Category: Religion
The Price of Intelligence is Falling Rapidly
An amazing Epoch AI report from Emberson and Roodman:
- Over the past three years, the cost of a given level of AI performance has fallen an average of some 47% per quarter. That is a 13-fold drop every year – a faster rate than any other transformative technology in history.
To give an example, OpenAI o3 cost about $0.30/question to attain 75% on GPQA Diamond in January 2025, while GPT-5.6 Luna attained roughly the same score for $0.0004 in mid-2026—a roughly 725-fold decline in under 18 months.
Thus, it’s not just that the models are getting smarter. A given level of intelligence is also requiring dramatically less inference expenditure. This is one reason the open-model threat is not as large as it appears: frontier models don’t merely outperform older models; they are rapidly becoming cheaper to run at any given level of performance. Smarter and cheaper.
Internet diffusion and religious decline?
Using a panel of 81 countries across six World Values Survey waves (1990–2022), we examine whether growth in internet diffusion is associated with religious decline. We construct a six-item composite religiosity index, align annual macro series to wave periods, and estimate country fixed-effects models with one-wave lags and a broad set of modernization, demographic, welfare-state, and cultural controls. We also estimate models separately for individual dimensions of religiosity. Across specifications, lagged internet penetration is negatively associated with religiosity within countries over time. These results remain robust under period dummies and in models estimated without lags, although reverse-ordering tests indicate that prior religiosity can also predict later internet use. Associations are strongest for denominational belonging and self-identification as a religious person. Overall, internet diffusion emerges as a robust macro-level correlate of within-country religious decline.
Here is the full article by Miran Lavrič and Tibor Rutar. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
My very interesting Conversation with Jared Diamond
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
So which leaders do make a difference?
Tyler and Jared debate that question, including conditions what a religious founder needs to succeed, whether destructive leaders matter more than constructive ones, why individual leaders have mattered so little in Papua New Guinea, whether we undervalue preventers, how much Rachel Carson and the Resnicks really mattered, whether Botswana’s success will endure, Jared’s own place in intellectual history, and what he’d tell an ambitious 25-year-old about how to become consequential. They go on to cover whether New Guineans are smarter, his reasons for why the Industrial Revolution started in England, what he learned from Jim Robinson about natural experiments, why he’s more optimistic about the environment than when he wrote Collapse, what he’d do about nuclear risk, the 189 bird species on his street in Los Angeles, why the MacArthur “genius grant” left him depressed for a week, why he’s listening to one Bach cantata a week, what he hopes to work on as he enters his nineties, and more.
Excerpt, we start with this:
COWEN: Who do you think is the least replaceable leader in human history?
DIAMOND: Wow. Wow. The least replaceable leader in human history. Frankly, my answer is none. There has been no unreplaceable leader in human history because over a long time, things wash out. A candidate, of course, would be Jesus Christ, but there were half a dozen other prophets in the Roman Empire at that time discussed in the New Testament. If Christ had died in childbirth, one of those other prophets might have taken over. I would say that in the long run, there is no leader that has made a difference.
COWEN: Well, you say “might have taken over,” but that’s probabilistic, right? Say with a 40 percent chance, someone else would have taken over. It still seems in expected value terms, Christ made an enormous difference.
DIAMOND: Certainly, his religion made an enormous difference. Christ himself was the charismatic founder, but a religion needs three things: It needs a charismatic founder, it needs an organizer, and often it needs a general because new religions often face opposition. The organizer for Christianity was St. Paul. In the case of the Mahdi’s religion of the Sudan in the late 1800s, the Mahdi was the charismatic founder, and he was the organizer, and he was the general. In the case of Islam, Muhammad was the founder and the organizer and the general. Religions may have three roles, some of which are sometimes played by the same person.
COWEN: Without the figure of Muhammad at exactly the time he came along, is it not quite easy to imagine a Middle East not unified under Islam, not unified with the common language of Arabic? In some ways, maybe a bit more like the Caucasus, which remains a crazy quilt of different patterns. Thus, Muhammad is one of the three or four most consequential leaders ever.
