Playing along with Sam Harris Part 2

This is the second part of my analysis of the Sam Harris - Eric Weinstein -  Ben Shapiro conversation.

Again, the intent isn't to deconstruct what is said, but respond in real time to the questions Harris raises before other people respond.

https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/112-the-intellectual-dark-web

PART 2

48:33-52:30  Let me make an objective claim [based upon Eric’s separation of objective truth and objective truth that is “good enough”].  Example of wealth inequality as framed intersectionaly.  We are a confluence of lots of influences.  Once you admit that you either have won the lottery or not, that conveys a sense of ethical responsibility.

I don’t think knowledge entails moral essentials.  I think it is likely that it bifurcates or binormalizes the population.  But even then we’re not quite sure how much overlap there is between means.  To answer the direct question so that comment may make sense for those not on my same wavelength - If I have perfect, or let’s just say lots of knowledge.  That doesn’t mean I must act ethically.  Not to get all Ayn Rand, but I can know that certain anti-social behaviours may be bad for other people and may harm me due to environmental effects or blowback.  But that doesn’t mean self-interest doesn’t win out.  In fact I would suggest self-interest may be a rather utilitarian position.  It may not be consequential (it doesn’t max things for everyone), but other than environmental effects and blowback why should I be concerned about summing across all individuals? 

You can go further down the rabbit hole and say that pro-sociality is a robust long-term good, but you haven’t made the case for any particular level of in-betweeness.  In effect you’re taking MacIntyrean approach to virtue.  Only perfect virtue leads to non-corruptive behaviour and environmental degradation.  Again in this sense I’d refer you to basic anti-utopian arguments. And, I would note the utter religiousness of your position from this frame.

There is no necessary ethical responsibility that goes with knowledge. It may increase the odds. But self-interest is, as per the multi-level selections in me suggests, is always an option.  If we can fool our genes or evolve them in directions we want, there are no guarantees that the solution we get is always going to be darwinianingly selected for pro-sociality.  It may be likely, but it is not guaranteed. Because it can’t be guaranteed you have a faith based position, albeit one based upon better data than random spaghetti monsters, but it is nonetheless faith based.  Thus I don’t see why worrying about the journey isn’t at least as important as worrying about the destination.

54:10  Eric alludes to the idea of social Heisenberg uncertainty.  You don’t say that quark is being unethical right now.  Morality has to do with some high up level.  Something that is not fundamental.  Each level of observable has effective theories.  Free will conversations get stuck here, mixing up effective theories.  Who denies we have free will to get here?  As if free will is good enough.  Computing large stuff just can’t be handled.  Its why self reflection leads to madness.

Again I think Eric Weinstein nails things here.  And I agree with the basic idea that free will emerges due to complicatedness or chaos in holding things in our minds for processing.  And I think we very much need to respect the “good enough” principle.  Assumptions of ever increasing levels of precision and sophistication is a fairly religious principle.  There is nothing wrong with this. But over-extending it and treating it like a foundational meta-truth that all must accept is wrong. It is classic evangelizing. So I think we need to hedge out bets a bit a get out of this metaphysical hubris.

56:50 Eric says, “The fun part of these conversations comes from making these category errors.  The unfun part comes from sorting it out.

Again, I rather like the Weinstein way of framing things. It is nice to see academics who have obviously thought ideas out but who lack the big pride thing some populists obviously have.

57:12 You’re not disputing that you can transition between layers?

I think micro-macro divides do introduce some very fundamental fuzziness.  The propagation of this fuzziness across levels can produce some rather chaotic effects, especially as you scale across multiple levels. Nothing is guaranteed.

57:30 There is nothing about doing dishes that violates quantum field theory [you knowing that your wife will get mad about doing the dishes does not violate quantum field theory and porting conclusions from that level on upward in terms of the free will debate]

 No.  But I do worry about the conflation of forward prediction and backward rationality.  I think Stuart Kauffman did a very good job in terms of these distinctions.

So I guess I’m not really sure what you are asking.  As you say “you can make a smooth transition between layers that doesn’t usurp your understanding of each layer”.  If that is what you are meaning, then I think I would say you can appear to make a smooth transition between layers, but that probably involves some to a lot of self-deception and ex post facto rationalization.  All the knowledge in the world does not necessarily escape you from these issues.  I mean will all the knowledge in the world get you around the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? If not why are we assuming the same for social phenomenon.  

