The elephant in the room, AMA

calcsam

30 The elephant in the room, AMA

by calcsam

12th May 2011

3 min read

432

30

Hello fellow Less Wrongians!

Given your comments on my organizing communities series, I get the feeling that many of you are wondering why:

a returned Mormon missionary would even come to Less Wrong in the first place.
why I find religion plausible at all
why I would identify with Mormonism in particular (several people have used the word 'cult')

I'm happy to hold discussions about any of these questions or related ones. However, I haven't responded to many comments on the main series of posts because:

they could eat up each thread
the threads aren't supposed to be about Mormonism. They're supposed to be about about making a movement work effectively. But being a missionary is where I got my experience.

I wanted to created this thread as a center for questions you might have about my faith. This is not an attempt to preach -- I would be perfectly happy not having a discussion purely about religion at all. But since there seem to be many comments, well, fire away.

Some basic facts: I am a student at Stanford. I am 22. I converted to Mormonism when I was 19. I used to be atheist/agnostic. I am very much a believer, not just in it for the social perks.

Well, as it is written, AMA (= Ask Me Anything)

(Thanks Kevin for the suggestion.)

Edit: Wow, there are a lot of comments. This has been a helpful chance to clarify my thinking. I hope you have learned something useful -- perhaps using the question is 'Is there anything surprising here that he said?'.

Edit 2: Here are some answers to repeated questions. Again, this really helped me distill and clarify myself and I've enjoyed the discussion.

Why do you believe? It's a combination of

"wow, this seems to be a really functional community in producing good people."
"wow, these doctrines are really amazing."[1]

personal spiritual experiences (experiences-which-I-interpret as spiritual if you prefer) and other positive experiences from doing church things, like emotional growth from going on a mission.

I would estimate that before this all happened, my odds ratio was about 2000:1, and now it's about 1:10. I would ballpark the odds ratios of each of the above 3 events as ~12.5:1, ~25:1, and ~62.5:1. (I was considering likelihood but didn't think in that precise of terms at the time, so any concretization is open to charges of ex post facto. And these are still ballparks.)

There are lots of arguments against Mormonism on factual and historical grounds; there are also counterarguments which I feel pretty much balance them out. (The feeling of balancing each other out was contemporaneous.)

What things could make you consider leaving the faith?

Undermining any of the above: negative experiences from doing church things, better arguments against Mormonism, the church repudiating the doctrines I love, experiencing it as much less functional, etc.

Why do you think your conversion story is disappointing to many of us?

Several possible reasons:

You might have been looking for a more rationalist narrative.
Your priors are like (say) 100,000:1 on this. So maybe something I say sounds plausible (1:2). But you're still at 50,000:1 and extremely skeptical.
It took a lot of experiences and arguments to persuade me; this is just the tip of the iceberg.
A lot of my conversion was experiential. An analogy would be that I ate a certain fruit which others haven't. We are discussing descriptions of the fruit; the only way to be truly convinced (or unconvinced) would be to taste it. [2]

[1] Specifically:

I felt the doctrines were coherent both with my experience of the world -- for example, how faith is introduced as an experiment and described empirically.
I felt they offered solutions to central human problems like the feeling of aloneness; the sometimes-destructive yet still necessary nature of guilt.
Finally, certain doctrines, like the "weeping God of Mormonism" or deification, struck me with a reaction which I can only describe as "it tasted good." I felt something like, "if there is a God, it just makes sense he would be this.

[2] Difficulty of adequately conveying strong emotional experiences to someone who hasn't had them is general, right? For a parent, try to imagine explaining the feelings you had from holding your infant in your arms the first time. Or someone else, try explaining the strength of arousal feelings to a pre-pubescent who is like "ew, gross." Just because it's really difficult to describe it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

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30 The elephant in the room, AMA

by calcsam

12th May 2011

3 min read

432

30

Hello fellow Less Wrongians!

Given your comments on my organizing communities series, I get the feeling that many of you are wondering why:

a returned Mormon missionary would even come to Less Wrong in the first place.
why I find religion plausible at all
why I would identify with Mormonism in particular (several people have used the word 'cult')

I'm happy to hold discussions about any of these questions or related ones. However, I haven't responded to many comments on the main series of posts because:

they could eat up each thread
the threads aren't supposed to be about Mormonism. They're supposed to be about about making a movement work effectively. But being a missionary is where I got my experience.

Some basic facts: I am a student at Stanford. I am 22. I converted to Mormonism when I was 19. I used to be atheist/agnostic. I am very much a believer, not just in it for the social perks.

Well, as it is written, AMA (= Ask Me Anything)

(Thanks Kevin for the suggestion.)

Edit 2: Here are some answers to repeated questions. Again, this really helped me distill and clarify myself and I've enjoyed the discussion.

Why do you believe? It's a combination of

"wow, this seems to be a really functional community in producing good people."
"wow, these doctrines are really amazing."[1]

personal spiritual experiences (experiences-which-I-interpret as spiritual if you prefer) and other positive experiences from doing church things, like emotional growth from going on a mission.

