qanon. The claim is falsified.
If atheists claimed an antivirus, you might want to search CRT or other liberal coded ideas. That’s a different claim though and one I don’t expect to be particularly true either.
I think you're getting hung up on the notion of "virus" and "antivirus" and losing sight of the fact that they're metaphors and don't mean anything outside the context of the original utterance.
The claim is that religion provides protection against a certain type of thing. Communism and CRT are central examples of that type of thing. Insofar as astrology is also that type of thing, or a relevantly similar type of thing, then it makes sense to discuss it in evaluating the claim.
But if astrology isn't the same as or even similar to the sort of thing religion is hypothetically supposed to protect against, it's not relevant. It doesn't matter if what the phrase "mind virus" evokes for you is a category of which astrology is a central instance, if that's not the category the original claim is about.
Do you think that Lewis and Chesterton would not have thought this applied to New Age woo? I think it seems like exactly the kind of thing this statement would be about. The choice of CRT, for example, seems much more like a “dunking on your political opponents” choice than a good test. I can always pick a property of my in group, say that it protects against mind viruses, and point to a characteristic of your in group as evidence. Commenters and Scott insisted on not allowing conservative coded viruses like Qanon to count - but commenters insist that the only valid test is liberal coded viruses? Of course those correlate with anything that is not conservative, yawn!
Oh, I agree that there's an element of dunking. More precisely, the argument simply assumes as a premise that some number of avowedly secular 20th-century (and now 21st-century) mass movements were (a) some combination of evil and stupid and (b) elicited "belief" from their adherents in the same sense that one might be said to "believe in" a particular religion.
If you don't share that premise, then yeah, the argument is going to be a non-starter for you. I don't quite agree that it's only about left-wing movements (although that's clearly what the people invoking it today have in mind). Fascism would be a very central example. In fact, if you want a neutral example to test the theory on, National Socialism would probably be your best bet, as a political ideology about which there's a virtually universal consensus that it was thoroughly bad.
QAnon seems like fair game too, though I don't know enough about it to be quite sure.
Your question is an interesting one. I don't know to what extent Chesterton and Lewis saw what we'd now think of as New Age beliefs as a major target, as compared to the various forms of scientific materialism or romantic nihilism, though I'm sure they were broadly opposed. Maybe somebody who knows those authors better can set me straight.
"Communism or CRT doesn’t fit that bill because they can’t be agreed open, and particularly won’t be agreed upon as viruses for the people that this matters most to: the non-religious."
Well, the fedora-tipping atheist community decided that Communism and CRT were viruses like other religions quite a while ago, that's why they started DeBOONKing them.
(Then they got called racist. Then actual racists turned up. Now it's 2022 and I hate the world.)
People tend to forget that communism rose to power in deeply religious Russia, and CRT was invented in the US, the most religious of Western societies. Not exactly a great argument for the mind-fortifying effect of religion.
I don't see that that's in any way inconsistent with the theory, though. If anything, it seems to me to support it.
The general claim is that people who divorce themselves from traditional religion tend to have a religion-shaped hole in their mental architecture that they turn to some religion-shaped object to fill. If that turns out to be especially true in societies where religiosity plays an unusually central cultural role, that's exactly what the theory would lead you to expect.
I mean, this is already a quite familiar thesis (and by no means only on the right) about BLM and related developments in the US, encapsulated in the phrase "Great Awokening": that this is literally just the latest iteration of the historic American pattern of Protestant revivalist movements, albeit shorn of the formal trappings of doctrinal Christianity.
I feel "human minds have a God-shaped hole in them, if you don't fill it with God, it will be filled with some false religion" and "religions drill a hole in the human mind and then sometimes other religions claw away the control over that hole" are fairly different claims with fairly different moral consequences.
I think most hard atheists would agree with the second description (and consider atheism a project to patch up those holes so they cannot be utilized by external agents, and stop the drilling in the longer term) and disagree with the first.
That's a good point. It's sort of hard to think through how to test the two claims against each other, given the relative paucity of societies that don't have at least some history of what looks like having the religion-hole drilled into them.
One possibility might be to look at somewhere like China. Granted, the usual line about China is that it had a "state religion" until the early 20th century, but I gather that's only because Western societies generally had state religions and naturally saw Confucianism as playing the same role in China. If Western societies had instead been atheist with some vague superstitions about ancestors, they doubtless would've seen China as another atheist country with vague superstitions about ancestors. (They emphatically would not have thought the same about, say, India under Aurangzeb.)
Then again, what if Confucianism was filling the God-shaped hole all along, and then Maoism came along and filled the Confucianism-shaped hole?
The alternative would be to look somewhere we have reason to believe the atheist hole-filling project has succeeded at a society-wide level, in a way that's clearly distinguishable from tons of people having had a very messy divorce from religion and stumbling around wearing "fill my God-shaped hole" T-shirts.
The place that, based on my own dubious amateur impressions, seems closest to that is the Czech Republic. But I don't know much about what cultural life is like there, and to what extent woke/QAnon/occultist/whatever beliefs tend to get traction there.
Estonia, Japan and Netherlands are also close. If you stay within urbanized parts of the country and interact mostly with educated or economically productive people, you can add the rest of Northern Europe, other East Asian countries, maybe even NZ, Australia and Canada (less sure about those though). I wonder if there are any stats on Taiwan.
> But I don't know much about what cultural life is like there, and to what extent woke/QAnon/occultist/whatever beliefs tend to get traction there.
Cultural life -- A few percent go to church (weekly I guess, mostly old or rural people), slightly more go on special occasions (Christmas, New Years', certain Saints days). People just do other stuff I guess? I have only a vague idea of the shape of the hole -- is networking the main use case of church attendance?
Conspiracy theorists mostly use chain emails and FB.
I haven't seen QAnon stuff, we do have the vaccine autism people (large overlap with Russian propaganda FB groups, anti-NGO, anti-Soros, 5G chips, etc). It's probably <20% of the population, but they tend to be vocal.
Only wokism I've seen is imported (we also import some parts of the gun rights debate and recently abortion stuff with some fringe proposals to ban Polish people from getting abortions here). None of these is particularly relevant here and is more just US politics leaking in.
We do have people who believe in (and get scammed into paying a ton for) healing crystals.
Russian communism and American CRT first rose to power among the intelligentsia of their respective countries, who in both cases were among the least religious segments of society.
My explanation would be that agnostics are more accepting of uncertainty, whereas evangelicals and atheists are not, and for most conspiracy theories it’s easier to be certain they’re false than certain that they’re true
On a minor note, I object to the framing of UFOs as a false belief or conspiracy theory. At this point the United States military has formally admitted that its pilots have seen UFOs (unidentified flying objects), that it has no explanation for what its pilots saw, and that it's investigating. Believing that *people are being anally probed by little green men* is evidence of false belief. Believing that *UFOs* exist is evidence of a sound mind, and anybody who conducts a poll of false beliefs using the word "UFO" is just producing confusion.
I like Julian Jaynes's definition of God as the demands of society anthropomorphized. With that in mind, there isn't a ton of leeway in how much people respond to the demands of society. We are social creatures that automatically process social desirability. If you reject one model of social demands, another will replace it. Wouldn't really be picked up with polls about conspiracy thinking.
Granted, this is a different definition of god than most use, but there are evolutionary reasons to believe it's how the gods came to be.
Wondering what the correlation to big5 personality trait "openness" would show.
Hypothesis: What allows for people to be dogmatic (low openness) is also a positive close-mindedness shielding from WooWoo, while non-conformation (such as submarine christians, only surfacing once a year; or spiritual atheists) is caused by the same openness that lays the groundwork for considering Aliens, BigFoot, etc. as potentially valid.
I think this is an interesting thing to look at, but the effect of "how are people's logical reasoning skills at figuring out if certain things like religion or bigfoot are true" is totally swamped in reality by "people decide to say they believe in certain things based on partisan/social factors rather than trying to figure out if they're true or not." People simply use different parts of their brain to determine "should I believe in thing X, where the actual believing will not change my life in any way - i.e. I won't go on a bigfoot hunt - but telling people I do will signal something positive, like that I am a free thinker, rejecting the social conventional wisdom" than they do for "what's my theory about whether or not the car in front of me will turn into my lane, killing me."
I think this is a situation where English lets us down - we shouldn't be using the same term for "belief" in these cases. Yes, obviously there are some people (you!) who do think about bigfoot, Catholicsm, covid vaccines and UFOs using the same framework of logic, but most people don't. Most people try to be more efficient: they take a shortcut, they make the far quicker, easier assessment of: how does this impact my life if I believe it, taking into account the social benefits of saying I believe it? If that's positive, then they say they believe it. But almost none of them actually do any costly behavior (pay tens of thousands of dollars to go into the deep backwoods on a Bigfoot hunt) based on that.
The covid vaccine thing actually provided a margin case, because pre-covid anti vaxxers had an extremely low chance of suffering harm from their beliefs, (even unvaccinated people usually don't get polio - sorry Connecticut) but during covid some (though still most anti-vaxxers probably did not) actual people did discover that their beliefs ended up causing them to take actions that harmed them, and in fact you see that effect in the data where being older (and therefore higher risk from covid) caused people to actually take the somewhat costly action to take the vaccine, whereas younger (and therefore lower risk) people didn't. I thought this was an interesting example of where the shore of "costless symbolic beliefs" was washed over by waves of "potentially costly real life actions driven by belief."
The counterexamples you gave are politically neutral, but they are not religiously neutral. Those who seriously believe in the truth of the gospels as written will be less inclined than, say, atheists to believe that there is anything "out there" (aliens?) other than God.
I think you'd have been better off looking at left-wing conspiracy theories. Evangelicals might very well be less likely than, say, atheists to believe in those.
"People who believe in nothing will believe in anything" is a dig against atheists in particular, but I think the mention of religion as anti-virus is slightly closer; more like a benign virus.
Lets say that your brain represents valuable living space for memes, but they compete with each other for space constantly, with the established ones choking out competitors. As unpleasant as your current meme flora is, if you were to clear it out, it'd probably be replaced by a bunch of strange weeds that can't typically compete with the big old monsters.
Also, if you want to find silly things that non-believers believe, aren't there plenty of nutty beliefs on the super-identitarian left? I've met people who believe in the gender wage gap or structural racism to such a degree that it qualifies as a conspiracy theory. One person insisted that her father personally wanted to take away her rights through some kind of coordinated effort with other men.
Good research into the wrong question. I don't think that conspiracy theories are my main worry. I worry about all-consuming ideologies, like Marxism. Do non-believers need an all-consuming ideology, and is such an ideology more dangerous than a religion? My own view is that religion need not be an all-consuming ideology, and in fact it may help insulate people from adopting an all-consuming ideology.
Would seem helpful to get conspiracy theories and common false beliefs that are easy to verify as false to test across a broader range of the political spectrum, rather than just testing right wing and neutral ones.
If atheists as a group underperform somewhere, it would probably be with respect to false beliefs that are more left wing than usual, while religious people would probably tend to fail in the opposite direction.
> People of “none” religion are less likely than any religion except Jews to believe in Bigfoot.
Only if you only look at the "Absolutely Not" category, though. There are some arguments that's appropriate, but if you combine "Absolutely Not" and "Probably Not" into a general Doubt category, "none" is the least skeptical: 81.5%, compared to 85.2%, 84.5%, 96.5%, and 83.2%, in order. With the difference between Absolutely Not and general Doubt, it doesn't really seem to support any difference (except that Jewish people are very skeptical).
I get that this post is talking about people believing in nonsense/woo/conspiracy theories and that fits with the fake Chesterton quote of believing in "anything".
But if you ask me a far more interesting topic is being referred to by the Amjad Masad tweet.
He was talking about "mind viruses" specifically, not conspiracy theories.
I think Bigfoot and UFO sightings are pretty weak mind viruses in that there's a notable lack of evidence in our modern age of smartphone cameras, and more importantly, these beliefs are signals for low-class, low-status.
A mind virus to me is something like the crazier versions of wokeness and the crazier versions of anti-vaccination. These are highly transmittable memes that take full advantage of our tribal instincts.
This fits well with the Atheist movement getting gutted by social justice in my opinion.
I think there's something to the theory that our brains have a deeply ingrained need for a belief system that bland athiesm doesn't fill very well.
The tweet referring to religion as an anti-virus seems inspired by the OG of this conversation Neal Stephenson who dealt with this topic heavily in the classic Snow Crash.
I loved how he talks about one character having a level of immunity because she'd spent time arguing with Jesuits.
In my (arrogantly biased) opinion, a population with a great mental immune system are ex-religious people. We already know what it's like overcoming a mind-virus from the inside.
Let’s try a steelman here. The steelman isn’t that the non-religious are somehow generically more gullible than the religious. It’s that there’s a phenomenon in which people leave relatively sober religions (say, Anglicanism or Conservative Judaism) and end up believing in New Age spirituality in ways that have more practical import than their previous religion. I maintain than this phenomenon is observable and, in the Bay Area, fairly common.
One can respond that this is a weaker claim than the one Scott is testing. That’s true, but I think it’s also closer to the observation that inspired the saying than the more generic things he gets into.
One possible explanatory factor of the Bigfoot thing: both strongly religious people and strongly committed atheists are used to having to disagree with conventional wisdom. Maybe both groups are pre-selected for skepticism?
Church attendance tends to be correlated with other good outcomes relative to other believers, in my experience. Maybe akin to how medication adherence is correlated to good outcomes, even for a placebo.
I heard that argument constantly as a kid in the evangelical world, and had a very different understanding of what they were saying. Not that non-religious people were more likely to believe false things about the world, but that they were more likely to have incoherent/contradictory/nihilistic ethics.
On the question of conspiracies, I'd expect the hyper-religious to believe conspiracy theories endorsed by their leadership, like the charismatics movement treating Donald Trump as some kind of savior figure, and not to believe conspiracy theories denounced by their leadership, like astrology. This seems to bear that out. Except bigfoot. Not sure what to do with that information.
But on the question of ethics, I'm not sure I can dismiss the idea that most social groups seem to be missing a coherent theory of ethics? Again, working off anecdote it really seems like everyone in my peer group thinks they're brave for focusing on themselves over others and asserting their needs, and that everyone else is toxic for focusing on themselves over others and asserting their needs. Concepts like duty, self-sufficiency, and sacrifice are widely mocked. Concepts like forgiveness and positivity are outright considered attacks on people.
That's...I mean I left the church, and had a good reason - an arbitrary ethics often based on exclusion *can* be more destructive than no coherent ethics at all. But when I see that quote, that's my first thought.
> I'm not sure I can dismiss the idea that most social groups seem to be missing a coherent theory of ethics?
I'd posit that this is because a coherent theory of ethics that also matches our ethical intuitions is not possible. Everyone fudges, and as long as most people fudge mostly in the same direction, it's mostly okay.
On the other hand, let's not forget that "you shall not suffer Jews to live among you" is a coherent ethical position (unless you happen to be Jewish). Coherent isn't the same as (intuitively) good.
I think of it as, Christianity doesn't let one think that the original sin was actually black chattel slavery, that all Americans (or earthlings) face the sin of White Supremacy, and the only solution is constant wailing and apologies, which can never go too far. And the new blasphemy is the n-word.
I feel like polls of this sort are always sort of incomplete in leaving out other religions, and also ignoring how internally diverse both religions and the non-religious really are. I mean, in theory you could be lumping in the super-woke Pentecostals down the street from me with people who handle snakes in Appalachia.
I’m not sure where I fit in myself. My two major social outlets are a) church and b) the ACX meetup.
There are also cases where someone’s religion or culture sort of obligated them to believe in things like astrology. I know astrology is super important to a lot of people in India, but I’m not 100% sure of Hinduism’s official position on it. Astrology isn’t a great correlate for conspiracy theories, either, IMO. I feel like belief in astrology uses a different part of the irrational brain. And the more normalized it is given where you are, the more it would differ from conspiracy theories as understood here.
Of course, it’s hard to poll enough South Asians in the US on Bigfoot. If we ran this poll in India asking if people believe in Yeti, what would those numbers be, and what would they mean?
"I don’t think this is why most frequent churchgoers do it. Most churchgoers do it because they come from families and areas where going to church is expected."
Point of order, compardre, but most non-theists and exvangelicals and etc ALSO come from areas where that's expected. Heck, I'd bet 10 dollars that being a devout protestant who religiously goes to to a serious church every sunday all dressed up is a good deal weirder in San Francisco than being a new atheist is in rural Georgia.
Yes, but you were presumably growing up in the deep south of at least 20 years ago. As someone living in the deep south now, I assure you, things have very much changed, at least in my area.
"I'd bet 10 dollars that being a devout protestant who religiously goes to to a serious church every sunday all dressed up is a good deal weirder in San Francisco than being a new atheist is in rural Georgia."
This is almost certainly false (unless you take "all dressed up" to specifically mean "wearing a particular style of garb common to Southern Evangelical Protestants," at which point it might technically be true on the extremely trivial grounds of local fashion norms rather than theological belief). Though honestly, I wouldn't expect either to be particularly uncommon, I'm sure there are plenty of staunch atheists *and* plenty of devoutly religious people in every city/state.
I don't think religious belief necessarily protects against conspiracy theories, nor do I think nonbelievers will necessarily believe anything, but I do think people who leave their faith will be inclined to believe in _something_. People seem to become more amenable to alternative forms of spirituality after they leave a more mainstream religion.
However, I think the actual pitfall of becoming a nonbeliever is to eventually think that you can actually cleanse yourself of all religious belief. That is folly. Everyone inevitably adopts some system of religious belief, even if on the surface it is founded on some notion of rationality or other good. It is in our nature. If you deny it then you will only become blind to the ways in which you participate in the same sort of ingroup/outgroup behaviors for which religious people are often criticized.
That's what I think wokeness is -- a religion, effectively, around social justice issues. The problem is not necessarily that it is an unworthy cause, but that its adherents don't understand their movement as a quasi-religious movement. As a Christian myself it's kind of amusing to watch. It's like, they're building a new religion and they don't even realize it. I don't mean to pick on this movement in particular, but it just struck me as the most obvious example.
> However, I think the actual pitfall of becoming a nonbeliever is to eventually think that you can actually cleanse yourself of all religious belief. That is folly. Everyone inevitably adopts some system of religious belief, even if on the surface it is founded on some notion of rationality or other good. It is in our nature.
In case you've never met an honest-to-goodness nihilist - hi!
I don't generally recommend it, because it's not terribly rewarding, but what is seen can't be unseen, so whatcha gonna do?
> If you deny it then you will only become blind to the ways in which you participate in the same sort of ingroup/outgroup behaviors for which religious people are often criticized.
Religious-type distinctions are one way to form ingroup/outgroup behaviours, but nowhere close to the only one. The first and most fundamental marker is family, then tribe as extended family, then polity as extended tribe.
Adding a religious dimension to it comes pretty late, and was a minoritarian obsession for centuries. Sure, it's easier to genocide your neighbours if you believe God tells you to do so (not that we have much evidence of actual genocide, other than scripture wherein the order is recorded), but doing onto your neighbour depends significantly more on your instrumental capabilities than your theological foundations, so you can skip the latter and focus on the former (especially since it tends to lead to overall fewer people hating your guts ).
I do agree that wokeness is a non-theistic manifestation of that quaintly American approach to religion - with the fire in the belly, the charismatic preacher, the revival tent, and all o' that. It shouldn't surprise that a country founded in large part by religious misfits retains religious misfit in its national character. However, I'm not sure that the same impulses manifested in yet another Evangelical revival, or some novel religious movement - a Twenty-First Century answer to the Latter Day Saints, or some such - would be particularly preferable; and I'm pretty sure the impulse comes prior to the manifestation.
I think you're overlooking selection effects. It might be that the hard-core atheists also lack other nonsense beliefs, not because the atheism *leads them* to lack other nonsense beliefs, but just because the class of people who end up hard-core atheists is a class of people not prone to believe any sort of nonsense in the first place.
By contrast, the class of devoutly religious people is a class of people who clearly *are* naturally inclined towards religiosity/spirituality/supernatural beliefs. So if being devoutly religious is correlated with *not* believing in UFOs and astrology, that's not because those people are just not inclined towards that sort of thing in the first place; it's because the one big religious belief is interfering by crowding out all the other nonsense. So it seems more plausible that religion is actually playing a *causal* role in preventing nonsense beliefs.
Some people are really hungry for some kind of supernatural belief, and won't end up being sensible materialist atheists if you take away their religion--they'll just fall into something worse instead. I'd much rather give them a nice sensible religion that encourages them to be honest and kind and donate to charity, rather than have them drift around looking for anything at all to believe in.
I don't think "believe in" things is the right way to look at it. Have faith is the better way to describe it. It isn't that they believe "anything" it's that they can attach their faith to anything. Look at the way science was fetishized during the coronavirus pandemic. Scientists were regarded like priests by many people. Fauci referring to him as science, like the Pope of Coronavirus. Those who say things like "the science is settled" on climate, evolution, coronavirus are engaging in religious behavior. I see the "religious impulse" in things like environmentalism and political movements. With Christians it sometimes dovetails with abolitionism or anti-abortion, but most major movements you'd think of today like Woke, Green and even the trans to some extent, are effectively religious substitutes for "non-believers."
I've always understood "the problem is that they will believe anything" to refer to moral claims. But without being able to track down the origin, I suppose that applying it to factual claims is a valid exercise.
My comment will first (1) make a small quibble with a claim you make in the essay; secondly (2), will point out a couple concrete non-cryptid examples of what theists might have in mind when they make statements about atheists believing in anything; thirdly (3), will talk about another sense of the claim--the religious structure of many non-religious beliefs.
1. You say: "although following the logical implications of Christian belief would make you go to church a lot, I don’t think this is why most frequent churchgoers do it. Most churchgoers do it because they come from families and areas where going to church is expected."
I disagree! I think regular church attendance is actually a pretty good indicator of religious belief. It's incredibly easy not to go to church nowadays! You can even credibly claim to be a religious believer and not really go to church! Just sleep in on Sunday!
2. So, I'm one of the theistic regular readers of ACX (and LessWrong). Here are a couple things off the top of my head I think fellow theists tend to think are traps for atheists who don't have an anchoring belief in God.
--It's weird for Christians to see atheists taking simulation arguments re: our universe really seriously compared with the wide variety of arguments in the philosophy of religion for the existence of God. I'm not going to get into the particulars of the arguments (people can tell me why I'm wrong in the replies), but on occasion it feels like that, by describing God as a little more computer-programmery, suddenly a certain sort of atheist will suddenly be more amenable to the idea. (And in any case, I think various arguments for God are at least *more interesting* than the simulation argument, but simply are rejected out of hand!)
--This is perhaps even more contentious, and of course I'm biased, but I genuinely think intelligent atheists are worse at talking about morality than intelligent theists. Obviously, there are all kinds of ways you can press theists about metaethics (this has been the case since Plato), but even very intelligent atheists I know will fall into pretty outré theories, or just acknowledged incoherence when talking about the subject.
3. Another interpretation of the claim, or at least another claim very close to it, basically is that: human belief generally ends up having a religious structure, whether you try to avoid it or not! You see this sort claim advanced sometimes nowadays by political theorists: 'liberalism is like a religion, with its own sacraments and rituals, priests and proscriptions, etc.'. Or you get it by people really uncomfortable with the rationalist community who call it a cult.
Part of the idea here is, well, these things are worse as religions than just Good Old Fashioned Religion! It makes sense why you would worship a God, why that could involve going beyond reason to some degree, pursuing transcendence and the Infinite Ground of All Being....it seems way stupider to worship John Rawls' veil of ignorance (or whatever), and make a leap of faith into something that *by its own lights* is kind of human-based and mundane.
Anyway, neat piece. Always a question about how useful statistics are as input into a sort of 'fundamental narratives' topic, but you usually strike the balance pretty well.
>but I genuinely think intelligent atheists are worse at talking about morality than intelligent theists
I don't tend to find this, and my response would be you are conflating "worse at talking about morality" with "their morality matches mine". If you want someone who has a strong argument for most conventional morality, an intelligent Christian is a good place to look. But my contention would be that a lot of conventional morality is simply wrong/outdated.
Though I guess there is something to the idea that people who are more interested in the ethical world tend to be more religious than those not. And so you average IQ 140 person who is religious, is likely to be a lot more concerned about ethics on average than your average IQ 140 person who is an atheist.
"I genuinely think intelligent atheists are worse at talking about morality than intelligent theists"
Hi Beata, I'm an atheist, and I consider myself reasonably intelligent. In what way do you think people like me are bad at talking about morality? I'm genuinely curious, not trying to be snarky.
Story time: I used to be an Evangelical Christian, and one major reason why I became an atheist is that I found God as presented in the Bible to be profoundly *immoral*. I understand that's an offensive statement to you, so let me present the evidence:
1. God commands his followers to commit *genocide* against their enemies: "Leave alive nothing that breathes," kill men, women, children, and livestock.
2. God orders *death by stoning* for trivial offenses that we don't even consider crimes nowadays, such as a young woman having sex before her wedding night. Pause to think a moment about being stoned to death: it's slow and extremely painful, as well as humiliating (because your whole community and family is rejecting you by taking part in killing you).
3. God himself directly metes out horrific punishments that are disproportionate to the offense. E.g., when a bunch of young men make fun of the prophet Elisha, God sends two she-bears to tear the young men to pieces!
>It's weird for Christians to see atheists taking simulation arguments re: our universe really seriously compared with the wide variety of arguments in the philosophy of religion for the existence of God.
As an atheist, I agree. I think that the argument for deism is much stronger than for any particular theism, and I've always been somewhat perplexed that atheists usually don't make this distinction.
"Another possible explanation is that people with coherent worldviews already have strong opinions on what’s true, making them closed-minded against conspiracy theories. For example, if God created humans in the Garden of Eden, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for aliens and UFOs. Or, since atheists believe everything works through purely physical scientifically-measurable forces, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for astrology.
But this one doesn’t quite work either: neither scientific materialism nor Biblical literalism precludes Bigfoot. God and/or Evolution created all sorts of weird ape species; why shouldn’t there be one more?"
Two points:
1. People who identify as atheists and people who identify as Evangelicals have something in common: a willingness to associate with belief systems that necessarily preclude others from being true. Saying you're an atheist means that you believe religions that claim the existence of God are wrong. Likewise, saying you're an Evangelical means that you believe all people who reject the existence of God and Christ as Messiah are wrong. Most agnostics I know pride themselves on being open-minded, likewise with wishy-washy, loosely-identified Christians. These groups like to leave open the possibility for truth outside their narrow set of beliefs, which means a willingness to acknowledge the possible veracity of otherwise unsubstantiated claims. They don't wish to pass judgement. The confounder here is open-mindedness, which dictates how people identify and their tolerance for beliefs outside their own.
2. I get in trouble for saying this, but there is not as wide as a gap between scientific materialist atheists and Christian Fundamentalists as there seems to be. Outside of faith-based beliefs, most Fundamentalists I know don't believe in a ton of woo. They still hold to the existence of objective reality, and, in fact, when pressed, will try to give scientific evidence and proof for the veracity of their beliefs. Press them hard enough and they'll try to argue that Noah's flood was an event in literal recorded history. In a strange way, most of them hold to the scientific method; they try to use science to prove the truth of their beliefs. The way atheists describe Fundamentalists as delusional and avoiding evidence is precisely the way Fundamentalists describe atheists. The difference between the groups is that they operate from two radically different sets of facts. (I know someone with a Ph.D in mechanical engineering who is a young-earth creationist. Likewise, I have a med student friend who will frequently criticize his peers for believing in astrology, but he himself is a biblical literalist.)
The differences between Mormonism and other forms of Christianity are vastly larger than the differences between Mainline Protestantism and Evangelical Protestantism. In fact, they're larger than the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism! So unless the survey conductors were extraordinarily incompetent and/or ignorant, Mormonism would never be lumped in with Evangelical Protestantism.
Mormonism would either be in its own category, lumped in with "Christianity" in general on polls that don't differentiate between Christian sects, or put into the "Other" category. But Mormons wouldn't just be put in the "Evangelical Protestant" box because they're very much *not* Evangelical Protestants.
Oh, my mistake, I misunderstood your question. In these particular polls, I'm pretty sure Mormons are grouped in the Other category. For the ones that don't have an Other category, I think they're just not included, just like Jews aren't included. I don't know for sure though, you'd have to contact the pollsters to find out, I was just pointing out that it would be very bizarre if they were listed as Evangelicals.
"Another possible explanation is that people with coherent worldviews already have strong opinions on what’s true, making them closed-minded against conspiracy theories. For example, if God created humans in the Garden of Eden, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for aliens and UFOs. Or, since atheists believe everything works through purely physical scientifically-measurable forces, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for astrology.
But this one doesn’t quite work either: neither scientific materialism nor Biblical literalism precludes Bigfoot. God and/or Evolution created all sorts of weird ape species; why shouldn’t there be one more?"
It is hard to deny the existence of weird ape species (although I understand that there are some diehards out there), so Evangelicals have to take weird apes into account. Bigfoot is easier to discount, at least for the time being.
One think I think is partially going on, is the people who are atheists are actively sorting for people who don't cave to peer pressure and social norms, and "woo" acceptance mostly relies on people succumbing to social pressure. Its not just skepticism, but that particular brand of skepticism.
The skeptical non-conformist. The person who is willing to say "no that is dumb I don't believe in god" out loud in fifth grade, is also the person to question radical gender theory at the DEI presentation.
I think that if you actively left a religion and chose to become an atheist, then you may be part of a sorting for these sorts of people, but if you are a third generation non-believer from a non-believing home in a not very religious country then this *is* your social norm.
This is a really good point. Being a convertite to atheism bears a strong resemblance to being a religious convertite – much higher average levels of stridency and insistence upon the dogmas of the faith. You're probably less likely than average to fall for dumb religious substitutes. But then your grandkids just grow up with a hole in that part of their psyche and *they* become susceptible to any old ridiculous nonsense that slots in there.
As I wrote down below as part of a longer reply -- generation 1 atheist -- believe in God?, no. Bigfoot?, no. 3rd generation -- believe in God?, no. Bigfoot? yes. "Bigfoot? Really? Why?" "I get to hike around in the beautiful Pacific north-west with my friends, -- "Looking for evidence" and give my rationalist father apoplexy at the same time". WIN WIN!
I'm shocked at the number of you guys trying to claim that the (apparently pseudo-)Chesterton quote is actually about wokism. Chesterton would have said this, if at all, close to a century ago, and the quote has been regularly used by religious people to make fun of secular superstitions for decades. I seem to remember seeing it used to poke at certain kinds of spiritualism more than anything else, e.g. non-religious theories of the soul that allow for communicating with the dead. It's certainly not about systemic racism and gender theory, and you should examine the impulse that makes you want your favorite blogger to be as obsessed with such things as you are.
Nah its pretty clear the big surrogate religions right now for people are: Environmentalism, Trump/Fox News, and "wokism" in some order. I don't even know what would be competing with those three.
Maybe nationalism/patriotism? But that is a long storied tradition of cohabiting with religion that was mostly hashed out for better and worse over hundreds of years.
The "quote" is interesting specifically because right now it seems very apt. No one thinks whoever made it was talking about today.
Nobody's claiming that the *original* quote (or, to be more precise, the original quote on which the present-day "People who stop believing in religion start believing in anything" line is based on) is about wokeism; rather, that people who quote it nowadays generally quote it with reference to wokeism.
I wish Lewis had been clearer on the scope of what he was talking about.
I'd expect communism to most clearly fit into the slot Christianity fits into:
- a glorious future (ignoring the piles of skulls...)
- an expectation of conquest ("the right side of history")
- a rigid creed
- ingroups and outgroups, executions for heresy in the latter
- an elect
(though it didn't have any post-mortem expectations that I'm aware of)
(despite the best efforts of the Stazi, it didn't claim the degree of surveillance Christianity did)
(nor what I'd call a creation myth - _maybe_ a societal one, not a cosmological one)
Wokeism seems similar, but I think lacking an expectation of a glorious future (I don't think they think that "smashing the patriarchy" will usher in paradise (do they???))
New Age Woo seems much fuzzier - maybe just down to
- an elect (with esoteric "knowledge")
maybe adding back in post-mortem expectations??? ( Some flavors of Wicca can include reincarnation )
(maybe??? a creation myth - lots of different groups...)
I think you'd be surprised how much of the quackery Chesterton criticized circa-1910 is identifiably progressive wokery. In one essay he even makes fun of Shaw for wearing a Jaeger wool shirtfront because it's "hygienic", a bizarre affectation of Shaw's which was well known at the time. In this same essay he also criticizes vegetarianism, peculiar speculations about the moral value of animals (COUGH EA COUGH) and celebrating Christmas even though you don't believe in it.
Interesting results. I am sympathetic to the idea that people with strongly held beliefs, theistic or otherwise, are the type of people who had the conscientiousness to actually form a semi-coherent worldview in the first place, and thus are least susceptible to woo.
I would posit that there's maybe a weaker version of the faux-Chesterton quote that, inflected with some evolutionary biology and a touch of anthropology, might hold up if it would go something like this:
"If we consider organized religions as evolved cultural adaptations that serve social or psychological functions we may not totally comprehend or recognize (especially as unbelievers like me), then if we discard our native religion, new memeplexes (in the Richard Dawkins sense of the term) will almost have to arise to take their place. Those new memeplexes, not having hundreds of years of cultural evolutionary history to prune and shape them like classical religions, are likely to have serious flaws that prove detrimental to at least some class of their adherents."
Or here's another alternative version inflected with some Joe Henrich:
"Humans have a very long evolutionary history of constructing animistic belief systems, but we largely discarded those in the past few thousand years in favor of monotheistic religions, for reasons I won't bore you with but which Henrich has explored at length (Henrich's distinction between the little gods of hunter gatherer societies and the Big Gods of settled agricultural societies). If society chooses to discard modern monotheistic belief systems en masse, what results is not the adoption of cold hard scientific materialism, but a return to those old animistic beliefs of our hunter-gatherer forebears. Those animistic beliefs are more likely to maladaptive for the modern world, given that there was probably a reason we discarded them in the first place."
What’s so surprising to me is that your comment is the first one to really nail this perspective. The Dawkins-meme interpretation was practically built to deal with this sort of question, yet now seems completely out of favor.
People will believe lots of crazy things. How many of these do you believe?
- Politics is controlled by a cabal of: ancient aliens, lizard people, Jews, the patriarchy, 'elites', military-industrial complex, woke activists, the deep state, career politicians, intelligence agencies
- The news media is controlled by a cabal of: (chose from the above list)
- People are being controlled en mass by: religion, partisanship, economics, superstition, news, TV, video games, schools, radicalization on the internet (your pick from: woke, alt-right, reddit, 4chan), the Algorithm, the 'trans agenda'
- We're in imminent danger of civil war erupting from radicals on the Right/Left
- It's clear there was criminal activity that Donald Trump/Hillary Clinton got away with
- The election was stolen by - wait for it -
* Biden '20 (rigged)
* Trump '16 (Russia)
* Obama '08 (birther)
* Bush '00 (Florida)
* Clinton '92 (media + Perot)
* Reagan '84 (concealed Alzheimer's)
* Reagan '80 (Iran hostage shenanigans)
I try not to take these surveys too seriously, because ... well, I've found myself taken in by all sorts of stupid ideas that seemed right at the time, but then later I found out everything I'd been told was wrong. The hard work doesn't come in making sure you don't ever believe wrong things, because if there's one thing you can be certain of it's that you do. Did Epstein kill himself? Did the Clintons rig the 2016 primaries? What are the origins of COVID-19? Are there multiple universes? Do you - personally - really have the evidence to accept or reject any of these propositions? Yet you likely have a strong opinion about a few of them. The hard work comes from being able to let go of something you once believed as a matter of course: "God exists", or even "God doesn't exist".
Honestly, these numbers aren't all that impressive. You want to tell me that Jews are 8% less likely to believe in astrology than agnostics, but at the same time Hispanics are 7% more likely than whites. Okay, but a majority of ZERO groups you sampled said they believe in astrology. The only group that even came close were the teeny-boppers, and 2/3 of them weren't willing to say it's true. This idea that I can insulate myself from unrelated wrong ideas by how often I go to church or by holding to scientific materialism feels like the same kind of social science research that failed to survive the replication crisis.
I think there are degrees to which you can believe a thing is or isn't true. For example, a friend told me today that "the rich don't pay taxes", which is a false statement. It is true that people with a larger net worth are able to afford to spend money to find tax shelters and other ways to avoid legally paying part of their tax bill. But most wealthy people still pay taxes. There's a motte and a bailey to that argument, and when pressed usually people defend the motte that there are a bunch of tax shelters, and some unscrupulous people find ways to write things off in illegitimate ways.
Or take the 'controlled by the elite' statement. There's an implicit assumption that large institutions are 'controlled'. I think that sometimes influential people can guide institutions in ways they prefer to achieve some preferred end, but that's not the same thing as 'controlling' that institution. (I recognize your qualifier of controlled 'at least to some degree', so I think we're on the same page there. Still, it's kind of a motte to the 'control' bailey.)
That said, I'm not going to go 100% in the direction of saying no institution is EVER controlled by a single person or by a small cabal of elites, because that has happened before as well. The question is whether there's sufficient evidence to support the proposition that the institution in question is actively under control by a central authority, and if so by whom?
For my part, I'll admit this category is more of a bailey for the claim 'everyone believes in crazy conspiracies', and could have been omitted.
Hmm. I'm not sure I'd buy your definition of cabal. It seems like it's overbroad enough to include any subset of people working independently whose interests align. A cabal to me implies coordination.
I'm not sure Bush '00 really belongs on the list, because I'm not sure who disputes the following argument:
* According to the original count, Bush won Florida by 537 votes
* This is well within the margin for error for such a count - e.g. the 2020 Georgia recount ended up increasing Trump's margin by 1274, and Georgia is less populous than Florida was in 2000; the 2020 Maricopa County recount increased Biden's margin by 360, and Maricopa County is several times less populous than Florida was in 2000
* Therefore there's a significant probability that Gore actually got more votes
The question is not whether in an ideal world we could get the vote count down to a MoE = 0, such that the 'true' vote winner would be declared as such and awarded the office. The question is whether the election itself was 'stolen' through unfair/illegal/dirty means. Gore pursued a legal strategy that SCOTUS disagreed with. Except SCOTUS said, "this is a one-off, there's no stare decisis from this decision". Lots of complicated arguments on both sides.
I'm less interested in the specifics (I'm not claiming no election is ever biased by unfair events), and more concerned with the observation that nearly every election the losing side comes up with an explanation for why their side SHOULD have won. I would be surprised if the results of the 2024 and 2028 elections aren't given an asterisk by the losing party. There's a strong group incentive to pursue motivating reasoning, where every 4 years roughly half of the country chooses to believe something because it fits their worldview, not because they arrived at it through a dispassionate review of the available evidence. Meanwhile, the other half the country does the reverse analysis, coming to the opposite conclusion.
It's been awhile since I looked at the details of the Florida recount, but I think you've oversimplified the situation. Neither side undertook a strategy of recounting in order to get closer to the true vote total in the state of Florida. Both sides approached the situation using the strategy they thought had the best chance to allow them to win.
Gore tried to get recounts in the 4 counties he was most likely to get additional votes from. He wasn't interested in a state-wide vote recount, and never pushed for it. He wanted to win, not get at whatever the 'true' vote total was.
Bush already had enough votes based on the initial counts. He didn't want a state-wide recount either, as that could have gone either way. His team pursued a legal strategy that argued a 4-county recount violated the 14th amendment, that the recount wasn't proceeding by pre-determined rule, but by rewriting them after the fact, then by rules-mongering about deadlines.
Yes, in a perfect world we would have all sat down dispassionately and done a full Florida recount, because it really was a close race. But since neither side of the conflict wanted that, I think it's a stretch to call the 2000 US Presidential Election 'stolen' by one side. Both sides pursued biased strategies. One side's strategy worked. The other side engaged in the old technique of complaining that the election was rigged against them. If Bush's legal strategy hadn't carried the day, his supporters would have been complaining about a 'stolen' election as well. Plus there would be a conspiracy theory that 9/11 was an inside job and that Gore knew about it the whole time.
To be honest I don't think we really disagree. I just wanted to express that the idea that 2000 was unfair because Gore might have actually got more votes in Florida doesn't deserve to be classed as a conspiracy theory (and I acknowledge that you didn't actually say that it was a conspiracy theory.)
Oh I think you're right. And I'll extend that to other elections, to boot:
2020 - without COVID-19, would likely have been a different election in unpredictable ways
1992 - the economy really was getting better for all of 1992, including significant GDP growth, yet the news media ignored all signs of economic recovery, pretending the recession hadn't inconveniently ended too early, so the election could be a referendum on a 'failed Bush economy' that was mostly fiction at that point
1984 - Reagan did have Alzheimer's. Not sure when it started, or whether it impacted him enough he shouldn't have run ... but it's not a medical diagnosis the American public was allowed to debate just prior to the election of a major political figure.
1980 - not that the Iranians needed a reason to want Carter gone, but Reagan's political team appears to have secured a deal to ensure the hostages were released at a time that was politically convenient.
I also forgot to add 2004 and the Swift boat political smear against Kerry. Can't believe I forgot about it, even though I heard about it non-stop for 4 years.
The thing I try to remember is that there were lots of underhanded/dirty/dishonest/smear tactics on both sides of each campaign. Politics isn't a fair game (though it seemed like McCain tried to take the high road), just one we try to polish up enough so it seems mostly legitimate.
I believe that politics is controlled by career politicians, and I think this is not a conspiracy theory. I think it's, like, the opposite of a conspiracy theory?
The citation I am seeing for this quote is, "Malcolm Muggeridge and Christopher Ralling, Muggeridge Through the Microphone, British Broadcasting Corporation, 1967, p. 44", but it isn't online in a format that will open sufficiently for me to check it.
When you get out of rationalist or internet atheism circles and into the real world, you find out that many people that call themselves nonreligious or atheists actually believe in a lot of shit and are just unhappy with traditional religious institutions.
This has been my experience also. For every rigorous rejection of superstition there must be ten purely bitter people angry that their institution of birth or choice didn't wholly prioritize their own favored causes or concerns (thereby completely missing the point). You see this a lot within religious institutions as well; for instance, in the big argument over the Anglican Communion's acceptance of gay marriage during last week's conference (they rejected it), the conservative faction's arguments are basically "this contradicts everything we understand our holy scriptures to say as well as our practical dogma since the inception of this church", while the liberal faction's arguments are "I can't believe you refuse to switch your belief system to *my* actual beliefs, even after I went to the trouble of pretending to share yours!"
One point worth making: the term "white Evangelical" has never been super well-defined in polls. Although "Evangelical" Christianity has theological definitions, almost nobody applies the term in that way. In practice it means "culturally Christian, rarely attends Church," which is right in the danger zone for conspiratorial thinking - aka "being willing to accept large claims without thinking about them very much."
If regular religious practice to maintain a stable belief system or a conscious skepticism of belief systems making big claims of any kind are the two most protective mindsets against random BS, then "white evangelicals" in the American context - in aggregate - have neither.
Fundamentally the problem here is people typical minding and thinking that their own beliefs are Normal and their own Religion is sensible and it's other people who are crazy. If you actually read historical accounts of all the things various believers have asserted down the centuries, the whole time claiming they were entirely compatible with their religion, you'll see that god offers no protection from superstition.
My main feeling here is that this question is too confounded by culture to be easily resolved. (Well, my actual main feeling is that the thesis of the post -- religious people are absolutely not inoculated against weird beliefs -- is both true and tricky to prove.)
Scott notes that belief in voter fraud is politically coded,* but belief in Bigfoot is almost certainly culturally coded, just in less obvious ways. My friends would find it extremely odd if I -- a city-living, professional, advanced degree-having atheist -- professed a belief in Bigfoot. Like a lot of kids, I was a big fan of cryptozoology when I was young. But eventually you put it away. It's silly, and people who believe that stuff as adults are rubes. Etc.
I have no idea what the churchgoing white evangelical take on Bigfoot is. Maybe the idea sinful. Maybe it just reads as weird. But I'm guessing there is a take.
So, yeah, I think the thesis of this post is spot on, but also would require some serious research that maybe hasn't been conducted yet to really prove.
* Fwiw, conservatives used to claim that vaccine skepticism and autism conspiracy theories were left-wing beliefs, in a sort of own-the-libs kind of way. I don't think this was ever actually true, or at least less true than supposed, but it is very much the case that vaccine skepticism was held up as an example of liberal stupidity.
Hmm, amazing stuff here. I am not to sure about strict scientific materialism these days. There is a somewhat older hypothesis that our brains have evolved to favor religious / spiritual beliefs. Would anyone care to comment? Incidentally, I have a post on the same topic today.
~ 85% of the world's population has religious / spiritual beliefs. To my mind, that is an enormous data point. If we can identify cognitive abilities that underpin this complex trait, one could begin thinking of GWAS studies like they did for language genes. Hmm.. you're right, it will be hard to prove but we could make big inroads. I agree, there is no question of proving whether religion is good or necessary, its only about whether we evolved to favor faith / spiritual beliefs. It bring us back from today's pole positions IMO
This post doesn't address the most widely believed conspiracies - the woke suite of beliefs. Surely there's data relating woke beliefs and religiousness. I suspect the negative relationship is quite strong.
Honestly, I don't think I have ever met anyone who was woke. I keep meeting people who think that wokism is the end of the world though. I don't spend any time on Twitter or FB so maybe that factors in ...
I mean, depending on your definition of woke I used to be somewhere between 30% and 80% woke. I've encountered people in person who mostly fit the caricature.
I largely see the original quote or at least that type of argument directed against extremist political movements/alternative sources of meaning more often than "woo" (see Chesterton's "Heretics" and Dostoevsky's "Demons"). Basically, once you've rejected the traditional foundations for claims like "don't kill people", you do not have any intellectual innoculation against radically inhumane philosophical views, like eugenics for Chesterton, or nihilistic radicalism for Dostoevsky. Probably a lot of the people who use it would look at some of the more exotic speculations common in the rationalist community and say "Yup, checks out to me. These guys explicitly reject the traditional foundations of meaning, and here they are talking about imaginary semi-divine computers and suggesting human extinction would be a good thing all day".
Perhaps a sufficiently trained theologian is totally insulated from all unreasonable beliefs, and the further away from that you go, the more insane you get. Chesterton makes something like this argument in his book on Thomas Aquinas, but then again, describing his views as "common sense" in very roundabout ways was kind of his thing. He also didn't really seem to mind woo all that much.
Anyway, I have no idea if the theory is true either.
I think "agnostics and people with no particular religion" are who people generally have in mind when they cite the quote, not committed atheists, but who knows. What really stands out to me about these numbers is how similar they are across different groups, at least once you exclude anything with a specifically religious/political valence.
I think frequency of attendance will be correlated with go-getter personality, class, and IQ. So I'm not super bullish about attendance frequency or the associated beliefs actually being causal here.
My mother attended church absolutely every sunday for decades, but in a very liberal sect. Meanwhile I know many people with more extreme religious beliefs who attended church quite irregularly.
Maybe intellectual laziness correlates with regular laziness and that's part of the cause of the attendancefrequency-woo anticorrelation.
...I'll admit, I find the whole idea kind of weird to start with. I mean, I haven't done any kind of thorough analysis, but in my personal experience, the more religious someone is, the *more* likely they are to believe in every goddamn crazy thing under the sun, regardless of whether these things make sense together. You can read 'The ArchAngels of Dreamland' by Steven L. Fawcette if you want a taste of the really heavy end of this kind of thing. :/
For the more tame end, you have my republican friend, who will tell you all about the evils of vaccines, GMOs, and microchips. Though I think he sobered up a little bit in recent years. XD
"When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything."
This quotation actually comes from page 211 of Émile Cammaerts' book "The Laughing Prophet: The Seven Virtues and G. K. Chesterton" (1937) in which he quotes Chesterton as having Father Brown say, in "The Oracle of the Dog" (1923): "It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense." Cammaerts then interposes his own analysis between further quotes from Father Brown: "'It's drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it's coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.' The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything: 'And a dog is an omen and a cat is a mystery.'" Note that the remark about believing in anything is outside the quotation marks — it is Cammaerts. Nigel Rees is credited with identifying this as the source of the misattribution, in a 1997 issue of First Things.
If you categorized "religion is the primary root causes for most wars and violence in human history" as a conspiracy theory, atheists would be by far the most superstitious people.
Wait, are you actually implying that religion has been the primary cause behind most wars and violence in human history? Have you ever studied, say, the animal kingdom? The problem of scarcity? The attitudes towards religion of Stalin and Mao?
If your point is that it isn't like most conspiracy theories, because it is a more broad claim, then that's totally fair. The claim about religion comes off as paranoid and absurd, like claims that "the patriarchy is to blame for everything wrong with the world", but maybe these are not conspiracy theories outright because they are blaming religion in general/ the patriarchy in general, not the illuminati or something super specific. So if that's your point, sure, it's an edge case at best.
But if your point is that religion indeed was the root cause behind most human violence throughout history, yeah, I'll debate that point. Leaders will use religion to justify their crimes/ wars whenever religion is popular. That doesn't mean religion is actually what makes those leaders commit crimes/ go to war. Chimps incapable of even understanding religion still go to war over territory, dominance issues, etc.
Hope I've made my arguments in a way that is respectful, thanks for the reply-
I'd also add here as a modern argument for my position that the country most likely to pull the United States into a great power conflict that could threaten the entire species- namely China- is the most atheist country in the world.
I mean, you might define atheist different than the standard definition, like "if you're communist you're suddenly not atheist" or something. But when you google "most atheist country" and you get links like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_irreligion.
But irreligious is different from "atheist", so 90% is overstating it. But "convinced atheist" numbers for China are still like 61%, which is way higher than anywhere in Europe (Austria highest at 34%). But yeah, if you've been to China and have some insights or something I'd be interested to hear.
My point is that a conspiracy theory requires a theory about a conspiracy, which this clearly fails to meet. Your arguments do nothing to address that point -- at most, all you've demonstrated is that these people overestimate the prevalence of a real phenomenon. Are all incorrect statistics now conspiracy theories?
If anything, *your* analysis is much closer to a conspiracy theory, since you are the one claiming that the explicit agendas of numerous historical leaders (spreading their religion through violence) were ruses to cover up a more sinister hidden agenda.
I mean, I admitted in my entire second paragraph that it's maybe not specific enough, so yeah, if that's your primary point, sure, we're on the same page. I know that I was always making a stretch.
Regarding your claim that it's a "conspiracy theory" to claim leaders lie about their true motives, I think that's a much more flexible use of the term "conspiracy theory" than even I was using :). I'm definitely not claiming that all leaders claiming religious motives throughout history were like Hitler, consciously lying and coopting the Christian conservatives into Naziism even though he privately despised Christianity as a religion of weakness. I'm just making the claim that if there had been zero religion in human history, there would have still been many wars over territory, dominance, etc. I'm not making the opposite claim that zero wars had a religious/ superstitious ideas motivating them, that would obviously be insane. I'm just claiming that human nature is warlike and competitive and that blaming religion for war in general is therefore illogical. I feel my arguments here are pretty straightforward.
