I really dislike these posts that are clearly written by someone unfamiliar with religion as a topic, and just use “worship” or “religion” as synonyms for “being obsessed with something to an irrational degree.” That isn’t an accurate description of the concept of religion, nor is it a synonym of irrational. Religion is probably one of the most complex yet misunderstood areas of study today.<p>Phones are no more worshipped in a religious sense than printed Bibles were worshipped in Gutenberg’s era. They are technological vectors for idea transfer that facilitate ideologies/worldviews/religions, not those things themselves. Being distracted by your phone doesn’t come with an entire metaphysical picture about the nature of life and death, proper social roles, or most of the other things religious systems typically come with.<p>Also - Durkheim is name dropped here, with the incorrect tense (he doesn’t <i>argue</i>, he <i>argued</i>, as he’s been dead for a long time.)
Anthropic is releasing blog articles where they are discovering how Claude works through experiments and observations. It seems more like science than engineering when even the creators have to run scientific experiments to figure out how what they engineered works.<p><a href="https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language-model" rel="nofollow">https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...</a>
> ...I don’t think religion is an inherently bad thing either.<p>Agree to disagree. Regardless I don't think their points are about religion. It seems like they're just complaining about memic and ritualistic behavior that happens on phones. Using the religion label feels more meant for click bait than as a fitting metaphor.
Tribes - and jockeying for position within them - is as old as humanity itself.<p>I often wonder whether the earliest religious leaders (think Egyptian pharaoh era), knew what they were doing, and figured that telling people why tombs needed to be built was much better than building them, so they got to the right side of the table.<p>Today, I wonder if that's what is really going on with business leaders: they know it's all crap, but if they say that, there is a risk they're going back to the open plan office with the rest of the schmucks.
It makes me wonder if we really so different than those who carved metal images to worship thousands of years ago. I made a 30s video exploring this idea here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7RoeHHqnAM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7RoeHHqnAM</a>
> Participating in group trends is fun—and essential to being human. It’s just important to remember exactly what we’re doing, and how our need for belonging can be manipulated by bad actors. Only then can we retain our individuality and understanding of what’s happening.<p>Ah; this looks relevant to a topic I met through Kegan's model of adult development. Apparently around 66% [0] of the population doesn't think in a way where "retaining [their] individuality" is even seen as possible, let alone desirable. They'd probably equate it to teenage impulsiveness.<p>It explains a lot of politics, practical dealings and provides a very neat model for understanding what religions are actually doing. This sort of call to action from the article is fundamentally misguided as general advice because it misses that people are socially designed to just follow that crowd in a way that can be quite astonishing. Their strategy is, nearly explicitly, to be manipulated by whatever actors rise to the top of the heap. Good, bad or other, they won't (in a practical sense can't) judge.<p>[0] <a href="https://brucesreflections.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Kegans-Levels-of-Development.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://brucesreflections.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Keg...</a>
That's a rather naive and self-serving take on religion.<p>Just call it a popularization of the esoteric. Like what happens to science, medicine, auto-repair...<p>A strange subject, dumbed down and framed in metaphor for the uninitiated. Turned unto a big mess. It happens all the time.
If personifying something means we worship it in a religious context then people have been worshipping our mode of transportation since the dawn of time, plus slot machines and a whole host of other things.