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JGWeissman comments on Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don’t Implement Themselves - Less Wrong
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Yes, in the ideal limit, rationalists don't compartmentalize. But decompartmentalizing too early, before you learn the skill of sanely resolving conflicts between beliefs and values in different compartments (rather than, for example, going with the one you feel more strongly), is a way to find the deepest, darkest crevices in the Valley of Rationality.
I would agree that there is a level of rationality at which religious beliefs become impossible, though to the extent that a religious person takes their religion seriously, and expects effective rationality to produce accurate beliefs, they should not expect this until it actually happens to them. Though it does occur to me that helping rationalists to establish the level of social support available within the Mormon community (as calcsam is doing) is an effective way of establishing a line of retreat for a religious person who is uncertain about retaining their religious beliefs.
Simple question, but what exactly is meant by "religion" when you say "there is a level of rationality at which religious beliefs become impossible"? I've been wondering about this for a while, and find it unclear whether my spiritual side is simply "not actually religion" or if there's just some huge chunk of rationality that I'm missing. Thus far, the two have felt entirely compatible for me.
I wonder if you could clarify for me what you mean by "spiritual" in "spiritual side"? I was raised as a Roman Catholic, and to me 'spiritual' means the other side of Descartes's dualism - the non-physical side. So, for example, I learned that the Deity and angels are purely spiritual. But being human, my spiritual side is my immortal soul - which pretty much includes my mind.
I'm pretty sure you (and millions of other people who talk about spirituality) mean something different from this, but I have never been able to figure out what you all mean.
A definition of 'spiritual' is preferred, but failing that, could you taboo 'spiritual' and say what you meant by 'spiritual side' without using the word?
More or less, it's schizophrenic/delusional episodes, with an awareness that this is in fact what they are. Mostly what I use 'spiritual' to refer to is that, during these episodes, I tend to pick up a strong sense of 'purpose' - high level goals end up developed. I have no clue how I develop these top-level goals, and I've never found a way to do it via rationality. Rationality can help me mediate conflicts between goals, conflicts between goals and reality, and help me achieve goals, but it doesn't seem able to set those top-level priorities.
About the closest I've come to doing it rationally is to realise that I'm craving purpose, and do various activities that tend to induce this state. Guided meditation is ideal, since it seems to produce more 'productive' episodes. It varies heavily whether I will get any particularly useful purpose out of one of these episodes; many episodes are drifting and purposeless, and others result in either impossible goals or 'applause light' goals that have no actual substance attached.
Ostensibly I could try to infer my goals from my emotional preferences, which I've been slowly working on as an alternative. Being bi-polar and having a number of other neurological instabilities makes it very difficult to get any sort of coherent mapping there, beyond very basic elements like 'will to live'. Even those basics can be unstable: For about a year I had no real preference on my own survival due to a particularly bad schizophrenic episode.
I'd actually be rather curious how others handle the formation of top-level goals :)
I do also notice certain skills that I'm much more adept at when I'm having such an episode. I've observed this empirically, and can come up with rational explanations for it. I'm pretty certain the same results could be replicated rationally, either by studying the skills or by figuring out what I'm doing different during the schizophrenic episodes. I don't feel that 'spiritual' is necessarily a good label for this aspect; "intuition" or simply "changing my perceptual lens on reality" seem more accurate. I mention it here simply because it happens to stem from the same source (schizophrenic episodes)
I find I have very little emotion attached to my highest-level goals. I'm not sure but I think I derive them by abstracting from my lower-level goals, which are based more on habit and emotion, and from ideas I absorb from books, etc. I then use them to try and make my lower-level goals less contradictory.
Yeah, this does not seem to have much to do with what we are usually talking about when discussing religion, supernaturalism, etc.
FWIW, I typically use the term in a secular sense to refer to those with interests in items from this list:
One reason amongst many: inasmuch as your religion includes unquestionable dogma, it is anathema to rationality. (It is for this reason that being a philosopher, I am non-religious for methodological reasons; dead dogma is not allowed). Having a belief that you cannot question is effectively giving it a probability of 1, which will distort the rest of your Bayesian network in terrible ways. See Infinite Certainty.