Maybe the idea is that in these compositions or superposition’s of fuzzy influence and fuzzy knowledge there is no guarantee for the correct arrow of morality to emerge. We are putting on bets on the fact that certain directions which we dogmatically and perhaps utilitarianly like are going to emerge as more probable, but I worry that we’re being naive if we aren’t really relying on our own selective history for pro-sociality.  Once you throw out this frame, I’m not sure you’re guaranteed to be grounded the way you think you are.  

That’s the classic problem with utopianism and transformation.  Its why current Great Awakenings like we’re now in aren’t as predictable as everything thinks.  After all, there is no rational way Trump gets elected, or we knowingly vote in a patently crazy Kim Jong Un in a democracy? Right?

58:10 What I’m interested in a first principles formulation of moving forward into the unknown

I guess I really like Stuart Kauffman here.  Let’s lose some of our own hubris about the rightness of our way, value the essential aspects of our human group nature and appreciate the value and insights each perspective has.

But I know you want specifics.  I think as specific as I can get is to say, don’t move too fast and don’t move too slow.  Keep things in conversation and don’t try to push one-size fits all solutions.

Now I know you’re rejoinder is going to be, “should we respect despotic Khmer Rouge dogmas”.  Great question, but I think it misses the mark. There is a zone of likelies and efficiency.  I think we all take that for granted. But that doesn’t imply that ever increasing narrowness is inevitable or that a certain direction is deterministic.  Complexity tends to rear its ugly head and there may be a zone of probabilities that produces black-swan superpositions that utterly destroy your precision. In that regard I would say I’m rather Peircean.  We can do better but as Eric says there may be a point where it is just good enough.

My issue with what I see as your approach is that it makes some foundational mistakes about precision and accuracy.

So what do we do? In the precise long-looking sense I don’t think it is wrong to say we don’t know. But as per David Snowden and his classic Cynefin framework for organizational solutions to these very questions, I would say keep exploring and don’t get so caught up in our need for absolute precision.  That is itself a very big crutch I think we have to get over.

People need certainty in order to motivate and unify.  The problem is we tend to provide false utopian certainty almost no matter what and no matter our good intentions.  We get back to the issue that we need a little bit of uncertainty and quasi-propositionality.  And here I think you suffer the same flaws, or rather your approach is subject to the same flaws as anything else.

58:35  What I object to about religion is that there was some prior century where we were given the best ideas we could ever have.  You can either locate yourself in a current modern conversation or anchor yourself in an ancient one.

I just think that is a non-sequitur which assumes religion and religious interpretations don’t change and evolve.  I think your direct reference to revelation brings in some connotations, at least from a Mormon perspective, about this.  Revelation opens the door to change and re-interpretation.  Sometimes it is gradual, as per Catholic systemic theology.  Sometimes it is dramatic as per the protestant revolution, or the emergence of any of the world religions.

The idea that only rationalism allows updating of belief just is non-sensical.  

I think what we are arguing about is the relative rates of change.  You seem to be saying more flexibility is ideal.  Canonical religions, or perhaps even religions of any type are too laconically and introduce uneeded supernaturalism and too much quasi-propositional and false belief.

In that I think we just have to disagree.  I think the rate of change should be informed by genetic tendencies and how easy they are for the populations as a whole to change them.  Push too fast because a particular sub-group can handle and excel with loose mores and you also have to watch out about the unintended effects this sub-group and its systems may have on the larger group as a whole. I guess I would sum that up as saying, respect the whole, but don’t be afraid to be different or to advocate for your differentness, but make sure you lose your hubris and learn the skeletons that come with systemic change and moral unfreezing.  Naivete here is just as bad as blind faith.

59:40 We need to get to a common humanity that removes our religious provincialism

Well, I think you just walked into your utopian trap here.  If only everyone would just follow religion X.

But, that is an easy polemical attack that I don’t think is fair to your position.  But, I do think it is the fundamental flaw in your position.  But let me address it directly rather than in terms of its foundational assumptions.

I’d frame what you are saying as a need for us to move to a higher group level - cosmopolitanism if your will.  By moving to a higher group level we should, as per Pinker’s Better Angel’s of our Nature have quite a bit of conflict reduction.  And yes, I know that Pinker would never invoke group selection.  

That certainly might be true.  Just because you have a larger group does not mean that you don’t have sub-group competition.  In fact, I suspect what you find is, as per Richerson, Cordes, Boyd, to sustain a larger group level usually entails loosening of moral norms and the permission of larger levels of freeloading which is offset by the selective advantages of group size, economies of scale, and group directed altruistic benefits by core groups of altruists.  In other words, your idea of a one-size fits all hyper-rational moral theology may be a bit naive. It does not necessarily entail the rational society and dynamics you envision.  You may jettison supernaturalism, something I have absolutely no problem with and suspect is inevitable to one degree or another.  But I don’t think rationalism guarantees the type of behaviour and dynamics you envision.  I think such reasoning is a fallacy.

