The last part is what gets me about this discussion. In almost every country, there are a handful of ultra-small but also ultra-fertile religious groups with very high retention rates, sometimes 90% and more. I also think that most of them will implode sooner or later, but only a single group has to resist modern culture. It's a fundamentally rigged game.
And as you say, in Israel we can already see it play out in real time. I can't tell you which group will win in any particular country with any confidence, yet it feels like a foregone conclusion that one will. And the group will most likely be FUCKING WEIRD to anyone with average modern sensibilities - at best, if not frightening. Mind you, it doesn't even need to be religious in the traditional sense, it could be some specific subgroup of natalists for example.
Your footnote #2 doesn’t make sense to me. Why carry the data on to such an unrecognizable year if equilibrium is met so much sooner? Showing data from an extrapolation out 3000 years just seems……… Useless? Meaningless?
You also talk about how the data from today won’t be the same data from 100 years from now let alone 1000 years or more. Is there any value in trying to extrapolate between the rates of answers in 2024 to 2024? To try and build a two-point trend line?
The honest answer: because you don't know in advance when the equilibrium will be reached, and running the simulation for 100 generations instead of 40 or whatever guarantees you arrive at it, and it's trivially easy to run. Writing the code takes a bit, but, once written, execution is measured in milliseconds.
Since it's an asymptote, I guess you could argue that, technically, equilibrium is *never* reached, it just slowly approaches its limit to more and more significant figures, but that's dumb, whatever, equilibrium is reached after ~20-30 generations, which I have somewhat haughtily defined as 28-year periods.
> Is there any value in trying to extrapolate between the rates of answers in 2024 to 2024? To try and build a two-point trend line?
How fertility and conversion rates have changed for U.S. adults over the past 10 years is definitely of interest! Eyeballing it, I didn't see any especially obvious trends, but that doesn't mean much.
I guess I’m not surprised the data was ran that far into the future but I ^am^ surprised the initial article’s editors didn’t ask her to truncate the headline down to a meaningful length of time.
Well, if you look at the original article, all she does is report the equilibrium, because she really didn't want anybody confused about the idea that this was a projection into the future. I had no idea how many generations were involved until I opened the code myself.
Like any self-respecting revolutionary, I am honor-bound to insist that I have made no mistakes and all was done to the glory of the revolution, so “religioms” is therefore the glorious new revolutionary spelling.
Two months later I have another comment: here's an ex-LDS (she spent decades in the LDS Church and ultimately left it in part to escape an abusive marriage), ex-Christian atheist on why she thinks religious affiliation has been declining in the United States, but the LDS Church has remained successful.
In brief, she argues that mainstream Christian churches have ceased to serve a social function in the community, but the LDS Church has retained a structure that permits them to do so. People are leaving organized Christianity not because they have ceased to believe in the basic tenets of the faith but because they are no longer receiving any of the social benefits of being part of a local congregation, because local congregations, at least in her part of the United States, no longer exist as they once did.
(I am assuming she is primarily talking about Protestant Christianity, but she draws no distinction between various denominations.)
My only remark is that the title made me think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probably_(South_Park)
The last part is what gets me about this discussion. In almost every country, there are a handful of ultra-small but also ultra-fertile religious groups with very high retention rates, sometimes 90% and more. I also think that most of them will implode sooner or later, but only a single group has to resist modern culture. It's a fundamentally rigged game.
And as you say, in Israel we can already see it play out in real time. I can't tell you which group will win in any particular country with any confidence, yet it feels like a foregone conclusion that one will. And the group will most likely be FUCKING WEIRD to anyone with average modern sensibilities - at best, if not frightening. Mind you, it doesn't even need to be religious in the traditional sense, it could be some specific subgroup of natalists for example.
Your footnote #2 doesn’t make sense to me. Why carry the data on to such an unrecognizable year if equilibrium is met so much sooner? Showing data from an extrapolation out 3000 years just seems……… Useless? Meaningless?
You also talk about how the data from today won’t be the same data from 100 years from now let alone 1000 years or more. Is there any value in trying to extrapolate between the rates of answers in 2024 to 2024? To try and build a two-point trend line?
The honest answer: because you don't know in advance when the equilibrium will be reached, and running the simulation for 100 generations instead of 40 or whatever guarantees you arrive at it, and it's trivially easy to run. Writing the code takes a bit, but, once written, execution is measured in milliseconds.
Since it's an asymptote, I guess you could argue that, technically, equilibrium is *never* reached, it just slowly approaches its limit to more and more significant figures, but that's dumb, whatever, equilibrium is reached after ~20-30 generations, which I have somewhat haughtily defined as 28-year periods.
> Is there any value in trying to extrapolate between the rates of answers in 2024 to 2024? To try and build a two-point trend line?
How fertility and conversion rates have changed for U.S. adults over the past 10 years is definitely of interest! Eyeballing it, I didn't see any especially obvious trends, but that doesn't mean much.
I guess I’m not surprised the data was ran that far into the future but I ^am^ surprised the initial article’s editors didn’t ask her to truncate the headline down to a meaningful length of time.
Well, if you look at the original article, all she does is report the equilibrium, because she really didn't want anybody confused about the idea that this was a projection into the future. I had no idea how many generations were involved until I opened the code myself.
"Fortunately, I have slain my editors."
"The chart as a whole is a disaster for all theist religioms."
Maybe you should have left one or two of them alive?
Like any self-respecting revolutionary, I am honor-bound to insist that I have made no mistakes and all was done to the glory of the revolution, so “religioms” is therefore the glorious new revolutionary spelling.
Two months later I have another comment: here's an ex-LDS (she spent decades in the LDS Church and ultimately left it in part to escape an abusive marriage), ex-Christian atheist on why she thinks religious affiliation has been declining in the United States, but the LDS Church has remained successful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYC_Sa3lb8Y
In brief, she argues that mainstream Christian churches have ceased to serve a social function in the community, but the LDS Church has retained a structure that permits them to do so. People are leaving organized Christianity not because they have ceased to believe in the basic tenets of the faith but because they are no longer receiving any of the social benefits of being part of a local congregation, because local congregations, at least in her part of the United States, no longer exist as they once did.
(I am assuming she is primarily talking about Protestant Christianity, but she draws no distinction between various denominations.)