ata comments on Rationality Quotes: February 2011 - Less Wrong

13 Post author: gwern 01 February 2011 05:46PM

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Comment author: gwern 01 February 2011 05:52:07PM *  17 points [-]

"I submit that claims about God are of this latter sort. There’s simply no reason to take them more seriously than one does claims about witches or ghosts. The idea that one needs powerful philosophical theories to settle such issues I like to call the “philosophy fallacy.”

We will see that people are particularly prey to it in religious discussions, both theist and atheist alike; indeed, atheists often get trapped into doing far more, far riskier philosophy than they need."

--Georges Rey, "Meta-atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-deception" (2009)

(First version seen on http://www.strangedoctrines.com/2008/09/risky-philosophy.html but quote from an expanded paper.)

Comment author: ata 01 February 2011 08:25:38PM *  13 points [-]

It's true that the question of God's existence is epistemologically fairly trivial and doesn't require its own category of justifications, and it's also true that even many atheists don't seem to notice this. But even with that in mind, it almost never actually helps in convincing people to become atheists (most theists won't respond to a crash course in Bayesian epistemology and algorithmic information theory, but they sometimes respond to careful refutation of the real reasons they believe in God), which is probably why this point is often forgotten by people who spend a lot of time arguing for atheism.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 02 February 2011 03:29:10AM -2 points [-]

It's true that the question of God's existence is epistemologically fairly trivial and doesn't require its own category of justifications

It's really epistemologically difficult to find out what people mean by God in the first case; how then can it be epistemologically trivial to judge the merits of such a hypothesis?

Comment author: shokwave 02 February 2011 09:48:37AM 11 points [-]

Difficult to pin down within a range of trivial-to-judge positions.

Comment author: false_vacuum 03 February 2011 11:26:15PM 0 points [-]

With, possibly, vanishingly rare exceptions.

Comment author: DSimon 02 February 2011 06:09:40PM 9 points [-]

If a given hypothesis is incoherent even to its strongest proponents, then it's not very meritorious. It's in "not even wrong" territory.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 09 February 2011 11:02:02AM *  0 points [-]

I strongly suspect that there is a lot of coherence among many different spiritualists' and theologians' conception of God, and I strongly suspect that most atheists have no idea what kind of God the more enlightened spiritualists are talking about, and are instead constructing a straw God made up of secondhand half-remembered Bible passages. In general I think LW is embarrassingly bad at steel-manning.

Comment author: ChristianKl 03 February 2011 01:05:35AM -1 points [-]

Coherence isn't necessary factor for a good theory. In artificial intelligence it's sometimes preferable to allow incoherence to have higher robustness.

Comment author: NihilCredo 03 February 2011 08:00:11AM 2 points [-]

Could you expand?

Comment author: ChristianKl 03 February 2011 01:04:09AM -2 points [-]

Choosing good priors isn't something that's epistemologically fairly trivial.

Using the majority opinion of the human race as a prior is a general strategy that you can defend rationally.

Comment author: komponisto 03 February 2011 03:44:59AM 4 points [-]

Using the majority opinion of the human race as a prior is a general strategy that you can defend rationally.

Use it as a prior all you want; but then you have to update on the (rest of the) evidence.

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