MrHen leaned back in his chair.
It had taken hours to write, but it was flawless. Everything was there: complete deference to the community’s beliefs, politely asking permission to join, admission of guilt. With one post, the tenor of LessWrong had been changed. Religion would join politics and picking up women as forbidden topics.
It would only be later that they would realize what had happened. When rationality became restricted by politeness, that would be when he would begin offering arguments that weakened atheist resolve. And he would have defenders, primed by this pitch-perfect post. Once he was made an honorary member of the “in” group, there is much greater leeway. They had already mentally committed to defend him here, the later details would be immaterial.
After the first online conversion, there would be anger. But at least some would defend him, harkening back to this one post. “It’s okay to be irrational,” they would say, “we’re all irrational about some things.” Oh, the luminaries would never fall. Eliezer, Robin, YVain, Gavin—they were far too strong. But there were those who longed to go back to the warm embrace of belief. Those just emerging from their shells, into ...
It's a half-joke, or a half-sarcastic joke -- I hold such humor in the highest regard and describe it as hyper-cynicism, from my own garbling of this. http://www.snpp.com/other/special/philosophy.html Basically, the poster is mostly joking, as given away by the last two sentences, but he wouldn't have made the post if he didn't think elements of truth behind it existed.
(Brief foreword: You really should read much more of the sequences. In particular How to Actually Change Your Mind, but there are also blog posts on Religion. I hope that one thing that comes out of this discussion is a rapid growth of those links on your wiki info page...)
What are the requirements to be a member of the LessWrong community? If we upvote your comments, then we value them and on average we hope you stay. If we downvote them, we don't value them and we hope either that they improve or you leave. Your karma is pretty positive, so stay.
You seem to be expecting a different shape of answer, about certain criteria you have to meet, about being an aspiring rationalist, or being above the sanity waterline, or some such. Those things will likely correlate with how your comments are received, but you need not reach for such proxies when asking whether you should stay when you have more direct data. From the other side, we need not feel bound by some sort of transparent criteria we propose to set out in order to be seen to be fair in the decisions we make about this; we all make our own judgement calls on what comments we value with the vote buttons.
I think you're led to ...
Saying you believe in an undefined and undefinable fuzzword doesn't reflect well on your high-level mastery of rationality either.
OTOH, saying you "believe" in some mostly vacuous statement that you were raised to believe, while not really believing anymore in most of the more obviously false beliefs in the same package, doesn't reflect very poorly on your rationality. (I'm not sure to what extent this applies to MrHen.)
ETA: I view belief in god in a growing rationalist as sort of a vestigial thing. It'll eventually just wither and fall off.
It reflects less poorly than seriously believing in astrology, perhaps. But it's still Not Good, the more so if you've been warned. "Just give up already and admit you were completely wrong from the beginning" is not a trivial or dispensable skill.
It's "not good" on the large scale, but it seems to me that on an individual level MrHen has done a very positive thing -- perhaps two: (1) admitted openly, in front of a crowd known for its non-theism, that he is a theist and holds a belief for which he fully expected some censure; (2) did not cling defensively to that belief.
On #2: His focus on a possible change in his "rationalist" group membership as a result of that belief could be seen as an attempt to divert scrutiny away from his actual belief so that he would not have to defend (and possibly question) it -- but it did not feel to me like that sort of move; it felt more like he was expecting this group to behave much the same way that a religious group would behave if he had openly admitted disbelieving some item of their doctrine: a mis-application of previously experienced behavior, not a diversionary tactic.
I fully agree that these are impressive subskills that have been displayed, but let us not also forget that it is better to be unimpressively right than impressively wrong. (E.g. Chalmers.)
While I agree with the overall point of this comment, the 99% statistic seems very wrong to me. I expect that for some individuals that's true, but across the whole population I'd be surprised if it's much higher than 40%. I'm basing my estimate on, among other things, having worked in a Roman Catholic nursing home (with actual nuns, though I didn't interact with them often) for four years and not making any particular effort to hide the fact that I'm an atheist from my co-workers. (The residents, I took on a case-by-case basis, as seemed appropriate given the situation.) I experienced exactly one instance in those four years of someone objecting more strongly than 'wait, what?' to my lack of faith: The leader of a new bible study group took offense when I didn't actively participate in their event (and got in my face about it in front of my residents, which you just *don't do* - I was much more upset about her upsetting them than anything else), and my supervisor's reaction to that was to apologize profusely to me (and not about the residents having been upset, either, heh) and forbid that group from coming back. The vast majority of instances where religion came up were either in social bonding contexts or as personal or interpersonal reassurances ('s/he's in heaven now') that were rarely to never directed at me by people who were aware of my atheism, and easily ignorable in any case.
