So it turns out that you can help a lot of people without meeting a very high bar. Good. In building rationalist communities, we are not going to make a perfect clone of Mormonism. We will seek to eliminate obstacles to greater rationality.
I'm thinking some especially desperate people may experience a net benefit from radically coercive restrictions on their freedom. I'm talking about the equivalent of at least temporary enslavement. I don't propose this for the vast majority of the population, let alone anybody who would claim to be a successful rationalist.
The time and money that members put into a community does not just disappear, it generates returns as value to the community.
Not "scripture" study. I suggest scripture study is at least a deadweight loss, perhaps worse. I imagine the purpose of scripture study and so forth in the Mormon context is to enforce conformity. I'd suggest this actually harms the Mormons who are the supposed beneficiaries of this education, limiting their freedom and dulling their thinking.
ETA:
Yes, I agree that this a real cost of Mormonism. Though it is easy to filter out of a rationalist community.
The conformity may be necessary to the Mormon model. You filter out the conformity, you filter out the obedience, then the model breaks down.
Not "scripture" study. I suggest scripture study is at least a deadweight loss, perhaps worse. I imagine the purpose of scripture study and so forth in the Mormon context is to enforce conformity.
I had a friend who did family scripture study every day and he (and his 5 or 6 siblings) were among the best readers in school, because they'd sat there and practiced it every single day since they were born. So there are definitively benefits to the scripture reading.
Also, many Mormons do appear to benefit from going on a mission. (To my surprise, ma...
Hello fellow Less Wrongians!
Given your comments on my organizing communities series, I get the feeling that many of you are wondering why:
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:
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
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?
Why do you think your conversion story is disappointing to many of us?
Several possible reasons:
[1] Specifically: