I recommend you this notebook for an in depth analysis of the phenomenon https://allendowney.github.io/ProbablyOverthinkingIt/gaussia...
'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#12It's not about what big tech thinks, but an individual looking for information who may perhaps be influenced by cohorts. And maybe an algo could accommodate these intricate relationships.
There's no single general algo that should work for all of us, nor a big tech platform that is able to understand us without our explicit choices.
As an agnostic, I can say I'll not understand theists preserving part of their brain for what God would think. But I would subscribe to people and groups when I back their modus operandi.
Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#13 - there is no such thing
- you made it your life goal to belong to no such thing in the first place
- you belong to many of those "tribes" in parallel
Where does that leave the whole argument?Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#14I am a Catholic Christian and a moral objectivist, so my thoughts are, of course, colored by my own religious and philosophic views. With that disclaimer out of the way ... I don't think this rings true. It suggests that the morality espoused by a particular religion basically just boils down to public opinion. But there are a multitude of cases from my own and other religions where the message put forth by the relig…
Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#15I am a Catholic Christian and a moral objectivist, so my thoughts are, of course, colored by my own religious and philosophic views. With that disclaimer out of the way ... I don't think this rings true. It suggests that the morality espoused by a particular religion basically just boils down to public opinion. But there are a multitude of cases from my own and other religions where the message put forth by the relig…
Exactly. A huge component of Christianity is separation from the world and standing out against a crowd. There is certainly a popular folk religion, but this is not the essence of religion.
Christians generally maintain a persecution complex even when they are holding tremendous power over others in their society, and this goes back centuries. It is extremely common for Christians to talk about slight curtailment of their ability to oppress others as persecution.
Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#16I am a Catholic Christian and a moral objectivist, so my thoughts are, of course, colored by my own religious and philosophic views. With that disclaimer out of the way ... I don't think this rings true. It suggests that the morality espoused by a particular religion basically just boils down to public opinion. But there are a multitude of cases from my own and other religions where the message put forth by the relig…
I think abortion is a good example of this. Plenty of people who oppose abortions have had abortions themselves.
Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. A huge component of Christianity is separation from the world and standing out against a crowd. There is certainly a popular folk religion, but this is not the essence of religion.
That’s what they claim, but it is not true in the slightest. Christians generally maintain a persecution complex even when they are holding tremendous power over others in their society, and this goes back centuries. It is extremely common for Christians to talk about slight curtailment of their ability to oppress others as persecution.
How would Catholicism represent the mean of public opinion?
Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#18My personal conception of God is based on something more like quantum immortality - not only are you immortal because there are infinite copies of you and at least one of the copies must survive to observe the universe, but there is some sort of party at the end of time where all your selves can get together and figure out which copy had the best life. And then these selves collectively are God and they (re)created the universe so you could have the most satisfaction. But you yourself are just a copy so you'd better look up those answers with chatgpt so that you don't end up being one of the copies with a sad story to tell.
Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#19This seems to be based on the assumption of the existence of a "tribe" you're supposed to belong to... what if: - there is no such thing - you made it your life goal to belong to no such thing in the first place - you belong to many of those "tribes" in parallel Where does that leave the whole argument?
Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#20The title explains literally the whole concept: Representing the "opinions" (or more appropriately dispositions ) of each person as a vector, the belief system of a "tribe" (connected set of individuals) is probably the mean of these vectors. And relgions seek to optimize the "morality" they preach (vector they propose as "god") to maximize membership / agreement / centralness of their god. Which of course (author do…
https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2019/05/25/dot-product...