But that aside, I think what you need is time for gene-culture elements to evolve such that a transition to a new evolutionary level is stable.  That involves, extreme dependency, conflict minimization tools, and coordination.  I don’t think the language problem you allude to is significant enough to make many gains on the coordination level.  I don’t think it induces any extreme dependencies, except for ancillarilarly like how the EU is now stuck to somewhat of a common fate.  And, most importantly enough I don’t think that it causes the development of new conflict minimization tools any more than any other utopian solution proposes to do.  But I will admit that it does make some progress.  But I don’t think the solution is structurally significant enough to do what I think you need it to do.

Playing Along With Sam Harris

I'm having some fun playing along with Sam Harris' recent podcast with Ben Shapiro and Eric Weinstein.  Every time I hear a good probing interview with one of those Weinstein brothers, I come off very appreciative of their level-headedness.  Reminds me of my family a bit.

Anyway, here is my attempt at playing along with Sam's interview.  I've taken his major questions and tried to write a bit of my response to each of them.  I've tried to keep things more like dialogue, but I've also expanded a bit more that I would ever do in a real conversation.  After the first bit, I figured I should add in minute intervals so you can follow along on the original podcast.

Has social media caused today’s extreme polarization levels?

No.  Polarization tends to follow a Father & Son’s cycle.  I look to Peter Turchin’s great historical work here.  I think your’e better off viewing today’s polarization as a somewhat nasty “Great Religious Awakening”.  About every 50 years or so you get a period of moral unfreezing & configuration.  For instance, look to the social turmoil of the late 60’s and the fairly significant left sourced period of politically oriented violence in the early 70’s.  Before that you had some really controversial times during the great depression and then the near civil war in the late 1800’s due to their immigration crisis, real wage decline and extreme income disparity.

Each cycle had different proximate causes, but I tend to view the underlying physics as emerging from the same ultimate cause.  Here I really like Nowak & Sigmund. They have a really great under appreciated Nature paper called Tides of Tolerance which models how slight preference for tolerance leads to sudden temporary phase changes to intolerance. The posit that this occurs when a generation loses direct touch for the reasons of tolerance itself.  I think the term “you can’t be tolerant of intolerance,” is apropos here.

My personal reference for this came from a great book by Chris Beneke on the emergence of religious secularism in America.  When you look back at the religious awakenings of the early 1700’s, late 1700’s and early 1800’s you tend to see many of the same dynamics we are now experiencing.

You have “priests” who lead and pace self-organizing movements.  They articulate new morals and as a natural sweet spot for group formation, push a hard in-group out-group dynamic by labelling anyone who doesn’t agree with them or support their morals as sinners.  When a society’s foundational social contract is questioned, this is a really explosive position to take.  It works, for a time, very well.  But it also produces some nasty paralysis once everyone other than your own group is a sinner who can’t be trusted.  Social capital, or as Ibn Kuhn states it, asabiyah, is real and is foundational for group coherence. 

I tend to think group coherence is slated to be the next global warming issue.  The irony here, is that the political sides on this very real phenomena are ironically switched.

What is the value of religion in social coherence?  What do you believe that I don’t believe?

Religious is a great adaptive tool.  I take David Sloan Wilson’s side and the body of researches studying the Scientific Study of Religion.  You can have beliefs that are factually incorrect but which are more adaptive (fitter) than beliefs which are factually correct.  I believe Brett Weinstein frames this as metaphorical truth, Wilson as practical vs. factual reality, and another pop scientist, Jordan Peterson uses the term Darwinian truth.  Of these I tend most to Wilson’s approach.

I think we do religion a great disservice by casting the baby out with the bath water. In this I guess the safest position is a classic God of the Gaps position. But I also think it is very important to recognize the intertwined role religion (in the group sense of things) and governance have played in the evolution of human society and the gene-cultural evolution of our own abilities to function at ever increasing levels of selection.  Whether you think these levels need to be biologically real or simply ephemerally real is a fairly technical question that I don’t think adds much to the conversation.

But in general I think this generation’s loss of touch with religion and some of the adaptive reasons for religion has left them without many of the pluralistic tools which are needed for effective social coherence at the high levels we now operate in.  Extreme divergence and diversity at our social scale have only exasperated, or rather tried the limits of pluralistic skills.  I’m afraid they are rather lacking.

