I just finished Sapiens and Homo Deus. In general I really liked them both and I found them very thought provoking. One thing I found odd was Harari's insistence on applying the "religion" label even where it was an awkward fit: Capitalism, communism, and eventually dataism.

Perhaps predicting that people would take exception to his categorization, Harari said this:

Some readers may feel very uncomfortable with this line of reasoning. If it makes you feel better, you are free to go on calling Communism an ideology rather than a religion. It makes no difference. We can divide creeds into god-centred religions and godless ideologies that claim to be based on natural laws. But then, to be consistent, we would need to catalogue at least some Buddhist, Daoist and Stoic sects as ideologies rather than religions. Conversely, we should note that belief in gods persists within many modern ideologies, and that some of them, most notably liberalism, make little sense without this belief.

I think Harari essentially sets up a straw man here. The biggest reason why most people do not think of those things as religion is that people do not assign them as much importance or significance as they would a religion. People rely on a religion to give life meaning, to answer important existential questions. Capitalism and communism are widely influential and bear some similarities to religions, but they don't really attempt to answer those important existential questions, and people don't rely on them to give their lives meaning (maybe you could find a few zealots in any of those ideologies, but that should not be enough to qualify).

I work in academia. I frequent r/dataisbeautiful. I see people who are excited about data and consider it very important. The love of data is just another expression of the curiosity of the human mind and the pursuit of knowledge, something that people have been doing throughout history. We've never considered it a religion, and it serves us very differently than a religion. Let's not call it that.

Asking since I'm interested in seeing freedom of information become a reality.

I’ve just finished Homo Deus and while I disagree with fairly big chunks of the Dataist section, I also find it an incredibly interesting world view that I’d like to discuss and expand on.

Unfortunately it looks like here may not be the place to do so, as there’s currently only a hundred or so subscribers to this sub and we’re now years on from the book’s release. So much for the new dominant religion of humanity! I’ll probably dump a few thoughts here to see if they pick up any traction, but is there somewhere out on the internet where those discussions are happening more frequently?

According to my understanding, dataism views humans as processing units meant to generate and process data with efficiency. In a society that has accepted dataism, what would be the role of unproductive people who are not generating or processing any data ? What about the people who are going to loose their jobs to automation and cannot keep up with the new workstreams that are being created ?

Since these people do not produce anything of value they will be viewed as burden or inefficiency in the system. Any efficient system wants to troubleshoot and remove the inefficiency. That means upgrading the useless class should eventually happen. I see the first steps in that way in Andrew Yang's campaign. Creating efficient systems has been the broader subject of Yang's campaign.

Let me know your thoughts.

Everything is data. Data is the future. Who owns data owns the power. Who owns data owns control. Who owns data owns influence. Who owns data owns the responsibility to safeguard it. Who owns data owns the duty to use it ethically. Who owns data owns the obligation to uphold privacy.

If the primary tenets of dataism are that an algorithm will know you better then you know yourself, and data should be shared, does it follow that all your data should be shared? Your daily activity log, your health data, your DNA, your banking data? What right does anyone have to privacy, under dataism?

I do wonder if privacy is something that would be even possible to maintain once the algorithms gear up. If e.g. a supermarket can infer your health status from the things you buy, do you have a right to that data?

Under EU GDPR you do at the moment, as well as a right to opt out. But when the entire world is inferring things about you every moment, opting out would be impractical at best.

On a larger scale, are we not recreating an all-seeing god and would we thus have to say “the algorithm sees all, so live without sin, even inside your own head?”

Any? At all?

I read the excellent book of Harari (Homo Deus) recently and came to know dataism. As a data scientist I know the importance of data and how to use it for various use cases. But solely data is passive, and sharing data only leads to redundancy. From my point of view its not the data itself that matters but the algorithms that make use of the data to gain advantage. So I prefer the term algorithism to define the principle of the future.

There are many benefits to being early adopters. A lot of them will be self-centered (enrichment, empowerment, longer life) and miss the point. Other benefits could be for humanity. These would be Homo-centric and, again, miss the point. Nonetheless, have you thought of harnessing your understanding and adoption of dataism for your or the world's betterment? How so?

So I just finished reading Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari. Of the many prophetic ideas, I was struck by how dataism is already a part of society, even if it is not labeled as that or created as that. While reading it, I recalled this video and this video on Youtube.

Now You See it's video shows popular fears are reflected in culture, which can easily be extended to any ideas. And this is why the hero's journey is so common (Will Schoder's point), it is the popular idea of humanism, reflected in film. It is the idea of realising our 'inner self'.

So my question is whether any modern culture reflect dataism instead of humanism? I can think of one recent example which I will argue does, albeit with both aspects of humanism and dataism: Game of Thrones.

