Rationality As Neo-catholicism

From my perspective, the so-called "rationality" community is a reinvention of catholicism by atheists
- Millenarian beliefs
  - Rationalists believe that the world will be ended either by a UFAI eating humanity or by a FAI ushering an "optimized" future
  - They believe that this will happen soon
  - This accords with many of the beliefs of the early Catholic church
    - Look at the period from AD 500 to AD 1000
    - Belief that the world was about to end
    - Belief that the elect would be ushered into Jesus' Kingdom of Heaven, while non-believers would be damned
  - Both sets of beliefs arise from many of the same sources
    - Disruption to society
      - Fall of Roman empire
      - Technological disruptions to "middle class" society of the late-19th and 20th centuries
    - Growing sense of the world as becoming a sinful, condemned place
- Devoted to the teachings of charismatic early leaders
  - Catholicism
    - St. Paul/St. Peter
    - Early medieval saints
  - Rationality
    - Robin Hanson
    - Eliezer Yudkowsy
    - Nick Bostrom
    - Scott Alexander
- Pressure to withdraw from the world rather than engage with it
  - Early church was quite apolitical
  - "Politics is the Mindkiller" = "Render unto Caesar"
  - Desire to build parallel institutions rather than interact with or reform existing institutions
    - In the medieval era, the Church was almost a separate pan-state unto itself
      - Owned vast amounts of land
      - Had its own farms, herds, etc
      - Abbeys and monastaries separated themselves as much as possible from the secular, "fallen" world
    - Rationality is tending in the same direction
      - CFAR/MIRI hold themselves separate from existing "fallen" academia and engage with it on an arms-length basis
      - Leverage - what is even going on there?
      - Group houses can be seen as rationalist monasteries
But, maybe it's a good thing?
- Catholicism saved Europe
  - Preserved continent-wide traditions and institutions through moral, rather than physical authority
  - Established codes of chivalry that were partially successful at limiting the destructive effects of war
- We need a new Catholicism
  - Existing religious memes are spent (at least in the West)
    - Memetic immunity?
  - Existing religions are too backwards looking to be useful for a technological future
  - We are already seeing troubling moral issues as systems become increasingly autonomous
  - Existing political systems are already showing strains in dealing with the effects of automation
  - These strains are only going to get worse, and it's not clear that rationalists, no matter how much power they obtain, will be able to fix society
  - Perhaps the correct thing to do is what the Roman Catholic church did after the fall of the Roman Empire
    - Stand aside from existing society
    - Build institutions that can survive social decay
    - Be there at the beginning to influence what comes next
- The "collapse" of the Roman Empire, viewed in real-time was more of a long, slow decline than a collapse as we would think of it
  - Took hundreds of years from the peak of the empire, under Hadrian, to the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths
  - Plenty of time for a "slow-burning" movement to establish institutions that preserve culture and knowledge