Now that doesn’t mean I think religion is necessary for society.  I just don’t think the data with atheism stands up to that.  I’m fairly Norezayan there. But it does mean we’re going to have to re-learn pluralism again.  This time without most of the supernatural trappings, but unfortunately with heightened levels of sacredness, blasphemy and sacrosanctness.  This is where I think Trump really hit a home run.

Imagine the world was rebooted.  How would someone rediscover this thing [this particular form of True religion]

Well I don’t think you’d see any particulars re-emerging.  But you would be likely to see some generalities re-emerge.  Sort of like the difference between homologous and analogous structures.  In this I suspect I lean to Peterson’s view of things.  There are some darwinian, if you like, wells in our cognitive architecture.  Some things are adaptive and some things aren’t.  If you look across human societies, get the right scale, worry about the very real effects of cultural evolution you can probably get a pretty good idea of what type of structures are likely to re-emerge.  Of course the colour of things will be complex, but in general I suspect you’d get some fairly common sense pro-sociallty concerns coming up, and some pretty interesting ways of teasing out in-groups and out-groups.

In this I always tend to smirk looking back at the fork the new atheists faced a number of years ago.  They definitely seemed to be poised to start reproducing evangelical like quasi-religion.  I’m just glad Dawkins and some of the others pulled back from that brink. But it is interesting to see some of the atheist “worship” services and such.  There are certain patterns of actions and beliefs that just feel right and just work.

Confronting that is I think one of the big questions of the next decade or so.  The scientific understanding of the role of quasi-factual but adaptive “truth”.  Neat times.

Can’t we just chart a course to greater well being [pro-scoaiity] just from intelligent analysis?  Why do we need an un-moved mover?

Yes. You can certainly try. I think you’ll find that the religious dynamics come up as fairly efficient solutions to most any problem.  Does this always entail supernaturalism? No. I think psychology would say it just needs the right amount of quasi-propositional (slightly exaggerated and slightly unbelievable but very memorable) ideas. I take a homeostatic view here.  It isn’t just the individual ideas or meme’s that need the right quasi-propositionality, its probably balanced out with a variety of other things.  Thus you see atheists in Europe having unbelievably high belief levels in ET’s and new age spiritualism.

But yes, intelligent analysis refined by selection would over time produce many of the solutions we now have.  It would probably produce some very good ones we don’t now have. But over time I think, like you do, we’ll have to face the question about what to do to get past the tribal like berries of conventional religion.  Where we [Sam Harris] differ is probably that I think we might still call this product “religion” where you certainly wouldn’t. 

But I also don’t see much fundamental difference between hyper-rational utopianism and some forms of religious belief.  Hence, what I worry about is more the journey than the destination.  Destination zealots, perhaps because of my religious background, always make me worried. I’m sorry I’m worried about you Sam.  Just kidding.  I think we’ll come to a balance between practical and factual truth sometime.  I just don’t think such a resolution will necessarily be kind to everyone’s sacred values.

It is pure hubris (36:00) to think the 7 billion of us here have pushed what is cognitively possible [or cognitive closed doors] to the limit.  [The assumption here is that religion is a closed cognitive door where what is now here is all that you need]

I think there are some mistaken assumptions here.  The God of the Gaps approach my quick solution.  I don’t think we need an unmoved mover. I’m quite content to think of God as a person who went through everything we did and is far ahead of us.

I think if you take religion and assume that it must be static you’re in trouble too.  The usual answer to this is revelation. But that’s a pretty simple ingenious and deflective answer. I think what fundamentally matters is that the rate of change of beliefs fits adaptive patterns.  Sometimes that can mean some fairly rapid change.  I am a gene-culturist who buys into the fairly extreme position of multi-path inheritance.  I think if you change religion too much and say “hey let’s do atheism and reinvent our moral beliefs based upon some good science” you’re going to get some really nasty things come out of it.  Heck, look at Marxism.  

Science is good at some things. Religion is good at others.  I suspect we’ll see coherence, but I just don’t think our social science is up to the playing field of religion yet.  Look at where we are with inter sectionalism.  I certainly don’t want that pushed as a mandated universal belief system empowered by all these latent religious like intensities people are subject too.  Especially not when those in charge deny the very religious like nature of their movement, making it all too easy to deny the ingrained tendencies that go with it.  I don’t think we need another cycle of religious wars. We did that after Martin Luther.  I don’t think we need to do that again.

But I do hope we get better at the science of religion. For instance, I think its a big shame few people have every grappled in an honest way with Stuart Kauffman’s Beyond Belief book.

Revelation is so limiting because we’re anchoring ourselves to a book that we just know is going to be outdated (37:10)

Yes, fixation can be a problem. But I think it behooves one to ask whether no fixation is also a problem.  Is it?  

