You’ve been talking about the plight of us low-social-skills … people a lot recently. Any chance you’ll ever share these advanced social skills you learned during your Five Thousand Years?

Obviously, some of these techniques may be evil. But you have unparalleled access to the rationalist community, so I’m guessing the instrumental value could be high.

Oh, and I’m crazy curious, of course. Hmm, I think I’ll ask this on a few posts in the hope it’ll be seen.

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My morality is not relevant to this discussion.

>modern morality

>what advantage was there

I won’t speculate on how hard Christian moral tradition pulls on the Catholic elite, and in what direction, but you said it yourself; popular morality has changed, which presumably changes the incentives for one type of signaling over another.

You might ask “why now”, when the change occurred over the last few hundred years. I think inertia could explain that.

That said, I’m not an expert in Catholic politics, history, social science, politics, etc. My concern was mostly your use of loaded language. It rubbed me the wrong way, especially since you are the author of these:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/62/defense_against_the_dark_arts_case_study_1/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/4h/when_truth_isnt_enough/

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I’m just going to chill and get high or something instead.

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:/ That’s really not nice. I like arguing against James, even when I don’t much like what he says.

Please nobody ever do this. It’s pure signaling…

Fair enough. I apologize.

(This apology might work a little better if I hadn’t been anonymous, but I think I picked the same only-visible-to-Scott fake email address at least.)

On the other hand, signaling was not the pure, or even primary, goal. I was expressing an actual dislike of both the quality and content of James’ arguments. But doing that in a snide one-liner also

creates an environment that is not conducive to rationality

and is pretty lazy besides, so I wish I hadn’t.

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Barack Obama and the Queen aren’t trying to signal holiness within the context of a religious tradition that’s been obsessed with humility and with helping the poor for thousands of years.

A Pope washing someone’s feet is a highly symbolic action. Barack Obama washing someone’s feet would be really bizarre and kind of creepy.

I think many presidents have donated their salaries to charity and tried to refuse a lot of the pomp around the Presidency, and I know that they already inherit something of a baseline of doing this (eg the form of address Mr. President, traditional dress is just a nice suit rather than any kind of regalia). Beyond that I’m not sure what the President could do.

The Queen seems to have no purpose except looking important, so abandoning the emphasis on looking important would be a bad move for her.

The Dalai Lama to my understanding does exactly what Francis is doing. He makes a big deal out of being just “a simple monk”, although I’m not sure how conscious it is. And he seems to live in a simple private house. How much more humble do you want him to be?

You haven’t justified your statement about Stalin, which is especially confusing given how much influence the Pope traditionally is believed to have had on the collapse of Communism. You also haven’t justified your statement that the Vatican needs more sovereignty to be independent. Right now the only way I could imagine anyone exploiting the Vatican’s military weakness to influence them is to invade them or threaten to do so. The only country that can do that effectively is Italy – anyone else would have to go through/nuke Italy to manage it and start a war with the EU/NATO. I’ve seen no evidence whatsoever that Italy or anyone else has considered invading the Vatican or that anyone in the Vatican takes the slightest bit of account of that in their planning. It may also be useful to compare the Vatican to eg Rwanda when analyzing just how high a barrier there is for countries to invade other countries, even when those other countries are very tiny and militarily weak.

“The Pope doesn’t and can not unfortunately effective speak directly to nominal Catholics anymore. He instead speaks to the NYT and CNN, who then speak to the people. ”

I think you’re missing the point of this post, which is not that the Pope is doing things that are controversial to Catholic morality (he’s not pro-choice, or pro-gay marriage, or anything like that). He’s doing things that are popular among seculars AND popular among Catholics, like being humble and saying nice things about the poor. There’s no abandonment of Catholicism at all here, which is why I’m surprised other Popes didnt try it.

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