https://blog.reaction.la/faith/intelligence-and-religiosity/

Intelligence and religiosity
June 5th, 2024

According to statistics that are likely out of date and obsolete there is a
negative 0.2 correlation between religiosity and intelligence. A 0.2
correlation is substantial.

Of course, this relies on the definition of woke and progressivism as not
religions. There is apt to be a positive correlation between adherence to
the state religion, and intelligence, because you have to adhere, or at
least pass as adhering, to the state religion, in order to be a member of
the state or quasi state elite. And smart people are apt to do whatever it
takes to get into the elite.

So, the state religion will have more of the smarties, and the other
religions necessarily less. Unless, of course, the state religion is really
stupid, and anyone smart is suspected of heresy, and therefore is not
allowed into the state and quasi state elite.

For several decades, an IQ north of 140 locked you out of the elite. Then an
IQ north of 130. These days it is starting to look more like an IQ north of
100, and it takes an IQ of at least 105 to make stuff work, to do almost any
productive task unsupervised and self organised.

Because a state is necessarily based on a synthetic tribe, because faiths
are synthetic tribes, and any synthetic tribe is going to have the
characteristics of a faith, it has always been the case that adherence is
required of members of the state and quasi state elite, and all states
always are going to require adherence. Always have and always will.
Separation of Church and State is always a lie. The question is always: what
is the State Religion to be?

But some religions are considerably dumber than others.

The French Church of Reason, which was the enlightenment acknowledging what
it is apt to deny, that it is a religion, was clever silly. Its priesthood
had to be very very smart, in order to understand the very clever
rationalisations for believing very silly things.

Similarly, Orthodox Judaism. You have to be mighty smart to understand the
reasoning as to why gross violation of the Lord's commandments constitutes
the strictest adherence to them. As I have often remarked, the Talmud is in
large part a vast collection of lawsuits against God which the Jews believe
they won and God lost.

It is striking that Orthodox Jewish contribution to science and technology
is absolutely insignificant, while Jewish contribution is considerable, and
often very impressive. I conjecture that if you believe in a God that can be
fooled and bamboozled with too clever by half rationalisations, you believe
in a nature that can be fooled and bamboozled by clever lawyer tricks and
bureaucratic bullshit, which as Richard Feynman observed, leads to
attempting to launch rockets that blow up. As Feynman observed, nature
cannot be fooled. Islam suffers a related a problem, because of its belief
in a capricious and changeable God. If you believe in a God that can change
and lie, you believe that Nature can change and lie. When debugging code,
you are too likely to give up on Schrodinger bugs, like the infamous bug
where LibreOffice could not print on Tuesdays, which kept being marked "will
not fix".

Unix and Linux has a notorious problem with reliably identifying file types,
which has led to no end of bugs, due to shotgun parsing. It should have been
immediately suspected that this was yet another one of those. In retrospect,
the bug was not a Schrodinger bug at all. A Schrodinger bug is never a
Schrodinger bug in retrospect. It is always something that should have been
one of the usual suspects. I don't think Islam was to blame for the "will
not fix" dismissal of this bug, but Islam encourages the mindset that led to
"will not fix". "$#!% just happens, nothing one can do about it". When one
Linux program is passing a temporary file to another Linux program created
by a different group of engineers, and something funny happens, file type
misidentification should be on one's list of the usual suspects.

The primary cause of Boeing's Starliner moon mission just not getting off
the ground, parts falling of Boeing airliners, and repeated "unusual extreme
turbulence" events severely injuring Boeing airliner passengers and crew,
seems to be tech lead Shaniqua, but tech lead Shaniqua's "$#!% just happens,
nothing one can do about it" mindset is clearly visible. Nasa gave launch
approval with a "will not fix. $#!% just happens, nothing one can do about
it" failure in the valve system, on the basis that the observed failures
would not have led to any great harm. But if one valve fails mysteriously,
and it does no great harm, another valve could fail mysteriously, and cause
catastrophic mission failure. This is similar to what led to the Challenger
disaster. They figured burn through in the Challenger booster was not doing
enough harm to lead to catastrophe -- but had no idea what was causing burn
through, or why some burns burned further through than others. And one day
it burned all the way through, which some people accurately predicted, and
permanently lost their careers for accurately predicting.

