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They treat Salafism, say, as just a religion—with its houses of “worship”—when in fact it is just an intolerant political
system, which promotes (or allows) violence and rejects the institutions of the West—those very institutions that allow them to operate. We saw with the minority rule that the intolerant will run over the tolerant; cancer must be stopped before it becomes metastatic. Salafism is very similar to atheistic Soviet Communism in its heyday: both have all-embracing control over all of human activity and thought,
Religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and, to some extent Shiite Islam, evolved (or, rather, let their members evolve in developing a sophisticated society) precisely by moving away from the literal. The literal doesn’t leave any room for adaptation.
Just as paganism cannot be pigeon-holed, the same applies to libertarianism. It does not fit the structure of a political “party”—only that of a decentralized political movement.
To conclude, beware labels when it comes to matters associated with beliefs. And avoid treating religions as if they are all the same animal. But there is a commonality. The next chapter will show us how religion does not like fair-weather friends; it wants commitment; it is based on skin in the game.
The strength of a creed did not rest on “evidence” of the powers of its gods, but evidence of the skin in the game on the part of its worshippers.
atheists in actions, religious in words (most Orthodox and Catholic Christians)
religious in actions, religious in words (Salafi Islamists and suicide bombers)
a) rationality resides in what you do, not in what you think or in what you “believe” (skin in the game), and b) rationality is about survival.
In real life, belief is an instrument to do things, not the end product.
Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later. In other words, you do not need science to survive (we’ve survived for several hundred million years or more, depending on how you define the “we”), but you must survive to do science.
decision theorist Ken Binmore, who spent his life formulating the logical foundations of rationality.
Judging people by their beliefs is not scientific. There is no such thing as the “rationality” of a belief, there is rationality of action. The rationality of an action can be judged only in terms of evolutionary considerations.
What matters, in the end, is what they pay for goods, not what they say they “think” about them, or the various possible reasons they give you or themselves for that.
Beliefs are…cheap talk. There may be some type of a translation mechanism too hard for us to understand, with distortions at the level of the thought process that
are actually necessary for things to work.
An error-free world would have no penicillin, no chemotherapy…almost no drugs, and most probably no humans.
Recall that skin in the game means that you do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and to how much of their necks they are putting on the line.
Science is currently too incomplete to provide all answers—and says it itself.
Further, I find it incoherent to criticize someone’s superstitions if these are meant to bring some benefits,
we can show that much of what we call “belief” is some kind of background furniture for the human mind, more metaphorical than real. It may work as therapy.
There is a difference between beliefs that are decorative and different sorts of beliefs, those that map to action.
How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.
The classical sophrosyne means precaution, self-control, and temperance all in one.
what is rational is that which allows for survival.
When you consider beliefs in evolutionary terms, do not look at how they compete with each other, but consider the survival of the populations that have them.
But it remains the case that whatever their purpose, kashrut laws survived several millennia not because of their “rationality” but because the populations that followed them survived. It most certainly brought cohesion: people who eat together hang together. (To be technical, it is a convex heuristic.) Such group cohesion might be also responsible for trust in commercial transactions with remote members of the community, thus creating a vibrant network. Or some other benefit—but it remains that Jews have survived in spite of a very hard history.
Rationality does not depend on explicit verbalistic explanatory factors; it is only what aids survival, what avoids ruin.
Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason. Rationality is risk management, period.
Recall that to do science (and other nice things) requires survival but not the other way around.
Courage is when you sacrifice your own well-being for the sake of the survival of a layer higher than yours.
Recall that I worry about the correlation between the death of one person and that of another. So we need to be concerned with systemic effects: things that can affect more than one person should they happen.
Mediocristan and Extremistan. Mediocristan is thin-tailed and affects the individual without correlation to the collective. Extremistan, by definition, affects many people. Hence Extremistan has a systemic effect that Mediocristan doesn’t. Multiplicative risks—such as epidemics—are always from Extremistan.
And things are a lot—a lot—clearer in probability than they are in words.
One may be risk loving yet completely averse to ruin. The central asymmetry of life is: In a strategy that entails ruin, benefits never offset risks of ruin. Further: Ruin and other changes in condition are different animals. Every single risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy. Finally: Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin.
When the beard (or hair) is black, heed the reasoning, but ignore the conclusion. When the beard is gray, consider both reasoning and conclusion. When the beard is white, skip the reasoning, but mind the conclusion.
No muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without consequence, change without aesthetics, age without values,
life without effort, water without thirst, food without nourishment, love without sacrifice, power without fairness, facts without rigor, statistics without logic, mathematics without proof, teaching without experience, politeness without warmth, values without embodiment, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, friendship without investment, virtue without risk, probability without ergodicity,
wealth without exposure, complication without depth, fluency without content, decision without asymmetry, science without ske...
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nothing without skin in the game.