Imma probably comment way too much on this article because of my background but...
Although I basically think this quote's intent is: "People who don't believe in Christianity are likely to believe in not Christianity," and that therefore it's not very interesting, I have been super interested in the concept of belief generally lately.
And my conclusion, very weakly held, is that "truth" is not a major component of belief for anyone except the hyper-literalist religious and the dogmatic atheist. For most it seems like belief is just a mental mapping of symbols and ideas that have proved useful in the past. I.e. the average stereotypical white girl who "believes" in astrology will not argue about *how* the relative alignment of the stars affects their personality, they'll just roll their eyes and make a meme about how white men are boring. This usually gets read as a lack of intellectual curiosity or atrophied critical thinking skills, but I've come to disagree. I think they're just saying "This mental framework helps me navigate the world, so as far as I'm concerned it's true. What's the actual mechanism got to do with me?"
Looking at the bigfoot data up there, I note "probably not" shakes out a lot differently than "absolutely not." And I think these are probably the same positions expressed differently - atheists and American Protestants care deeply about either the *process* of truthseeking or being seen to care deeply about the process of truthseeking. A person who doesn't have truth-seeking or morality-seeking as a major part of their personality doesn't care about whether bigfoot exists or not, and they say "probably not" because they have no reason to think he does, but *shrug* who knows?
Non-evangelists who don't explicitly identify as atheists have a "broader" allowance for beliefs: Not just "is this true?" but also "is this helpful? Is it interesting? Does it make me interesting? Does it gain me status? Is it a neat idea I enjoy thinking about? Does it piss off my parents? Is it really funny? If I tell someone I believe it on a date will I get to have sex? Do I enjoy songs about it? Will someone give me a chocolate bar for believing it? Do I like the color scheme of its merchandise? Was I bored when I read it..."
"But this one doesn’t quite work either: neither scientific materialism nor Biblical literalism precludes Bigfoot. God and/or Evolution created all sorts of weird ape species; why shouldn’t there be one more?"
This doesn't ring true. I'm not sure how generalizable this is, but having grown up fairly strictly Lutheran, certainly anything mystical which wasn't orthodoxy was considered heresy. For example, I don't credit skepticism for Christians being less likely to believe in astrology. Rather, astrology, as kind of a competing metaphysics, was taught to be a kind of heresy. A whole slew of things was deemed "false idols." Heck, even the Pope was considered the anti-Christ. Now, of course, you could argue that Big Foot isn't mystical. But I think the driving force was that anything that the Church didn't have epistemological control over, as it were, was then considered false. I've always chalked this up to the fact that religion recognizes its epistemological fragility and susceptibility to be co-opted by a rival metaphysics and thus puts a lot of energy into disparaging all rivals, but that's just loosely held speculation.
IMO holding a strong belief is synonymous with being embedded within a tribe. Someone who is "strongly religious" is just someone who really enjoys/is-dependent/has-power-and-responsibility-over/etc... a local group of people. To be "strongly scientific" is similarly an attachment to a more global distributed abstracted group of people.
Susceptibility to wrong models is a combination of the size of the group ("with enough eyes all bugs are shallow") and the average acuity of each member. The more strongly embedded in the group, the more information is filtered/contorted/dressed-up before it reaches you.
Being part of a group offers a buffer against dealing w/ raw reality and this mostly works. However certain kinds of information are "resonant" w/ the filters and can't be distinguished from "Sacred" information similar to cancer cells. authoritarian-high-modernist-imposed-legibility easily sneak into sciency-rationalist types while "those ppl are THE source of ALL evil" sneaks easily into religiousy types.
Over time as the social group fragments (or in the case of old people, as friends die) this socially-powered marauder's map starts to fail. It still has the wisdom of the ages collected over time but no longer updates b/c there are less willing contributors. Some models are also "anti-immigration" & actively rejects willing contributors.
A conspiracy theory is similar to a Chamber of Secrets. The map doesn't literally plot out "Basilisk here!" but discrepancies can be observed. No matter how the map evolves however it is never a replacement for the raw territory. There is always a "conspiracy" (aka reality) going on beneath the paper.
Non-mappers and Dumbledore's are more likely to encounter raw reality. Muggles crash into it while Dumbledores actively seek out the more dangerous corners. This process repeats itself infinitely over time as each generation's dumbledore is the next generation's muggle.
Intuitively, although likely impossible to quantify, I think there is truth to a more narrow version of this, and you can see it in the struggles of the existentialists (or the much earlier Epicureans for that matter). The work of Darwin and his contemporaries underscored the fact that nihilistic atheism is the most rational view of the universe and our place in it. We are simply here, and we are (largely blindly) following the drives and impulses that have helped keep our particular genetics floating around the planet to date--the same as any other species.
And yet, the immediate reaction of philosophers since Darwin is to try to discover or invent some sort of meaning and purpose within the abyss. I suspect this reaction is representative of a universal impulse--a purely rational nihilistic outlook is simply maladaptive generally, undermines group cooperation and discourages investment in offspring. People want (need?) to effectively delude themselves into believing that their lives have meaning and purpose.
Religions are a codification and institutionalization of this impulse toward meaning and purpose. They lend the trappings of authority and power, the weight of history and scholarship and the sheer number of adherents to foster belief in meaning and purpose among a population, which could be seen as an important public service.
Christianity, like the Paganism it replaced 2,000 years ago, has broadly lost its ability to imbue meaning or purpose to the lives of people in important segments of society. But that doesn't mean that even newly minted atheists won't go looking for some other group that can supply them with this lost sense of purpose, albeit perhaps groups that don't appeal to a divine being. I can think of momevents that have laid the groundwork that one would expect from a nascent religion--some combination of priests, acolytes, evangelists, martyrs, mysteries, and faith-based affirmations. One or more movements like these may fill a vacuum and play an important role in Western Civilization going forward.
No. I am not talking about climates of opinion here, or how contentious something is. I am talking about whether something has been disproven or shown to be impossible, or, at the very least, whether there is much less evidence than one would expect to see if it were true.
Those are what make a "conspiracy theory" dismissable, or usable as an example of the stupidity of people who believe in it.
In the case of both the "lab leak" theory and the "stolen votes" theory, we are still in the early phase where the EXTREME suppression and discouragement of investigation and discussion is being used to persuade people too time-constrained or lazy or ignotant to make a serious effort both that evidence which does exist does not exist, and (for the less intelligent and logical of that subclass who have trouble with the classic distinction between absence of evidence and evidence of absence) that the theories have actually been debunked and disproven.
As I said, this is not the place to argue about the merits of these two theories; I only insist that they DO have sufficient merits that they are "live" in a way that other examples cited such as Nessie and Flat Earth are not. (Bigfoot is probably also dead as a theory but the existence of Yeti legends, gigantopithecus fossils, and the Siberian land bridge means that that could be only because the legendary Bigfoots are actually extinct rather than never-existing).
Strawmanning a belief is a great way to cast those who believe the "bailey" of the belief, as ardent believers of the "motte" position.
"Trump has a favorable view of Russia" is an entirely different statement than "Trump directly reported to Putin while president" but similar demographics and get similar responses.
This is a huge problem with any reporting on 'conspiracy theories' everyone wants to dunk on the most obviously false nonsense but wouldn't dare touch any of the serious conflicts of interest and blatant corruption staring everyone in the face.
From a partisan angle, there are a great deal of beliefs that blue tribers sincerely believe that are seen as insane and unhinged as qanon. (See 'What is a woman' for examples)
"One in four people with postgraduate degrees believes in astrology?!" - I'm not sure this is that surprising? Postgraduate degrees aren't all in physics and computer science and their holders aren't all science nerds. I assume you can get an advanced degree in English, Art, etc. without any more scientific education than the general education requirements in undergrad, which in some places are weak or nonexistent. Some of these fields seem to oppose modern scientific reasoning or even actively elevate non-scientific beliefs (as long as those belief systems come from the right groups), including astrology.
This topic has been studied academically and - consistent with this post - there seems to be an inverted-U shaped relationship between religiosity and belief in the paranormal. Further reading:
This was really interesting. I do believe there is a religion shaped hole in our society that is filling up with quasi religious ideas / systems of belief. The problem is that people who believe them don’t perceive them as such. We are always given examples like 911 conspiracy theorists- but the biggest and by far most influential examples are Social Justice / CRT and Climate Change Catastrophism.
I know someone who is very well educated and atheistic who believes that the only reason men are better at sports is that the patriarchy chose to promote sports that men had advantages in. She argues that attention to particular diseases is driven by their relative risk to able bodied men, as opposed to even those men's own daughters. This smacks me in the face because she applies this rule to explain insufficient measures against covid despite a certain gender being at notably higher risk
But let's move quickly into the total opposite of an anecdote as we should! Since "God died" in elite circles what have been the most harmful beliefs worldwide? Communism and Nazism. These were both essentially based on a darwinistic zero sum group conflict explanation of reality and of how heaven like conditions could be manifested in the real world on a satisfying timeline since real heaven didn't exist. Life is so complex that any comprehensive explanatory replacement for belief systems which were developed and tested over time that is derived from top down first principles has a very high likelihood of producing less socially desirable results. I would argue that the number of anythings for which a believer or believer-adjacent person will fall is proven by you to be apparently equal but that the social consequences of those anythings will tend to be much less severe due to the overall time tested beneficial social consequences of those belief systems
> She argues that attention to particular diseases is driven by their relative risk to able bodied men, as opposed to even those men's own daughters.
Is she wrong about this? It’s widely known that clinical trials purposefully excluded women until the 1990s. Diseases affecting only female anatomy, such as polycystic ovary syndrome and endometriosis, are underfunded for their prevalence and morbidity. I am a woman who has extensively interfaced with the health care system on medical issues specific to women’s health at different phase of my life in different parts of the country, and the gaping holes of knowledge about the physiology of the female body were disturbing to me - and my physician husband - at every turn. If someone were to tell us that the idea of patriarchy in medical research is woo-woo, we would laugh in their face.
My own sense broadly tallies with yours -- it's not necessarily that anything that disproportionately affects men gets extra attention, but things that are understood to be "women's issues" get systematically less funding/research/integration into the med school curriculum.
I've had conversations with OB/GYNs who are absolute zealots for "evidence-based medicine," and I naively raise the usual post-replication-crisis caveats about being "evidence-based." And they round on me with a withering glare and say, do you have any idea what we're working against? We're fighting to establish the basic premise that evidence even matters in this area of medicine.
Cherry picking two prevalent cancers is not conclusive and may even be misleading. I would not draw any conclusions without looking at research dollars historically spent per case and per death on breast, cervical, uterine, ovarian, prostate, and testicular cancers. Also worth noting that the most prevalent cancers not specifically affecting either sex (lung colorectal etc) disproportionately affect men. Cancer is a loud disease that gets a lot of attention. Diseases that clearly reveal the bias are ones you may never have heard of.
I can definitely believe that the medical system disproportionately fails women through ignorance. I've heard something like that many foundational medical studies almost systematically exclude women. The particular interpretation that I see as an "anything" regarding beliefs is that any discrepancy is primarily intentional, systematic and deliberate
In terms of medical care this belief could be positive if it's tangentially true. What concerns me is that it is based on a conception of the world as being made up of discrete groups in constant zero sum competition. This "anything" belief seems to be the most available belief alternative to the conception of the world associated with belief in God and its consequences will naturally tend to involve starting and attempting to win zero sum competitions. While we seem to be blessed to be dealing with a very far cry from communism, the socially corrosive effects of this appear to be strongly enabled by social media. I think this will comprehensively fail to improve problems (see depolicing) and when the misdiagnosis of social problems as to be solved by group conflicts fails a likely response will be to initiate more intense conflicts
The quote is a claim of causation, not correlation, but the post looks only at correlation. The real question is, does someone losing their faith cause them to believe in some other kind of quackery, false conspiracies, or superstition? Not every atheist or “none” started off as a religious believer. Perhaps if you believe religious faith is caused by gullibility, and religious faith shoves other unsubstantiated beliefs out of the way, then it might be true that losing faith makes one more susceptible to other things, but it wouldn’t mean lifelong atheists are more gullible. Some kind of time dimension to this analysis would add value. Since surveys over the last couple of decades have shown, I think, that self-reported “nones” and “atheists” have increased over time at the expense of strong religious believers, we should see an increase in these other unsubstantiated beliefs in tandem (barring other confounding effects). But an admittedly biased sample of anecdotal information suggests to me that conspiratorial beliefs and superstition have been rife throughout time and not growing, and the recent spate of political conspiratorial thinking over the last 4 years seems too rapid to be attributable to rapid religious de-conversion. Anyway, most of these survey questions have been asked over time. What are the concurrent trends between belief in UFOs, faked moon landings, etc. and theism/religiosity?
As others have mentioned: Wokeness. I'd bet money that irreligious people are far more likely to believe woke nonsense. Wokeness has all the hallmarks of a substitute religion.
That is NOT the point of the quote, you rationalist dinks.
You could've spent 10 seconds looking at Christians using the reference, and you'd quickly understand that it refers to man being freed up to believe in destructive and murderous ideologies (fascism, Bolshevism, etc.) without moral constraints. The fact that you thought they were concerned with conspiracy theories and woo is... well it shows a certain lack of awareness.
Back when New Atheism formed, the looming moral specter of Communism wasn't a thing anymore and hadn't yet become a thing again, so most of what they had to dunk on was the middle-american brain-rot of the era. So calling Communism a religion didn't take off at the time, even though Dawkins was saying it even back then in an offhand way.
Communism is just an example. Christians read this quote as pertaining to "belief" in terms of morals and meaning, not in terms of irrational or dubious factual claims. To think of it in terms of the latter is projection.
The problem with your framing is that you categorize atheists as non-believers. No. *Agnostics* are non-believers. Atheists believe there is no god.
Put another way, to agnostics the question is "can the existence of god be known?" and their answer is "no, not with our current knowledge". For atheists, the question is "does god exist" and their answer is "no".
Agnostics think atheists are religious, atheists think agnostics are atheists.
Agnostics say "I don't believe in god", which is a fact. Atheists say "There is no god", which is likely a fact but given the constructs of religion, just as unprovable as "there is a god".
So do nonbelievers really believe anything? For agnostics, this is a real problem (in my view) in that we all struggle (or embrace) moral relativism. It's not a problem with atheists. They believe plenty .
One last thing: many people who "believe in god" but none of those pesky rules are functionally agnostic. That is, an agnostic's personal belief in what is likely to be the case ranges from likely no god to likely god.
Agreed the spectrum goes from "I believe in God but can't prove he exists" to "I don't believe in God and suspect he doesn't exist". I'd call all of those agnostics. Making agnosticism a special class of atheist is ahistorical. Atheism is a really, really old word going back to BCE. Agnosticism is less than 200 years old and was explicitly defined in counterpoint to atheism.
Another fun thing to consider (not as argument, just thought point): have you ever noticed how some religious words are useful, and move into general usage? Heresy, canonic, dogma, anathema all crossed over, while catechism, testify, eucharist are less commonly used. Atheism means you don't believe in god. But I can say "I'm agnostic on the topic of designated hitters" and everyone knows what you mean.
Agnostic is a distinct mindset and (heh) by God, don't put us in with those dogmatic atheists.
" And, of course, it's entirely possible to get dogmatic on the position that the existence of God is inherently improvable and that trying to prove or disprove it is a huge waste of time."
The minute a person says, "I admit that you can't prove God doesn't exist because you can't prove a negative, but I'm so convinced he doesn't exist that it's a waste of time to call myself agnostic." they are-as they say--not an agnostic.
An agnostic says "I admit you can't prove God doesn't exist and to me that makes it seem certain, but many other people think differently. I can only speak for myself."
I do not say this as any kind of brag. An agnostic left to him or herself can also say "I personally think pedophilia's a horror, but who am I to judge?" Scratch an agnostic and you find a moral relativist.
But the whole point of agnosticism is a) lack of certainty and b) acknowledgement that lack of certainty means no one's right. Not even an agnostic.
You seem to have Atheists and Agnostics all mixed up. Atheists believe there could be a god but not in the sense of religion (omnipotent/omniscient and gives a shit about what humans do). Agnostics are just Atheists who are hedging their answer so as not to alienate the (probably) religious person with whom they are talking.
An agnostic, saying, "I don't believe in God," means, "I don't believe in the existence of God." This is exactly the same as an atheist believing, "There is no God."
I think the steelman version of this concept is "religion is more socially adaptive than whatever would replace it." And I don't think "astrology" or "the moon landing was faked" really count as replacements for religion there because I don't think they serve the same abstract social purposes religion does.
I think the right abstract lens for viewing religion isn't "supernatural magic" but rather "source of meaning and social cohesion." So I think you have to construe the "anything" in "believing anything" as "anything that could be a rallying principle for society." I *guess* you could build a coherent social movement around the moon-landing hoax, but it feels like kind of a stretch. I think you have to look to something like Woke for a viable religion alternative.
The Economist survey cited in the post dealt with such things as QAnon and such that fall into your category of meaning-deriving beliefs. “Woke” is not easy to define as a belief as much as a set of ethical precepts. (Though some of its most public advocates trot out exaggerated empirical claims that invite religious-like hostility under challenge, there is similar ferocity in non-politically charged debates in academia). Problem is that in age of political polarization where everything meaning-deriving is divided as Red or Blue, all these meaning-deriving beliefs are so politically fraught that they tell you more about political loyalties than the effects of non-belief.
I'm super interested in seeing the "highlights from the comments section" because what you are arguing here seems to be representative of the critiquing plurality. (Including mine earlier this morning). With all respect, I think Scott missed the point of the Chesterson/Lewis/whomever quote.
I wonder if living in a rural area makes one more likely to believe in Bigfoot. It's easy to disbelieve the absurd if you live in a big city. The closer one lives to the wild, the more reasonable it might be to believe that there are big undiscovered creatures still out there. Would believing in giant squid have made one a conspiracy theorist before the mid-1800s?
I notice that "white evangelicals" was a category in a few places, missing any corresponding breakdowns along racial and religious lines.
A number of months ago, I wound up listening to NPR briefly. They were talking about vaccine "hesitancy" among white evangelicals, and had brought on a black evangelical minister to discuss the topic, and asked him what was wrong with white evangelicals. He refused to bite, and pointed out that black evangelicals had been at least as bad about vaccines, up until recently when a concerted effort was made to reach out and understand them, and that no similar effort had been made for white evangelicals. As a litmus test, he suggested that unless you can thoughtfully explain the importance of the Number of the Beast, you're not going to be able to connect with any evangelicals on this subject. This all went right over the interviewer's head, who ignored what he was saying and continued on the conversational track of assuming that there was something uniquely bad about white evangelicals. Soon after, I turned off the radio in disgust.
Which is mostly to say that those polls seem clearly biased in their design, implementation, and/or reporting.
It's quite odd to talk about rationalists and aliens and not mention Robin Hanson's copious speculation that the UFOs that pilots etc. keep seeing are, indeed, aliens. In online discussions Ive seen quite a few people in rat-adjacent spaces attracted by this hypothesis. (I'm not, FWIW). https://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/aliens
The quote is in the context of belief systems, I think a fair reading for "anything" interprets it to mean belief systems or worldviews as opposed to conspiracy theories or facts. In this case the statement becomes almost obviously true given their exclusionary nature. It would be interesting to see statistics of the same kind as you've found when it comes to:
- Transcedental meditation
- Buddhism
- Wokeness (in the CRT/'anti-racist' sense)
- Communism
- Incel-ness
- Scientology
- belief in 'consciousness uploading/the singularity/Roko's basilisk'
- QAnon (this seems sufficiently close to a 'belief system' in a way that 'the CIA orchestrated the JFK asassination' is not)
- belief in 'higher forms of consciousness' through psychedelics
While it may be possible to steelman some of these, without being too disrespectful I'd call most of these pretty crazy, and none of them involve a belief in God.
Then again, the way I'd expect a "religious apologetic" to 'really' mean the statement is to refer to things so ingrained in our psyche that we don't realize how crazy they are. It's hard to give examples, but the kind of things that seemed too true to question when being younger, before the realization of their folly then set in. Maye e.g. "I am strong and independent and don't need any help from other people" or unspoken beliefs like "I'm better than xyz because I am z".
"Incel-ness" seems to be an outlier here - somewhere between 15-30% of men aged 18 to 30 in the US are incels, and only a small percentage of that group subscribes to a particular worldview related to that (e.g. the blackpill).
But the economist article wasn’t trying to answer the question about left or right political preferences, they were answering a question about religiosity, how is it a trick to answer a different question and then fail to conclude anything about the question they didn’t ask?
Category 1 is a subset of atheists. From this perspective, agnostics are nothing like atheists: agnostics are in category 2.
Regarding what religion people say they are, there is a difference between people who identify culturally with a religion and those who think that various religious myths are true.
I go to buy a used car. The used car salesman tells me it's a great car. Is there anything wrong with it? Absolutely not. What about that rust spot? Only cosmetic. Tires look a little bald. They're brand new. How's the engine? Purrs like a kitten. I can tell he's lying, but not what about. As I'm leaving some guy says, hey buddy, that salesman is full of it. That car's got a faulty transmission. I have no way of knowing that's true, but because I know the salesman was lying so I'm inclined to believe him.
I think that's what's going on with a lot of conspiracy thinking. Public health people reflexively downplay any adverse vaccine effects, anyone who tries to object gets denounced, or fired, or booted off twitter and I start to think I'm being lied to, but I don't know why. Then someone comes and says of course you're being lied to, because Bill Gates wants population control, or whatever. I can't tell if that's true either, but he confirmed my suspicions and seems sincere, so I'm more inclined to believe him than the people I know are trying to spin me.
I think those data suffer a lot from being USA-centric. The US are a very singular country, and social patterns there don't necessarily applies elsewhere. This is especially true about religion where the US are really exceptional among developed countries.
This “PseudoChesterton” quote seems to be talking about three types of people (Traditional Believers, Believers in Random Bullshit, and People Who Can Judge Between Them). But it’s really just about two types: those who wear their beliefs lightly and those who don’t.
I’d rephrase “PseudoChesterton”’s remark as “Those who seek curiosity-stoppers will find them, in one place or another.”
Which is a psychological observation about one type of person. The type who doesn’t want to muck about with Bayesian probabilistic belief updates, but perceives uncertainty as an insatiable drain - a hole in the psyche which wants plugging.
It implies that you might as well leave the tried-and-true drain stopper / curiosity stopper in place if it seems to be working - better the devil you know, etc.
But people with more openess to experience, and less ego-attachment to their current opinions don’t care for such devils, known or otherwise.
As Hoffer in The True Believer said:
“It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet. The fanatics of various hues eye each other with suspicion and are ready to fly at each other’s throat. But they are neighbors and almost of one family. They hate each other with the hatred of brothers. They are as far apart and close together as Saul and Paul. And it is easier for a fanatic Communist to be converted to fascism, chauvinism or Catholicism than to become a sober liberal.
The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not.”
I have read some, but not all of, the comments (there are 623 as I speak), but I have never understood the quote in question to be about conspiracy theories.
I have always understood it to be about things such as mass murder (or abortion or eugenics or ...) with the idea that a person who believes in God would not be persuaded that mass murder would be correct but an atheist might be willing to follow some argument to a logical conclusion and then crank up the gas ovens. The person who believed in God would not turn on the gas that because doing so was "wrong" even if the person couldn't find a flaw in the logic.
One can haul out the "No True Scotsman" tool to show that Nazi and Communist mass murder wasn't committed by people who believed in God. Even the Nazi and Communists folks who *said* they did really didn't. Because if they had believed in God then they wouldn't have committed the mass murder :-)
Basically, I've read this quote as a variation on "Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them."
Am I the only one (here) who interprets the quote that way and not about conspiracy theories?
Edit: Ah, Eyebrows comment makes it clear that I am not the only one who reads the quote this way!
I'm not sure the fake C.S. Lewis quote is really getting at a notion that non-believers are vulnerable to conspiracy theories as much as to philosophical positions like nihilism and Nietzschean "will to power" ideas, which allow for essentially whatever moral system someone "wills". One could argue atheism allows and has allowed different non-believing people to select e.g. secular humanism (more socially accepted (currently)) as well as Nazi "might makes right" imperialism.
The question isn't really about object-level beliefs based on object-level evidence but about the personal formation of a sense of ultimate purpose, which is hard to formulate on sure footing for someone who doesn't necessarily believe it exists. Granted, this may not be what many atheists would claim but I think at the same time many would claim this is the case, that there isn't some absolute moral purpose "out there" that we need to fulfill, but just what individuals happen to choose is "good for them". The fact that atheism allows this ambiguity as to the existence of absolute moral purpose is also indicative of what I think the quote is getting at. Christians (the religious group I'm most familiar with) are much less ambiguous about their final purpose. This isn't to say religious views haven't been used to support positions that are currently considered immoral, but (I'd argue) religious views provide more constraint than atheism.
I think this is overlooking that atheism is properly modeled as a religion. It has Things To Say about all the religious topics, treats them seriously, and should have the same govt-granted protections as theistic religions.
This is mostly a combination of two effects that go in opposite directions: Intelligence and conformity. It’s well-known that nonconformity and intelligence are correlated with irreligion in general. However, atheism is correlated much more strongly with IQ. Being spiritual but not religious, a “None,” or a non-churchgoer who still identifies as religious is more strongly correlated with nonconformity and social alienation than with intelligence (if it’s correlated at all; nonobservance is anticorrelated with intelligence IIRC).
Both conformity and intelligence are strongly anticorrelated with belief in conspiracies. So which effect dominates depends on whether you’re looking at the slightly-smarter than average but very nonconformist “Nones,” or the significantly smarter than average but only slightly nonconformist atheists.
Lots of high IQ people are regular churchgoers in my experience. But they are of a more practical, pragmatic bent—lawyers, doctors, dentists, business owners—the same people who go to rotary meetings. There are a disproportionate number of devout Mormon lawyers who went to elite law schools and practice at top law firms. I think the calculus for them is pretty simple: if church improves your life satisfaction and puts you in beneficial social circles, why would dig for a truth that can only upset that? But I really don’t think this is the crowd that believes in big foot.
Intellectually curious people who are high IQ end up at CalTech (not Harvard Law) where they can get some answers about the nature of being that they find satisfying and are persuaded to accept. Lower IQ people who are intellectually curious are more apt to be persuaded by the explanations of the church down the street. They’re also more like to accept a prima facie case for Bigfoot without a lot of research around minimum breeding populations or skeletal remains or whatever. But the underlying credulity and lack of inquiry is corollary with their adopted religious beliefs, not causal.
Seeing any effect go from other religions through nonbelievers to Jews seems like an enormous red flag that you might really just be dealing with IQ. (Bigfoot)
I don't think we get anywhere near understanding this data until we control for some reasonable measure of general intelligence. It might be analogous to a chess position where a beginner takes an available piece because that's obvious, an expert notices a range of powerful opponent responses and avoids taking, but a grandmaster calculates counters to all of those responses and makes the same move as the beginner.
Can we please stop using the term "conspiracy theory" as a synonym for "crazy, ridiculous theory that only nutjobs believe in"?
This usage gives the media a very powerful motte-and-bailey: when discussing a perfectly plausible theory about people conspiring that is supported by good evidence, they can describe it as a conspiracy theory. This description is accurate in the literal sense of the term, as it is indeed a theory about people conspiring, but it poisons the well: everyone listening hears "conspiracy theory" and thinks "insane, baseless theory that [outgroup] believes".
This irrationally biases people against theories that involve conspiracies, and the effect is that people who want to expose actual conspiracies have to use different words to describe what's happening, or argue that their theory wouldn't actually require a conspiracy - but this is a waste of time, because "is X a conspiracy theory?" is really just a disguised query for "is X false?". We should not accept this linguistic framing, because it would amount to a concession that conspiracy is axiomatically impossible.
The Conspirituality podcast covers some of these issues well - SBNR (spiritual but not religious) people are often caught up in perpetuating views that, often unknown to them, are the same conspiracy theories that originate in and circulate widely on the alt right.
I think you undersell your point about correlation with "right-coded" beliefs and that this probably explains _all_ correlations better than any underlying characteristic of people with a given belief set.
All beliefs are culturally coded. If you found that religious people eat more bread and atheists eat more rice you wouldn't try to draw a conclusion about religious digestive systems, you'd just note it as a fairly arbitrary cultural constellation, maybe there are ethnic factors but they're entirely historical.
I don't think people believe in astrology because their model of reasoning is particularly attuned to it, I think they just believe it because the right person introduced it to them at the right time. If there are less atheist astrologers I'd say it's just because the social links that enable that trigger don't exist.
I think the last graph has it. Your likelihood of joining a cult increases for every year of higher education you had. Almost 80pc of cult members have 4 or more years of higher education.
It's hard to find a coherent relationship here, but my intuition tells me that there's probably a lot of different things involved.
In my experience, the extremely dim and extremely smart seem to be most likely to believe in conspiracy theories. On the one hand, you have the kind of people who buy supplements from Alex Jones because they don't want to turn into gay frogs. On the other hand, you have people like Eric Weinstein who are so smart that their brain can easily produce convincing narratives around almost anything.
I think science knowledge also has something to do with it, for instance I could see the belief in conspiracy theories being far less in STEM departments. For instance, a lot of people (even very brilliant ones like Einstein) struggle with the concept of extremely unlikely things happening by chance, whereas any discipline that involves a lot of statistics will probably inoculate you somewhat against that kind of thinking.
Lastly, some people probably just have a baseline level of neuroticism that makes them prone to conspiracy theories irrespective of the other relevant variables. I often see this kind of thing among creative types, but I think their paranoia is often part of what makes them creative.
Tbh I have no problem with conspiracy theories provided they aren't violent. To go even further, I'm often disappointed that more smart people don't really believe in any, as I think it's indicative of too much conformity and a lack of heteredox thought.
To add one more point, I think the status associated with the belief is also key. Few people believe in bigfoot or Q-anon because it's seen as a low-status belief supported by poor white people. However, the idea that Trump got pissed on by a Russian hooker is far more likely to garner support, because it's associated with more status.
> In my experience, the extremely dim and extremely smart seem to be most likely to believe in conspiracy theories.
Yeah, same here. I think part of the dynamic is that the Official Narrative tends to be packaged for people of roughly average intelligence.
For some people, that means it sails over their heads, they can't follow the reasoning the Official Spokesperson gives for why the Official Narrative should be persuasive, and they either assume it must be some kind of trick or just fail to register it at all and go off believing whatever story sounds sexier or more flattering to their ingroup.
At the other extreme, there are people whom the Official Narrative strikes as dumbed-down in ways they can easily detect. They either resent being patronized and instinctively distrust whatever the Official Spokesperson says, or they assume that there must be an alternate version for smart people that's more complicated and less congenial to the powers that be.
Paranoia's about connecting things that aren't actually connected, but if you're trying to make new art that might be a plus. Film noir + sci-fi = cyberpunk. Western + sci-fi = post-apocalyptic. Wargames + fantasy = D&D.
I think that most of the conspiracy theories mentioned are more reasonable than all mainstream religions, which kind of undermines the quote at the top.
The simple explanation here is that atheism is very much akin to protestantism in terms of it's treatment of belief/knowledge/truth, and this attitude produces the trends seen here.
Protestantism's main shift from Catholicism historically was the elevation of "inner feeling" or "belief" over the immediately experience of sacredness, the eucharist, etc. So protestantism became about "believing correctly", "knowing the truth", rather than about practices of worship etc.
Is atheism not primarily a negation of protestantism? Same epistemic structure, but an unshakeable belief in "no god" instead of "god"? If this were the case, it would make sense why atheists and protestants share the stances described.
A non-believing (and non-threatening to atheists) interpretation might be that human passions run so strong it's nearly impossible to avoid exercising a degree of "religious" faith in some purpose.
Except that atheism cannot answer questions like ‘What is the point of my existence?’ Or ‘Why am I investing in a future that I will not be part of?’ Or ‘Why should I not ruthlessly exploit others to my own benefit except insofar as it would be expected to result in some tangible adverse consequence for me?’
Or rather atheists can answer such questions, and possibly in the ultimately correct ways. But not in ways that assist individuals or societies in functioning well. Truth is kind of beside the point.
I think you’re confusing atheist with post-Christian. Maintaining a broadly Christian worldview without the need for strict adherence to every dogma or particular views about the existence of God or gods seems to work pretty great in the West. I don’t know how well that holds up now that it’s come unmoored though.
For example, the notion that people have equal fundamental spiritual value, whether man/woman, citizen/servant, Greek/barbarian rests on a Christian premise that helped it find appeal with Roman slaves early in its history. It’s widely accepted as self evident in the West now, but a pagan Roman senator would have been shocked by even the idea and vehemently disagreed.
The Christian worldview has two millennia of momentum behind it, so no doubt we coast on its premises for awhile even as its conclusions are discarded. But I don’t see how atheism either buttresses the existing Western worldview or supplies a knew one. At most it could say that we are all equal because we are all the same happy, fleeting, pointless accidents of physics and biology. True is different from helpful.
You’re not talking primarily about nations full of people who have diligently followed the tenants of science and logic to their likely conclusions and are atheists in that sense. More like they have a general sense that God, or at least the concept of God presented by organized religions, is kind of silly and getting rid of it allows them to live life as they want. Which is mostly how they lived it before minus some of the awkward baggage picked up over two millennia and pulled in haphazardly from preceding frameworks. Which in the short term is great, but allows for more drift.
Atheism is not itself a framework. It just discards a common trope relied on by other frameworks to punt on a lot of the ‘why’ questions. Certainly, there have been efforts to invent a workable atheistic framework uncoupled from, and independent of, residual premises and beliefs. Nietzsche’s ‘Antichrist’ is an example, but not particularly compelling or desirable in practice.
<i>But Christians don't actually believe that. Christianity explicitely teaches that anyone who isn't a Christian is spiritually worthless, and anyone who dies not a Christian deserves infinite punishment for the finite transgression of not believing the right thing at the right time; and God being all-knowing and all-powerful *could absolutely* reach those people, but chooses not to, which is explained as these people being reprobates, unreachable *by nature*, that God chose to bring into the world with their soul already pre-damned.</i>
That's just Calvinism, not Christianity as a whole. I was raised Catholic, and while I have a lot of problems with Catholic theology, I can tell you with confidence that Catholics don't believe what you're describing.
<i>And yet the most well functioning societies on Earth are also the most atheistic, and the most religious societies on Earth are also the most violent and dysfunctional.</i>
Given that "the most atheistic societies on Earth" include China and North Korea, you might want to be less bullish in your claims of superiority.
Well, I have been following this thread with amusement since there is little understanding demonstrated as to how the unit human mind works and how they collectively form groups and become a collective mind.
The title could equally have been "Will Anybody Really Believe Anything".
I would just point out that arbitrarily grouping together people based upon their religious beliefs (or lack thereof) will lead to extremely heterogeneous groups of people being lumped together. It might be fun to throw a whole bunch of survey questions unrelated to religion at these people and then classify the responses by religious affiliation, but it doesn't really tell you much because these groups are made up of people with extremely varied life experiences, political affiliations, viewpoints, intelligence quotients and levels of education.
This is something my mother says a lot. She (and her religious friends) like to frame all knowledge as a matter of belief. So, for example, she thinks that believing in evolution, LGBT rights, or climate change is simply a matter of faith, just like believing in God.
What always jumps out to me in this sort of discussion is just how common conspiracy theories actually are. 9/11 truth conspiracy theories poll in the 40s, moon landing around 20, JFK assassination in the 60s...
Even discounting heavily politicized theories, it seems likely that the vast majority of people believe in at least one or two conspiracy theories. It might be time to stop thinking of "conspiracy theorists" as deviants with a critical piece of mental capacity missing. A belief in mysterious forces beyond your control is psychologically normal, and we don't need any more thinkpieces speculating about why members of X group fall for conspiracy theories.
I've long felt that "conspiracy theories" form a continuum with no clear point of demarcation between reasonable and unreasonable to believe in.
At one end of the spectrum is the mob killing Jimmy Hoffa. This is minimally a conspiracy theory, insofar as it posits a conspiracy and is technically at odds with the official narrative (which is that we don't know what happened to Jimmy Hoffa). Virtually everybody who's looked into the evidence has reached the same conclusion that this is obviously what happened, but we'll probably never get the kind of definitive proof that we'd need to consider this a Fully Validated Historical Fact. An earlier historical example is Richard III killing the Princes in the Tower. We don't know, but... yeah, we kind of know. Say that's a 1 on the conspiracy-theory scale.
At the other extreme is Queen Elizabeth being a lizard. There is nothing remotely resembling evidence for this proposition, or even any sort of gap in the evidence for the opposing thesis that the Queen is a human being. It's a pure mental efflux wholly unrelated to any kind of empirical fact.
I recall that in Scott's post on the subject he proposed solving the Lizardman's Constant problem by asking a qualitatively more absurd question, as an example of which he suggested "Is Barack Obama a hippopotamus?" I've always found this amusing, as if there were some infinitesimal plausibility to the idea of a lizard impersonating the Queen that the idea of a hippo impersonating the President just didn't have. So I'm going to say that the lizardman theory is a 10 on the scale, but if you want the amps to go up to 11, I'm fine with making "Barack Obama is a hippopotamus" an 11.
The point is, I'm not sure where on that spectrum belief in a particular conspiracy theory goes from being perfectly reasonable to being locally unreasonable to being a signal of some sort of broader cognitive failure.
I don't think your characterization of that graph from the Economist as
"the authors are doing the usual trick where they cherry-pick right-wing examples of something bad, show that more right-wingers are in favor of them, then conclude that Science Has Proven Right-Wingers Are Bad."
"Belief in these theories is also linked to a person’s political views. White evangelicals are 34 percentage points more likely than other Americans to believe that “millions of illegal votes” were cast in the 2020 election. These adults also tend to be more conservative, and vote for Republican politicians more often, than non-whites and members of other religious groups do. Evangelicals are influenced by the official party line on issues of the day—even if they are conspiratorial."
In fact, the article's central question is why QAnon has become so popular--and whether the answer is because Americans lack faith. The conclusion, therefore, that QAnon adherents are particularly likely to be Christians, is salient for the question it sets out to answer.
Re: "For example, if God created humans in the Garden of Eden, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for aliens and UFOs."
This is not a new argument. In 1277, the existence of aliens was a controversy then dividing much of the French theological community. The Bishop of Paris ruled that one could not deny the power of God to create as He pleases. He didn't say anything about God's only begotten son versus God having begotten sons elsewhere.
This one is a lot more about theories of human nature rather than arbitrary supernatural beliefs. Not a fan of religion but it typically seems to take atheism to subscribe to unfalsifiable political ideologies like wokeness or communism otherwise.
An important distinction between evangelicals and other Christian traditions is the “conversionism” (to borrow from Bebbington’s quadrilateral). As Billy Graham supposedly put it,”God has many children, but he doesn’t have any grandchildren.” In other words, ideally evangelicalism requires a level of intentionality not present in other flavors of Christianity. Obviously, a lot of nonobservant folks self identify as evangelical, but I suspect that it is less committed than other traditions. In other words, an evangelical identity is more predictive of one’s actual beliefs than say “Catholic”.
As far as Christians believing in traditional woo and thus not really protective, it misses important methodological differences in why one might believe in astrology vs the virgin birth. The Protestant reformers posited two sources of reliable (infallible) information about reality: nature (general revelation) and scripture (special revelation). All truth claims had to be verified against the infallible evidence provided by these sources. Claims by councils, popes, tradition, or other authorities can in principle be wrong. The structure of this epistemic framework is not so different from that of the rationalists. This sparked deep skepticism of miracles (e.g., transubstantiation was described as an absurd superstition), relics, and visions. Indeed many reformed were various flavor of cessationist. If one adopts such a stance, then adhering to a religion that includes supernatural views is compatible with protection from a large class of irrational beliefs.
If I'm reading the UFO thing correctly, in a strict sense, UFO sightings by people in the military *is* evidence of life on other planets? Not particularly strong evidence, mind you, but I'd be hard-pressed to say those things have no correlation at all, or that UFO sightings are evidence against ET life.
This is a bad approach because it inevitably involves wading into a whole slew of object level claims. I think it was SSC years ago that suggested a way to avoid this controversy was to look at historical episodes that were far enough removed we could view them with detachment. And religionists have a number of powerful examples from the historic episodes of modernist ideology, such as the French Revolution or actually existing communism. This is much more productive than engaging in object-level epistemic skirmishing over who (currently) has the weirdest beliefs. Also, I am very suspicious of anyone who doesn't entertain at least a few deviations from consensus epistemology.
In C.S. Lewis's 'That Hideous Strength' one of the good characters is an old-fashioned atheist logical-positivist type, who refuses to get caught up in all the satanic stuff because he's too much of an honest atheist. So I think the general point of this article is already well appreciated by people in the Lewis-Chesterton tradition, but they would say it doesn't matter too much because strict atheists are basically irrelevant psychological oddities. Another way of phrasing Chesterton (if he didn't say the quote, he definitely said a lot of things like the quote) is 'most people are not psychologically capable of being cold rationalists'.
Further the people who state a version of this thesis today are talking about woo ideas like 'there is a conspiracy among police to shoot black people and falsify crime statistics' or 'a significant fraction of people are born the wrong sex and need invasive surgery'. Now, you can say that these are are left-coded beliefs so the argument is really just a fancy way of saying 'leftwingers are more leftwing', but at least address the real argument.
Normal people with common sense? Should it have said, " Me and my friends, we are very smart and better than you. You should trust us." I would love to see this poll associated with Happiness or satisfaction. Hmmmm wonder who is more satisfied, the religious or the atheist? Bing, bing, bing. The religious. The rabbit hole of not understanding yourself or others. Precious.
Probably worth pointing out that a lot of rationalist types believe in something fairly close to the robot apocalypse, which is a view most people would look at with a fair degree of skepticism, to say the least.
Personally I think no society has ever existed without something like a universal religion (even if the 'something like a universal religion' has been materialistic or non theistic).
If that gets fractured then people fragment into in-groups and networks of similarly minded people with a natural distrust of others who dont perceive the world the way they do.
It's probably in this environment of distrust that people become most open to conspiracy.
Social media facilitates the formation of in-groups and networks but this kind of thing happened long before social media in response to stresses and crises.
Think of post reformation European witch hunts or the way Jewish populations have been persecuted.
I really think you're misunderstanding the statement. It isn't about belief in conspiracy theories. From the point of view of the religious true believer who might say this, they have a source of "absolute truth" that is a guideline for what is true and false. Of course in reality this "absolute truth" doesnt cover everything, but they BELIEVE that that their beliefs regarding what we might call the "objective realm" derive from this absolute truth. Lewis may not hve said it, but the final book in his Narnia series very clearly illustrates this idea.
If one believes there is absolute truth they know, then people lacking such will be able to be "convinced of anything" because any possibility is open to them, via argument, persuasion, trend, bias, etc.
But I think its silly to take this statement from a different wordlview then where it comes from and try to think about whether or not it's true, as the meaning one gets from that is totally different from the meaning of the statement from the point of view of the believer.
Its a similar sentiment to the one stated often states by some religious believers belief in God and the morals he gives is neccessary for people to be moral and ethical because without an absolute sourcce all ethics are subjective.
There is a hint of truth to this but its confused. Ethics are in the subjective realm. They claim that a literal belief in an all power deity is what puts ethics and morals in the realm of the objective.
Many people mistake this claim to mean that without belief in God, people would just go around murdering and being completely immoral. I don't think thats what the saying generally means (of course some people will always have different interpretations because) because thats patently false. As explanied by my uncle who is a Baptist minister who said the equivalent of this, when people try to determine morals and ethics independent of a divine source they can never agree or establish any consistent principle from which ethics should derive. Thats sort of right, I don't buy for example Sam Harris' attempt to determine an "objective ethics" from analyzing biology, evolution, and commonalities in group behavior. Or rather I think what he's looking for isnt "ethics" as I think of it, and there's disconnect there betwen what he sees as the objectivity of the source versus the subjective nature.
But that sentiment is VERY similar to the "If you don't believe in God you can believe in anything." The significance from the point of view of the believer is very concerned with ethics, because from their epistomology ethics are absolutes like natural laws. Thus some set of arguments or circumstances could play on one's inherent sense of fairness or compassion but lead to wrong conclusions. In "The Last Battle" the Lewis book I mentioned, it becomes clear ( and this would be the Christian or Abrahamic view) that Satan uses things like playing on human conscious to mislead humans into damnation, and you can't trust your own "moral intuitions" without "fear of God" who makes clear what his commandements are. Humans have a choice to either obey or disobey.
It makes sense IF ONE BELIEVES IN GOD. But since people here don't, or at least probably not that fundamentalist version, trying to see if there's any validity to the claim seems to me like an exercise in silliness and missing the point.
Whether or not the religious are prone to conspiracy theories and the fact some are and some arent shows that the supposed absolute truth they say they beleive in really isnt absolute because different believers will come to different conclusions and both say its based on biblical reasosning (or whatever religious source) when actually there are all sorts of other factors- then the people who come to different conclusions will accusse the others of being led astray.
We see this again and again with religion and we see it now in the US as there is a division within American Christianity as to whether some Christians have put politics over their religious convictions or merged them versus the view that those politics are obvious following from commandements of the absolute religious truth and is the believers duty.
And frankly I dont give surveys on belief in conspiracy theories much worth because on top of the other problems with surveys conspiracy theorists are more prone to either be paranoid about answerin questions OR have a strong tribal indentification with such beliefs and survey takers usually have a strong bias in terms of what they are trying to show as well as the usual survey questions as I have experenced them when it comes to taking them are TERRIBLE because they are "strongly agree to strongly disagree" and its very clear how the questions are "loaded" i. e. what conclusion the survey maker will draw from different answers but words those questions in ways where what they are "looking for" isnt necessarily or even usually what they asked because of overly general assumptions.
As an example the question "Is support of law enforcement and crime a major factor in your voting?"
It was clear that if you said "strongly agree" the survey registered you as a "law and order, blue lives matter conservative"
But I am the opposite, an absolute cop hater- and thus my answer would ALSO be "strongly agree" because a candidate who was strongly supportive of law enforcement would NOT get my vote.
And enough of the questions are worded like that that I just don't think those sorts of surveys tell you much of anything.
I know this is a bit off-topic, but I am hoping this community can answer the question. Since the thread has died down a bit, I don't think I am crashing the party on this. If it doesn't belong here, my apologies. I am thinking of a fallacy, and I know it has a formal name. I just don't know if I have ever been aware of it. It's basically "comparing the best of ours to the worst of yours."
An example would be "The Christian worldview has resulted in societies based on justice, charity, human rights, and the Muslim world just flies planes into buildings and commits honor killings."
or "Conservatives have Victor Davis Hanson and George Will, liberals have Keith Olberman and Kamala Harris."
Evangelicals believe in a lot of evangelical-appropriate conspiracy theorists. What's the equivalent among atheists?
I think excluding political conspiracy theories from consideration is problematic. Extremist political ideologies are often built on the backs of conspiracy theories.
I believe in astrology because I recognize that there are other people who believe in astrology who change and model their behavior based on their belief in astrology, and these people interact with me indirectly in society.
I find it disconcerting that your use a Bayesian tagline, and statistically conflate so many groups.
Also, the game you played with the bigfoot statistics almost sounds like an xqcd statistics parody.
"(In theory some groups could be open-minded and less likely to take strong positions on either side, but it doesn’t look like that happens here)." Catholics seem pretty based.
It's interesting that the conversation went straight from right-wing conspiracy theories to politically-neutral conspiracy theories, skipping right over the many left-wing conspiracy theories. It's not that we atheists just don't believe; it's that we don't accept beliefs without evidence.
Businesses conspire all the time. That’s why there is so much lobbying.
Well a conspiracy is something where people conspire, that is in a hidden fashion. And you admit that businessmen do conspire and lobby. I think you’ve created a strawman here, “the secret lobby” that is ruling capitalist societies, but what most leftists and centrists believe is that capitalists run, or dominate, capitalist society. Which is as conspiratorial as believing that feudalists ran feudalism.
I too think that Douthat's "Bad Religion" was a very interesting read, and that American church history is probably a neglected topic, particularly given the exceptional uniqueness of American Christianity.
I've also had the thought that it's the logical endpoint of Protestantism. And I say this as a devout American Protestant, who concludes that at this particular moment in time our system looks like it's somehow, amazingly, the best one. While I also recognize the very apparent flaws that might lead people of other traditions -- Christian or not -- to conclude it's actually the worst one.
The difference between hardcore atheists and the “soggy middle” atheists isn’t belief in god, by definition. The former are generally angry anti-theists and the latter being just atheist or agnostic.
I don’t think the middle is where the conspiracy theories flourish either.
Yes, you are strawmanning. Let me remind you that people retiring today were 8 years old when Jim Crow laws stopped being enforced, so no one has ever claimed that unconscious bias is the only problem for blacks. Conscious, codified-as-law bias literally shaped generations alive today, which undoubtedly has substantial effects on today's youth as well. That's on top of not-legally-enforced racism, with unconscious racism being only a fraction of that. I would also remind you that, if you're going to accuse others of believing in mind-viruses, it would behoove you to make sure that you are not spouting one in the very same breath. A very, very common mind virus is "the out group believes [obviously false thing X]". Consider whether you have this virus. (In fact, I would hypothesize that you don't actually have this virus, are smart enough to know that your out group does not believe this, and are just making bad arguments online to score points with your in group. A thing I'm guilty of at times too!)
Per your last paragraph, the distinction here is that conspiracy theorists do actually endorse the beliefs you accuse them of having. SJWs would look at you cross-eyed if you said they believe that the only bias is unconscious bias.
Thank you for admitting to the straw man. I do think that knowingly strawmanning an opponent is a bad thing to do, and comes across particularly poorly when accusing others of bad, motivated reasoning and/or being brainwashed. I agree about the general point that debunking Bigfoot et al is basically mean and pointless, though I think I’m missing what you mean in this context.
This. Where is the Japanese-American rage? Seriously that was a gross violation of the norms of western civilization, let alone the constitution.
No SJW will disagree with you on that one and I’m surprised you think otherwise. Did you know we paid the victims 20,000$ in reparations in 1988 and had even passed ineffective reparations in the 40’s? Given your other comment that SJWism is ineffective, then maybe you should join them in fighting for reparations for Jim Crow subjects? It’ll never make up for the actual abuse they suffered, but at least it’s a real action to try to help people.
Why doesn't 50 plus years of affirmative action count as reparations?
I don't know why people should get more worked up about the fact that Japanese-Americans got forced into camps during WW2 than about the fact that non-Japanese-Americans got forced into the Army during WW2.
The US government violated everyone's rights during its involvement in WW2, not just those of Japanese descent. And if the government is going to be violating my rights anyway I'd rather that they send me to some crappy camp for a few years than that they send me to a crappy camp for a few weeks then drop me on the beaches of Normandy or Guadalcanal.
