Vladimir_Nesov comments on Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 February 2009 05:16PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 27 February 2009 02:40:11PM *  15 points [-]

I never believed in God, even though my parents are casually religious. The idea was simply prohibited by absurdity heuristics. At the same time, I was surrounded by believers in supernatural, alternative medicine, and had a couple of memories of apparently supernatural events. The specific God was absurd, but the invisible dragon of supernatural explanation was clearly true. I knew things normal people didn't, I knew that my alternative medicine worked while all those silly doctors didn't believe in it, I knew that supernatural exists. This gave a clear feeling of superiority.

I started to part with supernatural at University, on Traditional Rationalist grounds. I studied physics, and there was nowhere for supernatural to hide. Mystical retreated in a dark corner of the garage, not allowed to touch real things, not allowed to show in specific tricks, but still lingering as uncertainty. I called myself agnostic back then, taking pride in having an open mind, not excluding the supernatural or even a more abstract God, while not believing in them.

The systematic breakthrough started less than two years ago, when I began thinking about AI. Before then it didn't occur to me that my own beliefs can be treated as reductionistic phenomena, something that has to obey certain laws, which I can reason about, not just with. The supernatural and religion turned out to be mere symptoms of a more important problem, poor mental hygiene, and in their explicit form left the list of matters of concern.

Comment author: Raw_Power 13 December 2010 08:56:02PM 1 point [-]

But... didn't you say your alternate medicine and stuff actually worked? You don't need to throw the baby with the hot water (or whatever): techniques that work but have bogus explanations that still help in their practice (and I see that a lot in martial arts) simply need better, leaner explanations, but ignoring an empirical phenomenon entirely on the ground that its explanation sucks is not a very good idea. A few days ago I had my first Zen session. The sensation was unique, the results immediate, the explanation (harmony with the universe) bullshit/useless for deriving consequences, but useful for getting the position right. There's obviously more to it that "sitting before a wall in a contrived position", but what exactly?

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 13 December 2010 09:24:42PM *  1 point [-]

But... didn't you say your alternate medicine and stuff actually worked?

I said that I knew that it worked, not that it worked. I'm not moved by your argument that aimed to exploit that particular hypothetical point of confusion.