Religious Convictions

At least twice this year, I have found myself wanting to talk about having a religious conviction that something was the case. The first time of these two that I remember, I had a conviction that a late-Autumn swim in a cold lake would cure something in me that was ailing - and it did. It was fantastic. Not like regular swimming at all. It was spiritual swimming.

Then, just a moment ago, I wanted to talk about the religious conviction I had and have in my ability to build a deep, comprehensive, insightful theory of <the nonsense I'm currently enamored with /> (which wasn't sociosexuality or petrology, if you're reading this from after 2018).

This is a little odd for me because I'm not religious. I'm not terribly far from being religious, but still, I'd like to find a different way to describe this significant thing that I occasionally feel.

At first, I was reminded of the old Roman distinction between religion and superstition, and I asked myself, "Does a religious conviction feel different from a superstitious conviction?". Well, I don't have superstitious convictions, so, yes, I think superstitious convictions must either feel different or not exist. Moving on to more productive territory, let's try a big list of guesses, as is my usual form:

  1. An intuition is a belief you can't justify or abandon. A religious conviction might simply be a very confident intuition.
  2. A religious conviction is a belief about how the world properly interfaces with your soul. // Like how a swim can cure something in you that's upstream of your mood, or how, if my second religious conviction is/was right, you can aggressively stalk a fleeting idea through google scholar for a few months and eventually capture some deep and life-changing insight.
  3. A religious conviction is a belief that's accompanied by a suspicion which tells you that you believe the thing mostly because it's beautiful or cool or awe-inspiring. // Believing things because of their emotional impact is one of the Human Universal Cognitive Biases Associated With Religions Cross-Culturally that I tried to enumerate here. Some of the other guesses here will also be based on the Human Universal Cognitive Biases Associated With Religions Cross-Culturally (HUCBAWRCs?).
  4. A religious conviction is a belief that you feel was sneakily communicated to you by someone who knows what's going on behind the scenes. // Say it with me now: HUCBAWRC!
  5. A religious conviction is a belief in a narrative explanation of something in your life, even when a narrative explanation should feel unsuitable because you know that the thing isn't determined by the interactions of people. // Can I get a HUCBAWRC? No! This one wasn't on the list. Maybe it should have been? Not too shabby.
  6. A religious conviction is just a sacred belief - sacredness recognition being a shared social adaptation for not talking about beliefs that are strategically adopted in an epistemically irrational way. // Is this a HUCBAWRC? But of course! Yet another a HUCBAWRC! Also, when I first wrote this out, I accidentally typed "religious suspicion" rather than conviction. That's a whole new can of worms, isn't it? It will stay unopened for tonight.
  7. A religious conviction is a belief that you hold on the basis of non-verbal encouragement from a certain part of you - a part of you which knows just what you need to do in order to flourish and find eudaimonia - a part of you which would readily guide you by detailed instructions if it possessed any linguistic faculty of expression. // Wow. What? That is not a HUCBAWRC. Is that a new hypothesis and/or dumb micro-fiction? I'll tell you! That's some recent conceptual machinery: "the unconscious mind attributed with undue personhood and wisdom" is one of the Proposed Naturalistic Identifications Of The Soul (PNIOTS! I said and you can't stop me.).
  8. A religious conviction is a regular conviction felt on a night when you want to be better friends with people who also have god-shaped holes in their hearts. // D'aww?

As is the custom, I will probably add a few more guesses to the list over the next few days, and then never explicitly decide among them. Maybe I could summarize them though? That's the normal format for presenting ideas. Let's try a summary. A religious conviction is 1. A confident intuition. 2. A belief about your world-soul interface. 3. A belief which you want to have in something beautiful. 4. A gnostic belief of natural order. 5. A narrative explanation applied in an inappropriate context. 6. A strategic lie protected by a sacred taboo. 7. Encouragement from your unconscious MINDSOUL. 8. Just a regular conviction, Preinfarction. Just a regular conviction.

