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How scrolling becomes a religious act

etymology.substack.com

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Re: How scrolling becomes a religious act

#21

Post by sublinear »

roenxi wrote: post #17
sublinear wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does what you linked support what you said at all? What you're quoting doesn't exist in that PDF.

It is where I got the 66% from - the exact quote to look for is "Socialized mind (58% of the adult population)", add in the 6% Imperial and then round from 64 to 66 because that is much easier to remember.

Ok still sounds like junk to me though. I think stage 5 (1%) is a little too much the "galaxy brain" meme. How does one even achieve level 4 without also accepting the truths of level 5?

I think most people would accept that a majority of people blindly follow rules and accept toxic nonsense (your 2/3rds) while a smaller, but still substantial portion (roughly 1/3?) do what's in the best interest of themselves and the world they live in.

This is so self-evident that I don't think it needs a theory. Those who want this to be a theory are by its own definition "level 3" or something :^)

Re: How scrolling becomes a religious act

#22

Post by trollbridge »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #2

> ...I don’t think religion is an inherently bad thing either. Agree to disagree. Regardless I don't think their points are about religion. It seems like they're just complaining about memic and ritualistic behavior that happens on phones. Using the religion label feels more meant for click bait than as a fitting metaphor.

People who study religion often call this “folk religion” - ritualistic, and viewing the world as some giant mystery with all kinds of mysterious forces in charge.

Which is how many people approach technology, and virtually all of us approach LLMs.

Re: How scrolling becomes a religious act

#23

Post by trollbridge »

malfist wrote: post #5

If personifying something means we worship it in a religious context then people have been worshipping our mode of transportation since the dawn of time, plus slot machines and a whole host of other things.

I would say people definitely worship cars. Ask the average American to live without a car and see what response you get. Tell them it’s destroying the earth, their community, and their health and see what happens.

Or even just ask them to change “denominations” from an ICE car to an electric car.

Re: How scrolling becomes a religious act

#24

Post by roenxi »

sublinear wrote: post #21
roenxi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is where I got the 66% from - the exact quote to look for is "Socialized mind (58% of the adult population)", add in the 6% Imperial and then round from 64 to 66 because that is much easier to remember.

Ok still sounds like junk to me though. I think stage 5 (1%) is a little too much the "galaxy brain" meme. How does one even achieve level 4 without also accepting the truths of level 5? I think most people would accept that a majority of people blindly follow rules and accept toxic nonsense (your 2/3rds) while a smaller, but still substantial portion (roughly 1/3?) do what's in the best interest of themselves and th…

The 2/3rds don't necessarily believe toxic nonsense. These aren't levels of correctness or even proxies of intelligence. They're focusing on how beliefs are formed.

Re: How scrolling becomes a religious act

#25

Post by jfengel »

keiferski wrote: post #6

I really dislike these posts that are clearly written by someone unfamiliar with religion as a topic, and just use “worship” or “religion” as synonyms for “being obsessed with something to an irrational degree.” That isn’t an accurate description of the concept of religion, nor is it a synonym of irrational. Religion is probably one of the most complex yet misunderstood areas of study today. Phones are no more worshi…

About your last point: it's called the "literary present tense" or "historic present tense". It's related to the present tense used in newspaper headlines.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/510247/use-of-pr...

https://style.mla.org/literary-present-tense/

Though I agree that the jargon use of "religion" here is misleading. It is how a sociologist might understand the term, and drawing the connection can lead to some insight, to to say it is religion outside of that academic context sheds no light. It is absolutely not "literally worship" in the etymological sense of "declaring something to be worthy".

Re: How scrolling becomes a religious act

#26

Post by bloomingeek »

keiferski wrote: post #14
viraptor wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he doesn’t argue, he argued, This phrase is so common it's practically correct. Search for "Plato argues" online for example.

Yes you’re right and I hesitated putting that in there, but in the article itself, it’s written in such a way that I found confusing. Especially when the rest of the text doesn’t seem very familiar with the sociology / philosophy of religion. Probably an unnecessary quibble to have, and I shouldn’t have included it.

