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Why all religions have bizarre/stupid beliefs

Paul Graham has an  essay on the “Lies we tell kids”. The whole essay is pretty interesting, but one of the sections contains this startling insight (a little long, but worth it):

Some parents feel a strong adherence to an ethnic or religious group and want their kids to feel it too. This usually requires two different kinds of lying: the first is to tell the child that he or she is an X, and the second is whatever specific lies Xes differentiate themselves by believing.

Telling a child they have a particular ethnic or religious identity is one of the stickiest things you can tell them. Almost anything else you tell a kid, they can change their mind about later when they start to think for themselves. But if you tell a kid they’re a member of a certain group, that seems nearly impossible to shake.

This despite the fact that it can be one of the most premeditated lies parents tell. When parents are of different religions, they’ll often agree between themselves that their children will be “raised as Xes.” And it works. The kids obligingly grow up considering themselves as Xes, despite the fact that if their parents had chosen the other way, they’d have grown up considering themselves as Ys.

One reason this works so well is the second kind of lie involved. The truth is common property. You can’t distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people, you have to do things that are arbitrary, and believe things that are false. And after having spent their whole lives doing things that are arbitrary and believing things that are false, and being regarded as odd by “outsiders” on that account, the cognitive dissonance pushing children to regard themselves as Xes must be enormous. If they aren’t an X, why are they attached to all these arbitrary beliefs and customs? If they aren’t an X, why do all the non-Xes call them one?

This form of lie is not without its uses. You can use it to carry a payload of beneficial beliefs, and they will also become part of the child’s identity. You can tell the child that in addition to never wearing the color yellow, believing the world was created by a giant rabbit, and always snapping their fingers before eating fish, Xes are also particularly honest and industrious. Then X children will grow up feeling it’s part of their identity to be honest and industrious.

This probably accounts for a lot of the spread of modern religions, and explains why their doctrines are a combination of the useful and the bizarre. The bizarre half is what makes the religion stick, and the useful half is the payload.

I am not sure I buy the whole logic of the argument. But it certainly made me think and possibly view religion in a different way.

I spent a lot of my teenage years thinking of religion as a load of crap for weaker minds. Later, I read about how Tilak used Ganesh Chaturthi very effectively to bring people together. That got me thinking about the social value of religion. Here I am using “social” in the “making friends” sense of the word (not the “charity” sense of the word). Religion is the mother of all social networks.

In grad school, I would have arguments with my friend Frank, who used to go ga-ga over religion. He pointed out to me how many major artistic and architectural achievements over the centuries have been achieved because of the backing of religion.

And now Paul’s idea of separating religion into things that make it stick and the payload resonates with my view of religion. Basically, instead of focusing on the silly rituals that are the most visible aspects of any religion or specific religious activity, think instead about the payload. Think about what substantial things can be (is being) achieved (intentionally, or unintentionally).

Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

Wired an interesting article on a guy who, after a detailed study of how human memory works, has developed SuperMemo, a software program that will allow you to remember many more things than you currently can:

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It’s too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.

While initially I found myself tempted by the idea of trying this software, or at least the techniques used in it, I soon decided that in my current situation in life, I don’t really want to memorize anything so desperately. More generally, if I read something, and then I forget it later because I did not encounter it again in my readings soon enough, I believe that it was not important enough to remember in the first place. I only want to memorize the things that keep showing up in my readings.

Your mileage may vary. And even if it doesn’t, you should still read the full article. It’s rather long, but parts of it are quite interesting.

Catch-22 in real life

The book Philosophical Psychopathology reports on the case of a man who got into a real-life Catch-22 situation. He was brought to psychiatrists because he was suffering from mental delusions. He was afraid that he was going to be “locked up”. And the psychiatrists said that this was a delusion without any basis in reality. In fact, his delusion was so strong, that to avoid being locked up, he tried to kill himself. Based on this, the psychiatrists decided that he should be …… you guessed it …… locked up.

If they lock him up, then his belief was true, and he wasn’t really deluded, was he? So they shouldn’t be able to lock up him. But then his belief would turn out to be false. And they can lock him up after all. Somewhere, Alfred Tarski is getting uncomfortable in his grave.

See full article (via boingboing.