Nice. Actually, they feel much less persuasive in summary. Hopefully, any further guesses I make will be better.
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How is tonic immobility adaptive?

A gazelle goes still in a lion's mouth. Lots of prey animals do. It's called "tonic" immobility because the gazelle's muscles are tense. Why doesn't the lion kill it? The reason that the lion holds off on killing an immobile gazelle it is the reason that immobility is adaptive. Let's guess:
  1. The lion is stupid. It thinks the gazelle is dead. 
  2. The lion has stupid instincts. It only attacks moving prey. 
  3. The lion prefers giving its family fresh (live) meat, and it bets that the gazelle won't escape.
  4. Cats like playing with their food (whether for exercise, or training, or the thrill of the chase) and part of the lion wants her prey to escape so that she can capture it again. I feel like if this were the case, she'd wound the gazelle lightly to make recapture more probable. Which might happen? I don't know.
  5. The lion wants cubs in the family to kill the gazelle. Does that happen? Easy mode combat simulator.
  6. The lion wants to show off to other lions how healthy its gazelle was, which works better if it's alive.
  7. The lion doesn't like carrying the gazelle in its mouth and hopes that the gazelle will change its mind and agree to walk voluntarily back home.
  8. The lion loves carrying the live gazelle in its mouth. Happiness is a warm gazelle in the mouth. Don't knock it till you've tried it.
  9. The lion is cruel and wants the gazelle to suffer in fear. Fear is the lion's bacon bits.
  10. The lion is kind and wants the gazelle to have as long of a life as possible. That might not sound kind, but look at how your own society keeps suffering people alive in its beneficence.
  11. Lions procrastinate just like everyone else and would rather not go through the hassle of killing the gazelle until it's absolutely necessary.
  12. The lion's better nature just wants to bring the gazelle home as a friend or a pet, but somewhere down the road the lion's worse nature always rears its impulsive head.
I think #3 is the most probable ("fresh meat for the family"), but I've actually only seen #1 ("playing dead") and #2 ("attack in predators is triggered by the perception of movement") in the literature.

Immobility is adaptive in other contexts to avoid detection, of course, and you could argue that the same immobility is manifesting maladaptively when the gazelle has been captured. I think that's wrong. I think it's adaptive in gazelles at the time of capture, because it makes later escape more probable, because it keeps the lion from attacking. But why? It deserves a thorough analysis.

I'll keep adding guesses throughout the day if I think of more. Or if I read something cool. Or if I see another route by which immobility is adaptive besides avoiding detection and delaying attacks when you're in the lion's mouth. 

I guess there's the old situation of immobility being adaptive when action is being directly punished, like when arthritis causes joint pain or when people look for an excuse to slap down people they don't like, or when you've got a very vocal internal critic. That's not tonic, but it's also interesting. Yep.

Edit 1: A friend brought up Pinch-Induced Behavior Inhibition, aka the Vulcan Nerve Pinch of transporting baby cats, squirrels, mice, and rats by the neck scruff. Wouldn't it be awesome if predators were exploiting an adaptation that allows mothers to carry babies?

What about animals besides cats and rodents? The internet also has photos of adult wolves, bears, and foxes carrying their babies in their mouths, but I don't know if there's associated pinch immobility. Probably Pinch Immobility is less widespread in vertebrates than Defensive Predator-Contact Immobility, and can't explain it.

Edit 2: Any explanation that relies on the particulars of lion motivations will be insufficient, because tonic immobility is adaptive for animals on different continents with different predators. American rabbits hunted by foxes display tonic immobility too. Most of the above explanations aren't specific to lions, so that's fine, but I should say it up front. Anyway, here's a new one: Maybe tonic immobility following non-lethal contact with a predator deters the predator from further attacks not because the fox is fooled into thinking the rabbit is dead, but because the fox thinks the rabbit is sick. Lethargy is one of the symptoms of the syndrome called sickness behavior, and if you're not sure if the animal in your mouth is diseased, maybe that's reason to hold off on eating it.

