Other People's Religion

For quite some time I was baffled by the question, "why do so many people believe, or at least purport to believe, statements which clearly are not supported by the evidence?" The clearest example of this is other people's religions. We may convince ourselves that our own religion is true and clearly so, but given the variety of different beliefs in the world, it is undeniable that the vast majority of them must be wrong. In fact, viewed from the outside, other people's religions often seem not just obviously wrong, but literally laughable.

It turns out the answer is reasonably well known. The beliefs in question serve as group membership markers. Evidence has nothing to do with it. These beliefs are often of matters which are unknowable (what happens after one dies), or at least seemed to be when they were first formulated (where did the world come from). Often compliance with some sort of ritual is required, but I think people comply with the ritual in order to demonstrate their commitment to the group, not because of a genuine belief that violating some taboo will genuinely do harm to the violator or to anyone else.

These beliefs tend to be of little practical significance for those who hold them. It's easy to find people who will tell you this, but it may be difficult to convince yourself this is true, particularly since the significance of the beliefs are if anything more often asserted from the outside than from the inside; atheists often talk as if it's just a baby step from allowing the teaching of creationism as an "alternative theory" to witch burning. Conversely, Christians often talk as if a belief that humans are just another species of animal will lead to people acting like animals; they won't so much behave immorally as behave as if morality isn't even a meaningful concept. In the real world, not only do a majority of Americans believe in some form of creationism already, but most people who "believe in evolution" have some comic-book conception of it that is no closer to the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection than is the Genesis myth, and incidentally is somehow not incompatible with a belief in God.

In any dispute in which people separate into identifiable factions, whether allegedly religious, political, artistic, or even scientific, it is likely that a significant fraction of the adherents of each side have chosen their position not on the evidence of the issue itself but rather on which group they identify with. In principle scientific disputes can be resolved by observation and experiment, but in practice, particularly in the "soft sciences", this is not possible, particularly if one has very demanding standards for the burden of proof.

Unfortunately, none of this actually helps determine truth. As a neutral third party, it is easy to conclude that disputants on both sides are expressing far more confidence in the correctness of their opinions than is reasonable that this is largely based on a feeling of solidarity with those on their side and a dislike of those on the other, particularly since they aren't at all sgy about expressing this dislike, although they will reverse the arrow of causality. And if one is oneself involved in a political or "scientific" dispute in which emotions run strong, the idea that those on the other side genuinely believe that they are "the good guys" seems even more preposterous than the idea that they simply believe that what they say is true. Nonetheless, they do.

The Cost of Conflict

There are two opposite opinions as to what the cost of violent conflict ought to be. One side holds that war or something like war is inevitable, and therefore that it is desirable that there be such a thing as "rules of war" which are designed to minimize the length of war, the damage done, and the impact on nonbelligerents. This idea is the inspiration for such things as the Geneva Convention. The opposite view is that the high cost of war itself is a major impediment to war, and that peace is only likely if each side of a potential conflict realizes that it will lose more than it can gain in the event of an actual outbreak of hostilities. This idea has led to, among other things, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction.

I think most people would agree that neither extreme is really satisfactory. What's missing is a moral dimension. It's true that the stronger side may back down from a potential conflict on the grounds that the costs of victory exceed the rewards, and most people would regard this as a good thing, but only when the stronger party is in some sense the aggressor. For something like MAD to work, there must be enough sense of agreement on moral questions that it is usually reasonably clear which side "ought" to back down. If it become simply a question of who "blinks" first, with the reward going to the more reckless player, eventually a conflict will come in which neither side will "blink" until it is too late.

Voting can be considered as a form of nearly costless battle, with all that implies: people attempt to enforce their will upon others in whatever asinine way that pops into their minds. My personal favorite example is the California ballot initiative banning horsemeat for human consumption. It doesn't do the horses any good. Retired horses are made into dog food, it's hard to see why being made into human food would be worse for them. Then again, the ban doesn't do any practical harm. Nobody in California was eating hoses pre-ban anyway. If the people advocating forbidding other people from eating horse knew they would have to personally enforce their ban with guns, the whole idea wouldn't even have come up for discussion. Of course, nobody would fight for the right of others to eat horse either, but I think people would fight to avoid a situation where a numerical majority could micromanage their lives in arbitrary ways, if the issue was put to them in such a straightforward way. As it was, of course, that wasn't at issue. As far as the state is concerned, the principle has been completely established that any law, no matter how intrusive or pointless, is valid so long is it is enacted by the proper procedure.

Voting

From the standpoint of individual benefit voting is almost certainly a waste of time. For example, if one estimates the chances of one's vote deciding a presidential election as being about 1 in 10 million and the personal benefit of having one president over another as valued about $10,000 then the expected return from voting is about a tenth of a cent. I think there's far less difference than that to most people in most elections, but we'll use those numbers.

Voting is the ultimate collective act, and one could argue that the same anticipated benefit would accrue to the entire citizenry of about 350,000,000 people. In that case, one could imagine one's vote as being a gift to the country of a tenth of a cent per person, or $350,000 total expected value. If one is at all civic minded, such a gift is certainly worth one's time.

There is an obvious flaw with this argument: it cannot possibly be true for the general voter. Approximately half the voters are voting "the wrong way". Those of us who are exceptionally intelligent and knowledgeable may feel that "we" are smart and "they" are stupid. But stupidity alone cannot explain the results, because nobody could be so stupid that he always makes the wrong choice given two alternatives. A maximally stupid ought to be able to guess right about half the time. One can assume that nearly everybody that votes "the wrong way" is stupid, but then one ought to also conclude that an approximately equal number of people that vote "the right way" are stupid, which leads to the conclusion that virtually everybody is maximally stupid. This clearly cannot be true.

If one strongly identifies with some subset of the population and that subset tends to all vote the same way these difficulties vanish. Although voting is a waste of time if only considering the gains to one's self, it becomes rational if one considers voting as primarily a gift to one's group, and a failure to vote as abrogating one's group responsibilities. Since voting as a whole must be a zero sum activity the benefits to one's own group must be assumed to be offset by costs to others, but there's an easy to remember song that expresses the proper attitude towards these others: "them, them, fuck them." How one chooses which group one is voting on behalf of varies with the individual, but some kind of identity based politics is the only grounds under which the act of voting makes sense.

So, dear reader, do not ask whether a person who votes the opposite way from you is evil or stupid. Most likely he is neither one. A democratic nation can be considered as a loose coalition of many tribes, and he is simply a member of a tribe different from, and hostile to, your own.

Personally, I don't vote.