-Okay, that probably isn't _literally_ true. There probably really are quarks and leptons and an objective speed of light in a vacuum. But most people don't actually spend much of their lives interacting with reality at a level that requires scientific understanding. [specicialists have their specialty, folk physics helps us carry plates, and everything else is narrative]
+Okay, that probably isn't _literally_ true. There probably really are quarks and leptons and an objective speed of light in a vacuum. But most people don't actually spend much of their lives interacting with reality at a level that requires scientific understanding. Maintaining the wonders of our technological civilization demands that a few specialists understand some very _narrow_ fragment of the true structure of the world beneath the world—and even they don't have to [take it home with them](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory). For most people all of the time, and all people most of the time, basic folk physics is enough to keep us from dropping too many plates. Everything else we think we believe is shaped by the narratives we tell each other, which are far too complicated for a lone human to empirically check—or even _notice_ that such a check would fail.
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+And so sufficiently-widely-believed lies _bootstrap themselves into being "true"_. You might protest, "But, but, the map is not the territory! Believing doesn't make it so!" But if almost everyone accepts a narrative and _sort of_ behaves as if it were true, then that _does_ (trivially) change the _part_ of reality that consists of people's social behavior—which is the only part that _matters_ outside of someone's dreary specialist duties writing code or mixing chemicals.
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+If people are quantitatively less likely to do business with people who emit heresy-signals (even subtle ones, like being insufficiently enthusiastic while praising God), then believing in God actually _is_ a good financial decision, which is a _successful prediction_ that legitimately supports the "Divine Providence rewards believers" hypothesis. With sufficient mental discipline, a careful thinker might be able to entertain alternative hypotheses ("Well, maybe Divine Providence isn't _really_ financially rewarding believers, and it just looks that way because of these-and-such social incentive gradients"), but it would take a level of stubbornness that
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