At this point, I think I need to just put more effort into researching the real responses of predators to tonic immobility, and maybe predator neurology also, in order to learn whether predators have a stupid brain circuit giving them a stupid instinct to only attack moving prey, even if the prey was moving a second ago and is now sitting handily in the predator's mouth. Also, I've read inconsistent reports on whether tonic immobility is accompanied by brachycardia (decreased heart rate). If it is, then that's a small point in favor of the hypothesis that tonic immobility is a condition which a predator could confuse for death. Why the predator doesn't keep eating the animal she thinks she just killed would still be a mystery, but it would be a smaller mystery at least.

And maybe the hints I've read about tonic immobility being adaptive are wrong: maybe the prey animal's brain is just shutting down maladaptively in an extreme situation, or maybe evolution just sucks and tonic immobility is even a maldaptive response to something non-extreme like how rabbits and maybe dogs can be immobilized just by putting them on their backs in the right way, or maybe predators aren't deterred at all by tonic immobility displays, or maybe other things. I need to stop coming up with explanations for what's going on before I've gotten a thorough understanding of what's going on. Get my data first, then explain it. I suppose. And once I know about rabbits and foxes, then I'll know a little more about humans. It will be one of many dozens of perspectives on executive dysfunction in this, my Year of Solving Akrasia Forever, In Theory If Not In Practice.
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Why Do I Feel A Little Bit Morally Opposed To Video Games?

Observation: People who like video games more seem worse than people who like video games less. Why? Here are some things which could explain the apparent trend.

  1. Video games appeal to bad people.
  2. Playing video games makes people worse.
  3. Playing video games doesn't make people worse, but it funges against becoming better, so people who play video games gradually fall behind.

    🌡

  4. Playing video games makes people a little bit better therapeutically, but video games are mainly sought out by bad people (trying to improve) and that imbalance isn't fully offset by the improvement. Like Simpson's paradox. And maybe games are primarily played by people who start out bad because playing them is unpleasant or costly, like how it's mainly sick people who take unpleasant costly medications.
  5. Bad people like video games and good people don't, but this happens for a mysterious reason that has nothing to do with whether video games are good, which they are.
  6. Some people have lots of norms, of which some are good and some are neutral. Lacking norms is upstream both of being bad and of playing video games. 

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  7. Video games are good and liking them is shameful for some reason. Lack of shame is upstream both of being bad and of talking about liking video games. 

    🌡

  8. Good and bad people like video games the same amount, but it's mostly {the bad people who don't fully endorse being bad} who talk about liking and playing video games because they have fewer activities and preferences to talk about which aren't bad. This imbalance gets exaggerated when good people see that moderately bad people talk about video games and then avoid the topic or activity out of reputational interest. 

    🌡

  9. The demographic that likes video games is better characterized as being low status in society as a consequence of something else (being poor, lonely, impulsive, ...) than as being bad. Being bad is also low status. Low social status and badness often get incorrectly conflated. 

    🌡

  10. Video games appeal to people without physical culture, and the largest group without physical culture is the group that has no culture, so video game discussion is dominated by the uncultured.
  11. People who play some games, perhaps Civilization, are good. People who play other games, perhaps Red Dead Redemption, are bad. There are many more bad people than good, so video games get a bad reputation based on the popular titles, the same way that television shows and films do. 

    🌡

  12. Popular video games appeal to normal people, who are the regular amount of bad for humans, and also make them worse. Video games that make people better don't appeal to most people, because becoming better is costly.
  13. Video games are unpleasant for some, pleasant for others, and addicting but not pleasant for others still. People who play video games compulsively have a self-consistency incentive to believe that they like, rather than merely want, to play the games. People who find video games unpleasant just see other people doing unpleasant things, and assume that the players are addicted or like unpleasantness. Self-consistency incentives and theory-of-mind failures both contribute to a discourse which is unable to point to people with normal morals who actually find video games pleasant. The more people talk about video games, the less healthy will video games seem to people who don't play.
  14. Video games are good, but they don't contribute to complex human flourishing. People who choose to pursue complex human flourishing instead of video games see others as having made a failure of moral judgement and see people who play more as going further down the wrong path.
  15. It is specifically players of multi-player video games with an option of strong anonymity who are bad because people behave worse behind anonymity. 

