Really good piece, but one point this conversation never gets into is the fact that the old religions had a lot of ordinances that are totally arbitrary and don't improve life in a material or psychological sense in any way. You mention the Orthodox Jews stoning people on Shabbat, but we see stuff like that in every religion. That's the …
Really good piece, but one point this conversation never gets into is the fact that the old religions had a lot of ordinances that are totally arbitrary and don't improve life in a material or psychological sense in any way. You mention the Orthodox Jews stoning people on Shabbat, but we see stuff like that in every religion. That's the problem with sidelining rationalism too much- spirituality may serve as a conquest of the poetic over the prosaic, but it also actively encourages arbitrarily deciding what's "true" and what's "good". Rarely does it truly stop people from doing bad things as a whole, it just gives them an unfalsifiable source to point to so they can claim ultimate moral authority. Just look at Pope Nicholas V's "Dum Diversas" papal bull, where he authorized Alfonso of Portugal to force all "pagans and Saracens" into "perpetual servitude". Or Charlemagne's genocide of the Saxons in the name of Christ. Or the insane casualties of the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War. Even when spirituality was taken much more seriously than it is now, it certainly didn't prevent people from abusing one another. So while effective altruist spreadsheets are certainly missing something, spirituality definitely doesn't have a great success rate when it comes to keeping people from hurting each other.
In general this is a good point, but you should remember that "totally arbitrary" rules often do have some value, in that following them signals that you are pro-social and likely to follow the rest of the rules as well; cf. https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.09318 .
Really good piece, but one point this conversation never gets into is the fact that the old religions had a lot of ordinances that are totally arbitrary and don't improve life in a material or psychological sense in any way. You mention the Orthodox Jews stoning people on Shabbat, but we see stuff like that in every religion. That's the problem with sidelining rationalism too much- spirituality may serve as a conquest of the poetic over the prosaic, but it also actively encourages arbitrarily deciding what's "true" and what's "good". Rarely does it truly stop people from doing bad things as a whole, it just gives them an unfalsifiable source to point to so they can claim ultimate moral authority. Just look at Pope Nicholas V's "Dum Diversas" papal bull, where he authorized Alfonso of Portugal to force all "pagans and Saracens" into "perpetual servitude". Or Charlemagne's genocide of the Saxons in the name of Christ. Or the insane casualties of the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War. Even when spirituality was taken much more seriously than it is now, it certainly didn't prevent people from abusing one another. So while effective altruist spreadsheets are certainly missing something, spirituality definitely doesn't have a great success rate when it comes to keeping people from hurting each other.
In general this is a good point, but you should remember that "totally arbitrary" rules often do have some value, in that following them signals that you are pro-social and likely to follow the rest of the rules as well; cf. https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.09318 .
Yeah, but by that metric the Yakuza chopping off their pinkies has value too. I'm talking about material benefit to the practioner's lives.