Every ideology promises its followers either a wonderful outcome or an evasion of a tragic one. Belief in an unlikely but transformative future vision is the most powerful motivating force for groups of people to work extremely hard. This belief both unifies and motivates its followers. In this essay, I argue that every effective ideology has such a belief at its core.

Even rational people, such as Pascal, can be attracted to this promise. They accept it by calculating that the wonderful outcomes even when multiplied by a tiny probability are still worthwhile to pursue. Accepting such a belief is called Pascal’s Mugging.

Pascal’s Mugging is also an effective instrument for building ideological communities. The outside world is likely to misunderstand or even ridicule people who believe in these unlikely visions. Otherwise the outside world would be pursuing such visions. The outer world is cold and misunderstanding. In contrast, the insiders provide emotional support. They understand your deepest and most meaningful belief.

Frequently, such promises provide tantalising rewards and an eternity to enjoy them. Reward’s recipients would be proven right in the grand history of time.

Pascal’s Mugging

Pascal defended the belief in god on probabilistic basis. If one believes in god and she doesn’t exist, nothing’s gained and nothing’s lost. And if god does exist, then the eternal life in heaven is nearly infinitely great. Consequently, Pascal claimed, as long as that there’s a non-zero probability of god’s existence, the rationalist should believe in her.

Pascal’s Mugging is the inversion of this argument by Nick Bostrom. Nick argues that Pascal’s logic exposes him to a simple mugging. We can promise Pascal something infinitely great in the future, for the cheap cheap price of, say, $5 now. The probability of us keeping the promise isn’t exactly zero. As infinity multiplied by anything larger than zero is still infinity, Pascal should accept our offer.

Nick Bostrom’s argument exposes an error in Pascal’s calculus. The total probability of any wonderful event is fixed. Therefore, given a promise of a single, wonderfully impactful event, it is extremely unlikely for it to be larger than the probability of all such events in the past. The probability sum of the category of events is useful as our true internal probability assessment can be witnessed by our actions. If we say something is both likely and impactful our actions should reflect that. If they don’t, we are either lying our deluding ourselves.

Follower’s of the ideology experience a similar cognitive illusion as mathematicians who try to reason about expected value of unlikely events. By focusing their attention on a particular version of the future, other outcomes seem less important. This makes the powerful future vision dominate the imagination at the expense of probabilistic calculus. In the general case victims of Pascal’s Mugging don’t just shift the focus of the calculus towards the unlikely event, their whole lives become focused on it.

What’s in an Ideology?

I define ideology as a group of related ideas that tend to be accepted together rather than individually. There’s no moral judgement attached to the word in this essay. Agile software engineering has been responsible for improved productivity and developer happiness in many teams. Scientology has been responsible for harassment of its opponents and alienation of its members from their previous social ties. Both Agile software engineering and Scientology are ideologies by this essay’s definition.

For an ideology to be effective, its members need to be: persuasive and productive. Persuasiveness is measured by ability to convince new members to join the ideology. Ideology is productive if its members consistently make progress towards ideology’s goals¹.

Building Blocks of An Effective Ideology

The building blocks of an effective ideology:

1. The Mugging: belief in a large future reward, that’s unique to the followers of the ideology.
2. Community: a community that believes in (1.). This strengthens individual members belief in (1.), creates an us vs them dynamic, and motivates followers to extreme actions in advancing ideology’s interests.
3. Durability: the promise that the belief will stand the test of time and in the grand scheme of things its followers will be right.

The Mugging

At the core of every effective ideology is a belief in an unlikely but powerful future vision. Making this vision a reality is the core driving factor of the ideology.

Effective Altruism (EA) aims to quantitatively measure charity effectiveness and prioritize them accordingly. According to EA Against Malaria Foundation has been one of the most effective charities. It costs AMF $3K-$8K to save a life. At its core, EA is a reasonable framework that has come out of Oxford’s Philosophy Department. If there’s one thing that distinguishes such frameworks, it is that they fail to convince people outside of academia to actually change their actions. Quantitative arguments might convince journal reviewers to accept a submission but they’ll fail to convince people to act on your suggestions. EA has managed to connect ethical theory with practice through a Pascal’s Mugging. Large number of young, ambitious graduates of elite colleges have decided to join companies that align themselves with long-term priorities of EA. Back when OpenAI, Anthropic, and FTX were nascent startups, they were able to convince the top employees of Google and Jane Street to join them instead. Those who remained in high-paying positions have committed to donating 10% of their income to EA-approved causes.