What things could make you consider leaving the faith?

Undermining any of the above: negative experiences from doing church things, better arguments against Mormonism, the church repudiating the doctrines I love, experiencing it as much less functional, etc.

Why do you think your conversion story is disappointing to many of us?

Several possible reasons:

You might have been looking for a more rationalist narrative.
Your priors are like (say) 100,000:1 on this. So maybe something I say sounds plausible (1:2). But you're still at 50,000:1 and extremely skeptical.
It took a lot of experiences and arguments to persuade me; this is just the tip of the iceberg.
A lot of my conversion was experiential. An analogy would be that I ate a certain fruit which others haven't. We are discussing descriptions of the fruit; the only way to be truly convinced (or unconvinced) would be to taste it. [2]

[1] Specifically:

I felt the doctrines were coherent both with my experience of the world -- for example, how faith is introduced as an experiment and described empirically.
I felt they offered solutions to central human problems like the feeling of aloneness; the sometimes-destructive yet still necessary nature of guilt.
Finally, certain doctrines, like the "weeping God of Mormonism" or deification, struck me with a reaction which I can only describe as "it tasted good." I felt something like, "if there is a God, it just makes sense he would be this.

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badger15y170

As a convert, you apparently experienced a major shift in belief, especially since you committed to a mission soon after. What in particular changed your mind?
What is your perspective on the role of faith in belief? How much of your belief would you say is due to feelings attributed to the Holy Ghost vs weighing other evidence?
What would be evidence to substantially revise your belief in the church downwards?
What have you thought of your reception here? Have you been surprised by any reactions?
What are you studying at Stanford?

I'm particularly interested in what you have to say as a convert. I know how the process works in the other direction (leaving the church at 17), but it's important to know why people change their minds in general.

ETA: After looking at your blog, I'll be frank and admit I was hoping for something a little more sophisticated to engage with. Your conversion appears to be based on a feeling of rightness without really grappling why or why not it might be true. Since learning the technical meaning of evidence, I no longer dismiss "feeling the Spirit" completely. Spiritual experiences are more likely if religion is true than if it is not, but not significantly more so. Hence it's very weak evidence, nowhere necessary to overcome even basic evidence against.

LDS theology does have a veneer of rationality, saying "the glory of God is intelligence", encouraging learning, and claiming there are universal laws that God works within, but the substance isn't there. In your post on reading Dialogue, you acknowledge there are issues, but seem satisfied with acknowledgement rather than tracing out their implications.

I don't want to hold you to blog posts that are a couple years old though. I'm still eager to learn any insights you might have. Please stick around. However, (speaking to everyone else here) I'm remembering how direct discussion of religion isn't productive, even as a case study about how thinking can go awry. The mistakes you are making are too basic to be relevant to most people here. Thanks for opening yourself up to questions, but people (including myself) have been too eager in asking.

Also, economics and math! Always nice to meet another member of the tribe.

Desrtopa15y40

Since learning the technical meaning of evidence, I no longer dismiss "feeling the Spirit" completely. Spiritual experiences are more likely if religion is true than if it is not, but not significantly more so.

I don't think it's clear that this is the case. Do we have any meaningful measure of how often we ought to expect spiritual experiences to happen if religion were true, relative to how often we would expect them to happen if religion were not true?

If any religion were true though, we should probably expect that spiritual experiences would be clustered around that particular religion.

-1calcsam15y

Well, thanks for taking the time to read my posts. I wrote a longer post, but you already read a bunch of my stuff so I'll condense. As to why people change their minds in general, one comment that might help is that I first came to view the religious worldview as coherent, in that people's actions seemed to be in accord with their professed beliefs, it seemed to produce generally desirable results. Only after that did I come to believe that it was true. Another way of saying that, and perhaps an anwer to your second question, As to the second question, is that the non-spiritual experiences -- veracity of texts, ability to teach me something useful or have positive effects on me, established plausibility, perhaps .05 < p < 0.3. And experiences-which-I-interpret-as-the-Holy-Ghost took me from there to my current state. I'm going to reply to your later stuff. I think there's a basic epistemological difference in that I lend more credence to experience here. I would disagree that I didn't "trace out the implications" of issues that I discovered. To me, the main implication was that everything wasn't neat, tidy and perfect the way most church members thought it was. But truth claims depend on the Book of Mormon. Seer stones, divining rods and polygamy are all true but irrelevant to this question; I wasn't convinced by the View of the Hebrews/ Solomon Spaulding/ anachronisms arguments. (This is the short version of a long story as I'm sure you realize) Badger, possibly you're right in that everyone else's hopes were too high. If you're looking for a general theory of "why all religious people are wrong," hopefully the first two paragraphs are useful to you. But the last stuff is more "my judgment of a very particular set of evidence."

10Chroma15y

Some of your questions have answers on calcsam's blog. Specifically, his conversion story is here.

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