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As has frequently been the case with these newsletters, last time I left things on something of a cliff hanger. I had demonstrated the potential for technology to cause harm—up to and including the end of all humanity. And then, having painted this terrifying picture of doom, I ended without providing any suggestions for how to deal with this terror. Only the vague promise that such suggestions would be forthcoming.
This newsletter is the beginning of those suggestions, but only the beginning. Protecting humanity from itself is a big topic, and I expect we’ll be grappling with it for several months, such are its difficulties. But before exploring this task on hard mode, it’s worthwhile to examine whether there might be an easy mode. I think there is. I would argue that faith in God with an accompanying religion is “easy mode”, not just at an individual level, but especially at a community level.
Despite being religious it has been my general intention to not make any arguments from an explicitly religious perspective, but in this case I’m making an exception. With that exception in mind, how does being religious equal a difficulty setting of easy?
To begin with, if one assumes there is a God, it’s natural to proceed from this assumption to the further assumption that He has a plan—one that does not involve us destroying ourselves. (Though, frequently, religions maintain that we will come very close.) Furthermore the existence of God explains the silence of the universe mentioned in the last newsletter without needing to consider the possibility that such silence is a natural consequence of intelligence being unavoidably self-destructive.
As comforting as I might find such thoughts, most people do not spend much time thinking about God as a solution to Fermi’s Paradox, about x-risks and the death of civilizations. The future they worry about is their own, especially their eventual death. Religions solve this worry by promising that existence continues beyond death, and that this posthumous existence will be better. Or it at least promises that it can be better contingent on a wide variety of things far too lengthy to go into here.
All of this is just at the individual level. If we move up the scale, religions make communities more resilient. Not only do they provide meaning and purpose, and relationships with other believers, they also make communities better able to recover from natural disasters. Further examples of resilience will be a big part of the discussion going forward, but for now I will merely point out that there are two ways to deal with the future: prediction and resilience. Religion increases the latter.
For those of you who continue to be skeptical, I urge you to view religion from the standpoint of cultural evolution: cultural practices that developed over time to increase the survivability of a society. This survivability is exactly what we’re trying to increase, and this is one of the reasons why I think religion is playing on easy mode. Rejecting all of the cultural practices which have been developed over the centuries and inventing new culture from scratch certainly seems like a harder way to go about things.
Despite all of the foregoing, some will argue that religion distorts incentives, especially in its promise of an afterlife. How can a religious perspective truly be as good at identifying and mitigating risks as a secular perspective, particularly given that religion would entirely deny the existence of certain risks? This is a fair point, but I’ve always been one of those (and I think there are many of us) who believe that you should work as if everything depends on you while praying as if everything depends on God. This is perhaps a cliche, but no less true, even so.
If you are still bothered by the last statement’s triteness, allow me to restate: I am not a bystander in the fight against the chaos of the universe, I am a participant. And I will use every weapon at my disposal as I wage this battle.
Wars are expensive. They take time and attention. This war is mostly one of words (so far) but money never hurts. If you’d like to contribute to the war effort consider donating.
I don’t think having a religious society is “easy mode” for a few reasons, starting with the problem of putting the secularization trend back in the bottle for WEIRD societies. I take you to be referring to the traditional Western-style religions that come with ideology + organization, not the less structured variety of say Buddhism. The cat seems unlikely to get back in the bag, though it’s at least theoretically possible. When’s the last time there was a mass religious conversion in the way there have been political ones in the last couple of centuries (e.g., Marxism, Nazism)?
Along with that, there’s the whole problem of “if one assumes there is a God.” That’s a pretty big ‘if’ there, if we care about consistently using reason and evidence to develop our beliefs, and we should keep in mind that the theists don’t tend to agree on much about this God fellow or His dictates, which can and has caused problems within and between societies. Is epistemic rigor supposed to help or hurt us here? How much unity vs. disunity do we get by trying to use faith as our mechanism for decision making? How will we know what or who is correct/best?
And there’s the contradiction of believing in a God who can/does interfere in the workings of the universe, but we can’t just simply leave Him to His plan. There’s no actual difference between “God helps those who help themselves” and “God doesn’t do anything.” How is God helping here (independent of people just being more homogenous/united)? Similarly, I really have never noticed that the religious mourn less at funerals or actually fear death less, on average. Here’s a fun study that says we both may be right: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-03-20-atheists-and-highly-religious-don%E2%80%99t-fear-death-much-everyone-else
Sure, even a devout antitheist like me can accept that certain religions at certain times have–independent of the accuracy of their truth claims–provided practical benefits to their adherents that align with survivability. But the gap between “a society with shared religious bonds is probably more resilient than a comparable secular one” and actually engineering that seems very, very wide.