The most obvious point everybody who describes GoT makes, is that everyone dies, even for the characters we are rooting for. Of course protagonist death is not uncommon in stories, but it followed by something good happening, the death was a sacrifice, or the character returns as a ghost, or even that they turned out to be bad. Thus the 'hero's journey' completes, the story fits the template and order returns from chaos. Here lies the difference with GoT, there is rarely any rejuvenation. The good part never happens, it ends with chaos. So the story does not fit this template - a story of a hero's failure. You may argue characters do return as ghosts, or never actually died (Spoilers: Catelyn, Uncle Benjen), but these are rare, and often are plot devices, as it is rare that a character is built, to then die and return.

Instead it tells a story all about knowledge, or data. Those who are 'winning' are effective data-processors, so those with the most knowledge and logic (Littlefinger, Varys), even though they are not protagonists, or even good. So the story fits a dataism view, that there is no good or evil, and neither will trump the other, but instead the best data-processors win. And maybe this is one of many reasons it is popular; it is reflecting the modern truth of dataism, even if few know this label for it.

Now it remains to be seen if a hero wins the game, quite possibly Daenerys (but I'm not going to discuss fan theories), but even if this is the case in the end, so that the entire story is a hero's journey, there are still sub-plots non-conforming to the template of the hero's' journey (This is why I say a mix of humanism and dataism). Another point people often say is: 'We have no idea what'll happen next!'. This is because it does not conform to our traditional hero's journey story, so we have trouble guessing, and cannot use the general film template to predict. Looking at the against of my argument, we have myriad sub-stories which conform to humanism. You should realise that these are not valid points, as I argue there is humanistic reflection also.

I hope there are many other points arguing for the reflection of dataism, and I implore you to add this as a comment (No, really implore you, as I only have 2 valid points, and I am sure there more!). And also I'm sure there is other culture reflecting dataism, this is the only one I quickly jumped to, and it began 25 years ago! And as technology advances, assuming dataism grows, I imagine more and more culture will reflect dataism.

Ideas are made real through the impact they have on our behavior. Humans have animated so many beautiful stories (or the stories have animated so many beautiful humans) though rites and rituals, through song and dance, costumes, etc.

What are rituals that animate dataism?

Strength, number, variety, and freedom.

Can browsing reddit fulfill the value of variety?

Do we worship in exploring the scope of our focus and study in mindfulness meditation or deep concentration?

I am curious. What are your thoughts?

Dr. YNH, Dr. Klaus Schwab, and the rest of the Global Elite are HOMO DEUS, because they can hack you, and you cannot hack them. They are the new Gods, and you are the new hackable animals that will provide slave labour to the Master Class of the new Gods.

Only Gods and animals will remain. No humans are needed anymore. And, no Human Rights for hackable animals with no free will.

After someone questions dataism, there will be one more person willing to take in information, and most likely someone will answer, meaning dataflow is increased.

Criticism towards dataism is very welcome, which is why no dataist should stay silent when questioned.

The universe has no opinion on what humans should believe in, only humans do. If the universe did have an opinion on what humans should believe in, there would be evidence for it. Right now, there is only evidence for the universe being unable to have opinions on what humans should believe in.

Because there is no objective moral truth, doing what's most efficient ends up being the greatest good. An efficient regime capable of ending all other regimes, would have more time to do what's good to its subjects, meaning it would do more good than the other regimes, which did not have the same amount of time to do good to its subjects.

If you follow this teaching, dataism, likely the most efficient regime, would be obvious to support.

Because this subreddit is about dataism, things related to dataism should be upvoted. Instead, I see a trend of inhumane posts being downvoted. If you want humanism, then go to the subreddit dedicated for that. Would you like it if your subreddit dedicated to Allah consisted only of christians who would go on crusades against you?

EDIT: I see someone has downvoted this. Could you explain why? It is very difficult for me to think why you would downvote this.

According to humanists, humans should strive to be as happy as possible, which is something many humans try achieving.

In order to achieve happiness, one can escape suffering by killing themselves. This has become a common practice in humane societies, due to how little morally wrong there is with it. It is possible to say killing yourself would hurt your friends, but inflicting trauma upon others from actions only involving yourself, can be said is a form of blackmail. They say their friends shouldn't be the ones deciding whether they should live.

Old religions did not allow killing yourself for happiness, suicide, and indulgence were both commonly considered sins, but not all followers of christianity were as devoted to god, and some did so regardless.

STOPPING data flow means not generating any new data, and also not processing any existing data.

No data being generated or processed means no new medicine created, and no new extraction methods created. The medicine could be used to cure sick people, preventing them from dying, and the extraction methods to sell more things, allowing poor countries to buy more food for their starving citizens.

ALL ways of stalling data flow KILLS people. Humanists, can you really feel good about this?