Story: A company is making valuable products, but they need your skills to fill a hole in their production product. They're willing to pay good money if you'll help them out.
Action: Sign on the dotted line.
Connection: They need you to sign the contract so that you'll be officially registered as an employee in their system.
BUYING GROCERIES:
Desire: To obtain delicious food.
Story: If you go to the store and take groceries off the shelf, then as long as you hand the appropriate amount of money to the employee at the cash register, you can take the groceries home and eat them.
Action: Give your money to the employee at the cash register.
Connection: If you don't give them your money, the store will operate at a loss and have to close down.
SLEEPING:
Desire: To be refreshed and healthy.
Story: If you lie on your bed in the dark long enough, you'll enter a brief coma; when it ends the next morning, all your tiredness will be gone.
Action: Lie in bed and turn off the lights.
Connection: If you're not in bed, then for some mysterious reason, left unexplained, your body can't settle into the right mode and you'll stay awake.
This post seems to conflate several very different things.
An email scam is just a predatory attempt at fraud, where the individually correct decision is clear: there is absolutely no upside from engaging with the scammers, and no downside from ignoring them. There is also much benefit and little or no downside to social and legal norms punishing such scammers.
Whereas in the case of religion and ideology, such a simple model is very inadequate. Even just when it comes to individual cost/benefit calculation, there are many cases where adopting false beliefs is rational. (Principally for signalling and game-theoretical reasons.) See for example Robin Hanson’s “Are Beliefs Like Clothes?” and Bryan Caplan’s “Rational Irrationality.”
And this doesn’t even get to the role of religion and ideology in large-scale human coordination and overcoming collective action problems.
Human evolution has selected against individuals unable to detect straight-out deception — with the result that people, even not very intelligent ones, are normally good at detecting scams. It takes unusually skilled scammers or naive victims for a scam with high stakes to succeed.
Whereas evolution has also selected against non-religious societies, as clearly worse in solving their collective action problems, as well as against intellectually non-conformist individuals, as clearly worse in acquiring and maintaining social status. Without taking these facts into account, it makes no sense to conflate these facts with ordinary criminal scams.
>Whereas evolution has also selected against non-religious societies, as clearly worse in solving their collective action problems, as well as against intellectually non-conformist individuals, as clearly worse in acquiring and maintaining social status.
Evolution likely has almost nothing to do with this since these things can be explained almost purely by appeal to sociological factors. It's like saying evolution selected for eating McDonalds or wearing blue jeans. Evolution is clearly not the most salient factor at play here, rather enculturation.
Although Huemer doesn't list it as one of his four elements of a scam, a scammer is referred to a few times in the definition of those elements. So it's implicit that a scam is run by a scammer.
But identifying the scammer in religion is difficult, if not impossible! When the original con men have been dead for thousands of years, it means you have either ongoing explicit conspiracies or scams with no scammers. The former is very hard to believe, that such a conspiracy could be passed down for so long without ever being exposed, even through schisms and reformations. Yeah, Luther SAID he objected to indulgences, but really he just wanted to run his own grift. The latter then must be the case, but it raises questions (outside of this scope) about why religious scams are so robust. We wouldn't expect to find, hundreds of years from now, Nigerian royalty providing large sums to Americans in order to facilitate bank transfers. But you can find sincere practitioners of religion surrounded by nothing but other "suckers".
So I think that either the definition of a scam needs to be changed to make the scammer explicit, or the elements of a scam need to be rewritten to remove any references to a scammer. Either one is going to change the post significantly.
"Religion" covers a range of beliefs and practices. At one extreme is a cartoonish version of Christianity that requires faith for salvation and nothing else (other than perhaps large donations). At the other extreme is forms of Buddhism that are non-theistic and closer to a philosophy or a world view. In the middle are other forms of religion that combine wisdom tradition, supernatural ideas, guides for personal and social action, and creating community. Your scan claim would only apply to those religions that involve some huge benefit to the leaders.
The "very fine people" meme is probably not a scam. I have yet to see anyone point out any of the people who are supposedly very fine who were marching alongside the people waving swastikas. Like, it ought to be easy to point to one person or group that went to attend unite the right that was a normal person.
Common pattern in cons is making you think the other guy is the mark, and you’re in on the con.
Another common pattern in cons is that they are run on top of a partially real profitable opportunity (like a real business etc.)
These two complement each other. Think of Enron or FTX. They had actually profitable lines of business underneath the scam. And those business activities were cutthroat, taking money from the rubes (crypto gamblers, the California electricity markets, Enron’s trading clients, etc.).
The point is that when something is real, you could still be getting scammed, in fact this is a great way to scam someone.
True for financial scams. But also think about cults, often the guru or secret teachings actually can help the victims in real ways.
Related to the desires that religion fulfills, C.S. Lewis, I think in Mere Christianity, suggests that just as the desire for sex can be fulfilled by sex, and hunger can be satisfied with food, the near universal desire for immortality can truly be satisfied by God. He ponders the question of why death seems/feels so wrong and man’s desire to avoid it. Could there be a true answer? Could Christ’s resurrection be the answer? It is for me.
