Reason as memetic immune disorder | Hacker News Reader

Reason as memetic immune disorder

lesswrong.com

33 pointsrntz13 comments

Very interesting threads of thought in this essay. The idea of culture as an evolved complex, similar to an ecosystem in some ways and similar to an organism in others is a strong one.

Like an ecosystem, there is a certain equilibria that uses both rational and non rational elements to maintain. Some of the elements are downright irrational. There is a brilliant representation of this by Douglas Adams that I often quote. The whole thing is definitely worth a read if you enjoyed this essay. It is really a different way of looking at the same thing. I'll paste some pieces of it here:

..The one I have in mind at the moment is one that describes the culture and economy of Bali, which is a small, very crowded island that subsists on rice. Now, rice is an incredibly efficient food and you can grow an awful lot in a relatively small space, but it's hugely labour intensive and requires a lot of very, very precise co-operation amongst the people there, particularly when you have a large population on a small island needing to bring its harvest in. People now looking at the way in which rice agriculture works in Bali are rather puzzled by it because it is intensely religious. The society of Bali is such that religion permeates every single aspect of it and everybody in that culture is very, very carefully defined in terms of who they are, what their status is and what their role in life is. It's all defined by the church; they have very peculiar calendars and a very peculiar set of customs and rituals, which are precisely defined and, oddly enough, they are fantastically good at being very, very productive with their rice harvest. In the 70s, people came in and noticed that the rice harvest was determined by the temple calendar. It seemed to be totally nonsensical, so they said, 'Get rid of all this, we can help you make your rice harvest much, much more productive than even you're, very successfully, doing at the moment. Use these pesticides, use this calendar, do this, that and the other'. So they started and for two or three years the rice production went up enormously, but the whole predator/prey/pest balance went completely out of kilter. Very shortly, the rice harvest plummeted again and the Balinese said, 'Screw it, we're going back to the temple calendar!' and they reinstated what was there before and it all worked again absolutely perfectly. It's all very well to say that basing the rice harvest on something as irrational and meaningless as a religion is stupid - they should be able to work it out more logically than that, but they might just as well say to us, 'Your culture and society works on the basis of money and that's a fiction, so why don't you get rid of it and just co-operate with each other' - we know it's not going to work!..

..this bit of engineering practice and that bit of architectural practice; you don't really know what to make of them. Compare that to somebody who tosses a cricket ball at you. You can sit and watch it and say, 'It's going at 17 degrees'..

..instead of going through all the business of trying to work out the angles and trying to digest which genuine architectural principles you may want to take out of what may be a passing architectural fad, just ask yourself, 'how would a dragon live here?' We are used to thinking in terms of organic creatures; an organic creature may consist of an enormous complexity of all sorts of different variables that are beyond our ability to resolve but we know how organic creatures live. We've never seen a dragon but we've all got an idea of what a dragon is like, so we can say, 'Well if a dragon went through here, he'd get stuck just here and a little bit cross over there because he couldn't see that and he'd wave his tail and knock that vase over'. You figure out how the dragon's going to be happy here and lo and behold! you've suddenly got a place that makes sense for other organic creatures, such as ourselves, to live in.

http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/

"To paraphrase Steve Weinberg, 'For a smart person to do something truly stupid, they need a theory.' Actually, I could have quoted him directly--'stupid' is just a lighter shade of 'evil.' Communism and fascism both begin by exercising complete control over the memetic environment, in order to create a new man stripped of cultural immunity, who will do whatever they tell him to.)"

That's an interesting idea. There is considerable research support

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...

for the idea that people can be smart in the IQ test sense and just end up using their smartness to elaborate and make more rigid ideas that are just plain wrong.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805070893/

So reason has to be checked both substantively and procedurally to offer improvement in human thinking. Reasoning from irrational premises can often result in tightly developed delusions rather than better recognition of reality.

Have any religious people here read this article? What did you think?

I was raised Christian. Around the end of college, I had a bit of a quarter-life crisis, and I ended up applying reason to my religion in the way talked about in this article. I joined a Christian missionary organization, and was determined to "go therefore in to all the world and preach the gospel to all nations", one of the typically semi-ignored Christian commands.

I was also convinced that it would be a good idea to prove that the key disputed points of Christianity were in fact correct. I went on skepticsannotatedbible.com and the Atheism sub-reddit and compiled a list of arguments to refute. I couldn't refute enough of them, and so found myself in a conundrum. I ended up choosing to live in the real world.

Most of my close friends, however, are still from the Christian communities I used to frequent. I prod and poke them mentally a little bit. Its amazing to me how Christians can justify almost anything, as long as their community mostly agrees with them. I have a group of friends who go to church multiple times per week, and have no problems sleeping with their boy/girlfriends. I have gay Christian friends, Christian friends who are bartenders, etc. My parents would be livid.

Anyhow, I just wanted to point out that when I think back about my life so far, the part of it that scares me, was when I took my religion and decided that I had to take it seriously and do something.

I have come across gay men from Orthodox Jewish backgrounds. Since secular or even atheist Jews are a perfectly possible thing to be, they can have an identity as Gay & Jewish. Most go that path. But some seem to want exactly what this article is talking about to be developed. They want some smart rabbis to come up with some smart reasons around the contradiction.

The Jewish tradition doesn't really emphasise a rule against homosexuality as much as many think. Many of the much more explicit rules (eg. If your brother dies, you get his wife) have ways around them or are ignored. They are sort of vaguely interested in the how and have this sort of instinctive understanding that it's possible.

