Religion to become extinct, says model of census data

[littlebabyjesus]

Well yes, they wildly overstate their case to grab a headline. The idea that the social utility of religious affiliation is a major driver behind the levels of religious affiliation is not an entirely worthless one, though.

 

[kyser_soze]

 

[kabbes]

Well yes, they wildly overstate their case to grab a headline. The idea that the social utility of religious affiliation is a major driver behind the levels of religious affiliation is not an entirely worthless one, though.

No, it's definitely a factor in a proper model. A major factor, no doubt.

But so are a tonne of other things -- technology, global politics, shock events, wars, oppression. Those are just from the top of my head. I'm sure if you sat down for an hour you could come up with a dozen more. And those few dozen might not be significant over a short period of time under stable conditions... but over the horizon this model is being used for and for the purpose it is being put to (predicting extinction!), I'd say they're pretty crucial.

 

[frogwoman]

What about superstitions tho? are there any new ones?

 

[Dillinger4]

What about superstitions tho? are there any new ones?

That is an interesting question as well.

superstition: an irrational belief arising from ignorance or fear

http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=define%3Asuperstition

I'd say yes, yes there are. But perhaps just old superstitions in new forms.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I don't agree with that definition at all. Superstition can be anything but irrational. It is a belief based on an observed or imagined pattern or correlation, generally, a heuristic that can be the best guess about what to do in the absence of an understanding of the processes of cause and effect in question.

 

[TruXta]

I don't agree with that definition at all. Superstition can be anything but irrational. It is a belief based on an observed or imagined pattern or correlation, generally, a heuristic that can be the best guess about what to do in the absence of an understanding of the processes of cause and effect in question.

That's taking it a bit far surely? I'd restrict it to cases where someone thinks that there is a non-physical cause to a physical effect. It's not perfect, but does the job, mostly.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

That's taking it a bit far surely? I'd restrict it to cases where someone thinks that there is a non-physical cause to a physical effect. It's not perfect, but does the job, mostly.

Does that work? Isn't it simply a case of 'mechanism unknown'? Magic, basically – I suspect that a causes b, but I have no idea how. I don't think rationality or irrationality comes into it – it only becomes irrational if you are presented with evidence that it is wrong, but that evidence does not shift the belief. In that sense, it is certainly an emotional response, but isn't everything?

 

[kabbes]

I agree with lbj. Having a superstition does not preclude the belief that there might be an underlying chain of cause and effect, it just refers to cases where the believer doesn't know or care what the causal chain actually is.

 

[TruXta]

But in that case if you don't know how magnetism works, only that it works, you could call that a superstition. That sounds a bit odd to me. It's not, IMO, about having or not having a sense of an underlying cause-effect relationship, it's what kind of entities are thought to have causal powers in the first place.

It's obviously not clear-cut, and one could argue that one man's superstition is another man's fact - at least historically this must have been the case, and it still is - witness the "fucking magnets, how do they work" meme.

 

[kabbes]

Superstition is just one type of heuristic. From that Wiki link:

In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, hard-coded by evolutionary processes or learned, which have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgments, and solve problems, typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information. These rules work well under most circumstances, but in certain cases lead to systematic errors or cognitive biases.

Superstition fits this perfectly. Animals use the superstition heuristic all the time, due to their inability to form complete causal chains -- pattern recognition is a good evolutionary advantage even if the conclusions are sometimes wrong. B.F. Skinner performed a classic experiment that showed superstition in the pigeon, for example. The pigeon wasn't assuming some supernatural cause. It had just noticed a pattern of one event associated with another and formed a superstition around it. (This particular experiment has been criticised, but other less famous superstition experiments have certainly been formed instead).

 

[kyser_soze]

kabbes & lbj - you should write a letter to the compilers of Websters & teh OED detailing your issues with their defintion of 'superstition':

OED: excessively credulous belief in and reverence for the supernatural:
he dismissed the ghost stories as mere superstition[count noun] a widely held but irrational belief in supernatural influences, especially as leading to good or bad luck, or a practice based on such a belief:
she touched her locket for luck, a superstition she'd had since childhood

Websters: 1. An irrational belief arising from ignorance or fear.[Wordnet]
2. An excessive reverence for, or fear of, that which is unknown or mysterious.[Websters]
3. An ignorant or irrational worship of the Supreme Deity; excessive exactness or rigor in religious opinions or practice; extreme and unnecessary scruples in the observance of religious rites not commanded, or of points of minor importance; also, a rite or practice proceeding from excess of sculptures in religion.[Websters]
4. The worship of a false god or gods; false religion; religious veneration for objects.[Websters]
5. Belief in the direct agency of superior powers in certain extraordinary or singular events, or in magic, omens, prognostics, or the like.[Websters]
6. Excessive nicety; scrupulous exactness.[Websters].