Strawmen aren't good, ok?
"Rational" is a systematic process for arriving at true beliefs (or high-scoring probability distributions), so if you want true beliefs, you'll think in the ways you think are "rational". But even in the very best case, you'll hit on 10% probabilities one time out of ten.
I didn't see anything wrong with your original comment, though; it's possible that Ciphergoth is trying to correct a mistake that isn't there.
It may be enough if we find common cause in wanting to be rational in some shared topic areas. As long as we can clearly demarcate off-limit topics, we might productively work on our rationality on other topics. We've heard that politics is the mind killer, and that we will do better working on rationality if we stay away from politics. You might argue similarly about religion. That all said, I can also see a need for a place for people to gather who want to be rational about all topics. So, the question for this community to decide is, what if any topics should be off-limits here?
Agreed.
One caveat: it's great to want to be rationalist about all things, but let him without sin cast the first stone. So much of the community's energies have gone into analyzing akrasia - understanding that behavior X is rational and proper yet not doing it - that it appears hypocritical and counter-productive to reject members because they haven't yet reached all the right conclusions. After all, MrHen did mark religion for later contemplation.
I think that, in practice, a few religious people on LW are harmless and will probably have a positive effect.
It seems politically correct to go softly-softly on the few theists here, but let's not forget that theism is known to systematically lead to false beliefs (above and beyond the [probabilistically] false belief that there is a God), such as theistic moral realism, denial of evolution and evolutionary psychology, and abandonment of the scientific method. In a community dedicated to creating an accurate map-territory correspondence by systematic weighing of evidence and by fostering a fundamental mistrust of the corrupted hardware that we run on, theism is not welcome en-masse.
I think that a mass invasion of theists is unlikely for social reasons - they just won't bother to come; I don't lie awake at night frightened that when I next check LW the top article will be about how we can learn rationality lessons from JC.
There is nothing about being a rationalist that says that you can't believe in God. I think the key point of rationality is to believe in the world as it is rather than as you might imagine it to be, which is to say that you believe in the existence of things due to the weight of evidence.
Ask yourself: do you want to believe in things due to evidence?
If the answer is no, then you have no right calling yourself a "wannabe rationalist" because, quite simply, you don't want to hold rational beliefs.
If the answer is yes, then put this into practice. Is the moon smaller than the earth? Does Zeus exist? Does my toaster still work? In each case, what is the evidence?
If you find yourself believing something that you know most rationalists don't believe in, and you think you're basing your beliefs on solid evidence and logical reasoning, then by all means come and tell us about it! At that point we can get into the details of your evidence and the many more subtle points of rational reasoning in order to determine whether you really do have a good case. If you do, we will believe.
Here's another set of downvotes I don't get (ETA: parent was at -2 when I arrived). Gelisam is just stating their personal experience, not in order to claim we must all do likewise, but as their own reaction to the debate.
I think this community would be ill served by a norm that makes it a punishable offense to ever admit one doesn't strive for truth as much as one ought.
As far as replies go:
I'd rather believe, quite simply, in whatever I need to believe in order to be happiest.
It's not so simple. If you're self-deceiving, you might be quite wrong about whether your beliefs actually make you happier! There's a very relevant post on doublethink.
I believe in God too, since I think it's more likely that there is a God than that there isn't. But by "God" I mean "experimenter", or "producer", or "player".
I should start an apocalyptic Dionysian religion around one commandment and threat: "Be entertaining, for sweeps week cometh." The main problem is that would make Hitler a saint.
I am asking the community what they want me to do. Leave? Keep posting? Comment but don't post? Convert? Read everything posted and come back later?
I want you to keep doing what you have been doing. I find it distressing that you seem to think it'd be a reasonable, or even realistic, response for us to chase you out with torches and pitchforks. I am sorry to hear that we have created an environment that has led you to conceal this fact about yourself for such an extended time. I am pleased to note that you seem to find us worth hanging out with and seeking advice and help from in spite of us apparently having created this unwelcoming atmosphere.
