Desrtopa comments on Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don’t Implement Themselves - Less Wrong

32 Post author: calcsam 10 May 2011 07:15AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 10 May 2011 08:23:50PM *  0 points [-]

I can think of at least two other stable states - in one, you've had an experience that has acted as strong Bayesian evidence for you of the evidence of $DEITY, but which is either a purely subjective experience or which is non-repeatable. As an example of this class of event, if I were to pray "Oh Lord, give me enough money to never have to work again" and then two hundred thousand people were to buy copies of my books in the next five years, that would be enough evidence that it would be rational for me to believe in God.

Another stable state might be someone who has been convinced by Frank Tipler's Omega Point hypothesis. Tipler himself is now clearly extremely irrational, but the hypothesis itself is taken seriously enough by people like David Deutsch (who is one of the less obviously-egregiously-stupid public intellectuals) that it's not obviously dismissable out-of-hand.

I'm sure there are others, too.

EDIT - when I said "in the next five years" I meant to type "the next five minutes", which would of course be much stronger evidence.

Comment author: Desrtopa 10 May 2011 10:54:13PM 4 points [-]

As an example of this class of event, if I were to pray "Oh Lord, give me enough money to never have to work again" and then two hundred thousand people were to buy copies of my books in the next five years, that would be enough evidence that it would be rational for me to believe in God.

Do you really think that would be enough? Even if you don't think that the God hypothesis has a truly massive prior probability to overcome, you'd still have to reconcile this with the fact that most prayers for improbable things go unanswered, to the point that nobody has ever provided a convincing statistical demonstration that it has any effect except on people who know that prayers have been made.

Taking this as sufficient Bayesian evidence to hold a belief in God seems like believing that a die is weighted because your roll came up a six, when you know that it's produced an even distribution of numbers in all its rolls together.