I have numerous responses, but I’ll try to keep them short:
1- This is a charitable response, and I appreciate you taking the time to leave it.
2- In many respects this post was a necessary explanation of my own biases before I proceed to a less religious examination of the topic.
3- The “putting it back into the bottle” point is a good one, and I may have to write more on that later.
4- I believe my AI Risk model of the Plan of Salvation (as Mormons call it) does a pretty good job of explaining the contradiction you mentioned. Have you read it?
5- I think I have seen religious people who fear death less and mourn less at funerals, and isn’t that what that study says? (Though it’s interesting that atheists are also in that camp.)
6- Perhaps the biggest point of all when it comes to survivability and resilience: Afghanistan. This is kind of a big topic, but didn’t we just see a ragtag group of religious extremists win out using the power of religion over a vastly superior foe who lacked religion? And to the extent that America does fight well isn’t it generally ascribable to our patriotic secular religion? Samuel Huntington claims you can’t have a civilization without an associated religion, I guess we’ll see if he’s right.
1. You’re welcome
2. Fair enough
3. I look forward to reading it
4. I’ve read a fair bit of your back catalog, but don’t recall that one offhand. This one? https://wearenotsaved.com/2016/10/08/artificial-intelligence-and-lds-cosmology/
I see you presented related thoughts at the MTA. I’m pretty familiar with the parallels you point out and the related “new god argument” because I spent a few years debating with the MTA types on FB. Good times were had getting accused by Lincoln of being a “fundamentalist” for taking traditional Mormon truth claims seriously and opposed to his extremely creative reinterpretations. Naturally, I don’t think it’s possible to reconcile Mormonism (or any religion) with a modern understanding of science. Doesn’t accepting the possibility (inevitability?) of AGI mean accepting a materialist view of intelligence (and/or “consciousness”) that conflicts with a religious/spiritual conception of it? It’s interesting you cite the “problem of Hell” when one of Mormonism’s bright spots is that it almost entirely gets rid of the fire/brimstone version of eternal punishment.
5. I would guess the common theme is the very devout and anti-devout both dealt with the issue head on and came to terms with death. The wishy washy middle just tries to ignore the issue but doesn’t avoid the anguish.
6. Keep in mind that basically all Afghans are quite Muslim. Ethnic/tribal issues are far more significant for the divisions in Afghanistan than religion (note that the late government was an “Islamic republic”). We tried to develop/impose a modern government and it failed miserably against the traditional tribal model. The North Vietnamese were successful against us for many of the same classic insurgency reasons without religion being the key issue. We do agree on the importance of a patriotic secular religion.
4- That’s one of them. The more comprehensive treatment of it starts here: https://wearenotsaved.com/2017/07/22/returning-to-mormonism-and-ai-part-1/
I wish I’d know about your tussles with the MTA. We’ll have to compare notes at some point. I’ve had vast fights with Lincoln as well. And this conversation might be easier to have in person, but in brief. I think we agree. The development of AGI would IMHO falsify Mormonism, given the central role of intelligence to the theology if _anyone_ can create an intelligence then that fundamentally contradicts some pretty core religious beliefs. And yeah, this is the sort of thing Lincoln and I disagree about. If you look at my predictions you’ll see that I’m bearish about most tech:
https://wearenotsaved.com/2017/01/07/predictions-spoiler-no-ai-or-immortality/
6- You seem to be making the point that the Afghan’s success is more a factor of the strong tribal connections than their religion (though your first sentence confuses me because it seems to be the opposite) But in any case for very broad definitions of religion we seem to agree. The question I have is can you have a strong _secular_ religion? The American civic religion had a strong religious component. Perhaps that wasn’t necessary, but currently the best you could say about the increasing secularism is that it’s disconnected from civic religion, but I don’t think anyone is arguing that it’s strengthening our civic religion, and I think most people argue that it weakens it.
Vietnam works better as a nation because it is organically a nation. Afghanistan is much more artificial. Organically the area would probably be several different nations with a Pashtun nation made up of part of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
This is not always a fatal problem. Italy and Germany was able to unite into unified nations rather than remaining divided as ‘tribes’. However Afghanistan has geography that does not want that type of unity. If you wanted to nation build there, you’d probably have to start with a long sustained investment in infastructure to create a transportation network. It’s a lot of work for a sparsely populated area.
