8 ms·

How scrolling becomes a religious act

79 points by ZeroTalent 1y ago

paulryanrogers 1y ago
> ...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.
- trollbridge 1y ago
  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.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    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.
caleblloyd 1y ago
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-model https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...
- tough 1y ago
  Isn't that more an artifact of the nature of the indeterministic black boxes that llm's are? anthropic is doing great work, that understanding models blog post was really ground breaking.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  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.
PaulRobinson 1y ago
Tribes - and jockeying for position within them - is as old as humanity itself. I often wonder whether the earliest religious leaders (think Egyptian pharaoh era), knew what they were doing, and figured that telling people why tombs needed to be built was much better than building them, so they got to the right side of the table. Today, I wonder if that's what is really going on with business leaders: they know it's all crap, but if they say that, there is a risk they're going back to the open plan office with the rest of the schmucks.
malfist 1y ago
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.
- trollbridge 1y ago
  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.
  - RankingMember 1y ago
    I think that's more addiction enabled by infrastructure that supports it and provides little viable alternative (in most places in the U.S.) than it is religion.
    - justinrubek 1y ago
      That is definitely why it is so prevalent, but people take it a step beyond this. The vehicle becoming part of their personality. Taking offense at the notion of not using a vehicle or not wanting to use a vehicle. Driving trucks around empty, with covered beds all the time. Not wanting electric because they love the concept of the internal combustion engine.
  - malfist 1y ago
    Do we worship air? Water? Food? Just because we need something for a comfortable existence doesn't mean we worship it or are addicted to it. After, I'm not addicted to my house or my air conditioner, or my refrigerator. But I definitely don't want to live without them
keiferski 1y ago
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 worshipped in a religious sense than printed Bibles were worshipped in Gutenberg’s era. They are technological vectors for idea transfer that facilitate ideologies/worldviews/religions, not those things themselves. Being distracted by your phone doesn’t come with an entire metaphysical picture about the nature of life and death, proper social roles, or most of the other things religious systems typically come with. Also - Durkheim is name dropped here, with the incorrect tense (he doesn’t argue, he argued, as he’s been dead for a long time.)
- redczar 1y ago
  You are trying to fight how people use words and you won’t be successful. Phrases like “religious fervor” and “religiously <did some activity>” etc. are in common usage and refer to things outside of religion. Phones are worshipped in the sense that many people are lost or will panic if they had to do without them for an extended period of time. Using worshipped evokes an image that is apt.
  - keiferski 1y ago
    I’m just calling out sloppy thinking and sloppy word choice. And beyond that, the author explicitly made the reference to religion as a concept and to religious sociology by bringing up Durkheim. He made the analogy to actual religion.
    - redczar 1y ago
      Your jihad against how these words are used in common speech will fail.
  - BlarfMcFlarf 1y ago
    The meaning of words is central to the meaning of the article. If the meaning of religion is devolved to “very interested in” then the meaning of the article is “people are very interested in their phones” which is a quite boring article. You can’t rely on the gravity of the word religious while also disregarding it.
roenxi 1y ago
> Participating in group trends is fun—and essential to being human. It’s just important to remember exactly what we’re doing, and how our need for belonging can be manipulated by bad actors. Only then can we retain our individuality and understanding of what’s happening. Ah; this looks relevant to a topic I met through Kegan's model of adult development. Apparently around 66% [0] of the population doesn't think in a way where "retaining [their] individuality" is even seen as possible, let alone desirable. They'd probably equate it to teenage impulsiveness. It explains a lot of politics, practical dealings and provides a very neat model for understanding what religions are actually doing. This sort of call to action from the article is fundamentally misguided as general advice because it misses that people are socially designed to just follow that crowd in a way that can be quite astonishing. Their strategy is, nearly explicitly, to be manipulated by whatever actors rise to the top of the heap. Good, bad or other, they won't (in a practical sense can't) judge. [0] https://brucesreflections.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Kegans-Levels-of-Development.pdf https://brucesreflections.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Keg...
- keiferski 1y ago
  I’m sure this has been studied somewhere, but I bet the prevalence of individualism tracks with the proximity of a frontier to a civilization. Most of the really hyper individualist culture seems to come from frontier-type societies that need self-reliance to survive.
  - giraffe_lady 1y ago
    What these studies actually show is that a frontier in this sense is more of a relationship or conflict between civilizations. Scenarios where one single group was moving unimpeded into unoccupied land are very rare (only once per region ever!) and mostly unattested in written historical record so there simply isn't much to say about the actions or attitudes of the individuals within them. Basically almost always your frontier is also their frontier, the people you are trying to replace. You aren't acting on your own, for example in the US the western expansion depended heavily on connection to sophisticated trade networks, financial technology, and straightforward military support. Individual action is only one small part of what makes this process work, but is the part most highlighted after the fact by the winning side.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
swayvil 1y ago
That's a rather naive and self-serving take on religion. Just call it a popularization of the esoteric. Like what happens to science, medicine, auto-repair... A strange subject, dumbed down and framed in metaphor for the uninitiated. Turned unto a big mess. It happens all the time.
cwoolfe 1y ago
It makes me wonder if we really so different than those who carved metal images to worship thousands of years ago. I made a 30s video exploring this idea here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7RoeHHqnAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7RoeHHqnAM
arguflow 1y ago
Scrolling is just group gambling. Similar to a gotcha game. You can really see it in the "Legndary Pulls" meme's

79 points by ZeroTalent 1y ago

> ...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.

trollbridge 1y ago
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.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  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.

caleblloyd 1y ago

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-model https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...

tough 1y ago
Isn't that more an artifact of the nature of the indeterministic black boxes that llm's are? anthropic is doing great work, that understanding models blog post was really ground breaking.
jimbokun 1y ago
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.

