Developing a top (system) level

[From Rick Marken (2008.01.27.2020)]

Since we're talking about the top level of the control hierarchy,
which at last notice was the system concept level, I thought I would
post a little article I found a while ago that seems relevant. I just
happened to find it the other day sitting on my other computer (my now
much neglected Mac).

The article seems relevant to the question of what are "good" system
concepts to develop, in the sense that they might lead to a better
society (system), in some sense. System concepts are perceptions of
aspects of the behavior of groups of people, like sports teams,
business groups, etc. References for system concepts are desired
states of those perceptions: what type of team or business we like.
One system concept that many people consider important is religion.
Many people seem to believe that having a reference for a particular
religious system concept will result in a better society. Having a
reference for no religion (atheism) is considered a bad thing
(certainly in the US) because then you would have bad values and do
bad things -- commit crimes, get abortions, etc.

The attached paper is interesting because it suggests that having a
reference for no religion is definitely not a bad thing. The paper
(which happens to refer to our own Gary Cziko!!) shows that, in a set
of industrialized societies, the more people adopt a reference for a
religious system concept, the more poorly the society does on various
measures of quality: abortion rate, teen pregnancy, homicide rate,
life expectancy, etc. The lower the proportion of people in a country
who adopt a reference for practicing a religion, the better the
country tends to do on measures of life quality. Conversely, the
greater the proportion of people who adopt a non-religious reference
(atheism or agnosticism), the better the country tends to do on
quality of life.

Of course, these correlations (the actual values of which are not
reported in the paper) do not imply causality; adopting a religious
system concept reference is not necessarily the cause of high teen
pregnancy rates, high abortion rates and high crime rates and low life
expectancy. But the existence of a positive (rather than a negative
correlation) between religious references and these measures of poor
social quality certainly suggests that failure to adopt religious
references will not lead to a decline in the quality of a society, as
many religious people in the US have suggested. It suggests to me that
if one's goal is a higher quality society, in terms of less teen
pregnancy, fewer abortions, less crime and longer life expectancy, and
one also believes (as I do) that people's system concepts have a lot
to do with the quality of the society in which they live, then these
results suggest that the search for the system concepts (and
references thereof) that might lead to such a result can be limited to
non-religious system concepts.

Best regards

Rick

2005-11.pdf (1000 KB)

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Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com

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Of course, these correlations
(the actual values of which are not

reported in the paper) do not imply causality; adopting a religious

system concept reference is not necessarily the cause of high teen

pregnancy rates, high abortion rates and high crime rates and low
life

expectancy.
[From Bill Powers (2008.01.28.0129 MST)]

Rick Marken (2008.01.27.2020) –

I would change “not necessarily” to “not very
likely”. I would guess that religion is an attempt to deal with
problems like the ones listed, an attempt to help people be
“good” or force them with threats and promises to be
“good.” Science, in the past, has been of little help with
these matters, either to select beneficial personal and social reference
values or to figure out how to get people to adopt them. Scientists,
therefore, can’t complain if other people have tried to devise their own
means of dealing with such problems. As is usually the case, other means
of handling problems are less effective than the means science typically
comes up with, but when scientists refuse on principle to deal with
“non-scientific” issues, what other choices are there? Militant
athiesm is no more contructive than religion, and no more capable of
solving problems, so that’s no help, either. In fact it creates one of
the classes of social problems.

That religion (and athiesm) are unsuccessful in solving problems is shown
clearly by the fact that the same problems exist now as have existed
through recorded history. There may have been some ameliorations due to
religious activities but they are not effective enough and they often
take us in wrong directions such as burning people at the stake. Science
is needed, a systematically honest and realistic approach to
understanding human nature, in order to find out what is causing these
problems (those which are actually problems). When we understand the
underlying factors we will see what needs to be done, and do it.
Understanding the importance of conflict between control systems is a
start.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Kenny Kitzke (2008.01.28.1200EST)]

<Bill Powers (2008.01.28.0129 MST)>

Thank you for your intellectual honesty. It is always easy when you have an agenda to find some “data” that supports it while ignoring any contraventional data.

Neither science, psychology or “religion” as defined in this study seems to have done very well in eliminating social and personal ills.

The bias in the wording of the analysts seems to expose their “beliefs” of what might improve the conditions in societies. To continuously refer to the United States as an “outlier” as if irrelevant to their conclusions is mathematically inaccurate and appears to be disingenuous.

Is the variable of belief in Creationism or evolution really the one that matters most, or even much at all, for the frequency of pregnant teens or abortions? Or, is it what the teen girls want for themselves? How much do these analysts understand about HPCT? Or, is it the prevalent beliefs about the origin of mankind in a society what causes the statistics?

Rick knows better and even couches his reference and their insufficient data to show cause rather than correlation. But, I guess it resists some disturbances at Rick’s systems level to publish such analyses on a PCT dedicated forum. Been there, done that, again and again.

In a message dated 1/28/2008 3:55:49 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, powers_w@FRONTIER.NET writes:

Of course, these correlations (the actual values of which are not
reported in the paper) do not imply causality; adopting a religious
system concept reference is not necessarily the cause of high teen
pregnancy rates, high abortion rates and high crime rates and low life

expectancy.
[From Bill Powers (2008.01.28.0129 MST)]

Rick Marken (2008.01.27.2020) –

I would change “not necessarily” to “not very likely”. I would guess that religion is an attempt to deal with problems like the ones listed, an attempt to help people be “good” or force them with threats and promises to be “good.” Science, in the past, has been of little help with these matters, either to select beneficial personal and social reference values or to figure out how to get people to adopt them. Scientists, therefore, can’t complain if other people have tried to devise their own means of dealing with such problems. As is usually the case, other means of handling problems are less effective than the means science typically comes up with, but when scientists refuse on principle to deal with “non-scientific” issues, what other choices are there? Militant athiesm is no more contructive than religion, and no more capable of solving problems, so that’s no help, either. In fact it creates one of the classes of social problems.

That religion (and athiesm) are unsuccessful in solving problems is shown clearly by the fact that the same problems exist now as have existed through recorded history. There may have been some ameliorations due to religious activities but they are not effective enough and they often take us in wrong directions such as burning people at the stake. Science is needed, a systematically honest and realistic approach to understanding human nature, in order to find out what is causing these problems (those which are actually problems). When we understand the underlying factors we will see what needs to be done, and do it. Understanding the importance of conflict between control systems is a start.

Best,

Bill P.

No virus found in this outgoing message.
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···

Start the year off right. Easy ways to stay in shape in the new year.

Is the variable of belief in
Creationism or evolution really the one that matters most, or even much
at all, for the frequency of pregnant teens or abortions? Or, is it
what the teen girls want for themselves? How much do these analysts
understand about HPCT? Or, is it the prevalent beliefs about the
origin of mankind in a society what causes the
statistics?
[From Bill Powers (2008.01.28.1021 MST)]

Kenny Kitzke
(2008.01.28.1200EST)

Thanks, Kenny.

I don’t think creationism would even exist if it weren’t for Genesis.
Every religion has its creation story, and there is quite a range – they
can’t all be right. Of course if you leave it to the proponents of any
particular religion, their story is right and all the others are
wrong. The result is that if you took a vote among them all, you would
end up with every story being voted wrong by all but one religion
(including the Big Bang religion).