DIAMOND: That’s possible. That’s a big question. It’s harder to become clear about Muhammad than it is about Christ, because we don’t know what the weather was like in Arabia at that time. Weather makes a big difference. If it was rainy, that would mean lots of plant growth for lots of babies and for feeding an army. We just don’t have information on the weather in Arabia at that time.
A counter-example is Genghis Khan, who developed the largest land empire in world history, all the way from China to Poland. Recently, why did Genghis Khan do it when there were other steppe leaders like Adolf Hühnlein and Timur the Turk? We’ve learned recently that the wettest time on the steppes in the last 2,000 years was around the time of Genghis’s birth. He was born at exactly the right time at the right place. If he had been born 200 miles further away and 20 years earlier, we wouldn’t know anything about him. In the case of Muhammad, we just don’t know whether the time of his birth was a particularly propitious time to found a religion in that area or not.
COWEN: The very notion that the two first names we’re talking about, they’re both religious leaders, right? They’re not kings. They’re not inventors. Do you think that suggests a vision of the world where it’s ideas that really matter and somewhat at variance with your own geography-based theories?
Interesting throughout, and we debated pomegranate juice as well. I enjoyed reading Jared’s new book Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter?
My excellent Conversation with Luke Burgis
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Luke Burgis left Wall Street after two years, founded a few successful companies in his twenties, then walked away to spend three years in a Roman seminary on the path to the priesthood. He now runs the Cluny Institute and teaches at Catholic University. His book Wanting made René Girard legible to a general audience; the new one, The One and the Ninety-Nine, takes mimetic theory into the dynamics of self and crowd in an age of social contagion.
He joined Tyler to discuss whether the age of pessimism is ending, why the Anglo world in particular seems so unhappy, whether Dostoevsky or Thomas Mann better diagnoses modernity, the kind of reader his own book would ruin, why he thinks AI will make social contagion weaker, what put him off consulting with Anthropic on Claude’s constitution, what effective altruism misses, why men and women are drifting apart, what he’d fund in every American city, the case for reintroducing friction, whether a Gnostic reading of the lost sheep explains our moment, what Rod Dreher gets right about withdrawal, why Genoa is Italy’s most underrated city, what confession times reveal about a church, why Italians seem tired of their Catholicism, why he didn’t become a priest, where he differs from Ross Douthat, why exorcists appear to be on the rise, the sudden mimetic antisemitism on the right, the book his 23-year-old self would have hated, what he secretly admires about Silicon Valley, why Michigan never left him, what the original Cluny can teach a modern talent network, how he hopes to face his own death, what he’ll do next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: I’m not saying you’ll ever do it, but what does your escape fantasy look like? One of mine is I’ll go live in a third-tier city in Mexico. I’m not going to do it, but sometimes I think about it. Cost of living would be very low. The food would be amazing. I could improve my Spanish.
BURGIS: It is moving to Genoa with my family, making my US income, living in Italy. I love Italy. I love the food. I love the people. I love the culture. I feel lighter while I’m there. I laugh more. We eat dinner later. I love everything about it. It would probably be living in Italy for the most part, or at least making that my home base, brushing up on my Italian, working less.
COWEN: Why Genoa? It’s a wonderful city. It’s still medieval, right, in a funny way?
BURGIS: It’s medieval. I think it’s the most underrated city in Italy.
COWEN: In Italy, I mean, yes. I agree. Yes.
BURGIS: I think it’s the most underrated city. You agree.
COWEN: I took my wife there. She was stunned. “How come no one goes to Genoa?” She was telling me.
BURGIS: It’s close to Cinque Terre. It’s this city that’s elevated. It has a fascinating history. It was still a very functional port city. It was really the most important city in Italy, arguably the world, during when Spain was a great power. It’s very cosmopolitan. It reminds me of Marseille a little bit. It’s vertical, breathtaking views. The people there, they’re not very touristy. The Italians there seem indifferent to you as a tourist.