Quibbling is what we humans do. It is both necessary and helpful for fleshing out all kinds of subjects. And I won't mention how fun it is to say. :)

Re: How scrolling becomes a religious act

#27

Post by bazoom42 »

AStonesThrow wrote: post #13
keiferski wrote: post #6

I really dislike these posts that are clearly written by someone unfamiliar with religion as a topic, and just use “worship” or “religion” as synonyms for “being obsessed with something to an irrational degree.” That isn’t an accurate description of the concept of religion, nor is it a synonym of irrational. Religion is probably one of the most complex yet misunderstood areas of study today. Phones are no more worshi…

> Religion is probably one of the most complex yet misunderstood areas Well, yes, and as a religious person, I would suggest that the metaphor is more accurate than you think. To the pagans, a god is a supernatural force that demands worship, sacrifice, attention, effort, appeasement. To a Christian, a false idol is something that steals from the worship and sacrifice that is due to the One True God. You can spot a m…

So you are a pagan knowingly worshipping false idols all day, except you turn it off temporarily while attending church?

Re: How scrolling becomes a religious act

#28

Post by bee_rider »

trollbridge wrote: post #22
paulryanrogers wrote: post #2

> ...I don’t think religion is an inherently bad thing either. Agree to disagree. Regardless I don't think their points are about religion. It seems like they're just complaining about memic and ritualistic behavior that happens on phones. Using the religion label feels more meant for click bait than as a fitting metaphor.

People who study religion often call this “folk religion” - ritualistic, and viewing the world as some giant mystery with all kinds of mysterious forces in charge. Which is how many people approach technology, and virtually all of us approach LLMs.

Folk religion has always felt pretty sensible to me—we basically have build-in hardware acceleration to handle social situations, so we anthropomorphize the forces of nature and use that hardware to make predictions about the weather. It is just a heuristic (often wrong) and sometimes it can lead to wasteful actions as a result, like sacrificing a goat before you set out in a journey. But it can be good to start a journey with a meal anyway, if the gods are happy with the hard-to-cook parts this could be a win-win.

We just shouldn’t try to apply these gods outside their wheelhouses.

Re: How scrolling becomes a religious act

#29

Post by jimbokun »

caleblloyd wrote: post #3

Anthropic is releasing blog articles where they are discovering how Claude works through experiments and observations. It seems more like science than engineering when even the creators have to run scientific experiments to figure out how what they engineered works. https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...

The description of how Claude does "arithmetic" was enlightening. Shows how it uses clever pattern matching to fit the data, without ever learning the algorithm, even though the algorithm description was certainly in its training data.

Re: How scrolling becomes a religious act

#30

Post by 90s_dev »

AStonesThrow wrote: post #13
keiferski wrote: post #6

I really dislike these posts that are clearly written by someone unfamiliar with religion as a topic, and just use “worship” or “religion” as synonyms for “being obsessed with something to an irrational degree.” That isn’t an accurate description of the concept of religion, nor is it a synonym of irrational. Religion is probably one of the most complex yet misunderstood areas of study today. Phones are no more worshi…

> Religion is probably one of the most complex yet misunderstood areas Well, yes, and as a religious person, I would suggest that the metaphor is more accurate than you think. To the pagans, a god is a supernatural force that demands worship, sacrifice, attention, effort, appeasement. To a Christian, a false idol is something that steals from the worship and sacrifice that is due to the One True God. You can spot a m…

As another religious person, your comment was as boring and difficult to follow as a typical Sunday homily, and for the same reasons. The world doesn't need even more bone dry exhortations and predictable parables. For God's sake, at least say something new and interesting, like how the Blessed Virgin Mary most likely wrote the Letter to the Hebrews and what that implies for the role of mothers, or how Judas was likely the biological son of St. Peter the Apostle and how this is a warning to children, or how Jesus and Mary being the new Adam and Eve implies that Joseph was the new Abel and how that fact helps fathers to know and live their vocations.
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