This month I had an interesting* conversation with Michael Vassar about Nietzsche.

Nietzsche (in one popular interpretation) thought that ripping Christianity out of the European value system would undermine it, leading to nihilism and the collapse of society. Of course, Christianity is false, but European morality is built upon the Christian worldview even when the Christian vocabulary is not used to describe it.

Vassar pointed out that this collapse into nihilistic anti-productivity in general had not occurred with the spread of atheism, but was, he felt, unusually common in the LessWrong community. (Perhaps this is one reason Eliezer tried to give his metaethics sequence a 'moral realist' flavor even though his actual claims would be described by most moral philosophers as a variety of moral anti-realism.) Vassar suggested this may be because LessWrong does an unusually thorough job of eviscerating the phantoms of the Christian worldview that still exist in most atheists' implicit world model.

When you know as much cognitive science as a veteran LessWronger does, you understand that (1) we don't have libertarian free will, (2) we don't know our own desires and kinda don't have "desires" at all, (3) we can be wrong about our own subjective experience, and so on with much greater certainty and in much greater detail than most atheists do.

So maybe pop-atheism isn't enough to rip out ones values and general motivation, but a master's degree's worth of reductionist-grade cutting-edge cognitive science (on Less Wrong) is, at least for many people.

Or maybe both Nietzsche and Vassar are just wrong. Maybe the Less Wrong community doesn't display an unusual degree of nihilism and akrasia at all, or maybe it does but cogsci education has little to do with it.

*Oops. The word "interesting" in this sentence is redundant with "conversation with Michael Vassar."