PaulRobinson 1y ago

Tribes - and jockeying for position within them - is as old as humanity itself. I often wonder whether the earliest religious leaders (think Egyptian pharaoh era), knew what they were doing, and figured that telling people why tombs needed to be built was much better than building them, so they got to the right side of the table. Today, I wonder if that's what is really going on with business leaders: they know it's all crap, but if they say that, there is a risk they're going back to the open plan office with the rest of the schmucks.

malfist 1y ago

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.

trollbridge 1y ago
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.
- RankingMember 1y ago
  I think that's more addiction enabled by infrastructure that supports it and provides little viable alternative (in most places in the U.S.) than it is religion.
  - justinrubek 1y ago
    That is definitely why it is so prevalent, but people take it a step beyond this. The vehicle becoming part of their personality. Taking offense at the notion of not using a vehicle or not wanting to use a vehicle. Driving trucks around empty, with covered beds all the time. Not wanting electric because they love the concept of the internal combustion engine.
- malfist 1y ago
  Do we worship air? Water? Food? Just because we need something for a comfortable existence doesn't mean we worship it or are addicted to it. After, I'm not addicted to my house or my air conditioner, or my refrigerator. But I definitely don't want to live without them

keiferski 1y ago

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 worshipped in a religious sense than printed Bibles were worshipped in Gutenberg’s era. They are technological vectors for idea transfer that facilitate ideologies/worldviews/religions, not those things themselves. Being distracted by your phone doesn’t come with an entire metaphysical picture about the nature of life and death, proper social roles, or most of the other things religious systems typically come with. Also - Durkheim is name dropped here, with the incorrect tense (he doesn’t argue, he argued, as he’s been dead for a long time.)

redczar 1y ago
You are trying to fight how people use words and you won’t be successful. Phrases like “religious fervor” and “religiously <did some activity>” etc. are in common usage and refer to things outside of religion. Phones are worshipped in the sense that many people are lost or will panic if they had to do without them for an extended period of time. Using worshipped evokes an image that is apt.
- keiferski 1y ago
  I’m just calling out sloppy thinking and sloppy word choice. And beyond that, the author explicitly made the reference to religion as a concept and to religious sociology by bringing up Durkheim. He made the analogy to actual religion.
  - redczar 1y ago
    Your jihad against how these words are used in common speech will fail.
- BlarfMcFlarf 1y ago
  The meaning of words is central to the meaning of the article. If the meaning of religion is devolved to “very interested in” then the meaning of the article is “people are very interested in their phones” which is a quite boring article. You can’t rely on the gravity of the word religious while also disregarding it.

roenxi 1y ago

> Participating in group trends is fun—and essential to being human. It’s just important to remember exactly what we’re doing, and how our need for belonging can be manipulated by bad actors. Only then can we retain our individuality and understanding of what’s happening. Ah; this looks relevant to a topic I met through Kegan's model of adult development. Apparently around 66% [0] of the population doesn't think in a way where "retaining [their] individuality" is even seen as possible, let alone desirable. They'd probably equate it to teenage impulsiveness. It explains a lot of politics, practical dealings and provides a very neat model for understanding what religions are actually doing. This sort of call to action from the article is fundamentally misguided as general advice because it misses that people are socially designed to just follow that crowd in a way that can be quite astonishing. Their strategy is, nearly explicitly, to be manipulated by whatever actors rise to the top of the heap. Good, bad or other, they won't (in a practical sense can't) judge. [0] https://brucesreflections.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Kegans-Levels-of-Development.pdf https://brucesreflections.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Keg...

keiferski 1y ago
I’m sure this has been studied somewhere, but I bet the prevalence of individualism tracks with the proximity of a frontier to a civilization. Most of the really hyper individualist culture seems to come from frontier-type societies that need self-reliance to survive.
- giraffe_lady 1y ago
  What these studies actually show is that a frontier in this sense is more of a relationship or conflict between civilizations. Scenarios where one single group was moving unimpeded into unoccupied land are very rare (only once per region ever!) and mostly unattested in written historical record so there simply isn't much to say about the actions or attitudes of the individuals within them. Basically almost always your frontier is also their frontier, the people you are trying to replace. You aren't acting on your own, for example in the US the western expansion depended heavily on connection to sophisticated trade networks, financial technology, and straightforward military support. Individual action is only one small part of what makes this process work, but is the part most highlighted after the fact by the winning side.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

swayvil 1y ago

That's a rather naive and self-serving take on religion. Just call it a popularization of the esoteric. Like what happens to science, medicine, auto-repair... A strange subject, dumbed down and framed in metaphor for the uninitiated. Turned unto a big mess. It happens all the time.

cwoolfe 1y ago

It makes me wonder if we really so different than those who carved metal images to worship thousands of years ago. I made a 30s video exploring this idea here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7RoeHHqnAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7RoeHHqnAM

arguflow 1y ago

Scrolling is just group gambling. Similar to a gotcha game. You can really see it in the "Legndary Pulls" meme's