Having been raised Unitarian Universalist, I always find it very odd that "religion" is conflated with "unquestionable dogma". I don't think Unitarians have that any more than LessWrong does.
That said, if "religion" is being used as a shorthand for "unquestionable dogma", then the comments about religion make significantly more sense :)
I was raised a Unitarian Universalist too, by agnostic parents. It probably has a lot to do with my generally positive attitude towards religion. (I now sing in a High Anglican church choir and attend services regularly mostly because I find it benefits my mental health.)
I highly doubt that. For one, a glance at a typical Unitarian web page will show a comprehensive and consistent list of left-wing ideological positions. Are you really claiming that if one were to express deep disagreement with those among the Unitarians, the reactions would be equally dispassionate, upfront, and open to argument as they usually are when the prevailing opinion is challenged on LW? (Not that LW is perfect in this regard either, but compared to nearly any other place, credit must be given where it's due.)
Of course, some would claim that old-fashioned religious dogma is somehow incomparably worse and more irrational than modern ideological dogma, so much that the UU stuff doesn't even deserve that designation. However, I don't think this position is defensible, unless we insist on a rather tortured definition of "dogma."
The more I think about it, the more I find it difficult to answer this question. The main obstacle I'm running up against is that the two have very different communication styles, so the answer varies heavily depending on which communication style you're seeking.
In my experiences, LessWrong is a very blunt, geeky approach to communication. It is also post-based, and thus neither real-time nor face-to-face. It's very good at problem solving and science. People are likely to try and refute my stance, or treat it as a factual matter to be empirically tested.
Unitarian Universalist churches, by contrast, have been very polite and mainstream in their approach to communication. It's also in-person, and real-time interaction. They're very good at making people feel welcome and accepted. People are likely to simply accept that I happen to believe differently than them. People are likely to treat strong assertions as an article of faith, and therefore not particularly worth challenging.
I can't really find a way to translate between these two, so I can't really compare them.
Viewed through a mainstream, polite filter, I see LessWrong as a place that is actively hateful of religion, and extremely intolerant towards it, to the point of being willing to reject perfectly useful ideas simply because they happen to come from a religious organization.
Viewed through the blunt, geeky filter, I see UUs as blindly accepting and unwilling to actually challenge and dig in to an idea; I feel like I can have a very interesting discussion, but in many respects I'm a lot less likely to change someone's mind (although, in other respects, I'd have a lot more luck using Dark Arts to manipulate a church-goer)
Well, there are seven formal UU values:
*The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
*justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
*world peace, liberty and justice for all; and
*respect for the interdependent web of all existence.
*Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
*a free and responsible search for truth and meaning; and
*the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregation and in society at large.
I would consider the first four to be values that are roughly shared with LessWrong, although there are definitely some differences in perspective. The fifth one, UUs focus on spiritual growth, LW focuses on growing rationality. The sixth principle is again shared. The seventh seems implemented in the LessWrong karma system, and I'd actually say LW does better here than the UUs.
It's also worth noting that these are explicitly "shared values", and not a creed. The general attitude I have seen is that one should show respect and tolerance even to people who don't share these values.
LessWrong is a place for rationalists to meet and discuss rationality. UU Churches are a place for UUs to meet and discuss their shared values. It doesn't serve LessWrong to have it dominated by "religion vs rationality" posts, nor posts trying to sell Christianity or de-convert rationalists. It doesn't serve the UUs to have church dominated by challenges to those values.
For clarity: How do you think the members of your local UU congregation would react if one of their members turned up one day and said something along the lines of "you know, I've been thinking about it and doing the math, and it looks to me like war is actually pretty useful, instrumentally - it seems like it saves more lives than it takes, and at least in places with recruitment methods like ours, people who choose to be soldiers seem to get a fairly good deal out of it on average"?
