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.)
I FINALLY got this watched all the way through, and I think there's a lot to it. It's interesting to ask whether the Mormons will be able to sustain this as they grow beyond the tens of millions into the hundreds of millions.
I'd be interested in this woman's take on the social function of Catholicism, since we do or did -- or even invented! -- a number of the things she points out. (The requirement to attend your geographic parish, for example, was a real thing! But we've since dropped it.) But Catholicism is not doing those things as consistently and effectively as Mormonism -- and our retention has plunged and our parishes are no longer the local social fabric. It's interesting to wonder why, and which of these facts is causative.
I don't know her take on Catholicism; I believe she was mainstream Protestant of some description after leaving the LDS Church.
I would note that at one time the requirement to attend a geographic parish was, I think, not something that particularly needed enforcing by the institution; it was enforced by travel time! (I can't recall if she brings this up.) But as cars, and other transit options, became more available, people became able to choose between more places to attend services.
What I can say is that I live very nearby both a Catholic church building and a Protestant one. Since leaving Catholicism I have spent more time in the latter, not for any services, but because the Protestant building has a basement hall, and the minister there opens it up on occasion for community events even to people who are not of his denomination and have never professed its creed. (Meanwhile, the one time I got to ask the local Catholic Archbishop a question about church expansion decades ago, and being very young and not knowing the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, I asked something along the lines of whether said Protestant church was being taken into account, and got a very curt, dismissive answer of "They're Protestant".) So when it comes to that sort of community function, where I am the Protestants (at least that particular denomination) are doing it better than the Catholics. (The Catholic building has no similar facility, to be sure, but it was renovated some years ago and none was added at that time. I do not, however, know if none was planned or if they applied but were denied the necessary permits by relevant government authorities.) Whether this has resulted in any conversions, I do not know.
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.)
I FINALLY got this watched all the way through, and I think there's a lot to it. It's interesting to ask whether the Mormons will be able to sustain this as they grow beyond the tens of millions into the hundreds of millions.
I'd be interested in this woman's take on the social function of Catholicism, since we do or did -- or even invented! -- a number of the things she points out. (The requirement to attend your geographic parish, for example, was a real thing! But we've since dropped it.) But Catholicism is not doing those things as consistently and effectively as Mormonism -- and our retention has plunged and our parishes are no longer the local social fabric. It's interesting to wonder why, and which of these facts is causative.
Anyway, nice video.
I don't know her take on Catholicism; I believe she was mainstream Protestant of some description after leaving the LDS Church.
I would note that at one time the requirement to attend a geographic parish was, I think, not something that particularly needed enforcing by the institution; it was enforced by travel time! (I can't recall if she brings this up.) But as cars, and other transit options, became more available, people became able to choose between more places to attend services.
What I can say is that I live very nearby both a Catholic church building and a Protestant one. Since leaving Catholicism I have spent more time in the latter, not for any services, but because the Protestant building has a basement hall, and the minister there opens it up on occasion for community events even to people who are not of his denomination and have never professed its creed. (Meanwhile, the one time I got to ask the local Catholic Archbishop a question about church expansion decades ago, and being very young and not knowing the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, I asked something along the lines of whether said Protestant church was being taken into account, and got a very curt, dismissive answer of "They're Protestant".) So when it comes to that sort of community function, where I am the Protestants (at least that particular denomination) are doing it better than the Catholics. (The Catholic building has no similar facility, to be sure, but it was renovated some years ago and none was added at that time. I do not, however, know if none was planned or if they applied but were denied the necessary permits by relevant government authorities.) Whether this has resulted in any conversions, I do not know.