Why all the outrage about Japanese internment and not about conscription?
The objectionable belief isn't "Blacks are affected by prejudice", it's "*All* the negative outcomes in the black community are the result of prejudice" -- a much stronger, and less well-evidenced, claim.
This.
I’m replying specifically to the claim the poster made, which was about unconscious bias only. A statement that is obviously and transparently not believed by anyone at all. In other words, a strawman!
You’ll note that the original poster’s writing implies something much closer to the exact opposite of what you said (that there are no prejudice effects whatsoever, since unconscious effects are clearly negligible) than to your statement. So if you want to claim that the other side is the one making extraordinary claims, then you’ll have a hard time.
I've personally experienced interacting with highly-educated young people who hold forth some pretty wacky levels of belief in systemic racism/sexism, gender and everything else currently popular. Racism Is In The Air We Breathe. I once knew a woman who insisted that her father was colluding with other powerful men to take away her rights. Her proof of this was that he got re-married to a woman from Thailand and was himself white.
They say we're killing the planet, to the point where one of them got emotionally angry at the ecological costs of...leaving garbage in an alley for a week because the landlords stopped paying for a dumpster, to force them to put the dumpster back. Just a garbage bag containing garbage briefly not being in a dumpster caused a conniption fit about plastic straws and all the People of Color being drowned.
As a white man married to an Asian woman, I can tell you from firsthand experience that there's a crazy amount of hatred in the air these days for such pairings.
How does this actually express itself in real life? Honest question, I'm not trying to make a point. Do people bring it up TO you, or do you notice it around you more?
I'm still confused as to how progressives can bring up crap like that without the heads exploding; isn't that...Criticizing a Woman Of Color's Life Choices? Doesn't that violate some woke rule or other?
Right, but the question is what actions are necessary/effective in the face of this history? Should you put your ancestors in the dock? Or make sure those alive today aren’t able to treat others differently based on race? I’d argue the SJW approach is not only ineffective, but it is doing more harm than good. Even if you accept that historical racism affects people in the present, an effective approach can only be based on actions. Trying to improve black lives by demonizing whiteness does not actually help either.
Yes
Or even non-American Western countries. Are Church-going Finns more likely believe in UFOs? Do French Catholics have an opinion on the moon landings?
Apparently, Saudi housewives blame The Jews whenever a ceiling fan breaks down. A young Ayan Hirsi-Ali, who didn't know what a "Jew" was, assumed it was some kind of household mischief spirit, like a gremlin or kikimora.
"Is belief in Islam correlated with believing in the Protocols of Zion?"
Nomak already kinda pointed it out, but yes. Absolute yes on this one.
It's also correlated with believing that masturbation drains cerebro-spinal fluid, that salt and fresh water don't mix (I'm not really clear on what this would even look like), and, amusingly, human fetuses get their souls at 4 months.
That last part was also the dominant Christian belief throughout most of the Middle Ages, at least if you assume that European Common Law was reflective of religious views.
Interesting. I wonder about grey-area stuff like acupuncture and Freudian psychoanalysis.
That depends on what exactly you mean by "Freudian psychoanalysis". For example, I agree with the following things:
* Psychological problems that can be cured by hypnosis, can also be cured by talking to a therapist. (It may require more time.)
* Human mind does many things we are not consciously aware of. Some of those we may realize when we start paying attention. For example, you may be tapping your fingers without realizing it, but it's still your brain doing it.
* It is useful to model a human mind as a collection of agents with different goals. Some agents care about fulfilling desires, such as food, sex, addictions. Some agents care about social status, or approval by other people. There is also some mechanism that seeks to achieve a balance between the competing agents.
* Civilization requires a lot of self-control, which results in a lot of frustration. There are a few stereotypical ways how humans deal with emotions they are not allowed to act upon -- pretending that the emotion does not exist; redirecting the emotion to another target; attributing the emotion to another person; reshaping the emotion into e.g. an artistic impulse; (and perhaps some more I forgot).
* Suppressed emotions related to sexual desires are way more frequent than Freud's contemporaries would be willing to publicly admit. (Not necessarily true for our culture, because we have already updated on this fact, thanks to Freud.)
* Frustrated desires can appear in dreams, often in a coded (plausibly deniable) form. For example, a child who was not allowed to eat ice cream, may dream about walking in mountains of snow.
* Humans have a complicated love/hate relationship with authority. (This would require a longer explanation, I am not sure I could do it properly.)
This is roughly what I remember from Freudian psychoanalysis. On the other hand, here are my objections against it:
* Although I like the framework in general, when Freud goes into more specific details, he gets many of them wrong. (Not a fatal objection in my mind, as those details can be fixed later. Analogically, Darwin didn't discover genes, but that doesn't make evolution "debunked".)
* Missing from the picture are considerations of hereditary traits, hormonal imbalance, or simply brain damage. Not all things were caused by one's past experience; not all can be cured by talking.
* The psychoanalytical couch talk may be more efficient than hypnosis, but still less efficient than other therapeutic approaches. Psychoanalytic therapy is famous for literally taking years, that seems like a waste of time and money.
* The chance of a therapist projecting their thoughts on the patient is extremely high. Yes, it is a thing that Freud explicitly warned about, but the proposed solutions (such as: the therapist should first spend a lot of time in therapy himself) don't seem sufficient to me.
What about the consistent finding that all therapies are roughly as effective as each other? So, if following Freudian framework doesn't make you a more effective therapist, then it sure would seem that it doesn't have a better than chance correlation to reality (to the extent that it still says stuff that hasn't become conventional wisdom).
Is that “50% effective” stat just a statistical measurement across disciplines and the populace, or is it that if there’s only a 50% chance psychoanalysis works on me there’s only a 50% chance hypnosis will work? Might differing therapies have results dependent on the practitioner and the patient or are they all intrinsically a coin toss?
It's a statistical measure, and it says that all of them are somewhat better than 50% on average, which may or may not be a placebo effect. You wouldn't know before trying which will work better for you, but you probably can expect any of them to be better than nothing.
Thanks. I’d upvote but I think they feature is disabled.
Well, if *all* therapies are roughly equally effective, isn't it curious why Freudian psychoanalysis is always singled out as an example of embarassing pseudoscience? (Why don't people say things like "haha, I wonder how many rationalists actually believe in crazy stuff like astrology or behaviorism"?)
But honestly, I don't know what to think about that finding. -- Scott, if you are reading this, please write a meta-review. The fate of thousand internet debates depends on it. -- I don't want to dismiss inconvenient evidence. I also wouldn't want to just take it on your word that the study was replicated and doesn't have obvious flaws. And I have neither time nor skills necessary to review it myself. So I can only provide a few guesses:
Guess #1: There might be some huge flaw in the study that proved that all therapies are similarly effective. The easiest way to prove that all therapies are the same would be to make a half-assed attempt at each of them. This would even be super easy to replicate! It doesn't require any bad intentions; it could happen naturally as a result of a limited budget.
Guess #2: Diagnosing a problem and fixing it are two different skills. I could recognize a broken leg, but it doesn't mean I could also heal it. Maybe it is similar in psychotherapy: better descriptions of human mind do not necessarily translate into more efficient therapies. Correct theories may be unactionable, and incorrect theories may benefit from the power of placebo effect.
>why Freudian psychoanalysis is always singled out as an example of embarassing pseudoscience
Maybe because it made the biggest splash culturally and arguably still remains the most well-known/influential?
It might also be that the mere act of talking about things that are bothering you with an authoritative and empathetic person and then having that person give you some generic advice and some ritualistic behaviors to do just makes a lot of people feel better about things, and let go of obsessions and such, and it doesn't really matter if it's a priest, a shaman, or a psychologist.
I think there is no controversy that talking to a high-status empathetic person makes you feel better.
The curious part is that either (1) all schools of psychotherapy are equally wrong about human mind, or that (2) being more right is not actually helpful for therapy.
What you said would suggest the option 1, but that just sounds too pessimistic. Like, if you say that a specific school of therapy is wrong (could also be Freudian, for the sake of this argument), that alone sounds very plausible. I mean, if they disagree with each other, then naturally some of them should be wrong.
The difficult part is that they are *all* wrong, and all *equally* wrong. Like, come on, there were so many different approaches. At least the parts like "Pavlov successfully made the dogs salivate" should be beyond any controversy. So how likely is it that they are all wrong to the *same* degree? Do we all really have literally *zero* valid insights into human mind? That sounds like a too strong statement.
The option 2 is also pessimistic, but it sounds to me more plausible. As an analogy, look at the anti-aging research. On one hand, we have tons of knowledge about human metabolism, and I would say that a large part of that knowledge is true. On the other hand, we still do not have the pill of eternal youth, and maybe we will never have it. So we have a precedent in medicine how tons of true knowledge fail to translate into efficient therapy, because things are just too complex, too interdependent, would require billions of tiny precise interventions, etc.
Maybe something like this is also true for psychology -- that when things go seriously wrong in the mind, it is not one belief or emotional reaction that needs fixed, but thousands of mutually reinforcing beliefs and emotions, that you would need to fix all, plus the therapy itself is a process that creates all kinds of reactions that also need to be noticed and fixed... but this against starts to sound like something that (steelman) Freud would say.
Noticing that something is wrong and knowing how to fix it are very different things. Physicians have known about cancer and plagues etc for millenia, and yet until quite recently average medical intervention had a negative expected value (and people like Robin Hanson say that it's still the case).
Scott has written about this here and there. See for example https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/19/scientific-freud/ and https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/ and probably elsewhere. I feel like there was a longer post on this or a related topic, but can’t seem to find it.
My understanding (which is largely an impression from a combination of this blog, a psychology class, and therapist friends) is that modern-day psychoanalysis/psychodynamic therapy is fairly different from what Freud himself was doing, basically taking the parts that actually worked okay and leaving aside the parts that were complete nonsense. When people lambast psychoanalysis, they’re thinking of psychoanalysis as Freud did it (this being the only version that many people learn about), and not of how it’s practiced currently.
> When people lambast psychoanalysis, they’re thinking of psychoanalysis as Freud did it (this being the only version that many people learn about)
Even this is too optimistic, I think. When I see people who are *not* professional therapists trying to do "psychoanalysis", it goes kinda like this:
The "therapist" makes the "client" talk, and keeps pushing their buttons, until the "client" starts crying. At that moment the "therapist" assumes that the problem is solved; that after a moment of crying, the "client" will suddenly feel better and say that their problem was magically solved. Except, that almost never happens; the "client" often feels even worse than before. So the "therapist" gets annoyed, and starts accusing the "client" of not cooperating and being in denial. The "client" starts crying more, then runs away from the room...
The actual therapists usually take the parts that work in their experience, and often add parts from other schools of therapy that work in their experience. Just like a good programmer is familiar with more than one programming language (even if they clearly prefer one of them), a good psychotherapist is familiar with more than one school of therapy (even if they clearly prefer one of them).
I may have misunderstood but re:
you wrote: '"That depends on what exactly you mean by "Freudian psychoanalysis". For example, I agree with the following things:
* Psychological problems that can be cured by hypnosis'
I read Freud stopped using hypnosis when a patient became embarrassingly familiar and a servant walked in with tea. I can find the quote if desired.
The version I heard was that hypnosis usually only provided a temporary relief for various symptoms, and had to be repeated regularly, indefinitely. Which made it a reliable source of income, of course!
I don't remember the source of the following story, and maybe it's made-up, like with the apple falling on Newton's head... anyway... the story says that Freud once had a patient who was unable to drink water from a glass cup, because for some mysterious reason it felt very repulsive to her. Before hypnotizing her, he asked her, out of curiosity, when did this symptom start. She said it was since her college age, then she reminisced about various things that happened at the college, and said that she had a classmate who had a dog, and how the classmate often let the dog drink water from a glass cup for humans, which she found extremely disgusting. And... after she mentioned this memory, suddenly the symptom disappeared, and she just poured herself a cup of water and drank it, no problem. So the hypnosis turned out not to be necessary that day, and the symptom didn't return even later. Since this experience, Freud started designing his "talking therapy" as an attempt to reproduce this effect.
I tried to find more info by google, but instead I mostly found insinuations that Freud invented "talking therapy" because he sucked at hypnosis, ha ha. I find this a bit unlikely (more like something the hypnotists of that era would have invented as an excuse why Freud's inventions should not make their methods obsolete), because Freud was actually a huge fan of hypnosis at the beginning of his career -- hypnosis was probably the thing that made him become a therapist. However, Freud dramatically changed his professional opinion on various things several times in his life, so I found it plausible he would also dramatically change his opinion on hypnosis.
> I read Freud stopped using hypnosis when a patient became embarrassingly familiar and a servant walked in with tea. I can find the quote if desired.
I never heard this version and find it amuzing. If it's not a big problem to find, I am curious about the source... but I suspect that this is probably also made up.
A thoughtful response. Thanks.
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"Freud dramatically changed his professional opinion on various things several times in his life"
This is, IMO, an often glossed over complication of citing an 'authority.' Respected thinkers hold nuanced opinions that often change subtly or dramatically over their lifetime.
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"If it's not a big problem to find, I am curious about the source... "
Not at all - source at end:
'Early in his clinical experience Freud became aware of the process of transference, whereby a patient might develop romantic and sexual feelings toward the doctor. When he first began treating neurotic patients, he used hypnotism to help them bring unconscious thoughts into awareness. He found, however, that this method had certain limitations. First, not all patients could be hypnotized. Second, he realized that the success or failure of his treatment depended in large measure on the feelings of the patient for the doctor. These feelings could not be explored or controlled if the patient was under hypnosis. He noted that “the most brilliant results were liable to be suddenly wiped away if my personal relation with the patient became disturbed.” Finally an unexpected event pursuaded him to give up hypnosis: “. . . one day I had an experience which showed me in the crudest light what I had long expected. One of my most acquiescent patients, with whom hypnotism had enabled me to bring about the most marvellous results, and whom I was engaged in relieving of her suffering by tracing back her attacks of pain to their origins, as she woke up on one occasion, threw her arms round my neck. The unexpected entrance of a servant relieved us from a painful discussion, but from that time onwards there was a tacit understanding between us that the hypnotic treatment should be discontinued.” Freud quickly adds: “I was modest enough not to attribute the event to my own irresistible personal attraction, and I felt that I had now grasped the nature of the mysterious element that was at work behind hypnotism.” In a paper titled “Further Recommendations on Technique,...”'
--Armand Nicholi, The Question of God, 2002
Thank you! This actually sounds completely plausible to me.
I have almost no experience with hypnosis, but once I discussed the topic with a guy who does it professionally, and he told me the following, if I remember it correctly:
* Some people are easier to hypnotize, some are very difficult. A part of this is about who they are; specifically STEM students are often difficult to hypnotize. (Now that I think about it, could there be a possible relation to autism?)
* But another part is some kind of personal compatibility between the client and the therapist. It often happens that one therapist completely fails to hypnotize a client, and another hypnotizes the same client easily; and it is not necessarily about one therapist being generally better, because with another client it may be the other way round. So this guy had a mutual arrangement with a colleague next door, that if any of them fails to hypnotize a client on the first attempt, they will tell them to try the other colleague first, before trying something more complicated.
* Different clients are more susceptible to different techniques. Most therapists do the "your body is relaxed, your eyelids are heavy" way. But this guy told me that he knows some weird therapist who specializes on drug addicts, and he just screams at them "SLEEP!!!", and some of them immediately fall down "sleeping"; then he proceeds with hypnosis as usual. (This reminds me of "slaying in the spirit"; possibly the same mechanism.) Again, techniques that work well with some people will fail with others, and vice versa.
* Finally, it is sometimes possible to "tire out" a difficult client by repeated long sessions, making them watch huge rotating spirals, etc. So you could have like a 30-minute session every week, the first three sessions zero success, the next one the spiral starts rotating and you "sleep". Possibly a consequence of getting used to the situation, and therefore relaxing better.
* The stage hypnotists have a few tricks how to find the most susceptible individuals among the audience, which is why they have such high success rates so quickly. You should not base your expectations on stage performances, this is not how it works in the typical case.
I don't know much about hypnosis. It always seemed strange that people would volunteer to be hypnotized on stage for entertainment purposes. To give up basic control...
I do remember reading in Huxley's Brave New World Revisited(50's copyright) that while some people are resistant there is an injection that will overcome it. I think he wrote that as a caution not as a therapeutic recommendation!
My personal viewpoint is that we're inclined to want an easy, external fix to correct all our perceived shortcomings but in my reading and reflection I keep being brought back to the old adage: Know Thyself.
Cheers!
In my view, when people make statements like this now, they don't so much mean astrology and Q anon as they do wokery, with its Manichean religious elements.
It's worth noting that "religion", writ broadly, has an _awful_ lot of overlap with what many people would call woo and conspiracy theories. If you believe that Satan is orchestrating a grand design to corrupt the United States into secularism, is that a conspiracy theory or just evangelicalism? Is believing that visiting particular locations popularly associated with saints will bring you miraculous healing all that distinct from believing in crystal healing?
Yeah, I think this argument is used by two sets of people: actual believers, who would prefer people believe the true religion to false religions. And Jordan Peterson types who think that religion isn't necessarily true, but is a socially beneficial falsehood, and this is partly *because* it's productive against socially maladaptive falsehoods.
Part of what I'm saying is that the arguments by the latter set look much weaker if instead of lumping all "religious" belief together, you think of conspiracy and woo as optional add-ons to either religion or secularism.
The religious person who believes all of society is under assault by Satan may not be terribly different psychologically than the secular person who thinks that society is run by a pedophile cabal - they probably get along great on the QAnon Facebook page - but if you think of the latter as "conspiracy" and the former as just "religion", then sure, it'll look like religion defends against crazy beliefs.
You could say that religion has the advantage of dogma here, but I'm not sure that that's borne out by these data since Catholicism - the most hierarchical of the major religions - doesn't come out looking too good.
AFAICT there are more "cultural Catholics" -- people who identify as Catholic despite not believing and rarely if ever attending Church -- than there are cultural Evangelicals or whatever, so I expect that would skew the data quite a bit.
That's my take as well. I know a lot of cultural Catholics who rarely or never attend mass. They identify as Catholic, but may never read the Bible, attend services, pray, or any other outward expression of belief. I know some cultural Protestants (usually something specific like Methodist or Lutheran), but it seems to be far less common.
I think that while it's possible to have characteristics that may be typical of majority-protestant areas or countries, it's not necessarily conceptualized as being tied to religious practice in the same way by the people to whom such a description applies.
Speaking solely for myself, the first time I was told that it was possible to be "culturally Catholic" it struck me as a category error for precisely this reason--unlike being Jewish, where there's an ethnic component and a religious component such that one can be "culturally Jewish" without any baseline level of observance of Judaism, the entire content of Christianity (from a Protestant perspective, at any rate) is solely the religious prong, so (from the Protestant perspective) you can have a culture, and you can be Christian, and the culture can be (often quite strongly!) influenced by Christianity, but claiming to be "Culturally Christian" without actually engaging in religious observance seems like something that doesn't actually have any content, because the "Christian" part of it is literally all the specifically-religious parts of your life and everything else just falls under the general category of "culture."
I've since come to believe that, as you say, this is probably an asymmetry in worldview between Protestantism and Catholicism. I would presume it comes in part from majority-Catholic European countries being so overwhelmingly Catholic that the distinction between religious and secular practice dissolves away in the same way it does for the (large, in my experience) category of atheistic-but-kind-of-observant Jews, where even if you don't go to mass you still get your kids baptized because That's Just What People Do in (France / Italy / Poland / wherever).
Genetics - Mendel - Catholic religious
Heliocentricism - Copernicus - Catholic religious
Big Bang - Georges Lemaître - Catholic religious
Germ Theory - Pasteur - Catholic lay Jesuit
I think there is caricature of what it means to be a believer or religious.
Should the atheists who "believe" in the transcendental idea of "love" have their non-believer materialist membership cards revoked?
That 31% percent of self-identified Catholics believe in astrology is pretty pathetic. Especially since the official church teaching is that astrology and superstition is nonsense and in fact sinful!
Well, I haven't checked what their beliefs in the last few centuries are, but Catholics used to believe that one shouldn't read the Bible, but instead trust the priest's interpretation. Reading the Bible is/was much more a Protestant thing.
Maybe Catholics are just less invested in whether Bigfoot exists or not.
Catholicism is the most hierarchical but I think in many ways the least dogmatic. As others say, what’s important to being Catholic is that you recognize the hierarchy and participate in the culture (including confessing your sins) more than not sinning or believing what it says in the Bible.
Have to disagree at least partially here. Catholicism seems like the ur-example of dogmatic Christianity - although on the ground what believers do relative to what they're nominally *supposed* to do has long differed. Catholic teachings on the use of birth control are pretty unambiguous, it's just that people ignore them anyway -- I think what you're referring to (relative to Protestant denominations that often place a bigger emphasis on a personal relationship with God and the importance of personal conscience) reflects a divide between theology and praxis rather than an an actual tabula rasa absence of dogma *per se.*
Relative to Protestantism, consider that papal infalliblity is not only a Catholic origination but wouldn't even mean anything in Protestantism inter alia because there is no pope. Granted this goes to your point regarding hierarchy, but the point is that the hierarchy is intrinsically tied to the promulgation of dogma, even if in practice it's often ignored.
AIUI regarding the Bible, a big difference is that in practice the RCC has not placed nearly as much emphasis on worshipper's studying the Bible itself because subsequent Church tradition and interpretation is accorded higher status than it is in Protestantism, and the mediation of the hierarchy between the faithful and the texts isn't considered intrinsically suspect (in this sense RCC tradition is more analogous than Protestantism to the rabbinical Jewish tradition including acceptance of midrash. AIUI the Karaites would be the rough Jewish analog of Protestantism vis a vis relation to text).
From the perspective of someone with a mainline Protestant upbringing, the RCC approach has the upside of nipping in the bud some of the absolutely bizarre stances of Evangelicalism via a vis biblical literalism and corollary beliefs like creationism, but the downside of an enormous amount of historical syncretism, ritual, and practices that come across as tantamount to idolatry (relics, the intercession of saints / literally directing prayer to entities other than God, the inscrutable emphasis on Mary far beyond what's in any of the Gospels,) that not only don't have any textual basis but seem to be against the direct spirit and letter of the Bible--most obviously Commandments One and Two, but also e.g. the teaching that Mary remained a virgin throughout her life despite no particularly compelling doctrinal reason to believe this and *literal reference to Jesus's brothers* in the Gospel of Luke. Also (albeit in this day and age I don't think anyone on either side really *cares* all that much) Transsubstantiation -- seems obviously metaphorical from the mainline Protestant perspective, taken as literal by the RCC in an inversion of the Catholic tradition successfully avoiding creationism by emphasizing a metaphorical rather than literal interpretation of Genesis.
>on the ground what believers do relative to what they're nominally supposed to do has long differed
It seems to me that the longer a particular denomination has been around, the mellower it becomes towards enforcing its dogmas, which of course is partly responsible for periodical fundamentalist schisms where the most extreme factions are most eager to separate and establish a much more rigorous practice.
"what believers do relative to what they're nominally supposed to do has long differed"
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I recently read this and found it helpful:
”Turning to God without turning from self"—the formula is absurdly simple; and yet, simple as it is, it explains all the follies and iniquities committed in the name of religion."
--Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945
Not that we can completely turn from self but if we don't make a frequent effort we end up doing worse than without belief. Pascal had some choice words for this!
I think if you define "Catholic" as "someone that believes all the things that the church officially requires you to believe", then Catholicism probably does OK. If you define it as "someone who ticks the 'Catholic' box on a survey", then you get lots of Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans who last went to church on their wedding day.
Surveys don't require you to pass catechism to qualify as an official Catholic in their numbers, though.
What does "concertsy" mean?
In Scott's final graph, the wit to woo relationship seems both unquantified and uncertainly correlated. More controversially, is it cyclic?
Extrapolating, will our super-intelligent AGI saviour/nemesis be more or less prone to crazy beliefs than your average protestant pastor?
One way to think about it is that both religion and conspiracy theories are ways of outsourcing the decision of what to believe in (as are all kinds of more sensible things, like reading the newspaper or listening to a famous scientist), but religious authorities tend to have much less perverse incentives than conspiracy-theorist authorities.
(Most of the time, anyway. Too bad if you were relying on the Peoples Temple to protect you against mind virii!)
How about the difference between the religious person who believes society is under assault by Satan and the rationalist who believes it's under assault by Moloch?
One difference is that it's pretty easy to check the existence of Moloch - for example, you could run the fish farming experiment discussed in the original post (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/).
I mean, if you accept that low of a bar of proof, I can experimentally establish the existence of God!
There are dozens (at least) of possible explanations for any such single experimental outcome. Establishing that something your belief predicts will come true, does, isn't very strong evidence for your belief. Which is why the sequences recommend making predictions about what would definitely NOT happen if your beliefs were true. (This was actually the insight that made me leave religion; when I made predictions about what would happen if my beliefs were true, they nearly always came true. When I made predictions about what wouldn't happen, I found contradiction.)
"if you accept that low of a bar of proof, I can experimentally establish the existence of God!"
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An impersonal higher power is IMO, easy to figure due to tremendous amount of order(Systems Theory) and oddities like the properties of water. Beyond that a certain amount of faith is required to actively believe or disbelieve.
Moloch is an analogy, I don't think anyone takes a literal reading seriously.
Now I wonder If non-friendly AGI becomes a reality, would that be an embodiment of literal rationalist Moloch....
Moloch in the sense that Scott uses the term is not an actual agent, but rather a representation of all the forces that make coordinating large groups of people difficult. This is basically the exact opposite of a conspiracy theory.
If by "Moloch" you mean the actual child-eating demon from Carthaginian mythology, then this would indeed be basically the same thing, but I'm not aware of any rationalists who believe that.
I don't agree with this:
> The religious person who believes all of society is under assault by Satan may not be terribly different psychologically than the secular person who thinks that society is run by a pedophile cabal
Believing that society is under assault by Satan and that society is run by a pedophile cartel aren't very different in their evidential support, but their social psych roles are very different. "Society is under assault by Satan" is a hoary, traditional belief. That specific form dates back a millenium or so at least as a mainstream element of the christian faith. There's a parchment from Martin Luthor with an ink blotch on it, and he says it's from when he thought he saw the devil and threw the ink well at him. It's taught in every evangelical sunday school and church as a simple fact of history and theology. It's accepted background context for most evangelicals and 80+% of their social groups. (Plus, it's fundamental archetype is "the avatar of corruption is constantly trying to corrupt society" which is old as stories, and completely tautological if you accept the existence of an avatar of corruption.)
It's traditional, accepted, and boring.
On the other hand 'cabal of pedophiles' is lurid, new and innovative. It's a secret truth of the world, kept under wraps. Very different socially, so very different psychologically.
Thank you. I was looking for a way to articulate this. These things may look the same from the outside to a Rational Observer, but they *feel* different from the inside. And that's crucial.
In addition, as someone who grew up very white evangelical, I can confirm at least anecdotally Scott's paragraph on "people with coherent worldviews already have strong opinions on what's true." As an evangelical child, I was taught specific things about some of these other beliefs. Astrology was *wrong*. It fell under the kind of "divination" that the Bible forbade, to the point where I read a spoof horoscope once and worried I might have sinned. The existence of aliens was very, very dubious, because trying to fit it with the Genesis account of creation, which we saw as geocentric thematically though not physically, just didn't work that well. So no, you're not going to find evangelicals believing in these things in large numbers. And Bigfoot doesn't seem to me to be the exception Scott thinks it is: isn't the exciting thing about Bigfoot that he's maybe-kinda-sorta sentient? If he were just a weird ape, wouldn't we leave him to Jane Goodall and her successors and go haring off after aliens instead? As with aliens, Bigfoot simply doesn't fit the revealed story: the Bible says God made a big deal of creating humans on the sixth day and giving them souls; if God had made a rough prototype first, the Bible would have *said.*
But if this were true, then wouldn’t we still expect to see religion being positively correlated with these conspiracies? Since accepting one conspiracy theory seems to make you more predisposed to accept others (people who believe Bush did 9/11 seem more likely to be Q-Anon) rather than negatively? If not, why do *these* theories protect people against other theories.
The Jordan Peterson angle on this is not really universal, though: what exactly constitutes a socially maladaptive falsehood is strongly culturally dependent. So the benefits of the falsehood may vary strongly with an observer's viewpoint.
Sure, but why does this only start applying now, and not when the left are calling everyone on the right a bunch of conspiracy theorists?
It applies equally on both sides, I'd say. There's no shortage of brainwashed commie/woke npc accusations from the right.
A lot of these folks just want to give SJWs something to do, like traditional "feed the poor because Jesus" stuff, so they stop inventing new and annoying ways that child proof caps on tylenol are ableist and transphobic.
Not all Tylenol caps are transphobic. Only the name brand ones.
The probelm with SJWs (cringe name btw, wokies is the new deragotary label) types is that they're poisonous no matter what ideology tries to contain them. In the1000s their attitude-ancestors were the ones calling for the crusades, in the 1950s their attitude-parents were the ones freaking out about the commies in western countries. Their attitude-siblings are there in middle-eastern countries, freaking out because a pop-sci show doesn't mention the islamic god when discussing cosmology. As we speak right now there is probably a chinese kareen is gruelling a poor guy about how his book is offensive (or whatever word they use in china) toward the legacy of the great mao. Wokism is everywhere & forever. It's basically guaranteed by a certain mutation of ideologies, a mutation that ideologies often develop.
When you think about the ways to stifle and de-activate wokies, you will find pretty soon they are ideology-agnostic. Strong norms against busy-bodism and self-appointed-police, strong norms for standing up to yourself and defending oneself with evidence, strong norms against struggle sessions and for intra-group etiquette. Those are just general group hygiene. Religion isn't particularly anti-woke.
I know hardly anyone calls them SJWs anymore. I just hate the term "woke" and refuse to use it lol.
To your point, yeah, I don't think the "make people religious again and all of this will go away" strategy has a (pardon the pun) prayer of working.
Actually, this is why Catholicism is superior as a religion. Monasticism removes the aggressively pious from society and diverts most of their energy into getting up for 3 AM prayers to show how morally superior they are to everybody else, with a small surplus of doing something productive for wider society. They can grouse all they want in there about how impious and immoral the normies are and everyone around them will agree with them, and they get to live in a much nicer house than the stupid peasants, all the while being completely controlled by church superiors who are never chosen from among the woke ("eh, Sister Assumpta could never become abbess, she's too... fervent in her faith. It makes her impractical").
(You're largely wrong about the Crusades: those were mostly set off by a surplus of regular old fighty lads who weren't going to inherit land because they were born second, yet had a significant capacity for violence. Better to use them to destabilize the Saracen's country than your own. Sure, Peter the Hermit was woke, but it only caught on because it was so useful.)
EDIT: I should probably clarify that I'm talking about culturally hegemonic Catholicism here – it doesn't work if you can just opt out.
Ha, good comment, even though I don't precisely agree with your take on monks, there's probably a lot of truth to it -- both humble and good people and unsufferable self-righteous snobs. I'm a Protestant but I've long been fascinated by the idea of monasticism. The Protestant reformers really disliked it, and I understand their objections (yes, Protestant monarchs had cynical motives, but I think Luther and Calvin were sincere), but I still wonder if it's better to have the monasteries around than not. Though you're also right that the benefit you describe only really works if it's hegemonic.
And you're correct about the Crusades. One thing I seldom hear called out is the far-reaching Norman explosion of the second half of the 11th century, and I really see the Normans as exemplifying the crusading spirit, but it was certainly present elsewhere.
Over the course of a few decades, adventuring warriors from that one section of France conquered and took for themselves England and Wales (as is much-discussed), but also Southern Italy, the Principality of Antioch, and extensive holdings within the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Aragon. They moved into Ireland and Scotland a bit later. That's quite a spread, and it represents quite a lot of aggressive energy that would be nice to direct towards one's enemies and away from one's friends.
This thing about the Normans is very true, and it's also interesting that they were only a couple generations removed from Viking ancestors – what really separates a Viking raiding army from a crusade? That one section of France was *also* conquered, not that much earlier, by the same people and in the same way as all the rest, and I don't think there's any *paradigmatic* distinction between conquering Normandy and the Holy Land.
I forget where I read this, but I've even seen a claim that there's documentary evidence of the Norman crusaders raising their old ancestral battlecry when they stormed the walls of Jerusalem – a cry whose words they no longer understood, and used because it was traditional, but which was in fact an invocation of Týr, left-handed battle god of the Danes, in Old Norse.
I dunno, people in modern Spain, Italy, Portugal and Mexico can opt out, and those countries are significantly less woke than the United States, Britain and (I think?) Germany.
I think there is an interesting evolutionary corollary to the JP take on religion, in that he doesn't take into account the potential confounding variable that the most devout religious are also the most intellectually incurious. It seems probable that they are less susceptible to conspiracies and woo because they are simply uninterested in ideas and more closed-minded than the average person.
Interesting to note that Catholicism seems broadly accepting of some of the woo - according to the graphs above that's 31% believe in astrology and 61% in UFOs - more than any other religious / non-religious affiliations listed. As a teenager in the 1980s I transitioned from Irish Catholic childhood to Fortean mystic then via a degree in biology with Dawkins et. al. to hard-core evolutionist / born-again atheist. Several peaks and valleys beyond, I'm feeling much better now, thanks...
So how much wit is too much wit to woo?
That really surprised me because, as you point out, belief in astrology is contrary to dogma. However, I suspect that a great many Catholics *don't know that*, because (a) only a small proportion of churchgoers read the Cathechism, and (b) you don't really get many homilies on astrology (perhaps we need them).
Question: Why do the Vatican maintain a number of active astronomical observatories? Why did they start studying the stars?
Because they were responsible for calendars.
> The Gregorian calendar is the calendar used in most of the world. It was introduced in October 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII
You can read an interview with the chief astronomer:
https://www.science.org/content/article/talking-science-and-god-popes-new-chief-astronomer
Yes, I know Guy, he was teaching at MIT when I was there.
Because the Church was the scientific community!
People suggest the Galilean debates was about science and religion, but it was really more about preserving the Aristotlean paradigm.
I think John the Grammarian, 5th century, a Christian, was the first to attack Aristotle. One of the important things he proposed was that what is UP there is the same substance of what is down here.
People from Catholic backgrounds are more likely to self-identify as Catholic despite not/no longer going to Church, so I expect they'd skew the data somewhat.
Evangelicalism in practice has a sort of skepticism around magic that's justified without materialist reasoning. Occult and witchcraft is the worst because you could be communicating with demons. They snark at certain Catholic rituals because "uhh... saints' relics? gross, guys, and those things aren't magic anyway, just pray to God."
Miracles, prophecy, angels, etc., all cool though, as long as it's God who's sending them.
If you believe that magic can contact demons, then you believe magic is real. That's hardly being skeptical about magic!
St. Bonaventure, a doctor of the church, wrote about "extraterrestrials" - in fact, it is another word for "angels". The possibility of life and intelligent life beyond this planet has never by excluded. You might investigate Michael Crowe from Notre Dame, a specialist in the history of modern physical science and pretty nice and thoughtful fellow, "The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750–1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell". https://reilly.nd.edu/people/faculty/michael-crowe/
I'll admit that part of the arguement basically boils down to "if you have religion, conspiracy theories and woo don't really provide much extra" - the Illuminati, the healing power of crystals and the guidance of the stars are all a bit redundant when Satan, prayer and the divine plan of God are already part of your worldview.
I don't think so. Religions (as the combination belief system, culture and sometimes organization) have immune systems against new beliefs, and the strength of those immune systems varies a lot. Some polytheistic systems, like Rome's, had an adopt-and-corrupt approach; you can easily and happily add a new pantheon, provided they bow to Jupiter or your head god is actually just Jupiter as worshipped by different people. Others, like Christianity, have rather strong immune systems. The successful attempts to mutate the faith largely ended in schisms (see LDS, seventh day adventists, gnostics, unitarians, etc.) Even *relatively* minor points of faith like when people should be baptized have led to multiple schisms.
Most 'woo' belief systems have very weak immune systems. You can believe in Wicca, Astrology, the Flat Earth, Ley Lines and Auras all at the same time, and noone will think anything of it. If you add on that you believe in Jesus Christ as well, and have it all worked out in your head how he fits in your worldview, they largely won't care.
In so far as Christianity is protective against woo, it's because of its strong immune system. If you are a Christian (socially+belief+organization), and you tell another Christian that you ALSO believe in Wicca and think that crystals have auric power to heal, they'll tell you that you're sinning grievously, and probably try to stage an intervention. Or at least, tell everyone in the church to keep their kids and impressionable youth away from you. There will be serious consequences, so those who might be tempted to add to the faith generally don't.
Edit: It's also worth noting that on this level ("beliefs + culture + organization?") it's completely fair to include New Atheism as a religion. And if you think about it's immune system, it's really strong. If Dawkins comes out and says he doesn't believe in any God or supernatural forces because he can't observe them, but there are hundreds of barely observed giant hominids in the world, he will be WIDELY rebuked and admonished. New Atheism is not tolerant of those who deviate in any particular. Which is probably why there are very few people who identify as atheist and also believe in woo.
The original Illuminati conspiracy theory was spread by Christians who believed the Illuminati were undermining religion.
I mean, technically that was the Bavarian Illuminati's stated goals:
"The society's goals were to oppose superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life and abuses of state power."
I will concede that Christians are uniquely vulnerable to complimentary conspiracy theories and woo - a satanic/atheist conspiracy (what's even the difference, am I right?) is more plausible if you already believe Satan is plotting against the Church, but you don't actually need the Illuminati for that unless you want to get more specific.
I guess the point is that if you test for religious conspiracy theories you're basically doing the same as the guys testing right-wing conspiracy theories. Of course, you're free to skip the whole discussion by classifying all religions as conspiracy theories, but then that strategy works both ways...
How are you using "conspiracy theory" here? It doesn't seem like anyone would have to conspire for Satan to be corrupting the US. And even if it did require a conspiracy, why would that let you dismiss it out of hand?
Imagine if you could use that in court. "Ladies and gentleman of the jury - yes, the prosecution has DNA evidence, fingerprints on the murder weapon that match my client, and 4K video of my client committing the murder. However, one of the charges against my client is 'conspiracy to commit murder'. That makes it a conspiracy theory, so it can't possibly be true. I rest my case."
The first step in understanding is actually ATTEMPTING to understand...
There are many ways to interpret the relationship between Evangelicals and Satan, and the one you presented is a strawman.
A better interpretation is that Satan represents the part of ourselves that wants something different from what our "concious" or "primary?" self wants. In other words it represents an acceptance of the divided self, as opposed to the standard social sciences model (paging Gary Becker...) of the unitary self.
Now you can look at this and say "stupid evangelists, there's no such thing as a red anthropoid with cloven hooves living at the center of the earth". Or you can say "stupid social scientists, obviously the lived reality of every person is of a divided self, and to pretend otherwise is hardly a great starting axiom for your cargo cult 'science'". Which is the greater degree of woo?
I say all this not because I'm an evangelist (I'm not, I'm hardcore atheist) but because I think, not to toot my own horn, there's an easy explanation for this bimodal distribution, namely consilience, as I described in a previous comment:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-society-of-the/comment/8281543
The median strongly religious person, like the median atheist, may be dumb by themselves, but they both feel that they are part of a tradition that has attempted hard to connect multiple cross-cutting pieces of data to multiple cross-cutting theories, and in both cases the result is a degree of skepticism to anything that doesn't link very well with that pre-existing background.
The alternative of a self-created culture is every bit as lunatic as you would imagine, whether on the right (QAnon) or on the left (humans are blank slates on which we can impose whatever gender, sexual and other preferences we like). In both cases there are pseudo-links between factoids, but in both cases the primary goal of the infrastructure is to define and demonize an Other, it's not to approach Truth (hell, on the left it's an article of faith that Truth does not exist...), so inconvenient facts are ignored, analogies are cherry-picked, and incompatible arguments are papered over. (A very obvious version of this happening before our eyes is as we see Team Trump and Team Hillary [with a small admixture of Team Hunter Biden] each asserting the exact same arguments that they mocked four years ago.)
With enough time, it's possible that a self-constructed culture can grow rich enough and self-critical enough to start caring somewhat about truth. I suspect this has been the case for all the large religions; to last a few thousand years and not be conquered, you need a set of policies that are, at least in practice, somewhat conformant with physical and social reality even if the words used to describe those policies are nonsensical. But neither the hysterical left nor the know-nothing right have been around for nearly long enough for that to happen. Most people get sick of the fights, the finger pointing, the crazy attacks and struggle sessions and the rest of it, the use of everyday life as a weapon.
The Mormons seem to have reached that point today. The Russian seem to have given up the serious crazy around the 60s, likewise the Chinese around the 1990s. Of course in the past things move slower. The seriously Christian Crazy flared up on and off till Nicaea, then again with Iconoclasm; the seriously Protestant Crazy lasted about 100 years.
Perhaps today's crazy can last about 50 years before enough people either get sick of it (specifically the constant, on-going use as a weapon against anyone part) or see through its hypocrisies and lies (there comes a point at which you simply cannot paper over the inconsistencies any longer)...
But right now we're really only about ten years into the true crazy; quite a few more to go...
And meanwhile, well, you can choose to embrace one of the sides – and live with the consequences. Or you can, as the kids say, Touch Grass. Anchor your belief system in something that wasn't put together by some seriously disturbed individuals over the past twenty years, and ignore everything that either does not fit that belief system, or is simply not important even where it may fit.
A conspiracy requires two or more members, so if you believe *Satan* is orchestrating a grand design, then that doesn't count. If you believe that Satan, Barack Obama, the Queen of England, and Lady Gaga are all deliberately acting in concert, then yes.
And pedantry about the definition of "conspiracy" aside, that's a real difference. The belief that Satan is orchestrating a grand design is not actionable, except maybe as an excuse to not be evil. It's a bit of generic cosmology mixed with a bit of generic morality. The belief that specific living human beings are a part of that conspiracy, whether you are then called upon to kill them or just to denounce them and vote against them, is something very different.
But the latter version is very similar to the belief that Obama, Lizzie II, and Gaga are all secretly secular lizard people, or Illuminati or whatnot. So it would be interesting to know whether that sort of conspiracy, independent of whether L. Morningstar is assumed to be a member, is more prevalent among the religious or irreligious (and again whether hardcore atheists are their own category).
Atheism has overlap with conspiracy theories as well. The many atheists who write off the early accounts of the life of Jesus and the early church as having been fabricated by later believers are literally engaged in a conspiracy theory.
One way to interpret this data is just to look at where people source their beliefs. Which of the following talks about Bigfoot most often: a pastor (religious Christians), your social circle (less-religious Christians/agnostics), or public atheist intellectuals (atheists)? I think this heuristic maps pretty well to all of the examples here. Non-believers will believe anything that their preferred source of truth prescribes. One thing that's perhaps nice about having a specific religious belief system is that it is seemingly less "hackable" than the other alternatives, e.g. social knowledge can seemingly easily be modified via a small but dedicated Twitter campaign, so if this is someone's primary source of truth, it's easy to manipulate them.
Doesn't this just pass the buck down a level? Where did those people get their beliefs?
I'm basically claiming "willing to believe anything" is a description of people whose beliefs are acquired primarily socially, because those are the people whose beliefs are easiest to modify; it seems reasonable that this is less true of both religious people and hard-core atheists, though for somewhat different reasons.
I think the distinction of socially acquired beliefs vs other beliefs is less clear-cut than you make it out to be.
While there are probably some people who pick up a bible or Dawkins and become religious or atheists, even for these a socialization where the new belief is acceptable is probably helpful. I would estimate that the vast majority of church-goers was baptized during childhood. Does not get much more "socially acquired" than that.
I can however imagine that there are people with a preference for a fixed, coherent(ish), closed world view and people who are willing to engage with all sorts of conflicting theories on a provisional, perhaps even Bayesian basis.
This is also a function of the social environment, of course. In a heterodox environment, the social costs to subscribe to a minority belief (e.g. Bigfoot) is vastly smaller than an orthodox one. (Does Bigfoot have a soul? Are they structurally oppressed?)
Furthermore, while the coherent world views preclude most smaller conspiracy theories (if the devil is corrupting the US through the Democrats, Bigfoot can be a diversion at best), smaller, domain-limited conspiracy theories actually support each other some of the time (if "they" can cover up Bigfoot, they can also cover up UFOs, fake the moon landing etc).
from random sources. I think the solution here is that religious people and skeptics alike have beliefs determined by very well defined algorithms, whether that be Bayesian probability or just doing whatever the Bible says, both of which are hackable with only a lot of work. If you have no beliefs in particular to guide you, then why not believe whatever random thing comes across your plate.
IF the beliefs have been around for a "long" time, then they pretty much have to be smoothed and shaped to match reality. The words stay the same but the interpretations change: the words are allegories of this that or the other.
This pretty much has to be a multi-generational thing because the generation that adopted the first round of craziness is more or less immune to ever admitting they were wrong. The kids grow up seeing the pathologies and hypocrisies, but maybe not enough so (especially since generations don't have smooth boundaries). It takes about two generations at least before there's enough general disillusion that no-one takes the words too literally or seriously any longer, and the whole thing morphs from cult to religion. It will be interesting to see what happens to Scientology after David Miscavige dies...
So: point is not where did the beliefs come from.
It's: have the beliefs survived in the real world long enough to have to adapt to reality.
(And of course beware of names, especially when they're being used as weapons.
Protestantism was something different from "Christianity" (ie western european catholicism) even if you claim the same name, and had to go through its generations of being molded to sanity. I suspect "Militant Islam" or whatever their preferred term for it is the same sort of thing – superficially it's Islam, but in terms of understanding the appeal and the crazy, it's something new that glommed onto (some of) the pre-existing Islamic infrastructure.)
Well, it depends on how easy it is to hack the general Twitter conversation vs how easy it is to hack the small group of authorities.
I think "hack" is the wrong word here, or at least misleading, because it implies too much intent. I think it's difficult for any one individual to intentionally set out to influence the twitter conversation and succeed, yes. But it's self-evidentially true that a single person can *accidentally* influence the whole of twitter for a day, as the concept of "twitter main characters" shows. Evocative memes (in the original sense) spread more easily and rapidly on twitter, where the only gatekeeper is what people find engaging, than in the church, where there are specific appointed gatekeepers with strong predetermined dogma who are focused on spreading memes that are thousands of years old.
You do get ideological capture though - if Jerry Falwell chooses to embrace a political party, then that will bring his whole movement over, in a way that a less centralized group won't.
I think arguably we can see precisely this sort of thing happening with the Republican party, where Donald Trump has nearly single-handedly changed a lot of official party viewpoints in a way that couldn't happen through any single individual to the much less centralized Democratic party.
I don't think Trump is a good analogy here. The Republican Party wasn't actually all that centralised until he showed up, and he was an outsider who brought in his own viewpoints rather than an existing leader.
This wasn't "the Pope was convinced of [stuff] and took the faith with him", this is more like "a messiah candidate came in and stole the congregation out from under the priests".
This data simply supports the claim that ideological atheism is a religion.
Under what definition of religion?
"Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby."
It's not about the informational content of the belief. It's about the social behavior; many hard-core atheists talk like hard core evangelists.
As someone who has attended several Churches of Christ and also become an atheist, no, they do not. This is just a weird gotcha that honest consideration of both groups pretty much annihilates.
You don't exactly see atheists go around knocking on doors and talking about the nonexistence of God, no.
You don't exactly see Lutherans go around knocking on doors and talking about the existence of God either. Or Jews. That's not a useful standard.
Lutherans do put a lot of stuff in my mailbox unasked, though. It's true that evangelism isn't the defining feature, though.
The real difference is that said Lutherans have a particular doctrine, a particular supernatural worldview, holy scripture, particular ceremonies and sacraments, a moral system that believers are at least supposed to adhere to, particular views about the future of the world, sacred buildings, professional clergy, and so on, and so on. Atheism doesn't have anything like that.
Yes, most atheists reject the idea that they sound or behave like true believers, but the rest of us, from the outside looking in, find it a pretty accurate description.
The thing is that many atheists like to draw themselves into a category with ‘apatheists’—people who don’t care about the existence of God, don’t see any reason to believe, are as unmoved by the subject as I am unmoved by late-night commercials for the Slap Chop. But these people don’t really resemble atheists, despite being atheists technically. The biggest difference is obvious: they would not read this article—it would be boring. They would not care what is said about atheists—that’s somebody else’s problem. When somebody implies that atheists believe in materialism which is very much faith, they don’t type any response into the comment field because they don’t care and they’re not there.
I stipulate that these people are, in fact, atheists of a kind. But if you quiz them about God they are likely to shrug and say that God might be out there, who knows? These are the true nonbelievers in that they cannot muster any passion about the subject whatever.
There’s a huge behavioral gulf between these people and the usual sort of people who call themselves atheists. The usual sort of atheist is not apathetic about religion. He may define himself as ‘lack of belief in a God or gods,’ just like the apatheist. But he is deeply interested in religious matters, contrary to the apatheist: he usually finds religious matters quite stupid and worthy of contempt; sometimes this extends to finding religion a social ill, or accusing it of thwarting scientific progress or starting wars. He shows up in debates about whether God exists to complain of the lack of proof: he’s usually convinced that the proofs for God are poor. He *may* aver strong atheism, but more frequently says that he doesn’t *disbelieve* in God, he just doesn’t see any *evidence* for God and therefore fails to believe (he has fine-grained epistemology and is sensitive to accusations of counter-belief). Many do, in fact, proselytize. They don’t go door to door as Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses do, but then most Christians don’t do that either: they do start YouTube channels. For the most devoted and passionate there are things like Street Epistemology or Pastafarianism.
There are of course many differences between e.g. Christians and devoted atheists under the hood. It would be a very poor look for Christianity if there were not! But the usual sort of *avowed* atheist usually reminds others of a true believer for good reason.
People who believe in homeopathy and people who actively work to disconfirm homeopathy (who, btw, are not *most people* who do not believe in homeopathy, or who strongly disbelieve in homeopathy - the same is true of atheists) are also exactly the same by this inane logic.
The difference is that the homeopath goes to take his 9C pills when he feels poor, and the anti-homeopath does whatever medicine he actually believes works instead (probably going to the doctor, but also possibly exercise, CBT, multivitamins, keto, or some other woo besides homeopathy). This is, similarly, the vast and enormous difference between even the most obnoxious atheist and the Christian.
“People who believe in homeopathy and people who actively work to disconfirm homeopathy (who, btw, are not *most people* who do not believe in homeopathy, or who strongly disbelieve in homeopathy - the same is true of atheists) are also exactly the same by this inane logic.”
Weird, not sure who you’re replying to: I explicitly said that atheists and theists were not ‘exactly the same.’ I don’t think you understand the argument, unless you meant to post this elsewhere.
