Oh okay. I don’t find this convincing, consistent with my position above I’d bet that in the longer term we’d do best to hit a button that ended all religions today, and then eat the costs and spend the decades/centuries required to build better things in their stead. (I think it’s really embarrassing we don’t have better things in their place, especially after the industrial revolution.) I don’t think I can argue well for that position right now, I’ll need to think on it more (and maybe write a post on it when I’ve made some more progress on the reasonining).
(Obvious caveat that actually we only have like 0.5-3 decades of being humans any more, so the above ‘centuries’ isn’t realistic.)
“consistent with my position above I’d bet that in the longer term we’d do best to hit a button that ended all religions today, and then eat the costs and spend the decades/centuries required to build better things in their stead.”
Would you have pressed this button at every other point throughout history too? If not, when’s the earliest you would have pressed it?
For me the answer is “roughly the beginning of the 20th century?”
Like, seems to me that around that time humanity had enough of the pieces figured out to make a more naturalistic worldview work pretty well.
It’s kind of hard to specify what it would have meant to press that button some centuries earlier, since like, I think a non-trivial chunk of religion was people genuinely trying to figure out what reality is made out of, and what the cosmology of the world is, etc. Depending on the details of this specification I would have done it earlier.
If you get around to writing that post, please consider/address:
Theory of the second best—“The economists Richard Lipsey and Kelvin Lancaster showed in 1956 that if one optimality condition in an economic model cannot be satisfied, it is possible that the next-best solution involves changing other variables away from the values that would otherwise be optimal.”—Generalizing from this, given that humans deviate from optimal rationality in all kinds of unavoidable ways, the “second-best” solution may well involve belief in some falsehoods.
Managing risks while trying to do good—We’re all very tempted to overlook risks while trying to do good, including (in this instance) destroying “that which can be destroyed by truth”.
Before Christianity was discredited, it acted as a sort of shared lens through which the value of any proposed course of action could be evaluated. (I’m limiting my universe of discourse to Western society here.) I’m tempted to call such a lens an “ideological commitment” (where the “commitment” is a commitment to view everything that happens to you through the lens of the ideology—or at least a habit of doing so).
Committing to an ideology is one of the most powerful things a person can do to free himself from anxiety (because the commitment shifts his focus from his impotent vulnerable self to something much less vulnerable and much longer lived). Also, people who share a commitment to the same ideology tend to work together effectively: a small fraction of the employees of an organization for example who share a commitment to the same ideology have many times taken the organization over by using loyalty to the ideology to decide who to hire and who to promote. They’ve also taken over whole countries in a few cases.
The trouble with reducing the prestige and the influence of Christianity even now in 2025 is that the ideologies that have rushed in to fill the void (in the availability of ways to reduce personal anxiety and of ways to coordinate large groups of people) have had IMHO much worse effects than Christianity.
You, Ben, tend to think that society should “eat the costs and spend the decades/centuries required to build better things” than Christianity. The huge problem with that is that the extreme deadliness of one of ideologies that has rushed in to fill the void caused by the discrediting of Christianity: namely, the one (usually referred to vaguely by “progress” or “innovation”) that views every personal, organizational and political decision through the lens of which decision best advances or accelerates science and technology.
In trying to get frontier AI research stopped or paused for a few decades, we are facing off against not only trillions of dollars in economic / profit incentives, but also an ideology, and ideologies (including older ideologies like Christianity) have proven to be fierce opponents in the past.
Reducing the prestige and influence of Christianity will tend to increase the prestige and influence of all the other ideologies, including the ideology, which is already much more popular than I would prefer, that we can expect to offer up determined sustained opposition to anyone trying to stop or long-pause AI.
Oh okay. I don’t find this convincing, consistent with my position above I’d bet that in the longer term we’d do best to hit a button that ended all religions today, and then eat the costs and spend the decades/centuries required to build better things in their stead. (I think it’s really embarrassing we don’t have better things in their place, especially after the industrial revolution.) I don’t think I can argue well for that position right now, I’ll need to think on it more (and maybe write a post on it when I’ve made some more progress on the reasonining).
(Obvious caveat that actually we only have like 0.5-3 decades of being humans any more, so the above ‘centuries’ isn’t realistic.)
“consistent with my position above I’d bet that in the longer term we’d do best to hit a button that ended all religions today, and then eat the costs and spend the decades/centuries required to build better things in their stead.”
Would you have pressed this button at every other point throughout history too? If not, when’s the earliest you would have pressed it?
For me the answer is “roughly the beginning of the 20th century?”
Like, seems to me that around that time humanity had enough of the pieces figured out to make a more naturalistic worldview work pretty well.
It’s kind of hard to specify what it would have meant to press that button some centuries earlier, since like, I think a non-trivial chunk of religion was people genuinely trying to figure out what reality is made out of, and what the cosmology of the world is, etc. Depending on the details of this specification I would have done it earlier.
If you get around to writing that post, please consider/address:
Theory of the second best—“The economists Richard Lipsey and Kelvin Lancaster showed in 1956 that if one optimality condition in an economic model cannot be satisfied, it is possible that the next-best solution involves changing other variables away from the values that would otherwise be optimal.”—Generalizing from this, given that humans deviate from optimal rationality in all kinds of unavoidable ways, the “second-best” solution may well involve belief in some falsehoods.
Managing risks while trying to do good—We’re all very tempted to overlook risks while trying to do good, including (in this instance) destroying “that which can be destroyed by truth”.
Before Christianity was discredited, it acted as a sort of shared lens through which the value of any proposed course of action could be evaluated. (I’m limiting my universe of discourse to Western society here.) I’m tempted to call such a lens an “ideological commitment” (where the “commitment” is a commitment to view everything that happens to you through the lens of the ideology—or at least a habit of doing so).
Committing to an ideology is one of the most powerful things a person can do to free himself from anxiety (because the commitment shifts his focus from his impotent vulnerable self to something much less vulnerable and much longer lived). Also, people who share a commitment to the same ideology tend to work together effectively: a small fraction of the employees of an organization for example who share a commitment to the same ideology have many times taken the organization over by using loyalty to the ideology to decide who to hire and who to promote. They’ve also taken over whole countries in a few cases.
The trouble with reducing the prestige and the influence of Christianity even now in 2025 is that the ideologies that have rushed in to fill the void (in the availability of ways to reduce personal anxiety and of ways to coordinate large groups of people) have had IMHO much worse effects than Christianity.
You, Ben, tend to think that society should “eat the costs and spend the decades/centuries required to build better things” than Christianity. The huge problem with that is that the extreme deadliness of one of ideologies that has rushed in to fill the void caused by the discrediting of Christianity: namely, the one (usually referred to vaguely by “progress” or “innovation”) that views every personal, organizational and political decision through the lens of which decision best advances or accelerates science and technology.
In trying to get frontier AI research stopped or paused for a few decades, we are facing off against not only trillions of dollars in economic / profit incentives, but also an ideology, and ideologies (including older ideologies like Christianity) have proven to be fierce opponents in the past.
Reducing the prestige and influence of Christianity will tend to increase the prestige and influence of all the other ideologies, including the ideology, which is already much more popular than I would prefer, that we can expect to offer up determined sustained opposition to anyone trying to stop or long-pause AI.