Daily Archives: June 11, 2006

Survey Results 1-9

My thanks to everyone who participated in our survey on God and the Singularity. The results are presented in their entirety in this entry and the two entries following. (Movable Type was unhappy with the length of entry produced by mashing them all together.)

As with the survey itself, I will leave these results at the top for a few days so that everyone gets a chance to see them when they stop by. I hope the results lead to more discussion. Please leave your comments on the third entry (covering questions 14 and 15.) I set it up this way so that we can keep the discussion in one thread.

I have just a few observations at this stage; I’ll probably have much more to say about these results when I do my next essay in the series.

1. I tried to make the survey as open-ended as possible. There were only two questions — 6 and 7 — that called for answers only from people of a particular belief system / philosophical orientation. I note with great satisfaction that the restriction was largely ignored.

2. The readership of the Speculist is represented by individuals with a wide variety of beliefs. Most self-identified as Rationalists, Empiricists, or Transhumanists. I realize that there’s an apples-and-oranges aspect to those categories, which is why survey-takers were permitted to choose all that apply. Those who identified themselves as Theists were in the minority by a signficant margin. That’s interesting when you consider the responses to the question about religious self-identification. All told, 134 identified themsleves as Agnostics, Athiests, or Skeptics, while 130 identified themselves as being members of a particular religion, Syncretists, or Unaffiliated / Free Thinkers. Even if you remove the hard-to-classify categories of Skeptic and Unaffiliated, the breakdown was 107 in the Agnostic/Atheist category and 85 identifying themselves as having a religious affiliation. With only 178 people participating overall, that means there was some overlap between the two camps.

3. I regret that I didn’t include “Deist” in the religious categories. (Although several included it as an “other” response on the religion question, and one included it as an “other” response in on the Philosophy question.) Deism is, in my view, the meeting place between religious belief and non-belief. It figures prominently in my next essay on God and the Singularity.

4. The “other” responses and answers to open-ended questions are fascinating. I just want to highlight a few favorites. There are lots more where these came from.

In response to “God is…” one individual wrote:

A placeholder to explain the combination of a contingency-based universe seemingly arising out of nothing, and the moral progress that humanity achieves in spite of ourselves.

My favorite philosophical self-identification:

Neo-Libertarian Extropian/Singularitarian

Three religious self-identifications I particularly enjoyed:

Asatru

Old-school Gnostic

Lutheran ELCA

I never knew that gnostics had sectarian divisions, but I should have guessed. I haven’t Wikipedia’d Astru yet; I’m saving that. And I’m thinking our Lutheran friend must have been giving us a sub-category. (Last I heard, Lutherans were still technically considered to be Christians.)

A whopping 92% of those who answered the question about whether spirituality will survive the Singularity did so in the affirmative. When asked why they answered as they did, several answered as follows (or along these lines):

What’s spirituality?

Hey, who’s asking the questions, here? On the question of whether the Singularity will bring us closer to God, someone wrote:

Please divide by zero for the answer.

I was interested to see how much play the notion of an emergent God would get. Many responded to questions about God with the standard “this is meaningless” or “there is no God” type answers, while there were a few like this:

My view is that God is an end-state, in which the universe, or even the multiverse, has been ‘woken up’ by the spread of life, mind, civilization, etc. God doesn’t exactly exist right now, but rather, reaches back through time to choose the history that lead’s to God’s own existence (Stephen Hawking’s idea of the flexiverse, for instance, or Tipler’s idea that God is essentially the boundary condition of the universe.) But from our point of view, it’s not like God is choosing the historical path; it’s more that the history of the universe tends inevitably in God’s direction.

Finally, while at least one survey-taker quoted Yoda in framing his or her answer, this reponse appears to have come directly from the little green guy himself:

Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks–those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.

Full results below.

The Trump Gene

This sort of sounds like news…

Entrepreneurial skill may be in the genes

Wednesday June 7, 2006

Forget family influence and upbringing. When it comes to being an entrepreneur, genes seem to play an important role.

By comparing self-employment in 609 pairs of identical twins, who share all the same genes, and 657 pairs of non-identical twins, Spector and scientists at Imperial College London and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland analysed the impact of genetics and environment on entrepreneurs.

The rate of entrepreneurs among twins is the same as in the general population. Spector’s team found that being identical increased the odds of twins following the same path more than non-identical twins, suggesting genes are important.

…but let’s think about it. Genes aren’t fully determinative,of course, but there’s no question that they have a strong impact on personality. One’s temperament obviously has a lot to say about whether one would or would not be inclined to go out and start a business.

So what’s the news here, exactly? That identical twins often choose similar career paths? We knew that. That certain personality types are more likely to tend towards entrepreneurial ventures than others? We knew that. That certain personality types are mapped to genetics? Yeah, I think we knew that, too.

Looks like more research funding spent on proving the obvious.

UPDATE: FuturePundit opines that there’s more to this story than my snarky assessment would suggest. This gets interesting when we start identifying the specific genes that relate to being an entrepreneur. Randall speculates that parents might start looking to build such genes into their offspring, as part of an overall designer approach to parenting:

It is likely that entrepreneurship comes as a result of other qualities as mentioned above. Will parents choose those qualities based on a desire to make their kids self-employed? Or will they choose those qualities mainly for other reasons and will the effect on entrepreneurial behavior come as a side effect of choices made for other reasons?

People in different cultures, economic classes, occupations, religions, and with different genetically determined qualities for their own minds will make different choices on average. Will this tend to make the human race diverge? Or will there be a wide consensus on all the important genetically controlled qualities of the mind and will humanity tend to converge?

One split I expect: I predict some religious folks will choose genetic qualities that make their kids more inclined to have faith. Whereas more empirically minded folks will choose genetic qualities that make their kids highly skeptical, critical, and empirical. Though some of a more socialistic bent might choose qualities that make kids turn out more altruistic and group-oriented.

And let’s not forget: the practically minded designer parents will want to have children with a built-in tendency to clean up their rooms, do the dishes, mow the lawn, etc.