What some true believers sound like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ4114XO-Xo
You don't see much of that from Richard Dawkins
No, but on the other hand, you do have the Eliezer Yudkowskys of the world, who prophesy that with certainty the end of this age is at hand; even now, brothers and sisters, our wickedness hastens the coming of the Adversary, who shall blot out the kings of the earth and punish every man according to his misdeeds, even after death.
That there are differences between atheists and the religious is undeniable. What is in question are whether there are distinct similarities in behavior, and I’m not seeing an argument against that.
This seems to boil down to "atheism is a religion because atheists have opinions on religion". I have strong oppositional opinions on fundamentalist Islam; does that make me a Muslim?
"I stipulate that these people are, in fact, atheists of a kind. But if you quiz them about God they are likely to shrug and say that God might be out there, who knows?"
That's the very definition of an agnostic, not an atheist.
Atheism isn’t a religion and I am not arguing that it is. What I am arguing is that atheists share a tremendous amount of social behavior and intellectual features with committed believers in religion.
“That's the very definition of an agnostic, not an atheist.”
Not according to many atheists!
(Incidentally, I agree with you, to an extent. Agnosticism is compatible with atheism.) But many atheists aver that having no belief in God is not a belief, and therefore that the definition of an atheist is not *disbelief* in the existence of God/gods, which is equivalent to *belief* in the nonexistence of God/gods, but rather the *absence* of a belief in God/gods.
I don’t really care about this. Obviously unqualified atheism is the active disbelief in the existence of God. However, if we choose to go with atheism-as-many-atheists-define-it, then we must include people I would term apatheists, agnostic atheists: people with no belief in God because they don’t care about the question and don’t know the answer. If we say these people are *not* atheists, then the atheists who claim that ‘absence of belief makes one an atheist’ are themselves not atheists: they’re agnostics.
This is a semantic battle; I insist on rigor but don’t really care if the answer is that atheists must disbelieve in God or that atheists are anybody who don’t know or care. I just won’t let them have it both ways, motte-and-bailey.
Also, there's nothing about atheism that orders your experience, worldview or stance on the supernatural. There's no moral or ethical teaching in it. Atheism is a _state of mind_, the state of not actually believing in any gods.
This doesn't mean that something like this can't be created that is also atheist - Communism for instance looks a *lot* like a religion apart from excluding the supernatural. There, you have Holy Writ, Heresies and Excommunication, prophecies about the future (and inevitable) paradise, organizations that take on a lot of of the properties of churches, and so on, and so on.
But not believing in god doesn't actually lead you to *anything*. There are plenty of atheists that believe in other nonsense anyway, any number of ethical systems that might attract them, and a lot aren't even physicalists.
We can coin a term "Azeusist", person who don't believe in Zeus. Is Azeusism a religion? Of course not, that's obviously ridiculous. Do azeusists in fact have *anything* in common apart from not believeing in Zeus? No. Expand that to not believing in any other god either, and the same conclusions obtain.
Everyone in this conversation needs to reread this https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb
Taboo the question as to whether atheism is a religion, and talk about whether atheism has the particular characteristics you are interested in in this instance.
The reason athieism is not a religion, even incu luding people actively skeptical of religion: religions put great stress on beliefs that are unverifiable like the existence of a diety, effectiveness of prayer, life after death. There are a lot of arguments against religion, but probably the most salient that an acceptance of unprovable assertions is for suckers.
Religious people do say many things that are true and that can be verified, or that are intuitively reasonable. Thou shalt not kill, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. But they mostly also say stuff that a martian psychologist would say is plainl y delusional. The reasonable stuff is available in lots of ways that dont sound nuts.
If you want to go by that definition, then atheism is definitely a religion.
How does the atheist worldview answer "What created the universe?"
Monotheism has an easy answer to that - the unmoved mover.
Atheists will either say "I don't know" or mumble something about the big bang, but if you ask them what caused the big bang, they still don't know what came before it. Sometimes they'll say that the big bang created time itself, but how could the big bang have "happened" or "started" or "banged" without the concept of time already existing? Those words only have a coherent meaning in the context of an existing timeline. 13.7 billion years ago, the universe "started", but how could it have started at the exact "moment" that it did when there was no such thing as a "moment"?
The atheist worldview must accept on faith that "something created the universe, and I have absolutely no idea what or why, but it definitely wasn't God."
Possible selection bias? If there is a hardcore atheist who never talks about, you are unlikely to find out. The hardcore believers usually have to do some observable things.
If it's about the social behaviour, presumably that implies that a committed Christian who doesn't like to publicly discuss their faith isn't actually religious.
You are trying to use definitions to draw conclusions. It doesn't work that way - you just find out that words are ambiguous as they usually are.
The point here is that the two groups, although in firm disagreement, exhibit similarities in social behavior (that other groups, such as agnostics, do not).
If the definition of the word "religion" is so ambiguous that it is not worthwhile to discuss whether a particular belief is or is not religious, then your original comment ("This data simply supports the claim that ideological atheism is a religion") was not worthwhile.
It is worthwhile as long as we don't try to mix different meaning of the word. And the meaning is explained in my previous comment: this is just one more common behavior, so it is useful in many cases to bundle those groups together (call it religion or anything you'd like). Not always - but it's also not always useful to bundle Shia and Sunni together.
Is the idea that "religion" is ambiguous and hard to precisely define new to you?
And what's the significance of the similarity in social behavior? Is it supposed to discredit atheists, or the religious? Unless the similarities are precisely what atheists object to in religion, they are curious but inconsequential, and vice versa if the similarities are supposed to discredit religion.
I'd agree that some atheists can behave like evangelists in the sense of aggressively trying to persuade, but I don't think that makes atheism "a religion."
You can be an evangelist for lots of things, it's basically just (at least as I define it) a particularly aggressive and irritating form of attempted persuasion - people are evangelists for less oil drilling/more oil drilling, for "natural" birth, for particular views of history, etc etc, but it doesn't necessarily make all those things into religions.
Yeah, whether atheism is a "religion" depends entirely on exactly what you mean by "Religion" and "Atheism." It's a disguised query. Sure, New Atheism had evangelists, a social structure, a common set of beliefs, and a set of informal thought leaders. It even had congregations in some places who did meetups occasionally.
If you're discussing religions purely as social phenomena, sure, New Atheism is a religion for the purpose of the discussion. That's quite distinct from discussing what's likely to be true, or discussing the beliefs in general. New Atheism's beliefs are very different from any religions, so it doesn't make sense to group it with them when talking about beliefs.
But when people evangelise for those other things, they generally don't claim that they entail you renouncing your religion. Because talking (and sometimes more extreme measures) people out of their religions pattern-matches to religious behavior, it's not hard to see why this meme is so persistent.
Maybe its jsut my age, but my friends and I were mostly atheists who were in college 10 years before "new atheism" and while in college there was some mild "evangelizing(we had a non-religious students club where we talked about the history of religion, and ethics and whatnot). But by say 2005 we were all mostly done talking about atheism, none of our beliefs change, but once you are out of college it just doesn't really come up ever.
So many people seem to characterize atheists by the 1% of them that are really outwardly performative about it, but a huge number of us are totally invisible other than you know glancing around at each other during a funeral prayer when everyone has their heads down praying.
This is primarily because atheism was subsumed by leftism. I can think of two reasons why:
1. The vast majority of internet atheists are white men. Leftism told them that their slight annoyance at being evangelized at is irrelevant compared to the struggles of "people of color".
2. While many whites have become apatheists in recent decades, a lot of black people are still religious, so it's now considered passé to talk about religious people as being stupid and ignorant because the archetype of a "religious person" is more black-coded than it used to be. It's only acceptable to criticize "religious people" if you make it very clear that you're talking about white southern evangelicals. (A similar phenomenon could be observed recently with media coverage of vaccines: whites are "anti-vax, anti-science conspiracy theorists" while blacks have "vaccine hesistancy" or "mistrust").
That seems to lump together people who self-identify as atheists, people who self-identify as agnostics, and people who self-identify as “nothing in particular”, who behave very differently when they are broken out here.
Depends on the non-stamp collector.
"Not collecting stamps" is clearly not a hobby, but "trying to convince stamp collectors to quit collecting stamps" certainly can be.
So I suppose it really depends on the atheist in question. Most are just living their own lives, completely un-invested in the religion question, but it's hard to deny that there aren't a loud minority that behave more like evangelists for the cause.
To be fair, though that doesn't make atheism a "religion" though, you can be an evangelist for lots of causes.
*edited - wow, that was a rather important "doesn't" I left out.
So, you are saying that both atheism and religion can be hobbies but only religion can be a religion.
Sounds about right. I think the whole “atheism is a religion” thing is really confusing religion and evangelism.
You can evangelize about pretty much anything, religion and atheism included, but just doing that doesn’t make the thing a religion - it just makes the evangelist in question a bit annoying.
"Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby."
I don't think this is a good analogy. I have yet to meet anyone that spends a lot of effort telling other people that they do not collect stamps.
Wikipedia, "Religion":
"Religion is usually defined as a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements"
It's blatantly obvious that this doesn't apply to atheism. It might be possible to construct an atheistic religion that includes these things without in fact having a god (some forms of Buddhism could even be said to already do so), but this clearly isn't the mainstream.
Everything except for "sanctified places" and "prophecies" seems to apply to atheism.
Oh? Then tell me more about this moral system, worldview, ethics, and organization that all (or even just most) atheists share in? And just what the supernatural, transcendental and spiritual elements are?
Nope. A religion has one or more deities (or at a very minimum, elements of metaphysics). Being vigorous, restrictive, or prescriptive about an ideology - even *way too vigorous* as some atheists are - does not satisfy that very basic definition.
I thought about the same question when I read that the most atheist region in the whole wide world is...
...eastern Germany.
Pretty much Germany's premier location for anti-establishment ressentiments and conspiracy theory.
But I expect it to be co-evolution, one cause that makes two independent things develop in the same direction.
I think the eastern Germany case is best explained by the fact that if you've grown up with the Powers that Be lying to you all the time about everything, often quite brazenly defying you to call them out on it (and bringing the full might of the State down on your head if you did), you will naturally expect the next set to continue doing so, because - why wouldn't they?
To be fair, this is hardly an absurd thing to believe, given the number of corruption, incompetence, and other scandals that emerge on a depressingly regular basis. I mean, look at what's happening with Olaf Scholz as we speak.
Trust is an easy thing to lose and very difficult to regain.
Yes the problem with any academic or journalistic attempt to study "conspiracy theories" is that they invariably pick beliefs that satisfies their own ideology and ignore any conspiracy theories by their own side.
E.g. here the Economist picks "illegal votes" as a "conspiracy theory" but ignores Russiagate, which is by far the bigger and more influential conspiracy theory. It also ignores things like the COVID lab leak - a conspiracy theory that by now anyone familiar with the evidence accepts is an actual conspiracy - a the meta-conspiracy surrounding it that tried to suppress all discussion of the possibility of a conspiracy.
Oh yeah - illegal votes in 2020 isn't some right wing evangelical conspiracy theory. I live outside the USA and had forgotten what day the US election was. I was reminded by friends (local friends!) suddenly starting to text me, asking if I was "watching what's happening". I was like, um, no, why, what's going on? Is something on fire in the city? No no, the US election. I said no, I'm busy, I'll see what the results are tomorrow in the papers. Then they started to tell me they were seeing people post crazy evidence of vote stealing. These people were NOT right wing, or at least mostly were not at the time (COVID countermeasures changed their politics for some of them). Only one was even American (an ex-pat). But they were convinced bad things were happening and they were seeing it in real time. So the idea that nobody on the left had these beliefs is just wrong.
Incidentally, it's so sad what a rag the Economist has become. I stopped subscribing a few weeks after ZMB became editor because the quality nosedived massively and immediately. I was shocked how much difference a single chief editor could make.
I guarantee that belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from the rightwing candidate via mass voter fraud was far more widespread among rightwing people than among leftwing people both on election day and on every subsequent day. This is why people call these theories rightwing.
Ah. So if Biden had lost, the conspiracy would have become left-wing. That makes sense.
Some of Bernie Saunders' supporters claimed that Hillary Clinton's supporters committed voter fraud to get Hillary elected as the Democratic Nomination for President.. I don't live in North America, but I think 'distrust in polling results' is already a bipartisan problem in the USA
Um, yes. Your phrasing sounds sarcastic, but why *wouldn't* "my preferred left-wing candidate is being targeted by a shadowy cabal to have the election stolen from him/her" be a left-wing conspiracy theory?
No sarcasm meant at all. I am just not finding anything particularly left wing or right wing about the notion 'we do not believe we can trust our election results'. Seems to me that it is bipartisan belief. EDIT: ah, I see now that you weren't replying to me but to Philo Vivero, sorry.
But your reply is exactly what I would have written.
I don't get how voter fraud is a conspiracy when applied to USA elections. Whether it was Bernie vs Hillary, or Trump vs Biden isn't really important. There's no "wing" on this thing, left or right.
In America maybe? But I don't see how that applies the people I know. The idea that this is a "right wing" concern is false. People who aren't really into politics, who aren't American and don't live in America were sounding the alarm to me about it.
cf. Stacey Abrams
Re: the votes thing, it probably doesn't help that US election security is shockingly bad compared to almost any other Western country. I don't know whether the Trump vs. Biden election actually was hacked, but I do know it would be considerably easier to hack than an election in France or the UK.
Yes I think that's part of it. I'm not American and I can't believe that requiring ID to vote is a contentious issue there. It's absurd.
Something like 10-15% of the eligible voter population doesn’t have a valid ID, because most of the population doesn’t travel internationally, and some populations (particularly old and poor) don’t drive, and those are the contexts for which ID is given out.
I’m not sure why you’re saying people who care about the poor being able to vote don’t care about the poor being able to access banking. This is a major issue, but not one that is easily fixed.
If you look old enough (and being poor can make you look older), people at stores often don't bother to check IDs. Bank accounts aren't necessary. Cash cards can be used in place of credit cards where cash isn't accepted (I used one when subscribing here!). The definition of "ID" necessary for work can mean a lot of things, which may not overlap with ID necessary to vote, and that's putting aside "informal" (illegal) employment, as well as situations where the employer tacitly overlooks obvious falsehoods. I'm not aware of ID being legally required to rent an apartment (although it probably is required by the owner for any apartments where either of us would want to live).
Most of all that stuff can be done by just showing up in person and presenting a familiar face, which has the extremely important advantage of working after someone just stole all your stuff, including the ID. IMO, any identification requirement that isn't robust to frequent changes of address and frequent "someone stole all my stuff" incidents, isn't going to function for an unfortunately large number of people.
Yeah but so what? Large parts of Europe have an ID card system and everyone gets such a card whether you travel or not. It's not for any specific purpose, it's for every case where ID is needed. You're explaining what the present situation in the USA is, but that doesn't make it easier to understand, or why people claim fixing the ID situation would be racist.
They tried to fix the ID card system in the 1990s by creating a national form of identification that isn’t a passport, but it was criticized from both the right and the left as government intrusion in privacy. It’s weird that there are groups that are against national ID but for a requirement to show ID to participate in national elections, but that’s how it is.
So mail every single person in the United States a free ID card, and require them to use that card to vote?
Yes, that would be great. Especially if you can just easily get a free replacement.
Huh? That would void the point of having ID cards in the first place. Who do you mail them to exactly? Implementing schemes like that does involve a bit of up front work by each person who gets the card to prove who they are to a sufficient standard, although of course that can be just presenting a passport. But if you just mail them to anyone who asks lots of your ID cards will be faked and nothing was solved.
No idea about France, but the UK has more-or-less no election security. I've had someone go and cast my vote twice now (both by people I was living with who picked up the wrong polling card and were very apologetic about it). The polling card itself is something you could easily make if you knew someone's name and address. Postal voting has even less security, and no-one checks the electoral register to see if you're just making people up when you fill in the form.
And note that some Conservatives, especially ones in close seats with high immigrant populations (which unfortunately have correlated in the past with caught election fraud) have requested that election security be tightened for those exact reasons.
Unfortunately, the Conservatives haven't done anything about it for the usual reasons.
British election security is indeed dire, but at least the vote counts are generally finished by the morning after the election, making it harder to conveniently "discover" ballot boxes filled with just enough votes to put your preferred candidate in the lead.
...the polling card in UK elections is just a reminder to vote, it's not a document you have to take to the polling station to 'claim' your vote. That's why it's not difficult to forge, and also why you can bin it them moment it turns up if you like and still go and vote without a problem.
When you go to the polling station you are asked to give your name and address and those are manually crossed off a list of voters registered at your address. I suppose if, instead of replying, you handed over a polling card with somebody else's name printed on it, the election worker might cross their name off instead of yours; I think they are supposed to confirm who you are directly, though (they always have done when I've voted, whether I had the polling card with me or not).
When you register to vote the info you are asked to provide includes your name and date of birth as well as your NI number and your main place of residence. That is enough information for your identity to be checked against eg birth, tax, employment, and passport databases (reference: the paper registration form for those who don't want to do this online: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/931882/Register-to-vote-if-youre-living-in-England.pdf). You couldn't 'just make someone up', you would have to find an unregistered eligible voter and register them. Note that the form explicitly says that giving less information is fine but might mean you get contacted and asked for more evidence - if you can't give the electoral registry office enough to check up on your existence then that's when they come asking for ID.
Since the 'just make someone up' route is blocked any widespread voter fraud would be something of a logistical challenge. You'd have to get hold of the names and details of a large number of people who are eligible but unlikely to vote, and since one piece of information held (for example) in tax and employment records (which can be searched with the NI number) is primary address, you would really need to know where they all lived. Then you'd need to register them for postal voting, and make sure that none of them receive the letter confirming that they're registered for postal voting as that would rather give the game away.
Not saying that the system is perfect, or even particularly good, but it's not quite as doors-wide-open as your post implies. Just because there's not much security theatre doesn't mean there's no security.
Out of curiousity, what did you do when someone went and cast your vote accidentally? Did you get the vote back?
Both times, I decided that the joy I could get for sanctimoniously chiding them about how using their vote would be fraud and I was now disenfranchised was worth more to me than voting was.
Sorry to hear that.
In theory if you had gone to the polling station - assuming the election worker checked the name of the person voting as they're trained to - you would have found that it was the other person's name and not yours that had been checked off and your vote was still available for you to cast.
I was curious as to what would happen if you turned up at the polling station and found that the election worker hadn't checked and had got your name rather than your friend's crossed off - whether the 315 cases reported in England in 2021 include this kind of confusion or whether they're solely cases where somebody alleged deliberate fraud: https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/our-views-and-research/our-research/electoral-fraud-data/2021-electoral-fraud-data.
Thank you
Belief in conspiracy theories probably correlates inversely with wealth and education, in which Eastern Germany hasn't fully caught up. Having had freedom of thought and speech for multiple generations might also be something of a cultural advantage for Western Germany.
I think the German Democratic Republic period oversaw both a decline in religion (which was not really compatible with the state ideology) and economic power (relative to West Germany).
(I am unsure why the long term effects on religion were so much higher in East Germany than in neighboring Poland, though. Perhaps in post-communist Poland, Christianity was seen as a Polish thing (setting them apart from the Soviets) while in East Germany, it was seen as a West German thing instead?)
I would mostly blame the economic situation for any excess anti-establishment ressentiments in eastern Germany.
Can't really speak for Germany, but in Poland Christianity was absolutely a Polish thing setting us apart from the Soviets.
Only, it was Catholicism and it set us apart from the Russians.
In fact, both approaches work just as well, because Poland had well over a hundred years of prior beef with Russia over (at the time) preferred flavours of Christianity. When the Soviets rolled in after WWII with their brand new ideas about religion (atheism, this time), it was merely a case of "not this shit again".
People who come from former Soviet states are super conspiratorial IME. I think it's more likely a result of growing up in a place where conspiracies were commonplace.
Yeah, I agree...I know many people from former "Eastern Block" countries, and they are really the "Trumpy" type quite often (at least the older ones)...
Tangentially related:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233749943_Religion_spirituality_and_mental_health_Results_from_a_national_study_of_English_households
Saw this the other day but didn't really know what to make of it. Authors conclude that "spiritual understanding of life in the absence of a religious framework are vulnerable to mental disorder". I know the type, so to speak, but still seems like a wild conclusion.
Recently I have seen a lot of conspiracy theories turn into just conspiracies.
And a lot of non-believers believe some pretty strange stuff.
They are scissors statements.
A man can become a woman and at that point he was never a man. And her penis is a woman's penis.
A woman can become a man, and then can have a baby because men can have babies.
To a religious believer these statements can seem a lot stranger than a conspiracy theory.
Scissors statements.
10-20 years ago most atheists and agnostics would also have found these statements absurd.
There are plenty -- the majority? -- of atheists and agnostics who find these statements absurd today.
I combed through the whole comment section to see if anyone else recognized that somewhere along the line the original sense of the aphorism had been lost and had been nonsensically redirected to things like UFOs and conspiracy theories.
Sure, Chesterton never said the words exactly but his obvious point about the atheism of his day predicted things like "my girlfriend's penis is bigger than mine", not "atheists think UFOs are real". "Believe any old damn thing" includes (from Chesterton's point of view) every single fence-tearing-down that has happened in the last century, including a large number of things that everyone in this comment section thinks are good: socialism, legalizing abortion or gay marriage, contraception, perhaps even giving women the vote -- and no, don't quibble with me that religious people like these things now, they mostly didn't in 1920 and Chesterton was speaking specifically about a traditional Catholic belief in God anyhow. Understood in this original sense, the aphorism is so tritely true as to not even be worth talking about.
That's a very good point. Lewis made a very similar point in his (prophetic) book The Abolition of Man.
" things that everyone in this comment section thinks are good: socialism"
...What?
I hope you're right. Why does it seem like the only people willing to say they find these statements absurd and destructive are either right-wingers, religious fundamentalists, or iconoclasts? Is that me not paying attention or is there a large contingent of people who just won't say it even though they believe it?
One datapoint (me) does not a conclusion make, but I think there is a large contingent of people who, like me, rarely find ourselves in a place where such things would be said at all. I only discovered this substack a few days ago, by the usual practice of finding it as something somebody who wrote something I like also reads. Upon examination, it is clear that this is a continuation of something that has been going on for a very long time, but still is new to me.
This particular thread is one that would, normally, be one I skipped as not interesting. I think it skews American. American atheists are far more likely to have grown up in a religious home than not, simply because America, at least until very recently, was that religious a society. People who have actively renounced their religious upbringing because they 'are too clever to believe that nonsense' and who hang out with people who believe the same, will quite naturally avoid other things their peers will chide them for as being nonsense. 'God - No. Astrology and Bigfoot - Yes.' does not play well in rationalist circles.
But the question is what does this say for their children and grandchildren? Unbelievers who come from 3 generations of unbelief will have different answers, I predict. 'God -- No. Bigfoot Yes!' 'Huh? Bigfoot -- really? Why is that?' 'I get to go hiking weekends with my friends in the Pacific North West looking for evidence, and drive my rationalist father into apoplexy at the same time! Win/Win! ' ' But do you _really_ believe? Oh, really believing is so 20th century, wouldn't you say? Who really believes in anything today!"
So, the only reason I am here is because I wanted to see how the conversation went here on a topic that could be predicted to be polarising. I was doing a 'civility test'. (Seems pretty civil, so far.)
Can you explain what you mean? What's the difference between a conspiracy theory and a conspiracy (from the outside)?
Well, the "covid lab leak" was a "conspiracy theory" until we found out that scientists really were experimenting with gain of function research and tried to hide it. At that point it became a conspiracy (to hide it.)
Stuff like this:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/08/why-the-chair-of-the-lancets-covid-19-commission-thinks-the-us-government-is-preventing-a-real-investigation-into-the-pandemic
I think that is what's known as "a conspiracy," rather than "a conspiracy theory."
It's still a conspiracy if it hasn't been proven by the authorities...
I think a much more fruitful distinction is between everyday conspiracies - that happen _all the time_ - and grand conspiracies, which require hugely impressive efforts. When we talk about "conspiracy theories", we typically mean the latter.
The idea that Covid leaked accidentally from a lab and the Chinese government is doing its best to cover it up due to embarrassment is just a typical conspiracy - it might or might not be true (it very likely isn't, going by recent findings), but there's nothing insane about it, and it shouldn't be labeled a conspiracy theory. Believing that Covid is a world-wide conspiracy orchestrated by Bill Gates to inject us all with 5G "vaccines" that also turn us gay... is.
The truth is that "grand conspiracies" actually don't need huge efforts. For instance, were 9/11 an actual conspiracy, the simplest explanation would be that the CIA simply "let it happen." This would require the complicity of only one team within the agency. It's easy enough to dismiss it as a case of incompetence, and costs zero dollars. In fact it's suspicious that the theorists created elaborate scenarios involving additional explosions, as though Occam handed them a hammer.
That's only the case if that one team at CIA is the only one to get the early warning. Why is there one team that is both ok letting terrorism happen and is the only one who got the warning?
The obvious explanation would be that there is a supporter of Islamic terrorism inside that team in the CIA, ie one member of that team was an Al-Qaeda supporter, which is both why they knew and why they didn't do anything about it.
But 9/11 as a conspiracy in the conspiracy theory sense is: the Bush administration realised that 9/11 would enable them to invade Iraq, which they wanted to do and couldn't otherwise justify; jet planes crashing into the towers but not destroying them would be insufficient, and jet fuel can't melt steel beams, so they set explosives in the towers to demolish them, intentionally killing thousands of Americans, while also arranging for the planes to be flown into the towers because that enabled the hijackers to be clearly idenfied as Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda had nothing to do with it, it was entirely done by a covert arm of the US government who intentionally sacrificed a number of their own operatives, those being the actual hijackers.
That's a conspiracy theory explanation (one of many), and the problem is that there are a hell of a lot of people who would have known and they would leak; there are too many people who would know.
Big secrets, known by a lot of people, can hold for a long time, but only if the result when the secret does get out is that the wider society agrees that it was reasonable to keep it secret: for instance, the secret that the Allies had broken the German Enigma codes was kept for about 30 years after WWII. But it was uncontroversial when it was revealed that it was correct to have kept it secret for a long time.
>it shouldn't be labeled a conspiracy theory
And yet, the mighty edifice of US propaganda apparatus was doing exactly that for more than a year.
"I think a much more fruitful distinction is between everyday conspiracies - that happen _all the time_ "
I think I agree. I'm taking you to mean things like:
A boss tells their six subordinates: "Yeah, we screwed up. Don't tell this to the press or our customers, or I'll fire you."
Is that the sort of thing that you mean?
Or even ”we use our security services to secure blackmail material to help one of our nation’s companies gain that contract” (a French specialty, as I understand it), ”we illegally surveil our own citizens”, ”our company utterly and deliberately fails to follow our own public privacy policy when there’s money to be made” or ”we secretly support certain artists to score points against the Soviets”.
Yup, somewhat larger scale, and I'm not personally familiar with the first case, but the latter three are NSA, Facebook, and CIA, IIRC, all well documented.
So you're saying we should describe things as "conspiracy theories" if we think they are "insane"? With the implication being that it's just absolutely crazy to suggest that people engage in the act of conspiracy, one of the most basic human behaviors? I guess the jig is up.
You didn’t actually read my post, did you?
"[X] is just a typical conspiracy - it might or might not be true (it very likely isn't, going by recent findings), but there's nothing insane about it, and it shouldn't be labeled a conspiracy theory."
Are you using some nonstandard dialect of English where this means something different than what it means in my dialect?
It may be that your confusion stems from thinking "conspiracy theory" simply means "I think there's a conspiracy", but that's not the case at all. Let's say you have good reasons to believe that, say, the police falsified evidence and did a cover-up in some certain case. While that would be a conspiracy on their part, there's no "conspiracy theory" here. A "conspiracy theory" is something else.
Wikipedia: "A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation,[3][4][5] when other explanations are more probable.[3][6][7] The term has a negative connotation, implying that the appeal to a conspiracy is based on prejudice or insufficient evidence.[8] A conspiracy theory is not the same as a conspiracy; instead, it refers to a hypothesized conspiracy with specific characteristics, such as an opposition to the mainstream consensus among those people (such as scientists or historians) who are qualified to evaluate its accuracy.[9][10][11]
Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular reasoning: both evidence against the conspiracy and an absence of evidence for it are re-interpreted as evidence of its truth,[8][12] whereby the conspiracy becomes a matter of faith rather than something that can be proven or disproven."
So, the notion that Covid did a lab escape because of sloppy procedures and there was a cover-up attempt isn't a Conspiracy Theory. It could reasonably have been true, and as long as we let factual evidence decide, no-one in engaging in Conspiracy Theory. It just so happens that now that the science is in, it looks very unlikely that such a lab leak actually was involved. Only if you start rejecting this evidence to stick to the lab leak theory are you risking to move into such intellectual terrain, as you need increasingly convoluted explanations and larger and larger groups of conspiracists. If you decide that the scientists doing the study were also just part of the cover-up, then things are starting to look dubious, because now you have immunized yourself against any evidence.
Take the "elite pedophile rings" proposition, for example. Pre-Epstein that might've been called a conspiracy theory; post-Epstein, it seems like there just IS a conspiracy. I realize this is a misuse of the word theory, but that's how most people understand the difference.
An intel asset pimping 16 and 17-year-olds to wealthy targets doesn't satisfy to me the definition of an elite pedophile ring. Especially since it seems to me that they wanted us to know about it.
Idk, seems like splitting hairs to me. Obviously that’s not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “elite pedophile ring”--we probably all think of something more cultish--but if you showed me a bird’s eye view of Epstein and Maxwell’s activities and asked me if I was looking at an elite pedophile ring, I’d be hard-pressed to say no.
As I understand it, there was very little overlap between the theory of the elite pedophile ring and the actual pedophile ring though: The evidence for the original theory doesn't point at the actual pedophile ring and the people actually involved are mostly not the people who were accused.
There were (and are) a lot of different theories pointing at a lot of different elites, granted. As we still don’t know the full extent of who was involved with Epstein and to what degree, I’m reserving judgment. Personally, I would be surprised if at least one current or ex president hadn’t been tangled up with Epstein.
Well, Trump was...
I think that CS Lewis had it right. He talked about critical thinking on advertisements and pointed out you could both be above and below an advertisement. So, for example, imagine you see an advertisement for a great vacation that's to what's actually a mediocre resort. You can, through dissecting the ad and outside knowledge, arrive at the idea the ad is probably lying to you. Or you can through British patriotism sneer at the ad's idea of going abroad and just ignore it. And in both cases you come to the correct conclusion.
It was only the middle that were too clever by half who'd be taken in. He then makes the point that the ad's deception works mainly through the sin of pride. The person who understands the ad is not being prideful in thinking they understand the ad. The person who doesn't understand the ad is not being prideful in ignoring what they don't understand. Only the person PRETENDING to understand gets taken in. And I wonder if that's what's going on: a lot of people leave religion not so much out of atheistic conviction but anti-religious sentiment and so get taken in by the next semi-religion that comes along.
Anyway, being CS Lewis, he sees the atheists as sneerers and the educated religious as the people capable of such dissection. But I think the point stands regardless of your preferences. (Ironically for the staunchly Protestant and somewhat anti-Catholic Lewis this was one of the points Catholics made against the Reformation.)
I'd be curious to hear a rationalist take on his concept of the sublime, actually.
I tend to think of it as intellectual outsourcing. In a world where you can't know everything you need to choose to put your trust somewhere on topics you don't have the time to understand. Some religious authorities are good at this and others are bad. But I'd say, in general, widely respected traditional authorities tend to be selected to be above average (if not great). So when you toss them out (possibly for very good reasons) you need to be VERY CAREFUL with what you replace them with. And it's a bit of a trap to think you won't need outside authorities at all. The biggest trick the devil played etc.
I think this is the “right” distinction here. The content of a person’s beliefs isn’t as important as the method by which they modify or change their beliefs.
The argument that religion protects you from bad beliefs is, I think, only true if you restrict “religion” to require a combination of “belief that there is one reality following consistent rules and conscientiousness in attempting to understand what those rules are and what is consistent with them.”
This is essentially the same value system as rationality.
Of course for “religious people” there may be some bit about God in there but really this is just a name for the top-most predictive node in the DAG. Committed atheists call it “material reality” and say it’s valence neutral. Religious people call the topmost node “god” and say it has positive valence.
https://meltingasphalt.com/ads-dont-work-that-way/
But the phenomenon of plastering celebrity faces on things is consist with what the article calls “cultural inception,” and the people I know who care a lot about what celebrities think are all very status-minded and would probably be very susceptible.
True… but that’s not really relevant to the point?
I’m beginning to second TGGP’s thought that you didn’t read/understand the linked article.
Did you read the link? It argues that advertisers know exactly what they're doing.
Thaler & Sunstein hyped Brian Wansink's research in their book, and it all turned out to be worthless. Kahneman also said people had "no choice" but to believe in priming in one of his books, but after the replication crisis now admits he was wrong about that. I also remember when Dan Ariely was one of the people leading the behavioral econ "revolution" & I read one of his books. I recommend searching Andrew Gelman's blog for how to think of his work now.
I don't think CS Lewis's point was specifically about the ad industry. But it's an interesting article nonetheless.
> People of “none” religion are less likely than any religion except Jews to believe in Bigfoot
Are you just looking at the "Absolutely not" category? If you include "Probably not", then "none" is the highest.
Reads like that:
> I would ignore the Absolutely category, which is too small to have a good sample size, and look at who says “Absolutely Not” vs. weaker versions
I would be curious how religious millenarians overlap with AGI millenarians, since the basic views have so many similarities. Presumably if you already believe the Rapture is coming in a decade you’re not going to spend much time worrying about AGI takeoff.
The Singularity has famously been called "the Rapture for nerds".
I see this comparison made in the comments here several times per month. Perhaps Scott will write about it. Or has he already?
Imagine it's 1930. Someone says, 'Spinning uranium in a circle, so that more and more of it has fewer neutrons, will create weapons that could wipe out most of humanity.' What is more similar to belief in a high x-risk from AI, this hypothetical nuclear worry or religious millenarianism?
Worrying about AI x-risk is one thing, dreaming of an immortal life traveling among the stars as a digital consciousness is another.
How about if the same person in 1930 expresses concern that those same weapons might ignite the atmosphere?
I guess they would be wrong, but not religious.
(I mean, they might be religious in a different way, but the concern about igniting the atmosphere is not a religion. The debate is whether believing an unusual thing is necessarily a form of religion.)
Anything can be anything, if you generalize too much. If donating money is religion (because guess who else donates money? the religious people!), then of course effective altruism is a religion. If thinking that "superintelligence" means "smarter than humans" makes you religious, then I guess a proper atheist must believe that "superintelligent" actually means "pretty dumb".
These are silly verbal games that can prove anything. Liberalism is a religion, because they believe that state is a benevolent power stronger than humans. Conservatism is a religion, because they believe in tradition, which is a invisible force that guides human lives (and they often also believe in some religion in the ordinary meaning of the word). Libertarianism is a religion, because they believe in the invisible superpower of free market... oops it's actually an invisible *hand* of market, clearly an anthropomorphic concept. Even mathematics is a religion, because mathematicians contemplate infinity, and they also pay money to buy scientific journals which is exactly like religious people buying indulgences. Software developers finding bugs and fixing them are like priests finding sins and exorcising them. Medicine is a religion, because it protects you from the invisible evil forces of viruses, by performing rituals such as washing your hands. Sitting on a sofa and watching TV for hours is suspiciously similar to Buddha meditating, so that's probably a religion, too.
Two things are allowed to have several traits in common, without necessarily being the same thing -- "abstract thinking", "reading books", "meeting in groups", "thinking about the future, which can be very good but also very bad", "donating money", "trying to change the world", "having thought leaders", and probably many more, are traits shared by religions and rationality / AI safety. It seems like they could be split into two groups: the logical consequences of discussing a nontrivial topic, and the logical consequences of trying to achieve some change in the real world. (For example, when a debate gets complicated, someone is probably going to write an article or a book summarizing their position. Or if someone wants to do a project, they will probably need money, so if you approve of the project, you might donate.)
Can you imagine a large group of people trying to achieve something difficult that *wouldn't* be a religion by your definition? (If not, does it mean that the only way to avoid the accusation of being a religion, is to never try doing something difficult together?)
perhaps more interesting... is the quote "everyone worships"
https://mbird.com/literature/more-david-foster-wallace-quotes/
Yes, there's something to this, having to do with traditional religious societies being happier than modern secular ones. It doesn't follow from this, of course, that religious achieved global maximum, just a local one that secular culture so far hasn't managed to find a better alternative to.
It could be the case that zealots, of any stripe, tend to subscribe to a single belief system with a reasonably clear and well-defined message (be it "Jesus saves" or "there is no God"). Such a system leaves no room for competing beliefs, which the zealot automatically treats as hostile, and will likely seek to eradicate.
Meanwhile, people with weakly held beliefs are open to pretty much anything, which they will believe in -- weakly. To a zealot, Bigfoot is a terrible lie which must be resisted and eradicated at all cost; to an ordinary person, it's something to mull over while having a brew with your buddies.
I was raised catholic. I remember being told many times that believing in astrology is wrong, magic is evil, less frequently that I shouldn't believe in UFOs. So maybe if you go to church more you're exposed to authority telling you to not believe those things more so you're more likely to not believe them / say you don't?
Interesting to note that Catholicism seems broadly accepting of some of the woo - according to the graphs above that's 31% believe in astrology and 61% in UFOs - more than any other religious / non-religious affiliations listed. As a teenager in the 1980s I transitioned from Irish Catholic childhood to Fortean mystic then via a degree in biology with Dawkins et. al. to hard-core evolutionist / born-again atheist. Several peaks and valleys beyond, I'm feeling much better now, thanks...
So how much wit is too much wit to woo?
It's fairly common to find "cultural Catholics", who identify as Catholic despite not/no longer attending church and not knowing much about Catholic beliefs, so I'd guess that a lot of the "Catholic" responses on the survey would be more accurately classified as "Agnostic". OTOH, it's comparatively rare to find cultural Protestants, so they'd skew the data for Protestants less.
In a sense that’s what the “nothing in particular” line is.
I suspect this is because Catholicism in the U.S. is incredibly ethnically diverse and many U.S. Catholics are first or second-generation Hispanics. Many Hispanic cultures are less materialist than the U.S. and more likely to believe in not only religion but the supernatural more broadly.
I'm a little wary of making such a claim strongly because it's very very close to stereotyping. But it was still my first thought on seeing this.
Yes. I think this person is into something. Evangelicals are less likely to believe in alien visitation because they’re more likely to believe that UFOs are demonic.
I was also raised Catholic - I feel like a telling aspect of this is that I wasn't taught that these things are *fake* but that they are *evil and dangerous* - implying that they're real.
Good comment! Thanks 🙏
I don't know about CS Lewis but I think this piece doesn't address Amjad Massad's argument. My interpretation of that argument is that as people go less to Church and are less connected to their community they're more likely to adopt alternative "religions" like QAnon or wokeism. Maybe that just means that Massad's argument isn't the same one as the argument addressed in this post.
Right, I think the real argument is that beliefs can come from different sources:
A (the gold standard) faith in a consistent stable reality outside your mind, plus accumulation of evidence that alters Bayesian probabilities. You use humility to limit your confidence to where it’s actually warranted, and introspection to assess slight inconsistencies in your world model. You see yourself as being flawed and know you’ll never be perfect but you strive for it anyhow. Probably nobody pulls this off perfectly, and only a small minority of weirdos makes an effort to pull this off, with varying degrees of success.
B - you’re part of a community whose leaders tell you what you should and shouldnt beleive. The community has good type A leaders, and you get most of the benefits while paying a fraction of the cost. Your beliefs are a fuzzy approximation of what the gold standard would produce.
C - you’re part of a community whose leaders tell you what you should and shouldn’t believe. The community does not have type A leaders. Your beliefs are an incoherent mishmash, a weighed average of the beliefs of the people around you.
I think people who identify as religious and strive for A would often see rationalists as fellow travelers who simply believe in a “god of physics”, like deism but with no positive valence attributed to the deity.
The problem with the "gold standard", that rationalists usually sweep under the rug, is that it makes no obvious normative claims. They have endless criticism for religious ones, of course, and then turn around and just quietly try to adopt total utilitarianism, or whatever.
Goddammit, I just wrote a whole long response above and now see you beat my to it by 6 hours.
Yeah, I think the Amjad tweet is the far more interesting conversation. Conspiracy theories are stupid and not especially viral. But wokeism is super viral and it's issues far more subtle.
lol your long response might be more insightful :)
Thank you for raising the source of that quote. I admit I'd always trusted that attribute to Chesterton, largely because it is *so very much like something he would have said* - and, as your Chesterton.org link points out, it is in fact very similar to a number of lines in his short stories. I think those extracts make it pretty clear that Chesteron would see the active mechanism as "people with coherent worldviews already have strong opinions on what’s true, making them closed-minded against conspiracy theories.".
The CS Lewis connection is harder to source at first glance. The first/best conceptual fit I could think of was the opening to the Screwtape Letters:
"I note what you say about guiding your patient’s reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naif ? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” or “false”, but as “academic” or “practical”, “outworn” or “contemporary”, “conventional” or “ruthless”. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. "
(for those who haven't read it, the entire book is advice from a senior to a junior devil on how to corrupt the junior's 'patient' and guide him to Hell).
This would appear to be a better fit for the "people with any coherent worldview are smarter or at least more intellectual than people who don’t care" as a mechanism.
From the examples you give, I suspect that there may be a number of different mechanisms at play for different conspiracy theories and groups - for example, a strict Catholic ought to disbelieve in astrology (as belief in superstitions - the unkind would say 'other' superstitions is prohibited; the only power is God), but would be open-minded towards Bigfoot. However, they may then be unlikely to believe in Bigfoot for completely unrelated and perhaps 'irrational' reasons such as it being heavily coded in pop-culture with nutters and rednecks, which our imaginary Catholic views as an outgroup. They could therefore reach the correct opinions via a mixture of dogma, native reason, and social snobbery.
Conclusion reminds me of a joke you'll sometimes hear among Muslims: the atheist is closer to Islam than most, because she's got the "there is no God" part of the shahadah down, now she just needs the "but God" bit. The shahadah, of course, is the Muslim profession of faith.
I say joke, but people say it in a serious sense too.
I like it! Not least, because it works both ways.
Yeah. It's sometimes (mostly jokingly) said that the monotheist is *almost* there. They already disbelieve in all gods except for one, so there's just one more to go...
That's true, but nothing else beats the beauty-in-simplicity of the shahadah - I mean: it starts off so well...
Perfection is reached not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there's is nothing more to remove.
As such, I prefer to shorten it to “But”.
The other way round (not sure who said it, possibly one of the new atheists): Christians,unlike, say, Hindus, are only one god away from atheism.
Hinduism isn't really different from Christianity in that regard. It's only polytheistic if you consider each of the thousands of divine manifestations of Brahman to be its own distinct god, in which case the three coequal members of the Holy Trinity should really count as separate gods too.
If the members of the Trinity are actually distinct entities and not just different manifestations of one entity, then it makes even less sense to count them all as one god while counting each of Brahman's manifestations separately.
If you have a preferred truth mechanism, it's easy to reject weird ideas that fail the mechanism.
That's true whether your Truth Mechanism is "it's in the Bible" or "it's shown by science."
If this is the explanation, then atheists should be more vulnerable to scams that sound scientific, evangelicals should be more vulnerable to scams that invoke witchcraft or demons, and the wishy-washy middle is left to believe in astrology.
I think this is missing an important source of supernatural belief: hyperactive pattern recognition is often what makes people believe in supernatural explanations. So if you have high hyperactive pattern recognition, then being religious may prevent you from believing in other supernatural explanations, and when such a person leaves their religion, they will replace their religious belief with different beliefs.
But if you're not a hyperactive pattern recognizer, and you were born into a religion, you'll most likely leave it at some point, and become an atheist, at which point you have no need to believe in other supernatural explanations.
So for one type of person, leaving religion opens them up for belief in other supernatural explanations. But for another type of person, it does not.
I've always assumed this phenomena was about different people's varying drive for detail/clarity in their map of the territory (note: this is distinct from accuracy).
Most of the things you mention here take very little looking into to find they aren't coherent and don't make much sense, that the evidence generally discussed is terribly low quality, etc. People who are strongly, actively religious and people who are definite atheists are more likely to look at a statement (e.g. "astrology works") and want to a evaluate it's accuracy, spending the half hour or so to reach the conclusion "probably not". While certainly some agnostics and casually religious folks function similarly, they're washed out by people who don't have a strong compulsion to answer "does God exist, and if so, which one?". Those people are also less likely to feel any need to answer "does astrology work", and therefore remain at "well, lots of people believe in it, so maybe? Who knows?", having put no effort into finding or evaluating evidence.
Note that this doesn't cover passionate followers of various conspiracy theories who often build both their social life and worldview around weird views, but I tend to assume that's a small minority of nominal believers in most cases.
One thing I try to remind people of re: Christians who never go to church is that they are basically just saying they are Republican/Anti-coastal-culture, or similar. This makes a lot of this weird partially because a lot of things that get labeled conspiracy theories are kind of anti-education-anti-government oriented, as well as just plain "low education" oriented.
If actual churchgoing is going to help as an isolated factor, it probably has to not only be positive but actually so positive as to overwhelm all of that.
TBH this essay feels like it's missing the point somewhat. When people quote the "People who stop believing in religion start believing in anything" line, they usually do so with reference to beliefs like critical race theory, patriarchy theory, and other such belief systems. (The question of why these don't usually get described as conspiracy theories is left as an exercise to the reader.) So to really refute the argument, you'd have to show that religious believers are equally or more likely to believe in things like CRT.
Seems like the mirror image of the "churchgoers are more likely to believe QAnon" complaint, unless paired with a look into more neutral conspiracy theories.
Doesn't it fundamentally shake out to "people who stop believing [my religion], will believe [other religion]"?
I think this is a valid question to ask.
To a first approximation, it doesn't particualarly matter if bigfoot exists nor if you believe that he does. If the press were to announce that scientists working in the Amazon discovered a new species of tree frog, I bet you'd neither be surprised, nor skeptical of the claim.
The main thing about bigfoot (apart from striking build; also true for Nessie, but in a different way) is that we have some low-quality evidence in favour, and have failed to produce better quality evidence, despite no lack of trying. So, while it is *possible* bigfoot might exist, it also appears rather *unlikely*, and your choice boils down to whether you lean towards *possible* or *unlikely*.
Religions, CRT, gender theory et al. aren't merely academic questions. They carry very real consequences that affect your everyday life. The answer to "was the 2020 Presidential Election rigged?" may not directly impact your day-to-day, but it does carry significant implication regarding the socio-political environment you live in.
Therefore, I do get the impression that measuring "belief in some poorly-evidenced but otherwise neutral phenomena" and measuring "belief in poorly-evidenced, politically divisive statements" is actually measuring two very different things.
If you want to study belief in QAnon, you might do better to take something like Russiagate as a control.
EDIT: Punctuation.
Sloppy language aside, it's not intended as a sweeping sociological statement about the nature of belief. It's simply an attempt to lay the excesses of left wing social ideologies at the feet of atheism. I happen to think its all just confounded, and its uncharitable outgroup swipes etc but its different to what you're arguing against.
By definition, all conspiracy theories that don't involve supernatural forces are 'atheistic', but to be fair we would have to define most religions as 'theistic conspiracy theories'.
I understand this concern, but in this case I think it's misplaced on both sides - The quote intends to say "people who stop believing in God are unable to critically evaluate flash-in-the-pan ethical and truth-finding movements the way we can (because the correct ethics are ours, and the truth is there's a God)."
It's therefore fair to point out that religious folks have empirically failed at truth-finding, just as it's fair to point out that the non-religious still participate in quasi-religious behavior, just as it's fair to determine that the quote means "If people don't believe what I believe, they'll believe something else," and that that's not very interesting.
I think there a bunch of things unique to the contemporary west(and Americans in particular) which make looking at the data worse than useless(noting that churchgoing can be divorced from seriousness of belief is a start). To suggest a few:
- Irony. For bigfoot and aliens in particular, the existence of people who think these things is a recent cultural phenomenon which is understood to be dubious. The fact that the beliefs are understood as conspiracy theories distorts adoption. Beliefs which take the place of religion have to be more mundane, like the law of attraction or astrology, which have had serious take-off “recently”.
- Realignment. People haven’t finished resolving their identities in the wake of secularisation. There are multitudes who claim group identification over integral belief(I think reform jews do this explicitly, catholics implicitly). If you really sat down and questioned them, I think catholics in particular include a whole bunch of recent-ish immigrants who could probably be convinced to change their answer to agnostic.
- Interesting Times. The internet, and more particularly COVID lockdowns, have simply broken people’s ability to understand the world. All of us have been at least initially conned by outright fakery by now, and untangling how influence works online will take a while to settle. I think partisan fever probably falls
under this too, if you can go from concern about the NWO to being convinced satan is at work and attending church services, a no religion->crazy beliefs effect can’t be discerned after the fact, if that’s what it is. Some libertarian friends would probably want me to mention hysterical hygiene theatre and disproportionate fear of death “instilled by the media” here.
I think a better example of the phenomenon would be something like a political movement taking on religious overtones and holding revivals with outpouring professions of obviously absurd beliefs. Qanon is a good example of this with the resurrection of JFK Jr., but it’s hardly unique. In my experience these sorts of things are independent of “religious identity”, but are pretty obviously to do with filling that void.
Another example could be the emergence of sui-generis cults fleshing out previously uncommon philosophies. Churchmen thought marxism did this with urban workers uprooted from their homes, maybe post-industrial workers are adopting philosophers more recent than Hegel.
You're strawmanning the people you're arguing with. The tweet doesn't say "conspiracy theories", it says "mind viruses".
When people use this phrase, they don't mean *literally* anything. It's a highly contextual and nuanced statement that boils down to, if you don't believe in one of the formal organized religions, then you will find something similar to those religions to believe in instead.
All your examples (and the Economist's, eyeroll) miss this nuance and just start picking random "obviously" wrong beliefs and then correlating them with Church attendance. But none of those beliefs you picked are in any way substitutes for religion. Belief in Bigfoot really can't be described as a mind virus by any reasonable definition, for example.
Another comment in this thread points out what this "mind viruses" or "believe anything" claim is actually about in the modern day context: pseudo-religions like wokeism/CRT, which is often understood to be a mutation of Marxism, itself a belief system with quasi-religious components. But there are others. We could pick obvious examples like Scientology, or less obvious examples like AI risk (which seems to involve obsession with a hypothetical all powerful, unknowable being).
I'd argue the key sub-claims underlying the wider claim are:
1. People need to believe in a religion-like thing. If they stop believing in classical religions then they start to re-invent it, probably without realizing that's what they're doing.
2. The most important example is Leftism, which is typified by fundamental beliefs that can be rephrased to sound almost quasi-Christian if you want to.
