Tetronian comments on [Link] Research on Christian deconversion - Less Wrong

4 Post author: NancyLebovitz 06 March 2012 12:07PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 06 March 2012 08:58:40PM *  0 points [-]

There are a few things you can do:

1) Explain why Fully General Counterarguments are bad.

2) Explain why this particular counterargument doesn't make sense. This comment by pragmatist puts it nicely:

A consequence of ["God works in mysterious ways"] seems to be that the distribution over possible world states, given the hypothesis that god created the world, should be close to maximum entropy. This means no observation of the world state could count as much evidence for the hypothesis.

Comment author: shminux 07 March 2012 01:11:26AM 3 points [-]

Alert: inferential distance failure!

You would have to make them first read the sequences and learn university-level math and physics. And probably some philosophy of science.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 March 2012 02:31:23AM 1 point [-]

I mostly agree, but there are ways of explaining basic Bayesian reasoning without having to get into too many prerequisites. See my reply to David Gerard, which is an attempt to do just that.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 07 March 2012 03:02:02AM 0 points [-]

Probably best to teach them this before they know it's a conversation about deconversion. No one is going to want to learn something if it means losing an argument.

Comment author: David_Gerard 06 March 2012 11:21:59PM *  2 points [-]

So how would you phrase that in words that someone who says "God works in mysterious ways" would even take in? If they understood hypotheses and distributions they wouldn't be saying things like that. edit: Well, I hope they wouldn't.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 March 2012 02:29:02AM *  5 points [-]

I'm bad at writing/explaining, but here's my attempt:

Suppose you and a friend are looking at a painting of unknown origin that looks like a bunch of paint was thrown haphazardly at a piece of paper.
"Look," says your friend, "See how most of the red paint is concentrated in that one corner? This was clearly made by the famous artist Pablo Pretentious!"
"But," you protest, "Most of the canvas isn't even painted. There are blotches of white paint all over that look like they just dripped off a brush, and there's splotches of yellow all along the left side, which is the same color as that wall. This just looks like a piece of paper that was left on the ground when this room was remodeled."
"Laymen like us can't expect to understand the mind of a great artist! A Pablo painting is designed in a way that is beyond our comprehension--you may think that Pablo wouldn't paint ugly white dots, but there's no way we can truly understand the artistic decisions that Pablo Pretentious makes."
"But if that's the case," you reply, "Then we can't predict what a Pablo painting would look like, and that means that to us, any painting would have an equal chance of being produced by Pablo. And if any painting has an equal chance of being a Pablo, then seeing this painting doesn't tell us anything--it can't count as evidence either way."
"But I just told you, we know that it's a Pablo painting because of all that red in the corner!"
"You can't have it both ways. Either we have some idea what a Pablo painting looks like, in which case we can make good guesses about this painting's origin based on how it looks, or we don't know what a Pablo painting looks like, in which case no painting can tell us anything."

Comment author: David_Gerard 07 March 2012 08:17:19AM *  1 point [-]

I'm thinking of the latest wizard wheeze in apologetics, which is to posit that the fact of orderly physics is evidence of God. This is from people belonging to mainstream Christian churches subscribing to the Nicene Creed, i.e. belief in miracles that violate physics as evidence of God. When someone is that determined to be hard of thinking ...

Comment author: [deleted] 07 March 2012 02:06:15PM 0 points [-]

...then it's pretty much impossible to convince them with actual arguments, so you might as well use other means. You're never going to be able to convince people who put their fingers in their ears and say "Lalala I can't hear you!", but it seems like it should be possible to have some impact on people who will at least listen.

Comment author: David_Gerard 07 March 2012 10:38:43PM -1 points [-]

"One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent." - H.L. Mencken.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 08 March 2012 03:11:30AM 0 points [-]

I'm thinking of the latest wizard wheeze in apologetics, which is to posit that the fact of orderly physics is evidence of God.

This is new in Christianity? I heard of it as an old Islamic argument: God's presence continually maintains the order of the universe; without God, everything would fall into chaos; therefore, the fact that you are able to observe a consistent universe is itself evidence of God.

Comment author: David_Gerard 08 March 2012 08:09:48AM *  -1 points [-]

Wonder how the same arguers deal with an unorderly universe with flying horse miracles.

I suppose there aren't really new apologetics. I wonder if there's a list:

  1. God of the gaps.
  2. Argument from wishful thinking (ontological argument and variants).
  3. I feel there is God, therefore God.
  4. Both A and not-A are evidence of God.

Edit: Of course there's a list.

Comment author: TimS 07 March 2012 02:58:39AM 0 points [-]

I like this story.

But it seems there some equivocation or similar confusion around here:

if any painting has an equal chance of being a Pablo, then seeing this painting doesn't tell us anything--it can't count as evidence either way.

If I know nothing about Pablo's methods and so can't tell whether any painting is a Pablo painting, why should I expect that seeing a genuine Pablo painting will tell me anything. Particularly since it seems like I already learned something from this painting - I don't understand Pablo's methods.

Comment author: David_Gerard 08 March 2012 11:09:21PM -1 points [-]

I just had to explain to someone yesterday "No, you just said not-A as evidence of B. You can't do that and say A is evidence of B. Because if you say both, that means A or not-A has nothing to do with B."

"You expect me to go get more evidence."

"No, I expect you to have evidence already to make that claim."

I'm not entirely sure I convinced, but it's about as compact as I can get it in small words. "A" and "B" were the actual things we were talking about.

Comment author: shminux 07 March 2012 01:07:56AM 1 point [-]

They might if they are good at compartmentalizing.

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