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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Open Thread, August 2010 - Less Wrong
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Tricycle has the data. Also if an event of JCW magnitude happened to me I'm pretty sure I could beat it. I know at least one rationalist with intense religious experiences who successfully managed to ask questions like "So how come the divine spirit can't tell me the twentieth digit of pi?" and discount them.
Actually, you have to be sure that you wouldn't convert if you had John Wright's experiences, otherwise Aumann's agreement theorem should cause you to convert already, simply because John Wright had the experiences himself-- assuming you wouldn't say he's lying. I actually know someone who converted to religion on account of a supposed miracle, who said afterward that since they in fact knew before converting that other people had seen such things happen, they should have converted in the first place.
Although I have to admit I don't see why the divine spirit would want to tell you the 20th digit of pi anyway, so hopefully there would be a better argument than that.
Here's a more detailed version (starting at "I know a transhumanist who has strong religious visions").
What if you sustained hypoxic brain injury, as JCW may well have done during his cardiac event? (This might also explain why he think it's cool to write BSDM scenes featuring a 16-year-old schoolgirl as part of an ostensibly respectable work of SF, so it's a pet suspicion of mine.)
It would seem he is just writing for Mature Audiences. In this case maturity means not just 'the age at which we let people read pornographic text' but the kind of maturity that allows people to look beyond their own cultural prejudices.
16 is old. Not old enough according to our culture but there is no reason we should expect a fictional time-distant culture to have our particular moral or legal prescriptions. It wouldn't be all that surprising if someone from an actual future time to, when reading the work, scoff at how prudish a culture would have to be to consider sexualised portrayals of women that age to be taboo!
Mind you I do see how a hypoxic brain injury could alter someone's moral inhibitions and sensibilities in the kind of way you suggest. I just don't include loaded language in the speculation.
Interestingly, if the book in question is the one I think it is, it takes place in Britain, where the age of consent is, in fact, sixteen.
Come to think of it, 16 is the age of consent here (Australia - most states) too. I should have used 'your' instead of 'our' in the paragraph you quote! It seems I was just running with the assumption.
Although "18 years old" does seem to be a hard-and-fast rule for when you can legally appear in porn everywhere, as far as I know...
Point of curiosity: Does anyone else still notice this sort of thing? I don't think my generation does anymore.
I've only read his Golden Age trilogy, so if it's there, then no, to this 50-something it didn't stand out from everything else that happened. If it's in something else, I doubt it would. I mean, I've read Richard Morgan's ultra-violent stuff, including the gay mediæval-style fantasy one, and, well, no.
[ETA: from Google the book in question appears to be Orphans of Chaos.]
I could be an outlier though.
Well, I'm female. Could be women tend to be more sensitive to that kind of thing.
That said, I wasn't really planning to start a discussion about sexually explicit portrayals of sub-18 teenagers and whether they're ok, and I doubt I'll participate further in one. Unfortunately I don't own the book, so if anyone is curious about the details of what I was referring to, they'll have to read Orphans of Chaos (not that I recommend it on its merits). I wouldn't hazard a guess as to how much a person can be oblivious to (probably a lot), but I'd be surprised if most people's conscious, examined reaction to the sexual content (which is abundant and spread throughout the book, though not hardcore) was closer to "That is normal/A naturalistic portrayal of a 16-year-old girl's sexual feelings/Literary envelope-pushing" than to "That is weird/creepy."
Eh, you see people trying to "push boundaries" in "respectable" literature all the time anyway.
Certainly there are other explanations. If you can show me that JCW openly wrote highly sexualized portrayals of people below the age of consent before his religious experience/heart attack, I will be happy to retract.