Boyi comments on How to Not Lose an Argument - Less Wrong
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You are correct that rhetoric can be misused. It should be complemented by facts. My point is that just because rhetoric can be used to convince people of falsehoods does not prove that truth is not equally dependent on rhetoric to become normative in people's minds.
People are not born judging information by its verisimilitude. Empirical fact as a criteria for knowledge must be taught. I am not saying it is a bad thing to teach people (it is really good), what I am saying is that judging information by fact has to be seen as highly technical knowledge, not a fundamental system of cognition. The majority of the world's population does not judge information by fact. I am not even convinced that all scientists or rationalists truly judge information by fact.
My perception of you is that you see religion as an antiquated method for producing knowledge. I agree with you. I do not think religion should be the criteria of determining facts. Where we do not see eye to eye is that I also believe that religion serves several other functions beyond literal interpretation of the world. One of which is the maintenance and strengthening of social bonds. So I cannot as easily deem non-factual beliefs as a waste of resources (see my comment here http://lesswrong.com/lw/bk/the_trouble_with_good/ for more on this).
My response was meant to question your statement " I think it is still worth it to learn the truth."
At the pinnacle of your values is Truth. Can you explain to my why Truth should be regarded more important than social relationships/ personal health.
Truth is an instrumental value, not a terminal value of mine. Believing true things helps me achieve my actual goals.
Yes, and a major goal of LessWrong is to help people avoid cognitive bias and therefore do better at achieving their goals.
How is religion a "method for producing knowledge" at all?
Religion is the original norm for producing knowledge whether you like it or not. I am not saying it was a good method, but you cannot deny that it is embryologically the basis of knowledge and knowledge production. The first scholars were theologians and aristocrates, the first colleges were religous institutions. I am not saying that it is a correct methodology, but it is our history.
Early doctors healed people in ways we no longer condone, but we cannot deny the fact that they were the forefathers of modern medical knowledge.
That's just a more emphatic way of stating the premise, isn't it?
Religions are certainly models of the world, or at least of certain parts of it: fertility, cosmology, all those things with mysterious causes. And it's true that the lines between religion and philosophy (including natural philosophy) were awfully blurry in pre-modern thought; I'd actually put the watershed there relatively late, somewhere around Darwin or a little earlier. But calling religions methods of producing knowledge carries certain implications which don't necessarily follow from a conception of religion as a model of the numinous world: "knowledge" is a fairly strong word, much stronger than "thought" or "belief".
I'd say a more productive approach would be to call religions the first totalizing systems of belief: there are other and earlier paths to knowledge (nonhuman animals can learn from experience, but we don't observe worship among them), but before the Classical period all the Western attempts at organizing knowledge and belief into a comprehensive system of the world wound up looking pretty religious. When people start limiting themselves to talking about knowledge, you don't get religion, you get philosophy: often religious philosophy, yes, but that's a proper subset of all religious topics.
Most knowledge is entirely orthogonal to religion. If Ugg wanted to know whether there was a fruit tree on the other side of that hill, he didn't pray about it - he looked. I understand that chimpanzees exhibit curiosity. I think it is certainly fair to say that religion was, in part, an early attempt at knowledge generation; it may well be fair to say that it was the original norm for producing cosmogonical knowledge (or, at least, attempting to).