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SarahC comments on Open Thread: May 2010 - Less Wrong
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Question: Which strongly held opinion did you change in a notable way, since learning more about rationality/thinking/biases?
Theism. Couldn't keep it. In the end, it wasn't so much that the evidence was good -- it had always been good -- as that I lost the conviction that "holding out" or "staying strong" against atheism was a virtue.
Standard liberal politics, of the sort that involved designing a utopia and giving it to people who didn't want it. I had to learn, by hearing stories, some of them terrible, that you have no choice but to respect and listen to other people, if you want to avoid hurting them in ways you really don't want to hurt them.
I just listened to UC Berkeley's "Physics for Future Presidents" course on iTunes U (highly recommended) and I thought, "Surely no one can take theism seriously after experiencing what it's like to have real knowledge about the universe."
Disagreed. My current opinion is that you can be a theist and combine that with pretty much any other knowledge. Eliezer points to Robert Aumann as an example. For someone that has theism hardcoded into their brain and treats it as a different kind of knowledge than physics there can be virtually no visible difference in everyday life from a normal a-theist. I think the problem is not so much the theism, but that people use it to base decisions on it.
oh it's true. I know deeply religious scientists. Some of them are great scientists. Let's not get unduly snide about this.
There seems to be a common thought-pattern among intelligent theists. When they learn a lot about the physics of the Universe, they don't think "I should only be satisfied with beliefs in things that I understand in this deep way." Instead, they think, "As smart as I am, I have only this dim understanding of the universe. Imagine how smart I would have to be to create it! Truly, God is wonderful beyond comprehension."
"Wonderful" I could believe, but I don't think John Horton Conway is actually wonderful beyond comprehension. To make an analogy.
If Conway used the Turing-completeness of Life to create within it a universe like our own, he would be wonderful beyond my comprehension :).
If Flatland would do, he could do it 'naturally' given enough scale and time. (:
could you link some of these stories, please? I am known to entertain utopian ideas from time to time, but if utopias really do hurt people, then I'd rather believe that they hurt people.
Personal stories, from a friend, so no, there's no place to link them. Well-meaning liberals have either hurt, or failed to help, him and people close to him.
Communism is one utopia that ended in disaster, see Rummel's Death by Government
I recommend reading Blank Slate to get a good perspective on the Utopian issues; the examples (I was born in USSR) are trivial to come by, but the book will give you a mental framework to deal with the issues.