TimS comments on How to Not Lose an Argument - Less Wrong

109 Post author: Yvain 19 March 2009 01:07AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (409)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: TimS 15 December 2011 05:01:34PM *  1 point [-]

Respectfully, if you don't think post-modernism is an extraordinary claim, you need to spend more time studying the history of ideas. The length of time it took for post-modern thought to develop (even counting from the Renaissance or the Enlightenment) is strong evidence of how unintuitive it is. Even under a very generous definition of post-modernism and a very restrictive start of the intellectual clock, Nietzsche is almost a century after the French Revolution.

my claims are not extraordinary, they are contradictory to several core beliefs of this community.

If your goal is to help us have a more correct philosophy, then the burden is on you to avoid doing things that make it seem like you have other goals (like yanking our chain). I.e. turn the other cheek, don't nitpick, calm down, take on the "unfair" burden of proof. Consider the relevance of the tone argument.


"several people have told someone that they need there to be God because without God the universe would be immoral" is not sufficient enough evidence to make that claim.

There are many causes of belief in belief. In particular, religious belief has social causes and moral causes. In the pure case, I suspect that David Koresh believed things because he had moral reasons to want to believe them, and the social ostracism might have been seen as a feature, not a bug.

If one decides to deconvert someone else (perhaps to help the other achieve his goals), it seems like it would matter why there was belief in belief. And that's just an empirical question. I've personally met both kinds of people.