I'm also personally curious about your exact flavor of theism, but that may, as you indicate, be neither here nor there.
If you haven't already, you might want to read Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted. I don't know if the case I describe is similar to yours or not, though.
That's basically nothing. Okay, not much point in my wondering "What could I have missed?" then.
Your intentions seem good, and if you read through the Sequences (or even just Map and Territory, Mysterious Answers and How To Actually Change Your Mind) then I expect you'll have a very different perspective at the end of it.
Byrnema, if you took someone who'd just never heard of God to begin with, never heard of any superstitutions, just grew up in a nice materialistic civilization that expected to take over the galaxies someday, and you asked them "What's left, when God's gone?" they'd look up at the stars, look back at you, and say, "I don't understand what you think is missing - it looks to me like everything is there."
I'm sorry that I failed to convey this, and I do worry that the metaethics sequence failed and will need to be done over. But you can't say I didn't try.
It seems to me that you conflate the lack of an outside moral authority with a lack of meaning to morality. Consider "fairness". Suppose 3 people with equal intrinsic needs (e.g. equal caloric reserves and need for food) put in an equal amount of work on trapping a deer, with no history of past interaction between any of them. Fairness would call for each of them to receive an equal share of the deer. A 90/9/1 split is unfair. It is unfair even if none of them realize it is unfair; if you had a whole society where women got 10% the wages of men, it wouldn't suddenly become massively unfair at the first instant someone pointed it out. It is just that an equal split is the state of affairs we describe by the word "fair" and to describe 90/9/1 you'd need some other word like "foograh".
In the same sense, something can be just as fair, or unfair, without there being any God, nor yet somehow "the laws of physics", to state with controlling and final authority that it is fair.
Actually, even God's authority can't make a 90/9/1 split "fair". A God could enforce the split, but not make it fair.
So who needs an authority to tell us what we should do, either? God couldn't make murder right - so who needs God to make it wrong?
Orthonormal, yourself, Eliezer, all seem to argue that value nihilism just doesn't happen.
That's a rather poor interpretation. I pointed out from my own experience that nihilism is not a necessary consequence of leaving religion. I swear to you that when I was religious I agonized over my fear of nihilism, that I loved Dostoyevsky and dreaded Nietzsche, that I poured out my soul in chapels and confessionals time and time again. I had a fierce conscience then, and I still have one now. I feel the same emotional and moral passions as before; I just recognize them as a part of me rather than a message from the heart of the cosmos— I don't need permission from the universe to care about others!
I don't deny that others have adopted positions of moral nihilism when leaving a faith; I know several of them from my philosophy classes. But this is not necessary, and not rational; therefore it is not a good instrumental excuse to maintain theism.
Now, I cannot tell you what you actually feel; but consider two possibilities in addition to your own:
What you experience may be an expectation of your values vanishing rather than an actual attenuation of them. This expectation can be mist
This might turn out to be vacuous, but it seems useful to me. Here goes nothing:
Do you have a favorite color? Or a favorite number, or word, or shirt, or other arbitrary thing? (Not something that's a favorite because it reminds you of something else, or something that you like because it's useful; something that you like just because you like it.)
Assuming you do, what objective value does it have over other similar things? None, right? Saying that purple is a better color than orange, or three is a better number than five (to use my own favorites) simply doesn't make sense.
But, assuming you answered 'yes' to the first question, you still like the thing, otherwise it wouldn't be a favorite. It makes sense to describe such things as fun or beautiful, and to use the word 'happiness' to describe the emotion they evoke. And you can have favorites among any type of things, including moral systems. Rationality doesn't mean giving those up - they're not irrational, they're arational. (It does mean being careful to make sure they don't conflict with each other or with reality, though - thinking that purple is somehow 'really' better than orange would be irrational.)
I think the basic problem is that evolution re-used some of the same machinery to implement both beliefs and values. Our beliefs reflect features of the external world, so people expect to find similar external features corresponding to their values.
Actually searching for these features will fail to produce any results, which would be very dismaying as long as the beliefs-values confusion remains.
The God meme acts as a curiosity stopper; it says that these external features really do exist, but you're too stupid to understand all the details, so don't bother thinking about it.