I've been to sermons on exactly that topic, so I'd have to argue that in my experience they take it very well.
This is a list of applause lights, not a statement of concrete values, beliefs, and goals. To find out the real UU values, beliefs, and goals, one must ask what exact arrangements constitute "liberty," "justice," etc., and what exact practical actions will, according to them, further these goals in practice. On these questions, there is nothing like consensus on LW, whereas judging by the uniformity of ideological positions espoused on the Unitarian/UU websites, there does seem to be a strong and apparently unchallenged consensus among them.
(To be precise, the applause lights list does include a few not completely vague goals, like e.g. "world peace," but again, this says next to nothing without a clear position on what is likely to advance peace in practice and what to do when trade-offs are involved. There also seems to be one concrete political position on the list, namely democratism. However, judging by the responses seen when democracy is questioned on LW, there doesn't seem to be a LW consensus on that either, and at any rate, even the notion of "democracy" is rather vague and weasely. I'm sure that the UU folks would be horrified by many things that have, or have historically had, firm democratic support in various places.)
The core theme I've seen repeated across congregations is the "seven core principles" that I posted above. I've seen some degree of ideological consistency across those, but I've attended seen quite a few sermons discussing various perspectives on the seven core principles. It seems like a fairly common tradition to even invite speakers from other religions or affiliations to come and share their own thoughts.
Certainly a bias towards those who are "compatible" with the group consensus, and there is some degree of "group think". LessWrong has this going for it as well, though: there's a strong thread of anti-religion bias, and I'd say there's a moderate pro-cryonics/singularity bias. I don't see a lot of posts about how SIAI is a waste of time and money, or how Christianity is really misunderstood and we should come to embrace our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
Can you can point to something specific in the UU literature that makes you feel that they're less tolerant to dissent than LessWrong?
Before I even click at a link to a Unitarian Universalist website, I know with very high probability that there is going to be a "social justice" section espousing ideological positions on a number of issues. And for any such section, I can predict with almost full certainty what precisely these positions will be before I even read any of it.
Now, the UU folks would probably claim that such agreement exists simply because these positions are correct. However, even if I agreed that all these positions are correct, given the public controversy over many of these issues, it would still seem highly implausible that such ideological uniformity could be maintained in practice in a group highly tolerant of dissent. In contrast, I see nothing comparable on LW.
You say:
Actually, in my opinion, LW does have its collective quirks and blind spots, but you're nowhere close to pinpointing them.
Regarding SIAI being a waste of time and money, I've seen such opinions raised in several threads without getting downvoted or otherwise creating any drama. (I can dig up some links if you insist.) As long as you make a polite and coherent argument, you won't elicit any hostility by criticizing SIAI.
Regarding religious proselytism, that is generally considered impolite anywhere. On the other hand, I actually do believe that there is a lot of misunderstanding of religion on LW, in the sense of many people having a "reversed stupidity" attitude towards various religious teachings and beliefs, developing "applause lights" reactions to various loudmouth atheists who bash traditional religion but believe far crazier stuff instead, etc., etc. I have made arguments along these lines on occasions, and I've never encountered any hostility in response, just reasonable counterarguments.
Regarding cryonics, it may well be that the average opinion on LW is heavily biased in favor of it. But again, if you want to argue that cryonics is bunk, you'll be welcome to do so as long as you have something new, intelligent, and well-informed to say about it. (In fact, I remember posts from people who solicited for anti-cryonics arguments.)
In contrast to these topics, one that usually destroys the quality of discourse on LW are gender issues. This really is a recurring problem, but then, I seriously doubt that a diversity of views on these issues is welcome among UUs. Another problem are certain topics whose understanding requires familiarity with some peculiar theories that are discussed on LW occasionally, where certain (seemingly) very theoretical and far-fetched speculations are apparently taken seriously enough by some of the prominent people here that discussing them can lead to bizarre drama. None of this however comes anywhere close to the ideological uniformity that I observe among the Unitarian Universalists, at least judging from their internet presence.