I don’t think anyone actually knows how the universe started: they’re all
guessing. I trust some guesses more than others, but none of them
completely. The one I trust most is the one based on observations and
carefully-constructed models. I give that one about 30% credibility. The
rest are at about zero.

I think teenage pregnancies are caused by teenagers having sex. For some
of them, that’s exactly what they want, but for most others and just
about all adults, it’s a disaster. The reaction of adults seems mainly to
be punitive, using a teenage mother and her baby as a means of sending a
message to other teens. The theory seems to be that if you just punish
the transgressors harshly enough, the others will get the message and not
want to be punished that way themselves. Perhaps they should torture the
mothers and their babies (the way God tortures sinners in Hell) so other
teenagers will become frightened enough to abstain fron sex, since the
present punishments don’t seem to be working. The general principle is
that if a harsh treatment doesn’t work, you should keep doing it even
more harshly until it does work. Brilliant idea.

I would like to eliminate certain comic strips that tell everyone
every day how impossible, stupid, and selfish teenagers are. Teenagers
see those comic strips; I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them felt a
bit misunderstood. If teenagers trusted and believed adults, I think they
would not find it difficult to accept the information that having babies
too soon really ruins your life. Most of them are intelligent enough to
see that for themselves, and possess high-enough levels of perception, if
not yet completed, to make the appropriate decisions. So it’s really up
to the adults to become more trustworthy and believable, not to mention
lovable. I think that entails refraining from using fairy tales to
threaten the teenagers and make them more fearful, and treating them with
respect, not anger and contempt.

David Goldstein reports that teenagers respond very well to the method of
levels, at least in his institution, because for many of them it’s their
first interaction with an adult that involves asking them what they think
and want instead of telling them what to do and not to do. Since that
seems to work, maybe we should try doing it some more. Another brilliant
idea?

Best,

Bill P.

[From Rick Marken (2008.01.28. 1230)]

Bill Powers (2008.01.28.0129 MST)--

> Rick Marken (2008.01.27.2020) --

Of course, these correlations (the actual values of which are not
reported in the paper) do not imply causality; adopting a religious
system concept reference is not necessarily the cause of high teen
pregnancy rates, high abortion rates and high crime rates and low life
expectancy.

I would change "not necessarily" to "not very likely".

I don't think that is implied by the data. I said "not necessarily"
because the correlations between religious belief levels and measures
of social dysfunction for different societies do not imply causality.
But neither do they imply lack of causality. So it's not really
correct to say, based on the evidence, that religious system concepts
are "not very likely" to be the cause of social dysfunction; just that
they are "not necessarily" the cause of this dysfunction. In fact,
there is other data that suggests that there is a causal relationship
between religious beliefs and abortion rate, for example. Abortion
rates are higher in regions where counselors are not allowed -- for
strictly religious reasons -- to discuss the abortion option with
expectant mothers than in places where they are allowed to discuss
this option. This is not a pure experimental study, of course, (the
abortion vs non- abortion counseling "treatment" was not randomly
assigned to counseling centers) so the causal link is still not
certain. Nevertheless, while these data certainly leave open the
possibility that religious beliefs are not necessarily responsible for
the difference in abortion rates, they do suggest that it is more than
"not very likely" that they had something to do with it. Don't you
think?

Scientists, therefore, can't
complain if other people have tried to devise their own means of dealing
with such problems.

I didn't present this data as a way of complaining about people
adopting religious approaches to dealing with their problems. Nor did
I present it as some kind of anti-religious jab. The point of
presenting the data was twofold: 1) to show that there is no evidence
that societies are improved (in terms of the social variables
discussed in the paper) by the adoption of religious beliefs and 2) to
show an example of research that suggests that the system concepts
prevalent in a society might make a difference in the quality of the
society. Point (1) is interesting because many people, here in the US
in particular, seem to take it for granted that adopting a religious
system concept is important for the social health of a society. I
think these data show that this is unquestionably not the case at all.
There is no evidence that more religious societies are better off in
terms of these social variables; in fact, the data suggest that these
societies may be worse off.

I didn't present the data to suggest that people shouldn't adopt
religious system concepts. I would imagine that, on a personal level,
religious system concepts might improve the happiness of the
individual; it might be nice for some people to imagine living forever
and having make believe friends. But the data do suggest that those
who argue that society will be improved by the general adoption of
such beliefs -- and work politically toward that end -- have no
evidence to support their position; indeed, the data suggest the
distinct possibility that adopting such concepts can make things worse
at a social level.

As is usually the case, other means of handling problems
are less effective than the means science typically comes up with, but when
scientists refuse on principle to deal with "non-scientific" issues, what
other choices are there?

I agree. And I presented the data to show how one might start to
approach this problem scientifically; with a model of behavior that
suggests that the kind of system concepts people control for should
make a difference in the kind of social behavior we see among those
people and with some data that are at least a start at testing that
notion (in a very general way, true, but it's better than the pure
armchair approach, I think).

Militant athiesm is no more contructive than
religion, and no more capable of solving problems, so that's no help,
either. In fact it creates one of the classes of social problems.

I'm no fan of militant atheism either. But this article suggests that
the the atheist (and agnostic) system concept is strongly related to
societal health, unlike the religious system concept, which is
strongly related to societal dysfunction. These data show pretty
clearly that an increased prevalence of religious system concepts does
not make things better and that increased prevalence of atheistic
system concepts does not make things worse.

That religion (and athiesm) are unsuccessful in solving problems is shown
clearly by the fact that the same problems exist now as have existed through
recorded history.

Yes, but they clearly exist to very different degrees in different
societies. Homicide rate is a good example. Religious system concepts
(getting people to believe that god will be pissed if you kill
someone) are supposed to keep people from killing. But the data show
that this is not the case. Homicides are far more prevalent in very
religious countries (like the US) than in non-religious countries
(like Scandinavia and Japan). This just supports what you say: that
religion is unsuccessful at solving problems like this, as evidenced
by the fact that these problems have existed through recorded history.
But the data I presented make a more interesting point than this; they
suggest that certain system concepts (the one's adopted in Japan and
Scandinavia, for example) may result in better societies (in terms of
low homicide rate, for example) than do other system concepts. The
data also suggest (though this must certainly be tested more) that the
system concepts that have led to more civilized societies are
inconsistent with the religious system concepts adopted in less
civilized societies. I don't know if this is the case but it
certainly seems like it might be a place to start a scientific look at
the kinds of system concepts that result in the kinds of societies
that I'm sure most of us -- even those with religious system concepts
-- want to live in.

Understanding the importance of conflict between control systems is a start.

Yes, of course. And it seems to me that the kind of system concepts
adopted in the more civilized societies -- those with less crime, teen
pregnancy, abortion, poverty, etc -- are the kind that seem to reduce
conflict between the control systems who adopt those system concepts.

Best

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com

Gavin Ritz (2008.01.29.9.56NZ)

Understanding the importance of conflict between control systems is a
start

Good idea, this list is a great place to start understanding this concept. A
self-reflection of the conflict dialogue on this list.

Kind regards
Gavin

[From Rick Marken (2008.01.28.1330)]

Kenny Kitzke (2008.01.28.1200EST)--

Neither science, psychology or "religion" as defined in this study seems to
have done very well in eliminating social and personal ills.