"According to a position of absolute indifference, no state of the universe is preferable to any other."
And this I think is why people find moral non-cognitivism so easy to misunderstand - people always try to parse it to understand which variety of moral realism you subscribe to.
When I became convinced that my belief in God was poorly founded, I worried intensely that I would become a nihilist and/or feel a perpetual vacuum of value. I've been incredibly relieved to find this fear unfounded.
On the nihilism front, I found that even in the absence of any Framework of Objective Value, I still cared about things (the welfare of friends and family, the fate of the world, the truth of my own beliefs, etc). I had thought that I'd cared about these things only insofar as they fit within the old FOV, but it turned out this fear was just a defense mechanism I employed in order to resist changing my worldview. Even with the FOV gone, I am simply the sort of being that cares about these things, and I don't need the permission of anyone or anything to do so!
I feel the same sense of purpose, passion, and meaning about these matters now that I felt when I was religious. Life is at times less comforting in other ways, but my fear of nihilism was misplaced. (Worse, it was subconsciously manufactured in order to stand in for other fears related to leaving religion, so that I wouldn't have believed someone else telling me this until I went through it myself!)
I think your personal beliefs do matter. From my perspective, there is a big difference between "I believe that Jesus Christ lived on Earth and died for my sins and God really listens to my prayers", "I believe that some entity exists in the universe with power greater than we can imagine", "the entire universe is God" or "God is love."
Presumably, there is a level of entry to LessWrong that is enforced. Does this level include filtering out certain beliefs and belief systems?
Any rule that would prevent Robert Aumann from contributing here, or that would have prevented Kurt Gödel from contributing here is a bad rule.
I have a question for you: do you expect that you will still be a theist after having read all the sequences?
It occurs to me that I never responded to your explicit questions.
1. Should I have kept this to myself? What benefit does an irrational person have for confessing their irrationality? (Is this even possible? Is this post an attempted ploy?) I somewhat expect this post and the ensuing discussion to completely wreck my credibility as a commentator and participant.
I think it is fairly obvious that people's beliefspace can have great chasms beneath the sanity waterline while still containing valuable islands or continents of rationality. For my purposes, when asking for book recommendations and the like, I will discount yours to an extent on these grounds (or not, if they are in a specific domain where I consider religion irrelevant), but argument screens out authority, and you've proven your capacity to provide desireable (on the karma scale) commentary. Which leads to:
...2. Presumably, there is a level of entry to LessWrong that is enforced. Does this level include filtering out certain beliefs and belief systems? Or is the system merit-based via karma and community voting? My karma is well above the level needed to post and my comments generally do better than worse. A merit-base
I think the minimal level of rationality necessary to participate successfully here has almost nothing to do with actual beliefs and everything to do with possessing the right attitude-- willing to change your mind, a desire to be have more accurate beliefs, updating with new evidence etc. See the Twelve Virtues of Rationality. You seem to be more than adequate in that regard.
If being a theist is a big part of your life, if you do things that you wouldn't do if you were an atheist then I suggest that your theism might be a big enough deal that you should stop beating around the bush and just subject your views to examination and argument in an open thread or in a dedicated thread for people to discuss issues where they don't agree with the rest of the community. But that is a recommendation, not a demand or anything.
If your theism is just a comforting, abstract belief it may well be harmless and you might as well take your time.
I wonder if we make too big a deal out of atheism here. Once you are an atheist it seems obviously true, but it is one of the hardest beliefs to change when you're a theist because it is so entangled in community, identity and normative issues. Scientology ...
Somewhat long and rambly response, perhaps in the spirit of the post:
I think those who quest for rationality, even if not completely, ought to be welcome here. Caveat that applies to all: I don't really deserve a vote, as a short-timer here.
So long as you are not trying to deliberately peddle irrationality, you're acting in good faith. That goes a fair distance.
Religious people are regularly rational and right on a lot of different issues. Rejecting a religious person's view solely because of religion doesn't seem like a good idea at all. (Deciding not to use time on a zombie-vampire hypothesis because it stems from religious belief rather than empirical evidence is dandy, though.) Irrational atheists are also commonplace.
Religion is an indicator of rationality, just not the be-all end-all of it.
This isn't a binary sin/no-sin situation. You can be rational in some areas and not others. Some religious people are able to be quite rational in virtually all day-to-day dealings. Some are poisoned.