It certainly  seems like societies with no moral anchors enable some rather despotic caste formation, moral flipping and nasty abusive freeloading.  See my blog post

I think what you need is the “right amount” of change and re-interpretation.  Re-interpretation that is aware of our Darwinian traps and natural propensities.  I’m a very real believer in abuse and the set-up of systems of abuse.  But that may just be the organizationalist in me talking….

This remind me of the debate I had with Rick Warren where he said without God people would just be out raping and murdering and such.  I just don’t think that is true. 40:00

Well, I think this is the “climate change” moment we have to face.  Would society crumble or not?  I think the answer is we don’t know.  And that type of destruction isn’t something I think should be played around with willy nilly.  There have been some rather horrible world disasters emerging from well intentioned by Darwinianingly naive social engineering.

So I think in your question, would everyone be better off without religion? Some might. Some might not.  But if you go for a long-game argument, in the long-run people would be better off because hyper-rationalism is the most rational solution because it is the quickest way to factual based reality which is highly probable to be the most adaptive as long as we can surprise our natural instincts, I think you necessarily face the same criticisms that get levelled at any utopian styled movement.  Just because something is possible through out naive lenses, doesn’t mean it will actually work out that way.  I’m very practical, in the D.S. Wilson pun of the word, here.

Invoke utilitarianism or consequentialism here if you like, but I think we need to be really careful to maintain pluralism and the ideals of pluralism.  That’s why I think religions are very wise when the adopt a “multi-path” approach and say, yes that path may be better for you, but I like this one and think it will get me to a similar enough spot, but with a much more pleasant-for-me journey.  Sometimes it is the side effects and after effects that we’re after. Religion can have some rather nice pro-social side effects. Even seemingly irrational beliefs and norms, can if viewed right, produce some strong and unique social and pro-social qualities.

I just think we have to watch our own hubris to think that everything can be engineered. But I also think religions tend to go way overboard on denying the utility of science and the scientific process in this regard.  But then again, they aren’t worrying about the individual, they are worrying about the group as expressed by the sum of all the individuals, or even in some cases just as the group as a whole.  But feel free to make another multi-level selection joke here Sam.

43:00 I think Eric Weinstein did a great job summing up my position.  Sam Harris comes across as very religious or quasi-religious at his core.

44:25 Here is how is and ought converge is with a complete understanding. If you have all the information there really is, if that can’t give you a complete picture of what you ought to do then where would you go to get that picture?

I think it is interesting that you just made a mormon theological argument here.  That is what I suspect religions, well at least many formal world religions would say.  Complete understandings can do this. But are we any where near that.  What is the error introduced by what we don’t know? How much should we trust the long arm of evolved selection versus the hubris of modern rationalism? 

I think the two exist in tension. I don’t think putting all your eggs in one basket is good.  Not because middle ground is always the best solution (think of the let’s kill all ethic group X,  can’t you meet them halfway, negotiating cartoon). I think you need tension between elements in a group which are conservative, let’s call them in-group oriented, and elements which are outward oriented, let’s call them out-group oriented.  I think tension between those two perspectives is an essential dialectic. It is adaptive and highly so.

So I fully support your right for your position.  I also fully support the right of others for their position. I do not think the case should get decided based upon who makes the most rational case. That type of solution process is just too subject to gaming. I think we need much more sophisticated checks and balances. And, I think our evolutionary history has given us some rather formidable tools in this regard, and I think we should trust cautions that those systems suggest we take with regard to moral engineering.

Creeds & Creedal Defences: They're Adaptive & They Bi-normalize

A while ago I made some comments about how I was worried about a nascent trend in academia for formal creedal statements concerning the morality of certain positions.  While the original manifesto came from a religious studies department, the whole dynamics had me a bit worried for academia.

My main fears were that it could open the door for litmus tests about peoples' politics and political moralities.  "Where do you sit on the morality of position X?"  Morality tests are not something I generally think many academics should willingly bring into the pursuit of objective truth.  Of course I also don't think science should be "intersectional".  Research needs space to be research. It requires the space and freedom to  be able to look at controversial ideas with minimum deference to how people might use or interpret the results.

Of course once you start telling or suggesting how people should act, or what policies should be followed, moral ethics seem mandatory. From one frame, current tensions in academia reflect the tension of higher education as a pursuit of abstract knowledge versus a pursuit of applied knowledge. While the two intermingle, abstract pursuits are really only suited to a small minority of people. Applied pursuits appeal to a much broader range of people.  The expansion of higher ed into an ever increasing percentage of the population no doubt informs the shift in these tensions.