All the study shows is an association between degree of religiosity
and societal dysfunction. The data show that an increase in
religiosity is clearly not associated with a decrease in social
dysfunction. I conclude from this that the general adoption of
religious system concepts in a society is, at best, irrelevant and at
worse an impediment to the quality of social life in a society. Isn't
that a fair conclusion based on the data?

The bias in the wording of the analysts seems to expose their "beliefs" of
what might improve the conditions in societies. To continuously refer to
the United States as an "outlier" as if irrelevant to their conclusions is
mathematically inaccurate and appears to be disingenuous.

What does calling a point that lies well outside the spread of data
points an "outlier" have to do with one's interpretation of the data?
I've attached a graph from the article showing the relationship
between the proportion of people in a country who believe in God and
the homicide rate per 100,000 in that country. U is the United states.
Don't you think it is reasonable to call the location of U an
"outlier"? The US is not that much of an outlier on belief in God
(thanks to Portugal, which has apparently managed to get over the
theological implications of the Sunday morning Lisbon earthquake that
killed thousands of people as they worshiped in church) but it is
certainly an outlier on homicides per 100,000 people.

Is the variable of belief in Creationism or evolution really the one that
matters most, or even much at all, for the frequency of pregnant teens or
abortions? Or, is it what the teen girls want for themselves? How much do
these analysts understand about HPCT? Or, is it the prevalent beliefs about
the origin of mankind in a society what causes the statistics?

No one is saying that religious belief is directly responsible for
teen pregnancy or abortion. What the data show is that an increase in
the level of societal religious belief (as indicated, among other
things, by a belief in creationism) is _not_ associated with a
decrease in these societal ills. Indeed, to the extent that their is a
relationship at all, it is positive: increase in religious belief is
associated (possibly causally, possibly not) with an increase in
societal ills.

Rick knows better and even couches his reference and their insufficient data
to show cause rather than correlation.

I know that the existence of a positive correlation between religious
belief and societal ills does not mean that religious belief causes
societal ills. But the existence of such a relationship does make it
possible to legitimately conclude that there is not a negative
relationship between religious belief and societal ills. This means
that, if there is a causal relationship between religious belief and
social ills, it is definitely not a negative one; an increase in
religious belief does not cause a decrease in social ill.

But, I guess it resists some
disturbances at Rick's systems level to publish such analyses on a PCT
dedicated forum. Been there, done that, again and again.

To the extent that my post "resists disturbances" the disturbance
resisted is the claim, made by many religious leaders in this country,
that our society would be improved if people would just adopt a
religious system concept, preferably theirs. The data I presented are
just one piece of evidence that this is not the case; countries where
most people don't adopt religious system concepts do as well or (more
often) better, in terms of many measures of social dysfunction, than
those countries where most do adopt such concepts. The data I
presented is relevant in a forum dedicated to PCT because PCT suggests
that the adoption of certain system concepts may lead to better social
results (Less interpersonal conflict) than does the adoption of others
and the data I presented suggests (to me, anyway) that this is,
indeed, the case.

Best

Rick

Figure.GIF

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rsmarken@gmail.com

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[Martin Taylor 2008.01.28.17.27]

[From Rick Marken (2008.01.28.1330)]

Kenny Kitzke (2008.01.28.1200EST)--

Neither science, psychology or "religion" as defined in this study seems to
have done very well in eliminating social and personal ills.

All the study shows is an association between degree of religiosity
and societal dysfunction. The data show that an increase in
religiosity is clearly not associated with a decrease in social
dysfunction. I conclude from this that the general adoption of
religious system concepts in a society is, at best, irrelevant and at
worse an impediment to the quality of social life in a society. Isn't
that a fair conclusion based on the data?

I knoe this is very unscientific, but I find it hard to look at all those graphs and sustain the belief that correlation does not imply causation. When there's only one correlation, it's easy to say to oneself that there may well be a common factor that has an influence on both correlated variables, but when there are so many apparently independent variables being influenced the same way, it takes a real mental effort to retain that belief.

It would be very interesting to compare these same indicators across countries in which the dominant religion in question isn't one of those with a single easily angered vengeful god. It would probably be hard to do that, since most of those are relatively poor, and that could matter. It would also be interesting to compare the GINI index against the same religiosity and social dysfunction indicators across nations, since we know that at least the health outcomes are worse in wealthy countries with a wide income disparity, such as the USA.

Martin

[From Kenny Kitzke (2008.01.28.2030)]

Rick, did you check out the statistical prowess and objectivity of Mr. Paul before you posted his study on CSGNet?

Here is some information from Wikipedia about Mr. Paul and the voracity of his data selection:

Religion
See also: Morality#Religion and morality
Paul authored a paper in 2005 entitled “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look”.[1] He states in the introduction that the paper is “not an attempt to present a definitive study that establishes cause versus effect between religiosity, secularism and societal health”.[2] This paper has been criticized on statistical grounds, including the seemingly arbitrary sampling of 18 countries out of more than 193 for examination, its indirect measure of “religiosity” (the author’s term) and its “chi-by-eye” interpretation of scatterplots rather than quantified measures.[citation needed] Moreno-Riaño, Smith, and Mach wrote in a published article in the same journal that “[Paul’s] methodological problems do not allow for any conclusive statement to be advanced regarding the various hypotheses Paul seeks to demonstrate or falsify.”[3]

Gary F. Jensen of Vanderbilt University is one of the scientists who criticizes the methods used by Paul, including that “Paul’s analysis generates the ‘desired results’ by selectively choosing the set of social problems to include to highlight the negative consequences of religion”. In a response [4] to the study by Paul, he builds on and refines Paul’s analysis. His conclusion, that focus only in the crime of homicide, is that there is a correlation (and perhaps a causal relationship) of higher homicide rates, not with Christianity, but with dualistic Christian
beliefs, something Jensen defines as the strong belief in all of the following : God, heaven, devil and hell. Excerpt: “A multiple regression analysis reveals a complex relationship with some dimensions of religiosity encouraging homicide and other dimensions discouraging it.”

The wisdom of your proposal to have this study inform CSGNet about “good” and “bad” system level references for a higher quality society requires some evaluation. Here is what you said:

“The article seems relevant to the question of what are “good” system
concepts to develop, in the sense that they might lead to a better
society (system), in some sense.”

Your own representation of its relevance is so cautious, can it really be worth mentioning as a serious proposition?

But, you wrap up in a more suggestive tone, even being definitive, regarding such an interesting (at least to you) paper:

“The attached paper is interesting because it suggests that having a
reference for no religion is definitely not a bad thing.”

I would hope we could do better than this to sharpen our knowledge of good and bad systems concepts. While there is probably some bad religion, there is probably also some bad science. I trust we can discern both if we hope to do no harm?

···

Start the year off right. Easy ways to stay in shape in the new year.

I don’t think that is implied by
the data. I said “not necessarily”

because the correlations between religious belief levels and
measures

of social dysfunction for different societies do not imply
causality.

