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aausch comments on The Wannabe Rational - Less Wrong
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(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 expect a different sort of answer because you're coming at this from the point of view of what Eliezer calls Traditional Rationality - rationality as a set of social rules. So your question is, am I allowed this belief? If challenged, can I defend it such that those who hear it acknowledge I've met the challenge? Or can I argue that it should not be required to meet these challenges?
This of course is an entirely bogus question. The primary question that should occupy you is whether your beliefs are accurate, and how to make them more accurate. This community should not be about "how can I be seen to be a goodthinking person" but "how can I be less wrong?"
Also, it seems very much as if you already know how things are going to swing when you subject your theistic beliefs to critical examination. That being so, it's hard to know whether you actually believe in God, or just believe that you believe in God. I hope you will decide that more accurate beliefs are better in all areas of study for several reasons, but one is that I doubt that you are maximizing your own happiness. You are currently in a state of limbo on the subject of religion, where you openly admit that you daren't really think about it. I think that you will indeed find the process of really thinking about it painful, but it will be just as painful next year as it will be now, and if you do it now you'll avoid a year of limbo, a year of feeling bad about yourself for not goodthinking, and a year of being mistaken about something very important.
Yes, I agree with you here. It looks to me like one of the core values of the community revolves around first evaluating each individual belief for its rationality, as opposed to evaluating the individual. And this seems very sensible to me - given how compartmentalized brains can be, and how rationality in one individual can vary over time.
Also, I am amused by the parallels between this core value, and one of the core principles of computer security in the context of banking transactions. As Scheiner describes it, evaluate the transaction not the end user
first evaluating each individual belief for its rationality Again, no, I'm afraid you're still making the same mistake. When you talk about evaluating a belief for its rationality, it still sounds like the mindset where you're trying to work out if the necessary duty has been done to the rationality dance, so that a belief may be allowed in polite society. But our first concern should be: is this true? Does this map match the territory? And rationality is whatever systematically tends to improve the accuracy of your map. If you fail to achieve a correct answer, it is futile to protest that you acted with propriety.
Now I am really confused. How can a belief be rational, and not true?
"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.
Well, if you got a very improbable result from a body of data; I could see this happening. For example, if most of a group given a medication improved significantly over the control group, but the sample size wasn't large enough and the improvement was actually coincidence, then it would be rational to believe that it's an effective medication... but it wouldn't be true.
Then again, we should only have as much confidence in our proposition as there is evidence for it, so we'd include a whatever-percent possibility of coincidence. I didn't see anything wrong with your original comment, either.
I've since learned that some people use the word "rationality" to mean "skills we use to win arguments and convince people to take our point of view to be true", as opposed to the definition which I've come to expect on this site (currently, on an overly poetic whim, I'd summarize it as "a meta-recursively applied, optimized, truth-finding and decision making process" - actual definition here).