I am a Catholic Christian and a moral objectivist, so my thoughts are, of course, colored by my own religious and philosophic views. With that disclaimer out of the way ...
I don't think this rings true. It suggests that the morality espoused by a particular religion basically just boils down to public opinion. But there are a multitude of cases from my own and other religions where the message put forth by the religion was never popularly accepted by the prevailing community. You can move the goal posts, of course, and say that it's not the prevailing community's views that matter but the tribe's, and you can define "tribe" in such a way that it only applies to the people who accept a particular opinion -- but then that becomes a tautology.
It also suggests that the primary goal of religion is to attract new members, and so the religion is going to offer views that appeal to the majority of people. I don't think religion resembles politics in that way, at least not for the major world religions.
I think there are different ways to interpret what a popular opinion is. For instance, there is doing thing X, wanting to do thing X, and wanting to want to do thing X. So even if a religious concept appears unpopular, it’s possible that believers of a religion want to express that concept, or even want to want to express that concept, even if they don’t directly express that concept in their everyday lives.
I think abortion is a good example of this. Plenty of people who oppose abortions have had abortions themselves.
In group/out group ego games are about feeding the narcissists false self, not “values”. In order to support the false self the narcissist must create an out-group in order to place themselves in the in-group. Cults are groups of narcissists. Religions are cults whose founder has died.
Read The Naked Feminist where the author talks about the origins of modesty. It’s all about power and ego.
That’s what they claim, but it is not true in the slightest.
Christians generally maintain a persecution complex even when they are holding tremendous power over others in their society, and this goes back centuries. It is extremely common for Christians to talk about slight curtailment of their ability to oppress others as persecution.
> What powerful institutions or media influence do they control?
Christians (even if in name only) have maintained majority control of the executive, judicial, and legislative branches since inception. They often still publicly swear an oath with a hand on the bible.
- The founder's didn't even believe in the Bible, likely including George Washington.
- Stated vs revealed preferences are complicated among politicians.
- being jewish clearly has an influence on politicians and businessmen who identify that way, and they often make reference to it. Can you give an example of a president or supreme court judge revealing that kind of influence? George bush doesn't even believe religion is the root issue in the conflict with the Middle East.
jawns wrote of Catholicism, bsdpufferfish and throw__away7391 wrote of Christianity. The latter, broader, category is the majority of the population across the USA.
The enormous power exists in the voters within the USA, because it's a democracy filled with many who hold religious views, despite the theoretical separation of church and state.
"In God We Trust" on the money is a superficial symptom of that.
> jawns wrote of Catholicism, bsdpufferfish and throw__away7391 wrote of Christianity.
The claim that is addressing is that religion is the mean of popular belief. How does that account for the Catholic experience? Catholics are obviously a minority among American christians and have less political power.
> The latter, broader, category is the majority of the population across the USA.
Indeed. However they are not organized in any way. The percentage who has been to a church more than 3x in their life is probably significantly lower.
Representing the "opinions" (or more appropriately dispositions) of each person as a vector, the belief system of a "tribe" (connected set of individuals) is probably the mean of these vectors.
And relgions seek to optimize the "morality" they preach (vector they propose as "god") to maximize membership / agreement / centralness of their god. Which of course (author does not point this out) is the mean of the population.
They could have expanded a little:
* By what metric do we define "closeness"? A higher norm would penalize dissent / divergence from "god" more.
* In the limit, how does dissent penalties affect the "coverage" of available religions? This is basically k-means with different defintions of "mean"
* You could model the problem as unsupervised clustering where k is unknown to predict how many religion clusters form, for a given population - if opinions could be measured.
on and on. Title was the most interesting part, the rest was just coffee kicking in.
I thought the analogy to linear algebra added very little. It seems more they’ve just littered words about vectors around the word average. They just want the word average.
I think there might be some interesting analogies to vectors out there, so it annoys me that they’ve basically made a head-fake toward them and then just used the word average.