We're all wanna-be rationals at some point. This post, to me, is great - the best thing I've seen written by MrHen. If someone tries to tell us that God wants us to eat less bacon, it...
The point of the community is to figure out how to think, not to blame outsiders.
Unfortunately, the siren song of majoritarianism makes it critical to establish that the world is mad if one is to progress past the gates of Aumann with one's own sanity.
Discussion of the sanity waterline is largely focused on establishing epistemic non-equivalence between claimed "beliefs" in order to prevent efforts to avoid overconfidence from being self-undermining.
I liked this post.
Note that "Wannabe Rational" is not terribly different from "aspiring rationalist" -- the very term that most LWers use for themselves!
All of us, presumably, have some beliefs that are not accurate. That, of course, makes us irrational. But we'd like to be more rational. That desire, that aspiration, is the entrance requirement here.
It's true that there is a limit on how rational you can be and still be a theist. But that's not the same as the limit on how rational you can become in the future, given that you are now a theist (or have whatever incorrect belief X).
I haven't read your entire post, but I find it very strange (and distracting, if I'm honest) that you would word it as if you believed it was irrational to believe in God. It is as if you either believe your belief is irrational (in which case, why believe it?) or you believe that it is polite to defer linguistically to the local majority position in this case. (Or something I haven't thought of - it's not like I've mathematically shown that these constitute all cases.)
I expect to find your discussion interesting - I love meta-discussions - but I'm just throwing that out there.
Edit: Ah, I see you discussed that very thing just a few paragraphs later. Interesting.
People on LW like to insist that there is a litmus test for rationality; certain things any rationalist believes or does not believe as a necessary condition of being rational. This post makes this pretty explicit (see 'slam-dunks').
However, I wish that the LW community would make more of a distinction between rational beliefs based on really good epistemological foundations (i.e., esoteric philosophical stuff) and rational beliefs that are rational because they actually matter -- because they're useful and help you win.
I'm someone who is interested in ph...
For what it's worth:
This is not an atheism conversion site, right? There needn't be pressure. Let them learn the methods of rationality and the language of Bayes, without eyeing them for whether they're ready to profess the teacher's password yet. If they're making useful contributions to the topics they post on, no less than atheist members, that screens off other considerations.
Anyone who claims to be rational in all area of their lives is speaking with irrational self confidence. The human brain was not designed to make optimal predictions from data, or to carry out flawless deductions, or to properly update priors when new information becomes available. The human brain evolved because it helped our ancestors spread their genes in the world that existed millions of years ago, and when we encounter situations that are too different from those that we were built to survive in, our brains sometimes fail us. There are simple optical...
Throwing people out because they hold certain beliefs generally leads to groupthink effects that are lead to less clear thinking.
Having someone who plays devils advocate against the consensus is sometimes even helpful if everyone believes in the consensus. Otherwise one often finds oneself arguing against strawmans that come from not fully understanding the argument that's made by the opposing side.
Also, admittedly, I am unjustifiably attached to that area of my map. It's going to take a while to figure out why I am so attached and what I can do about it. I am not fully convinced that rationalism is the silver-bullet that will solve Life, the Universe, and Everything. I am not letting this new thing near something I hold precious. This is a selfish act and will get in the way of my learning, but that sacrifice is something I am willing to make.
I have had a theory for some time now that people confuse "God" with "good[ness]". Th...
"I'll pray for you."
"I'll think for you."
Is that original? GF and I both think it's awesome.
Should LessWrong /kick people who fail at rationality? Who makes the decision? Who draws the sanity water-line?
If we were doing that I would have /kicked Robin Hanson a long time ago and probably Eliezer too. There are few people who do not have at least one position they stick to more than would be rational.
As far as I am concerned you are more than welcome and seem to be a thoroughly positive influence towards rational discussion. Besides, you will probably not believe in God for much longer. People just don't tend to change that sort of fundamental part of their identity straight away unless they have some sort of traumatic experience (eg. hazing).
Believing in God may be "below the sanity waterline", but there are plenty of other ways to have crazy beliefs for the wrong reasons (anything other than "because as far as I can tell, it's true") while being an atheist - about about science, about themselves, about politics, about morality ...
