Read on Twitter
God’s love is vastly overrated; God’s wrath is the greatest of all divine blessings. If we ever want to escape from hell, then we must reignite our BELIEF in hell. Forgiveness is useless to men with no theory of sin
The world is deeply uncertain, and all of our actions are predicated on informed guessing. When we systematize our guessing behavior into a repeatable prescription for action, that's called a heuristic.
A heuristic that we all know well is our desire to consume sweets. The continuum from the nutritional affordance of sugar to the pleasure of a sweet taste is a heuristic built by natural selection that makes us thrive under sugar scarcity
The heuristic to crave sugar is adaptive under the right circumstances, but once we tamed sugar through agriculture and industrial food manufacturing, the heuristic broke.
And the devil of it is that craving sugar doesn’t hurt you till well after you spawn, and maybe it even helps you before that, so we’re stuck at a local maximum that natural selection cannot escape
The selection pressure that makes you crave sugar has relaxed, so the trait might attenuate in a few thousand years, but that doesn’t help anyone now
Moral intuitions are exactly like sugar cravings—they are behavioral heuristics spewed out by natural selection to make you thrive in a particular social environment
There is no perfect or correct systematization of morals for the same reason there is no perfect correct systematization of diet; the social organism, like the human body, is a constantly emerging assemblage of contingencies that require patterned yet idiosyncratic solutions
The morality of fairness is highly suited to small groups of people who have to cooperate with each other for decades at a time. It does not scale into societies where most people are strangers to each other.
Just as a perception of a sugary sweet incepts a pain in the belly and an anticipation of gustation, a perception of unfairness incepts a pain in the heart and an anticipation of restitution. At industrial scale, both heuristics poison you https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1118918241433206789
As societies scale up, protein becomes the bottleneck instead of sugar and trust becomes the bottleneck instead of fairness, because sugar and fairness are cheap. We do have strategies for dealing with these bottlenecks, but they require conscious effort
Shariff and Norenzayan hypothesize that theology evolved to solve a coordination problem in societies that are too big for everyone to know everyone. Trust is essential to social order and society can use fear of a wrathful god to incentivize honesty and scale past Dunbar limits
It is critical that the god be a wrathful moral enforcer, otherwise we find it impossible to synthesize trust. Shariff et al found that belief in a wrathful god made people more honest, and belief in a merciful god had no impact on behavior
Belief in a wrathful god is necessary to synthesize trust at scale, however it is not sufficient. For that, you must also convince strangers of your belief, and you do this by sending costly signals, e.g. big sacrifices, tithes, and rituals https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1061984213224706049
A disturbing possibility is that we evolved a strong preference to send and receive costly signals but the part about the wrathful god never permeated into the genome. This would explain much of modern life. Our instinctive reaction to trust scarcity is to spend more on signaling
If some social innovation were to create a perception of a trust collapse, this could set off a signaling death spiral. Maybe wireless high speed networks are a great filter. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1060965006668222464
Cochran and Harpending argue that evolution can happen very fast, sometimes in only a few generations, in the presence of a sharp selection pressure. A famous example is the melanisation of the peppered moth during the industrial revolution
Industrial pollution changed the colorscape environment of the peppered moth, which comes in two variants: black and white. A surge in coal pollution turned the environment dark, and black moths became invisible to predators, white moths conspicuous. White moths nearly died out
If, hypothetically, a sudden change to the human environment caused smart people to stop having children, a dysgenic intelligence collapse could happen in a few short generations. If not having children (or mutilating them) became a costly trust-building signal...
We live in an enchanted world where behaviors that are developed in the sociological layer of society eventually permeate into the biological layer. Through genetics and selection, ideas become embodied https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1126905040780685313
Memes can become genes, as for example when compulsory specialization in usury turned ashkenazis into geniuses of numbers, or when norms against cousin marriage turned some flavors of Western European into pathological xenophiles
The body is only an ephemeral shell, the genome is the true soul, you are literally your mother and father and your children are literally you. Your ancestors and your descendants are a single being, a continuous identity
https://twitter.com/l0m3z/status/1128065315256934401
https://twitter.com/l0m3z/status/1128065315256934401
This isn’t ridiculous! Nerds think they share an identity with an emulation of their brain running on an alien computer in a distant future. Christians think their consciousness magically dwells in eternal paradise after death. My teaching is much smaller!
Whatever the soul does, the soul becomes. This is the cosmic poetry of gnon. The sins of the father can become the biological imperatives of the son. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1038056707979530240
Our problem as ever is that we aren't able to perceive slow crises as such. Only acute problems, problems which are unbearable FOR EVEN A SINGLE MOMENT cause philosophy to escape the brain and enter the heart.
Let me offer you a new moral axiom, much better than the diabetogenic golden rule, much truer than Crowley’s idiotic “do as thou wilt”, grounded in the autotelic logic of natural selection
“Do that which causest thou to recur” IS the whole of the law
The fully automated model of the universe (the enlightenment model, if you must call it that) does contain a wrathful god, and the trick is to make him feel real enough to fear him.
Trust is the sling that David can use to topple Goliath. We are fighting an arms race over the ability to manufacture trust between strangers, and I do not see any right wing group that is succeeding at building trust at a distance
The digital panopticon may end up supplanting the social innovation of belief in a wrathful god, and the digital panopticon demands dysgenic sacrifices. Perhaps that very real threat can be our new fear of hell
This is what I’m talking about. Trust no one. https://twitter.com/bronzeagemantis/status/1139625031540137984