Anyhow, I just wanted to point out that when I think back about my life so far, the part of it that scares me, was when I took my religion and decided that I had to take it seriously and do something.

I'm not sure you'll see this, but bringing this up should be fine now the thread has died.

Why do you feel that way about that time of your life? My experience has been exactly the opposite. When I was in high school I began questioning God. I attended a small church school with poor academics and being average and not knowing how to study in school I spent a good deal of time questioning the moral instruction I was given. (There were better reasons, caused a crisis regarding gods existence at 10. Fun.) The only difference is that I didn't accept that the reading the Bible was necessary. What bothered me most, and still does, was the apparent hypocrisy. Plenty of people in church, but none of them seemed to hold the traditional beliefs my family did. It was the little things, as well as boyfriend/girlfriend sort of things.

But, even now, after rejecting Christianity, I still have the greatest respect for those who really do believe. My grandfather who took his family to Argentina to teach college as a missionary and founded a chain of christian radio stations is probably the finest man I have ever met; my grandmother is similar. My ex-girlfriend spent last year teaching children in India. A sweetheart I wish I was with.

Due to my experiences I don't see why you were scared of the time when you sincerely followed your beliefs. To me this should be lauded, even, if I believe it is a false belief.

So, why do you feel that way?

The idea of ideas as viruses is old. They can infect you, then can breed with other ideas, they spread, etc.

Religion world wide does seem to follow a pattern of more complicated and more energy demanding religions being replaced by religions which require less effort. One god instead of many, and lately that god doesn't even want sacrifices, oh and peace is better then war... most of the time.

Obviously it not that simple, religion can spread through war, some religions make themselves extinct by demanding life long celibacy from everyone. And there's been some studies which found the us vs them pattern common in religious groups can decrease and/or slow the spread of disease.

There's one particular thing about Christianity though. Well OK, a couple of things, one it's kind of a modern less complex flavor of Judaism, no offense meant to any Hebrews reading this.

But the other thing is Christ's rather extreme love your enemies, turn the other cheek message. You have to see that in the context of the Roman empire and Roman culture at the time.

Rome was EXTREMELY pro war, violence and punishment. Think crucifixion, gladiators, pax romana etc. But even more then that, Roman culture saw mercy as a dirty animalistic emotion, to be surprised like all animalsitic and primitive urges should be. Reason was human, emotions, especially mercy were disgusting instincts not to be trusted, but to be fought against, with reason.

In short it was an extreme culture, that must have put some unique psychological pressures on those living there. Think how people in Japan who remember the end of WWII describe how the emperor announcing Japan's surrender felt like a bow breaking and huge pressure being relieved.

Christianity is like the perfect counter culture to the old Roman culture. No wonder it successfully spread throughout the empire. And from Rome to all of Europe, to the new world.

The other parts of the old world, have not turned Christian, and it's not for lack of trying by well funded Christian missionaries, suggesting there really was something unique about Rome and early Christianity.

Modern American Christianity is often quite, shall we say unique, why with the pro Gun, pro war thing.

  There's one particular thing about Christianity though. 
  Well OK, a couple of things, one it's kind of a modern 
  less complex flavor of Judaism, no offense meant to any 
  Hebrews reading this.

First, the similarity between the practice of Judaism and Christianity is the product of the last century or so. At the time, the ideas of, e.g., Paul diverged significantly from contemporary Jewish thinking.

Second, if you don't want to offend Jews, don't call them "Hebrews". ;)

Why, not? It's archaic and not strictly a synonym, but why would it be offensive. I understand that those that use it, usually mean offense, but there is no real reason for it.

In lots of languages it is not derogatory.

Equating a religious group with an ethnic one is mistaken (like saying 'Arabs when 'Muslims is meant), regardless of whether anyone is offended.

Thinking of those two things as distinct concepts with clear borders is a mistake. Both religious and ethnic group do not usually have definite boundaries and they are not always seperate from each other. Saying Arabs when you mean Muslim is what you mean is indeed a mistake. Most Muslims are not Arabs, but that proves nothing about how to classify these things.

Hebrews is a different issue. Jewish is actually Judah-ite, from the tribe of Judah. These were (according to the tradition) the surviving tribe of the Israelites or People of Israel. People is actually a bit misleading. In Hebrew it uses the word normally translated as 'Nation'. In modern times, the relationship between Judah & Jewish has been blurred since some groups trace their heritage to other (lost) tribes.

In any case, all of these equally refer to an ethnic group though you could argue that they are not exact synonyms. This is not just about the origin of the words. It is also the religious tradition. Jewish is not a Religion in the sense that Islam or Christianity are. It are not something you chose. It is not something you can stop and it is not something that anybody who is not (ethnically) Jewish is required or encouraged to join. Basically, the "religion" as you would probably call it doesn't distinguish between religion and ethnic group. The members of this ethnic-religious do not usually do so either. That is, many secular, atheist Jews describe themselves as Jewish, and behave in someway that indicates this.

Hebrews & Israelites, People of Israel, are as far a I know, used interchangeably in the old testament. In modern Hebrew all but the most pedantic (and religious) will use Israelites interchangeably with Jews. Secular Jews are unlikely to say Jews. "Hebrews" is not really used in modern Hebrew unless making some sort of biblical reference. In some languages it has a derogatory ring but in some languages describing someone as a Jew/Hebrew/Israelite is derogatory regardless of the word you use.

You forgot to add the argument that it's (strictly speaking) more accurate, since Yehuda is just one of the tribes.

But s/Hebrew/Colored/. Same arguments apply, but---here we are.

Maybe it is possible for lesswrong to be less wrong after all.

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