{"id":538,"date":"2006-11-11T17:27:35","date_gmt":"2006-11-11T22:27:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2006\/11\/11\/optimization-multiplicity\/"},"modified":"2006-11-11T17:34:49","modified_gmt":"2006-11-11T22:34:49","slug":"optimization-multiplicity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2006\/11\/11\/optimization-multiplicity\/","title":{"rendered":"Optimization Multiplicity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Religion fascinates me. I am not religious myself, but I sometimes yearn to be. It’s fashionable among the intellectual set to disparage religion, especially when the discussion is political, but having grown up in a religious town, I try to stay away from that (not always successfully<\/a>). I knew lots of good people whose faith is inspiring to me. <\/p>\n

And I like the religious system in a lot of ways. It emphasizes the needs of the community over the needs of the individual. In fact, it creates community – the first thing people do upon moving someplace new is to find a new church to belong to, as that is what anchors them and gives them a base to explore their new environment from. Religion also presents a coherent world view so that its adherents don’t have to waste time and energy trying to make sense of the world; they are given a filter to work with<\/a>, which allows them to spend their cognitive effort<\/a> elsewhere.<\/p>\n

I had a discussion about this at work several months ago, and was surprised to hear myself defending religion. My point in that discussion was that religion is optimizing for different things than egghead intellectuals believe in. It’s optimizing for stability of community, for hierarchy (in the Catholic Church at least), for commitment and continuity, for long-range planning. And it’s very effective at that; I was filled with awe and wonder when I was at Salisbury Cathedral<\/a>, where workers spent two lifetimes to create this building with a 40-story tower as a monument to their faith. It’s phenomenal. I can’t imagine the level of commitment necessary to work on something that won’t be completed until decades after you have died. <\/p>\n

Judging religion based on intellectual standards such as freedom of thought or technological advancement is unfair. That’s not what it’s about. For what it’s designed to do (or at least what it’s grown into), it’s excellent. Honestly, religious people I know tend to be more happy and content than my other friends. They have a strong community. They do more charity work and more volunteer work. They are, in most ways, better people than I am. If we want a society where people are happy and content, where they will work hard but not expect a reward in this lifetime, where they help each other out, where things are stable and long-lasting, religion is a very good solution.<\/p>\n

So why do people, including myself, dislike religion? Because there are many things it sacrifices in the pursuit of those goals. It may not be fair to judge religion based on the things it sacrifices, as it is not concerned with those, but I can still prefer another system of thought that emphasizes goals that I value more than those of religion. That does not mean that religion is inherently bad. It just means that religion, as a system, is optimizing for different things than I value.<\/p>\n

This is the key point I want to make. Systems can not be good at everything. Any system must have particular goals for which it is optimizing. If it does not, or if those goals change, the system isn’t good at anything. This holds true for software systems (where I have more experience), and for companies (more on this in another post), but I think it also holds true at the level of societal structures such as religion. Since we don’t have unlimited resources, we can’t have everything – we have to choose what we value. <\/p>\n

So what are the reasons I have for not being religious? It sounds like a pretty great deal, doesn’t it? Happiness, comfort, community, self-sacrifice – what’s not to like? I think there’s a lot of value in religion, and I’m discovering more all the time<\/a>. But I can’t get over the idea that faith trumps reason. There are elements of religion that can not be questioned. And I question many many things in life, although not everything<\/a>. The idea that I’d not be able to change my mind tomorrow, even if I discover something new, really bothers me. But it may be that I’m just a commitment-phobe; in the pursuit of having all options available to me at all times, I end up choosing nothing (this is stolen from David Brooks’s discussion of the bourgeous bohemians’ quest for spiritual fulfillment in Bobos in Paradise<\/a>, which prompted me to dust off this half-written post and finish it). <\/p>\n

Which system is better? Religion or relentless individuality? It’s impossible to say. One isn’t better or the other. They are optimizing for different things. It’s a choice of what you value. Judging either by the standards of the other would make it look like a failure, but that would be using the wrong criteria, like judging a track meet by aesthetics. First you have to figure out what you want to value, and then you can figure out how to construct a system that delivers that.<\/p>\n

P.S. It frightens me that that last paragraph relates well to the reading in my management class – Henry Lucas has a theory of Conversion Effectiveness that says almost the same thing. I had already planned to do a follow-up post on relating these ideas to management, but it’s weird to discover these links being created in my brain by my classes. New frames are being put in place, and I’m not always aware of it. Weird. <\/p>\n

P.P.S. In case you haven’t, you should go read the comments on my last post<\/a>, as my friends are way smarter than me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Religion fascinates me. I am not religious myself, but I sometimes yearn to be. It’s fashionable among the intellectual set to disparage religion, especially when the discussion is political, but having grown up in a religious town, I try to stay away from that (not always successfully). I knew lots of good people whose faith […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-people","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}