EA doesn’t advocate for a single cause but instead has a set of priorities. Each of these priorities is best viewed as a Pascal’s Mugging of its own. Entire ideologies have been built around some of the best-known strategic priorities.

Here are a couple of examples:

1. Existential AI risk.
2. Decreasing deaths from preventable diseases.
3. Ending factory farming.

The Pascal’s Mugging of EA is in saving (a large number of) lives. Sometimes, the lives are saved immediately. Investing money into malaria nets and water sanitation programs prevents deaths nearly as soon as the money is deployed. At other times, future lives are saved by preventing an existential risk. Interestingly, the later vision has been more effective (and it’s also more effective as a low probability, infinite reward Pascal’s Mugging). Just consider that OpenAI and Anthropic have been started with this Pascal’s Mugging at it’s core. Today jobs at AI safety and interpretability are the most sought after, even if they are the least profitable (at least in the short-term).

A job with a high monthly salary is about as close to the opposite of a Pascal’s Mugging as a person can get. The likelihood of payoff is high and legally enforcible. One demonstration of EA’s social power is how it managed to convince some of the most talented young people to accept it’s Pascal’s Mugging over one of the best paying salaried jobs. EA’s persuasive powers are so powerful, management at Jane Street was worried about talent flight to FTX²:

“First-year traders whom Jane Street had just paid $200,000 didn’t simply up and quit – especially not to go work for a fly-by-night crypto trading start-up. Caroline sensed, rightly, that her departure alerted Jane Street to an alarming new threat. Jane Street and the other high-frequency trading firms had been fishing for traders in the same ponds as Will MacAskill and the other Oxford philosophers fished for effective altruists. People able to calculate the expected value of complicated financial gambles were the same people drawn to the belief that they could calculate the expected value of their entire lives.” ³

Community

Belief in an unlikely future vision also serves a social purpose. Ideology’s community by its definition has accepted the future vision. People outside of this community will think of you as crazy if you speak about your beliefs openly. Therefore fellow people from the in-group become the only people with whom you can discuss the most interesting vision for the future without being ridiculed.

Durability

Rewards don’t have to be experienced directly, even in the best case scenario. Yes, many ideologies promise infinite rewards in the afterlife. But one can follow an ideology where they believe that they’ll land on the right side of history long after their death. In this case, even if the promise materializes, they won’t be there to witness its rewards directly. Nevertheless, the future vision is worth sufficiently for a lot of people.

Humans are temporal creatures with hopeless aspirations towards infinity. The core of our suffering comes from inability to reconcile our aspirations with the cruel reality. Victor Frankl described that the core sources of meaning for humans come from one of the three possible sources: family, religion, and work. The common thread between all three is the attempt to connect with something that will outlive you. If we go all the way down to the genetic level, we see this struggle too. Evolutionarily, the meaning of our existence comes from providing a vehicle for our genes to survive just a little bit longer.

Durability of a belief is a stab at overcoming the boundaries of our temporal existence. It doesn’t matter if today’s society finds our beliefs weird. Future society is the one that will hold the ultimate judgement.

St Peter’s Return to Rome

Durability can come in many forms. The ideology itself can withstand (or fail) the test of time. Furthermore, an individual can be seen as important for the ideology. St Peter’s return to Rome exemplifies both of these cases.

In the year 67, the city of Rome was just recovering from The Great Fire. Nero, an infamously brutal and tyrannical dictator, was blaming the Christian community for causing the fire. This lead to brutal persecution and torture of Christains within Rome.

Henryk Siemiradzki (1876) in his painting Nero’s Torches communicates what it meant to be a Christian in Rome at this time far better than I can. See the top right corner of the painting:

At this time St. Peter was, understandably, trying to leave Rome. As the legend goes, on his way out of Rome, Peter encounters Jesus. Jesus, carrying his cross, is going back to Rome. Seeing Jesus going back to Rome, makes Peter ashamed of himself. Peter turns around, returns to Rome, and is ultimately crucified.