CREEDAL DEFENSES

As most people know, Brett Weinstein of Evergreen college sent out an email where he said that telling people to leave college for a day due to their skin color was an act of racism.  The ultimate intentions of the act (to combat racism) did not justify the racist of the act itself.  One dimensionality is of course a hallmark of modern intersectional theories.  For this defence against classical racism he was branded a racist nazi.  He was racist because he did not accede to the right level of support for students of color.  Thus his act was racist by omission.  It was not racist by commission.  Second, he was a Nazi because his lack of support for people of color was a form of violence. It perpetuated and gave space for rhetorics of violence, which could cause actual violence.  Further, the flash-point this created spawned a backlash involving unsavoury people who created a hostile environment due to who they were and what they were perceived to support.

Luckily Brett had a pretty good memo.  He specifically called to end racism. But he defined racism in the classical sense (against a phenotype) rather than in an intersectional sense (one-way down punching).  Did many of his attackers look at the nuance in his memo?  No.  It didn't support the right side of things and so was wrong by omission.  He omitted the "right" kind of support.

The purposefully pejorative over application of "supremacist" labels,  mean many people are in the same boat, or have the potential to so be.  I think Lindsay Shephard is the latest example.

UNDERSTANDING DEFENSIVE NEEDS

Over the last few years I've tried to listen to enough "alt-right" youtube feeds to get a sense of their paradigm.  Why?  I'm interested in understanding deep seated, genetic-level social dynamics.  This means coming to grips with the moral flash-points around which the left and right adaptively resonate.  Models are only as good as the data you feed into them.  Part of the picture I get is that at least some "alt-righters" are protesting what they see as white directed racism.  That is, classical racism against whites. "Kill all whites", "whiteness is the problem", "I lick your white tears", "No more old white men", etc;

What I worry about is that various supremacist groups on the left and right are going to see the value in creedal like statements.  For instance, imagine if like Brett Weinstein, you are protesting against white directed racism but are lumped in with a bunch of vile supremacists.  Instead of pleading your case, which seems utterly pointless in highly polarized environments, it is easier to refer people to a well vetted creedal statement that summarizes why you think all racism is bad, but which also indicates that you see your role as protesting against a specific incarnation of classical racism because no one else will.  Or, your creed could sophistically defend why racism, as a one-directional punch-up phenomenon, is valid and actually not phenotypically supremacist.

That sounds pretty reasonable.  It may not make much of a difference on the ground, but it may help a teeny bit with any larger media outlets which haven't fully fallen for click-bait polemics.  You just lump people into good or bad groups and encourage them to get on board with the right verbiage or right groups.  Sounds very religious like doesn't it?

CREEDS AS A DEFENSIVE GUISE FOR ADVANTAGE TAKING

The problem is that this type of orthodox foil can be used to protect against all sorts of hypocritical behaviour.  Hey, you can't call me a racist because I won't hire white people - see this academically accepted statement on intersectionality and the impossibility of punch-up racism. Our intent is to make America Equitable Again!

Note, that it doesn't actually matter whether the individual's intention was actually for equity or whether the intention was unbridled white racism.  Reference to formal creedal statement ends conversation. Sure intrepid investigators can try to tease out whether you're actually following the creed or not.  In fact it provides the investigator an easy way to see theoretical tension points.  But, creedal confessions tend to only require basic understandings and acquiescence to creedal intent. How many Nicenists are really up on homoousia or homousia distinctions vs. how many are up on the creed's overall intent?  I force you, the journalist, to get lost in sophisticated sophistry whose cover frees up my action space.

In practice, what creeds allows is individuals to hide under a cloak of group acceptance. Groups are adaptive for a reason! Never underestimate human propensity for "freeloading" (advantage taking self-interest).  When I publicly acquiesce to a creed I also enable orthodoxic protection, which for those so inclined, can free them up for much greater ranges of motion.  For others though, it provides a unifying goal.  The whole thing is rather bimodal...

In this sense it mirrors what gene-culture models suggest.  Large groups require transparent norms. You can't judge individuals (too much anonymity). You can only judge power acquiescence.  The loosening of norms, compensated by their easier comprehension, enables group size to expand. But is also bifurcates the population. You get a core group of altruists who supply much of the group's day-to-day adaptive fitness.  You also get a large group of freeloaders who pursue self-interest and advantage taking.  Out-group (between-group) competition keeps things in check.  But without existential doom hanging over you, what keeps the freeloaders in check?

Creeds without existential pressure serve as a pandora's box for advantage takers.