I think you are going in a better direction. I’d call a person’s opinions a point in a many-dimensional space, a space of issues. Then, to come up with a discourse we project those opinions into a some space of ideals. I think what things like the 1D left/right spectrum and the 2D political compass miss is that there isn’t some objectively correct way of picking the unit vectors for the space you are projecting onto. Probably we’d want to do the PCA, but that’s based on the population.
I’d also place the discussion in terms of political opinions rather than some analogy to a god or some gods, since they bring in a lot of feelings.
I'm not sure many religious people would agree that this is how it works. Theologically, God is never thought to be a bottom-up process, or a democratic process. Historically, I'm not sure it works either, as doctrine has always been a complex mixture of top-down ex cathedra declarations, and reactions to those declarations, and the interaction between what somebody in power wants, what they can get, and what happens next. This feels like somebody casting religion in terms of graphs because they understand graphs and think about them a lot. Like a programmer saying "after all, what is a marriage but a state machine?" or something unproductive like that.
This blog post plays too loose and fast with its terms to be useful as a model of anything:
- It's tautological. A tribe is defined as a connected graph of members with a shared mean opinion, and then God is defined as that shared mean opinion. You can't do that - you can't assume what you're setting out to prove. Nor can you just call something a term (like 'God') and then assume it actually has other properties we associate with the term - you have to demonstrate that. In other words, all this blog post does is propose a definition and fail to show how that definition remotely captures that interesting properties we care about. I can call birdsong "trees" all I want, I doubt I'll be getting calls from the department of forestry anytime soon.
- It assumes a bad foundation. N in the author's formulation is clearly infinite (I challenge anyone to describe a procedure to enumerate all possible opinions), but the author assumes its finite. What they really want to mean is that you can assign a numeric score to a person that describes inclination towards agreement with a particular proposition, which is still workable.
I think average is the wrong approach. Chatgpt is pretty much an average: if you ask it about a 50/50 topic it will avoid giving you a straight answer and will split its answer down the middle with the pros and cons of each side. I've played with chatgpt a lot and it has never given anything like a feeling of omnipotence or omniscience - quite often the average opinion is wrong or at least misleading for my specific situation.
My personal conception of God is based on something more like quantum immortality - not only are you immortal because there are infinite copies of you and at least one of the copies must survive to observe the universe, but there is some sort of party at the end of time where all your selves can get together and figure out which copy had the best life. And then these selves collectively are God and they (re)created the universe so you could have the most satisfaction. But you yourself are just a copy so you'd better look up those answers with chatgpt so that you don't end up being one of the copies with a sad story to tell.
OP here. I'm reworking the essay quite a bit, e.g. removing the vector space stuff, and the clumsy usage of the word "God".
I've been thinking about these things for so long while not really discussing it with anyone, so there's this soup of associations that doesn't make any sense to any outsider, nor even to me, now when I finally put it down into writing.
Anyway, the essay title will be updated to:
> Is there a canonical parametrization of all social groups that describes their culture?
which captures what I really want to talk about.
If anyone else is interested in this topic, feel free to email me.
Seems like a good segue into how 21st century big tech algorithms should work.
It's not about what big tech thinks, but an individual looking for information who may perhaps be influenced by cohorts. And maybe an algo could accommodate these intricate relationships.
There's no single general algo that should work for all of us, nor a big tech platform that is able to understand us without our explicit choices.
As an agnostic, I can say I'll not understand theists preserving part of their brain for what God would think. But I would subscribe to people and groups when I back their modus operandi.
Given a big enough n every tribe member will be a dissident. Mathematically it can be shown that as n grows the distance between the average vector and any other vector grows, ie: in the limit everyone is a dissident. Therefore I don't think this notion of God makes any sense.
Respectfully, it sounds like a young person's ideals where they have the idea no one ever thought about their ideas before. Or alternatively, just someone who has very little inclination to be involved in society. Or further, someone that never cared about anyone elses opinions. Valid stance I guess, for certain scenarios.