I think the "politics is the mind killer" policy is a bit of an avowal that the people here are fully capable of irrationality, and that it's more productive to just avoid the subject.
If OB/LW had started a few centuries ago, maybe the p...
Re: Irrational Beliefs.
When I was born, I was given a baby-blanket (blue), and a teddy bear. During childhood, I developed the belief that these two entities protected me, and even clung to those beliefs (although in a much less fully believed fashion). The presence of these two items, even though they really did nothing more than sit in my closet, did help to calm me in times of stress... Yet, I knew there was no possible way that a square piece of cloth, and a piece of cloth sewn into the shape of a bear (stuffed and buttoned with eyes) could affect the ...
"So, yeah. I believe in God. I figure my particular beliefs are a little irrelevant at this point."
I think the particulars of your beliefs are important, because they reveal how irrational you might be. Most people get away with God belief because it isn't immediately contradicted by experience. If you merely believe a special force permeates the universe, that's not testable and doesn't affect your life, really. However, if you believe this force is intelligent and interacts with the world (causes miracles, led the Israelites out of Egypt, e...
Making a general response to the post, now:
I think it is fairly obvious that the LessWrong community is not innately privileged as arbiters of rationality, or of fact. As such, it is reasonable to be cautious about obscuring large portions of your map with new ink; I don't think anyone should criticize you for moving slowly.
However, regarding your hesitance to examine some beliefs, the obvious thing to do (since your hesitance does not tell you whether or not the beliefs are correct, only examining them does) is to make the consequences of your discovery f...
I disagree with creating a hierarchy of rational levels, as you are suggesting. For one thing, how do you categorize all the beliefs of an individual? How do you rank every single belief in terms of value or usefulness? These are serious obstacles that would stand in the way of the execution of your program.
Moreover, I don't believe this categorization of perspective serves any real purpose. In fact it seems that many topics lie either "outside" of rationality, or else, they are not really served by a rational analysis. People shouldn't receive d...
I get the feeling that most discussions about the beliefs themselves are not going to be terribly useful.
You lost me there. I can't think how this discussion can yield a useful result if held entirely at the meta level. It makes a difference what you mean by "believe in God"; your beliefs matter to the extent that they make a difference in how you behave, decide, and so on. Words like "rational" and "rationalist" can be a distraction, as can "God"; behaviour and outcomes offer better focus.
If you find yourself pra...
My apologies in advance for rambling:
To begin, the subject reminds of a bumper sticker I occasionally see on a car around here: "Militant Agnostic: I Don't Know, And You Don't Either!"* Though there are plenty of examples of irrational religious beliefs leading to bad results, nonetheless I am not convinced that rationality is most useful when applied to (against?) religion. Just off the top of my head, applying it to politics directly (per Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter), or even something as mundane as climate (one way or the other), would...
Rationality is a tool. There must be something more fundamental for which the tool is wielded. I liken it to a formal mathematical system, where rationality is the process of proof, and what lies beneath are the axioms of the system. Some choices of axioms are inconsistent, but there are likely many choices that aren't.
While a rational person should never arrive at and then hold an unfalsifiable belief, I don't think it's irrational if an unfalsifiable belief is a starting axiom, something fundamental to who you are. Belief in God may or may not be such an axiom for you, but either way I find it useful to try and keep in mind the purpose of my rationality when applying it to areas of my map that scream when prodded.
There is one thing I don't understand: you seem to perceive your belief in God as irrational. In my understanding you can't belief in something and at the same time belief that this belief is irrational.
If I believe "the sky is red" and I'm aware that this is irrational since I know that in reality the sky is blue there is no way for me to continue believing "the sky is red".
Or did I misunderstand you somehow?
The realization that the sky is not red and that the sky is blue are two different things. Accepting "the sky is red" as irrational is possible without discovering that the sky is blue. If I happen to find an irrational belief in my map but have nothing to put there instead, what is the correct behavior? When I need to act on that area of the map, and all I have is an irrational belief, what should be done?
The first thing is to realize that you don't have even the irrational belief, because if the map is wrong, it's worse than useless. You should regress to the prior, accept not knowing the answer, but at the same time being careful about "you either win the lottery or lose, hence equal odds" fallacy (it's "privileging the hypothesis" lingering even after you remove a given hypothesis from dominance). Incidentally, it's rarely a mistake to let go of your beliefs: if they are correct, reality will imprint them back.