3. Implicitly, that these ad-hoc reinvented beliefs are worse than the classical religions they seek to displace, and thus that it's a good idea to be religious (n.b. I am not personally religious, but I'm open to this argument).
Leftist beliefs being a pseudo-religion, really? Sure. Marx insisted strongly on suppressing the Church ("no false idols"), that the population could be divided into two categories of pure evil and pure good ("sinners", "saints"), he had an axiomatic belief that human nature is fundamentally good but corrupted by external badness ("man was created pure in the Garden of Eden"), that virtually any challenge can be overcome through application of collective will ("we are made in God's image") and so on. Now over time what happened is that Christianity evolved and some of these rather destructive Marx-like elements got retconned out, such as when the core concept became "We are all sinners" i.e. stop dividing everyone into good and bad all the time please.
Regardless of where the aphorism originates exactly, it was made famous by Chesterton, a man who lived in time when people were starting to realize that God was dead, that lots of people no longer truly believed in him. It was also a time of violent, revolutionary ideas - the French revolution was still quite a recent event, and Marx was busy penning his ideas of how to create a godless utopia. So this idea that without God you'd end up worshipping Man, would have been a contemporary one regardless of who came up with each formulation.
"We're all sinners" has been a part of Christianity since long before Marx. It's the belief that Pelagius got in trouble for denying, for example.
Yes, of course. I don't think I claimed that the timeline of the evolution of Christian belief overlaps with the timeline of Marxism? Leftism as a concrete, nameable thing didn't really start to appear until the late 1700s by most accountings, and by then Christian beliefs had been stable for nearly two millenia.
The Reformation and the 30 years war etc might want to have a word with you.
Not to mention what the orthodox people were up to.
I don't quite see the connection, sorry. The argument above is all relative. That is, yes, religion led to the 30 years war, but not anything like the Great Leap Forward or the French Revolution.
I did not intend to make an argument about relative badness of tragedies. My focus was narrower:
Modern Christian doctrine had not sprung fully formed into the world 2000 years ago. Just the opposite, it evolved a lot over time. The Reformation (and counter reformation) was a sign of some of these changes. But far from the only one.
Christian beliefs had NOT been stable for nearly two millennia.
(Christian beliefs are about as stable as US constitutional law. Ie they nominally have an unchanging document they base everything on, but in practice things change.
For the US, in the early 20th century they thought they needed a constitutional amendment just to ban alcohol at the federal level. Later the later federal war on drugs was fought with just regular laws, and people didn't think a constitutional amendment was necessary anymore to authorise them, because 'obviously' the federal government is meant to regulate drugs.)
Yes, that's true, when I said "stable" I didn't mean totally unchanging. Obviously Christianity continued to evolve. But those evolutions didn't change its fundamental nature. The Bible wasn't changed in any major ways due to the 30 years war for example.
I took "Christianity evolved and some of these rather destructive Marx-like elements got retconned out" as indicating that this process happened after and as a response to Marxism, if that's not what you were claiming then I'll happily own my error.
Ah no, sorry. What I meant was that you can trace the evolution of Christianity throughout the Bible (including the old testament), and certain traits like the obsession with angels and demons are clearly more in evidence in the older parts of the book than in the newer parts. If you keep tracing that evolution past the Bible then you see angels and demons basically disappear, saints become way less prevalent/important, and there's an increased understanding that everyone is corruptible, everyone has capacity for evil, that the world isn't divided into fundamentally good and fundamentally bad people.
Marx tossed God to one side and ended up right back at the start, with Genesis. Man is born fundamentally pure and is then corrupted by the tempting serpent of capital. To create utopia (communism) and restore Eden we just need to get rid of Satan and everything will be great again. The irredeemably corrupted bourgeoisie capitalists are the fallen angels, who cannot be saved, only conquered.
Modern wokeism has hardly evolved beyond that, beyond switching from class to race/gender/sexuality. If you're a straight white man there's no hope for you, you're born with original sin and just have to suffer for it. Other people are pure, near perfect angels.
Though I agree that "mind viruses" doesn't normally mean regular conspiracy theories like bigfoot or UFOs.
The most obvious religious example on the atheist left is the idea that doctors “assign” gender rather than recognise biology. This is the idea of a soul above biology.
On the atheist right it’s AI, which has all the hallmarks of a god or demon.
The simulation hypothesis has always struck me as an atheist equivalent of intelligent design theory.
Interesting examples! I named AI risk but I've studiously avoided all gender/trans related topics so had missed the assignment one.
You seem to be confused about what gender assignment means.
It definetely doesn't mean that genders are assigned at random, uncorrelated to actual biological evidence that doctors can observe. But doctors can't observe all necessary biological facts regarding a newborn to know for sure what is their gender. Mistakes and even deliberate falsehoods can and are made all the time. So the idea of assigned gender instead of actual true gender is the acknowledgement of our uncertanity. No souls, just the virtue of precision.
That's clearly a religious belief, sorry. Knowing the gender of a baby is the easiest thing in the world. The idea that mistakes are made all the time is for the birds, it has no more validity than a belief in turning water into wine.
While you sure can use such bizzare definition of religios beliefs and gender so that you statement would be technically correct, I find this way to draw category borders completely unhelpful.
It's not obvious even what sex the child has, because you would have to check the chromosomes. And gender is an even more complex category and our neuroscience isn't there yet to have close to 100% f1-score predicting the gender identity of a newborn with any kind of diagnostic.
How would you "prove" someone's "gender"?
So, if you're really curious, I can dig around for the article. But I remember a while ago in the National Geographic they did an article on a group of people (predominantly in Africa it seemed) who were born with female genetalia, but upon reaching puberty, the genetalia changed to be male genetalia. I don't remember reading about any clear hallmark of this effect, and it strikes me as a pretty clear counterexample to "the baby's gender is clear," albeit one perhaps a little removed from the transgender debate
That is something where I think a lot of us would like to see the article, and ideally it's sourcing.
Güevedoces were already named elsewhere in the thread and also occur in (one village in) the Dominican Republic, are extremely rare, clearly a case of the exception that proves the rule, and totally irrelevant to transsexuals, who don't have 5-alpha-reductase deficiency and therefore don't pop male genitals suddenly at puberty. (Especially irrelevant to men wanting to be women, since this syndrome only affects men, making them look like girls in their childhoods.)
Also, güevedoces form an interesting counterproof to the concept of an internal sense of gender, since there are no reports of them complaining about being considered girls or knowing that they're really boys prior to puberty making it clear.
For Mr. Schilling, a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCevedoce
Thank you for providing a citation for me
> But doctors can't observe all necessary biological facts regarding a newborn to know for sure what is their gender.
That would make doctors truly unusual, since it is trivially easy for any layperson to observe all the facts necessary to know a newborn's gender. Any mistakes or falsifications would be quickly corrected by the first person to change the child's diaper.
Claiming otherwise isn't an "acknowledgement of our uncertainty." It's a spurious assertion of uncertainty where none actually exists.
Sigh. You do not seem to even try to understand what I'm talking about.
Sure, you can say that gender=sex and is solely based on the genitals of the people. It's ant easy definition, which our society been using for quite some time. The problem however, that this definition is not accurate. It ignores a chunk of reality, lots of scientific data and millions of people. We now know much more about chromosomes, hormones, related medical conditions and gender identities. So now we are using more accurate definitions which explains reality in more nuanced ways and captures more of it. And in a thousand years we may have an even better model.
This is the way the accumulation of knowledge works in every sphere. We start from the primitive models and then go to more accurate ones when we develop them. Were people throwing similar tantrums when Neutonian mechanics was replaced by Relativity? Or it's just this topic as something more personal and down to earth that more people can partisipate in?
The way I understand it, "sex" refers to the physical fact of differentiation into male and female, and "gender" to the social meaning attributed to that physical fact at a given place and time, as well as to the subjective experience of that social meaning as it relates to one's own embodied existence.
Gender is thus logically subsequent to sex, insofar as classification by gender necessarily *refers* to classification by sex. (There are lots of systems of social classification that have nothing to do with sex differences, and we call those systems caste or class or race or whatever, not "gender.")
And in the case of a newborn, it's hard to see what gender could possibly mean *besides* biological sex, as the newborn is wholly ignorant of society and has no subjective notion of him/herself as male/female whatsoever. Either the baby has no gender at that point, in which case gender can't be the thing being "assigned," or else the baby's gender is simply identical to its sex, in which case there's no "assignment," just a simple empirical observation.
I take it you're saying that in some instances that observation might be wrong, in ways we couldn't have realized in the past because we lacked knowledge of the biological basis for sexual differentiation. That is, a person born with a penis might nonetheless actually, at that moment, be female -- presumably because her hormonal and/or chromosomal makeup was such that in the normal course of development she'd develop certain objectively female characteristics that would, on some sort of scale, outweigh the fact of her genital anatomy.
I don't know if I agree with that proposition. But if I did, then I guess it'd make sense to say, *in that specific scenario*, that this was a person who'd been "assigned male at birth" but subsequently turned out otherwise. But it doesn't make sense to me to say so about human beings generally.
Thank you for properly engaging with my position. I appreciate it, truly.
> Either the baby has no gender at that point, in which case gender can't be the thing being "assigned,"
Not sure I follow your logic here. If the baby had no gender and then doctors wrote in the papers that baby's gender is male, that would be an obvious example of gender assignment.
> That is, a person born with a penis might nonetheless actually, at that moment, be female
Here is how I think about it. People are not blank slates. There have to be some kind of tangible biological reason, why some people've experienced gender dysphoria throughout the history. Something has to be different about them. And indeed modern science has very interesting data, regarding brain scans of trans people and other kinds of bodily dysphoria, like wanting to amputate a limb after suffering a brain injury. Correlation with autism, consequences for motor control, optical illusions etc. We do not know everything, but what we know hints in this direction.
> I don't know if I agree with that proposition. But if I did, then I guess it'd make sense to say, *in that specific scenario*
It would make sense in that specific scenario to say that she was *incorrectly* assigned male at birth, and in more common scenarios where a person born with the pennis actually turned out to be a man, it would make sense to say that he was *correctly* assigned male at birth. But in any case the act of declaring baby's gender based on not full information is gender assignment. It's a neutral term.
Is actually good science possible in this hyper-politicized issue? Somehow I doubt that if your study comes to a unfavorable conclusion to certain ideologies that your career survives its publication.
Notice that this is a universal antiepistemological argument.
In hyper politicized environment if one side is unhappy with your conclusion the other would be very happy. Up to the point where some people manage to build fortune on ridiculously obvious lies, no matter how cancelled they are.
> Sure, you can say that gender=sex and is solely based on the genitals of the people. It's ant easy definition, which our society been using for quite some time. The problem however, that this definition is not accurate. It ignores a chunk of reality, lots of scientific data and millions of people. We now know much more about chromosomes, hormones, related medical conditions and gender identities.
I must have missed the scientific study which points to chromosomal/genetic basis for gender identity, or for the condition known as gender dysphoria.
Where is it?
Is it easier, or harder for a pregnant mother to test their fetus for than, say, Downs or Trisomy-18?
I have heard of genetic variants that are chromosomally-male, and phenotypically-female. Typically described as female at birth, and transforming into male at puberty. In the one town in the Dominican Republic where this genetic abnormality is common, the children are called 'guavedoches'.
However, this example is far afield from 'assigned gender at birth' as it is usually discussed in relation to transgender individuals, and the society that deals with it the most appears to not confuse it with the condition for gender dysphoria.
You may start from here and check the references
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_gender_incongruence#factors
We do not know everything yet, but there are a lot of evidence from twin studies, brain scans etc. and we can see which direction the evidence is pointing to.
> I have heard of genetic variants that are chromosomally-male, and phenotypically-female.
Well yes, intersex people are much better accounted for when we are using "assigned gender at birth" category. The fact that people are usually talking about it in regards to transgenders doesn't change this fact at all.
I suspect that trans people are a more specific case of broader intersex spectrum. Some people have weird chromosomes, some weird genitals and some weird brain chemistry. We separate them in two distinct categories due to historical reasons, not because it's a really sensible way to make category borders.
But anyway, let's imagine that no trans people actually exist. That there are male, female and different kinds of conventional intesex people. Wouldn't you a agree that in that world "gender assigned at birth" would be a more careful and accurate wording?
"Sure, you can say that gender=sex and is solely based on the genitals of the people."
I mean, that's literally what it means, gender has always been a euphemistic synonym for sex ever since it was taken out of the realm of purely grammatical terms. It's only very recently that there's been a (politicized, ideological) push to change the meaning of the word to something else in order to create a false distinction. "Gender" as separate from sex does not exist.
As I said it was what it used to mean when we didn't know better. And recently scientific consensus changed and a new, more accurate model was adopted.
The fact that some people post factum felt offended for whatever reason and started creating controversy, thus making a rallying flag for political divide doesn't change this.
We use none of this "science" in adults to decided whether some is in the incorrect gender. In fact lobbyists tend to oppose any medical decisions, or indeed psychiatric treatment to determine if someone is in fact trans, which indicates there isn't much science there.
Right when I think of "mind viruses" I don't think of stuff like Bigfoot or UFO's. Maybe QAnon.
I think more of morality stuff like embracing nihilism or trying to build up an ethical system from a handful of axioms and following it rigorously wherever it leads.
Or stuff like our modern sexual/gender type explosion. Religion sets guardrails and say "no don't do that thing" and without that Chesterton Fence there is no telling where where the new equilibrium lands if there is a new equilibrium at all with what seems to me to have bad consequences for many individuals. Of course the guard rails also had bad consequences for some as well.
I'd say that it's a somewhat different statement. It's one thing to claim that everybody has some kind of ideology, vague religion-like. It's the other thing to claim that without religion people people are vulnerable to all kind of ridiculous beliefs. Both statement deserve to be explored, I think.
> 3. Implicitly, that these ad-hoc reinvented beliefs are worse than the classical religions they seek to displace
I struggle to understand how this claim can withstand a scrutiny when made explicit. Do you really claim that, say, Christianity is less wrong than social justice? Christianity may seem tamer than wokism, for sure, but it has little and less to do with its long evolution - memetic cross polination transfered the"We are all sinners" to woke "We are all racists/sexists/homophobes" long time ago. No, the real difference is that people actually believe in woke ideas, instead of mere belief in belief in Christianity which is mostly just culture nowdays.
Subcultures made up of people who genuinely believe in Christianity tend to be less dysfunctional than subcultures made up of people who genuinely believe in social justice.
This is probably due to a couple of Christian principles that are deeply baked in:
1. Lying is a sin that sends you straight to hell
2. When you are wronged, turn the other cheek (in both the current sense of work with it, or the original sense of nonviolent protest)
3. People can repent and become good with God again.
4. Eye-for-an-eye: the punishment should fit the crime.
These principles, and a few others I find less important, are strikingly absent in the Woke/CRT pseudo-religion.
It is totally okay to lie, cheat, steal, and otherwise destroy the lives of the sinners. It is totally OK to meet a microaggression from a sinner with completely destroying their career and putting their entire family into homeless shelters. If you're a cis-gender white male, you cannot possibly ever do right, for you are permanently a sinner. The best you can do is "be an ally," as in, become the fetch-boy for someone higher on the oppression hierarchy.
It's pretty repugnant, all-told.
I'm really not sure about that, actually. Woke believers managed to take control over major institutions in the modern West. While christianity believers managed to take control over major institutions in the medival west. I'd say the former achievement is more impressive.
I'm not sure how you'd determine which is more impressive really. Nor do I think it's relevant: it's quite possible for a subculture to be good at taking over things but bad at running them once it's got control, or good at taking over things but bad for it's actual members.
Medieval people were much less sofisticated and experienced regarding memplexes, didn't have propper scientific method. Spreading a meme among them seems much less impressive than among modern people.
> it's quite possible for a subculture to be good at taking over things but bad at running them once it's got control
While possible I don't see why we are supposed to prioritise this hypothesis all things being equal. Wokeness isn't even as optimised for easy replication as christianity with its "believe this and tell everyone and be infinitely rewarded or be infinitely punished".
<i>Medieval people were much less sofisticated and experienced regarding memplexes, didn't have propper scientific method. Spreading a meme among them seems much less impressive than among modern people.</i>
Given that the modern, post-scientific world saw the rise of (among other things) communism, fascism, eugenics, scientific racism, and the use of lobotomy as an accepted treatment for mental disorders, I don't think we're really in a position to sneer at previous ages for their ignorant gullibility.
<i>While possible I don't see why we are supposed to prioritise this hypothesis all things being equal. Wokeness isn't even as optimised for easy replication as christianity with its "believe this and tell everyone and be infinitely rewarded or be infinitely punished".</i>
We have plenty examples of woke spaces becoming riven with infighting and purity spirals, indicating that wokeness isn't actually very good at maintaining healthy communities.
I think Philo's argument has merit here. That is, something like Christianity (it doesn't have to be Christianity) has evolved over a long period of time, whereas hard left wokeism bears more resemblance to the sort of thing you find in the Old Testament except that it's missing big chunks.
It's easier to see examples of this at the margins. If you look into the black depths of academia to learn what surprises they're cooking up for us next, you can find the idea that incest should be legit and accepted, because if you're against incest you're a fascist "ableist" who wants to rid the world of disabled people, which is the same thing as eugenics. The logic is easy to follow but it ends up at an obviously stupid and absurd place, because it's missing some axioms.
People who follow the Bible are immune to degenerate reasoning failures like that because they don't try to reason about incest from first principles to begin with. The Old Testament says "incest is bad, stone to death people who do it" and helpfully lists out lots of combinations of relationships that count. Later Jesus amended biblical punishments to be less harsh, and you don't get him constantly telling his followers to stone people for things, but the prohibition remained. Interestingly, this prohibition evolved at some point between the oldest and newest books being written because in the oldest parts of the bible incestuous relationships do occur and aren't remarked upon as being wicked, even though later on that taboo appears.
If your entire belief system revolves around the singular belief that sin = "any claim that intersectional group X is better at anything in any way than intersectional group B", then you inevitably end with a quasi-religious conviction that incest is best. But you'd be wrong. Religion saves people from this by listing out a whole lot of moral rules that are "obviously" correct and then assigning them all to God, which avoids the need to try and present arguments for every rule from first principles. The word of God is itself the first principle.
> I think Philo's argument has merit here. That is, something like Christianity (it doesn't have to be Christianity) has evolved over a long period of time,
This reasoning falls apart as soon as you account for the fact that new memeplexes do not need to reinvent the wheel every time and can actually use the already successful memes. Memetic evolution is even more flexible here than biological one, because memplexes do not even have to directly descend from one another to inherit adaptations.
> If you look into the black depths of academia
The level of strawmanning you use here is well above my tolerance level. The fact that you really think that you are describing the thinking process of your outgroup means that you completely don't understand it and shouldn't try to deduce things based on this kind of (mis)understanding.
I don't even know how to explain how much off the mark you are. I don't think that even taking the words of the most fringe radical out of context and assuming with all confidence that it's the median christian beliefs and then deducing stuff about christianity as a whole based on this false premise would do the trick.
<i>This reasoning falls apart as soon as you account for the fact that new memeplexes do not need to reinvent the wheel every time and can actually use the already successful memes. Memetic evolution is even more flexible here than biological one, because memplexes do not even have to directly descend from one another to inherit adaptations.</i>
"Memeplexes" don't do anything, because they aren't agents. In fact, I'd say that treating memeplexes as agents and humans as passive carriers is a good example of irreligious woo of the sort Lewis or Chesterton would call out if they were still alive.
Sigh. At this moment we can start calling any metaphor to be woo, thus comparing ideas to each other to be woo and thus everything is religion which is itself a metaphor and a woo.
Critical race theory and Marxism really are pretty opposed to each other, and definitely don’t have any connections, other than that they’re both embraced on the left, just as fascism and laissez-faire capitalism are pretty strongly opposed to each other and don’t have any connections, other than that they’re both embraced on the right.
Leftism is much better defined than the right, which is a mishmash of all sorts of things.
CRT and Marxism seem pretty similar which is why so many draw the comparison. They're both about dividing the world into exactly two groups of oppressors and the oppressed. People can't move between these groups, they are born into them. To bring social justice to the world the oppressors must be overthrown and generally ground into the dust. And unfortunately, they both teach an "ends justify the means" approach that boils down in practice to lots and lots of lying, nasty tactics and general unpleasantness.
Huh, this bit about the left being one and the right being many seems entirely backwards to me. The right seems to be unified (it’s about supporting the traditional hierarchies and single majorities in all axes) while the left is completely disunified (it’s about any change from tradition and any minority group, each of which is different).
CRT and Marxism are completely opposed - CRT says that race, which is externally and socially imposed, is the important organizing force of society, and that this is a cultural phenomenon; Marxism says that the organizing force of society is not at all cultural but is the boring material thing about whether you have control of the means of production or not. For a Marxist, moving between the bourgeoisie and proletariat is as simple as gaining or losing control of the means of production, while changing races requires changing how you are perceived by society. Marxism and CRT both have strands that are utilitarian (where the ends justify the means) and strands that are deontological (where there are purity requirements that must never be violated no matter how bad the result is).
In terms of bringing Justice, overthrowing oppressors, and lying/nasty tactics, they are no different from any other totalizing beliefs at any point on the spectrum, ranging from blood and soil nazism to free market Pinochetism.
The libertarian/small-government/just-want-to-grill right doesn't care much about all that, but admittedly is a pretty irrelevant minority.
It's interesting to read your left-wing perspective on this. I've always agreed with the grandparent that the right is far more diverse than the left, it's interesting to see how this looks from the other side.
It seems to me like Marxism and CRT agree on just about everything (people are divided into groups, certain less powerful groups are unfairly oppressed by certain more powerful groups, this imbalance should be overthrown) and only disagree on exactly what distinguishes those groups (race vs class). I think you only see these as somehow significantly different because you're so close to all the other in-built assumptions of the left (e.g. that people should be considered as part of groups) that you don't really see them as optional.
(To be fair, some of those assumptions are shared by some groups on the right too; the White Nationalist types have the same underlying assumptions as the CRT types, they just disagree on who is getting oppressed..)
Similarly your characterisation of the right couldn't be more foreign to my own. When you talk about "it’s about supporting the traditional hierarchies" that doesn't sound right; it's only the left who thinks in terms of hierarchies, and they see them where others don't... for instance the left seems to think of the employer-employee relationship as somehow being "hierarchical" whereas I, on the right, see it as a free exchange between equals. I don't support traditional hierarchies because I don't really see hierarchies all over the place.
I can't really respond to the "and single majorities in all axes" part because I don't know what you mean by it.
When I talk about the majorities, I’m specifically talking about the demographic groups that support Republicans vs Democrats. A majority of white people support the Republicans, while a majority of every other racial group supports the Democrats. A majority of Christians support the Republicans, while a majority of every other religious group supports the Democrats. I don’t think a *majority* of straight people support Republicans, but a plurality do, while majorities of all other orientations support the Democrats.
I feel like you're moving the goalposts here. You originally indicated that the left was more ideologically diverse, but now you've shifted to the (obviously true, but boring and irrelevant to this topic) claim that the left merely has more demographic diversity. Maybe you believe the the latter implies the former, but I think that's a mistake: https://balioc.wordpress.com/2017/08/10/fractal-diversity/
Really, I think both sides of this discussion are misguided. The whole notion that "our side is many, but their side is one" is just a coded way of saying "we're open-minded and flexible, while they're rigid and blindly dogmatic," which itself is just a coded form of "we're real people, while they're robotic P-zombies." There are many lefts, and many rights: Free-market libertarianism and revolutionary fascism and theocratic monarchism are all as different from each other as they are from any leftist ideology; Orthodox Marxism and progressive identity politics and trade unionism are likewise as different from each other as they are from any rightist ideology.
Not expressing any opinion on the Marxism/CRT issue, but I agree with others in sharing the basic "left is one, right is many" intuition.
The basic idea is that left social movements tend to resemble each other more than right social movements do, for the same reason that competing plans for a new model city tend to resemble each other more than Houston resembles Venice.
Huh, the analogy seems backwards to me. Houston seems to resemble Venice much more than competing plans for new model cities, because plans for a new model city just aren’t tied down by the past in any way!
I mean, just looking at examples that Scott has described, NEOM and Prospera are just so much more different in fundamental ways than Houston and Venice!
Maybe it's a bad analogy. The idea I was trying to convey is that conservatisms are inherently different from one another to the extent that what's traditional varies from society to society.
In countries with a long tradition of monarchy, the right may be very much identified with the project of preserving the monarchy. In countries like the US that have never had a monarchy, that project forms no part of mainstream conservative politics whatsoever. The US has, at least notionally, a historic tradition of laissez-faire capitalism, so US conservatives tend to be very into that, much more so than conservatives in places where laissez-faire capitalism can't really be presented as a form of "traditional values."
It seems like Marxists who actually oppose critical race theory like Freddie de Boer are much more the exception than the rule, though. In fact, most people on the left seem to dislike FdB, whether they're explicit CRT adherents or not. I think this is mostly a reflection of "you don't criticize your 'team' too vociferously," which applies at the broader level. In theory the old Marxist class struggle set and the CRT race-obsessed equality of outcome types have competing goals. In practice, they cooperate quite readily, with rare exceptions.
I'm not seeing this. Can you name any members of the Marxist class struggle set that support CRT or identity politics?
Dude....I can't name any (other than the honorable FdB, as mentioned) who can actually bring themselves to oppose it.
You probably don't read a lot of left media. But if you look at the more Marxist left (people who write at Current Affairs or Jacobin for instance) you'll often see them criticize identity politics or bourgeois feminism as distractions from the real goal of class struggle. They'll occasionally defend CRT from the right-wing critics that think it's the same thing as Marxism, but they won't say anything that suggests that race or gender is a helpful additional lens through which to view the real fight. Conversely, if you look at Ibram Kendi or Robin DiAngelo or any of the other central CRT figures, you won't see them centering class in any way. I think there's a populist Teen Vogue or Vox type of leftism that pays lip service to both sorts of things, but they generally only accept a "smash capitalism" view rather than any of the Marxist stuff about class, while treating race and gender and other identities as things to think and care a lot about.
That's basically what I said: they might criticize it as a distraction (ie, they want to de-emphasize it). They won't criticize it as unworkable, ethically dubious, or factually wrong, which is what actually opposing it would look like.
I wonder how many of the respondents to that poll were right-thinking Bayesians who thought "yes, indeed, UFO sightings are very weak evidence of extraterrestrial life".
Even it were true...now what? If there were some effective way of converting millions of people, religious people would likely have discovered it long ago, or at least it's unlikely to be discovered by these particular twitter people.
But I think you're misrepresenting the argument here, it's not that people will believe in literally anything, what is meant is mostly left-wing ideologies. They are perhaps using sloppy and uncharitable language, but they're saying something very different than what you're arguing against.
To the extent that the non-religious are the ones believing in loony wokeness the most though, it seems overwhelmingly more likely that both of these things are caused by the same broad cultural trends (and a predisposition to be influenced by them) rather than the former causing the latter.
Also, note how other than atheists, old southern white men are basically the least likely to believe in astrology. If this became widely known, rather than being an obvious datum against the stereotype of this demographic being ignorant, I imagine this would lead to criticism of astrology being considered "racist".
>religious people would likely have discovered it long ago
They have, and it historically was extremely effective, the "convert or die" approach. It would be curious to see a poll on how popular it would be these days.
Well, conversion by the sword was certainly... rapid. I'm not entirely sure if "effective" is true.
Regardless, we do have other examples of religions rapidly spreading and earning converts without violence; Christianity ate the Roman Empire from the inside whilst getting executed and purged every few decades.
Sure, I'm not saying that it's the only way that religion has ever spread, but seems to be the only one to make it so on demand.
I'm skeptical of conclusions to be drawn from this. It looks a bit like "white americans most likely to subscribe to these specifc conspicracy theories that originated/took hold in white american populations". UFOs, moon landin, vaccine/autism & Qanon are a curiously specific slice of conspiracy theories
Scott said that.
I like redundantly spouting the same things as Scott, it's a net improvement on my usual ramblings.
Helps bring them back to mind for those of us halfway through the comment section. ;)
I'd predict "spiritual but not religious" blows everything else out of the water. If true, this suggests there is a dimension distinct from religious/atheist, probably related to openness to experience. Neither Big Foot nor UFOs are an "already established world view". However you get to yours (family, personality, context, pure accident), the more conservative you are with keeping that world view, the less likely you are to believe in weird stuff.
A lighthearted palate-cleanser piece, pleasant as far as it goes...I don't think it's strenuous enough that it's worth particularly updating on, beyond Yep That Sure Looks Like Lizardman's Constant and Lots Of People Sure Say They Believe In Weird Things. All the standard confounders for extrapolating from poll results come to mind, not least of which the difference between socially mediated poll-beliefs and actual action-beliefs...though I guess it's a lot harder to get concrete revealed preferences for stuff like belief in Bigfoot.
I'm reminded of a post you wrote long ago about more than 50% of Americans apparently believing in Young Earth creationism (or was it flat-earth?), despite no evidence of this whatsoever in your personal life, and how that was statistically improbable. People can cop to believing all kinds of stuff but not really have that influence reality...QAnon is sort of a weird example in this mix, since it gets lots of media airtime (like here!) and has had some meaningful impact, but is actually pretty unpopular[1].
The more interesting question would be: __why__ do people seem to have a need for some sort of coherent beliefs pre-package, such that religion and its woo substitutes get reinvented over and over and over? (Granted that some types of woo are higher-quality than others. Rationalism is a pretty nice vintage of woo, I think.) I think diving more narrowly on that topic would be interesting...the consequences, positive and negative, of not picking up any particular beliefs pre-package to fill the God-shaped hole. If it exists in the first place.
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/qanon-is-not-a-conspiracy-theory
Yes. Scott’s as smart as they come but it does read like a rationalist understanding of belief as something that you nod your head to, rather than build your life on.
Would you disagree that the world "religious" describes both of those categories in common use?
I wouldn’t disagree but I’d argue that the people who think it means the former haven’t understood the place religion has in the lives of adherents. It’s not a set of things they agree are true, it’s their whole worldview
No, I mean that there actually is a significant amount of "cultural Catholics" or whatever, who were maybe raised religiously, but were mostly nodding along to that stuff, have long since stopped going to church, but still identify and are counted as Catholics.
A very interesting essay but, as others have pointed out, it misses the point of the tweet, which is really to disparage belief in things like radical gender theory and systemic racism - few would dispute that white US evangelicals are less susceptible to these ideas than the average American.
But “mind virus” is clearly a bigger category that includes things like QAnon and astrology if it means anything at all!
Maybe it should include those as well, but it's a bit silly to write a post about the embedded tweet and focus on them, without even touching on what the tweet is clearly referring to. Scott has a long record of being strongly pro-trans &c. so maybe he would've felt a bit awkward comparing it to belief in QAnon, but without doing that you can't really come to a good conclusion on the veracity of the tweet.
I think the tweet uses the phrase “mind virus” for a reason. If it were just about one or two sets of beliefs, then it would clearly be an ad hoc theory that makes no sense. It has to be claiming something about a broader type. So tests of that broader type are the relevant ones.
I would rework the original quote as:
> Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they *adopt dangerous secular beliefs in order to signal group membership*.
There is this idea - not mine - that people signal membership by believing unlikely things, specifically things other people would be unlikely to randomly believe. The point about these beliefs is that they are *supposed* to be unlikely otherwise they wouldn't signal membership.
Classic examples include: Roman Catholics who are monotheists who believe in the Holy Trinity; certain hard leftists who believe 3rd world dictators are automatically still morally better than western governments; and conservative radical free marketeers. I think it's probably why political slogans always seem unpersuasive - people use them to signal membership, and thus embrace the stupid-sounding ones.
Most modern core religious Membership Signalling Unlikely Beliefs are pretty harmless: illogical theological/metaphysical ideas and weird lifestyle rules. They don't generally prevent a religious tradition from evolving morally, or from embracing changing knowledge of the material world. For example, the RC church still believes in the Holy Trinity etc, but no longer supports slavery (as it once did), and actually has astronomers on its payroll. Many Protestant churches are OK with homosexuality, when, back in the 17th century, their response was... nasty.
The (tragic) problem is that Unlikely Beliefs held by Atheists have to be secular ones, at best causing reputational damage to their movement - whatever it is - and at worst impacting on bystanders.
Hence the different flavours of modern "wokism", and also the fiercely held Marxist views of yesteryear's left. Either way, they are locked into these views regardless of changing political landscape or technical knowledge.
Religious folk can *also* have Secular Unlikely Beliefs - usually rightist ones - but don't need them in order to belong somewhere.
Unfortunately, to test this hypothesis, you'd have to have a politically unbiased way of deciding what views are "unlikely"...
This is a difficult thing to analyse as the number of beliefs that are wrong are essentially infinite, and limiting the data to a few culturally and temporally specific cases doesn't even scratch the surface.
FWIW The transgender craze seems to have elements of atheistic religious enthusiasm, with adherents demanding the recitation of catechism, an apparent urge to convert others to the belief, extreme anger against apostates and persecution of those who reject the faith. An analysis of the traditional religious beliefs of the cult members would be interesting.
“I would have liked to look into JFK and 9/11 conspiracies, but I couldn’t find great data.”
This is particularly unfortunate, as it means that all of the (not overtly political) “conspiracy theories“ being examined are not beliefs in literal conspiracies per se, but beliefs in the supernatural. there is an obvious confound here: beliefs in the supernatural may be more highly correlated did with religion than non-supernatural conspiracy theories.
I think the confounder is so big that the signal can barely be seen.
People who are naturally inclined to believe (because genes!) will believe both religion and other woo.
People of a more rational disposition will disbelieve both, but only given the opportunity.
The saying about losing religion is precisely about that: a given person who loses one's religion and then goes on to believe a lot of other things.
Anyhow, does someone have a twin study about religiosity ?
https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-08/what-twins-reveal-about-god-gene/
As always, it is impossible to exclude 'co-founders which we haven't recognised yet'.
>If you’re making strong claims about how everybody except you is gullible, you should at least bother to double-check the source of your quote.
That, in its essence, *is* a GK Chesterton quote:
"The nineteenth century decided to have no religious authority. The twentieth century seems disposed to have any religious authority." [Illustrated London News, April 26, 1924]
More precisely, it is a bog standard transformation of that quote, a transformation which regularly happens in all kinds of retellings that aim to increase memetic spreading by trading off subtlety for catchiness.
Such as the "increased catchiness" that was already infused into Scott's sentence above, "claims about how everybody except you is gullible". That fragment is a strawman in itself -- strawmanned for catchiness -- as opposed to the very subtle analysis which had followed in the rest of the article.
I feel like the obvious explanation here is that people who are wishy-washy on religion are also wishy-washy about belief in general. Does God exist? Maybe. Does bigfoot exist? Maybe. Does astrology have significance? Maybe. Is the moon landing fake? Maybe.
The kind of person who isn't strongly opinionated and decided about truth of things. They're not sure they know.
It's a personality thing, among other things.
Well, I'm a "vague agnostic" myself and I don't feel even remotely inclined to believe in Bigfoot or astrology or crystal healing or Q-Anon or any of that stuff. But I could just be an outlier. My take is basically that, when it comes to things here on Earth that are observable and make a difference in people's day-to-day lives, the secular materialists are correct on all counts. I just don't think we know enough about the origins and nature of the universe to rule out a Creator and/or Universal Consciousness of some kind.
I would argue that scientific materialism militates against the Bigfoot. We know from evolutionary biology that very small populations are prone to inbreeding and accumulation of genetic damage which often dooms them to extinction after they fall below a certain number of breeding pairs. The absence of ape fossils in the Northwest is a strong paleontological argument against the existence of large sustained populations of apes in the region's prehistory. If there were no plausible common ancestral species for Bigfoot and any small populations that could have been missed by fossil hunters would have been long since extinct, then where does Bigfoot come from? The Himalayas, as an offshoot of the Yeti lineage? Or one of original apes that idolized the Black Monolith and was made immortal by the Aliens?
In short, scientific materialism as focused through the lens of biological science does make Bigfoot very, very implausible, although not completely ironclad impossible.
Interestingly, as of 2005, there had been no fossils of chimpanzees ever discovered! There are some ecosystems from which it’s very difficult to get fossils, either because the ecosystem is naturally erosional (like tall mountains) or because the current ground cover obscures the soil (recent tropical rain forests). I don’t know that there’s any case for Bigfoot’s supposed environment to be like this, but there are definitely species that we know full well to exist, for which fossil evidence is missing.
Another example is the coelacanth, which was thought to be extinct because the most recent fossils are a hundred million years old, though again, deep ocean ecosystems are different from the Pacific Northwest.
(There are now a few known fossil teeth of chimpanzees: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04008 )
The problem with the Bigfoot's ancestry is that there are no ape fossils of any kind in the Americas, anywhere. Missing one species in the fossil record, like the chimpanzee, is of course possible and in the case of relatively low-density populations in the rainforest or somewhere deep in the ocean, quite easy but you are much less likely to miss a whole terrestrial lineage lasting for 25 million years (as the apes did in the Old World).
Presumably, belief in crazy stuff correlates with belief in other crazy stuff?
Similarly, nothing could be less surprising that people who are actively skeptical about religion (unlike merely not wanting to take a stance) will also be more skeptical about other supernatural claims. While skeptics frequently do have the occasional blind spot, the correlation seems an obvious theory.
The strongly religious person perhaps already has one systematic (but incorrect) belief system crowding out all supernatural claims that doesn't fit it? But this is hardly a good thing - they already believe in crazy stuff, and the objective is to *not* believe in crazy stuff, not in selecting one all-encompassing system of crazy above others.
I think the issue is that relatively few people disbelieve in religion because of skepticism. Most believe it for the same reason they vote a particular way, because their parents told them.
My parents have different political views, and the idea of being brought up in a household where both parents had the same views sounds terrifying. Sometimes I forget that this is the norm.
It sounds terrifying because you'd have to choose either to go along with your parents' politics or to reject it. If you rejected it, how would they react?
"the objective is to *not* believe in crazy stuff, not in selecting one all-encompassing system of crazy above others."
_Mostly_ agreed, but, from a harm reduction standpoint, if they've managed to pick a relatively benign delusion, that's better than if they start burning heretics, join jihadists, or help implement Mao's great leap corpseward. Of course, there is always the question of whether their system of crazy will _stay_ relatively benign. ( Hmm... I don't recall a case of astrologers killing skeptics of astrology... How's their body count? )
Presumably, if people actually take their advice, this would create widespread but mostly low-level anti-utility? That stuff adds up, though.
"if people actually take their advice, this would create widespread but mostly low-level anti-utility"
That sounds plausible. It seems _comparatively_ harmless, if it were to act as an alternative to more virulent alternatives.
On reflection - one of the comments on this post mentioned that astrology co-existed with religion, which, besides being evidence that religion doesn't innoculate against astrology, is also evidence that astrology doesn't innoculate against religion. Insofar as most people have a god-shaped-hole, perhaps we need better measurements of the shape of the hole to search for the least damaging thing to stick in it?
One of the comments mentioned the animistic gods of our hunter-gatherer past. They argued against reviving them, on the grounds that they got displaced by agricultural pantheons for a reason. Maybe the reason was an advantage for the rulers, rather than for the population as a whole? Perhaps something like genii locorum might be both closer to what we evolved with and less lethal than more recent deities?
Perhaps similarly, it would also help if our current early Iron Age agricultural gods were replaced with ones more fitting to modern life? Ones not reveling in war, genocide, slavery, patriarchy and eternal torture in cosmic concentration camps?
I think Shinto is pretty cool, too - it seems to give people the traditions and aesthetics they like, without trying to take charge of the political system or get people murdered.
"Ones not reveling in war, genocide, slavery, patriarchy and eternal torture in cosmic concentration camps?"
Agreed!
"I think Shinto is pretty cool, too - it seems to give people the traditions and aesthetics they like, without trying to take charge of the political system or get people murdered."
Maybe with some tweaks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasukuni_Shrine includes some commemoration of some rather lethal people...
Uhm, could we please avoid at least the most blatant strawmanning? No one believes it is "magically", and I think most people don't believe it is a "decision" or "transformation".
If your argument depends on using such verbal tricks, please consider the possibility that you might actually not have a good argument, or at least not as good as you believe.
Setting aside what exactly "most people" means in this context, I gather it's true that supporters of transgender rights generally believe *as a descriptive matter* that being transgender is a reflection of an antecedent unchosen state of being and not a consciously willed "decision" to "transform."
But it's also true, AFAICT, that their prescriptive beliefs commit trans rights supporters to the position that *if* a man did decide, by an act of pure fiat, to become a woman, there would be no legal, moral, or social basis for asserting that he was deluded or lying and not, in fact, a woman.
Maybe trans rights people don't believe that -- it seems to me that they do, but I don't keep close tabs on the movement, and would appreciate it if anyone can correct me on this.
But insofar as they believe that, it follows that they believe a man *can* transform into a woman because he decides to -- irrespective of whether they think this is the typical scenario, and irrespective even of whether they think it has ever empirically happened.
That's not a strawman: it's what they actually believe, or at any rate purport to believe. And it strikes me as not inaccurate (though perhaps uncharitable) to describe the belief as "magical," insofar as it appears to posit a capacity to affect the material world by sheer force of will.
They seem to be in their own kafka trap where even if they don't truly believe that men "magically" become women through legal registration, surgery, or verbal declaration, it's necessary (to "save lives") to pretend that they do believe this, and to hold forth to the absolute factuality of the person's gender to such a degree, the word "magic" begins to become appropriate.
So someone insisting that trans men are men is more like saying "I didn't see nuffin," but with moralistic social threats backing it up. They're at least similar in the sense that you can't argue the speaker around by saying "Aha, that's a double-negative, actually you DID see something! Or are you claiming to be blind?"
To me, this sounds like all of society being held hostage to one mentally fragile person that can't stand being reminded that she used to have a penis, and she'll kill herself if everyone else doesn't play along.
It’s no more magical than the belief that a person can transform from an architect to a baker, or from a millionaire to a poor person, just by deciding to.
In those cases, there are presumably mind-independent criteria that would allow us to determine from the outside whether the person had in fact become a baker or a poor person, or whether he had merely decided to do so without the transformation having actually taken place.
(Suppose the millionaire tells a trustee to give away all his money to charity, but the trustee secretly doesn't do it. The millionaire has decided to become a poor person, believes he's become a poor person, and may well be making significant life changes consistent with his belief that he is now poor. But if the trustee tells the millionaire's children, "don't tell your dad, but he's actually still a millionaire," the trustee is making a true statement.)
Are you saying that such mind-independent criteria exist in the case of a man deciding to become a woman? Such that he could believe he'd become a woman, but in fact be wrong about that? If so, it seems to me -- and again, I may be misunderstanding their position -- that your view isn't the one that's predominant in the trans rights movement.
I don’t think there are any kind independent criteria or being an architect or a baker. They are about what you decide to be attempting to do with your time. You might be an unemployed baker, who isn’t very successful, which would be analogous to a trans person who doesn’t succeed in passing at all. Or you might become a successful baker who is recognized for the quality of your baking, which would be analogous to a trans person who succeeds in passing and becomes an icon of their gender.
The case of ownership of money is perhaps a less similar one for some reasons that you mention.
But the claim is that gender is about identifying with a social grouping that one then does or doesn’t get recognized as by others, seems very much to me like much ordinary ideology about profession/career. It’s not nice to tell the waiter who thinks of himself as an unemployed actor that he’s not really an actor, and in an important sense it’s wrong to deny that the person is an actor (though it’s right that they don’t do acting well enough to be paid for it).
If I decide to become a baker because I identify with the social grouping of bakers, but carry on designing buildings all day and never do any baking, I wouldn't be deemed an unemployed baker moonlighting as an architect. I'd be an architect who happens to identify with bakers.
Similarly, say I've been an architect my entire working life and I decide to quit that job. On Monday I go apply for jobs as a hedge fund manager, on Tuesday I change my mind and apply to be a rodeo clown, and on Wednesday I change my mind again and apply to be a cryptographer. Am I therefore an unemployed hedge fund manager on Monday, an unemployed rodeo clown on Tuesday, and an unemployed cryptographer on Wednesday?
But even that scenario actually involves an independent criterion, i.e., that I'm at least putting in applications for those jobs. What if instead I decide to identify with the social grouping of hedge fund managers, and spend all of Monday searching the local public library for a book about how to apply to be a hedge fund manager? What if I happen to be quarantined with Covid and spend Monday making a plan for how I *would* search the library once I'm able to go there? What if I'm too sick even to that, so I spend Monday in bed thinking about how good it would be to make a plan for searching the library for a book on applying to be a hedge fund manager, once I have the mental energy for it?
In all of those scenarios, am I still a hedge fund manager on Monday, and then something else on Tuesday?
Come on, some guy bussing tables and going to auditions *absolutely isn't* an actor in any meaningful sense. No matter how hurt he is by that fact.
There is something wrong about the argument: "You say that you believe A. I believe that A implies B. Therefore, you believe B."
(By the way, I have no strong opinion either way on this issue. I just wish for a higher quality of debate. Like, less sneering, more empathy to the ideological opponents, etc.)
I agree that there's something wrong with that argument. I maybe shouldn't have used the phrase "follows from," which may have given the impression I was making an argument of that form. That wasn't my intention.
What I meant to say was that the position described in the sentence beginning "But it's also true..." and the position described in the sentence beginning "But insofar as they believe that..." are logically identical, not that one deductively follows from the other.
I might be wrong about that -- wrong that the two propositions are logically identical -- but I don't think there's any general problem with an argument of that form.
"their prescriptive beliefs commit trans rights supporters to the position that *if* a man did decide, by an act of pure fiat, to become a woman, there would be no legal, moral, or social basis for asserting that he was deluded or lying and not, in fact, a woman"
This is just the principle of charity applied to trans issues. It's more that I think it's highly unlikely that someone would lie about this, absent the very rare case where they would have a specific motive for doing so (and no, I don't think something as broad as "being trans is trendy now and gets you lots of SJW points" counts as a motive here). Furthermore, just in the interest of good faith, I'd prefer to act as though they're telling the truth unless there was very strong evidence to indicate that they were lying (e.g. a screenshot of a text message where a guy says that he's using they/them pronouns just to sleep with progressive bisexual girls), rather than the other way around. But that's a heuristic, not a positive claim that no one is ever mistaken or lying about their gender identity, and it's a strawman to conflate the two.
The principle of charity isn't a presumption that someone's factual assertions are factually true. It's the idea that, as between more and less reasonable possible constructions of someone's words, we should presume that they mean the most reasonable one. So, if someone with an obviously male-presenting gross anatomy says "I'm a woman," I should assume them to mean not "I have a vagina" (under the circumstances, quite likely false), but rather "I'm a woman within the meaning of that word as used by people who believe gender is at least partly a matter of subjective self-identification" (much more likely to be true).
Applying the principle of charity to the extent of situating someone's assertions within a paradigm of gender in which they make plausible sense, as opposed to one in which they don't, doesn't preclude me from disputing with them whether the former paradigm is in fact false and the latter in fact correct.
The screenshot hypothetical seems to be about someone who hasn't actually decided to become a woman, but is instead pretending to have done so. The screenshot revelation, I take it, is that all along he's really thought of himself as a man carrying out a ruse for purposes of sexual adventurism. Of course a subjectivist theory of gender would have no problem accepting the possibility of lying about *that.*
That's not what I'm talking about, as I think is exceedingly clear if you re-read the sentence you quoted. I'm talking about people who actually have the property of having genuinely, sincerely, on every conceivably relevant level decided to become a woman (and haven't subsequently renounced or gone back on that decision).
The question is whether contemporary transgender theory would allow for the possible falsity, not of the assertion that they made the decision -- which we stipulate to be true, along with whatever accompanying mental states might be required to make the decision "real" -- but of the assertion *that they are a woman.*
("Deluded or lying" was really just a verbal formula for covering the two basic logical categories of falsity. I agree that both conceptually and empirically mistake is the more relevant issue here than mendacity, by a ratio of about 99:1.)
Granted that 'magically' is a loaded word which clearly betrays the author's bias, you have to admit there's a more-than-superficial similarity between "this cracker, despite all evidence to the contrary, does in fact turn into the flesh of a dead Jew after it passes into a realm beyond easy observation" and "this penis-having XY individual is a woman based on non-objectively verifiable data."
Not really. There is a very big difference.
Namely that the people who say
"this penis-having XY individual is a woman based on non-objectively verifiable data."
are really saying
"the word woman is being redefined to include this penis-having XY individual"
Whereas the Catholics are not simply using the proper noun "Jesus" to refer to "the set of a particular dead Jew and a bunch of crackers" , rather they are literally believing that the cracker is flesh. Or, at least some of them do. Honestly I'm not sure what it means to say the cracker is flesh. Meaning, are they saying the cracker is chemical equivalent to Jesus' flesh? Are they saying the matter that composed Jesus's flesh is transported to the cracker so that you are eating the flesh that was once in Jesus's body? Or are they saying that nothing was transported but that at some point after Jesus's death the cracker became part of his flesh in a purely formal sense such that an eater of the cracker is considered to be eating Jesus' flesh.
My guess is different Christians disagree. Some of the explanations of what it means might be similar to the redefinition of the word women in that they are just redefinitions of the word "Jesus's flesh". But some of the explanations are decidedly not that.
With transgender issues, however, no claim is being made about biological facts or any kind of facts really. It is purely a linguistic claim that the word "woman" and "man" have new meanings.
Calling the TG movement a purely linguistic endeavor seems ... more than a little disingenuous to me. Otherwise you should expect them to be just as happy adopting the term "breeble" as they would be with "woman" and I suspect you wouldn't.
I never said the movement was purely linguistic. I said the claim is purely linguistic.
Meaning the claim "Soandso is a man" or "soandso is a woman" is best understood not as making any claim about biology. Indeed, it's not as though they believe that people born male can now become pregnant. Rather the *claim* is a linguistic one. That the words man and women no longer refer to "adult male" and "adult female".
But there reasons for making this linguistic claim are indeed based off of other, nonlinguistic factors.
And it's those nonlinguistic factors that are relevant to my comment.
I agree that TGs aren't making supernatural claims, but just because a claim isn't supernatural doesn't mean that it's not absurd.
I imagine that age & education level are significant confounders of what nutty notions a person might have, and would have thought that would have been mentioned.
Surprised that this is the only comment among hundreds that caught the glaring omission.
Agreed. Considering how education is such a clear predictor of political views, I would expect it to be a strong factor here.
Some people believe that Monsanto/others create seeds that grow into plants that don't themselves give fertile seeds (the "terminator gene"). This belief is false, and has some hallmarks of a conspiracy theory:
-Spread by word of mouth - mainstream newspapers don't talk about it
-Involves powerful people wielding control over less powered, through misfortune that has been "engineered" ("conspired")
-Disproven within 30 seconds of looking it up on Wikipedia, but is nevertheless quite a widespread belief
-Integrates into some other ideologies
The ideologies that it is integrated into (anti capitalism, anti-science, anti-GM) are anti-correlated with being religious, so I would expect it to be anti-correlated with that too?
