timtyler comments on BHTV: Yudkowsky & Adam Frank on "religious experience" - Less Wrong

14 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 March 2009 01:33AM

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Comment author: timtyler 23 March 2009 07:16:07PM 3 points [-]

Throwing out religion would be like throwing out folk medicine - you lose all the traditional knowledge about which plants are good for what. In both cases, it's best to squeeze out the cultural juices before consigning to the dustbin of history.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 23 March 2009 08:15:49PM 5 points [-]

But practicing religion is as disastrous as practicing folk medicine. You may use both as raw material, as better-than-noise source of hypotheses, but not as out-of-the-box applicable techniques.

Comment author: timtyler 23 March 2009 09:02:38PM 3 points [-]

According to most of the studies I have seen, religious people are systematically more healthy than unbelievers. Also, atheists are one of the most distrusted American minority groups, according to a recent survey. "Disastrous" seems like a bit of a curious synopsis in the light of such results.

Comment author: SoullessAutomaton 24 March 2009 11:12:30AM 2 points [-]

Believing religion is disastrously antithetical to epistemic rationality. Practicing religion is potentially quite useful from an instrumental rationality standpoint.

Comment author: timtyler 24 March 2009 09:10:41PM 3 points [-]

Presumably, epistemic rationality only suffers if you believe untrue things.

The whole idea that religion is concerned with belief is quite a western one. Look at some of the eastern religions, and they are more concerned with what you do and how you live - and do not necessarily place an emphasis on faith.

Comment author: Annoyance 24 March 2009 05:22:56PM 2 points [-]

Folk medicine is demonstrably useful, even if it's chock full of superstition and nonsense.

What benefits actually derive from religion that make it not worth throwing out before it's picked over?

Comment author: timtyler 24 March 2009 09:05:11PM 2 points [-]

Check Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism. Numerous valuable things in there - including yoga, meditation, and lots of Taoist health practices.

Comment author: B_Frank 24 March 2009 01:10:23AM 3 points [-]

I'm not sure who you're addressing this to.

It appeared to me that "squeezing out the cultural juices" was precisely what Eliezer was doing when he talked about the Old Testament, the kind of society it originated in, the way people have always tried to irrationally defend religious beliefs, and the process by which science has repeatedly devastated those defenses.

Freeing ourselves from beliefs doesn't mean ridding the world of all of the related literature and artifacts. I've never heard anybody advocate the complete elimination of all knowledge that was ever believed in religiously (any more than not practicing folk medicine means eradicating those species of plants, along with whatever information there may be about how many people lived/died because/despite of their application).

And what's wrong with being consigned to history? That's where scientific knowledge tends to end up, after all.

Comment author: JulianMorrison 23 March 2009 09:29:26PM *  0 points [-]

Can you justify that tradition ought to contain knowledge? Folk medicine has a very crude optimizing drift - do it wrong and the patient dies, and some cures can be obvious. I don't see even that in religion. For what reason ought it to produce better results than noise?

Comment author: timtyler 23 March 2009 10:51:30PM 5 points [-]

You are doubing there are things of value in religions? Many religions contain things which have proved to be valuable in modern times. Consider Hinduism and Hatha Yoga, for example. Civilisation didn't get Hatha Yoga because science rediscovered it - it got it from the Hindu religious tradition.

Comment author: ciphergoth 24 March 2009 07:52:39AM 4 points [-]

Sure, so let's dump the religion and keep the yoga.