But neither do they imply lack of causality. So it’s not really

correct to say, based on the evidence, that religious system
concepts

are “not very likely” to be the cause of social dysfunction;
just that

they are “not necessarily” the cause of this
dysfunction.
[From Bill Powers (2008.01.28.1355 MST)]

Rick Marken (2008.01.28. 1230) –

I wasn’t judging from the correlations but from common sense. The cause
of teenage pregnancy is teenage sex. I don’t see how religion could cause
that. Religions work against abortions as best they can, so I don’t think
abortions are caused by religion. They’re caused by women and girls
getting pregnant and wishing not to carry the baby to term (or someone
else not wishing it, pretty forcefully). If safe abortions were not
allowed to be discussed and were effectively unavailable, I could see
that the rate of unsafe abortions would probably increase. But I don’t
see abortion rates increasing because of religion. How would that work?
And anyway, look at the scatter in the data. It’s horrendous. Those are
not facts.

In fact,
there is other data that suggests that there is a causal
relationship

between religious beliefs and abortion rate, for example. Abortion

rates are higher in regions where counselors are not allowed – for

strictly religious reasons – to discuss the abortion option with

expectant mothers than in places where they are allowed to discuss

this option.

That’s pretty mysterious. Not discussing the abortion option leads to
more abortions? I hardly think that’s the link. I should think that when
counsellors are allowed to mention the abortion option to teens who don’t
know about it, abortions would increase – unless the counsellors mention
it in a way that makes it sound dangerous, evil, or something like
that.

This is not a
pure experimental study, of course, (the

abortion vs non- abortion counseling “treatment” was not
randomly

assigned to counseling centers) so the causal link is still not

certain. Nevertheless, while these data certainly leave open the

possibility that religious beliefs are not necessarily responsible
for

the difference in abortion rates, they do suggest that it is more
than

“not very likely” that they had something to do with it. Don’t
you

think?

Not unless I can understand how.

Point (1) is
interesting because many people, here in the US

in particular, seem to take it for granted that adopting a religious

system concept is important for the social health of a society. I

think these data show that this is unquestionably not the case at
all.

There is no evidence that more religious societies are better off in

terms of these social variables; in fact, the data suggest that
these

societies may be worse off.

Worse off in some ways, I agree. But the religious impulse in most people
is aimed, I think, at combating evil, not increasing it. It shouldn’t
surprise us to find that people who think they are doing one thing may
actually be accomplishing the opposite, but it would surprise me to find
that religious people are deliberately doing bad things. They don’t think
they are bad.

As is usually
the case, other means of handling problems

are less effective than the means science typically comes up with,
but when

scientists refuse on principle to deal with
“non-scientific” issues, what

other choices are there?

I agree. And I presented the data to show how one might start to

approach this problem scientifically; with a model of behavior that

suggests that the kind of system concepts people control for should

make a difference in the kind of social behavior we see among those

people and with some data that are at least a start at testing that

notion (in a very general way, true, but it’s better than the pure

armchair approach, I think).

Fine. I think we’re doing that even if we haven’t got very far with it
yet. We think we have an approach that will improve the human lot more
than religion has ever managed to do. Very well, let’s get on with it. We
don’t have to beat religion into the ground to do that. Why waste time
getting into fights? Let’s just do it. Lots of us ARE doing it.

Militant
athiesm is no more contructive than

religion, and no more capable of solving problems, so that’s no
help,

either. In fact it creates one of the classes of social
problems.

I’m no fan of militant atheism either. But this article suggests
that

the the atheist (and agnostic) system concept is strongly related
to

societal health, unlike the religious system concept, which is

strongly related to societal dysfunction.

I think the statistical trends in the data are mild and entirely
insufficient to accomplish the ends I want to see brought about. If we
eliminated religion entirely and let atheism triumph, do you think people
would instantly become sane and happy? I think there would still be
prejudice and jealousy and depression and crime and despair in full
measure. In fact, all the reasons that people use religion in disgusting
and oppressive ways would still be there; they would simply motivate some
other kind of unpleasantness. All the good reasons would still be there,
too. The point is that religion and other conventional approaches to
human difficulties are for the most part irrelevant, incapable of finding
and curing the real disease because they misidentify the cause. It
doesn’t really matter whether you are religious or not; you’re not going
to have much effect either way, unless you turn to some other approach
that works a whole lot better.

These data
show pretty

clearly that an increased prevalence of religious system concepts
does

not make things better and that increased prevalence of atheistic

system concepts does not make things worse.

That religion (and athiesm) are unsuccessful in solving
problems is shown

clearly by the fact that the same problems exist now as have existed
through

recorded history.

Yes, but they clearly exist to very different degrees in different

societies. Homicide rate is a good example. Religious system
concepts

(getting people to believe that god will be pissed if you kill

someone) are supposed to keep people from killing. But the data show

that this is not the case. Homicides are far more prevalent in very

religious countries (like the US) than in non-religious countries

(like Scandinavia and Japan).

Or you could say that in countries where the underlying culture is
violent and hostile, religion is commonly evoked as a way of combating
such things (ineffective, of course), and in countries with less
underlying violence, there is less reason to bring religion into play. I
see religion as a very popular but unsuccessful way of trying to make the
world better. The worse the world is (for entirely nonreligious reasons)
the more likely people are to try to make the religious formula work. If
something that worked better were as well known as the religious approach
is, it would be used instead.

This just
supports what you say: that

religion is unsuccessful at solving problems like this, as evidenced

by the fact that these problems have existed through recorded
history.

But the data I presented make a more interesting point than this;
they

suggest that certain system concepts (the one’s adopted in Japan and

Scandinavia, for example) may result in better societies (in terms
of

low homicide rate, for example) than do other system
concepts.

I don’t think religion has anything to do with making societies better or
worse. I see it as a symptom of the state of a society. The worse things
get, the more desperate the measures become; people will try anything
that might even hypothetically work when things get bad enough. But
making them stop using religion is not going to make the reasons they
want to use it go away. We ought to be looking at the evils that beset
our society and thinking about what to do about them, not focusing on the
methods people have been using (in vain, but what’s the alternative?) to
combat those evils.

The

data also suggest (though this must certainly be tested more) that
the

system concepts that have led to more civilized societies are

inconsistent with the religious system concepts adopted in less

civilized societies.

No, I think you have it backward. Less civilized societies have more
reason to try to cure the problems, and lacking any other means, they
crank up their religions in the attempt to cure them. It doesn’t work,
but what else do they have? Abolish religion, and the problems will
remain. You have to ask WHY people adopt religions. They’re trying to
make some sort of errors go away. If we address the errors, there will be
no need for the religions or the other conventional approaches that work
so poorly.

I don’t know
if this is the case but it

certainly seems like it might be a place to start a scientific look
at

the kinds of system concepts that result in the kinds of societies

that I’m sure most of us – even those with religious system
concepts

– want to live in.

That’s getting involved in the content. The particular system concepts
are not the problem; the problem is ignorance, confusion, and conflict.
Why do all these errors still exist? What is wrong with people’s capacity
to reorganize? How can we redirect reorganization to the levels where it
will do some good? We’re not in the business of saying which system
concepts people should adopt. We’re in the business of bringing conflicts
into awareness and trying to find out what is causing them. We can’t
reorganize other people, and nobody knows what the next reorganization is
going to produce. We have a strategy that works anyway, without giving
advice or analyzing or even always making the right moves. It works a lot
better than creating more conflicts does.

Understanding the importance of conflict between control systems is a
start.

Yes, of course. And it seems to me that the kind of system concepts

adopted in the more civilized societies – those with less crime,
teen

pregnancy, abortion, poverty, etc – are the kind that seem to
reduce

conflict between the control systems who adopt those system
concepts.

