Erm, that's supposing the religious person would actually want to suicide or do the ridiculous thing, rather than this itself being an expression of belief, affirmation, and argument of the religion. (I.e., as appeal to consequences, or saying negative things about the negation.)
The most reasonable interpretation I can find for your statement is that you're responding to this:
If a religious person says they'd do something ridiculous if God quit, we have a problem when implementing an FAI, since the FAI would either believe in Heaven or be inclined to help religious people do something ridiculous.
I agree, the goal would be to figure out what they would want if their beliefs were revised, and revising their circumstances so that God puts Himself out of the picture isn't quite the same as that.
The experiment also has other weaknesses:
Ebay bidding shows that many people can't correctly answer hypothetical questions. Perhaps people will accidentally give false information when I ask.
The question is obviously connected with a project related to athiesm. Perhaps some religious people will give false answers deliberately because they don't want projects related to athiesm to succeed.
The relevant question is what the FAI thinks they would want if there were no God, not what they think they would want. A decent FAI would be able to do evolutionary psychology and many people can't, especially religious people who don't think evolution happened.
It's not a real experiment. I'm not systematically finding these people, I'm just occasionally asking religious people what they think. There could easily be a selection effect since I'm not asking this question of random religious people.
Related to: Lessons from Latter-day Saints, Building Rationalist Communities overview
This is my basic thesis:
Using Eliezer’s levels scheme, these are the three descending levels on which belief systems operate: theology, norms, and implementation.
I’ll give some examples. Here’s a general example, again from the Latter-day Saints:
Here’s one that I often dealt with as a missionary:
I did both of these (with different people), and they worked.
Norms and Implementation
As a missionary for the Church, my basic role was to:
There’s a lifestyle change here.
The “basic package,” (my terminology), which is a prerequisite to joining the church, includes: a strong focus on strengthening the family, daily family prayer and scripture study, the aforementioned health code, and sex only inside marriage. The glue is weekly church attendance, ensuring membership in a community that shares the same values.
After the “basic package,” it gets a bit more complex, as there are lots of higher-level elements of this lifestyle. To sample a few in no particular order:
Obviously these are different than rationalist norms, but my point is that they are fairly comprehensive. Though each topic is fairly regularly discussed in church, it’s impossible to implement them into your life all at once. It’s easy to seem overwhelmed by the flood of new information. (Sound familiar?)
And that is why we were there, to design mini-programs for each person.[3] We would isolate a couple of specific standards that would be effective for person X, and assist in implementation. If they liked it and wanted more, we helped them implement the “basic package” lifestyle.
This decision, that they liked it and wanted more, was the single most crucial decision that someone could make. It is directly related to Bhagwat’s Law of Commitment: “The degree to which people identify with your group is directly proportional to the amount of stuff you tell them to do that works.” I will discuss this further on a subsequent post.
Okay, so how does this apply to Less Wrongians?
Less Wrong has its version of a theological framework – the Sequences. They give a comprehensive set of statements about the way the world works, drawn from evolutionary psychology, anthropology, Bayesian statistics, etc.
But rationalism doesn’t have a well-defined set of norms/desirable skills to develop. As a result, we Less Wrongians unsurprisingly also lack a well-developed practical system for implementation.
You may cite lukeprog’s guide. That’s good, but it’s only six posts. Less Wrong needs a lot more of it!
Or maybe you’ll say that if you read the Sequences carefully, etc, etc. Well, I did. Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions is 51 dense pages in Word, or about 25,000 words. This is an (extremely good) foundational text. It is not a how-to manual.[4]
Brevity is key to implementation.
For Latter-day Saints, the basic explanation of family standards is about 6000 words (95% of the important stuff is from page 4 to 15). The basic guide for teenagers is about 4000 words, and the basic guide for running a church organization is about 12000 words. And each one is very clear about what to do. (The teenage guide most clearly illustrates this point about brevity.)
The easiest way to begin building a how-to manual is for LW members to post specific, short personal examples of how they applied the principles of rationality in their day-to-day lives. Then they should collect all of the links somewhere, probably on the wiki.
If this sounds salesman-y or cheesy to you, or if you're extremely skeptical about religion, I quote a commenter on my last post. “If this works for people that are obviously crazy," said Vaniver, "that suggests it'll work for people who are (hopefully obviously) sane.”
[1] Admittedly, this also supports other norms, such as ‘marry another Latter-day Saint.’
[2]I’m not claiming this is perfect. Over the four years since I joined, I've encountered various amounts of ingroup snobbery, use of these standards to judge others, cliquishness, and intolerance towards certain groups, primarily gays. Plus all of the normal human imperfections.
[3] In designing and sequencing programs, we generally used a simple cost-benefit standard: how much will this help X vs. how much effort will it cost X?
[4] By comparison: the Bible is a foundational text of Christianity. The Purpose-Driven Life is a derivative how-to manual. This is a distillation of the Sequences, which is at least a start.