I experienced this process while erasing my beliefs in folk medicine practices. At one point, I decided to forget all I knew about this stuff since I was little, and to draw the judgment anew in each case, as if I heard of it for the first...
it'll probably save a lot of time to discuss the particulars of your belief in God instead of going meta. ie. 'God' is a very specific entity, discussing the specifics instead of imagined abstractions is more useful.
Suppose you could change your desires. Would you choose to abandon your desire to believe in (whatever) God? How about if it turned out to conflict with success in your other values?
Life with less-conflicting desires may be more effective or pleasurable. Maybe it's possible to have a mystical belief that retreats from actual rent-paying rational world-modeling, and only modifies your values and personal interactions. I'd still worry: am I now taking an irrational path toward satisfying myself, because of unquestioned beliefs about how I should behave?
I...
Someone upvoted this already? It hasn't been up for more than a minute. Do people here really read and process that quickly?
EDIT: Wait, I just checked the timestamps. My internal clock apparently has issues. It looks like it was about 4 minutes.
I have a terrifying confession to make: I believe in God.
This post has three prongs:
First: This is a tad meta for a full post, but do I have a place in this community? The abstract, non-religious aspect of this question can be phrased, "If someone holds a belief that is irrational, should they be fully ousted from the community?" I can see a handful of answers to this question and a few of them are discussed below.
Second: I have nothing to say about the rationality of religious beliefs. What I do want to say is that the rationality of particular irrationals is not something that is completely answered after their irrationality is ousted. They may be underneath the sanity waterline, but there are multiple levels of rationality hell. Some are deeper than others. This part discusses one way to view irrationals in a manner that encourages growth.
Third: Is it possible to make the irrational rational? Is it possible to take those close to the sanity waterline and raise them above? Or, more personally, is there hope for me? I assume there is. What is my responsibility as an aspiring rationalist? Specifically, when the community complains about a belief, how should I respond?
So, yeah. I believe in God. I figure my particular beliefs are a little irrelevant at this point. This isn't to say that my beliefs aren't open for discussion, but here and now I think there are better things to discuss. Namely, whether talking to people like me is within the purpose of LessWrong. Relevant questions have to do with my status and position at LessWrong. The short list:
This post has little to do with actual beliefs. I get the feeling that most discussions about the beliefs themselves are not going to be terribly useful. I originally titled this post, "The Religious Rational" but figured the opening line was inflammatory enough and as I began editing I realized that the religious aspect is merely an example of a greater group of irrationals. I could have admitted to chasing UFOs or buying lottery tickets. What I wanted to talk about is the same.
That being said, I fully accept all criticisms offered about whatever you feel is appropriate. Even if the criticism is just ignoring me or an admin deleting the post and banning me. I am not trying to dodge the subject of my religious beliefs; I provided myself as an example to be convenient and make the conversation more interesting. I have something relevant and useful to discuss in regards to the overall topic of rationalistic communities that applies to the act of spawning rationalists from within fields other than rationalism. Whether it directly applies to LessWrong is for you to decide.
How do you approach someone below the sanity waterline? Do you ignore them and look for people above the line? Do you teach them until they drop their irrational deadweight? How do you know which ones are worth pursuing and which are a complete waste of time? Is there a better answer than generalizing at the waterline and turning away everyone who gets wet? The easiest response to these people is to put the burden of rationality on their shoulders. Let them teach themselves. I think think there is a better way. I think there are people closer to the waterline than others and deciding to group everyone below the line together makes the job of teaching rationalism harder.
I, for example, can look at my fellow theists and immediately draw up a shortlist of people I consider relatively rationalistic. Compared to the given sanity waterline, all of us are deep underwater due to certain beliefs. But compared to the people on the bottom of the ocean, we're doing great. This leads into the question: "Are there different levels of irrationality?" And also, "Do you approach people differently depending on how far below the waterline they are?"
More discretely, is it useful to make a distinction between two types of theists? Is it possible to create a sanity waterline for the religious? They may be way off on a particular subject but otherwise their basic worldview is consistent and intact. Is there a religious sanity waterline? Are there rational religious? Is a Wannabe Rational a good place to start?
