= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wedrifid comments on Goals for which Less Wrong does (and doesn't) help - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (101)
Your recent post is a good example. A friendly math post! I gave up after reading "...within-cluster sum of squared differences..." :-)
Your points are really surprising. I do not interact with educated people in meatspace at all. I didn't think that someone who reached your level of education needed LW to break with religion. And I've always been the kind of person to take futuristic topics seriously by default, so that was no surprise at all to me. I guess that is why people here are irritated when I argue that science fiction authors talk about many topics discussed here for a long time. I don't see how the fictional exploration of concepts could lower the credence of the subjects.
Nevertheless, I never tried to argue that Less Wrong is useless. It's one of my favorite places in the metaverse.
People certainly ought not need to. By that I mean that people with the general cognitive capacity of humans have more than enough ability to evaluate religion as nonsense given even basic modern education. But even so it is damn hard to break free. Part of what makes the 'Belief in Belief' post particularly useful is that it is written in an attempt to understand what is really going on when people 'believe' things that don't make sense given what they know.
The social factors are also important. Religion is essentially about signalling tribal affiliation. It is dangerous to discard a tribal identity without already having found yourself a new tribe - even a compartmentalised online tribe used primarily for cognitive affiliation.
This is something I have to remind myself of when reading your comments. You are sincere. Not having known your online self at all some of your arguments and questions would seem far more rhetorical than you intended them. You actually do update on new information which is a big deal!