Interesting! I had heard that terminator gene stuff. I believed it, but just figured it wasn't a terribly common plant/food since most everything I get at the grocery store and plant, seems to grow into at least something (often not as good as the fruit I had retrieved the seeds from).
Thanks for bringing this up. I've learned something today.
Not sure that rises to the level of conspiracy theory or even being like a conspiracy theory. Terminator genes (GURT) *were* developed, just not deployed for real, so all it takes to believe this is to mix up "was planned" with "actually happened". I don't think anyone asserted the genes were being covered up.
And BTW one of the first hits I get when searching for the topic is the Guardian, so the idea newspapers didn't talk about it is wrong.
So far as I know the guardian has reported the truth - i.e., that nobody uses the terminator gene and that nobody has researched it since the 90s
This is really interesting - I had believed this too, but thought it was because of using first generation hybrids to achieve the effect, but it looks like I was wrong.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top-five-myths-of-genetically-modified-seeds-busted
Most of those criteria apply to the actual absurdity of Monsanto stuff, that they maintain "copyright" on their seeds which you can't re-seed for "free". People would probably agree that this is at least as morally wrong as the "terminator gene", and so don't particularly care about which of those is the correct belief, when Monsanto=evil clearly follows either way.
That *is* the terminator gene
No? The grown seeds are functional, the point is that Monsanto entirely "owns" them, so as far as you're concerned they might as well not be there at all. Or, for an even bigger absurdity, if the wind happens to blow them onto a third party's field, the owner of it becomes indebted to Monsanto without having done anything!
I don’t see a conspiracy there. Monsanto and several other companies did indeed develop these technologies, or purchased the technology through acquisitions. There was a massive controversy that led to UN and national bans on it in several countries. Because of these controversies the technology was never deployed, but it certainly exists and might be deployed in the future.
Monsanto did not develop or purchase the technology.
Please feel free to correct the post with useful and relevant information. The seed was developed by Delta and Land Pine company, which Monsanto attempted to acquire. As a result of the controversy thrown up by the acquisition attempt they agreed not to deploy the tech. The acquisition failed in 1999 due to antitrust concerns, and then completed in the 2000s after Monsanto had agreed not to deploy or further develop the tech. It’s possible that following the very public debate, Monsanto also divested itself of the patent (or failed to acquire it.) None of this means that public reporting around the Terminator gene was a “conspiracy theory”.
First of all, the quotation attributed to Lewis/Chesterton has nothing particularly to do with conspiracy theories. They were reacting to the tradition of nineteenth-century materialist rationalism and its aspirations to sweep away all superstition, and to replace it with a purely rational, scientific, atheistic world-view, where there was no question of "belief", but only of firmly established scientific truth. The criticism was that science had failed to provide this expected certainty anyway, but that in addition other forms of belief (political, social, even economic) had replaced formal religion, and non-formal religious beliefs hadn't gone away. It was a fair (in my view) criticism of the wildly ambitious expectations of people like Huxley and Saint-Simon.
Second, a number of these stories are not "conspiracy theories." Conspiracy theories are theories about the existence of a conspiracy. The idea of the existence of aliens which has been debated (at least by the Catholic Church) since the time of Giordano Bruno, is not a conspiracy theory. It's only a conspiracy theory if you believe that someone is conspiring to cover it up. Russia!Russia!Russia! is a conspiracy theory because it posits the existence of a conspiracy.
Third, I'm not sure "belief" is the word here. How about "convinced by evidence" vs "unconvinced by evidence"? "Belief" is precisely what you have when you can't reach an opinion by weighing evidence. People who use acupuncture, for example, are not expressing a "belief", but generally either basing themselves on evidence that it has done them good in the past, or on assurances from others they trust. It's quite a different process from "belief" that a pill prescribed by a doctor, whose name they can't pronounce, will do them good. Likewise, astrologers (I have one in the family) are intensely pragmatic, and financial astrologers, for example, make very good livings in a climate that doesn't not easily reward failure. There's an argument that a certain sort of mindset is more open to new ideas, and less conformist with the dogmas of the day. This is an attitude more than anything else, and means people are prepared to critically examine ideas that others would just dismiss. Witness the famous scene in Brecht's Galileo, where the Cardinal refuses to look through Galileo's telescope on the basis that it is alleged to be showing things that he knows can't exist. I've always seen this as the classic take-down of nineteenth century materialist scientism.
Finally, religion is the original conspiracy theory. This applies even in the Iliad, where the gods decide everything, but is particularly strong with monotheistic religions. I knew a diplomat in an Arab country who had long arguments with his chauffeur who routinely drove through red lights. The chauffeur argued that, if he was meant by Allah, to have an accident, he'd have an accident. If not, not. I've had Muslim students who regard success or failure in examinations as outside their control. We live in a more secularised world, but we long to recapture the world-view of our ancestors (Lewis was an expert on this) when the whole world was magical and full of signs and everything was connected. Since then, we've had what Weber called the "disenchantment of the world" - see Charles Taylor's mighty tome for how this happened. As the quotation says, science once promised to provide an explanation for an otherwise meaningless world, but hasn't done so. People seek it elsewhere.
<i>Second, a number of these stories are not "conspiracy theories." Conspiracy theories are theories about the existence of a conspiracy... Finally, religion is the original conspiracy theory.</i>
I'm not sure these statements really go together -- "Things happen as God wills, and there's nothing we can do to affect the outcome one way or the other" doesn't actually posit any conspiracy.
>financial astrologers, for example, make very good livings in a climate that doesn't not easily reward failure
Do they ever predict anything which could be clearly contradicted by later observations? If not, then they can't fail, and thus prove themselves to be cunning enough to earn good living, I guess.
My impression is that they work for the kind of organisation (hedge-funds etc) that don't reward failure, bearing in mind that astrologers see themselves as something akin to weather forecasters rather than fortune tellers. But my wider point, irrespective of the specific subject, is that the word "belief" is a very tricky one. You can "believe" that the theory of evolution is solidly established, having looked at the evidence. You can "believe"that a given healing system works (I mentioned acupuncture) if it has a solid theoretical foundation and works on a significant number of people you know in predictable ways. You can "believe" that Jesus is your saviour, which is an internal conviction. In he case of astrology, it's reasonable to "believe" it provides useful results (ie the second sense) if someone has explained how the calculations are done, shown you the results of the calculations and the results seem borne out by experience or can be independently verified. In general I don't like the word "belief."
Well, my impression is that when people are consciously aware of having a particular belief, they feel that they have adequate evidence to justify is. The problem here is that people have a pretty weak intuitive grasp of epistemology, and our civilization happens to be immature enough that formal education in it isn't even considered to be a necessary part of general curriculum.
How the heck can you, despite noticing the Economist/YouGov sneaky trick of mostly choosing right-coded conspiracy theories, fall for the other sneaky trick of calling the “millions of illegal votes” theory a “conspiracy theory” in a context which makes it clear that the term denotes a *false and disproven* theory?
Be honest, Scott, WOULD YOU HAVE made this mistake if they, in the poll, called “COVID-19 was created in a laboratory” a “conspiracy theory” of this type?
In both cases, we have a not-yet-proven theory with shocking political implications *investigation into and discussion of which has been very strongly resisted and censored without ACTUAL DISPROOF or anything approaching it having been provided*.
Be honest. Would you have made this mistake if the switch I proposed had been made?
“Millions of illegal votes” and “COVID was created in a lab” are both theories that can’t be fully ruled out, but that do posit something for which there should be ample evidence that we don’t find. They’re a lot like claims that ufo sightings are best explained by extraterrestrial aliens that way.
I disagree strongly with you about the existence of evidence for both those theories, but this is not the place to discuss that; the point is that they are both “live” theories which have in no way whatsoever been DISproved or shown impossible, so don’t belong on a list of false “conspiracy theories.”
Was the theory that Bush did 9/11 ever shown to be impossible? This seems like a pretty demanding criterion.
You weren’t paying attention. It’s not necessary for it to be disproved or shown impossible, I also allowed a theory to be dismissable if there was much less evidence for it than one would expect if it were true.
In the case of 9/11, it seems very unlikely indeed that Bush tried to make it happen, but there’s plenty of evidence that various entities knew it was coming and kept quiet about it
I don't think Scott's sneakily implying that the "Millions of illegal votes" theory is false and disproven. I think he's blatantly implying it, and would explicitly state as much if asked directly. For what it's worth, I agree with him that it's a laughable theory, not a "live option".
Are you proposing that Scott must remain agnostic on any issue that remains contentious, and faces "Censorship" (however nebulously defined)? *Creationism* remains contentious, in that nearly half of Americans believe in it, and "censored" (in that it won't be taught in public schools or published in academic journals), but I'd still expect Scott to offhandedly dismiss it.
For some reason my reply disappeared from my browser; in case it is truly gone, the gist is:
Of course I am not proposing that, I am talking about evidence not contentiousness, and distinguishing not only between absence of evidence and evidence of absence, but between true absence of evidence and a situation where there is extreme discouragement of investigation and suppression of discussion of evidence so that those making less than a serious effort conclude both that evidence is much more absent than would be expected, and, if they are especially stupid, that "debunking" and "disproof" have actually occurred despite themselves being unable to reproduce such disproofs.
The “millions of illegal votes” theory deserves attention in proportion to its intrinsic plausibility, evidence, and credibility of its proponents. The COVID lab leak hypothesis and illegal votes theory aren’t comparable in this regard, IMO.
A good many atheists seem largely motivated to become atheists in order to flaunt their intellectual superiority over the credulous. This leads them to pre-sort new beliefs that come their way into "will I look credulous if I believe this or will it make me look smart" while maintaining that this is part of their deep intellectual sophistication. "I cannot believe in Bigfoot because I would look like a fool" will protect against believing in Bigfoot. But it won't do you any good against things that your social group wouldn't mock you for believing. So, if you look at the past, you will find atheists whose deep faith in science caused them to embrace phenomenology, behaviouralism, and lobotomy as a mental health procedure, who fought Ignaz Semmelweis' hygenic efforts because to believe that invisible poisions were causing childbed fever was irrational, and who thought that dialectical materialism was proven, and we are destined to the promised Socialist Paradise on Earth. I think you need to look at bad science when you want to measure the credulousness of atheists.
My suspicion is that anyone who still identifies as "Atheist" instead of "agnostic" or "no religion" these days is also the kind of person who self-identifies as a skeptic, and sort of gets off a little bit on disbelieving things like bigfoot and astrology.
I identify as an atheist despite acknowledging that there is a nonzero but <1% chance that God exists. I just think it's more intellectually honest to say "therefore I don't believe in God" rather than pretending to be undecided. In my experience it's the self identified agnostic who seems to be getting off on the idea of "but we dont really *know*"
God of any religion in particular, or simply a creator of the Universe in general? I've never seen good arguments for either that the first chance shouldn't be absurdly low, or the second pretty substantial.
"simply a creator of the Universe in general"
Hmm... If this allows creators with arbitrarily low IQs, this can more-or-less reduce down to "physics still worked around the time of the big bang", just labeling the explosion as the creator.
Well, there having been an explosion implies that there was some stuff which exploded, so something should've created that also.
Or it was just _there_, a brute fact, with no separate creator. Or one can relabel the stuff that exploded as the creator, if arbitrarily low IQ creators are possible.
<i>Or it was just _there_, a brute fact, with no separate creator.</i>
You can say that, but it's an intellectually lazy cop-out which violates the PSR and throws the whole foundation for science and logical thought in doubt.
<i>Or one can relabel the stuff that exploded as the creator, if arbitrarily low IQ creators are possible.</i>
Creation, by definition, involves making something different to oneself. A bunch of matter rearranging itself from Form A into Form B wouldn't count.
The point is that we have no good explanation for that fact, but are for some reason still supposed to confidently rule out a not-particularly-satistactory one.
What could be more absurd and untrue too than believing that you are "saved" from having to intelligently dealing with the fact that your body is going to die (and indeed intends to) by believing in the brutal murder of the God-man Jesus, or that the pope is the vicar of christ and that his "authority" is based on "apostolic succession" - never mind that some many popes were essentially psychotic and/or not fit for human company. And that monstrous "catholic" magisterium is binding on all human being, and that the Bible is the "word of god". Or in the case of amerika that it has some kind of divine dispensation or unique role in the fulfillment of "god's plan" for humankind. Or that you go to "heaven" when you die, if you are/were a good-two-shoes true believer.
Which is to point out that anyone who believes in such garbage is in fact completely deluded, and will both individually and collectively perpetrate all kinds of monstrous crimes against both "heretical" individuals and collectives.
Found the New Atheist
High school or college version, though?
Some people when you ask them if something weird is true, go “yeah, maybe. It’s a big world out there.”
Those people are likely to say yes/possible to conspiracy theories and astrology and think God is maybe real hard to say (so agnostic or religious but rarely go to church depending on where they fall on the likelihood).
Openness trait
Intriguing Post! Perhaps one explanation for the data is that the average person has a set limit to the amount of socially challenging or weird beliefs they are comfortable holding at any one time, and thus people with strong coherent beliefs outside the norm (atheists and evangelicals) are less inclined to believe in assorted woo than those who have the social credit and thought space to spare?
I think others here are onto this too. It’s easier to believe anything if lots of other people do. Social proof is real. It seems impossible for something to be false when everyone you know believes. But I think the real question is whether there is some wiring - or some function - that the ability to believe without evidence serves. That would explain the replacement of religion by other belief systems. Do we “need to believe?” Why?
I don't think they are talking about believing in UFOs. I'd guess what they are referring to is (or at least includes) social positions like "men can have periods".
I don't think anyone is worried about atheists' belief in big foot. These are strawman examples. How about woke/environmentalist claims such as:
- there are no biological differences between the sexes
- climate change will end the world in my lifetime
What’s the difference between those beliefs and “Trump is not guilty of crimes” and “Q will show us the truth”?
I don't consider myself to be on the autism spectrum in any way. (I don't think "suffer" is the general term that people like to use.)
I'm not sure which "clown in biotech" you're talking about. I think there are several people involved with problematic viral research that are opposed to further investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology because they don't want people shutting down their legal research that probably (though not certainly) didn't cause this pandemic but does pose risks of future ones.
I believe your comment may violate some of Scott's comment policies.
What is whatsboutism for 200.
There are, in fact, several climate tipping points such as a methane clathrate release or cloud feedback effects that could cause sudden 8-10°C warming this century, with corresponding devastating effects on agriculture and society. I don’t think “climate change will end the world in my lifetime” is a precise formulation of this, but “there are tail risks we don’t really understand and can’t rule out that could cause global civilizational collapse within our lifetimes” certainly is something one might reasonably be worried about.
"cloud feedback effects that could cause sudden 8-10°C warming this century"
Yup, I've read of that possibility. A normally-4 C rise could actually give us 12 C. It comes down to one computer model, and it isn't obvious if the effect is empirically testable short of triggering the full effect... If the conclusion of the paper has, say, 25% odds of being right (new research is a chancy thing...), and if there are, say, 20% odds of screwing up decarbonization badly enough to get the normally 4 C rise by 2100, then I could guess there could be 5% odds of humans being reduced to a few million hard scrabble subsistence farmers in a thawing Antarctica.
Can you provide links? Because it seems you are claiming a 4C rise could lead to an 12 C rise quite likely?
One url is: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/26/137259/the-loss-of-clouds-could-add-another-8-c-to-global-warming/
This basically is traceable to one paper about possible cloud instability. Of course, this is mostly from simulations (and some historical evidence from the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum). I take it with a large grain of salt... As I had written earlier "(new research is a chancy thing...)" Personally, I would not phrase it as "quite likely"
I would argue religion, or other belief system is not so much an "anti-virus", as a whole OS. It might be less vulnerable to mind-viruses developed for the older platform, unless they manage to adapt, but it's not inherently much more secure. Some flaws lie in our lower-level cognition processes (BIOS, if we continue with computer analogies), so they can be exploited no matter other mind-software, but really - every OS just needs to get more popular to have more viruses targeted specifically to it.
Already 10% of *atheists* believe in astrology, while there is maybe just 10% atheists in population. I wonder how many young atheists believe in it - it seems that youth is almost as good predictor of this belief as religiosity? And there are more atheists among Millennials (according to the same page). Unless these people grow out of this belief en masse, they will probably pass it on to their children, and we will see more astrology-believing atheists in future. Which means that this particular virus have adapted to the new circumstances - new software architecture, if you will.
I'd imagine as the percentage of atheists grows (if it does), we will find them as willing to believe in impossible stuff as the current, more religious population. Though probably in slightly different stuff, for entirely different reasons.
As someone else mentioned, flirting with astrology and the like is probably more about openness as a personality trait. I don’t “believe” in astrology but I like to read my horoscope sometimes. Given it’s been around for a very long time, perhaps there is some value in it we moderns don’t understand.
I think it would be helpful to get some non-US data on this before drawing any conclusions. Religion in America, particularly evangelical Christianity, is a pretty unique beast in a global context.
UFOs don't really fit with the other ones because "of all the hundreds of trillions of planets in the universe, Earth is the only one with life" is more of a woo article of faith than allowing for the possibility of extraterrestrials. A better "conspiracy theory" of this vein is the question of whether the government is keeping alien equipment in Area 51.
Believing that ufos are the result of visits from extraterrestrial life is very different from believing that there is life on other planets.
I think it would be more informative to have all of this broken down by sex. Women are more likely to go to church and also more likely to believe astrology (per the one chart that includes sex). This might explain the difference between religion and church attendance.
I speculate that if you could segment the data you'd see a clearer pattern: there's a subset of Americans who will believe in either 1) religion or 2) conspiracy theories and if you take away religion, then they will believe in conspiracy theories.
The question is can you believe in nothing? An affirmative belief that there is no god puts one in the believer category. It’s difficult for humans to dwell in a state of not knowing.
That's not how it works.
There is still a sufficient number of extant religions in the world that I strongly suspect the number of religious claims you reject vastly exceeds the number you accept (if any), for the simple reason that you've never encountered these claims.
You exist without the slightest inkling of the religious convictions of the Sentinelese, say, with no problem whatsoever.
You might argue that not knowing a claim is somehow different from knowing and actively rejecting it, but at the end of the day you will still act as if you held a particular claim to be false. You won't be celebrating the Sabbath until you know you are supposed to celebrate the Sabbath.
Thus the symmetry between theists and atheists is illusory. What is happening instead, is that both groups are faced with a claim and some measure of supporting evidence and one group (the theists) changes their belief based on the evidence, while the other (the atheists) does not.
It bears restating: not believing any particular religious claim - that is, acting as if the claim was false - is the default. You must first encounter the claim and evaluate the evidence for it before you can start believing it.
It only looks like atheists are doing the same thing - but only with regards to a small subset of all extant religious claims - because we live in societies where certain religious claims are taken as social default and are adopted without examination. If we take a wider perspective and consider *all* religious claims being made around the world, we find the theists and atheists to be mostly on the same page - in a state of ignorance or active disbelief.
This is what is meant by: "I merely believe in one God fewer than you do".
It's also worth pointing out that this has nothing to do with the question of beliefs or knowledge in a more general sense. If God was subject to the sort of empirical testing that our everyday knowledge is (say, "what goes up must come down"), we wouldn't be having this conversation.
There is research to show that belief precedes knowledge. In other words, even to entertain an idea you must be open to its validity. The default switch is belief (hmm, wonder if so and so is true) not the disinterested weighing of evidence. Therefore I’d say back to you: that’s not how it works.
“Will believe in anything” is obviously wrong.
Absent survey data on things like “communism” or “critical race theory”, we don’t get to see the more interesting stuff.
My guess would be that for most people, they aren’t particularly conscientious about their beliefs; it’s a bag of stuff that more or less feels good when you say it. A smaller subset probably cares about “does my tribe allow/mandate this belief”, and then a tiny tiny tiny subset probably tries to make their beliefs coherent and consistent.
What is a post-rationalist and why are they more vulnerable to woo?
Interesting. I do agree with claims that one of our evolved brain's most distinguishing features is conceptualization, but i don't align with either of the quoted refrains you used to exemplify the attitudes you would associate with a post-rationalist. I'll note I don't identify as a post-rationalist nor a rationalist either.
The long version:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5LP6Jc8ztwcyb296X/outline-of-metarationality-or-much-less-than-you-wanted-to
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2Ee5DPBxowTTXZ6zf/rationalists-post-rationalists-and-rationalist-adjacents
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qgJfyAbzwnWt4a7Go/the-archetypal-rational-and-post-rational
The short version:
It is a subculture of people that seem to admire some aspects of the rationalist community (the culture of trying to be reasonable) but reject some other aspects (atheism, Yudkowsky). Their favorite blog is Ribbonfarm.
They admire writings of David Chapman, because he criticizes rationality a lot -- but later Chapman said that when he writes "rationalist", he does not actually mean the rationalist community, but rather something that Buddha criticized long ago, and that the rationalist community does not seem to fit his definition of "rationalists".
Their favorite claim to superiority over rationalists is that the rationalists are stuck at Kegan's level 4, while themselves are at Kegan's level 5, because they realize that rationality is just one of many possible approaches to understand the world (religion would be one of the alternatives).
Kegan's levels = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_developmental_framework
Thank you for the thorough reply. Reading through those added to the confusion I have around all of this labeling and conceptualization within these communities. Seems like its inherently messy as this quote highlights (it makes me think of the spider man pointing at spider man memes).
> I think it's lovely and useful that we have labels, not just for rationalist, but for rationalist-adjacent and for post-rationalist. But these labels are generally made extensionally, by pointing at people who claim those labels, rather than intensionally, by trying to distill what distinguishes those clusters.
My gut has long felt like there's a degree of unnecessary overthinking amongst people trying to define an identity. I like labels for conceptualization, but I don't like labels that oversimplify. We're all people and people are complicated... I don't think a 'rationalist' exists just like I don't think a 'narcissist' exists. These labels categorize traits that can present in any person. Even at the extreme end, someone who uses 100% rational approaches or 100% narcissist approaches is still a human and could shift the paradigm if they choose to. I stay open to a possible value in these types of labels, but in my personal experience I have yet to find value or hear an argument that convinced me.
Two follow up questions:
1) Is there an empirical basis for "post-rationalists" being more subjected to woo? Is it based on the anecdotal and subjective relationship between the communities? Or is it simply a playful jab at them?
2) Is there a counter claim to the Kegan's level claim?
Post-rationality used to be a hot topic a few years ago, but I didn't hear about it about since covid (maybe I just wasn't paying attention), so my memory is not fresh here...
> Is there an empirical basis for "post-rationalists" being more subjected to woo?
Many of them approve of Buddhism (beyond mere "meditation is healthy"), so if you consider Buddhism a woo (I do), this would be the most obvious example. If I understand it correctly, David Chapman is a leader of some local Buddhist group.
I think there are more examples, but nothing specific comes to my mind now.
> Is there a counter claim to the Kegan's level claim?
Finding a vaguely defined hierarchy of "psychological maturity", putting myself on the top, and people I didn't like below me, is something I used to do in my 20s, and afterwards I felt quite ashamed of it, because it was very immature. -- See? Two can play this game. Now I have cleverly sketched a new hierarchy of psychological development that puts my current self on the top, and the post-rationalists below me. This is a cheap move that proves nothing.
Using the definition from Wikipedia, how would you even know whether a stranger on internet "has their sense of self determined by a set of values that they have authored for themselves" or "is free to allow themselves to focus on the flow of their lives"? (The former is level 4, the latter is level 5.) If you ask dozen different people WTF this means, they will give you dozen different answers. Is there even a contradiction? Is having values incompatible with perceiving the flow of your life? Is going with the flow really superior to having values... and isn't this a value statement itself?
Another explanation that post-rationalists use is that people at level 4 think in "systems", while people at level 5 think in "systems of systems". Again, feel free to guess WTF this means, and how specifically you would diagnoze a stranger on internet. My interpretation, using the LW lingo, would be that people at level 4 mistake their map for the territory (have only one perspective for looking at things), while people at level 5 are using multiple maps (multiple perspectives) flexibly.
But saying that rationalists are incapable to see things from multiple perspectives is in my opinion just a map/territory confusion. Yes, I believe that there is ultimately only one reality, but "a map is not the territory", i.e. you can still have multiple imperfect perspectives of the same underlying reality. It's precisely the awareness of the imperfection that allows me to use multiple perspectives without believing in multiple realities. So in my opinion, the post-rationalists have this backwards. They are not "beyond" the (Less Wrong style) rationality; they just fail to understand its finer points. (But if you ask them, it's the other way round, and it's me who fails to understand their finer points. Again, two can play this silly game.)
...sorry if this was too abstract and confusing. The short version is that all this Kegan-something seems like a superficially polite way to make a rude statement "if you are an atheist and materialist, you are a dumb person incapable of considering things from multiple perspectives". (To clarify, this is not something that Kegan says. It is something that post-rationalists imply when they smugly insist that all rationalists are at Kegan level 4.) First, if that's what you believe, at least have the decency to state your accusation openly. Second, I don't think it's true; it's a strawman.
> Many of them approve of Buddhism (beyond mere "meditation is healthy"), so if you consider Buddhism a woo (I do), this would be the most obvious example. If I understand it correctly, David Chapman is a leader of some local Buddhist group.
Anecdotal and not emperical? Arguably any spiritual practice can be viewed as having "woo" by someone else... and this article gave some good data to suggest that it is hard to evaluate religious woo, though it didn't touch on Buddhism as it was western-centric.
> Finding a vaguely defined hierarchy of "psychological maturity"...
The wikipedia article has a lot of detail and I see there is some research to back it. Interpretation of some of the phrasing is odd but I understand the idea and naturally it mirrors other developmental frameworks. I do agree with is the difficultly of categorizing someone based on limited online interactions. I'd have to look at how actual psychological assessments are done (I don't focus on this kind of MH work I focus on trauma recovery and healing), but either way the idea of psychologically assessing two similar online communities is simply foolish in my opinion. This isn't to say that, under the lens of this concept, they are right or wrong... rather to ask "what is the actual value of this?" Concepts aren't something to hold onto... leading to
> Another explanation that post-rationalists use is that people at level 4 think in "systems", while people at level 5 think in "systems of systems". Again, feel free to guess WTF this means, and how specifically you would diagnoze a stranger on internet. My interpretation, using the LW lingo, would be that people at level 4 mistake their map for the territory (have only one perspective for looking at things), while people at level 5 are using multiple maps (multiple perspectives) flexibly.
I have no doubt someone at level 4 and level 3 (perhaps not level 2) could assess an external situation from more than one perspective. I understand the differentiation as an internal level... I might try to reframe 4 as having a concept of the self and 5 as letting go of a concept of the self. In that case, both rats/post-rats could be at level 4 or 5 and we both seemingly agreed, this isn't an armchair activity.
> ..sorry if this was too abstract and confusing.
No need to apologize!! I appreciate you taking the time to entertain my questions, step back in time, and try to explain things for me. I feel like I've gotten a good taste of these ideas and how the communities are conceptualizing themselves. The Kegan levels are as ephemeral as any ideas about the self, id, ego, buddha nature, natural spirit, etc, all of which can be reasoned about in limited fashion as language is a clumsy vehicle for communicating the internal human experience that underlies this. And the rat/post-rat debate idea. Hard pass. I like thoughtful people and thoughtful ideas, every community has its mix imo. Even the one with the "most developed" people... whatever that means lol
On the side of religious people, there's a bunch of neat measures for degree of religiosity (church attendance, prayer, and what not), but I would like to point out that atheists are hardly a homogeneous group in their own right. On one hand you have atheistic leity, people who are atheists because their parents raised them as one or because evolution debunks the existence of God (while their understanding of evolution bears more resemblance to Pokemon than the modern theory), and on the other hand you have people who are committed.
I would suspect belief in conspiracy theories or astrology largely comes from people's surrounding cultural environment/memes and that the self-identified atheists are unlikely to believe in bigfoot or moon landing hoaxes even if they "believe in science" in just about the same way as most non-church-going religious people do in their religion. Perhaps this is somewhat different in the States where I could see atheists being more likely to be independent thinkers of one kind or another, but by my reckoning most atheists aren't anything like that, and these people either dominate or at least strongly influence the polls: one would expect committed atheists familiar with natural sciences, naturalistic philosophy, epistemology, etc, to be even less likely to believe in these specific conspiracies and falsehoods asked about in the polls. I would like to think this isn't the case, but I do however concede the possibility that committed naturalists might be more likely to believe in some other kinds of bunk (or things that will turn out to be bunk, while in principle being knowable as bunk right now), just like the final graph in the post would show for post-rationalists.
Some of the charts break out “atheist”, “agnostic”, and “nothing in particular”, which sound sort of like three levels of commitment to atheism, and do in fact pattern in some similar ways.
I’m surprised none of you smart people questioned a sub-premise of this article: that UFOs are a conspiracy theory. There is now emerging evidence that UFO/UAP are indeed real, although not clear what they are or where they are from. But all you Bayesians should update your priors on this one, because the evidence is piling up that something real is definitely being seen by sensors and military pilots (and congressmen).
We should do a meta-poll within this group of religious conviction vs belief in anything Scott writes.
Conspiracy theories do come true sometimes
The ufo one is the belief that ufos are visits from extraterrestrial intelligences, not the belief that there are some systematic patterns of aerial phenomena that haven’t been identified and look a lot like flying objects.
I would argue that assuming this is not in fact the case is more cognitive shortcut than the other way around. Given the existing evidence of flight characteristics as well as the sheer size of the known universe, it seems strange that the default position should be anything other than: “it’s extraterrestrial”. But even ignoring the Drake equation aspect, the evidence, and especially the reaction from military pilots and congress people with access to black projects seems to indicate these flight characteristics are potentially hundreds of generations above what we have, and likely require new physics. So all told, I’m not saying someone hasn’t cracked the origins of gravity and unified physics and then engineered a craft based in this and is flying it around for fun around our military….but that seems an extremely high bar given what we know of the science and what we see happening with other major superpowers. Just sayin
I think it’s clear that it’s not flying objects created by humans. But “extraterrestrial” rules out strange meteorological phenomena (when we know there are strange meteorological phenomena we only discovered in the past few decades, like many different forms of lightning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning) ) as well as unknown aerial microorganisms and the like, and “intelligence” rules out all forms of weird physics that we don’t understand.
I think that concluding it’s extraterrestrial intelligence is very restrictive, and that what we can conclude is just: there are real phenomena, and they aren’t made by humans.
Yes I think this is a good summary given what we know. Just one extra data point, which is not enough but does exist: recent interview with Tucker Carlson (ugh I know but still) and Dr. Gary Nolan describes that some people have touched these “craft” and then suffered health effects that seem related to radiation damage. But I guess it’s a data point moving away from weather phenomenon and more towards physical object with conscious control (it reacts to humans)
"...the existing evidence of flight characteristics..."
The evidence seems pretty shabby...
https://www.metabunk.org/home/authors/mick-west.1/
I think it’s important to examine every possible explanation, including the most likely earthly ones. However, most of Mike West’s debunking struggles against Occam’s Razor. If you have to twist yourself into a pretzel to explain away something, it’s probably not the likely explanation. That said, I would check out the pentagon report that came out. They are hardly prone to overstating something of this magnitude. And they don’t use the “A” word…but to quote: “
In 18 incidents, described in 21 reports, observers reported unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics.
Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion. In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings.
The UAPTF holds a small amount of data that appear to show UAP demonstrating acceleration or a degree of signature management. Additional rigorous analysis are necessary by multiple teams or groups of technical experts to determine the nature and validity of these data. We are conducting further analysis to determine if breakthrough technologies were demonstrated. “
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdf
"However, most of Mike West’s debunking struggles against Occam’s Razor. If you have to twist yourself into a pretzel to explain away something, it’s probably not the likely explanation."
Wow! I don't see it that way at all! All his debunking seems completely mundane and plausible to me. (As there wasn't enough time for you to review the link, I'll assume that you were familiar with West's work from before.)
The report predates West's stuff. As far as I'm concerned, West leaves the evidence in complete tatters.
Philip Mason does a pretty good job of debunking as well, if you can get past his speech impediment...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=thunderfoot+ufo+busted+
Just watched the video link. I think in general, the videos of the UAP definitely don’t show anything that couldn’t fit known flight characteristic s. They don’t seem to be all the weird, from my non-military perspective. However what gets me is all the evidence that’s being cited from many eye witnesses of the radar returns, as well as the pilot interviews. When you put it together, what seems to come out is: 1) they are solid, 2) they can come from above 80,000ft. 3) they can drop from 80,000ft to 2ft in a few seconds (~27,272 mph) and hover 4) they can enter water, air and space 5) they don’t have traditional propulsion 6) they can outlast anything we have in the air by hours 7) they’ve been around since at least WW2.
Huge caveat: it’s all heresay until we can see the radar returns and the pilot GoPro and the FLIR and the satellite footage simultaneously. But again what’s more likely: massive delusion across multiple people, organizations and timescales, or what seems more likely: when a bureaucratic military is faced with ultra powerful foes that they don’t understand, the org just freezes up and decides to not talk about it. Seems like a natural reaction to me. That’s the case for the non-ordinary explanation. This is just my opinion here but I also think there is a strong argument in the positive as well. Basically, this form of behavior is very well predicted by someone who is able to negate the effects of gravity. Since we know gravity warps space-time, traveling this way would make matter itself bend around you. No need for propellant, and no difference between air, space or water. All matter bends around you. This also would allow signature reduction through the same mechanism. Ultra high speed sharp turns wouldn't create crushing G forces, because G is effectively rendered to 0. Finally, the one area of physics we truly have not fully understood is gravity. It’s a key missing link between the two major theories and hasn’t been unified into one cohesive theory. Any advanced civilization would likely have to solve this question at some point. And just like you and I are communicating through manipulated electromagnetic energy, who knows what that level of control would look like for gravitational force. No idea. Finally, current theory of relativity forbids faster than light travel, which a major loophole: if you can manipulate the space-time fabric itself, you could accelerate to faster than light travel, without braking relativity in the local frame of reference. An existing framework for this is called the Alcubierre drive. We don’t have the technology to implement it, but the math checks out if we could. So now, the true question becomes, out of the estimated 100-200 billion galaxies in the universe, is it possible than any other life emerged and it evolved long enough to build these types of drives? If so, they would unlock access to the whole universe, since the distance no longer become constrained by light years. And if they did invent it and travel, why wouldn’t they come to say hi? They probably wouldn’t land, and they probably don’t care enough to destroy us. They probably would just check out our early nuclear technology (directly related to our understanding of physics) and would play cat and mouse with our big lumbering flying machines. Given the statistical odds and how well this fits the stated evidence, is it so hard to believe? Seems like to think the opposite is tantamount to being pre-Copernican.
Counterpoint: "The opiate of the middle classes" - https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb05/taleb05_index.html
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The problem with all of your examples is that they're academic. Whether or not you believe in bigfoot -- in itself -- has no influence over your life. I suspect that atheists are more likely to believe in scientific racism, eugenics, Marxism-Leninism, neo-reaction, "wokism" (stop saying "blacklist"!!), etc.
> Strongly religious people and outright atheists were usually less likely to believe in conspiracy theories.
This makes a ton of sense to me. Both atheists and church-goers belong to identity groups centered around belief. Believing anything that isn't explicitly condoned threatens to put you in the outgroup.
The unaffiliated are susceptible because they have no fear of believing the (morally/socially) wrong thing.
Edit: This also explains why church-going is such a strong predictor of resilience to conspiracy theories--churchgoers explicitly belong to a belief-oriented community. The religious-but-non-church-going people wouldn't lose many friends if they recanted (or said they believe in bigfoot).
I think you're incorrect on why most people go to church, if we're talking about the regular attendance group. You state that they do it for family or cultural reasons, but those are the people who are infrequent and fill the middle role. Those who regularly attend generally have stronger beliefs in God and more strictly follow the beliefs of the religion.
Always amazes me how thoroughly secular thinkers refuse to believe that religious folks believe the things they say they believe. I've seen my religious friends have this conversation with folks *who also grew up religious* repeatedly to no avail:
"Why do you believe X?"
"Because my church's leadership says that's what God wants me to believe."
"Haha, no seriously why?"
"...I...I told you."
"Okay but really"
There actually are people who believe God speaks to them, or speaks to their leaders, and who base most of their life decisions on that premise. They make up a large minority of the country.
Reminds me of historians arguing that some medieval theological controversy was *really* about political power, or economics, or pretty much anything apart from what the actual participants said it was about.
Things can be about more than one thing. Important things usually are about more than one thing! The fact that some internecine conflict within the medieval Catholic Church started as a dispute over actual theology does not preclude it from *also* being a conflict over politics or economics or culture.
I always understood the quote (whether its Chesterson or Lewis) to be more of a reference to the idea that the human mind seems to be prewired for religiosity. What Christians in particular mean when they say this is something like "you are going to believe in something. If not a Christian worldview and man's purpose in the universe, what?"
So likelihood of belief in things like UFOs and Bigfoot strikes me as (at least) one off from the real question. It may serve as a proxy for a particular predisposition of susceptibility to odd beliefs, but I am not sure.
I am a believer, so it is really hard for me to step outside the paradigm. I do, however, relate well to cultural Christians like Theodore Dalrymple and Christopher Degroot. The coherence and the second order outcomes of Christendom, which evolved into what we now call "western civilization" are pretty hard to ignore. In short, you don't have modern society without it, even if you think the Christian idea of God coming down in the form of a man to save the world from itself is really cooky (or off-the-charts improbable).
The far-left looks likes a religion to me. They have dogmas, sacraments, clergy, prophets, etc. They just don't call them that. I think that's the point of the quote.
I also understand the arguments AGAINST this line of reasoning. It is pretty easy to deconstruct. One might say;
"Oh, so I have to accept holy wars, the inquisition, and so on in order to have modern medicine, space travel and eating utensils? No thanks."
And that is a good point. So, as a Christian, I don't make that argument. Its a topic for a different discussion anyway.
To be fair, if you accept the "Wokeism, leftism, liberalism, etc., is a kind of religion" framing, I think it's fairly clear that we *do* have our own holy wars and inquisitions -- "Defending/spreading democracy/freedom" is a stock justification for modern wars, and lots of countries have laws against hate speech. So I'd say the question is less "Do we have to accept holy wars and the inquisition?" than "What sort of holy wars and inquisition do we have to accept?"
Agreed. "Americanism" is a religion too. It cloaks itself in something like Christian principles (some say "Judeo-Christian" as if that is a thing).
The bottom line is, I could see myself reaching a point where I walk away from faith-based world view. What I would look like as a member of society is a mystery from this vantage point. I am not sure what I would replace it with.
'To be fair, if you accept the "Wokeism, leftism, liberalism, etc., is a kind of religion"' then you have completely redefined the word religion so as to be meaningless.
Even if those ideologies are not religions by the book definition, they share enough in form, function and outcomes for the analogy to hold up fairly well. I am not sure that makes the word religion meaningless.
It is possible to believe in anything religiously. The vast majority of people with left, liberal and anti-discrimination views do not believe in them religiously. If you are going to call all of those religions then you might as well call pet-ownership, football-viewing and BBQ-ing religions.
I guess I would argue that you don't have to believe in anything "religiously" when it is the dominant, ambient, legally binding air we breathe. Try gently turning away a gay couple wanting to have a wedding cake made (and even refer them to another bakery) and watch what happens.
People are quite happily calling Buddhism a religion, even though under some definitions, it arguably doesn't count as a religion. Likewise Confucianism, although that's less common.
Buddhism as created by Buddha may not have been a religion. After he died it adapted a bunch of Hinduism to improve salability. Then as it added on a ton of mysticism as it traveled around to various asian countries. Virtually every flavor now has gods and spirits and prayers. A bit along the lines of, wtf would Jesus think if he ran into a Hare Krishna in the airport.
I think there might be a misunderstanding here regarding the meaning of the original quote. In the context in which it is commonly used, the statement “will believe in anything” does not usually refer to a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, but rather to a need to look for an alternative overarching worldview that will provide a similar sense of belonging to something bigger than oneself, as traditional religion had in the past for many people.
A number of commentators have made such a point with regards to “wokeism” - and also pointed out the parallels between it and traditional religion (a high priesthood who may not be argued with, a concept of original sin, dogma that may not be questioned etc). A recent New Yorker article on William MacAskill makes very similar claims regarding some passionate adherents to EA.
The point I think those who use this “quote” are trying to make is that people in general have a fundamental need for an overarching belief system, and the abandonment of traditional religion has seen a not-unrelated-rise in other “religions” that provide a similar sense of meaning and purpose for adherents
Yes
At risk of derailing conversation, I don't think replying to any comment here with a single word "Yes" as you've done a number of times... adds anything. Maybe you could amplify the aspect or point you found useful in the parent comment instead?
At the very least, can you at least identify which part of the comment you are saying "yes" to? In all cases I've seen you reply "yes" it is not at all obvious that the comment could be replied to with "yes" and allow us to infer anything about what you mean. The comments aren't yes/no questions.
It’s an expression that I found the comment particularly useful. As such meant for the person who made the initial comment. But you are correct, it doesn’t add to the conversation. There is no like button so this was my equivalent. I don’t know whether it’s useful or not for the original commenter to get this feedback, but I in general I think it’s useful to know what ideas resonate with people.
I think the "will believe anything" statement isn't really about specific facts or theories that can be verified or falsified. It's about how one navigates the moral universe, how one discerns right and wrong and acts on that discernment. People who make the "will believe anything" claim seem to be arguing that non-believers just cobble together whatever bits of morality they can find and paste them together as it suits them in any given time or place.
Though that meaning of the statement rings true to me, I'm still not sure I really agree with that statement. I'm not sure how I'd go about proving or disproving it, or what sorts of epicycles I'd have to invent in order to do so.
I am in agreement with your notion that its about coherence. My mental model for people is that we are all future predictors, and that it’s hard to predict another future predictor who could do literally anything, so we try to align on assumptions as a means of cooperation.
All the responses here of the form “but what about communism, etc” are begging the question. The point is that if, as the claim goes, we’ve uninstalled an antivirus, then we should expect more viruses. The viruses like astrology are tests for that, and ones that can be agreed upon as viruses. Communism or CRT doesn’t fit that bill because they can’t be agreed open, and particularly won’t be agreed upon as viruses for the people that this matters most to: the non-religious. The only way to persuade me that religion is an antivirus is to demonstrate that it prevents things that I think of as viruses! Astrology is the test for that.
Re Klansmen and "more or less devout", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_recruitment cites a requirement that they be specifically Protestant.
"The organizations that the KKK targeted for bloc recruitment were usually fraternal lodges and Protestant churches. Protestant ministers were offered free membership and powerful Chaplain status within the KKK."
"I haven't seen any data on the devoutness of white supremacists of the last say ten years."
Sorry, neither have I. And, as you noted, the klan has gone through three versions, so their 2.0 recruiting may not say anything useful about the 3.0 version.
"a lot of white supremacists and far right types have started gravitating to Orthodoxy and specifically Russian Orthodoxy in recent years" In the United States? That is an interesting and odd development. ( There has to be some way to make a bad joke about Trump and Putin out of this... )
I think it's pretty much incontestable that things like Communism and CRT are what the original quote was about. Unsurprisingly, many of the responses here reflect the sense that talking about astrology and Bigfoot seems like oddly changing the subject to other phenomena that aren't in any obvious way the same sort of thing.
If the claim is that the waning of traditional religious belief leads to the rise of a variety of modern substitute religions, then what we'll ultimately need to be looking at are things that large numbers of smart, sophisticated people at a given time believe are fundamentally right and true. We'll specifically need to be looking at belief systems that appear outwardly "religious" insofar as they involve metaphysical claims that aren't easily susceptible of empirical disproof -- like that white supremacy pervades every aspect of society or that the logic of history leads inexorably to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
You seem to be assuming that astrology is a reasonable proxy for those kinds of belief. But I just don't see why that would be so. Astrology is older than virtually all the major world religions and has existed alongside them for centuries. It doesn't strike me as relevant to the question of whether post-religious people end up being attracted to new ideologies that are essentially religions, albeit of an implicitly rather shabby sort.
Let me put it this way. If I claim that atheism is an antivirus and point to the fact that religious people believe that God exists, wouldn’t I be begging the question? And would it convince any religious person that atheism is an antivirus by showing that? No, but if I showed that religious people believe in astrology but atheists don’t (hypothetically), then that would perhaps convince some religious people that atheism was an antivirus. And if I failed to show that atheism defended against astrology, then I would have a hard time claiming it is an antivirus as even this really simple one got past its defenses! The reason that astrology works is that we both agree it’s nonsense.
Once I have an established that atheism is an antivirus I can then use it to argue about religious beliefs being viruses, evidence of the frailty of religious thinking, or whatever. But those aren’t what you use to demonstrate that it is an antivirus in the first place. That’s why Scott needs to talk about astrology and not about CRT even if those claims were about CRT in the first place!
Yeah, but if the quote means "People who don't believe the stuff I believe are likely to believe other stuff (which obviously I think is incorrect by definition)" then we're having a completely irrelevant discussion here.
American Christians don't believe in astrology because their interpretation of the Bible decries astrologers. They don't believe in communism because communist theory is often explicitly anti-religious and also something something protestant work ethic. We might draw a distinction, but we're not saying the thing. It's kinda begging the question to say "okay well we'll say the quote is true if Christianity protect Christians against believing obviously wrong things by our definition of obviously wrong, ignoring their definition of obviously wrong."
Maybe it's done in the spirit of intellectual charity, i.e. would becoming religious make us less likely to believe wrong things. Except...the writer and most of the commenters think Christianity is a wrong thing, so definitionally no. It's fake intellectual charity - we were never going to be convinced by this, which makes sense because it's not for us.
"If I claim that atheism is an antivirus and point to the fact that religious people believe that God exists, wouldn’t I be begging the question? And would it convince any religious person that atheism is an antivirus by showing that?"
No, but then I don't think the original quote was aimed at people who think that CRT is true. If it's trying to convince anyone (as opposed to giving a boost to people who already agree with the tweeter), it's likely atheists/agnostics who already agree that CRT is a mind virus, and who might therefore be amenable to an argument along the lines of "If religion immunises people against this thing we both agree is a mind virus, maybe there's something to be said for it."
I suppose that’s possible. The other obvious audience is the already religious. But Scott’s audience includes nearly 100% who will reject astrology and so that makes the most sense to use for the argument here. And again, if religion doesn’t cure astrology, how can you claim it’s an antivirus? This seems a necessary condition and also a neutral topic to base it off.
I think the other difficulty if you hinge on CRT etc as being the obvious mind virus, then you have to cope with other things that are highly religiously biased and even more obviously mine virus, like Qanon. Why doesn’t religion stop that virus? PRRI poll finds that born again and evangelicals are more likely to be Qanon even after controlling for all the obvious stuff - that doesn’t mean a lot but it does mean religion isn’t effective against this obvious virus. It’s totally a death knell for the theory in my books. If you include CRT, I think you doubly have to include those, so the only way this theory has weight is if you stick to the boring neutral virus of astrology.
<i>But Scott’s audience includes nearly 100% who will reject astrology and so that makes the most sense to use for the argument here.</i>
Only in the sense that, since the drunk guy can see most clearly under the lamppost, it "makes sense" for him to look for his car keys there, regardless of where he last saw them.
No, I’ll actually make the opposite claim: CRT is exactly the wrong test for this. One group has claimed to have an antivirus. To disprove that, you don’t need to look at whether others have viruses. You need to look at whether the people with the “antivirus” have viruses. And for that, you look at Qanon. The claim is falsified.
If atheists claimed an antivirus, you might want to search CRT or other liberal coded ideas. That’s a different claim though and one I don’t expect to be particularly true either.
I think you're getting hung up on the notion of "virus" and "antivirus" and losing sight of the fact that they're metaphors and don't mean anything outside the context of the original utterance.
The claim is that religion provides protection against a certain type of thing. Communism and CRT are central examples of that type of thing. Insofar as astrology is also that type of thing, or a relevantly similar type of thing, then it makes sense to discuss it in evaluating the claim.
But if astrology isn't the same as or even similar to the sort of thing religion is hypothetically supposed to protect against, it's not relevant. It doesn't matter if what the phrase "mind virus" evokes for you is a category of which astrology is a central instance, if that's not the category the original claim is about.
Do you think that Lewis and Chesterton would not have thought this applied to New Age woo? I think it seems like exactly the kind of thing this statement would be about. The choice of CRT, for example, seems much more like a “dunking on your political opponents” choice than a good test. I can always pick a property of my in group, say that it protects against mind viruses, and point to a characteristic of your in group as evidence. Commenters and Scott insisted on not allowing conservative coded viruses like Qanon to count - but commenters insist that the only valid test is liberal coded viruses? Of course those correlate with anything that is not conservative, yawn!
Oh, I agree that there's an element of dunking. More precisely, the argument simply assumes as a premise that some number of avowedly secular 20th-century (and now 21st-century) mass movements were (a) some combination of evil and stupid and (b) elicited "belief" from their adherents in the same sense that one might be said to "believe in" a particular religion.
If you don't share that premise, then yeah, the argument is going to be a non-starter for you. I don't quite agree that it's only about left-wing movements (although that's clearly what the people invoking it today have in mind). Fascism would be a very central example. In fact, if you want a neutral example to test the theory on, National Socialism would probably be your best bet, as a political ideology about which there's a virtually universal consensus that it was thoroughly bad.
QAnon seems like fair game too, though I don't know enough about it to be quite sure.
Your question is an interesting one. I don't know to what extent Chesterton and Lewis saw what we'd now think of as New Age beliefs as a major target, as compared to the various forms of scientific materialism or romantic nihilism, though I'm sure they were broadly opposed. Maybe somebody who knows those authors better can set me straight.
"Communism or CRT doesn’t fit that bill because they can’t be agreed open, and particularly won’t be agreed upon as viruses for the people that this matters most to: the non-religious."
Well, the fedora-tipping atheist community decided that Communism and CRT were viruses like other religions quite a while ago, that's why they started DeBOONKing them.
(Then they got called racist. Then actual racists turned up. Now it's 2022 and I hate the world.)
People tend to forget that communism rose to power in deeply religious Russia, and CRT was invented in the US, the most religious of Western societies. Not exactly a great argument for the mind-fortifying effect of religion.
I don't see that that's in any way inconsistent with the theory, though. If anything, it seems to me to support it.
The general claim is that people who divorce themselves from traditional religion tend to have a religion-shaped hole in their mental architecture that they turn to some religion-shaped object to fill. If that turns out to be especially true in societies where religiosity plays an unusually central cultural role, that's exactly what the theory would lead you to expect.
I mean, this is already a quite familiar thesis (and by no means only on the right) about BLM and related developments in the US, encapsulated in the phrase "Great Awokening": that this is literally just the latest iteration of the historic American pattern of Protestant revivalist movements, albeit shorn of the formal trappings of doctrinal Christianity.