The reason I ask these questions is not to excuse any particular belief while feeling good about everything else in my belief system. If there is a theist struggling to verify all beliefs but those that involve God, then they are no true rationalist. But if said theist really, really wanted to become a rationalist, it makes sense for them to drop the sacred, most treasured beliefs last. Can rationalism work on a smaller scale?
Quoting from Outside the Laboratory (emphasis not mine):
Now what are we to think of a scientist who seems competent inside the laboratory, but who, outside the laboratory, believes in a spirit world? We ask why, and the scientist says something along the lines of: "Well, no one really knows, and I admit that I don't have any evidence - it's a religious belief, it can't be disproven one way or another by observation." I cannot but conclude that this person literally doesn't know why you have to look at things.
A certain difference between myself and this spirit believing scientist is that my beliefs are from a younger time and I have things I would rather do than gallop through that area of the territory checking my accuracy. Namely, I am still trying to discover what the correct map-making tools are.
Also, admittedly, I am unjustifiably attached to that area of my map. It's going to take a while to figure out why I am so attached and what I can do about it. I am not fully convinced that rationalism is the silver-bullet that will solve Life, the Universe, and Everything. I am not letting this new thing near something I hold precious. This is a selfish act and will get in the way of my learning, but that sacrifice is something I am willing to make. Hence the reason I am below the LessWrong waterline. Hence me being a Wannabe Rational.
Instead, what I have done is take my basic worldview and chased down the dogma. Given the set of beliefs I would rather not think about right now, where do they lead? While this is pure anathema to the true rationalist, I am not a true rationalist. I have little idea about what I am doing. I am young in your ways and have much to learn and unlearn. I am not starting at the top of my system; I am starting at the bottom. I consider myself a quasi-rational theist not because I am rational compared to the community of LessWrong. I am a quasi-rational theist because I am rational compared to other theists.
To return to the underlying question: Is this distinction valid? If it is valid, is it useful or self-defeating? As a community, does a distinction between levels of irrationally help or hinder? I think it helps. Obviously, I would like to consider myself more rational than not. I would also like to think that I can slowly adapt and change into something even more rational. Asking you, the community, is a good way to find out if I am merely deluding myself.
There may be a wall that I hit and cannot cross. There may be an upper-bound on my rationalism. Right now, there is a cap due to my theism. Unless that cap is removed, there will likely be a limit to how well I integrate with LessWrong. Until then, rationalism has open season on other areas of my map. It has produced excellent results and, as it gains my trust, its tools gain more and more access to my map. As such, I consider myself below the LessWrong sanity waterline and above the religious sanity waterline. I am a Wannabe Rational.
The advantage of a distinction between different sanity waterlines is that it allows you to compare individuals within groups of people when scanning for potential rationalists. A particular group may all drop below the waterline but, given their particular irrational map, some of them may be remarkably accurate for being irrational. After accounting for dumb luck, does anyone show a talent for reading territory outside of their too-obviously-irrational-for-excuses belief?
Note that this is completely different than questioning where the waterline is actually drawn. This is talking about people clearly below the line. But an irrational map can have rational areas. The more rational areas in the map, the more evidence there is that some of the mapmaker's tools and tactics are working well. Therefore, this mapmaker is above the sanity waterline for that particular group of irrational mapmakers. In other words, this mapmaker is worth conversing with as long as the conversation doesn't drift into the irrational areas of the map.
This allows you to give people below the waterline an attractive target to hit. Walking up to a theist and telling them they are below the waterline is depressing. They do need to hear it, which is why the waterline exists in the first place, and their level of sanity is too low for them to achieve a particular status. But after the chastising you can tell them that other areas in their map are good enough to become more rational in those areas. They don't need to throw everything away to become a Wanna Rational. They will still be considered irrational but at least their map is more accurate than it was. It is at this point that someone begins their journey to rationalism.
If we have any good reason to help others become more rational, it seems as though this would count toward that goal.
This last bit is short. Taking an example of myself, what should I be doing to make my map more accurate? My process right now is something like this:
These things, in my opinion, are learning the ways of rationality. I have a few areas of my map marked, "Do this part later." I have a few inks labeled, "Favorite colors." These are what keep me below the sanity waterline. As time moves forward I pickup new favorite colors and eventually I will come to the areas saved for later. Maybe then I will rise above the waterline. Maybe then I will be a true rationalist.