[deleted] comments on BHTV: Eliezer Yudkowsky & Razib Khan

[[deleted]]

Allegedly, he is a LW reader (unlike EY nowadays!)

Here are some tantalising excerpts from Razib Khan’s blog:

Mass literacy and mass society, as well as the decentralization of authority and power, likely made fundamentalism inevitable as the basal level of individuals with susceptible psychological profiles could now have direct access to the axioms in question (texts) Just as some scientists tend to take ideas to their “logical extremes” (e.g., the “paradoxes” of physics) no matter the dictates of common sense, so some fundamentalists take the logical conclusion of their religious texts to extremes

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Humans may ascribe omniscience to gods, but their behaviors and narratives when pushed off any script suggest that they don’t take this at face value in any deep manner. Or, more accurately, they can’t really construct a plausible model of the universe where gods are omniscient. Similarly, though there is a wide range of high-level religious ideas across denominations, from the spare monotheism of Islam, the de facto* polytheism of Hinduism, to the marginalization of gods in Theravada Buddhism, the author’s field work in Sri Lanka suggests that in fact the average peasants’ conception of supernatural agents was surprisingly uniform across religious groups.

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Perhaps the most surprising revelation of this body of research for me is that ofttimes believers in a particular creed are not quite clear on the details of their own religious profession. As I am an atheist who has never really had any belief in gods in any deep manner this took me by total surprise, but then, I had no intuition to go on. But, after realizing this fact I became much more skeptical of the idea that “Christians are x because the Bible says….” or “Islam is xbecause the Koran says….” As per Kahneman’s scheme in Thinking, Fast and Slow, much of religious phenomena probably bubbles up from system 1, but the preoccupation of elite institutional religion is geared toward system 2 (not to go off on a current events tangent, but this might explain why so many notionally conservative Christians are willing to put their orthodoxy to the side and support Donald Trump, he appeals to their system 1 instincts).

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Marketplace of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion (answer: it doesn’t).

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In short those who held beliefs about moralistic gods were more altruistic, more ethical, toward co-religionists. This confirms a deep human intuition. Recall that historically atheists were held in suspicion because they were perceived to be unethical, and even today in the United States most Americans view atheists unfavorably. Though these results don’t say anything about atheism (it seems unlikely any of the respondents were atheists!), it does suggest that moralistic gods do nudge many people toward particular behaviors, so they logically infer that removing the god from the equation would result in the converse.

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Consider that the reference daily intake you see on nutritional labels are “level of a nutrient that is considered to be sufficient to meet the requirements of 97–98% of healthy individuals in every demographic in the United States.”