It just feels very, very homey. It’s so close to a lot of other great things in Italy. You can get to Torino relatively easily. That whole area up there, Bra, where the Slow Food movement originated, you’re just in striking distance from everything. Nobody I know that goes to Italy goes to Genoa. I plead with them. I’m like, “Please, just go to Genoa.”
COWEN: I am the exception. My wife sometimes talks of wanting to live in the smaller towns nearby, which we’re not going to do because we’re slated for a third-tier city in Mexico, but we’re not going to do that either. I sometimes think of Northern Italy as a place where there were fewer different dimensions for mimetic desire. That is, more people dress the same. There are fewer status dimensions, maybe less room for eccentrics compared to America. Do you think that’s true, or do you think I’m off base? Paris is a bit like this also. There’s a certain notion of what kind of shoes an Italian man should wear. They wear them, and they’re amazing, and actually more affordable than here. There’s a sameness to some things.
Recommended, and do note Luke’s new book The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in an Age of Social Contagion.
*Rome’s Age of Revolution*
The author is Tim Whitmarsh and the subtitle is Augustus, Empire and the Making of Christianity. This is the most important book on the history of Christianity I have read in a long time, and it is also an important work in Roman history. Yet also fun and extremely readable. Excerpt:
The story I have told so far has emphasised the fit between Christianity and the Greek world of the early Roman Empire; I have given relatively little space to conflict. That has been quite deliberate. One of the commonest misconceptions about the early Roman Empire is that it was a time of ceaseless and inevitable suppression of virtuous Christians by a brutal governmental machine. This is a myth that has roots in antiquity itself, and has been pumped systematically into western popular culture since the nineteenth centuury. It is a remarkably durable myth, because it is both emotionally seductive and ideologically powerful. The idea that virtuous Christians were engaged in endless conflict with the Roman state makes for great narrative. But the reality is more banal: most Christians were fully integrated into Roman society, and no more or less harassed than anyone else…
My argument has been, rather, that Christianity could not have come into being in anything like the form we know it without the revolutionary impact of Augustus’ political reforms. It was this seismic change that fundamentally transformed Mediterranean thought…The most dramatic effect of the Augustan swirl was Christianity itself: a breakaway Judaean sect led by brilliant entrepreneurs who understood the opportunities offered by the new political dispensation, and rapidly reshaped their ideas to suit new audiences.
Definitely recommended, and not only to Christians and Romans.
Markets in everything?
Peter Brook‘s five-hour-plus film adaptation of “The Mahabharata” is set for a BFI Blu-ray release on Aug. 10, presented in high definition from a new 4K restoration of the 1989 production.
The release centres on the triptych version of the film, running 332 minutes, which sits between Brook’s three-hour cinema cut and the six-hour television version he shot concurrently. Based on the ancient Hindu epic, the film was originally produced by Brook with screenwriters Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne, and features an international cast drawn from 16 nationalities.
Here is the Variety article, but will there be a version suitable for U.S. players? The work is highly recommended, real genius. For the pointer I thank Sam Mendelsohn.
Creating your own religion in an AI-drenched world
Religious life, I think one thing we’ll see, and this is, again, pretty soon, it won’t be hard to create your own religion. I’m not sure many people will do this. I don’t think most people will. But they’ll be like accretions to the religions we have now. And I think with Fable 5, you could even do this already. Like, you ever actually try to read through the Hindu sacred texts? They’re pretty naughty, pretty detailed, quite long. Many parts are great and dramatic. I wouldn’t say they’re smoothly or evenly written. Not all of it is well written. They have significant meaning. For some people, a lot of people consume them through stories they’re told with their children. It’s not that every Hindu is like reading through the whole Ramayana. That’s all fine. But if you can sit down with, you know, the latest quad, whatever, and create your own set of sacred books. Again, I think like 2% of people are going to do this. Not most people. People have other interests, other hobbies. A lot of people aren’t religious. But if 2% of people do this, you end up with a lot of new religious accretions. Some of them will be totally new religions. But I think a lot will just be like, here are my sacred books of Christianity, or my add-ons to the Book of Mormon, or my whatever’s. There’ll be this extreme religious diversity. I don’t know, too much, too little. I think it will be quite different.
