Do religions really scale?
A lot of talk about the social benefits of Mormonism, Orthodox Judaism and Catholicism talks about the effects of the religion on local communities.
The social “benefit“ of hellfire as a deterrent against crime, in addition to secular punishments like jail or fines should persist on a national level.
Positive effects of Mormon communities extent to their non-Mormon neighbours.
It’s really unclear to me if a belief in the supernatural is necessary to create these benefits, or if the benefits of the beliefs vanish if you’re the only one with them, or if they vanish as a religion becomes the majority in a country.
Religion has one hell of a Simpson’s paradox. The wealthiest nations are also some of the least religious, and poor nations tend to be more religious. But within nations, religion correlates positively with income.
I do not understand this, and I wish I did.
Entrepeneurs standing on the shoulders of nerds?
This one seems pretty straightforward.
From the viewpoint of a social group, society-at-large can be modeled as a giant Prisoners’ Dilemma, where liberal norms = cooperating and tribal norms = defecting.
Liberalism: “We are going to be scrupulous about giving our individual members the freedom to pursue their individual well-being, even if that results in them doing things that degrade group coherence or group prestige. We will also try very hard to pretend that we don’t care about outsiders less than we care about our own people, even to the extent of giving them our resources for reasons of abstract principle.”
Tribalism (which includes many popular forms of organized religion): “We are ruthlessly going to optimize for group success, which will entail both quashing inconvenient outbursts of individualism and systematically privileging our own interests over the interests of outsiders whenever we possibly can.”
If every group is tribal, then you end up with the sort of place where politics is always zero-sum and corrupt, where infrastructure isn’t developed because there isn’t enough widespread trust, where conflict and violence are rampant, etc.
If every group is liberal, you end up with a well-developed, atomized, highly mobile society full of people who do whatever the fuck they want (which will often involve wasting lots of time and energy on stupid shit).
If you are the only tightly-knit tribe in a liberal society, then you can move through it like a shark. You find ways to hunt down lone undefended tribe-less people and absorb their resources into yourself. You parasitize the infrastructure built by the liberals and redirect its benefits to your members as much as you can. You redistribute resources within yourself to the places where they will be the most useful.