All I can say is, try thinking of it the other way around. System
concepts don’t control behavior; just the opposite.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Rick Marken (2008.01.28.2300)]

Kenny Kitzke (2008.01.28.2030)

Rick, did you check out the statistical prowess and objectivity of Mr. Paul
before you posted his study on CSGNet?

No. I just found the data interesting.

Here is some information from Wikipedia about Mr. Paul and the voracity of
his data selection:

What, are we going to swift boat Mr. Paul? :wink: And don't you mean
"veracity". He only had 18 data points; not very voracious.

Religion See also: Morality#Religion and morality

This paper has been criticized on statistical grounds, including the
seemingly arbitrary sampling of 18 countries out of more than 193 for
examination, its indirect measure of "religiosity" (the author's term) and
its "chi-by-eye" interpretation of scatterplots rather than quantified
measures.[citation needed]

These don't seen like particularly strong statistical bases for
criticism? The 18 countries were not selected to be a representative
sample of all countries; they were selected because they are all
advanced industrialized societies. The idea was too look at how
differences in the religiosity of people in these countries relates to
measures of social quality. The "indirect" measures of religiosity
seem like perfectly reasonable measures to me. I would bet any other
measures you select would be very highly correlated with these. And
just showing the scatterplots and not computing the associated r
values (you would use r, not chi square for these data), while
annoying, is not much of a basis for statistical criticism; anyone
reasonably familiar with statistics could make a pretty close estimate
of what the r value is for each of the scatter plots.

It looks to me from your quote of the Wiki piece like Mr. Paul struck
a nerve with just the people whose nerves should be struck; the Elmer
Gantys who think that people must be religious or society will come
unglued. These are the Pat Robertson's of the world, who think that
the US should be based on a religious system concept -- Christianity,
in particular. I know you are not one of these people, Kenny, because
you just like Christianity for yourself. But there are many people
around like Pat Robertson and I think good religious people like
yourself should really dissociate themselves from them and condemn
them.

Gary F. Jensen of Vanderbilt University is one of the scientists who
criticizes the methods used by Paul, including that "Paul's analysis
generates the 'desired results' by selectively choosing the set of social
problems to include to highlight the negative consequences of religion".

So does this Jensen fellow know of some social problems that are
negatively correlated with an increase in religion? Based on the next
statement it doesn't seem like it.

In a response [4] to the study by Paul, he builds on and refines Paul's
analysis. His conclusion, that focus only in the crime of homicide, is that
there is a correlation (and perhaps a causal relationship) of higher
homicide rates, not with Christianity, but with dualistic Christian beliefs,
something Jensen defines as the strong belief in all of the following : God,
heaven, devil and hell. Excerpt: "A multiple regression analysis reveals a
complex relationship with some dimensions of religiosity encouraging
homicide and other dimensions discouraging it."

Could you get me the reference to that study. I'd love to see what he
actually did. It seems like Jensen is ignoring his own criticism of
Paul's selection of only those social problems that will give the
desired results and analyzing one of those social problems -- homicide
rate -- using one or two more variables, which are measures of the
type of Christianity practiced in each country. I think he must be
including those variables in a multiple regression and finding that
some of them are related to homicide rate in the "right" way. With
only 17 degrees of freedom available for the analysis, I'd be
surprised if the partial correlation for any of these variables (looks
like there were only two -- dualistic and non-dualistic Christianity)
was statistically significant. But maybe they are. That would be
interesting. It might suggest that Newton was right and the the
"right" kind of Christianity is unitarianism and that dualistic (it
was actually trinitarian for Newton) beliefs are the work of the
devil;-)

The wisdom of your proposal to have this study inform CSGNet about "good"
and "bad" system level references for a higher quality society requires some
evaluation. Here is what you said:

"The article seems relevant to the question of what are "good" system
concepts to develop, in the sense that they might lead to a better
society (system), in some sense."

Your own representation of its relevance is so cautious, can it really be
worth mentioning as a serious proposition?

Obviously I thought it was. I still think its relevant suggests that
things don't go haywire in society when a large proportion of people
in that society do not adopt religious system concepts. This, I think,
is a worthwhile result since there are still people seriously pushing
the idea that societies benefit from religion (see above). I don't
understand why you are so upset about this data. You seem quite
comfortable with non-religious people; you have said that you think
non-religious people can be moral and good. The data I presented just
supports your view; non-religious people can be just as good -- maybe
even better -- than religious people. That doesn't mean being
religious is bad; if it works for you then go with it. It just means
that it's probably a bad idea to push religion as a solution to social
problems since they are obviously not.

"The attached paper is interesting because it suggests that having a
reference for no religion is definitely not a bad thing."

I would hope we could do better than this to sharpen our knowledge of good
and bad systems concepts. While there is probably some bad religion, there
is probably also some bad science. I trust we can discern both if we hope
to do no harm?

I don't think -- and I didn't say -- that religion is a bad thing.
Religion is just something people do and I find it fascinating and
sometimes inspiring and uplifting (I love gospel music, I do the sing
along Messiah every year and I have enjoyed studying the Bible, all
books including apocrypha). The evidence I presented says nothing
about whether religion is good or bad; what it says is that it is
unnecessary for people to adopt religious system concepts in order to
live in a high quality society. I thought you already agreed with
that?

Best

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com

[From Rick Marken (2008.01.28.1040)]

Bill Powers (2008.01.28.1355 MST)--

But I don't see abortion rates increasing because of religion. How would that work?

How about this: Children of religious parents tend to get no
information about sex and birth control other than "don't do it". I
don't think they stone the kids for this anymore but, still, sex might
be more of a problem for children of religious then non-religious
parents. The children, of course, tend to have sex anyway and the
result is sometimes pregnancy. The child fears telling the religious
parent (picture Raymond Massey in "East of Eden") about out of wedlock
pregnancy and bringing baby to term. Many of these children, thus,
either seek abortion (increasing abortion rate), commit suicide
(increasing suicide rate) or shoot their parents (increasing homicide
rate).

And anyway, look at the scatter in the data. It's horrendous. Those are not facts.

Oh, come on Bill. The correlation for some of these graphs are
probably in the .7 range. When I analyzed the relationship between
investment and GDP growth you accepted a correlation of .3 as a fact.
But even if there were nothing but scatter in these graphs
(correlations of 0) it would still represent a fact pertinent to my
point, which was simply that there is no evidence that the prevalence
of religious belief in a society is related to the quality of that
society. The absence of correlation between religiosity and measures
of societal quality is certainly a fact that supports this point.

I think the statistical trends in the data are mild and entirely
insufficient to accomplish the ends I want to see brought about. If we
eliminated religion entirely and let atheism triumph, do you think people
would instantly become sane and happy?

Of course not. All the data show is that societies with a low
proportion of religious people are just as well off -- often better
off -- than societies with a high proportion of religious people. It
seems to me that this kind of social level data can help us see the
kinds of system concepts that tend to work better than others. What
the data show, it seems to me, it that we can eliminate religious
concepts as being the kind of system concepts that we should encourage
if out goal is to produce better social results. My guess is that the
system concepts that are resulting in better social results in places
like Japan and Western Europe are what could be called "scientific",
the main feature of which is a willingness to evaluate social policies
based on observation of the results of those policies. I think the
problem with a religious system concept is that it leads to a dislike
of data, especially data that is inconsistent with preconceptions
about what should work.