As Peter was not a Roman citizen, he’s grave was likely unmarked if he was buried at all. In nearly two centuries since, two churches have been built to mark Peter’s resting place. Today, the most important church (both building and institution) marks our best guess of where he’s body was buried. The leaders of the Catholic church formally are Peter’s successors.

Peter has been right in the grand history of time (or at least the history of the last 2000 years). He’s right, not because he’s right about his existence of god (that doesn’t matter for the purposes of this essay). St Peter’s cultural and institutional influence makes him right. Enough people believe that Peter’s right, that those people have shaped our reality to make him right.

What made St Peter turn around and head into certain torture? There’s an obvious aspect of peer pressure from Jesus. But beyond that, I believe the aspect of legacy, the idea of being right in the grand history of time is just as significant.

Imagine we remove all other factors of influence. Imagine St Peter didn’t believe in Christianity and was not persuaded by Christ. Would a glimpse at his future legacy convinced him to return to Rome for certain torture? Back in 67, there was no way St Peter could’ve imagined that his actions will be remembered today. But today we have examples people from the past being remembered in the grand history of time. Today, we have the record keeping technology to create legends that will last for tens of thousands of years. Today being right in the long-term (asymptotically in the grand history of time) is one of the most important driving motivators behind ideological following.

Salafi Islam

Salafism is a branch within Sunni Islam that emphasizes the emulation of the earliest Muslims. Known as the Salaf, these are the companions of Prophet Muhammad and two subsequent generations. Salafism rejects how Islam has evolved past Salaf generations and advocates a return to the this period.

Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Talban, and nearly every other organization of Islamic extremism would consider itself Salafi. Salafism does not justify violence. However, two aspects of Salafism lend themselves well to justification of extremism within those who are searching for such.

First, is the conservative interpretation of Islam within Salafism. This aspect is most frequently used to explain Salafism’s appeal to extremist organizations. Salafism is known for literalist interpretations of Islam’s holy texts and rejection of later innovation within Islam. This can be used to justify extremism by, for example, redefining the concept of Takfir (declaring another Muslim as a non-Muslim). Takfir is a serious offence within most interpretations of Islam, including Salafism. However, Al-Qaeda and other extremist organizations are reinterpreting this concept and using it to justify violence towards other Muslims.

Second, being right in the grand history of time justifies departure from current societal norms. This is the main lure, used to conduct Pascal’s Mugging here. Being shunned by contemporaries is a tiny price to pay for being right in the long run. Every visionary of the past, from Jesus and Copernicus to J.C.R. Licklider and James Clark were ostracised or at least seen as weird by their contemporaries. Any society is likely to criticise ideas just because they are different. Most people tend to be wrong about most new ideas most of the time. People working on radically different ideas must apply a strong filter to the cynicism of others if they want to succeed. Unfortunately, it is difficult to distinguish between knee-jerk cynicism of newness and constructive criticism. So it’s easy to dismiss all criticism. The absence of a good filter leaves the person working on the new thing without an external sanity check.

TODO: what about non-extremist Salafi followers, do they generally show stronger devotion and depth of study than other schools? e.g. is complete memorisation of Quran more common within Salafi’s than in other schools of Islam.

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Case studies:

Veganism

I’m neither a Salafi Muslim nor an Effective Altruist, albeit, I do support the latter ideology. The analysis of the previous two groups was an observation from the outside rather than the inside. It is easy to criticise beliefs of others, but my theory would be invalid if I’d consider myself exempt from it. Now I turn to analysis of two groups that I do consider myself part of: vegans and startup founders. Both of these groups exemplify minorities who were able to leverage asymmetric societal and economic impact to their size. I believe that Pascal’s Mugging plays a central role in why followers of these groups have managed to collaborate so well and work as hard as they have.

1. Veganism as Pascal’s Mugging. What does it mean to be right in the grand scheme of time for a vegan?
2. What impact have vegans had?
   2. What has been the role of cooperation between vegans in leveraging this impact?

Startup culture

Footnotes