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Loren comments on Incremental Progress and the Valley - Less Wrong
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Comments (105)
Eliezer said: "Even the surveys are comparing the average religious person to the average atheist, not the most advanced theologians to the most advanced rationalists."
Very true. Wouldn't it be a kicker if that was done and we found out that the most advanced theologians ARE the most advanced rationalists? I suspect the chances of something like this being true are higher than most of us think.
Roko said "do you have any reason or evidence pointing your conclusion?"
First of all, I wasn't concluding anything. As I said, it's just a suspicion. Is there a rule that all speculation on this web site is downvoted?
My suspicion comes from being impressed by the work of Ken Wilber. He is a case in point that I am thinking of. Here is a brief introduction to his work:
http://www.kenwilber.com/writings/read_pdf/91
I didn't downvote you, but I think such downvoting as you've received has been not just because you were speculating but because you were making what on the face of it is a very implausible suggestion without any indication of why it might be true. That's kinda rude: if you have some reason for thinking it's likely to be true, why aren't you at least hinting at it? and if you haven't, what's the value in telling us?
Ken Wilber's site is annoying. The link you gave, rather than just serving up the damn PDF file, <embed>s it in the page, which means that on my (admittedly slightly weird) system I can't read it. And his front page is Flash-only, ditto. However, I grabbed the file at http://www.kenwilber.com/Writings/PDF/SS-Walsh.pdf and also looked at his Wikipedia entry; from these, my own estimate of his likelihood of being one of "the most advanced rationalists" is extremely low. (Not that you need care what my estimate of that likelihood is.)
I read the brief introduction, and was thoroughly unimpressed. Maybe there's a kernel of truth somewhere but you'd think a brief introduction would make it more visible... saying "scientism" over and over, dismissing reductionism as calling things "nothing but" their components over and over... apparently he has split things we can know up into 2x2=4 parts, and "Yet in erasing left-hand interiors, modernity also erased meaning, purpose, and significance from our view of the universe, life, and ourselves. For meaning, purpose, and significance, subjective value, and all other qualitative distinctions are interior left-hand events. Gone was any sense of value or purpose for life. Instead humans began to see themselves merely as meaningless blobs of protoplasm, adrift on a tiny speck of dust in a remote unchartered corner of one of countless billions of galaxies."
It seems science stole Ken Wilber's rainbows. Bad scientists! Or wait, I mean:
"scientists (or better, scientismists)"
In fairness, maybe it's just Roger Walsh (the author of the introduction) that failed to impress me enough to get me to read Wilber.