= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
steven0461 comments on Secure Your Beliefs - 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 (48)
Condemning people for holding particular beliefs can be useful, or it can be anti-useful when the person you're condemning is right, or it can be bad diplomacy that backfires, or it can erode the standards of debate, depending on the particular belief and other circumstances. Can you propose a criterion that allows me to tell when condemnation is net useful? Without such a criterion, the post strikes me as just saying "boo irrationality".
This post doesn't advocate condemning certain beliefs. It advocates condemning epistemic negligence that often leads to harmfully false beliefs.
As for your question for more detail, I take that to be an empirical question that is beyond the (very modest) scope of the present post. This post does indeed just say "boo irrationality." It is meant as the kind of very short post to which you can send all the people who say "Why does it matter to you what I believe? Why are you trying to get me to give up these beliefs?"
I see. I certainly don't see anything wrong with condemning epistemic negligence in the abstract. I guess it can't hurt to make the point again.
This part put me on the wrong foot:
Surely they were condemning your specific beliefs here.
As a historical matter, that may be what happened, but that's not what I've explicitly advocated here.
Choose your anecdotes carefully.
While I don't think anyone here opposes extending the legal category of marriage to homosexual couples (or rather the ones that do probably do so on Libertarian grounds where they want to abolish state sanctioned marriage altogether) you use of it basically conveyed "boo Abrahamic faiths" or "boo nonconformity".
+1
Remember that if someone is very fond of a really stupid belief, they will attack anything coming anywhere near it.
I have a gut feeling that lukeprog was still fairly fond of his really stupid beliefs when he arrived in college, but his newfound peers (1) didn't criticize anything until some mutual levels of respect and liking had built up, and (2) criticized the most peripheral manifestations of those beliefs, like gender/sexual politics, not the existence of a deity.
Regardless of that gut feeling, I didn't get "boo nonconformity" at all from his anecdote; I got "be aware of peer pressure, which is in some circumstances a pressure so deep as to affect your very belief system."
Lots of cases. Possibly the usual method people change their beliefs.