I feel "human minds have a God-shaped hole in them, if you don't fill it with God, it will be filled with some false religion" and "religions drill a hole in the human mind and then sometimes other religions claw away the control over that hole" are fairly different claims with fairly different moral consequences.
I think most hard atheists would agree with the second description (and consider atheism a project to patch up those holes so they cannot be utilized by external agents, and stop the drilling in the longer term) and disagree with the first.
That's a good point. It's sort of hard to think through how to test the two claims against each other, given the relative paucity of societies that don't have at least some history of what looks like having the religion-hole drilled into them.
One possibility might be to look at somewhere like China. Granted, the usual line about China is that it had a "state religion" until the early 20th century, but I gather that's only because Western societies generally had state religions and naturally saw Confucianism as playing the same role in China. If Western societies had instead been atheist with some vague superstitions about ancestors, they doubtless would've seen China as another atheist country with vague superstitions about ancestors. (They emphatically would not have thought the same about, say, India under Aurangzeb.)
Then again, what if Confucianism was filling the God-shaped hole all along, and then Maoism came along and filled the Confucianism-shaped hole?
The alternative would be to look somewhere we have reason to believe the atheist hole-filling project has succeeded at a society-wide level, in a way that's clearly distinguishable from tons of people having had a very messy divorce from religion and stumbling around wearing "fill my God-shaped hole" T-shirts.
The place that, based on my own dubious amateur impressions, seems closest to that is the Czech Republic. But I don't know much about what cultural life is like there, and to what extent woke/QAnon/occultist/whatever beliefs tend to get traction there.
Estonia, Japan and Netherlands are also close. If you stay within urbanized parts of the country and interact mostly with educated or economically productive people, you can add the rest of Northern Europe, other East Asian countries, maybe even NZ, Australia and Canada (less sure about those though). I wonder if there are any stats on Taiwan.
> But I don't know much about what cultural life is like there, and to what extent woke/QAnon/occultist/whatever beliefs tend to get traction there.
Cultural life -- A few percent go to church (weekly I guess, mostly old or rural people), slightly more go on special occasions (Christmas, New Years', certain Saints days). People just do other stuff I guess? I have only a vague idea of the shape of the hole -- is networking the main use case of church attendance?
Conspiracy theorists mostly use chain emails and FB.
I haven't seen QAnon stuff, we do have the vaccine autism people (large overlap with Russian propaganda FB groups, anti-NGO, anti-Soros, 5G chips, etc). It's probably <20% of the population, but they tend to be vocal.
Only wokism I've seen is imported (we also import some parts of the gun rights debate and recently abortion stuff with some fringe proposals to ban Polish people from getting abortions here). None of these is particularly relevant here and is more just US politics leaking in.
We do have people who believe in (and get scammed into paying a ton for) healing crystals.
Russian communism and American CRT first rose to power among the intelligentsia of their respective countries, who in both cases were among the least religious segments of society.
Communism is clearly a secular religion.
My explanation would be that agnostics are more accepting of uncertainty, whereas evangelicals and atheists are not, and for most conspiracy theories it’s easier to be certain they’re false than certain that they’re true
On a minor note, I object to the framing of UFOs as a false belief or conspiracy theory. At this point the United States military has formally admitted that its pilots have seen UFOs (unidentified flying objects), that it has no explanation for what its pilots saw, and that it's investigating. Believing that *people are being anally probed by little green men* is evidence of false belief. Believing that *UFOs* exist is evidence of a sound mind, and anybody who conducts a poll of false beliefs using the word "UFO" is just producing confusion.
I like Julian Jaynes's definition of God as the demands of society anthropomorphized. With that in mind, there isn't a ton of leeway in how much people respond to the demands of society. We are social creatures that automatically process social desirability. If you reject one model of social demands, another will replace it. Wouldn't really be picked up with polls about conspiracy thinking.
Granted, this is a different definition of god than most use, but there are evolutionary reasons to believe it's how the gods came to be.
Consider
https://interestingengineering.com/science/godels-incompleteness-theorem-shows-us-limitations-exist-within-all-systems
Wondering what the correlation to big5 personality trait "openness" would show.
Hypothesis: What allows for people to be dogmatic (low openness) is also a positive close-mindedness shielding from WooWoo, while non-conformation (such as submarine christians, only surfacing once a year; or spiritual atheists) is caused by the same openness that lays the groundwork for considering Aliens, BigFoot, etc. as potentially valid.
I think this is an interesting thing to look at, but the effect of "how are people's logical reasoning skills at figuring out if certain things like religion or bigfoot are true" is totally swamped in reality by "people decide to say they believe in certain things based on partisan/social factors rather than trying to figure out if they're true or not." People simply use different parts of their brain to determine "should I believe in thing X, where the actual believing will not change my life in any way - i.e. I won't go on a bigfoot hunt - but telling people I do will signal something positive, like that I am a free thinker, rejecting the social conventional wisdom" than they do for "what's my theory about whether or not the car in front of me will turn into my lane, killing me."
I think this is a situation where English lets us down - we shouldn't be using the same term for "belief" in these cases. Yes, obviously there are some people (you!) who do think about bigfoot, Catholicsm, covid vaccines and UFOs using the same framework of logic, but most people don't. Most people try to be more efficient: they take a shortcut, they make the far quicker, easier assessment of: how does this impact my life if I believe it, taking into account the social benefits of saying I believe it? If that's positive, then they say they believe it. But almost none of them actually do any costly behavior (pay tens of thousands of dollars to go into the deep backwoods on a Bigfoot hunt) based on that.
The covid vaccine thing actually provided a margin case, because pre-covid anti vaxxers had an extremely low chance of suffering harm from their beliefs, (even unvaccinated people usually don't get polio - sorry Connecticut) but during covid some (though still most anti-vaxxers probably did not) actual people did discover that their beliefs ended up causing them to take actions that harmed them, and in fact you see that effect in the data where being older (and therefore higher risk from covid) caused people to actually take the somewhat costly action to take the vaccine, whereas younger (and therefore lower risk) people didn't. I thought this was an interesting example of where the shore of "costless symbolic beliefs" was washed over by waves of "potentially costly real life actions driven by belief."
The counterexamples you gave are politically neutral, but they are not religiously neutral. Those who seriously believe in the truth of the gospels as written will be less inclined than, say, atheists to believe that there is anything "out there" (aliens?) other than God.
I think you'd have been better off looking at left-wing conspiracy theories. Evangelicals might very well be less likely than, say, atheists to believe in those.
"People who believe in nothing will believe in anything" is a dig against atheists in particular, but I think the mention of religion as anti-virus is slightly closer; more like a benign virus.
Lets say that your brain represents valuable living space for memes, but they compete with each other for space constantly, with the established ones choking out competitors. As unpleasant as your current meme flora is, if you were to clear it out, it'd probably be replaced by a bunch of strange weeds that can't typically compete with the big old monsters.
Also, if you want to find silly things that non-believers believe, aren't there plenty of nutty beliefs on the super-identitarian left? I've met people who believe in the gender wage gap or structural racism to such a degree that it qualifies as a conspiracy theory. One person insisted that her father personally wanted to take away her rights through some kind of coordinated effort with other men.
Good research into the wrong question. I don't think that conspiracy theories are my main worry. I worry about all-consuming ideologies, like Marxism. Do non-believers need an all-consuming ideology, and is such an ideology more dangerous than a religion? My own view is that religion need not be an all-consuming ideology, and in fact it may help insulate people from adopting an all-consuming ideology.
Would seem helpful to get conspiracy theories and common false beliefs that are easy to verify as false to test across a broader range of the political spectrum, rather than just testing right wing and neutral ones.
If atheists as a group underperform somewhere, it would probably be with respect to false beliefs that are more left wing than usual, while religious people would probably tend to fail in the opposite direction.
Isn't the last chart inverted? Or you're saying that post-rationalists are most vulnerable to woo?
> People of “none” religion are less likely than any religion except Jews to believe in Bigfoot.
Only if you only look at the "Absolutely Not" category, though. There are some arguments that's appropriate, but if you combine "Absolutely Not" and "Probably Not" into a general Doubt category, "none" is the least skeptical: 81.5%, compared to 85.2%, 84.5%, 96.5%, and 83.2%, in order. With the difference between Absolutely Not and general Doubt, it doesn't really seem to support any difference (except that Jewish people are very skeptical).
I grew up an atheist, became an evangelical Christian at 19 and became an atheist against at ~32. I would say my beliefs during this time were:
0-19 Atheist: Yes to UFOs, no to Bigfoot, no to ghosts.
19-32 Christian: Yes to UFOs (but they were demons), no to Bigfoot, yes to ghosts (also demons).
32-present Atheist: No to UFOs (but with some small probability that they are real alien spacecraft), no to Bigfoot, no to ghosts.
I was always no to Astrology.
> One out of four people with postgraduate degrees believes in astrology?!
Based on my encounters with humanities people in grad school this wouldn't surprise me.
I get that this post is talking about people believing in nonsense/woo/conspiracy theories and that fits with the fake Chesterton quote of believing in "anything".
But if you ask me a far more interesting topic is being referred to by the Amjad Masad tweet.
He was talking about "mind viruses" specifically, not conspiracy theories.
I think Bigfoot and UFO sightings are pretty weak mind viruses in that there's a notable lack of evidence in our modern age of smartphone cameras, and more importantly, these beliefs are signals for low-class, low-status.
A mind virus to me is something like the crazier versions of wokeness and the crazier versions of anti-vaccination. These are highly transmittable memes that take full advantage of our tribal instincts.
This fits well with the Atheist movement getting gutted by social justice in my opinion.
I think there's something to the theory that our brains have a deeply ingrained need for a belief system that bland athiesm doesn't fill very well.
The tweet referring to religion as an anti-virus seems inspired by the OG of this conversation Neal Stephenson who dealt with this topic heavily in the classic Snow Crash.
I loved how he talks about one character having a level of immunity because she'd spent time arguing with Jesuits.
In my (arrogantly biased) opinion, a population with a great mental immune system are ex-religious people. We already know what it's like overcoming a mind-virus from the inside.
“There should be a science of oppression. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles. -- Muad'Dib”
Turns out, for the budding fedora-tipping atheist, Sunday School was the hard times.
Let’s try a steelman here. The steelman isn’t that the non-religious are somehow generically more gullible than the religious. It’s that there’s a phenomenon in which people leave relatively sober religions (say, Anglicanism or Conservative Judaism) and end up believing in New Age spirituality in ways that have more practical import than their previous religion. I maintain than this phenomenon is observable and, in the Bay Area, fairly common.
One can respond that this is a weaker claim than the one Scott is testing. That’s true, but I think it’s also closer to the observation that inspired the saying than the more generic things he gets into.
I'm sympathetic to the desire but
"A man with moonlight in his hand has nothing there at all"
One possible explanatory factor of the Bigfoot thing: both strongly religious people and strongly committed atheists are used to having to disagree with conventional wisdom. Maybe both groups are pre-selected for skepticism?
Church attendance tends to be correlated with other good outcomes relative to other believers, in my experience. Maybe akin to how medication adherence is correlated to good outcomes, even for a placebo.
I heard that argument constantly as a kid in the evangelical world, and had a very different understanding of what they were saying. Not that non-religious people were more likely to believe false things about the world, but that they were more likely to have incoherent/contradictory/nihilistic ethics.
On the question of conspiracies, I'd expect the hyper-religious to believe conspiracy theories endorsed by their leadership, like the charismatics movement treating Donald Trump as some kind of savior figure, and not to believe conspiracy theories denounced by their leadership, like astrology. This seems to bear that out. Except bigfoot. Not sure what to do with that information.
But on the question of ethics, I'm not sure I can dismiss the idea that most social groups seem to be missing a coherent theory of ethics? Again, working off anecdote it really seems like everyone in my peer group thinks they're brave for focusing on themselves over others and asserting their needs, and that everyone else is toxic for focusing on themselves over others and asserting their needs. Concepts like duty, self-sufficiency, and sacrifice are widely mocked. Concepts like forgiveness and positivity are outright considered attacks on people.
That's...I mean I left the church, and had a good reason - an arbitrary ethics often based on exclusion *can* be more destructive than no coherent ethics at all. But when I see that quote, that's my first thought.
> I'm not sure I can dismiss the idea that most social groups seem to be missing a coherent theory of ethics?
I'd posit that this is because a coherent theory of ethics that also matches our ethical intuitions is not possible. Everyone fudges, and as long as most people fudge mostly in the same direction, it's mostly okay.
On the other hand, let's not forget that "you shall not suffer Jews to live among you" is a coherent ethical position (unless you happen to be Jewish). Coherent isn't the same as (intuitively) good.
Another interesting analysis from Scott.
I think of it as, Christianity doesn't let one think that the original sin was actually black chattel slavery, that all Americans (or earthlings) face the sin of White Supremacy, and the only solution is constant wailing and apologies, which can never go too far. And the new blasphemy is the n-word.
I feel like polls of this sort are always sort of incomplete in leaving out other religions, and also ignoring how internally diverse both religions and the non-religious really are. I mean, in theory you could be lumping in the super-woke Pentecostals down the street from me with people who handle snakes in Appalachia.
I’m not sure where I fit in myself. My two major social outlets are a) church and b) the ACX meetup.
There are also cases where someone’s religion or culture sort of obligated them to believe in things like astrology. I know astrology is super important to a lot of people in India, but I’m not 100% sure of Hinduism’s official position on it. Astrology isn’t a great correlate for conspiracy theories, either, IMO. I feel like belief in astrology uses a different part of the irrational brain. And the more normalized it is given where you are, the more it would differ from conspiracy theories as understood here.
Of course, it’s hard to poll enough South Asians in the US on Bigfoot. If we ran this poll in India asking if people believe in Yeti, what would those numbers be, and what would they mean?
"I don’t think this is why most frequent churchgoers do it. Most churchgoers do it because they come from families and areas where going to church is expected."
Point of order, compardre, but most non-theists and exvangelicals and etc ALSO come from areas where that's expected. Heck, I'd bet 10 dollars that being a devout protestant who religiously goes to to a serious church every sunday all dressed up is a good deal weirder in San Francisco than being a new atheist is in rural Georgia.
Yes, but you were presumably growing up in the deep south of at least 20 years ago. As someone living in the deep south now, I assure you, things have very much changed, at least in my area.
"I'd bet 10 dollars that being a devout protestant who religiously goes to to a serious church every sunday all dressed up is a good deal weirder in San Francisco than being a new atheist is in rural Georgia."
This is almost certainly false (unless you take "all dressed up" to specifically mean "wearing a particular style of garb common to Southern Evangelical Protestants," at which point it might technically be true on the extremely trivial grounds of local fashion norms rather than theological belief). Though honestly, I wouldn't expect either to be particularly uncommon, I'm sure there are plenty of staunch atheists *and* plenty of devoutly religious people in every city/state.
It seems like we're dealing with caricatures of what it means to be a believer or a non-believer.
The entire program of investigation seems so poorly operationalized that it is impossible to make any sense of it.
The pew surveys are clearly well designed.
I don't think religious belief necessarily protects against conspiracy theories, nor do I think nonbelievers will necessarily believe anything, but I do think people who leave their faith will be inclined to believe in _something_. People seem to become more amenable to alternative forms of spirituality after they leave a more mainstream religion.
However, I think the actual pitfall of becoming a nonbeliever is to eventually think that you can actually cleanse yourself of all religious belief. That is folly. Everyone inevitably adopts some system of religious belief, even if on the surface it is founded on some notion of rationality or other good. It is in our nature. If you deny it then you will only become blind to the ways in which you participate in the same sort of ingroup/outgroup behaviors for which religious people are often criticized.
That's what I think wokeness is -- a religion, effectively, around social justice issues. The problem is not necessarily that it is an unworthy cause, but that its adherents don't understand their movement as a quasi-religious movement. As a Christian myself it's kind of amusing to watch. It's like, they're building a new religion and they don't even realize it. I don't mean to pick on this movement in particular, but it just struck me as the most obvious example.
> However, I think the actual pitfall of becoming a nonbeliever is to eventually think that you can actually cleanse yourself of all religious belief. That is folly. Everyone inevitably adopts some system of religious belief, even if on the surface it is founded on some notion of rationality or other good. It is in our nature.
In case you've never met an honest-to-goodness nihilist - hi!
I don't generally recommend it, because it's not terribly rewarding, but what is seen can't be unseen, so whatcha gonna do?
> If you deny it then you will only become blind to the ways in which you participate in the same sort of ingroup/outgroup behaviors for which religious people are often criticized.
Religious-type distinctions are one way to form ingroup/outgroup behaviours, but nowhere close to the only one. The first and most fundamental marker is family, then tribe as extended family, then polity as extended tribe.
Adding a religious dimension to it comes pretty late, and was a minoritarian obsession for centuries. Sure, it's easier to genocide your neighbours if you believe God tells you to do so (not that we have much evidence of actual genocide, other than scripture wherein the order is recorded), but doing onto your neighbour depends significantly more on your instrumental capabilities than your theological foundations, so you can skip the latter and focus on the former (especially since it tends to lead to overall fewer people hating your guts ).
I do agree that wokeness is a non-theistic manifestation of that quaintly American approach to religion - with the fire in the belly, the charismatic preacher, the revival tent, and all o' that. It shouldn't surprise that a country founded in large part by religious misfits retains religious misfit in its national character. However, I'm not sure that the same impulses manifested in yet another Evangelical revival, or some novel religious movement - a Twenty-First Century answer to the Latter Day Saints, or some such - would be particularly preferable; and I'm pretty sure the impulse comes prior to the manifestation.
As Freud puts it : "their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one."
I think you're overlooking selection effects. It might be that the hard-core atheists also lack other nonsense beliefs, not because the atheism *leads them* to lack other nonsense beliefs, but just because the class of people who end up hard-core atheists is a class of people not prone to believe any sort of nonsense in the first place.
By contrast, the class of devoutly religious people is a class of people who clearly *are* naturally inclined towards religiosity/spirituality/supernatural beliefs. So if being devoutly religious is correlated with *not* believing in UFOs and astrology, that's not because those people are just not inclined towards that sort of thing in the first place; it's because the one big religious belief is interfering by crowding out all the other nonsense. So it seems more plausible that religion is actually playing a *causal* role in preventing nonsense beliefs.
Some people are really hungry for some kind of supernatural belief, and won't end up being sensible materialist atheists if you take away their religion--they'll just fall into something worse instead. I'd much rather give them a nice sensible religion that encourages them to be honest and kind and donate to charity, rather than have them drift around looking for anything at all to believe in.
I don't think "believe in" things is the right way to look at it. Have faith is the better way to describe it. It isn't that they believe "anything" it's that they can attach their faith to anything. Look at the way science was fetishized during the coronavirus pandemic. Scientists were regarded like priests by many people. Fauci referring to him as science, like the Pope of Coronavirus. Those who say things like "the science is settled" on climate, evolution, coronavirus are engaging in religious behavior. I see the "religious impulse" in things like environmentalism and political movements. With Christians it sometimes dovetails with abolitionism or anti-abortion, but most major movements you'd think of today like Woke, Green and even the trans to some extent, are effectively religious substitutes for "non-believers."
I've always understood "the problem is that they will believe anything" to refer to moral claims. But without being able to track down the origin, I suppose that applying it to factual claims is a valid exercise.
My comment will first (1) make a small quibble with a claim you make in the essay; secondly (2), will point out a couple concrete non-cryptid examples of what theists might have in mind when they make statements about atheists believing in anything; thirdly (3), will talk about another sense of the claim--the religious structure of many non-religious beliefs.
1. You say: "although following the logical implications of Christian belief would make you go to church a lot, I don’t think this is why most frequent churchgoers do it. Most churchgoers do it because they come from families and areas where going to church is expected."
I disagree! I think regular church attendance is actually a pretty good indicator of religious belief. It's incredibly easy not to go to church nowadays! You can even credibly claim to be a religious believer and not really go to church! Just sleep in on Sunday!
2. So, I'm one of the theistic regular readers of ACX (and LessWrong). Here are a couple things off the top of my head I think fellow theists tend to think are traps for atheists who don't have an anchoring belief in God.
--It's weird for Christians to see atheists taking simulation arguments re: our universe really seriously compared with the wide variety of arguments in the philosophy of religion for the existence of God. I'm not going to get into the particulars of the arguments (people can tell me why I'm wrong in the replies), but on occasion it feels like that, by describing God as a little more computer-programmery, suddenly a certain sort of atheist will suddenly be more amenable to the idea. (And in any case, I think various arguments for God are at least *more interesting* than the simulation argument, but simply are rejected out of hand!)
--This is perhaps even more contentious, and of course I'm biased, but I genuinely think intelligent atheists are worse at talking about morality than intelligent theists. Obviously, there are all kinds of ways you can press theists about metaethics (this has been the case since Plato), but even very intelligent atheists I know will fall into pretty outré theories, or just acknowledged incoherence when talking about the subject.
3. Another interpretation of the claim, or at least another claim very close to it, basically is that: human belief generally ends up having a religious structure, whether you try to avoid it or not! You see this sort claim advanced sometimes nowadays by political theorists: 'liberalism is like a religion, with its own sacraments and rituals, priests and proscriptions, etc.'. Or you get it by people really uncomfortable with the rationalist community who call it a cult.
Part of the idea here is, well, these things are worse as religions than just Good Old Fashioned Religion! It makes sense why you would worship a God, why that could involve going beyond reason to some degree, pursuing transcendence and the Infinite Ground of All Being....it seems way stupider to worship John Rawls' veil of ignorance (or whatever), and make a leap of faith into something that *by its own lights* is kind of human-based and mundane.
Anyway, neat piece. Always a question about how useful statistics are as input into a sort of 'fundamental narratives' topic, but you usually strike the balance pretty well.
>but I genuinely think intelligent atheists are worse at talking about morality than intelligent theists
I don't tend to find this, and my response would be you are conflating "worse at talking about morality" with "their morality matches mine". If you want someone who has a strong argument for most conventional morality, an intelligent Christian is a good place to look. But my contention would be that a lot of conventional morality is simply wrong/outdated.
Though I guess there is something to the idea that people who are more interested in the ethical world tend to be more religious than those not. And so you average IQ 140 person who is religious, is likely to be a lot more concerned about ethics on average than your average IQ 140 person who is an atheist.
"I genuinely think intelligent atheists are worse at talking about morality than intelligent theists"
Hi Beata, I'm an atheist, and I consider myself reasonably intelligent. In what way do you think people like me are bad at talking about morality? I'm genuinely curious, not trying to be snarky.
Story time: I used to be an Evangelical Christian, and one major reason why I became an atheist is that I found God as presented in the Bible to be profoundly *immoral*. I understand that's an offensive statement to you, so let me present the evidence:
1. God commands his followers to commit *genocide* against their enemies: "Leave alive nothing that breathes," kill men, women, children, and livestock.
2. God orders *death by stoning* for trivial offenses that we don't even consider crimes nowadays, such as a young woman having sex before her wedding night. Pause to think a moment about being stoned to death: it's slow and extremely painful, as well as humiliating (because your whole community and family is rejecting you by taking part in killing you).
3. God himself directly metes out horrific punishments that are disproportionate to the offense. E.g., when a bunch of young men make fun of the prophet Elisha, God sends two she-bears to tear the young men to pieces!
>It's weird for Christians to see atheists taking simulation arguments re: our universe really seriously compared with the wide variety of arguments in the philosophy of religion for the existence of God.
As an atheist, I agree. I think that the argument for deism is much stronger than for any particular theism, and I've always been somewhat perplexed that atheists usually don't make this distinction.
"Another possible explanation is that people with coherent worldviews already have strong opinions on what’s true, making them closed-minded against conspiracy theories. For example, if God created humans in the Garden of Eden, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for aliens and UFOs. Or, since atheists believe everything works through purely physical scientifically-measurable forces, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for astrology.
But this one doesn’t quite work either: neither scientific materialism nor Biblical literalism precludes Bigfoot. God and/or Evolution created all sorts of weird ape species; why shouldn’t there be one more?"
Two points:
1. People who identify as atheists and people who identify as Evangelicals have something in common: a willingness to associate with belief systems that necessarily preclude others from being true. Saying you're an atheist means that you believe religions that claim the existence of God are wrong. Likewise, saying you're an Evangelical means that you believe all people who reject the existence of God and Christ as Messiah are wrong. Most agnostics I know pride themselves on being open-minded, likewise with wishy-washy, loosely-identified Christians. These groups like to leave open the possibility for truth outside their narrow set of beliefs, which means a willingness to acknowledge the possible veracity of otherwise unsubstantiated claims. They don't wish to pass judgement. The confounder here is open-mindedness, which dictates how people identify and their tolerance for beliefs outside their own.
2. I get in trouble for saying this, but there is not as wide as a gap between scientific materialist atheists and Christian Fundamentalists as there seems to be. Outside of faith-based beliefs, most Fundamentalists I know don't believe in a ton of woo. They still hold to the existence of objective reality, and, in fact, when pressed, will try to give scientific evidence and proof for the veracity of their beliefs. Press them hard enough and they'll try to argue that Noah's flood was an event in literal recorded history. In a strange way, most of them hold to the scientific method; they try to use science to prove the truth of their beliefs. The way atheists describe Fundamentalists as delusional and avoiding evidence is precisely the way Fundamentalists describe atheists. The difference between the groups is that they operate from two radically different sets of facts. (I know someone with a Ph.D in mechanical engineering who is a young-earth creationist. Likewise, I have a med student friend who will frequently criticize his peers for believing in astrology, but he himself is a biblical literalist.)
I wonder how "evangelical" possibly including mormons (does it?) would confound the data.
The differences between Mormonism and other forms of Christianity are vastly larger than the differences between Mainline Protestantism and Evangelical Protestantism. In fact, they're larger than the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism! So unless the survey conductors were extraordinarily incompetent and/or ignorant, Mormonism would never be lumped in with Evangelical Protestantism.
So where would they be put in?
Mormonism would either be in its own category, lumped in with "Christianity" in general on polls that don't differentiate between Christian sects, or put into the "Other" category. But Mormons wouldn't just be put in the "Evangelical Protestant" box because they're very much *not* Evangelical Protestants.
Yeah I know that. Did you look at the data?
Oh, my mistake, I misunderstood your question. In these particular polls, I'm pretty sure Mormons are grouped in the Other category. For the ones that don't have an Other category, I think they're just not included, just like Jews aren't included. I don't know for sure though, you'd have to contact the pollsters to find out, I was just pointing out that it would be very bizarre if they were listed as Evangelicals.
"Another possible explanation is that people with coherent worldviews already have strong opinions on what’s true, making them closed-minded against conspiracy theories. For example, if God created humans in the Garden of Eden, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for aliens and UFOs. Or, since atheists believe everything works through purely physical scientifically-measurable forces, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for astrology.
But this one doesn’t quite work either: neither scientific materialism nor Biblical literalism precludes Bigfoot. God and/or Evolution created all sorts of weird ape species; why shouldn’t there be one more?"
It is hard to deny the existence of weird ape species (although I understand that there are some diehards out there), so Evangelicals have to take weird apes into account. Bigfoot is easier to discount, at least for the time being.
One think I think is partially going on, is the people who are atheists are actively sorting for people who don't cave to peer pressure and social norms, and "woo" acceptance mostly relies on people succumbing to social pressure. Its not just skepticism, but that particular brand of skepticism.
The skeptical non-conformist. The person who is willing to say "no that is dumb I don't believe in god" out loud in fifth grade, is also the person to question radical gender theory at the DEI presentation.
I think that if you actively left a religion and chose to become an atheist, then you may be part of a sorting for these sorts of people, but if you are a third generation non-believer from a non-believing home in a not very religious country then this *is* your social norm.
This is a really good point. Being a convertite to atheism bears a strong resemblance to being a religious convertite – much higher average levels of stridency and insistence upon the dogmas of the faith. You're probably less likely than average to fall for dumb religious substitutes. But then your grandkids just grow up with a hole in that part of their psyche and *they* become susceptible to any old ridiculous nonsense that slots in there.
As I wrote down below as part of a longer reply -- generation 1 atheist -- believe in God?, no. Bigfoot?, no. 3rd generation -- believe in God?, no. Bigfoot? yes. "Bigfoot? Really? Why?" "I get to hike around in the beautiful Pacific north-west with my friends, -- "Looking for evidence" and give my rationalist father apoplexy at the same time". WIN WIN!
I'm shocked at the number of you guys trying to claim that the (apparently pseudo-)Chesterton quote is actually about wokism. Chesterton would have said this, if at all, close to a century ago, and the quote has been regularly used by religious people to make fun of secular superstitions for decades. I seem to remember seeing it used to poke at certain kinds of spiritualism more than anything else, e.g. non-religious theories of the soul that allow for communicating with the dead. It's certainly not about systemic racism and gender theory, and you should examine the impulse that makes you want your favorite blogger to be as obsessed with such things as you are.
Nah its pretty clear the big surrogate religions right now for people are: Environmentalism, Trump/Fox News, and "wokism" in some order. I don't even know what would be competing with those three.
Maybe nationalism/patriotism? But that is a long storied tradition of cohabiting with religion that was mostly hashed out for better and worse over hundreds of years.
The "quote" is interesting specifically because right now it seems very apt. No one thinks whoever made it was talking about today.
Nobody's claiming that the *original* quote (or, to be more precise, the original quote on which the present-day "People who stop believing in religion start believing in anything" line is based on) is about wokeism; rather, that people who quote it nowadays generally quote it with reference to wokeism.
I wish Lewis had been clearer on the scope of what he was talking about.
I'd expect communism to most clearly fit into the slot Christianity fits into:
- a glorious future (ignoring the piles of skulls...)
- an expectation of conquest ("the right side of history")
- a rigid creed
- ingroups and outgroups, executions for heresy in the latter
- an elect
(though it didn't have any post-mortem expectations that I'm aware of)
(despite the best efforts of the Stazi, it didn't claim the degree of surveillance Christianity did)
(nor what I'd call a creation myth - _maybe_ a societal one, not a cosmological one)
Wokeism seems similar, but I think lacking an expectation of a glorious future (I don't think they think that "smashing the patriarchy" will usher in paradise (do they???))
New Age Woo seems much fuzzier - maybe just down to
- an elect (with esoteric "knowledge")
maybe adding back in post-mortem expectations??? ( Some flavors of Wicca can include reincarnation )
(maybe??? a creation myth - lots of different groups...)
[Can this be lumped in with late 19th century spiritualism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Blavatsky et. al. ? ]
I think you'd be surprised how much of the quackery Chesterton criticized circa-1910 is identifiably progressive wokery. In one essay he even makes fun of Shaw for wearing a Jaeger wool shirtfront because it's "hygienic", a bizarre affectation of Shaw's which was well known at the time. In this same essay he also criticizes vegetarianism, peculiar speculations about the moral value of animals (COUGH EA COUGH) and celebrating Christmas even though you don't believe in it.
Interesting results. I am sympathetic to the idea that people with strongly held beliefs, theistic or otherwise, are the type of people who had the conscientiousness to actually form a semi-coherent worldview in the first place, and thus are least susceptible to woo.
I would posit that there's maybe a weaker version of the faux-Chesterton quote that, inflected with some evolutionary biology and a touch of anthropology, might hold up if it would go something like this:
"If we consider organized religions as evolved cultural adaptations that serve social or psychological functions we may not totally comprehend or recognize (especially as unbelievers like me), then if we discard our native religion, new memeplexes (in the Richard Dawkins sense of the term) will almost have to arise to take their place. Those new memeplexes, not having hundreds of years of cultural evolutionary history to prune and shape them like classical religions, are likely to have serious flaws that prove detrimental to at least some class of their adherents."
Or here's another alternative version inflected with some Joe Henrich:
"Humans have a very long evolutionary history of constructing animistic belief systems, but we largely discarded those in the past few thousand years in favor of monotheistic religions, for reasons I won't bore you with but which Henrich has explored at length (Henrich's distinction between the little gods of hunter gatherer societies and the Big Gods of settled agricultural societies). If society chooses to discard modern monotheistic belief systems en masse, what results is not the adoption of cold hard scientific materialism, but a return to those old animistic beliefs of our hunter-gatherer forebears. Those animistic beliefs are more likely to maladaptive for the modern world, given that there was probably a reason we discarded them in the first place."
Just throwing these out there.
What’s so surprising to me is that your comment is the first one to really nail this perspective. The Dawkins-meme interpretation was practically built to deal with this sort of question, yet now seems completely out of favor.
People will believe lots of crazy things. How many of these do you believe?
- Politics is controlled by a cabal of: ancient aliens, lizard people, Jews, the patriarchy, 'elites', military-industrial complex, woke activists, the deep state, career politicians, intelligence agencies
- The news media is controlled by a cabal of: (chose from the above list)
- People are being controlled en mass by: religion, partisanship, economics, superstition, news, TV, video games, schools, radicalization on the internet (your pick from: woke, alt-right, reddit, 4chan), the Algorithm, the 'trans agenda'
- We're in imminent danger of civil war erupting from radicals on the Right/Left
- It's clear there was criminal activity that Donald Trump/Hillary Clinton got away with
- The election was stolen by - wait for it -
* Biden '20 (rigged)
* Trump '16 (Russia)
* Obama '08 (birther)
* Bush '00 (Florida)
* Clinton '92 (media + Perot)
* Reagan '84 (concealed Alzheimer's)
* Reagan '80 (Iran hostage shenanigans)
I try not to take these surveys too seriously, because ... well, I've found myself taken in by all sorts of stupid ideas that seemed right at the time, but then later I found out everything I'd been told was wrong. The hard work doesn't come in making sure you don't ever believe wrong things, because if there's one thing you can be certain of it's that you do. Did Epstein kill himself? Did the Clintons rig the 2016 primaries? What are the origins of COVID-19? Are there multiple universes? Do you - personally - really have the evidence to accept or reject any of these propositions? Yet you likely have a strong opinion about a few of them. The hard work comes from being able to let go of something you once believed as a matter of course: "God exists", or even "God doesn't exist".
Honestly, these numbers aren't all that impressive. You want to tell me that Jews are 8% less likely to believe in astrology than agnostics, but at the same time Hispanics are 7% more likely than whites. Okay, but a majority of ZERO groups you sampled said they believe in astrology. The only group that even came close were the teeny-boppers, and 2/3 of them weren't willing to say it's true. This idea that I can insulate myself from unrelated wrong ideas by how often I go to church or by holding to scientific materialism feels like the same kind of social science research that failed to survive the replication crisis.
Hard-pass on updating based on these surveys.
I think there are degrees to which you can believe a thing is or isn't true. For example, a friend told me today that "the rich don't pay taxes", which is a false statement. It is true that people with a larger net worth are able to afford to spend money to find tax shelters and other ways to avoid legally paying part of their tax bill. But most wealthy people still pay taxes. There's a motte and a bailey to that argument, and when pressed usually people defend the motte that there are a bunch of tax shelters, and some unscrupulous people find ways to write things off in illegitimate ways.
Or take the 'controlled by the elite' statement. There's an implicit assumption that large institutions are 'controlled'. I think that sometimes influential people can guide institutions in ways they prefer to achieve some preferred end, but that's not the same thing as 'controlling' that institution. (I recognize your qualifier of controlled 'at least to some degree', so I think we're on the same page there. Still, it's kind of a motte to the 'control' bailey.)
That said, I'm not going to go 100% in the direction of saying no institution is EVER controlled by a single person or by a small cabal of elites, because that has happened before as well. The question is whether there's sufficient evidence to support the proposition that the institution in question is actively under control by a central authority, and if so by whom?
For my part, I'll admit this category is more of a bailey for the claim 'everyone believes in crazy conspiracies', and could have been omitted.
Hmm. I'm not sure I'd buy your definition of cabal. It seems like it's overbroad enough to include any subset of people working independently whose interests align. A cabal to me implies coordination.
I'm not sure Bush '00 really belongs on the list, because I'm not sure who disputes the following argument:
* According to the original count, Bush won Florida by 537 votes
* This is well within the margin for error for such a count - e.g. the 2020 Georgia recount ended up increasing Trump's margin by 1274, and Georgia is less populous than Florida was in 2000; the 2020 Maricopa County recount increased Biden's margin by 360, and Maricopa County is several times less populous than Florida was in 2000
* Therefore there's a significant probability that Gore actually got more votes
The question is not whether in an ideal world we could get the vote count down to a MoE = 0, such that the 'true' vote winner would be declared as such and awarded the office. The question is whether the election itself was 'stolen' through unfair/illegal/dirty means. Gore pursued a legal strategy that SCOTUS disagreed with. Except SCOTUS said, "this is a one-off, there's no stare decisis from this decision". Lots of complicated arguments on both sides.
I'm less interested in the specifics (I'm not claiming no election is ever biased by unfair events), and more concerned with the observation that nearly every election the losing side comes up with an explanation for why their side SHOULD have won. I would be surprised if the results of the 2024 and 2028 elections aren't given an asterisk by the losing party. There's a strong group incentive to pursue motivating reasoning, where every 4 years roughly half of the country chooses to believe something because it fits their worldview, not because they arrived at it through a dispassionate review of the available evidence. Meanwhile, the other half the country does the reverse analysis, coming to the opposite conclusion.
I'd describe "trying to block a recount because you're worried that it will reveal you didn't actually get more votes" as dirty (though legal).
I'm not saying you should aim for a margin of error of 0, but in such circumstances a recount is common sense.
It's been awhile since I looked at the details of the Florida recount, but I think you've oversimplified the situation. Neither side undertook a strategy of recounting in order to get closer to the true vote total in the state of Florida. Both sides approached the situation using the strategy they thought had the best chance to allow them to win.
Gore tried to get recounts in the 4 counties he was most likely to get additional votes from. He wasn't interested in a state-wide vote recount, and never pushed for it. He wanted to win, not get at whatever the 'true' vote total was.
Bush already had enough votes based on the initial counts. He didn't want a state-wide recount either, as that could have gone either way. His team pursued a legal strategy that argued a 4-county recount violated the 14th amendment, that the recount wasn't proceeding by pre-determined rule, but by rewriting them after the fact, then by rules-mongering about deadlines.
Yes, in a perfect world we would have all sat down dispassionately and done a full Florida recount, because it really was a close race. But since neither side of the conflict wanted that, I think it's a stretch to call the 2000 US Presidential Election 'stolen' by one side. Both sides pursued biased strategies. One side's strategy worked. The other side engaged in the old technique of complaining that the election was rigged against them. If Bush's legal strategy hadn't carried the day, his supporters would have been complaining about a 'stolen' election as well. Plus there would be a conspiracy theory that 9/11 was an inside job and that Gore knew about it the whole time.
To be honest I don't think we really disagree. I just wanted to express that the idea that 2000 was unfair because Gore might have actually got more votes in Florida doesn't deserve to be classed as a conspiracy theory (and I acknowledge that you didn't actually say that it was a conspiracy theory.)
Oh I think you're right. And I'll extend that to other elections, to boot:
2020 - without COVID-19, would likely have been a different election in unpredictable ways
1992 - the economy really was getting better for all of 1992, including significant GDP growth, yet the news media ignored all signs of economic recovery, pretending the recession hadn't inconveniently ended too early, so the election could be a referendum on a 'failed Bush economy' that was mostly fiction at that point
1984 - Reagan did have Alzheimer's. Not sure when it started, or whether it impacted him enough he shouldn't have run ... but it's not a medical diagnosis the American public was allowed to debate just prior to the election of a major political figure.
1980 - not that the Iranians needed a reason to want Carter gone, but Reagan's political team appears to have secured a deal to ensure the hostages were released at a time that was politically convenient.
I also forgot to add 2004 and the Swift boat political smear against Kerry. Can't believe I forgot about it, even though I heard about it non-stop for 4 years.
The thing I try to remember is that there were lots of underhanded/dirty/dishonest/smear tactics on both sides of each campaign. Politics isn't a fair game (though it seemed like McCain tried to take the high road), just one we try to polish up enough so it seems mostly legitimate.
This is a great comment. If you have never taken stock of the crazy ideas you have entertained in your adult life, you are doing it wrong.
I believe that politics is controlled by career politicians, and I think this is not a conspiracy theory. I think it's, like, the opposite of a conspiracy theory?
The citation I am seeing for this quote is, "Malcolm Muggeridge and Christopher Ralling, Muggeridge Through the Microphone, British Broadcasting Corporation, 1967, p. 44", but it isn't online in a format that will open sufficiently for me to check it.
When you get out of rationalist or internet atheism circles and into the real world, you find out that many people that call themselves nonreligious or atheists actually believe in a lot of shit and are just unhappy with traditional religious institutions.
This has been my experience also. For every rigorous rejection of superstition there must be ten purely bitter people angry that their institution of birth or choice didn't wholly prioritize their own favored causes or concerns (thereby completely missing the point). You see this a lot within religious institutions as well; for instance, in the big argument over the Anglican Communion's acceptance of gay marriage during last week's conference (they rejected it), the conservative faction's arguments are basically "this contradicts everything we understand our holy scriptures to say as well as our practical dogma since the inception of this church", while the liberal faction's arguments are "I can't believe you refuse to switch your belief system to *my* actual beliefs, even after I went to the trouble of pretending to share yours!"
One point worth making: the term "white Evangelical" has never been super well-defined in polls. Although "Evangelical" Christianity has theological definitions, almost nobody applies the term in that way. In practice it means "culturally Christian, rarely attends Church," which is right in the danger zone for conspiratorial thinking - aka "being willing to accept large claims without thinking about them very much."
If regular religious practice to maintain a stable belief system or a conscious skepticism of belief systems making big claims of any kind are the two most protective mindsets against random BS, then "white evangelicals" in the American context - in aggregate - have neither.
Fundamentally the problem here is people typical minding and thinking that their own beliefs are Normal and their own Religion is sensible and it's other people who are crazy. If you actually read historical accounts of all the things various believers have asserted down the centuries, the whole time claiming they were entirely compatible with their religion, you'll see that god offers no protection from superstition.
My main feeling here is that this question is too confounded by culture to be easily resolved. (Well, my actual main feeling is that the thesis of the post -- religious people are absolutely not inoculated against weird beliefs -- is both true and tricky to prove.)
Scott notes that belief in voter fraud is politically coded,* but belief in Bigfoot is almost certainly culturally coded, just in less obvious ways. My friends would find it extremely odd if I -- a city-living, professional, advanced degree-having atheist -- professed a belief in Bigfoot. Like a lot of kids, I was a big fan of cryptozoology when I was young. But eventually you put it away. It's silly, and people who believe that stuff as adults are rubes. Etc.
I have no idea what the churchgoing white evangelical take on Bigfoot is. Maybe the idea sinful. Maybe it just reads as weird. But I'm guessing there is a take.
So, yeah, I think the thesis of this post is spot on, but also would require some serious research that maybe hasn't been conducted yet to really prove.
* Fwiw, conservatives used to claim that vaccine skepticism and autism conspiracy theories were left-wing beliefs, in a sort of own-the-libs kind of way. I don't think this was ever actually true, or at least less true than supposed, but it is very much the case that vaccine skepticism was held up as an example of liberal stupidity.
Would naysayers would ever say 'Yay!' to anything?
Sure, to themselves, whenever they find a particularly satisfying naysaying opportunity.
Hmm, amazing stuff here. I am not to sure about strict scientific materialism these days. There is a somewhat older hypothesis that our brains have evolved to favor religious / spiritual beliefs. Would anyone care to comment? Incidentally, I have a post on the same topic today.
~ 85% of the world's population has religious / spiritual beliefs. To my mind, that is an enormous data point. If we can identify cognitive abilities that underpin this complex trait, one could begin thinking of GWAS studies like they did for language genes. Hmm.. you're right, it will be hard to prove but we could make big inroads. I agree, there is no question of proving whether religion is good or necessary, its only about whether we evolved to favor faith / spiritual beliefs. It bring us back from today's pole positions IMO
should we discount a study that shows group X believes Y, just because the group also believes Z?
This post doesn't address the most widely believed conspiracies - the woke suite of beliefs. Surely there's data relating woke beliefs and religiousness. I suspect the negative relationship is quite strong.
I thought the most widely believed conspiracy theory was that there exists a "woke suite of beliefs."
Semantics. There's a bunch of beliefs classified as woke. Do you disagree?
Honestly, I don't think I have ever met anyone who was woke. I keep meeting people who think that wokism is the end of the world though. I don't spend any time on Twitter or FB so maybe that factors in ...
Consider yourself fortunate.
I mean, depending on your definition of woke I used to be somewhere between 30% and 80% woke. I've encountered people in person who mostly fit the caricature.
I largely see the original quote or at least that type of argument directed against extremist political movements/alternative sources of meaning more often than "woo" (see Chesterton's "Heretics" and Dostoevsky's "Demons"). Basically, once you've rejected the traditional foundations for claims like "don't kill people", you do not have any intellectual innoculation against radically inhumane philosophical views, like eugenics for Chesterton, or nihilistic radicalism for Dostoevsky. Probably a lot of the people who use it would look at some of the more exotic speculations common in the rationalist community and say "Yup, checks out to me. These guys explicitly reject the traditional foundations of meaning, and here they are talking about imaginary semi-divine computers and suggesting human extinction would be a good thing all day".
Perhaps a sufficiently trained theologian is totally insulated from all unreasonable beliefs, and the further away from that you go, the more insane you get. Chesterton makes something like this argument in his book on Thomas Aquinas, but then again, describing his views as "common sense" in very roundabout ways was kind of his thing. He also didn't really seem to mind woo all that much.
Anyway, I have no idea if the theory is true either.
I think "agnostics and people with no particular religion" are who people generally have in mind when they cite the quote, not committed atheists, but who knows. What really stands out to me about these numbers is how similar they are across different groups, at least once you exclude anything with a specifically religious/political valence.
I am thinking Umberto Eco's essay on The Force of Falsity (from collection "Serendipities") might be useful theoretic backdrop.
I think frequency of attendance will be correlated with go-getter personality, class, and IQ. So I'm not super bullish about attendance frequency or the associated beliefs actually being causal here.
My mother attended church absolutely every sunday for decades, but in a very liberal sect. Meanwhile I know many people with more extreme religious beliefs who attended church quite irregularly.
Maybe intellectual laziness correlates with regular laziness and that's part of the cause of the attendancefrequency-woo anticorrelation.
...I'll admit, I find the whole idea kind of weird to start with. I mean, I haven't done any kind of thorough analysis, but in my personal experience, the more religious someone is, the *more* likely they are to believe in every goddamn crazy thing under the sun, regardless of whether these things make sense together. You can read 'The ArchAngels of Dreamland' by Steven L. Fawcette if you want a taste of the really heavy end of this kind of thing. :/
For the more tame end, you have my republican friend, who will tell you all about the evils of vaccines, GMOs, and microchips. Though I think he sobered up a little bit in recent years. XD
"When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything."
This quotation actually comes from page 211 of Émile Cammaerts' book "The Laughing Prophet: The Seven Virtues and G. K. Chesterton" (1937) in which he quotes Chesterton as having Father Brown say, in "The Oracle of the Dog" (1923): "It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense." Cammaerts then interposes his own analysis between further quotes from Father Brown: "'It's drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it's coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.' The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything: 'And a dog is an omen and a cat is a mystery.'" Note that the remark about believing in anything is outside the quotation marks — it is Cammaerts. Nigel Rees is credited with identifying this as the source of the misattribution, in a 1997 issue of First Things.
Thanks.
This is just about the most authentic inauthentic quote there is.
Excellent comment.
If you categorized "religion is the primary root causes for most wars and violence in human history" as a conspiracy theory, atheists would be by far the most superstitious people.
If tails were legs, dogs would have five legs.
Wait, are you actually implying that religion has been the primary cause behind most wars and violence in human history? Have you ever studied, say, the animal kingdom? The problem of scarcity? The attitudes towards religion of Stalin and Mao?
If your point is that it isn't like most conspiracy theories, because it is a more broad claim, then that's totally fair. The claim about religion comes off as paranoid and absurd, like claims that "the patriarchy is to blame for everything wrong with the world", but maybe these are not conspiracy theories outright because they are blaming religion in general/ the patriarchy in general, not the illuminati or something super specific. So if that's your point, sure, it's an edge case at best.
But if your point is that religion indeed was the root cause behind most human violence throughout history, yeah, I'll debate that point. Leaders will use religion to justify their crimes/ wars whenever religion is popular. That doesn't mean religion is actually what makes those leaders commit crimes/ go to war. Chimps incapable of even understanding religion still go to war over territory, dominance issues, etc.
Hope I've made my arguments in a way that is respectful, thanks for the reply-
I'd also add here as a modern argument for my position that the country most likely to pull the United States into a great power conflict that could threaten the entire species- namely China- is the most atheist country in the world.
I mean, you might define atheist different than the standard definition, like "if you're communist you're suddenly not atheist" or something. But when you google "most atheist country" and you get links like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_irreligion.
90% seems pretty atheist.
But irreligious is different from "atheist", so 90% is overstating it. But "convinced atheist" numbers for China are still like 61%, which is way higher than anywhere in Europe (Austria highest at 34%). But yeah, if you've been to China and have some insights or something I'd be interested to hear.
* East Germany was highest at 34%, according to one survey. Each survey gets way different results though, so these numbers are suspect in general.
My point is that a conspiracy theory requires a theory about a conspiracy, which this clearly fails to meet. Your arguments do nothing to address that point -- at most, all you've demonstrated is that these people overestimate the prevalence of a real phenomenon. Are all incorrect statistics now conspiracy theories?
If anything, *your* analysis is much closer to a conspiracy theory, since you are the one claiming that the explicit agendas of numerous historical leaders (spreading their religion through violence) were ruses to cover up a more sinister hidden agenda.
I mean, I admitted in my entire second paragraph that it's maybe not specific enough, so yeah, if that's your primary point, sure, we're on the same page. I know that I was always making a stretch.
Regarding your claim that it's a "conspiracy theory" to claim leaders lie about their true motives, I think that's a much more flexible use of the term "conspiracy theory" than even I was using :). I'm definitely not claiming that all leaders claiming religious motives throughout history were like Hitler, consciously lying and coopting the Christian conservatives into Naziism even though he privately despised Christianity as a religion of weakness. I'm just making the claim that if there had been zero religion in human history, there would have still been many wars over territory, dominance, etc. I'm not making the opposite claim that zero wars had a religious/ superstitious ideas motivating them, that would obviously be insane. I'm just claiming that human nature is warlike and competitive and that blaming religion for war in general is therefore illogical. I feel my arguments here are pretty straightforward.
Feel rude not responding but I don't really have much more to say. Wish you well, thanks for arguing-
Imma probably comment way too much on this article because of my background but...
Although I basically think this quote's intent is: "People who don't believe in Christianity are likely to believe in not Christianity," and that therefore it's not very interesting, I have been super interested in the concept of belief generally lately.
