Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Steelmanning Divination, published by Vaniver on the LessWrong. [This post was primarily written in 2015, after I gave a related talk, and other bits in 2018; I decided to finish writing it now because of a recent SSC post.] The standard forms of divination that I’ve seen in contemporary Western culture--astrology, fortune cookies, lotteries, that sort of thing--seem pretty worthless to me. They’re like trying to extract information from a random number generator, which is a generally hopeless phenomenon because of conservation of expected evidence. Thus I had mostly written off divination; although I've come across some arguments that divination served as a way to implement mixed strategies in competitive games. (Hunters would decide where to hunt by burning bones, which generated an approximately random map of their location, preventing their targets from learning where the humans liked to hunt and avoiding that location.) But then I came across this striking passage, and sat up straight: One performs the rain sacrifice and it rains. Why? I say: there is no special reason why. It is the same as when one does not perform the rain sacrifice and it rains anyway. When the sun and moon suffer eclipse, one tries to save them. When Heaven sends drought, one performs the rain sacrifice. One performs divination and only then decides on important affairs. But this is not to be regarded as bringing one what one seeks, but rather is done to give things proper form. Thus, the gentleman regards this as proper form, but the common people regard it as connecting with spirits. If one regards it as proper form, one will have good fortune. If one regards it as connecting with spirits, one will have misfortune. This is from Eric L. Hutton's translation of a collection of essays called Xunzi (presumably written by Xunzi, an ancient Chinese philosopher who was Confucian with heavy Legalist influences). The book was overall remarkable in how much of Xunzi's brilliance shone through, which is something I very rarely think about authors. (Talking to another rationalist who was more familiar with Chinese philosophy than I was, he also had this impression that Xunzi simply had a lot more mental horsepower than many other core figures.) By the end of it, I was asking myself, "if they had this much of rationality figured out back then, why didn't they conquer the world?" Then I looked into the history a bit more and figured out that two of Xunzi's students were core figures in Qin Shi Huang's unification of China to become the First Emperor. So this paragraph stuck with me. When Xunzi talks about the way that earlier kings did things, I registered it as an applause light and moved on. When he talked about how an important role of government was to prevent innovation in music, I registered it as covering a very different thing than what I think of when I think about 'music' and moved on. But when he specifically called out the reason why I (and most educated people I know) don't pay much attention to astrology or other sorts of divination or magic, said "yeah, those would be dumb reasons to do this," and then said "but there's still a reason", I was curious. What's the proper form that he's talking about? (Sadly, this was left as an exercise for the reader; the surrounding paragraphs are only vaguely related.) In his introduction, Hutton summarizes the relevant portion of Xunzi's philosophy: In this process of becoming good, ritual plays an especially important role in Xunzi's view. As he conceives them, the rituals constitute a set of standards for proper behavior that were created by the past sages and should govern virtually every aspect of a person's life. These rituals are not inviolable rules: Xunzi allows that people with developed moral judgment may need to depart from the strict dictat...