Again, that is from my recent DeepMind talk. Perhaps two percent is too high, and only a fraction of one percent of the population will do this, with agents. You still end up with a great deal of religious accretion and innovation.
The tomb of Duns Scotus
Köln!
We spent a few days in the city, and once again I marveled at the splendors of the Cathedral. If it had its original stained glass, it would count as one of the very best churches ever. It still stands in the top tier as it is. Plus the Ludwig and Wallraf museums are excellent, making the city worthy of a visit.
But, and yes there is a but. My first visit to the city was I think in 1984, and I have been maybe five times since. When I walk through the pedestrian zone, the stores there seem far stupider than in earlier times. They seem to reflect a lower level of intelligence from the populace and the city’s numerous visitors. One feels there is not much chance of stumbling upon something interesting or very high quality, not compared to earlier times. And I think MR readers will know I am no paragon of nostalgia per se.
Now that might be an illusion. Perhaps the smart stuff has moved to mail order, to online, and to the outer rims of the city. Perhaps. But is it not dispiriting when one of the best cities in one of the smartest countries in the world, over the decades, starts appearing stupider? If someone told me I had to live in center city Köln, circa 2026 that would simply feel like aesthetic hell.
Jackson Dahl podcasts with me and Nabeel on aesthetics
Filmed at home, this ran about two hours, and yes that is Nabeel Qureshi, with a cameo from Spinoza toward the very end. From Jackson:
From the episode summary:
Tyler and Nabeel are good friends, and given how prolific Tyler is, I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point and interview them together. We discuss sacred commitments, AI acceleration, mentorship, friendship, and more, but I focused the majority of the conversation on art and aesthetics. Tyler and Nabeel are unlikely aesthetes given their day jobs, but in fact take art deeply seriously. They have a shared love for and similar tastes in art, music, and film, in particular. We discuss strange and beautiful art, aesthetic stagnation, and a wide range of favorites: The Beatles, Mozart, Mondrian, Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, Cassavetes, The Sopranos, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=wC78q_BeD27XDnLN&v=qPHV-BezoIc&feature=youtu.be
Excerpt:
Tyler: (18:31) I think I’m very mundane in many ways. When Marc Andreessen had that famous tweet about not being too introspective, I know he got slammed for that, but I sympathize with that in many ways. I have my work. I focus on it. I want to go see places I haven’t seen before. That really drives me. I feel pretty well motivated. I do think all kinds of deep thoughts, but to me those deep thoughts feel more superficial than my so-called superficial urges to go around doing things. And I’m fine with that.
…Jackson: (23:25) Do you experience art primarily by thinking or by feeling?
Tyler: (23:29) I don’t even know what those words mean. I experience it by looking at it. I don’t think I have very deep emotional responses. I think it’s pleasure and I feel I learn a lot from it. When I go out and look at other works of art or just the world, I see a lot more than people who don’t live with art. I don’t think I feel that much. I’ve never cried in front of a painting. When I read these accounts of someone seeing a Madonna and weeping, it makes no sense to me. It’s like people who do sports gambling. Why do you do that? There are positive-sum gambles for you. Here are a few.
There is much more of interest, self-recommending!
My Conversation with Joanne Paul
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Joanne Paul is a historian at the University of Sussex, author, and a go-to Tudor expert on YouTube. She tells Tyler she’s drawn to the 16th century because it sits between the medieval and the modern, and because its paths not taken are a way of asking whether our own world had to turn out this way. Her biography Thomas More: A Life takes its subject in that spirit, refusing to reduce More to either martyr or monster.