> Respectfully, it sounds like a young person's ideals
LOL, thanks for the compliment, but - assuming the standard definition of the words "young person" - and also assuming you're talking about me and not the OP's author (not clear), you're way off the mark.
I think the word for this is "culture", not "God". I highly recommend taking an anthropology class. It's fascinating and eye-opening stuff. The entire course is basically all about this topic. It's case study after case study of this group or that group (often tribes since it works well as a microcosm) looking at how they operate as a group and what shared beliefs, values, traditions, norms, and rituals they have.
In the modern world and in larger societies, we tend to separate the ideas of ethics, values, religious beliefs, understanding of the natural world, education, and civil order (law, etc.) into different spheres of life, but in smaller groups, they can be all mashed together into a singular "this is what the tribe believes and how it works" thing.
So for example, in the US we don't have a state religion and we do have freedom of religion (mostly), which means our government and our church aren't the same cultural institution. But in some societies, they are. European countries have vestiges of this. Some countries in other parts of the world are literal theocracies.
And in most modern societies, the learned members of societies aren't the same group of people as the priests, but in some societies they are and you have a class of clerics who deal with all intellectual matters including religion, the natural world, and maybe other stuff.
So various societies decouple these different areas of life to different degrees. Some societies (and some elements within a given society) demand more uniformity than others.
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So, why is culture such a strong force? Why do people ardently believe in things they were taught, regardless of evidence? Why do some traditions have such importance to people? Personally, I think it's because the human brain is hardwired to promote a common culture. I think we have a basic drive to spread cultural ideas and a drive to accept cultural ideas. We humans are social animals. Along with intelligence, it is what makes us successful as a species. For a group to function, it needs some shared rules and beliefs and agreement about what its goals are. In order to agree on those, I think we're built to promote and accept ideas from our culture. It also helps us preserve useful ideas over long periods of time.
But just like any drive, while it has a purpose, it's important to limit and control it. We also have a drive to eat delicious foods, but that has to be controlled. Culture should serve our needs, not the other way around.
Yeah, it's definitely about "culture". What I've been trying to express with usage of "God" is how primitive societies, lacking law enforcing institutions etc, tried to instil order through fear of punishment from a power no-one can top, not even the most respected leader.
I don't really have the time to take anthropology classes, but yes, that's what I'm interested in. There's something called "theoretical anthropology" which is spot-on what I'm interested in. Have you heard about it?
The big interest comes from me being frozen out by all peers during most of my life (grew up in a very dysfunctional family, ADHD etc), and I have been interested in social dynamics ever since.
I do standup comedy, which to me feels related in a way I cannot explain.
I wonder what religions adhere to this? There's nothing "average" about the gods I've read about, and their desired moralities are often beyond the reach of the average adherant.
What this is talking about is basically what's called the "superego" in Freudian writing.
Anyway, basically agree with the OP that societies try to find a stable configuration for it, but I like to think of it in physics terms: it's a stable attractor in the space of moral configurations, not exactly uniform everywhere but something that has a "pressure" keeping it close to a set of norms so that everything feels more-or-less safe and predictable. Perturbations are tolerated as long as their magnitudes are small and they die out over time.
Fads and changes of moral fashion, then, act like waves propagating in this substrate, as everyone's moral compasses realign slightly to account for the new concepts. Complete social revolutions, and likely physical revolutions, are "phase changes" in which the local inconsistencies become so great that they blow up to global transformations that reconfigure the whole thing at once.
I don't think this rings true. It suggests that the morality espoused by a particular religion basically just boils down to public opinion. But there are a multitude of cases from my own and other religions where the message put forth by the religion was never popularly accepted by the prevailing community. You can move the goal posts, of course, and say that it's not the prevailing community's views that matter but the tribe's, and you can define "tribe" in such a way that it only applies to the people who accept a particular opinion -- but then that becomes a tautology.
It also suggests that the primary goal of religion is to attract new members, and so the religion is going to offer views that appeal to the majority of people. I don't think religion resembles politics in that way, at least not for the major world religions.