    🌡

  16. Doing bad activities within video games is bad, even if it doesn't change your values - bad in a way that isn't captured by consequentialism - and people who are more insensitive to this are also more insensitive to other moral considerations.
  17. Video games and cartoons are fine for children, but adults who like them have an aesthetic faculty which is underdeveloped, and this is upstream of being bad in other parts of life.
  18. Video games are good. People who like video games are good. Preinfarction is bad, except when he indulges in the occasional video game. Everything he thinks is wrong. His utility function has a minus sign where it should have a plus sign. He is the closest thing we have to Satan in this world.
  19. Video games appeal to people in pain, and being in pain is upstream of not having the energy to be good. 

    🌡

  20. Some video games are bad, and they appeal to everyone, and good people are better at disengaging: Some video games are addicting supernormal stimuli made by an industry looking to exploit quirks in your reward system for profit. People who have experienced games like these and then not disengaged might have poor self-control, poor self-awareness, a weak memetic immune system, or limited concern for their mental autonomy and well being. None of these traits do we associate with health and good judgement and righteousness. They're bad traits. Not necessarily traits of bad people, but still bad traits. 

    🌡

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Think Before You Don't Speak

Wei Dai told us to think before we speak and signal it. Wei Dai does that himself. He writes wonderful, thoughtful things. But he writes so rarely. I'm glad he's around, but I don't know if everyone should do that.

If people could largely develop beautiful theories in isolation, human history wouldn't look like it does. We're mostly not that smart individually. We need to talk and work together. You're not Alexander Grothendieck and neither am I. Neither am I Wei Dai for that matter.

On the other hand, human history has had no shortage of people talking, and most of it didn't result in theoretical progress. Were they talking about non-intellectual things? Were their gains not captured? Are gains mostly made in isolation by great people, regardless of priorities and capture? I am reminded of myself:
Well, last night I skimmed a dozen papers trying to identify the function of serotonin. Nothing came of it. I wrote a tweet and deleted it. I didn't post the papers. I probably won't summarize it here on my blog. And now I'm a little burned out on serotonin literature. Everything is like this. It's amazing, but sometimes progress is limited by the "compare notes" phase and not the "solitary bold conceptual departure" phase.

Have you noticed that people who post thousands of tweets a year have thousands of followers? It makes me wonder if a constant stream of my thoughts would be a good way to spread ideas. But I mostly don't follow those people. People who tweet with high volume don't tweet with depth. They might be capable of depth, but they stop demonstrating it when they start to care about large audiences.

On the other side of the coin, I heard about cool ideas like the Gödelian diagonalization view of trolling from Will N. like six years ago, and his smart friends talk about it and understand it, but no one has ever written it up. Deep people don't write at all, or they write a few things and let the bulk of their ideas live and die in private chats.

Why should formal, high-quality, algorithmically precise philosophy on topics like voting theory not happen on public blogs outside of academia? Why can't we post and talk to each other and make progress?

You're all cute on twitter and I like hearing about what you're having for supper and what you saw on the train and which works of art you enjoy and how dating is going and how you're making a skating rink for you son.

Sometimes I like being cute too. But existential risk reduction through formal philosophy sits in my heart where religion sits for other people, and it's not cute, but it's what I want to talk about a lot of the time.

But Wei Dai told us to think before we speak and signal it. And look how well he writes. So here am: not really wanting to be cute, too burned out to think on my own, and not talking through hard thoughts with friends, just like almost every human has done throughout our glacial 300,000 year history.