It’s kind of a strain to call this a ‘success’ for Afghanistan. Perhaps if large powers stay out they could learn to work together and do something with their nation, but right now their biggest challenge is to try to play nice enough to keep access to foreign aid. Not exactly a successful nation.
It was a battle between cultures, the fact that one side was composed of multiple cultures doesn’t change the fact that they won and we lost.
To a degree and I think it is a small degree. I think it is like saying Godfather I was a battle between cultures. Yes the Five Families had different cultures, but they were more alike than different. I think this is evidenced by the easy way different tribes switch and swap allegiances between Taliban one day, ISIS-K the next or even whatever they are calling the ‘Northern Alliance’ these days.
My mental model of Afghanistan is easy to capture the nation, hard to hold it with strength. If the Taliban is to provide a stable gov’t, it will have to be a very weak one.
I do think there are an urban elite who have a more cosmpolitian culture than the rest of the nation. But they are not numerous enough to really test it because AFghanistan does not have the resources to support many urban communities.
A clash of cultures test to me seems like it requires a matchup that is otherwise roughly equal. For example if you wanted to test the US culture with an authoritarian government centered culture, the US vs Cuba would not be a great matchup but the US vs China would have more merit as a test.
I’ll give that one a read.
There were a few years when the MTA had an open FB discussion page, which was an interesting place. There were Mormons, ex-Mormons, New Order Mormons, non-Mormons, and other strange categories debating Mormonism and technology, past and present. Eventually they closed the page to official members only, and I exited because I am not a disciple of Jesus Christ under any definition of those words. Some of the people there really just liked to let their imaginations run wild while ignoring blatant contradictions between their theology and technology. Flipping between literal and figurative interpretations and using, uh, bespoke definitions of preexisting terms were common challenges. I would love to see you and Lincoln go at it because what you have in common would lead to some interesting disagreements going down some deep rabbit holes.
Basically all Afghans are conservative Muslims. The Taliban are Pashtuns (though not all Pashtuns are necessarily Taliban), as opposed to Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras, etc. The Taliban used tribal/ethnic unity and the old ways to beat/outlast synthetic nationalism/modernization imposed from an external source. Religiosity itself just isn’t an important variable here, though traditionalism may be.
Also, is there not a way to have notifications?
I’ve been meaning to do an overhaul of the site, it’s one of the many items on the “Things I should be doing to better promote my writing list” and the whole list keeps losing out to, earn money and feed family. 😉
I’m unimpressed with using the Taliban as much of a data point here. You have a large country that is geographically easy to conquer but difficult to hold. A perfect trap for invading powers who have an easy time going in but then discover things get tighter as time goes on.
I think however the evolutionary advantage argument runs up against innovation. If innovation alters the relationships in society, the religious precepts that have been adopted from long evolutionary back and forth may suddenly shift a lot in their advantage or disadvantage. For example, we shifted from home based production to external production. The nuclear family became unstable and the religious norm about gender segrgation and women remaining homebound has become a massive disadvantage. Except for Saudi Arabia, no country that enforced traditional gender norms has done well economically and you could say SA is a decadent society.
Now maybe remote work would flip things back around, returning us to a pre-industrial era of home based production where most of the time it will be the men who leave the home when necessary and religious conservatives will claim to have the last laugh. But the point is not what may or may not be an advantage in the future. The question is are advantages stable or changing?
If they are stable, then you could say religious evolution will stumble upon workable models. If they are unstable, then religious evolution may occassionally be right twice a day but that’s not sufficient.
A long period of sluggish innovation would likely favor religious evolution but fast innovation would not. AND you did once point out a chap who noted assuming a small 2% growth rate means the entire galaxy is going to be colonized by humans in a realitive blink of the eye.
I also feel we once had a long discussion about this. Is traditional religious belief built up over evolution to be valued by time or people? We are probably going to hit a point soon when there will be more people alive than dead. Does 10B people following traditions from modern urban living for a century count for less than 10,000 years of never more than a few thousand people living out tribal customs?
To use a minor example, it is traditional in the more rural parts of Mexico for a groom to give the bride’s family a live goat. OK suppose modern day US followed that custom. Each year millions of live goats given to people when almost no one knows what to do with a live goat. Rescues opening for goats, millions spent on ‘designer goats’ for those with extra money. Millions of goats bred simply as the equilivant of a wedding diamond. Pretty big waste of resources.
For about 90% of the time of humans on earth, a pretty reasonable custom. For about 90% of the life-years lived on earth, not a reasonable custom (or soon to be not).