Or you could say that in countries where the underlying culture is violent
and hostile, religion is commonly evoked as a way of combating such things
(ineffective, of course), and in countries with less underlying violence,
there is less reason to bring religion into play.

Yes, of course. That's a very likely possibility. Which is still
consistent with my point; adopting a religious system concept is not a
useful approach to solving social problems. What we want to get at, I
think, is the type of system concept that is prevalent in the brains
of a majority of individuals in those societies that are not violent
(and, given your suggestion above, that didn't have to turn to
religion).

I don't think religion has anything to do with making societies better or
worse. I see it as a symptom of the state of a society.

Maybe. Maybe not. I can see it working the other way as well.

The worse things
get, the more desperate the measures become; people will try anything that
might even hypothetically work when things get bad enough. But making them
stop using religion is not going to make the reasons they want to use it go
away.

I am not suggesting that we should make people stop using religion. I
am saying that we should encourage the development and adoption of
better system concepts. Part of this encouragement would involve
presenting data regarding the social benefits of system concepts, like
religion, that many people are pushing as being not only beneficial
but necessary for a quality society.

We ought to be looking at the evils that beset our society and
thinking about what to do about them, not focusing on the methods people
have been using (in vain, but what's the alternative?) to combat those
evils.

Some of the methods (system concepts) people have been using have been
far more successful than others. People who have developed certain
system concepts (non-scientific ones, for example) are not likely to
find your analysis of the causes of social evils persuasive if they
have adopted system concepts that incline them toward ignoring such
analyses in the first place. While I think such analyses are important
(that's why I continue to do research and modeling) I think it is also
important to try to encourage people to develop system concepts that
make them open to being persuaded by the results of those analyses.
And I think that that involves encouraging the adoption of the kind of
system concepts that are currently more prevalent in most of Europe
and Japan than they are in the US, whatever those concepts are, but
they are surely not religious ones.

I don't know if this is the case but it
certainly seems like it might be a place to start a scientific look at
the kinds of system concepts that result in the kinds of societies
that I'm sure most of us -- even those with religious system concepts
-- want to live in.

That's getting involved in the content. The particular system concepts are
not the problem; the problem is ignorance, confusion, and conflict...
We have a strategy that works anyway, without giving advice or
analyzing or even always making the right moves. It works a lot better than
creating more conflicts does.

I guess I don't understand your vision of a conflict free strategy for
working towards an improved society. Indeed, I don't see how we talk
about anything -- or, for that matter, do scientific research --
without creating conflict -- or, at least, disturbing a variable that
someone cares about deeply. Maybe you could explain what you have in
mind. Should I not have presented the data on religiosity and homicide
rates because it would be a disturbance to the religious zealots on
this net? Should I not have published my research on control behavior
because it would upset conventional psychologists? Should you not have
published your Psych Review paper for the same reason? Should I not
have posted the data on investment and growth because it would offend
some conventional economists? What should be the PCT approach to
helping people develop better societies? Just keep quiet? That would
certainly avoid conflict.

All I can say is, try thinking of it the other way around. System concepts
don't control behavior; just the opposite.

I'm sorry, I can't think of it that way. I'm a control theorist;-)

Best

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com

[From Kenny Kitzke (2008.01.29.1900)]

And, Rick, I found your posting it interesting since it does not pass the smell test. It lacks statistical veracity. And, the conclusions drawn by Mr. Paul defy common sense and experience. Two stinkers. And, it is not just me who smells them, none other than our PCT leader, Bill, smells them too. Mr. Paul’s life’s work and professional expertise credentials concerning dinosaurs seem irrelevant to this topic and further makes his analyses and conclusions questionable.

It is not important enough to me to spend my time refuting the paper or your conclusions. You have acknowledged your bias against God, Christians, religion, etc. You seem to enjoy tearing down people who have such references as naive or stupid or worse. You are free to do so here, but it may say more about you than about the people whose beliefs you malign.

I am content to let readers decide for themselves about me, you and our respective views. However, when any of us choose to post opinions or papers or studies by others that we find “interesting,” should we not also check their credibility? Since you did not, I did and posted what I found. And, up front, I make no claim that the critiques, or Wikipedia itself are trustworthy. If I wanted to refute your positions, I’d do the checking; but my gain (PCT talk) is too low for that. I accept that non-religious people or even societies can do either better or worse than religious ones in various selected variables at various times.

In a message dated 1/29/2008 2:02:03 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, rsmarken@GMAIL.COM writes:

···

[From Rick Marken (2008.01.28.2300)]

Kenny Kitzke (2008.01.28.2030)

Rick, did you check out the statistical prowess and objectivity of Mr. Paul
before you posted his study on CSGNet?

No. I just found the data interesting.

Here is some information from Wikipedia about Mr. Paul and the voracity of
his data selection:

What, are we going to swift boat Mr. Paul? :wink: And don’t you mean
“veracity”. He only had 18 data points; not very voracious.

Religion See also: Morality#Religion and morality

This paper has been criticized on statistical grounds, including the
seemingly arbitrary sampling of 18 countries out of more than 193 for
examination, its indirect measure of “religiosity” (the author’s term) and
its “chi-by-eye” interpretation of scatterplots rather than quantified
measures.[citation needed]

These don’t seen like particularly strong statistical bases for
criticism? The 18 countries were not selected to be a representative
sample of all countries; they were selected because they are all
advanced industrialized societies. The idea was too look at how
differences in the religiosity of people in these countries relates to
measures of social quality. The “indirect” measures of religiosity
seem like perfectly reasonable measures to me. I would bet any other
measures you select would be very highly correlated with these. And
just showing the scatterplots and not computing the associated r
values (you would use r, not chi square for these data), while
annoying, is not much of a basis for statistical criticism; anyone
reasonably familiar with statistics could make a pretty close estimate
of what the r value is for each of the scatter plots.

It looks to me from your quote of the Wiki piece like Mr. Paul struck
a nerve with just the people whose nerves should be struck; the Elmer
Gantys who think that people must be religious or society will come
unglued. These are the Pat Robertson’s of the world, who think that
the US should be based on a religious system concept – Christianity,
in particular. I know you are not one of these people, Kenny, because
you just like Christianity for yourself. But there are many people
around like Pat Robertson and I think good religious people like
yourself should really dissociate themselves from them and condemn
them.

Gary F. Jensen of Vanderbilt University is one of the scientists who
criticizes the methods used by Paul, including that “Paul’s analysis
generates the ‘desired results’ by selectively choosing the set of social
problems to include to highlight the negative consequences of religion”.

So does this Jensen fellow know of some social problems that are
negatively correlated with an increase in religion? Based on the next
statement it doesn’t seem like it.

In a response [4] to the study by Paul, he builds on and refines Paul’s
analysis. His conclusion, that focus only in the crime of homicide, is that
there is a correlation (and perhaps a causal relationship) of higher
homicide rates, not with Christianity, but with dualistic Christian beliefs,
something Jensen defines as the strong belief in all of the following : God,
heaven, devil and hell. Excerpt: “A multiple regression analysis reveals a
complex relationship with some dimensions of religiosity encouraging
homicide and other dimensions discouraging it.”