Think before you speak and signal it. It sounds good. It doesn't work. Not for me. Nothing else works either, but I'm going to try something else anyway. I'm going to think as I speak, because otherwise I get stuck on the thinking and never get to the speaking. That's no way to make progress.
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Displacement Behaviors Demonstrate Cognitive Compulsions

Hair pulling is a displacement behavior that shows frustration. Hand wringing shows deliberation about whom you will end up choosing to hurt, perhaps. Holding your arms and rocking shows anxiety about whether to perform when you doubt your skill and the cost of failure is high.

What are some other compulsive behaviors of neurotypical people that are cognitively interpretable?

And also, isn't it wild that they exist at all? What does wringing your hands have to do with moral deliberation? Nothing, so far as I can tell. It's just part of the universal human gesture lexicon in which compulsive gestures were paired up randomly with compulsive thoughts for their signalling value.

What is the meaning of drumming your fingers or tapping your toes? What does cleaning a table by scratching it with one fingernail mean? What does biting down on the side of your lower lip mean?

Maybe squinting + grimacing + shaking or nodding your head is a technique to self stimulate your ears so that you can reset your phonological loop when you've reached a conclusion and you want to stop thinking about a topic. I think that one's not compulsive enough to call a displacement behavior, but it's still interesting, no?
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Beard stroking is a displacement behavior that's culturally associated with deep thinking. It might be more specific than that though? What do you think? I want to talk to someone who can think.

Several people I've known will tap some point on the center-line of their face (chin, lower lip, or nose) when they're approaching a conclusion.

I think drumming your fingers probably shows boredom. And hair twirling shows boredom. Are they different kinds of boredom? Are they? These are answerable questions. Look in yourself and make a guess. And then tell me, and I will say, "Hm, yes, interesting! Maybe.".

Boredom by itself doesn't seem all that compulsive. There are compulsive thoughts associated with the mood of boredom, like looking for something else to do or wondering when something else will happen or wondering when the current thing will stop happening. Probably others. I think drumming your fingers is about waiting, and twirling hair is about something else, but I'm not sure what. Maybe hair twirling shows mild frustration. That makes a little sense on the grounds that the behavior is like a mild version of hair pulling. But when you see it, you think "boredom" first, don't you?

You might say "hair twirling is self-stimulation so you have something to process when you're bored". Fine, sure, yes. But they're all self-stimulation. What's the associated thought? There might not be one. I don't know. Let me know.
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The False Lexical Constituent Riddle Game

A false lexical constituent pun looks like this:
There's a fake meaning (to acquire a pub) derived from breaking the word "bargaining" into false lexical constituents. Here are some more lexical constituent puns presented as tricky riddles. If you saw these before on Twitter or Slack, you may want to skip the first seven.

1. Fake meaning: A hollow metal cylinder that was born under the first sign of the Western zodiac.
Real meaning: Yellow finches native to islands off the coast of Portugal and Morocco.
Hyphenation pattern: 3 letter - 5 letters.

2. Fake meaning: An Oriental or Eastern Orthodox painting of a religious figure which people like to brush their fingers against.
Real meaning: The river separating Gaul from Italy.
Pattern: 3-4.

3. Fake meaning: A mesh for catching a falling male descendant.
Real meaning: A form of poem in 14 lines.
Pattern: 3-3.

4. Fake meaning: A sheep made from the remains of a fire.
Real meaning: An Indian monastery.
Pattern: 3-3.

5. Fake meaning: A lord of immoral transgressions.
Real meaning: Gradually entering into the ground.
Pattern: 3-4.

6. Fake meaning: A furry animal that can be caressed when it sits on your thighs.
Real meaning: A small fold in a garment. (This one was a little obscure to me.)
Pattern: 3-3.

