Are you religious by chance? I have been trying to understand why some individuals are more susceptible to it.

crystal_revenge 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

Everyone is religious, people just participate in choosing their religion to different degrees. This famous quote from David Foster Wallace is perhaps more relevant now then ever:

> In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

—David Foster Wallace

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bogdan 7 days ago | parent [-]

I politely disagree with everything in your post.

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setsewerd 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's worth reminding readers here that David Foster Wallace committed suicide, so perhaps some of his views on topics like this were not the healthiest.

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satyrun 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Then you haven't thought very hard about the things you do worship.

It is not possible to be more of an atheist than myself but there are all these things I notice I worship with religious conviction instead.

You have your own rituals too. You are just calling them something else.

There has to be biological hard wiring for people to believe so much religious nonsense across space and time.

It is delusional to believe you don't believe in all kinds of similar nonsense if someone from 500 years in the future was looking at your beliefs.

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nameless_me 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

I agree with you. When I was younger, I spent many many years in evangelical Christian work and went to seminary. It is not difficult to manipulate people especially if one orates well and echoes the audience's pre-existing beliefs.

There appears to be a neurological wired-in need to 'believe' whether in God or UFOs (think Mulder in X-Files) which I think is a evolutionary survival mechanism to have an advantage to cope with the uncertainty of primitive survival. Any psychological edge such as believing we are special (chosen people arose during nation-building phases of cultural development) or that some supreme being will protect us against threats or enemies unifies and motivates feats involving danger.

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xordon 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Rituals and beliefs are not the same as "worship with religious conviction".

I ritually shower every day and I have beliefs like, when water comes out of the faucet it will fall to the floor because of gravity. That is wildly different than worshipping the water or the shower.

I suspect you have a very strange definition of the word worship.

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Xss3 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I dont worship anything. Simple as that. What could you possibly consider the average atheist to worship?

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neom 6 days ago | parent [-]

Capitalism, family, pets, foodieism, pick your thing, most of us bow to the temple of something.

	▲	Xss3 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Nope. Swing and a miss. Looking after pets or children isn't bowing to anything nor are they temples. You need to check your definitions.

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kaivi 8 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not at all, I think the big part was just my unfamiliarity with insuretech plus the unexpected change in gpt-4 behavior.

I'm assuming here, but would you say that better critical thinking skills would have helped me avoid spending that Saturday with ChatGPT? It is often said that critical thinking is the antidote to religion, but I have a suspicion that there's a huge prerequisite which is general broad knowledge about the world.

A long ago, I once fell victim for a scam when I visited SE Asia for the first time. A pleasant man on the street introduced himself as a school teacher, showed me around, then put me in a tuktuk which showed me around some more before dropping me off in front of a tailor shop. Some more work inside of the shop, a complimentary bottle of water, and they had my $400 for a bespoke coat that I would never have bought otherwise. Definitely a teaching experience. This art is also how you'd prime an LLM to produce the output you want.

Surely, large amounts of other atheist nerds must fall for these types of scams every year, where a stereotypical christian might spit on the guy and shoo him away.

I'm not saying that being religious would not increase one's chances of being susceptible, I just think that any idea will ring "true" in your head if you have zero counterfactual priors against it or if you're primed to not retrieve them from memory. That last part is the essence of what critical thinking actually is, in my opinion, and it doesn't work if you lack the knowledge. Knowing that you don't know something is also a decent alternative to having the counter-facts when you're familiar with an adjacent domain.

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infecto 8 days ago | parent | next [-]

Thanks for responding and I hope my question was not read the wrong way. Genuinely curious the potential differences in folks.

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rgovostes 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Out of curiosity, was it James Tailor in Bangkok? I was whisked there on my last day by my hired guide while she stopped for an “errand”. It struck me as a preposterous hustle, but now I’m curious if this is a common ploy.

	▲	kaivi 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It was Royal Boss Taylor, I still have it saved on Google Maps. There are a lot of these tailors, but an innumerable amount of other scams too.
	▲	setsewerd 7 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not the parent commenter, but this scam is super common in South Asia in general. It was attempted on me a couple times in India, but luckily (and in some ways, unfortunately) by that point I'd seen such a wide range of scams there that my shields were always up against potential scams.

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neom 8 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not op but for me, not at all, don't care much for religion... "Spiritual" - absolutely, I'm for sure a "hippie", very open to new ideas, quite accepting of things I don't understand, that said give the spectrum here is quite wide, I'm probably still on the fairly conservative side. I've never fallen for a scam, can spot them a mile away etc.

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rogerkirkness 8 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I would research teleological thinking, some people's brains have larger regions associated with teleological thinking than others.