Tyler and Joanne discuss how More influenced Erasmus, what to make of Utopia, why fear drove More’s persecution of heretics, how Holbein’s portraits of More and Cromwell differ, what movie depictions get wrong about More, how his execution was viewed at the time, how the Tudor period paved the way for Shakespeare and the scientific revolution, the surprising social mobility of the period, how the City of London governed itself and where that clashed with the Crown, Joanne’s upbringing in Canada and what drew her to English history, what she thinks sits beneath a lot of Britain’s current stagnation, the subject of her next book, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: As you point out in the book, and you’re well aware, he oversaw the persecution of heretics. He oversaw torture. He was misogynistic when he wrote about women. Was he just a bad guy? Is that the correct picture of More, or am I supposed to admire him? He took a stand on principle, and he died, but what was the principle, really? To defend Catholicism, which then was also an instrument of torture?
PAUL: As a historian, I take one of my principles as to not try to put people into a box of good or evil.
COWEN: I’m not a historian. Should I just dislike him?
PAUL: No, I think you should be interested in these contradictions. I think you should be interested in the complexity that is the human experience. I think we should ask questions about why someone who is clearly very educated, clearly very intelligent, clearly very worldly in many ways, has also these beliefs that we rightly and should condemn. With Thomas More, I think he comes to these beliefs out of a place of fear. I think that’s something that we should take note of. He was afraid of what he would consider the Lutheran heresy. He was afraid of how it would lead to the breakdown of his society, and he was convinced by those people who held that to be the case.
I think that there are important lessons in that for us today, the way that we can become convinced that a group will lead to the breakdown of our society, that fear can lead to that hatred and indeed that violence. I think that’s an important lesson. If we just reject, oh, he was bad, then I don’t think we understand the way in which someone like Thomas More can become convinced that way. In terms of his role in opposing heresy, yes, he advocated for the persecution of heretics. He thought it was right and just that they were burned at the stake. I think that at times his role in that has been overstated, and I think we just need to understand what it was in historical reality.
He imprisoned heretics. He interrogated them. We don’t know if he tortured them. That was something he was accused of at the time. He said he didn’t. I don’t know that we’ll ever find evidence either way on that. There were three cases that he oversaw as Lord Chancellor of those who were burned at the stake. I only say that because I see on social media and the like and people presenting me with the suggestion that hundreds were put to the flames by Thomas More personally. I just think we have to understand what it is that we are actually talking about.
And:
COWEN: What precursors of the scientific revolution do you see, other than education? That’s coming in the 17th century. Is there more emphasis on calculation or measurement or accounting? What are the roots in the Tudor period?
PAUL: A lot of that comes from the Renaissance, as indeed humanism does. There’s this reintroduction of a lot of classical texts, an advocacy for reading these classical texts, particularly Greek texts and learning Greek. A lot of it is coming from an engagement with Greek mathematics and science. The other thing, and this is something I really emphasize when I’m teaching the scientific revolution with my students, is that we have to remember that the scientific revolution isn’t this grand triumph of science over religion or mysticism or what have you, that these two things very much go hand in hand through the 16th and into the 17th century.
The scientific method, for instance, comes from alchemy, which we might think of as an occult science. The methodology for scientific experimentation comes out of this desire to find the philosopher’s stone. Someone like John Dee is this polymath, as well as this occultist, Francis Bacon, has his interests in these sort of mystical elements as well. The growth and interest in what we might think of as mystical texts, a lot of them having to do with Judaism, as well as these Greek texts, comes together to form, I think, something that looks like the foundations of the scientific revolution.
A good episode with many points of interest. And I enjoyed Joanne’s recent book Thomas More: A Life.
Does fasting harm cognitive performance?