Getting back on topic. The enlightenment faith was a very clever religion, a
too clever by half religion, a clever silly religion. And an excellent
example of this was the extraordinarily brilliant philosopher George Bernard
Shaw, who believed in all sorts of completely stupid things. For example he
visited Soviet Russia during the great Holodomor famine, and believed that
the Soviet Union was doing a great job of looking after the peasant masses
and that food was abundant.

But as our officially unofficial faith became holier and holier, it became
sillier and sillier, and people just gave up concocting and learning clever
rationalisations. The last clever rationaliser was Scott Alexander, who came
up with no end of amazingly clever rationales for the grossest stupidity,
and was predictably purged on suspicion of heresy.

Anyone really smart in the elite is really old or recently died, for example
Larry Summers and Kissinger. The slightly younger ones, for example Hillary
Clinton, are midwits, and the new generation of the elite is just stupid. It
looks like the mean IQ of the Harvard intake is south of a hundred.

The Dark Enlightenment is smart and takes as its fundamental principle
engaging with empirical reality through the scientific method, rather than
finding clever reasons to ignore reality after the fashion of the
Enlightenment and peer review. (Though these days I increasingly see peer
review ignoring reality without bothering to find clever rationales for
doing so.) The Dark Enlightenment is dark because, as Christians would say,
mankind is fallen, and as the Dark Enlightenment says the same thing in game
theoretic language, attaining cooperate cooperate equilibrium on a large
scale is difficult.

Science is inherently a priestly profession. And if the official religion is
unduly focused on the next world, it is apt to be stupid. And we see a lot
stupid variants of Christianity. What made late seventeenth century, early
eighteenth century Anglicanism such a great religion is it managed to
endorse the scientific method as explained in the Sceptical Chymist. If
nature is the direct manifestation of the will of a God that cannot change
and cannot lie, then someone who directly has observed nature with his own
hands and own eyes has special authority, and peer review and priestly
consensus does not. Recall that the Puritans rioted and attempted to shut
down the Royal Society, because the King was granting the scientific method
status that they felt properly belonged to priests and prophets.

Well it does properly belong to priests and prophets. Prophets like Elon
Musk and Richard Stallman, and priest prophets like Linus Torvalds. It
belongs to the technomages. And the official state religion just has to make
its peace with such people, as Charles the Second's Anglicanism managed to
do. Newton was rightly ordained and rightly buried in Westminster Abbey,
even though his intellectual curiosity led to him dabbling in no end of
heresies. The state and the state religion just has to do its best to
include such difficult people in the state religion, because it has to
include them in the state and quasi state elite, or else the state will wind
up with a stupid state religion and a hostile elite outside the state and
state religion.

A lot of versions of Christianity are infamously somewhat stupid: Young
Earth creationism is faithful to an overliteral interpretation of scripture
and is stupid. I have good authority for arguing that it is overliteral,
since Saint Augustine argued it was overliteral, neglecting the spiritual
meaning for an interpretation as history and geography, long before anyone
knew it was stupid. Mariolatory is stupid and a gross violation of scripture
and Christian morality.

Right now we have problem with perverts in the schools, in child protective
services, in the scouts, in every quasi state institution that can give a
pervert access to other people's children, with the schools and similar
services sexually mutilating other people's children. And Christians are
very quiet about this. By and large, it is the stupidest versions of
Christianity that are quietest. Russian Orthodoxy is not quiet, but the
credit for that belongs to Putin's nukes, not to its doctrines. It is a lot
safer to criticise Western state immorality and heresy when located in
Russia.