7. Fake meaning: 2000 pounds of intercourse.
Real meaning: A groundskeeper for a graveyard or parish.
Pattern: 3-3.

8. Fake meaning: The edge of a garment that has been sewn by a ground-dwelling eusocial insect.
Real meaning: An uplifting song associated with a nation or other social group.
Pattern: 3-3.

9. Fake meaning: A large saline body of water in the shape of a torus which is connected to an ocean.
Real meaning: Hot enough to scorch.
Pattern: 3-4.

10. Fake meaning: To prohibit Scottish bonnets.
Real meaning: The miniature, dwarf variety of any chicken breed. Also a publishing house that uses a chicken as its mascot. Also a weight class in boxing between fly- and feather-.
Pattern: 3-3.

11. Fake meaning: A place to lie down and rest in a pub.
Real meaning: Having jagged spines, as on a fish hook.
Pattern: 3-3.

12. Fake meaning: The era in which an item of clothing was worn.
Real meaning: Trash.
Pattern: 4-3.

13. Fake meaning: A person who cooperates with a lower limb.
Real meaning: Done in a licit manner.
Pattern: 3-4.

14. Fake meaning: A single object which reflects light at the lowest end of the visible spectrum. 
Real meaning: To have performed again.
Pattern: 3-3.

15. Fake meaning: When NBC tries to make a new version of an 80s sitcom featuring an alien anteater. 
Real meaning: A pasta sauce made with parmesan cheese, named after its inventor.
Pattern: 3-4.

16. Fake meaning: A billion years of geological time following the domestication of boars. 
Real meaning: A dove, especially one which is not white.
Pattern: 3-3.

17. Fake meaning: A person who shoots down several enemies in combat while riding a wave.
Real meaning: The outer or uppermost layer of a thing.
Pattern: 4-3.

18. Fake meaning: A skinny monarch.
Real meaning: Cognition.
Pattern: 4-4

19. Fake meaning: A safari park ruled by a dynasty of Emperors of Han Chinese ethnicity. (This one is easier to get if you know about my love for adjectives pospositional.)
Real meaning: Moving quickly, or adjusting a camera smoothly between long-shot and a close-up.
Pattern: 3-4.

20. Fake meaning: A regular stopping place on a public transportation route for shrew-like mammals.
Real meaning: Sexual assault, especially of children. (Sorry.)
Pattern: 4-7.

21. Fake meaning: A long serrated blade re-purposed as a weapon in battle.
Real meaning: The capital of Poland.
Pattern: 3-3.

22. Fake meaning: White cereal grain stored in a baseball hat.
Real meaning: A sudden change of mood or behavior; eccentrically impulsive.
Pattern: 3-4.

23. Fake meaning: The speed at which molten metal is poured into a mold.
Real meaning: To remove the testicles of a male animal.
Pattern: 4-4.

24. Fake meaning: The sound of sonar pulse reflected off of gauze fabric. (The fabric is a little obscure. It's the five-letter component, if that helps.)
Real meaning: Being thrifty.
Pattern. 5-4.

25. Fake meaning: A commercial for a solid sphere.
Real meaning: A narrative poem or song presented in short stanzas.
Pattern: 4-2.

26. Fake meaning: The last stop on a line of the San Francisco metro.
Real meaning: To serve alcoholic drinks from behind a counter.
Pattern: 4-3.

27: Fake meaning: Anger experienced in a small sheltered bay.
Real meaning: The extent to which something has been placed beneath another thing, especially for concealment or protection.
Pattern: 4-4.

28. Fake meaning: Having the poor visual acuity of a cloistered religious mendicant.
Real meaning: Tampered with a machine in the manner of a curious primate.
Pattern: 4-4.

29. Fake meaning: A Native American from a tribe indigenous to Colorado and surrounding areas who has chemically reshaped their hair into curls.
Real meaning: To change, especially to reorder the elements of a mathematical set.
Pattern: 4-3.

30: Powdered resin used in laser printers which is pale in color.
Real meaning: A person who is unrestrained, unruly, or unchaste.
Pattern: 3-5.
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