 

[kabbes]

OED's own example arguably doesn't fit their own definition. "Luck" is ill-defined and not necessary related to a belief in supernatural influences. Unless you also define just "supernatural" to include the idea of "luck", but I would say that is stretching the point.

Dictionaries illustrate useage but they're not always the most useful for examining the reaches of psychology and epistimology.

 

[DotCommunist]

That's a good idea, but i'm not sure.

The 'god' believed in by the conspiracy theorist would be a supremely evil one.

there have been religions that believe the world is defined through an ultimate evil battling with fast fading light. Manicheans for one.

 

[Dillinger4]

there have been religions that believe the world is defined through an ultimate evil battling with fast fading light. Manicheans for one.

True.

 

[kyser_soze]

OED's own example arguably doesn't fit their own definition. "Luck" is ill-defined and not necessary related to a belief in supernatural influences. Unless you also define just "supernatural" to include the idea of "luck", but I would say that is stretching the point.

Dictionaries illustrate useage but they're not always the most useful for examining the reaches of psychology and epistimology.

Pah, I was hoping to be a witness to an exchange of emails between yourselves & the OED on the matter.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

It's tempting.

I think I've posted before about Konrad Lorentz's superstitious pet goose. It was in the habit of running in when the door opened and heading up the stairs, but there was a dodgy step near the bottom with a loose bit, so it had to take little shimmy to one side to avoid it. The step was eventually fixed, but the goose continued with its shimmy as before, until one day, in a particularly excited state, it dashed in and bolted straight up the stairs. It reached half-way up when it stopped stock-still, clearly perturbed. After a moment's thought, it ran back down the stairs and retook them with the customary shimmy. Only then would it proceed to the top.

 

[Kizmet]

The validity of their approach depends on how well they capture the data. I would not dismiss it without seeing the figures.

There's loads of work out there centred around predicting large-scale behaviour of human beings using mathematical models originally formulated for biology or physics.

With how much success?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

But in that case if you don't know how magnetism works, only that it works, you could call that a superstition. That sounds a bit odd to me. It's not, IMO, about having or not having a sense of an underlying cause-effect relationship, it's what kind of entities are thought to have causal powers in the first place.

That's a sensible objection. In order for it to be a superstition, there has to be some kind of over-generalisation going on – a jumping to conclusions that the evidence is not strong enough to support. Specifically, this can be seen to have been selected through evolution because we don't have time to gather evidence. We need to act, and to build up systems of heuristics to guide our action, based on far from complete information.

So, in the case of Lorentz's goose, the original reason for the shimmy is now long forgotten. What remains is, at a neuronal level, the long-term potentiation of certain neural pathways that ensures that the shimmy continues to be taken upon seeing the stairs. No need to think about why you're shimmying, just do it – until such a day as the goose rushes in and doesn't register what it is doing sufficiently to trigger the shimmy. But the process of climbing the stairs without having shimmied sets off all kinds of alarm bells telling the goose that something is wrong, and upsetting it. It now recognises the situation, and decides that it can rectify the problem by retaking the stairs 'properly'.

The nature of superstitions is often to do something to keep you safe. You may not be sure whether or not doing it will keep you safe. In fact, you may well suspect that doing it makes no difference, but your superstitious heuristic tells you to do it anyway just in case. You can see how the psychology that would lead to this kind of behaviour has been selected. In Lorentz's goose, it costs the goose little to do its shimmy just in case there is something in doing the shimmy that it doesn't understand that keeps it safe.

 

[TruXta]

Another theory that's big in some quarters these days is the "minimal counter-intuitiveness" theory. Crudely it states that

religious concepts belong to a class of concepts which Barrett (2000) has called ‘minimally counterintuitive’, namely, fulfilling intuitive assumptions about any given class of objects (e.g., persons, plants, tools) but also violating some of those assumptions in small ways which make the resulting concepts particularly attention grabbing and memorable. An example of a counterintuitive concept would be a plant which has all the usual properties of a plant but which has the additional property of being able to talk (i.e., violating the natural assumption that plants cannot communicate verbally). Pyysiäinen and Anttonen (2002) claim that counterintuitiveness is a condition which can be taken as a universal characteristic of all religion, although it is not a sufficient criterion for religion.

Link