Could you get me the reference to that study. I’d love to see what he
actually did. It seems like Jensen is ignoring his own criticism of
Paul’s selection of only those social problems that will give the
desired results and analyzing one of those social problems – homicide
rate – using one or two more variables, which are measures of the
type of Christianity practiced in each country. I think he must be
including those variables in a multiple regression and finding that
some of them are related to homicide rate in the “right” way. With
only 17 degrees of freedom available for the analysis, I’d be
surprised if the partial correlation for any of these variables (looks
like there were only two – dualistic and non-dualistic Christianity)
was statistically significant. But maybe they are. That would be
interesting. It might suggest that Newton was right and the the
“right” kind of Christianity is unitarianism and that dualistic (it
was actually trinitarian for Newton) beliefs are the work of the
devil;-)

The wisdom of your proposal to have this study inform CSGNet about “good”
and “bad” system level references for a higher quality society requires some
evaluation. Here is what you said:

“The article seems relevant to the question of what are “good” system
concepts to develop, in the sense that they might lead to a better
society (system), in some sense.”

Your own representation of its relevance is so cautious, can it really be
worth mentioning as a serious proposition?

Obviously I thought it was. I still think its relevant suggests that
things don’t go haywire in society when a large proportion of people
in that society do not adopt religious system concepts. This, I think,
is a worthwhile result since there are still people seriously pushing
the idea that societies benefit from religion (see above). I don’t
understand why you are so upset about this data. You seem quite
comfortable with non-religious people; you have said that you think
non-religious people can be moral and good. The data I presented just
supports your view; non-religious people can be just as good – maybe
even better – than religious people. That doesn’t mean being
religious is bad; if it works for you then go with it. It just means
that it’s probably a bad idea to push religion as a solution to social
problems since they are obviously not.

“The attached paper is interesting because it suggests that having a
reference for no religion is definitely not a bad thing.”

I would hope we could do better than this to sharpen our knowledge of good
and bad systems concepts. While there is probably some bad religion, there
is probably also some bad science. I trust we can discern both if we hope
to do no harm?

I don’t think – and I didn’t say – that religion is a bad thing.
Religion is just something people do and I find it fascinating and
sometimes inspiring and uplifting (I love gospel music, I do the sing
along Messiah every year and I have enjoyed studying the Bible, all
books including apocrypha). The evidence I presented says nothing
about whether religion is good or bad; what it says is that it is
unnecessary for people to adopt religious system concepts in order to
live in a high quality society. I thought you already agreed with
that?

Best

Rick

Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com


Start the year off right. Easy ways to stay in shape in the new year.

Re: Developing a top (system)
level
[Martin Taylor 2008.01.29.22.59]

[From Rick Marken
(2008.01.28.2300)]

Rick, you seem to be ebing beset by scepticism from Bill about
the data scatter, and determined resistance from Kenny defending some
controlled perception, so I feel like donning shining armour an riding
to your rescue!

I do have one issue with your language, though. You keep talking
about the effect of “religion”, which is unsppuortable from
the paper, since other than Japan, the main religion in all of these
countries is Western Christianity. Your statements apply only to that
particular brand of religion, and I agree with you, the data show no
evidence at all that increased adherance to Western Christianity
increases the general welfare of the society as a whole.

Kenny Kitzke (2008.01.28.2030)

Rick, did you check out the statistical prowess and objectivity
of Mr. Paul
before you posted his study on
CSGNet?
…> This paper has been criticized on
statistical grounds, including the

seemingly arbitrary sampling of 18 countries out of more than 193
for

examination, its indirect measure of “religiosity” (the
author’s term) and

its “chi-by-eye” interpretation of scatterplots rather
than quantified

measures.[citation needed]

These don’t seen like particularly strong statistical bases for

criticism? The 18 countries were not selected to be a
representative

sample of all countries; they were selected because they are all

advanced industrialized societies.

Right, except that he added Portugal as a “representative”
Second World country. Looking at the current CIA World Factbook, which
isn’t entirely fair since its figures are at least a decade newer than
the data on which the study was based, so far as I can see, Greece is
the only sizeable country with a per capita income higher than
countries in th list (excluding Portugal). The “arbitrary
selection” put-down fails.

The idea was too look at how

differences in the religiosity of people in these countries relates
to

measures of social quality. The “indirect” measures of
religiosity
seem like perfectly reasonable measures
to me.

To me, too.

I would bet any other

measures you select would be very highly correlated with these.
And

just showing the scatterplots and not computing the associated r

values (you would use r, not chi square for these data), while

annoying, is not much of a basis for statistical criticism; anyone

reasonably familiar with statistics could make a pretty close
estimate

of what the r value is for each of the scatter plots.

I think you would have to do some linearizing transforms first,
but I’ve always tended to follow Ward Edwards’s argument that the only
really valid statistical test is the “Interocular Traumatic
Test”, which these scatterplots pass.

It looks to me from your quote of the Wiki piece like Mr. Paul
struck

a nerve with just the people whose nerves should be struck; the
Elmer

Gantys who think that people must be religious

substitute “Christian” for “religious”

Gary F. Jensen of Vanderbilt
University is one of the scientists who

criticizes the methods used by Paul, including that "Paul’s
analysis

generates the ‘desired results’ by selectively choosing the set
of social

problems to include to highlight the negative consequences of
religion".

It looks like a pretty good set to me. I would prefer to belong
to a society in which all these “social problems” went
away!

Always when you look at correlations, you have to be aware that
there may be a common cause, rather than one thing causing the other.
So I looked to see whether income disparity could perhaps be related.
One could imagine that it might lead to other social problems, though
how higher income disparity should lead to greater religiosity is not
obvious to me.

I took only the percentages in the paper for "Absolutely
believe in God’ and “Atheists and Agnostics”, and did
scatter plots agains the Gini index from the CIA World Factbook. Both
give similar plots, so I show only one of them. With the glaring
exception of Japan, the only country in the set where the dominant
religion is not Western Christian, it seems that high income
inequality goes along with high religiosity, which is exactly the
opposite of what you would expect from the teachings of Christ.

From this you might argue that if there is causality, it’s the
income disparity that drives the other social evils in the paper.
Against that view, there is the Japanese outlier, with a high Gini
index and low belief in God. In all the plots in the paper, Japan fits
right where it would be expected from the religiosity score. It would
be a big outlier if the income disparity were used instead. So, if
there’s a common cause for all the correlated phenomena, it also
causes what I consider to be another social ill – big income
disparity between the richest and poorest.

It seems odd that all these bad things that seem contrary to
Christian teachings tend to be worse in those countries where
Christian influence is strongest.

Anyway, I think Rick’s point is well made, that there’s no
evidence that social problems are ameliorated by deep penetration of
Cristianity into the culture.

Martin

FreeSnap001.jpg

[From Richard Kennaway (2008.01.30.1636 GMT)]

[Martin Taylor 2008.01.28.17.27]
I knoe this is very unscientific, but I find it hard to look at all those graphs and sustain the belief that correlation does not imply causation. When there's only one correlation, it's easy to say to oneself that there may well be a common factor that has an influence on both correlated variables, but when there are so many apparently independent variables being influenced the same way, it takes a real mental effort to retain that belief.

The variables "Absolutely believe in God", "Attend religious services", "Pray several times a week", and so on are hardly independent. I would expect them to be highly correlated, although the article does not mention this. There may also be correlations among the various measures of societal well-being. In which case, the correlations shown in the paper may be not many, but one. The paper does not address this issue.

