I’m someone who values nature strongly, in a personal way. Spending time in nature is my no. 1 favorite thing to do. But I’ve also think my personal love for nature has very little to do with the truth, or with my ethical understanding of the world, and I think nature is very bad for most sentient beings. I guess that for most people that personal value and their understanding of the world are interlinked.
Another view (which I hope you’ll explore) put to me by a colleague is that, for many people, nature seems to have taken on the role of religion. They talk about nature as if it’s sacred: nature ‘knows best’, has an unquantifiable value, and is above humans (these people will talk about human attempts to improve nature as “playing God”). I guess people like a bit of mystery and wonder. If we know and control everything, then there’s less to be curious about and less to imagine. And maybe they also like the idea of nature continuing after we’re gone—so there are a lot of parallels to religion you can draw.
There are definitely some people out there (and these people are overrepresented among hardcore environmentalist types, of course) who seem to indeed have adopted “nature” as a kind of hippie religion that seems to have originated (or intensified) sometime in the 1970s. But this doesn’t strike me as explaining all or most of how ordinary people value nature:
even many people who believe ACTUAL religions, or who have other sorts of very strong ideologies that provide structure and meaning to their lives, nevertheless often seem to value nature highly in the ways Tandena outlined (spending time visiting national parks, sometimes voting for and donating to conservation programs, sometimes watching documentaties about the natural world, etc). So it can’t be that valuing nature is purely a religion-substitute filling a psychological hole, otherwise we’d see a much stronger anti-correlation between religious/ideological/etc people vs nature-enjoyers?
Many people certainly seem to treat respect for nature as a “sacred value”, and treat the idea of sacrificing nature for other goals as a “taboo tradeoff”. I sympathize with you that this is annoying and economically inefficient. But many things are considered “sacred values” or “taboo tradeoffs” in human culture, and this doesn’t make them 100% religious \ fake. For instance, people often treat “saving lives” or “protecting children” as sacred values and act as if any related tradeoffs are taboo (even though we are constantly trading off lives vs other things in many parts of society). But that doesn’t mean that “saving lives” is like a secular religion. In general, many things can be compared to a religion, but IMO this is often less informative than it appears. (“EA is like a religion! It has priests: 80k career advisers, temples: EAG conference venues, commandments: blog posts,...”)
I am forgetting the exact Yudkowsky essay(s) where he lambasts people for simply worshipping the mysterious (aka their own state of ignorance) and acting like additional knowledge inevitably ruins the supposedly sublime experience of ineffability that makes life worth living, or whatever. I agree with yudkowsky that it’s dumb when people are like that, and I agree with you that many people take that attitude to nature. But many others seem eager to learn more about the natural world and appreciate it in a deeper, more rationalist-approved way. For instance: scientists studying creatures, birders (and other hobby groups like people who like to fish, or scuba dive, or etc), little kids learning about zoo animals, anybody who watches nature documentaries or reads books about nature-related stuff or reads the posted informational signs at national parks, people who like to learn a lot of detailed skills for backpacking in wilderness areas, etc...
I also think it’s probably possible to steelman some version of the common nature vibe of “we should respect nature for its own sake, and not seek to control everything”, such that it might come off sounding less dumb than it usually seems. (Even though I expect, after reading such a steelman, I would still be pretty strongly in favor of controlling most things most of the time, to better achieve various goals.) Joe Carlsmith’s essay series “Otherness and Control in the Age of AGI”, particularly the essay “On Green” is partly about this.
One big point where I do think “nature as religion” matters a lot, though, is in shaping the *environmentalist movement* itself, since the movement is disproportionately steered by people who are really into nature-as-religion. Therefore our laws/norms about the environment, the way most academics/intellectuals discuss the value of nature, the sorts of things that are considered taboo within environmentalism (eg geoengineering, gene drives, etc), all end up significantly warped by the perspective you described, even though IMO it isn’t the main way most ordinary people relate to nature.