The characterization of positive outcomes resulting from "joining the religion" is a mess. At a very minimum, you're dramatically shifting your worldview and reorienting your priorities. More realistically you're going to engage in a lifetime journey of sacrificial activities to subordinate your ego. Considering only natural physiological impact of intentional religious practice, you would expect life altering impact (which happiness studies seem to indicate are positive).
There is a brand on cheap salvation Christianity that is a scam, but viewed kindly I think the claim is that true faith is life changing that leads to sanctification/theosis.
Really, a ritual and ethical alignment with a higher order of good, a metaphysics and perceived truth as explored by generations of practitioners almost certainly align with that order of good. At a minimum, religion is the technology of philosophy. Christianity is at least the embodiment of neoplatonism along with other philosophical synthesis.
I don’t think that’s the problem with a carefully-enough designed form of Pascal’s Mugging, which makes it clear that utilities can grow faster than probability declines. Consider Yudkowsky’s version, where instead of promising money, they threaten to torture simulations of you. The probability that someone can torture n copies of you, where n is really large, doesn’t diminish linearly as n grows. After all, if someone can torture a googol copies of you, it seems really plausible they can torture 10^200 copies of you too.
In fact, in Bostrom’s original paper, Pascal makes this very objection in page 1; and Pascal’s mugger responds with the claim on magical powers immediately. If the mugger has magical powers to procure money, seems, once more, like the probability doesn’t decline linearly with respect to the amount offered.
EDIT: I didn’t notice that this was a guest post until after I commented. This comment only makes sense if it was Bentham writing it. Whoops!
I hear what you’re saying about “the higher the dollar amount, the less likely it is to be true”: yet, isn’t the doctrine of Hell one of your primary objections to Christianity? Your own beliefs, that God exists and he loves us and we will live forever and that there is no eternal punishment for anyone, seem to be promising more than Christianity does. To add to this, Christianity does not promise that all who join the religion will be saved. As Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’”
It is a rare scammer who tells his marks that they must commit to lives of virtue in order to get the payoff. They usually just say that all you need to get the prize is give them money: which is the main difference between prosperity gospel scammers and orthodox Christians, as you point out.
Some more examples:
GOING TO WORK:
Desire: to make money
Story: A company is making valuable products, but they need your skills to fill a hole in their production product. They're willing to pay good money if you'll help them out.
Action: Sign on the dotted line.
Connection: They need you to sign the contract so that you'll be officially registered as an employee in their system.
BUYING GROCERIES:
Desire: To obtain delicious food.
Story: If you go to the store and take groceries off the shelf, then as long as you hand the appropriate amount of money to the employee at the cash register, you can take the groceries home and eat them.
Action: Give your money to the employee at the cash register.
Connection: If you don't give them your money, the store will operate at a loss and have to close down.
SLEEPING:
Desire: To be refreshed and healthy.
Story: If you lie on your bed in the dark long enough, you'll enter a brief coma; when it ends the next morning, all your tiredness will be gone.
Action: Lie in bed and turn off the lights.
Connection: If you're not in bed, then for some mysterious reason, left unexplained, your body can't settle into the right mode and you'll stay awake.
What about the "Believe my claims and do as I say if you don't wanna get scammed" scam? /j
I like this article overall, but I think the short section on religion is a charicature (at least of Christianity).
This post seems to conflate several very different things.
An email scam is just a predatory attempt at fraud, where the individually correct decision is clear: there is absolutely no upside from engaging with the scammers, and no downside from ignoring them. There is also much benefit and little or no downside to social and legal norms punishing such scammers.
Whereas in the case of religion and ideology, such a simple model is very inadequate. Even just when it comes to individual cost/benefit calculation, there are many cases where adopting false beliefs is rational. (Principally for signalling and game-theoretical reasons.) See for example Robin Hanson’s “Are Beliefs Like Clothes?” and Bryan Caplan’s “Rational Irrationality.”
And this doesn’t even get to the role of religion and ideology in large-scale human coordination and overcoming collective action problems.
Human evolution has selected against individuals unable to detect straight-out deception — with the result that people, even not very intelligent ones, are normally good at detecting scams. It takes unusually skilled scammers or naive victims for a scam with high stakes to succeed.
Whereas evolution has also selected against non-religious societies, as clearly worse in solving their collective action problems, as well as against intellectually non-conformist individuals, as clearly worse in acquiring and maintaining social status. Without taking these facts into account, it makes no sense to conflate these facts with ordinary criminal scams.
>Whereas evolution has also selected against non-religious societies, as clearly worse in solving their collective action problems, as well as against intellectually non-conformist individuals, as clearly worse in acquiring and maintaining social status.
Evolution likely has almost nothing to do with this since these things can be explained almost purely by appeal to sociological factors. It's like saying evolution selected for eating McDonalds or wearing blue jeans. Evolution is clearly not the most salient factor at play here, rather enculturation.