And perhaps the causality goes the other way. The greater the societal well-being, the less it turns to religion. Well, it's at least as plausible as the opposite direction, and either way does not speak well of religion. But eyeballing the data and making up stories about it doesn't go very far, especially data of this poor quality.

The paper is suggestive but no more than that. To the atheist it will suggest that it hits the nail on the head, while to the religionist it will suggest that it's completely flawed.

These responses to Gregory Paul's paper are worth reading:
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2006/2006-1.html
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2006/2006-7.html

···

--
Richard Kennaway, jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk, Richard Kennaway
School of Computing Sciences,
University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.

[From Rick Marken (2008.01.30.1345)]

Kenny Kitzke (2008.01.29.1900)--

And, Rick, I found your posting it interesting since it does not pass the
smell test.

You're right. I didn't do the smell test because I don't know how to
do it. How do you do the smell test?

And, the conclusions drawn by
Mr. Paul defy common sense and experience. Two stinkers.

Interesting. I gave a talk at Ucla last week and presented the results
of my tracking experiments. The conclusions from those experiments
(that perceived cursor movements are not the cause of the mouse
movements that keep the cursor on target) defy common sense and
experience. My audience apparently did the smell test on those results
and concluded that my results did not pass. So my audience of academic
psychologists remains convinced of the correctness of the causal model
of behavior just as you, apparently, remain convinced of the social
benefits of religious belief. Wish I knew how to do the smell test.

And, it is not just me who smells them, none other than our PCT leader, Bill, smells them
too.

There's no accounting for taste;-)

It is not important enough to me to spend my time refuting the paper or your
conclusions.

That's good. So why don't you just stay out of this conversation? It
seems to upset you. I didn't present the data for your sake anyway. I
wasn't trying to upset you; I wasn't even thinking of you. I presented
them as a possible approach to evaluating the merits of adopting
particular system concepts.

You have acknowledged your bias against God, Christians, religion, etc.

I do have an acknowledged bias against untested belief, but not
against religion per se. As I said, I enjoy certain aspects of
religion, like the music, art and some of the literature. It's also
true that I'm an acknowledged non-fan of the God described in Hebrew
mythology (given his condoning of genocide, for example) but other
Gods are OK with with me. And I am certainly not biased against
Christians. Heck, I married one.

You seem to enjoy tearing down people who have such references as naive or stupid or
worse.

I don't believe I have ever torn down anyone for their beliefs; I have
tried to tear down some beliefs, but that's not tearing down the
people who harbor those beliefs.

I accept that non-religious people
or even societies can do either better or worse than religious ones in
various selected variables at various times.

Great. So what's your problem with the data? That's all that the data
suggest (and all I meant to suggest by presenting it). The data
suggest that various measures of the religiosity of a society are
unrelated (or moderately positively related) to measures of social
dysfunction. The data don't imply that religion is good or bad, right
or wrong. They just imply that, if one's goal is a society with a low
homicide rate, low abortion rate, equitable distribution of wealth
(thanks for that great Gini chart, Martin) and so on, getting people
to believe in God or go to church a lot and so on is not going to get
you there. It's not even clear that getting people to adopt any
particular system concept at all will help out. But it would be nice
to know why, say, almost every developed nation is doing better on so
many measures of social quality than is the US.

Best

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com

Re: Developing a top (system)
level
[Martin Taylor 2008.01.30.17.17]

[From Richard Kennaway (2008.01.30.1636
GMT)]

[Martin Taylor 2008.01.28.17.27]

I knoe this is very unscientific, but I find it hard to look at all
those graphs and sustain the belief that correlation does not imply
causation. When there’s only one correlation, it’s easy to say to
oneself that there may well be a common factor that has an influence
on both correlated variables, but when there are so many apparently
independent variables being influenced the same way, it takes a real
mental effort to retain that belief.

The variables “Absolutely believe in God”, “Attend
religious services”, “Pray several times a week”, and
so on are hardly independent. I would expect them to be highly
correlated, although the article does not mention this.

Yes, I would expect that, to the degree that when I did the
scatterplot against the Gini index I considered trying a principal
components analysis with the intention of using just the first
component of “religiosity” as the criterion variable. Figure
1 of the paper shows the correlations among the “religiosity”
variables to be moderately high, though less so than I would have
expected – perhaps from noisiness in the data collection.

There may also be correlations
among the various measures of societal well-being. In which
case, the correlations shown in the paper may be not many, but
one.

On the other hand, whereas the various “religious”
criteria intuitively do have a common basis in the dogma of the
various factions of Christianity, the different social ills have no
such immediately evident common cause. What are the “social
ills”? Homicide rate, Teen suicides, under-5 mortality rate, life
expectancy (these latter two have an obvious commonality), two teenage
STD rates, teen pregnacy and teen abortion (all of which have an
obvious common cause). I see four classes of evils that don’t have an
intuitively obvious common cause. And I add inequality of income as
another strong correlate of Chrisitan religiosity, which has no
obvious common cause with the others, though it could be asserted as
being the common cause for the other social ills, were it not for the
strongly outlying position of Japan.

The paper does not address this
issue.

Nor need it. If they are indeed correlated, as one might expect
when many variables all correlate with another, then one has to look
to see what is/are the common factor(s). In this particular case, I
suspect there is a complex web of influences.

And perhaps the causality goes the other
way. The greater the societal well-being, the less it turns to
religion.

I’m inclined to believe that this is true, and that there’s a
low-gain positive feedback loop. It does seem, historically, that when
a sociaety is under threat, people tend to turn to religion. The
quetion raised by the data in the paper is whether religion actually
helps to ameliorate the social evils in the way that the Christian
evangelists would have their followers believe.

Well, it’s at least as plausible
as the opposite direction, and either way does not speak well of
religion. But eyeballing the data and making up stories about it
doesn’t go very far, especially data of this poor quality.

The paper is suggestive but no more than that.

Quite so.

To the atheist it will suggest that
it hits the nail on the head, while to the religionist it will suggest
that it’s completely flawed.

These responses to Gregory Paul’s paper are worth
reading:
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2006/2006-1.html
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2006/2006-7.html

You might like to comment from a PCT point of view on Riano Smith
and Mach’s: “The methodological assumption
inherent in this inference [that the religiosity of a society is
related to the religiosity of its individuals] is that the religiosity
or secularity of a political system is reducible to the religiosity or
secularity of its individuals as measured through survey questions.
Such analysis leads Paul to commit what social scientists call the
individualistic or reductionist fallacy: the error of making
inferences about collectivities based upon
individuals.”

Looking at the rest of the paper, I would
say they followed a few red herring and trapped them in their lair.
Had I been a referee for the journal, I would not have recommended
publication.

The second link is to a much better paper, by Gary Jensen, which
has some possibly valid criticism, notably of the selection of social
ills in Paul’s study. The conclusion from that critique is that not
all social ills can be attributed to Christian religiosity. In fact,
none of them can be, from the evidence at hand, though Jensen’s paper
does make it seem more lilely. The other interesting point of Jensen’s
paper is the refinement of religiosity to a particular version.
Refinement is usually a good thing. I think his final comment on Paul
is pretty close: “Paul’s “first look”
at popular religion as a positive correlate of homicide is partially
correct. But, a “closer look” supports a more complex, but quite
meaningful, set of findings that accord some validity to each
perspective.”

Martin