But for those of us in academia, the adaptive groups they facilitate might just be the only way we can protect ourselves against Spanish Inquisitions.  What a conundrum!

Metaphorical Truth / Practical Reality vs. Hyper Rationalism

Post modernism injected a lot of new energy into academic thinking.  Some of it for the better.  Some of it for the worse. Coming to grips with the "irrational" side of human nature is a major challenge for social science.

Some approaches try to get at this by extending game theory interactions while holding onto homo-economicus reasoning.  Behavioural economics is one field that does this. Other approaches assume everything is subjective to some degree or another and figure free-hand explorations curtailed by progressive moral guidelines will lead to just neo-marxist ends. Many "studies" departments do this.

Here's a list of how different researcher's I'm familiar with have tackled the question of the adaptiveness of human "irrationality".

BRET WEINSTEIN: Metaphorical Truth

Bret Weinstein raised the achilles heel of hyper-rationalism in a recent interview with Sam Harris.  The issue is whether things like religious belief (which are non-factual) can still be adaptive.  Unfortunately Harris didn't push the debate too much. But that is alright, they covered a lot of ground. I suspect Harris didn't want to get antagonistic in a conversation that was going so well.

My argument is that "metaphorical truth" is an important phenomenon necessary to understand human evolutionary history.

If the hypothesis is correct, 'metaphorical truth' is itself factual, like 'lekking' or 'echolocation'.

Your truck is beside the point (and double parked). https://t.co/0h0Vikzd0y

— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) December 19, 2017

Bret's reasoning on the adaptiveness of counter-factual religious beliefs was entirely evolutionary. His logic, as far as I can remember it, goes like this:

1. Religion is adaptive.  It is a universal human expression up until the era of modernity.
2. Religious beliefs are adaptive. The weak form of this argument is that the belief system as a whole is adaptive.  The strong form of this argument is that individual beliefs which have persisted are in and of themselves adaptive. Bret took the strong form of this argument, much to Harris' surprise.
3. Beliefs which have persisted for a "long" period of time are not just memetically fit, but are gene-culturally (culturegen) fit.  They provide a real fitness advantage for group members.
4. If the beliefs were not fit, they would have been selected out by competing, lower cost beliefs.
5. Only beliefs which are stable enough over time are likely to have been adaptive.
6. We can not infer that any of this applies to modern beliefs.  Modern beliefs have not necessarily been stable enough to justify point 4. You might only be able to say that a certain belief lineage is likely to have been adaptive, and even then, only for past conditions.

It is really nice to see Bret taking dynamic evolution into play here.  When combined with his caveat to modernity you escape many of the easy criticisms people have with respect to evolutionary thinking.

I think the main counterpoint to this argument is that one can never guarantee that any idea is in fact adaptive.  Can't maladaptive memes and culturegens persist over time?  Yes. But Bret's argument makes it a case of probabilities.  What is the probability that any meme or culturegen stable over a "long time period" is maladaptive? This is a productive area of discussion.  Nowak's work on virulence seems informative.  Viruses moderate their virulence over time.  The steady state solution for parasitic behaviour exists in tension between high virulence and low longevity vs. low virulence and high longevity. Moderation in both is Nash stable.  Mutation rates also decrease to match moderation.

DAVID SLOAN WILSON: Practical Reality

Wilson spent pretty much a whole book expounding his view on how religion is adaptive.  Darwin's Cathedral is an under appreciated work of art.  If the arguments aren't convincing, read Norezayan's Big Gods and then go back to it.

Here is D.S. Wilson's take on adaptively false belief.  In Darwin's Cathedral he states:

If there is a trade-off between the two forms of realism [factual & practical], such that our beliefs can become more adaptive only by becoming factually less true, then factual realism will be the loser every time. … Factual realists detached from practical reality were not among our ancestors. 

For context, here's how he frames the two forms of realism:

What do I mean by factual and practical realism? A belief is factually realistic when it accurately describes what’s really out there (e.g., there are no people up there sitting on clouds). A belief is practically realistic when it causes the believer to behave adaptively in the real world.

Wilson's approach in inexorably tied to multi-level selection theory and the biological reality (real-enough reality) of human groups.

As of 2002 he said "Thinking of religious groups as adaptive units comparable to guppies and finches is so new that it is impossible at present to identify the appropriate spatial and temporal scale."  And,

The concept of local adaptation allows religion to be studied from an evolutionary perspective using the same methods employed on nonhuman species, as I discussed in chapter 2.  If the environment changes over time and space, and if religions adapt human groups to their environments, we should be able to predict the properties of religion at a fine spatial and temporal scale as surely as we can predict the properties of upstream and downstream guppies.