And my conclusion, very weakly held, is that "truth" is not a major component of belief for anyone except the hyper-literalist religious and the dogmatic atheist. For most it seems like belief is just a mental mapping of symbols and ideas that have proved useful in the past. I.e. the average stereotypical white girl who "believes" in astrology will not argue about *how* the relative alignment of the stars affects their personality, they'll just roll their eyes and make a meme about how white men are boring. This usually gets read as a lack of intellectual curiosity or atrophied critical thinking skills, but I've come to disagree. I think they're just saying "This mental framework helps me navigate the world, so as far as I'm concerned it's true. What's the actual mechanism got to do with me?"
Looking at the bigfoot data up there, I note "probably not" shakes out a lot differently than "absolutely not." And I think these are probably the same positions expressed differently - atheists and American Protestants care deeply about either the *process* of truthseeking or being seen to care deeply about the process of truthseeking. A person who doesn't have truth-seeking or morality-seeking as a major part of their personality doesn't care about whether bigfoot exists or not, and they say "probably not" because they have no reason to think he does, but *shrug* who knows?
Non-evangelists who don't explicitly identify as atheists have a "broader" allowance for beliefs: Not just "is this true?" but also "is this helpful? Is it interesting? Does it make me interesting? Does it gain me status? Is it a neat idea I enjoy thinking about? Does it piss off my parents? Is it really funny? If I tell someone I believe it on a date will I get to have sex? Do I enjoy songs about it? Will someone give me a chocolate bar for believing it? Do I like the color scheme of its merchandise? Was I bored when I read it..."
A similar pattern exists for crime: Increasing religiosity is associated with less crime, but so is atheism.
See, for example: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01639625.2017.1286183
"But this one doesn’t quite work either: neither scientific materialism nor Biblical literalism precludes Bigfoot. God and/or Evolution created all sorts of weird ape species; why shouldn’t there be one more?"
This doesn't ring true. I'm not sure how generalizable this is, but having grown up fairly strictly Lutheran, certainly anything mystical which wasn't orthodoxy was considered heresy. For example, I don't credit skepticism for Christians being less likely to believe in astrology. Rather, astrology, as kind of a competing metaphysics, was taught to be a kind of heresy. A whole slew of things was deemed "false idols." Heck, even the Pope was considered the anti-Christ. Now, of course, you could argue that Big Foot isn't mystical. But I think the driving force was that anything that the Church didn't have epistemological control over, as it were, was then considered false. I've always chalked this up to the fact that religion recognizes its epistemological fragility and susceptibility to be co-opted by a rival metaphysics and thus puts a lot of energy into disparaging all rivals, but that's just loosely held speculation.
Great username!
Ha, thanks.
IMO holding a strong belief is synonymous with being embedded within a tribe. Someone who is "strongly religious" is just someone who really enjoys/is-dependent/has-power-and-responsibility-over/etc... a local group of people. To be "strongly scientific" is similarly an attachment to a more global distributed abstracted group of people.
Susceptibility to wrong models is a combination of the size of the group ("with enough eyes all bugs are shallow") and the average acuity of each member. The more strongly embedded in the group, the more information is filtered/contorted/dressed-up before it reaches you.
Being part of a group offers a buffer against dealing w/ raw reality and this mostly works. However certain kinds of information are "resonant" w/ the filters and can't be distinguished from "Sacred" information similar to cancer cells. authoritarian-high-modernist-imposed-legibility easily sneak into sciency-rationalist types while "those ppl are THE source of ALL evil" sneaks easily into religiousy types.
Over time as the social group fragments (or in the case of old people, as friends die) this socially-powered marauder's map starts to fail. It still has the wisdom of the ages collected over time but no longer updates b/c there are less willing contributors. Some models are also "anti-immigration" & actively rejects willing contributors.
A conspiracy theory is similar to a Chamber of Secrets. The map doesn't literally plot out "Basilisk here!" but discrepancies can be observed. No matter how the map evolves however it is never a replacement for the raw territory. There is always a "conspiracy" (aka reality) going on beneath the paper.
Non-mappers and Dumbledore's are more likely to encounter raw reality. Muggles crash into it while Dumbledores actively seek out the more dangerous corners. This process repeats itself infinitely over time as each generation's dumbledore is the next generation's muggle.
Those aren’t the kind of mind viruses they saying is directed at.
Think moral relativism, everything is a social construction, the labor theory of value, etc.
Those kinda of things. The kinds of things many educated non religious people believe.
Intuitively, although likely impossible to quantify, I think there is truth to a more narrow version of this, and you can see it in the struggles of the existentialists (or the much earlier Epicureans for that matter). The work of Darwin and his contemporaries underscored the fact that nihilistic atheism is the most rational view of the universe and our place in it. We are simply here, and we are (largely blindly) following the drives and impulses that have helped keep our particular genetics floating around the planet to date--the same as any other species.
And yet, the immediate reaction of philosophers since Darwin is to try to discover or invent some sort of meaning and purpose within the abyss. I suspect this reaction is representative of a universal impulse--a purely rational nihilistic outlook is simply maladaptive generally, undermines group cooperation and discourages investment in offspring. People want (need?) to effectively delude themselves into believing that their lives have meaning and purpose.
Religions are a codification and institutionalization of this impulse toward meaning and purpose. They lend the trappings of authority and power, the weight of history and scholarship and the sheer number of adherents to foster belief in meaning and purpose among a population, which could be seen as an important public service.
Christianity, like the Paganism it replaced 2,000 years ago, has broadly lost its ability to imbue meaning or purpose to the lives of people in important segments of society. But that doesn't mean that even newly minted atheists won't go looking for some other group that can supply them with this lost sense of purpose, albeit perhaps groups that don't appeal to a divine being. I can think of momevents that have laid the groundwork that one would expect from a nascent religion--some combination of priests, acolytes, evangelists, martyrs, mysteries, and faith-based affirmations. One or more movements like these may fill a vacuum and play an important role in Western Civilization going forward.
Cool. Now do "Marxism works."
No. I am not talking about climates of opinion here, or how contentious something is. I am talking about whether something has been disproven or shown to be impossible, or, at the very least, whether there is much less evidence than one would expect to see if it were true.
Those are what make a "conspiracy theory" dismissable, or usable as an example of the stupidity of people who believe in it.
In the case of both the "lab leak" theory and the "stolen votes" theory, we are still in the early phase where the EXTREME suppression and discouragement of investigation and discussion is being used to persuade people too time-constrained or lazy or ignotant to make a serious effort both that evidence which does exist does not exist, and (for the less intelligent and logical of that subclass who have trouble with the classic distinction between absence of evidence and evidence of absence) that the theories have actually been debunked and disproven.
As I said, this is not the place to argue about the merits of these two theories; I only insist that they DO have sufficient merits that they are "live" in a way that other examples cited such as Nessie and Flat Earth are not. (Bigfoot is probably also dead as a theory but the existence of Yeti legends, gigantopithecus fossils, and the Siberian land bridge means that that could be only because the legendary Bigfoots are actually extinct rather than never-existing).
Strawmanning a belief is a great way to cast those who believe the "bailey" of the belief, as ardent believers of the "motte" position.
"Trump has a favorable view of Russia" is an entirely different statement than "Trump directly reported to Putin while president" but similar demographics and get similar responses.
This is a huge problem with any reporting on 'conspiracy theories' everyone wants to dunk on the most obviously false nonsense but wouldn't dare touch any of the serious conflicts of interest and blatant corruption staring everyone in the face.
From a partisan angle, there are a great deal of beliefs that blue tribers sincerely believe that are seen as insane and unhinged as qanon. (See 'What is a woman' for examples)
Also great chart.
For, "(See 'What is a woman' for examples)," see, "THE CATEGORIES WERE MADE FOR MAN, NOT MAN FOR THE CATEGORIES."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
For why we nevertheless should not cede control of these categories over to these types of people without a fight, see:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/
"One in four people with postgraduate degrees believes in astrology?!" - I'm not sure this is that surprising? Postgraduate degrees aren't all in physics and computer science and their holders aren't all science nerds. I assume you can get an advanced degree in English, Art, etc. without any more scientific education than the general education requirements in undergrad, which in some places are weak or nonexistent. Some of these fields seem to oppose modern scientific reasoning or even actively elevate non-scientific beliefs (as long as those belief systems come from the right groups), including astrology.
This topic has been studied academically and - consistent with this post - there seems to be an inverted-U shaped relationship between religiosity and belief in the paranormal. Further reading:
"Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer: The Relationship between Conventional Christian and Paranormal Beliefs in the United States" (https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/70/1/65/1646595)
"A Bounded Affinity Theory of Religion and the Paranormal" (https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/77/4/334/2726536)
Thanks for the sources.
This was really interesting. I do believe there is a religion shaped hole in our society that is filling up with quasi religious ideas / systems of belief. The problem is that people who believe them don’t perceive them as such. We are always given examples like 911 conspiracy theorists- but the biggest and by far most influential examples are Social Justice / CRT and Climate Change Catastrophism.
> Climate Change Catastrophism
A climate catastrophe *could* be underway. There's no convincing evidence that it's not.
I know someone who is very well educated and atheistic who believes that the only reason men are better at sports is that the patriarchy chose to promote sports that men had advantages in. She argues that attention to particular diseases is driven by their relative risk to able bodied men, as opposed to even those men's own daughters. This smacks me in the face because she applies this rule to explain insufficient measures against covid despite a certain gender being at notably higher risk
But let's move quickly into the total opposite of an anecdote as we should! Since "God died" in elite circles what have been the most harmful beliefs worldwide? Communism and Nazism. These were both essentially based on a darwinistic zero sum group conflict explanation of reality and of how heaven like conditions could be manifested in the real world on a satisfying timeline since real heaven didn't exist. Life is so complex that any comprehensive explanatory replacement for belief systems which were developed and tested over time that is derived from top down first principles has a very high likelihood of producing less socially desirable results. I would argue that the number of anythings for which a believer or believer-adjacent person will fall is proven by you to be apparently equal but that the social consequences of those anythings will tend to be much less severe due to the overall time tested beneficial social consequences of those belief systems
> She argues that attention to particular diseases is driven by their relative risk to able bodied men, as opposed to even those men's own daughters.
Is she wrong about this? It’s widely known that clinical trials purposefully excluded women until the 1990s. Diseases affecting only female anatomy, such as polycystic ovary syndrome and endometriosis, are underfunded for their prevalence and morbidity. I am a woman who has extensively interfaced with the health care system on medical issues specific to women’s health at different phase of my life in different parts of the country, and the gaping holes of knowledge about the physiology of the female body were disturbing to me - and my physician husband - at every turn. If someone were to tell us that the idea of patriarchy in medical research is woo-woo, we would laugh in their face.
> someone who is very well educated and atheistic
Same, fyi.
My own sense broadly tallies with yours -- it's not necessarily that anything that disproportionately affects men gets extra attention, but things that are understood to be "women's issues" get systematically less funding/research/integration into the med school curriculum.
I've had conversations with OB/GYNs who are absolute zealots for "evidence-based medicine," and I naively raise the usual post-replication-crisis caveats about being "evidence-based." And they round on me with a withering glare and say, do you have any idea what we're working against? We're fighting to establish the basic premise that evidence even matters in this area of medicine.
Yep.
Breast cancer vs prostate cancer is a counterexample, and indicates a strong bias in the opposite direction.
Cherry picking two prevalent cancers is not conclusive and may even be misleading. I would not draw any conclusions without looking at research dollars historically spent per case and per death on breast, cervical, uterine, ovarian, prostate, and testicular cancers. Also worth noting that the most prevalent cancers not specifically affecting either sex (lung colorectal etc) disproportionately affect men. Cancer is a loud disease that gets a lot of attention. Diseases that clearly reveal the bias are ones you may never have heard of.
I can definitely believe that the medical system disproportionately fails women through ignorance. I've heard something like that many foundational medical studies almost systematically exclude women. The particular interpretation that I see as an "anything" regarding beliefs is that any discrepancy is primarily intentional, systematic and deliberate
In terms of medical care this belief could be positive if it's tangentially true. What concerns me is that it is based on a conception of the world as being made up of discrete groups in constant zero sum competition. This "anything" belief seems to be the most available belief alternative to the conception of the world associated with belief in God and its consequences will naturally tend to involve starting and attempting to win zero sum competitions. While we seem to be blessed to be dealing with a very far cry from communism, the socially corrosive effects of this appear to be strongly enabled by social media. I think this will comprehensively fail to improve problems (see depolicing) and when the misdiagnosis of social problems as to be solved by group conflicts fails a likely response will be to initiate more intense conflicts
The quote is a claim of causation, not correlation, but the post looks only at correlation. The real question is, does someone losing their faith cause them to believe in some other kind of quackery, false conspiracies, or superstition? Not every atheist or “none” started off as a religious believer. Perhaps if you believe religious faith is caused by gullibility, and religious faith shoves other unsubstantiated beliefs out of the way, then it might be true that losing faith makes one more susceptible to other things, but it wouldn’t mean lifelong atheists are more gullible. Some kind of time dimension to this analysis would add value. Since surveys over the last couple of decades have shown, I think, that self-reported “nones” and “atheists” have increased over time at the expense of strong religious believers, we should see an increase in these other unsubstantiated beliefs in tandem (barring other confounding effects). But an admittedly biased sample of anecdotal information suggests to me that conspiratorial beliefs and superstition have been rife throughout time and not growing, and the recent spate of political conspiratorial thinking over the last 4 years seems too rapid to be attributable to rapid religious de-conversion. Anyway, most of these survey questions have been asked over time. What are the concurrent trends between belief in UFOs, faked moon landings, etc. and theism/religiosity?
As others have mentioned: Wokeness. I'd bet money that irreligious people are far more likely to believe woke nonsense. Wokeness has all the hallmarks of a substitute religion.
Could you explain what you precisely mean by "woke nonsense"?
I also hear people talking about "social justice" as a non believer thing, but when I hear social justice I think about Rerum Novarem, etc.
Erm, mostly CRT, gender ideology, and the related post-mod rejection of enlightenment values. What else?
Sure, plenty of churches have embraced it, but not all, and it clearly reaches pseudoreligious levels mostly among those with blue hair and bod mods.
Also, the Churches that have embraced it tend to be the more wishy-washy, "There is at most one God", type of Churches.
Mr. X indeed!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOVygoQajEw
That is NOT the point of the quote, you rationalist dinks.
You could've spent 10 seconds looking at Christians using the reference, and you'd quickly understand that it refers to man being freed up to believe in destructive and murderous ideologies (fascism, Bolshevism, etc.) without moral constraints. The fact that you thought they were concerned with conspiracy theories and woo is... well it shows a certain lack of awareness.
Back when New Atheism formed, the looming moral specter of Communism wasn't a thing anymore and hadn't yet become a thing again, so most of what they had to dunk on was the middle-american brain-rot of the era. So calling Communism a religion didn't take off at the time, even though Dawkins was saying it even back then in an offhand way.
Communism is just an example. Christians read this quote as pertaining to "belief" in terms of morals and meaning, not in terms of irrational or dubious factual claims. To think of it in terms of the latter is projection.
The problem with your framing is that you categorize atheists as non-believers. No. *Agnostics* are non-believers. Atheists believe there is no god.
Put another way, to agnostics the question is "can the existence of god be known?" and their answer is "no, not with our current knowledge". For atheists, the question is "does god exist" and their answer is "no".
Agnostics think atheists are religious, atheists think agnostics are atheists.
Agnostics say "I don't believe in god", which is a fact. Atheists say "There is no god", which is likely a fact but given the constructs of religion, just as unprovable as "there is a god".
So do nonbelievers really believe anything? For agnostics, this is a real problem (in my view) in that we all struggle (or embrace) moral relativism. It's not a problem with atheists. They believe plenty .
One last thing: many people who "believe in god" but none of those pesky rules are functionally agnostic. That is, an agnostic's personal belief in what is likely to be the case ranges from likely no god to likely god.
Agreed the spectrum goes from "I believe in God but can't prove he exists" to "I don't believe in God and suspect he doesn't exist". I'd call all of those agnostics. Making agnosticism a special class of atheist is ahistorical. Atheism is a really, really old word going back to BCE. Agnosticism is less than 200 years old and was explicitly defined in counterpoint to atheism.
Another fun thing to consider (not as argument, just thought point): have you ever noticed how some religious words are useful, and move into general usage? Heresy, canonic, dogma, anathema all crossed over, while catechism, testify, eucharist are less commonly used. Atheism means you don't believe in god. But I can say "I'm agnostic on the topic of designated hitters" and everyone knows what you mean.
Agnostic is a distinct mindset and (heh) by God, don't put us in with those dogmatic atheists.
" And, of course, it's entirely possible to get dogmatic on the position that the existence of God is inherently improvable and that trying to prove or disprove it is a huge waste of time."
The minute a person says, "I admit that you can't prove God doesn't exist because you can't prove a negative, but I'm so convinced he doesn't exist that it's a waste of time to call myself agnostic." they are-as they say--not an agnostic.
An agnostic says "I admit you can't prove God doesn't exist and to me that makes it seem certain, but many other people think differently. I can only speak for myself."
I do not say this as any kind of brag. An agnostic left to him or herself can also say "I personally think pedophilia's a horror, but who am I to judge?" Scratch an agnostic and you find a moral relativist.
But the whole point of agnosticism is a) lack of certainty and b) acknowledgement that lack of certainty means no one's right. Not even an agnostic.
You seem to have Atheists and Agnostics all mixed up. Atheists believe there could be a god but not in the sense of religion (omnipotent/omniscient and gives a shit about what humans do). Agnostics are just Atheists who are hedging their answer so as not to alienate the (probably) religious person with whom they are talking.
Hey, thanks for confirming my statement: " atheists think agnostics are atheists."
I know, right?
An agnostic, saying, "I don't believe in God," means, "I don't believe in the existence of God." This is exactly the same as an atheist believing, "There is no God."
"I don't believe the Yankees will win the World Series" is not the same as "The Yankees will win the world series."
"I hate the taste of chocolate ice cream" is not the same as "Chocolate ice cream is disgusting."
Once again, fact vs. belief.
> Atheists believe there could be a god but not in the sense of religion (omnipotent/omniscient and gives a shit about what humans do)
No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism
I think the steelman version of this concept is "religion is more socially adaptive than whatever would replace it." And I don't think "astrology" or "the moon landing was faked" really count as replacements for religion there because I don't think they serve the same abstract social purposes religion does.
I think the right abstract lens for viewing religion isn't "supernatural magic" but rather "source of meaning and social cohesion." So I think you have to construe the "anything" in "believing anything" as "anything that could be a rallying principle for society." I *guess* you could build a coherent social movement around the moon-landing hoax, but it feels like kind of a stretch. I think you have to look to something like Woke for a viable religion alternative.
The Economist survey cited in the post dealt with such things as QAnon and such that fall into your category of meaning-deriving beliefs. “Woke” is not easy to define as a belief as much as a set of ethical precepts. (Though some of its most public advocates trot out exaggerated empirical claims that invite religious-like hostility under challenge, there is similar ferocity in non-politically charged debates in academia). Problem is that in age of political polarization where everything meaning-deriving is divided as Red or Blue, all these meaning-deriving beliefs are so politically fraught that they tell you more about political loyalties than the effects of non-belief.
I'm super interested in seeing the "highlights from the comments section" because what you are arguing here seems to be representative of the critiquing plurality. (Including mine earlier this morning). With all respect, I think Scott missed the point of the Chesterson/Lewis/whomever quote.
*Like*
I’m open to all possibilities. “Heck if I know.” Is my mantra
I wonder if living in a rural area makes one more likely to believe in Bigfoot. It's easy to disbelieve the absurd if you live in a big city. The closer one lives to the wild, the more reasonable it might be to believe that there are big undiscovered creatures still out there. Would believing in giant squid have made one a conspiracy theorist before the mid-1800s?
I notice that "white evangelicals" was a category in a few places, missing any corresponding breakdowns along racial and religious lines.
A number of months ago, I wound up listening to NPR briefly. They were talking about vaccine "hesitancy" among white evangelicals, and had brought on a black evangelical minister to discuss the topic, and asked him what was wrong with white evangelicals. He refused to bite, and pointed out that black evangelicals had been at least as bad about vaccines, up until recently when a concerted effort was made to reach out and understand them, and that no similar effort had been made for white evangelicals. As a litmus test, he suggested that unless you can thoughtfully explain the importance of the Number of the Beast, you're not going to be able to connect with any evangelicals on this subject. This all went right over the interviewer's head, who ignored what he was saying and continued on the conversational track of assuming that there was something uniquely bad about white evangelicals. Soon after, I turned off the radio in disgust.
Which is mostly to say that those polls seem clearly biased in their design, implementation, and/or reporting.
It's quite odd to talk about rationalists and aliens and not mention Robin Hanson's copious speculation that the UFOs that pilots etc. keep seeing are, indeed, aliens. In online discussions Ive seen quite a few people in rat-adjacent spaces attracted by this hypothesis. (I'm not, FWIW). https://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/aliens
The quote is in the context of belief systems, I think a fair reading for "anything" interprets it to mean belief systems or worldviews as opposed to conspiracy theories or facts. In this case the statement becomes almost obviously true given their exclusionary nature. It would be interesting to see statistics of the same kind as you've found when it comes to:
- Transcedental meditation
- Buddhism
- Wokeness (in the CRT/'anti-racist' sense)
- Communism
- Incel-ness
- Scientology
- belief in 'consciousness uploading/the singularity/Roko's basilisk'
- QAnon (this seems sufficiently close to a 'belief system' in a way that 'the CIA orchestrated the JFK asassination' is not)
- belief in 'higher forms of consciousness' through psychedelics
While it may be possible to steelman some of these, without being too disrespectful I'd call most of these pretty crazy, and none of them involve a belief in God.
Then again, the way I'd expect a "religious apologetic" to 'really' mean the statement is to refer to things so ingrained in our psyche that we don't realize how crazy they are. It's hard to give examples, but the kind of things that seemed too true to question when being younger, before the realization of their folly then set in. Maye e.g. "I am strong and independent and don't need any help from other people" or unspoken beliefs like "I'm better than xyz because I am z".
"Incel-ness" seems to be an outlier here - somewhere between 15-30% of men aged 18 to 30 in the US are incels, and only a small percentage of that group subscribes to a particular worldview related to that (e.g. the blackpill).
I suggest you steel-man my point to include the worldview in the definition as I intended.
But the economist article wasn’t trying to answer the question about left or right political preferences, they were answering a question about religiosity, how is it a trick to answer a different question and then fail to conclude anything about the question they didn’t ask?
The relevant categories are
1) People who can determine what is true,
2) Those who can't.
Category 1 is a subset of atheists. From this perspective, agnostics are nothing like atheists: agnostics are in category 2.
Regarding what religion people say they are, there is a difference between people who identify culturally with a religion and those who think that various religious myths are true.
I go to buy a used car. The used car salesman tells me it's a great car. Is there anything wrong with it? Absolutely not. What about that rust spot? Only cosmetic. Tires look a little bald. They're brand new. How's the engine? Purrs like a kitten. I can tell he's lying, but not what about. As I'm leaving some guy says, hey buddy, that salesman is full of it. That car's got a faulty transmission. I have no way of knowing that's true, but because I know the salesman was lying so I'm inclined to believe him.
I think that's what's going on with a lot of conspiracy thinking. Public health people reflexively downplay any adverse vaccine effects, anyone who tries to object gets denounced, or fired, or booted off twitter and I start to think I'm being lied to, but I don't know why. Then someone comes and says of course you're being lied to, because Bill Gates wants population control, or whatever. I can't tell if that's true either, but he confirmed my suspicions and seems sincere, so I'm more inclined to believe him than the people I know are trying to spin me.
Helpful thinking 👍
Father Brown said that about unbelievers in one of the short stories by Chesterton.
I think those data suffer a lot from being USA-centric. The US are a very singular country, and social patterns there don't necessarily applies elsewhere. This is especially true about religion where the US are really exceptional among developed countries.
This “PseudoChesterton” quote seems to be talking about three types of people (Traditional Believers, Believers in Random Bullshit, and People Who Can Judge Between Them). But it’s really just about two types: those who wear their beliefs lightly and those who don’t.
I’d rephrase “PseudoChesterton”’s remark as “Those who seek curiosity-stoppers will find them, in one place or another.”
Which is a psychological observation about one type of person. The type who doesn’t want to muck about with Bayesian probabilistic belief updates, but perceives uncertainty as an insatiable drain - a hole in the psyche which wants plugging.
It implies that you might as well leave the tried-and-true drain stopper / curiosity stopper in place if it seems to be working - better the devil you know, etc.
But people with more openess to experience, and less ego-attachment to their current opinions don’t care for such devils, known or otherwise.
As Hoffer in The True Believer said:
“It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet. The fanatics of various hues eye each other with suspicion and are ready to fly at each other’s throat. But they are neighbors and almost of one family. They hate each other with the hatred of brothers. They are as far apart and close together as Saul and Paul. And it is easier for a fanatic Communist to be converted to fascism, chauvinism or Catholicism than to become a sober liberal.
The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not.”
Excellent point - I've thought something similar for many years, but had never heard it put as well as your quotation from Hoffer.
I have read some, but not all of, the comments (there are 623 as I speak), but I have never understood the quote in question to be about conspiracy theories.
I have always understood it to be about things such as mass murder (or abortion or eugenics or ...) with the idea that a person who believes in God would not be persuaded that mass murder would be correct but an atheist might be willing to follow some argument to a logical conclusion and then crank up the gas ovens. The person who believed in God would not turn on the gas that because doing so was "wrong" even if the person couldn't find a flaw in the logic.
One can haul out the "No True Scotsman" tool to show that Nazi and Communist mass murder wasn't committed by people who believed in God. Even the Nazi and Communists folks who *said* they did really didn't. Because if they had believed in God then they wouldn't have committed the mass murder :-)
Basically, I've read this quote as a variation on "Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them."
Am I the only one (here) who interprets the quote that way and not about conspiracy theories?
Edit: Ah, Eyebrows comment makes it clear that I am not the only one who reads the quote this way!
I'm not sure the fake C.S. Lewis quote is really getting at a notion that non-believers are vulnerable to conspiracy theories as much as to philosophical positions like nihilism and Nietzschean "will to power" ideas, which allow for essentially whatever moral system someone "wills". One could argue atheism allows and has allowed different non-believing people to select e.g. secular humanism (more socially accepted (currently)) as well as Nazi "might makes right" imperialism.
The question isn't really about object-level beliefs based on object-level evidence but about the personal formation of a sense of ultimate purpose, which is hard to formulate on sure footing for someone who doesn't necessarily believe it exists. Granted, this may not be what many atheists would claim but I think at the same time many would claim this is the case, that there isn't some absolute moral purpose "out there" that we need to fulfill, but just what individuals happen to choose is "good for them". The fact that atheism allows this ambiguity as to the existence of absolute moral purpose is also indicative of what I think the quote is getting at. Christians (the religious group I'm most familiar with) are much less ambiguous about their final purpose. This isn't to say religious views haven't been used to support positions that are currently considered immoral, but (I'd argue) religious views provide more constraint than atheism.
I think this is overlooking that atheism is properly modeled as a religion. It has Things To Say about all the religious topics, treats them seriously, and should have the same govt-granted protections as theistic religions.
This is mostly a combination of two effects that go in opposite directions: Intelligence and conformity. It’s well-known that nonconformity and intelligence are correlated with irreligion in general. However, atheism is correlated much more strongly with IQ. Being spiritual but not religious, a “None,” or a non-churchgoer who still identifies as religious is more strongly correlated with nonconformity and social alienation than with intelligence (if it’s correlated at all; nonobservance is anticorrelated with intelligence IIRC).
Both conformity and intelligence are strongly anticorrelated with belief in conspiracies. So which effect dominates depends on whether you’re looking at the slightly-smarter than average but very nonconformist “Nones,” or the significantly smarter than average but only slightly nonconformist atheists.
Lots of high IQ people are regular churchgoers in my experience. But they are of a more practical, pragmatic bent—lawyers, doctors, dentists, business owners—the same people who go to rotary meetings. There are a disproportionate number of devout Mormon lawyers who went to elite law schools and practice at top law firms. I think the calculus for them is pretty simple: if church improves your life satisfaction and puts you in beneficial social circles, why would dig for a truth that can only upset that? But I really don’t think this is the crowd that believes in big foot.
Intellectually curious people who are high IQ end up at CalTech (not Harvard Law) where they can get some answers about the nature of being that they find satisfying and are persuaded to accept. Lower IQ people who are intellectually curious are more apt to be persuaded by the explanations of the church down the street. They’re also more like to accept a prima facie case for Bigfoot without a lot of research around minimum breeding populations or skeletal remains or whatever. But the underlying credulity and lack of inquiry is corollary with their adopted religious beliefs, not causal.
Seeing any effect go from other religions through nonbelievers to Jews seems like an enormous red flag that you might really just be dealing with IQ. (Bigfoot)
I don't think we get anywhere near understanding this data until we control for some reasonable measure of general intelligence. It might be analogous to a chess position where a beginner takes an available piece because that's obvious, an expert notices a range of powerful opponent responses and avoids taking, but a grandmaster calculates counters to all of those responses and makes the same move as the beginner.
Can we please stop using the term "conspiracy theory" as a synonym for "crazy, ridiculous theory that only nutjobs believe in"?
This usage gives the media a very powerful motte-and-bailey: when discussing a perfectly plausible theory about people conspiring that is supported by good evidence, they can describe it as a conspiracy theory. This description is accurate in the literal sense of the term, as it is indeed a theory about people conspiring, but it poisons the well: everyone listening hears "conspiracy theory" and thinks "insane, baseless theory that [outgroup] believes".
This irrationally biases people against theories that involve conspiracies, and the effect is that people who want to expose actual conspiracies have to use different words to describe what's happening, or argue that their theory wouldn't actually require a conspiracy - but this is a waste of time, because "is X a conspiracy theory?" is really just a disguised query for "is X false?". We should not accept this linguistic framing, because it would amount to a concession that conspiracy is axiomatically impossible.
Well said! I wish there were a "Like" button.
We're operating on Imageboard rules. You want to "Like" something? "Yes, And" it. "Yes, but also" works too.
👍
>Can we please stop using
The answer to any question of this for is, sadly, no.
When you get a sufficiently high intellectual sophistication, it'd be more accurate to say that woo is vulnerable to you.
The Conspirituality podcast covers some of these issues well - SBNR (spiritual but not religious) people are often caught up in perpetuating views that, often unknown to them, are the same conspiracy theories that originate in and circulate widely on the alt right.
I think you undersell your point about correlation with "right-coded" beliefs and that this probably explains _all_ correlations better than any underlying characteristic of people with a given belief set.
All beliefs are culturally coded. If you found that religious people eat more bread and atheists eat more rice you wouldn't try to draw a conclusion about religious digestive systems, you'd just note it as a fairly arbitrary cultural constellation, maybe there are ethnic factors but they're entirely historical.
I don't think people believe in astrology because their model of reasoning is particularly attuned to it, I think they just believe it because the right person introduced it to them at the right time. If there are less atheist astrologers I'd say it's just because the social links that enable that trigger don't exist.
I think the last graph has it. Your likelihood of joining a cult increases for every year of higher education you had. Almost 80pc of cult members have 4 or more years of higher education.
It's hard to find a coherent relationship here, but my intuition tells me that there's probably a lot of different things involved.
In my experience, the extremely dim and extremely smart seem to be most likely to believe in conspiracy theories. On the one hand, you have the kind of people who buy supplements from Alex Jones because they don't want to turn into gay frogs. On the other hand, you have people like Eric Weinstein who are so smart that their brain can easily produce convincing narratives around almost anything.
I think science knowledge also has something to do with it, for instance I could see the belief in conspiracy theories being far less in STEM departments. For instance, a lot of people (even very brilliant ones like Einstein) struggle with the concept of extremely unlikely things happening by chance, whereas any discipline that involves a lot of statistics will probably inoculate you somewhat against that kind of thinking.
Lastly, some people probably just have a baseline level of neuroticism that makes them prone to conspiracy theories irrespective of the other relevant variables. I often see this kind of thing among creative types, but I think their paranoia is often part of what makes them creative.
Tbh I have no problem with conspiracy theories provided they aren't violent. To go even further, I'm often disappointed that more smart people don't really believe in any, as I think it's indicative of too much conformity and a lack of heteredox thought.
To add one more point, I think the status associated with the belief is also key. Few people believe in bigfoot or Q-anon because it's seen as a low-status belief supported by poor white people. However, the idea that Trump got pissed on by a Russian hooker is far more likely to garner support, because it's associated with more status.
> In my experience, the extremely dim and extremely smart seem to be most likely to believe in conspiracy theories.
Yeah, same here. I think part of the dynamic is that the Official Narrative tends to be packaged for people of roughly average intelligence.
For some people, that means it sails over their heads, they can't follow the reasoning the Official Spokesperson gives for why the Official Narrative should be persuasive, and they either assume it must be some kind of trick or just fail to register it at all and go off believing whatever story sounds sexier or more flattering to their ingroup.
At the other extreme, there are people whom the Official Narrative strikes as dumbed-down in ways they can easily detect. They either resent being patronized and instinctively distrust whatever the Official Spokesperson says, or they assume that there must be an alternate version for smart people that's more complicated and less congenial to the powers that be.
Paranoia's about connecting things that aren't actually connected, but if you're trying to make new art that might be a plus. Film noir + sci-fi = cyberpunk. Western + sci-fi = post-apocalyptic. Wargames + fantasy = D&D.
Is gullibility what is really meant by the quote? I always assumed it was something to do with existential dread!
I think that most of the conspiracy theories mentioned are more reasonable than all mainstream religions, which kind of undermines the quote at the top.
The simple explanation here is that atheism is very much akin to protestantism in terms of it's treatment of belief/knowledge/truth, and this attitude produces the trends seen here.
Protestantism's main shift from Catholicism historically was the elevation of "inner feeling" or "belief" over the immediately experience of sacredness, the eucharist, etc. So protestantism became about "believing correctly", "knowing the truth", rather than about practices of worship etc.
Is atheism not primarily a negation of protestantism? Same epistemic structure, but an unshakeable belief in "no god" instead of "god"? If this were the case, it would make sense why atheists and protestants share the stances described.
I think Scott's addressing the weaker of the claims that religious intellectuals make—the stronger being: "Everybody worships." https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122178211966454607
A non-believing (and non-threatening to atheists) interpretation might be that human passions run so strong it's nearly impossible to avoid exercising a degree of "religious" faith in some purpose.
Except that atheism cannot answer questions like ‘What is the point of my existence?’ Or ‘Why am I investing in a future that I will not be part of?’ Or ‘Why should I not ruthlessly exploit others to my own benefit except insofar as it would be expected to result in some tangible adverse consequence for me?’
Or rather atheists can answer such questions, and possibly in the ultimately correct ways. But not in ways that assist individuals or societies in functioning well. Truth is kind of beside the point.
I think you’re confusing atheist with post-Christian. Maintaining a broadly Christian worldview without the need for strict adherence to every dogma or particular views about the existence of God or gods seems to work pretty great in the West. I don’t know how well that holds up now that it’s come unmoored though.
For example, the notion that people have equal fundamental spiritual value, whether man/woman, citizen/servant, Greek/barbarian rests on a Christian premise that helped it find appeal with Roman slaves early in its history. It’s widely accepted as self evident in the West now, but a pagan Roman senator would have been shocked by even the idea and vehemently disagreed.
The Christian worldview has two millennia of momentum behind it, so no doubt we coast on its premises for awhile even as its conclusions are discarded. But I don’t see how atheism either buttresses the existing Western worldview or supplies a knew one. At most it could say that we are all equal because we are all the same happy, fleeting, pointless accidents of physics and biology. True is different from helpful.
You’re not talking primarily about nations full of people who have diligently followed the tenants of science and logic to their likely conclusions and are atheists in that sense. More like they have a general sense that God, or at least the concept of God presented by organized religions, is kind of silly and getting rid of it allows them to live life as they want. Which is mostly how they lived it before minus some of the awkward baggage picked up over two millennia and pulled in haphazardly from preceding frameworks. Which in the short term is great, but allows for more drift.
Atheism is not itself a framework. It just discards a common trope relied on by other frameworks to punt on a lot of the ‘why’ questions. Certainly, there have been efforts to invent a workable atheistic framework uncoupled from, and independent of, residual premises and beliefs. Nietzsche’s ‘Antichrist’ is an example, but not particularly compelling or desirable in practice.
<i>But Christians don't actually believe that. Christianity explicitely teaches that anyone who isn't a Christian is spiritually worthless, and anyone who dies not a Christian deserves infinite punishment for the finite transgression of not believing the right thing at the right time; and God being all-knowing and all-powerful *could absolutely* reach those people, but chooses not to, which is explained as these people being reprobates, unreachable *by nature*, that God chose to bring into the world with their soul already pre-damned.</i>
Ideological Turing Test score: fail
That's just Calvinism, not Christianity as a whole. I was raised Catholic, and while I have a lot of problems with Catholic theology, I can tell you with confidence that Catholics don't believe what you're describing.
<i>And yet the most well functioning societies on Earth are also the most atheistic, and the most religious societies on Earth are also the most violent and dysfunctional.</i>
Given that "the most atheistic societies on Earth" include China and North Korea, you might want to be less bullish in your claims of superiority.
https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2014/01/global-religion-full.pdf
Well, I have been following this thread with amusement since there is little understanding demonstrated as to how the unit human mind works and how they collectively form groups and become a collective mind.
The title could equally have been "Will Anybody Really Believe Anything".
George Berkeley would have been proud.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/
Consider
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/do-our-questions-create-the-world/
I would just point out that arbitrarily grouping together people based upon their religious beliefs (or lack thereof) will lead to extremely heterogeneous groups of people being lumped together. It might be fun to throw a whole bunch of survey questions unrelated to religion at these people and then classify the responses by religious affiliation, but it doesn't really tell you much because these groups are made up of people with extremely varied life experiences, political affiliations, viewpoints, intelligence quotients and levels of education.
This is something my mother says a lot. She (and her religious friends) like to frame all knowledge as a matter of belief. So, for example, she thinks that believing in evolution, LGBT rights, or climate change is simply a matter of faith, just like believing in God.
What always jumps out to me in this sort of discussion is just how common conspiracy theories actually are. 9/11 truth conspiracy theories poll in the 40s, moon landing around 20, JFK assassination in the 60s...
Even discounting heavily politicized theories, it seems likely that the vast majority of people believe in at least one or two conspiracy theories. It might be time to stop thinking of "conspiracy theorists" as deviants with a critical piece of mental capacity missing. A belief in mysterious forces beyond your control is psychologically normal, and we don't need any more thinkpieces speculating about why members of X group fall for conspiracy theories.
I've long felt that "conspiracy theories" form a continuum with no clear point of demarcation between reasonable and unreasonable to believe in.
At one end of the spectrum is the mob killing Jimmy Hoffa. This is minimally a conspiracy theory, insofar as it posits a conspiracy and is technically at odds with the official narrative (which is that we don't know what happened to Jimmy Hoffa). Virtually everybody who's looked into the evidence has reached the same conclusion that this is obviously what happened, but we'll probably never get the kind of definitive proof that we'd need to consider this a Fully Validated Historical Fact. An earlier historical example is Richard III killing the Princes in the Tower. We don't know, but... yeah, we kind of know. Say that's a 1 on the conspiracy-theory scale.
At the other extreme is Queen Elizabeth being a lizard. There is nothing remotely resembling evidence for this proposition, or even any sort of gap in the evidence for the opposing thesis that the Queen is a human being. It's a pure mental efflux wholly unrelated to any kind of empirical fact.
I recall that in Scott's post on the subject he proposed solving the Lizardman's Constant problem by asking a qualitatively more absurd question, as an example of which he suggested "Is Barack Obama a hippopotamus?" I've always found this amusing, as if there were some infinitesimal plausibility to the idea of a lizard impersonating the Queen that the idea of a hippo impersonating the President just didn't have. So I'm going to say that the lizardman theory is a 10 on the scale, but if you want the amps to go up to 11, I'm fine with making "Barack Obama is a hippopotamus" an 11.
The point is, I'm not sure where on that spectrum belief in a particular conspiracy theory goes from being perfectly reasonable to being locally unreasonable to being a signal of some sort of broader cognitive failure.
I don't think your characterization of that graph from the Economist as
"the authors are doing the usual trick where they cherry-pick right-wing examples of something bad, show that more right-wingers are in favor of them, then conclude that Science Has Proven Right-Wingers Are Bad."
is at all fair.
The article in question is here, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/27/what-drives-belief-in-conspiracy-theories-a-lack-of-religion-or-too-much, and while the title seems to support your point, they put the exact caveat you do in the actual article.
"Belief in these theories is also linked to a person’s political views. White evangelicals are 34 percentage points more likely than other Americans to believe that “millions of illegal votes” were cast in the 2020 election. These adults also tend to be more conservative, and vote for Republican politicians more often, than non-whites and members of other religious groups do. Evangelicals are influenced by the official party line on issues of the day—even if they are conspiratorial."
In fact, the article's central question is why QAnon has become so popular--and whether the answer is because Americans lack faith. The conclusion, therefore, that QAnon adherents are particularly likely to be Christians, is salient for the question it sets out to answer.
Re: "For example, if God created humans in the Garden of Eden, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for aliens and UFOs."
This is not a new argument. In 1277, the existence of aliens was a controversy then dividing much of the French theological community. The Bishop of Paris ruled that one could not deny the power of God to create as He pleases. He didn't say anything about God's only begotten son versus God having begotten sons elsewhere.
For more, I'll recommend "The High Crusade".
This one is a lot more about theories of human nature rather than arbitrary supernatural beliefs. Not a fan of religion but it typically seems to take atheism to subscribe to unfalsifiable political ideologies like wokeness or communism otherwise.
Not non-believers but the rationalist community, yes they will believe anything. Just look at the prevalence of insane LW cults.
An important distinction between evangelicals and other Christian traditions is the “conversionism” (to borrow from Bebbington’s quadrilateral). As Billy Graham supposedly put it,”God has many children, but he doesn’t have any grandchildren.” In other words, ideally evangelicalism requires a level of intentionality not present in other flavors of Christianity. Obviously, a lot of nonobservant folks self identify as evangelical, but I suspect that it is less committed than other traditions. In other words, an evangelical identity is more predictive of one’s actual beliefs than say “Catholic”.
As far as Christians believing in traditional woo and thus not really protective, it misses important methodological differences in why one might believe in astrology vs the virgin birth. The Protestant reformers posited two sources of reliable (infallible) information about reality: nature (general revelation) and scripture (special revelation). All truth claims had to be verified against the infallible evidence provided by these sources. Claims by councils, popes, tradition, or other authorities can in principle be wrong. The structure of this epistemic framework is not so different from that of the rationalists. This sparked deep skepticism of miracles (e.g., transubstantiation was described as an absurd superstition), relics, and visions. Indeed many reformed were various flavor of cessationist. If one adopts such a stance, then adhering to a religion that includes supernatural views is compatible with protection from a large class of irrational beliefs.
If I'm reading the UFO thing correctly, in a strict sense, UFO sightings by people in the military *is* evidence of life on other planets? Not particularly strong evidence, mind you, but I'd be hard-pressed to say those things have no correlation at all, or that UFO sightings are evidence against ET life.
This is a bad approach because it inevitably involves wading into a whole slew of object level claims. I think it was SSC years ago that suggested a way to avoid this controversy was to look at historical episodes that were far enough removed we could view them with detachment. And religionists have a number of powerful examples from the historic episodes of modernist ideology, such as the French Revolution or actually existing communism. This is much more productive than engaging in object-level epistemic skirmishing over who (currently) has the weirdest beliefs. Also, I am very suspicious of anyone who doesn't entertain at least a few deviations from consensus epistemology.
In C.S. Lewis's 'That Hideous Strength' one of the good characters is an old-fashioned atheist logical-positivist type, who refuses to get caught up in all the satanic stuff because he's too much of an honest atheist. So I think the general point of this article is already well appreciated by people in the Lewis-Chesterton tradition, but they would say it doesn't matter too much because strict atheists are basically irrelevant psychological oddities. Another way of phrasing Chesterton (if he didn't say the quote, he definitely said a lot of things like the quote) is 'most people are not psychologically capable of being cold rationalists'.
Further the people who state a version of this thesis today are talking about woo ideas like 'there is a conspiracy among police to shoot black people and falsify crime statistics' or 'a significant fraction of people are born the wrong sex and need invasive surgery'. Now, you can say that these are are left-coded beliefs so the argument is really just a fancy way of saying 'leftwingers are more leftwing', but at least address the real argument.
Normal people with common sense? Should it have said, " Me and my friends, we are very smart and better than you. You should trust us." I would love to see this poll associated with Happiness or satisfaction. Hmmmm wonder who is more satisfied, the religious or the atheist? Bing, bing, bing. The religious. The rabbit hole of not understanding yourself or others. Precious.
Probably worth pointing out that a lot of rationalist types believe in something fairly close to the robot apocalypse, which is a view most people would look at with a fair degree of skepticism, to say the least.
Found the the relevant Chesterton quote:
"Insofar as religion is gone, reason is going."
-Orthodoxy.
Well democratisation of belief comes with a cost... but on the long run I believe it is the so-called right thing to do!?!
Interesting.
Personally I think no society has ever existed without something like a universal religion (even if the 'something like a universal religion' has been materialistic or non theistic).
If that gets fractured then people fragment into in-groups and networks of similarly minded people with a natural distrust of others who dont perceive the world the way they do.
It's probably in this environment of distrust that people become most open to conspiracy.
Social media facilitates the formation of in-groups and networks but this kind of thing happened long before social media in response to stresses and crises.
Think of post reformation European witch hunts or the way Jewish populations have been persecuted.
I really think you're misunderstanding the statement. It isn't about belief in conspiracy theories. From the point of view of the religious true believer who might say this, they have a source of "absolute truth" that is a guideline for what is true and false. Of course in reality this "absolute truth" doesnt cover everything, but they BELIEVE that that their beliefs regarding what we might call the "objective realm" derive from this absolute truth. Lewis may not hve said it, but the final book in his Narnia series very clearly illustrates this idea.
If one believes there is absolute truth they know, then people lacking such will be able to be "convinced of anything" because any possibility is open to them, via argument, persuasion, trend, bias, etc.
But I think its silly to take this statement from a different wordlview then where it comes from and try to think about whether or not it's true, as the meaning one gets from that is totally different from the meaning of the statement from the point of view of the believer.
Its a similar sentiment to the one stated often states by some religious believers belief in God and the morals he gives is neccessary for people to be moral and ethical because without an absolute sourcce all ethics are subjective.
There is a hint of truth to this but its confused. Ethics are in the subjective realm. They claim that a literal belief in an all power deity is what puts ethics and morals in the realm of the objective.
Many people mistake this claim to mean that without belief in God, people would just go around murdering and being completely immoral. I don't think thats what the saying generally means (of course some people will always have different interpretations because) because thats patently false. As explanied by my uncle who is a Baptist minister who said the equivalent of this, when people try to determine morals and ethics independent of a divine source they can never agree or establish any consistent principle from which ethics should derive. Thats sort of right, I don't buy for example Sam Harris' attempt to determine an "objective ethics" from analyzing biology, evolution, and commonalities in group behavior. Or rather I think what he's looking for isnt "ethics" as I think of it, and there's disconnect there betwen what he sees as the objectivity of the source versus the subjective nature.
But that sentiment is VERY similar to the "If you don't believe in God you can believe in anything." The significance from the point of view of the believer is very concerned with ethics, because from their epistomology ethics are absolutes like natural laws. Thus some set of arguments or circumstances could play on one's inherent sense of fairness or compassion but lead to wrong conclusions. In "The Last Battle" the Lewis book I mentioned, it becomes clear ( and this would be the Christian or Abrahamic view) that Satan uses things like playing on human conscious to mislead humans into damnation, and you can't trust your own "moral intuitions" without "fear of God" who makes clear what his commandements are. Humans have a choice to either obey or disobey.
It makes sense IF ONE BELIEVES IN GOD. But since people here don't, or at least probably not that fundamentalist version, trying to see if there's any validity to the claim seems to me like an exercise in silliness and missing the point.
Whether or not the religious are prone to conspiracy theories and the fact some are and some arent shows that the supposed absolute truth they say they beleive in really isnt absolute because different believers will come to different conclusions and both say its based on biblical reasosning (or whatever religious source) when actually there are all sorts of other factors- then the people who come to different conclusions will accusse the others of being led astray.
We see this again and again with religion and we see it now in the US as there is a division within American Christianity as to whether some Christians have put politics over their religious convictions or merged them versus the view that those politics are obvious following from commandements of the absolute religious truth and is the believers duty.
And frankly I dont give surveys on belief in conspiracy theories much worth because on top of the other problems with surveys conspiracy theorists are more prone to either be paranoid about answerin questions OR have a strong tribal indentification with such beliefs and survey takers usually have a strong bias in terms of what they are trying to show as well as the usual survey questions as I have experenced them when it comes to taking them are TERRIBLE because they are "strongly agree to strongly disagree" and its very clear how the questions are "loaded" i. e. what conclusion the survey maker will draw from different answers but words those questions in ways where what they are "looking for" isnt necessarily or even usually what they asked because of overly general assumptions.
As an example the question "Is support of law enforcement and crime a major factor in your voting?"
It was clear that if you said "strongly agree" the survey registered you as a "law and order, blue lives matter conservative"
But I am the opposite, an absolute cop hater- and thus my answer would ALSO be "strongly agree" because a candidate who was strongly supportive of law enforcement would NOT get my vote.
And enough of the questions are worded like that that I just don't think those sorts of surveys tell you much of anything.
I know this is a bit off-topic, but I am hoping this community can answer the question. Since the thread has died down a bit, I don't think I am crashing the party on this. If it doesn't belong here, my apologies. I am thinking of a fallacy, and I know it has a formal name. I just don't know if I have ever been aware of it. It's basically "comparing the best of ours to the worst of yours."
An example would be "The Christian worldview has resulted in societies based on justice, charity, human rights, and the Muslim world just flies planes into buildings and commits honor killings."
or "Conservatives have Victor Davis Hanson and George Will, liberals have Keith Olberman and Kamala Harris."
What is that called?
Evangelicals believe in a lot of evangelical-appropriate conspiracy theorists. What's the equivalent among atheists?
I think excluding political conspiracy theories from consideration is problematic. Extremist political ideologies are often built on the backs of conspiracy theories.
I can think of a number of religious panics.
I believe in astrology because I recognize that there are other people who believe in astrology who change and model their behavior based on their belief in astrology, and these people interact with me indirectly in society.
I find it disconcerting that your use a Bayesian tagline, and statistically conflate so many groups.
Also, the game you played with the bigfoot statistics almost sounds like an xqcd statistics parody.
"(In theory some groups could be open-minded and less likely to take strong positions on either side, but it doesn’t look like that happens here)." Catholics seem pretty based.
Interesting read, though.
It's interesting that the conversation went straight from right-wing conspiracy theories to politically-neutral conspiracy theories, skipping right over the many left-wing conspiracy theories. It's not that we atheists just don't believe; it's that we don't accept beliefs without evidence.