Tangentially: The discussion of actual issues and biases on LessWrong is appreciated. I've only been here briefly, so I haven't really gotten to know the community that well yet.
This was sadly not clear in my original post, but my goal was to compare "looking at a public website" to "reading top-level posts". I've never seen a top-level post supporting Christianity or condemning the SIAI here. On an individual level, I'm sure there are people that hold those stances, just as there are individual UU members who don't agree with the values you're seeing on the UU websites.
My point was simply "when you look at the 'public face' of an organisation, you're going to see some degree of consensus, because that's just how human organisations work"
I suppose I should reiterate this, as it seems to be unclear: My point was not that UUs don't have a degree of "group consensus." My point was that they do not treat it as an unquestionable dogma.
That they generally have a "social values" page does not seem at all contradictory to this - the issue is whether they're willing to entertain discussion from opposing views.
In my (anecdotal) experience as someone who has actually attended UU churches, the answer has been very strongly yes. If you have actual experiences to the contrary, or have seen websites from them that seem to make it vividly clear that dissent is not tolerated, I'd be genuinely curious to see this. It's entirely possible that my experiences aren't typical, but I haven't seen any evidence to support that theory.
LessWrong FAQ:
You don't see a lot of posts about how gravity doesn't really exist and it's just the Flying Spaghetti Monster pushing us down with his tentacles, either.
Note the previous part of the sentence by Vladimir_M that you quoted: (emphasis added)
There's a difference between consensus on empirical questions where the evidence falls overwhelmingly on one side, and consensus on higher-level ideological questions with a much less clear distribution of both evidence and arguments.
Nevertheless there are some from time to time, as well as comments to effect and many more that are ambivalent.
Dictatorship of the Proletariat? Class struggle? Ownership of the means of Production? Universal Free Healthcare, even?
Or did you mean the kind of lpoliicies that count as "left wing" in the US, and liberal/moderate/centre-left everywhere else.
"Everywhere else"? I hate to break the news, but there are other places under the Sun besides the Anglosphere and Western Europe! In most of the world, both by population and surface area, and including some quite prosperous and civilized places, many UU positions would be seen as unimaginably extremist. (Try arguing their favored immigration policies to the Japanese, for example.)
You are however correct that in other Western/Anglospheric countries, the level of ideological uniformity in the political mainstream is far higher than in the U.S., and their mainstream is roughly similar to the UU doctrine on many issues, though not all. (Among their intellectual elites, on the other hand, Unitarian Universalism might as well be the established religion.)
In any case, I didn't say that the UUs had the most extreme left-wing positions on everything. On the contrary, what they espouse is roughly somewhere on the left fringe of the mainstream, and more radical leftist positions are certainly conceivable (and held by some small numbers of people). What is significant for the purposes of this discussion is the apparent ideological uniformity, not the content of their doctrine. My points would hold even if their positions were anywhere to the left or right of the present ones, as long as they were equally uniform.
There are some conservative Universal Unitarians, which seems to indicate that there isn't complete ideological uniformity.
Point taken, and thanks for the interesting link. Googling around a bit more, it seems like there are a few groups like these, but they are small and extreme outliers without influence and status. Before writing my above comments, I checked out the links on the first few search pages that come up when you google "Unitarian Universalist," and I definitely encountered perfectly predictable and uniform positions advocated on those.
In case you haven't encountered him before, Peter A Taylor, the author of that FAQ has some interesting articles on religion and politics: Rational Religion, The Market for Sanctimony, or Yet Another Space Alien Cult, What Does "Morality" Mean?, etc. - he apparently is a reader of LessWrong.
ie they won't burn you at the stake, and they won't stick around to be questioned when they can find someone else to talk to who'll agree with them.
I'm curious if you're being sarcastic or serious. It's hard to tell online :)
Given that Unitarianism was originally Christian and yet some UU's have collectively embraced atheism, you are probably right about that.