More than 2 billion people participate annually in Ramadan fasting, making its potential effects on cognitive performance important for workplaces, education and high-stakes decision-making. We study these effects in tournament chess, an incentivised, real-world cognitive task in which move quality can be evaluated objectively by a strong chess engine. We analyse nearly 300,000 games and more than 25 million moves played by almost 10,000 expert players from 178 countries over 10 years. Two validation exercises support our Muslim-status classification, covering almost 11% of the sample and survey evidence indicates substantial Ramadan fasting compliance among Muslim chess players. In the preferred intention-to-treat specification, using pre-game controls, player fixed effects and year-month fixed effects, we find no impact of Ramadan fasting on Muslim players’ overall move quality or shares of optimal and nearly optimal moves, with tightly bounded estimates around zero. Muslim players make 0.13 additional percentage points of large errors during Ramadan, but this small estimate is fragile across alternative measures, samples, Muslim-status definitions, fasting-compliance adjustments and event-study diagnostics, with no evidence of heterogeneous effects, selection bias, or compensatory behavioural adjustments. We conclude there is little robust evidence that Ramadan fasting broadly impairs cognitive performance among expert chess players.
That is from a recently published paper by Samuel Buckland and David Smerdon. Some claim that people think best when they are just a wee bit hungry?
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
I am told James Mill is buried there also
Philosophical Ideas Behind Their Time
Justin Weinberg at Daily Nous riffs off my post, Ideas Behind Their Time, to ask for philosophical examples. He nominates Gettier problems–i.e. counterexamples to the idea that knowledge is simply “justified true belief” as a possibility. The classic Gettier paper is from 1963. Wikipedia notes that the Indian philosopher Dharmottara has some clear examples c770 AD but as an element within the Western tradition the idea does seem behind its time.
I would nominate the following as philosophical ideas behind their time:
- Hume’s is/ought distinction: the idea that you cannot derive a normative conclusion from factual premises.
- Hume’s problem of induction: past regularities do not rationally guarantee future regularities.
- Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance: the principles of justice should be derived without knowing one’s own particularities of class, race, gender and so forth. Seems obvious as an idea.
- The Trolley Problem: similar ideas can be found earlier but the clean distinction between killing and let die or more generally omission and commission could have come much earlier. One might also think of the Prisoner’s Dilemma in this category of ideas or constructs that cleanly isolate an otherwise present but opaque idea.
- The analytic/synthetic truths distinction: some things are true by definition, others are empirical. Obvious and it can be found before say Kant, yet a clear earlier statement would have resolved many issues and seems well within say Aristotle’s capability.
- Aumann’s Agreement Theorem, technically, this requires Bayesian machinery and is difficult to formulate with precision, so I would not say the actual theorem was behind its time. But the underlying idea—that disagreement itself, not merely the arguments offered, should cause one to question and refine one’s own beliefs—could have been developed in Athens.
- I’d also nominate a package of ideas like abolitionism, equal rights for women, and religious toleration–each of these is tendentious as examples yet the basic package seems fairly obvious as a category and yet late. (Perhaps if the veil of ignorance had been thought of earlier so would these ideas!) Note, that I am not arguing that abolitionism or equal rights for women could have happened much earlier only that these ideas were behind their time–the ideas were morally obvious even if not institutionally feasible.
Note also that I am not arguing that these ideas are all correct, only that they were philosophical ideas behind their time. More examples?
What should I ask Luke Burgis?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. Excerpted (and edited) from a bio:
He is on the business faculty at Catholic University and has a background on both Wall Street and in the startup world, where he founded several companies. His first book, Wanting (2021), has been translated into 20+ languages and is selling more than copies than ever five years in. He is an expert on Rene Girard. His new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, is out from St. Martin’s June 16 — a theory of how identity gets formed or deformed under conditions of technological social contagion. He has a third book with a major publisher (on “technology as soulcraft”) in the pipeline with a major publisher. He also lived in Italy and for a while was studying to be a priest. He remains a true Catholic, and is the founder and director of the Cluny Institute.
Here is Luke on Twitter. Here is Luke’s home page. So what should I ask him?
LDS fact of the day
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has grown 66% this century, fueled in part by a record-breaking number of convert baptisms in 2025.
The church had 10,752,986 members at the end of 1999. The church had 17,887,212 at the end of 2025, according to an annual statistical report released Saturday during the church’s 196th Annual General Conference.
Furthermore the growth is coming in every part of the world (as a qualifier I am not sure what the outflow is). Here is the full article, via Tyler Ransom.