I’m looking forward to the rest of this series!
I’m someone who values nature strongly, in a personal way. Spending time in nature is my no. 1 favorite thing to do. But I’ve also think my personal love for nature has very little to do with the truth, or with my ethical understanding of the world, and I think nature is very bad for most sentient beings. I guess that for most people that personal value and their understanding of the world are interlinked.
Another view (which I hope you’ll explore) put to me by a colleague is that, for many people, nature seems to have taken on the role of religion. They talk about nature as if it’s sacred: nature ‘knows best’, has an unquantifiable value, and is above humans (these people will talk about human attempts to improve nature as “playing God”). I guess people like a bit of mystery and wonder. If we know and control everything, then there’s less to be curious about and less to imagine. And maybe they also like the idea of nature continuing after we’re gone—so there are a lot of parallels to religion you can draw.
There are definitely some people out there (and these people are overrepresented among hardcore environmentalist types, of course) who seem to indeed have adopted “nature” as a kind of hippie religion that seems to have originated (or intensified) sometime in the 1970s. But this doesn’t strike me as explaining all or most of how ordinary people value nature:
even many people who believe ACTUAL religions, or who have other sorts of very strong ideologies that provide structure and meaning to their lives, nevertheless often seem to value nature highly in the ways Tandena outlined (spending time visiting national parks, sometimes voting for and donating to conservation programs, sometimes watching documentaties about the natural world, etc). So it can’t be that valuing nature is purely a religion-substitute filling a psychological hole, otherwise we’d see a much stronger anti-correlation between religious/ideological/etc people vs nature-enjoyers?
Many people certainly seem to treat respect for nature as a “sacred value”, and treat the idea of sacrificing nature for other goals as a “taboo tradeoff”. I sympathize with you that this is annoying and economically inefficient. But many things are considered “sacred values” or “taboo tradeoffs” in human culture, and this doesn’t make them 100% religious \ fake. For instance, people often treat “saving lives” or “protecting children” as sacred values and act as if any related tradeoffs are taboo (even though we are constantly trading off lives vs other things in many parts of society). But that doesn’t mean that “saving lives” is like a secular religion. In general, many things can be compared to a religion, but IMO this is often less informative than it appears. (“EA is like a religion! It has priests: 80k career advisers, temples: EAG conference venues, commandments: blog posts,...”)
I am forgetting the exact Yudkowsky essay(s) where he lambasts people for simply worshipping the mysterious (aka their own state of ignorance) and acting like additional knowledge inevitably ruins the supposedly sublime experience of ineffability that makes life worth living, or whatever. I agree with yudkowsky that it’s dumb when people are like that, and I agree with you that many people take that attitude to nature. But many others seem eager to learn more about the natural world and appreciate it in a deeper, more rationalist-approved way. For instance: scientists studying creatures, birders (and other hobby groups like people who like to fish, or scuba dive, or etc), little kids learning about zoo animals, anybody who watches nature documentaries or reads books about nature-related stuff or reads the posted informational signs at national parks, people who like to learn a lot of detailed skills for backpacking in wilderness areas, etc...
I also think it’s probably possible to steelman some version of the common nature vibe of “we should respect nature for its own sake, and not seek to control everything”, such that it might come off sounding less dumb than it usually seems. (Even though I expect, after reading such a steelman, I would still be pretty strongly in favor of controlling most things most of the time, to better achieve various goals.) Joe Carlsmith’s essay series “Otherness and Control in the Age of AGI”, particularly the essay “On Green” is partly about this.
One big point where I do think “nature as religion” matters a lot, though, is in shaping the *environmentalist movement* itself, since the movement is disproportionately steered by people who are really into nature-as-religion. Therefore our laws/norms about the environment, the way most academics/intellectuals discuss the value of nature, the sorts of things that are considered taboo within environmentalism (eg geoengineering, gene drives, etc), all end up significantly warped by the perspective you described, even though IMO it isn’t the main way most ordinary people relate to nature.