Belief systems must cope with

• Justification
• Cheating
•  Economical (easy to understand)
•  More motivating than a real system
•  More efficient at producing behaviour

An adaptive belief systems must be economical.  The beliefs that justify the behaviors must be easily learned and employed in the real world.  A fictional belief system that is user-friendly and that motivates an adaptive suite of behaviors will surpass a realistic belief system that requires a Ph.D. to understand and that leads to a paralysis of indecision.

Wilson explicitly states that "religions [or any group] adaptiveness must be judged by the behaviours they motivate not by their factual correspondence to reality."  The counterpoint to this is that over time, correspondence to reality is usually more fit than a-factuality.  While this is likely true, it is pragmatics not theory that is the ultimate arbiter of what is fit.

This is where things get messy with hyper-rationalists.  New atheists like Harris take a utopian position here, arguing that our ability to chose enables us to pursue transformative paths that can exceeds the cold hearted calculus of nature (evolution).  Weinstein explicitly mentioned this in his conversation with Harris.  All organisms have the same ultimate goal - spread their genes.  Thus, evolution's goal may not be what we actually want - maximal domination.  Instead what we might want is some balance.  This means a conscious limiting of fundamentally insatiable proclivities.

Thus, I am sensitive to Harris' stance. But, like many others, I smirk at the ironically "religious" utopian aspects he has to make. While they might be rational, they are still dogmatic.  But, ultimately, the question comes down to who do we want to be in control, us or nature?

The real issue then becomes over what time period do we need to "supress" out genetic proclivities to get benefits which outweigh the real human costs a quick change to hyper-rationalism might entail?  After all, most people aren't likely to give up the yoke of pro-social religion for the yoke of pro-social hyper-rationalism without a fight.  Pro-social hype rationalism hasn't yet shown itself a very adept, very friendly hegemon.  Pro-social religion, though messy, is at least a known entity with evolutionary robust mechanisms and norms (like inescapable eternal damnation and Big God arbiters who can't be fooled nor bribed). 

Here's a final quote from Wilson (p. 156)

along with Durkheim, I predict that most enduring religions survive on the basis of their secular utility…  What will not be observed, or rather seldom observed, are major beliefs that have no function other than to satisfy the human urge to explain, or that actually handicap the believer by motivating dysfunctional behaviors.

a sect or cult doesn’t senesce [decay] as it grows into a church; it adapts to the changing wealth of its members caused by its own success.

JORDAN PETERSON: Darwinian Truth

Peterson takes a very Jungian approach to his idea of Darwinian Truth.  He views religion as a meta-truth as per a Joseph Campell monomyth.  However, Peterson adds some evolutionary colour to the monomyth.  Here is his logic (as near as I can tell)

1. Stories emerged amongst early humans as a way to convey information, especially information that was morally/evolutionarily important. In other words, stories conveyed classically adaptive information.
2. These stories have been refined for millennia, producing a series of near universal monomyths. 
3. The length of refinement ensures fitness payoffs are stable over long time periods. While there may be competing payoffs, such as low cost commitment beliefs, the payoff of these cheaper beliefs are uncertain and are less likely to have been as (evolutionarily) vetted.
4. These Darwinian truths are fit because they keep us in contact with basic aspects of human nature which are so deep seated that they only change on long genetic time scales.

The challenge about this view is its unfalsifiability and avoidance of dynamic evolution.  Is the "deep seated enough" inference enough to obviate modernity?  I doubt it.  But I also worry about the "just so" critique sloppy functional evolution is subject to.  How do you tease out that which is "deep seated" from that which is superficial and potentially maladaptive?  I interpret Peterson's likely answer to be that of probabilities.  If you find that the ideas and tensions which are most fundamental to long-lived human moral cultural, you increase the probability that any leaven added to these ideas is less maladaptively significant that any leaven added to modern dogma and hyper-rationality.  In essence, you need connection to deep metahistories to temper the forward-predicting blinders hyper-rationality and modern quasi-secular religion necessarily has.

To be honest, I'm sympathetic to this last critique. Purposeful recreation of secular religion has a bad track record. Marxism is a classic example. I think Animal Farm critiques are apropos here.  It is very hard to re-invent all the human dynamical checks and balances necessary to keep self-interest at bay.  While we get better at social engineering all the time, eons of "arms races" on this front make for a very nuanced and sophisticated space. In fact I suspect our hubris with respect to rational atheistic moral quasi-religion is akin to 19th century biological engineering.  What could possibly go wrong with cane toads?