Although Huemer doesn't list it as one of his four elements of a scam, a scammer is referred to a few times in the definition of those elements. So it's implicit that a scam is run by a scammer.
But identifying the scammer in religion is difficult, if not impossible! When the original con men have been dead for thousands of years, it means you have either ongoing explicit conspiracies or scams with no scammers. The former is very hard to believe, that such a conspiracy could be passed down for so long without ever being exposed, even through schisms and reformations. Yeah, Luther SAID he objected to indulgences, but really he just wanted to run his own grift. The latter then must be the case, but it raises questions (outside of this scope) about why religious scams are so robust. We wouldn't expect to find, hundreds of years from now, Nigerian royalty providing large sums to Americans in order to facilitate bank transfers. But you can find sincere practitioners of religion surrounded by nothing but other "suckers".
So I think that either the definition of a scam needs to be changed to make the scammer explicit, or the elements of a scam need to be rewritten to remove any references to a scammer. Either one is going to change the post significantly.
"Religion" covers a range of beliefs and practices. At one extreme is a cartoonish version of Christianity that requires faith for salvation and nothing else (other than perhaps large donations). At the other extreme is forms of Buddhism that are non-theistic and closer to a philosophy or a world view. In the middle are other forms of religion that combine wisdom tradition, supernatural ideas, guides for personal and social action, and creating community. Your scan claim would only apply to those religions that involve some huge benefit to the leaders.
The "very fine people" meme is probably not a scam. I have yet to see anyone point out any of the people who are supposedly very fine who were marching alongside the people waving swastikas. Like, it ought to be easy to point to one person or group that went to attend unite the right that was a normal person.
Common pattern in cons is making you think the other guy is the mark, and you’re in on the con.
Another common pattern in cons is that they are run on top of a partially real profitable opportunity (like a real business etc.)
These two complement each other. Think of Enron or FTX. They had actually profitable lines of business underneath the scam. And those business activities were cutthroat, taking money from the rubes (crypto gamblers, the California electricity markets, Enron’s trading clients, etc.).
The point is that when something is real, you could still be getting scammed, in fact this is a great way to scam someone.
True for financial scams. But also think about cults, often the guru or secret teachings actually can help the victims in real ways.
Great example of this -- the movie The Sting.
This is all very true and applies to every ideology except for mine:
YIMBYism-Leninism Henry George Thought
Related to the desires that religion fulfills, C.S. Lewis, I think in Mere Christianity, suggests that just as the desire for sex can be fulfilled by sex, and hunger can be satisfied with food, the near universal desire for immortality can truly be satisfied by God. He ponders the question of why death seems/feels so wrong and man’s desire to avoid it. Could there be a true answer? Could Christ’s resurrection be the answer? It is for me.
The characterization of positive outcomes resulting from "joining the religion" is a mess. At a very minimum, you're dramatically shifting your worldview and reorienting your priorities. More realistically you're going to engage in a lifetime journey of sacrificial activities to subordinate your ego. Considering only natural physiological impact of intentional religious practice, you would expect life altering impact (which happiness studies seem to indicate are positive).
There is a brand on cheap salvation Christianity that is a scam, but viewed kindly I think the claim is that true faith is life changing that leads to sanctification/theosis.
Really, a ritual and ethical alignment with a higher order of good, a metaphysics and perceived truth as explored by generations of practitioners almost certainly align with that order of good. At a minimum, religion is the technology of philosophy. Christianity is at least the embodiment of neoplatonism along with other philosophical synthesis.
I don’t think that’s the problem with a carefully-enough designed form of Pascal’s Mugging, which makes it clear that utilities can grow faster than probability declines. Consider Yudkowsky’s version, where instead of promising money, they threaten to torture simulations of you. The probability that someone can torture n copies of you, where n is really large, doesn’t diminish linearly as n grows. After all, if someone can torture a googol copies of you, it seems really plausible they can torture 10^200 copies of you too.
In fact, in Bostrom’s original paper, Pascal makes this very objection in page 1; and Pascal’s mugger responds with the claim on magical powers immediately. If the mugger has magical powers to procure money, seems, once more, like the probability doesn’t decline linearly with respect to the amount offered.
EDIT: I didn’t notice that this was a guest post until after I commented. This comment only makes sense if it was Bentham writing it. Whoops!
I hear what you’re saying about “the higher the dollar amount, the less likely it is to be true”: yet, isn’t the doctrine of Hell one of your primary objections to Christianity? Your own beliefs, that God exists and he loves us and we will live forever and that there is no eternal punishment for anyone, seem to be promising more than Christianity does. To add to this, Christianity does not promise that all who join the religion will be saved. As Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’”
It is a rare scammer who tells his marks that they must commit to lives of virtue in order to get the payoff. They usually just say that all you need to get the prize is give them money: which is the main difference between prosperity gospel scammers and orthodox Christians, as you point out.
Paywall circumvention glitch
It's not paywalled.
The comments are!
Oh strange, I could have sworn his original post was paywalled earlier today.
It was. He paywalls them for a day before releasing them.
Ahh, makes sense