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gjm comments on Marketing rationalism - Less Wrong
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Most people (even those who aren't rationalists) consider rationality to be usually a good thing. Most people who aren't Christians don't consider following the Bible to be particularly useful or meritorious. So I find your analogy unconvincing. But:
You should convince them by appealing to whatever they understand, in a way you can do with integrity. If there is no such way, then you're probably both wasting your time. I'd have thought that saying more than this would require consideration of the special characteristics of particular situations.
To expand on this: one major arrow in rationality's quiver is that practically everyone (a few genuine postmodernists excepted) values some basic concept of rationality. If this weren't so, then political actors wouldn't get such mileage out of showing inconsistencies, biases and (purported) fallacies in their opponents.
Furthermore, the vast majority of people believe themselves to be epistemically rational, now excepting some fideists of various types as well (but even these usually have arguments for doing so that appeal to some sense of second-order rationality).
Yet Christians manage the same trick, on a large scale.
There is a Mahayana Buddhist doctrine - it might have to do with the "doctrine of the lesser vehicle", but I forget - that says (paraphrased), "No one can be persuaded of the truth of Buddhism unless they already understand the truth of Buddhism. Therefore for their own good you may deceive them, and tell them that the study of this doctrine will give them the lesser things that they in their ignorance desire, to persuade them to follow it unto understanding."
I think a much-too-large fraction of how Christians manage it is by means that most people here would deplore: not merely because they appeal to something other than reason, but because they're actually anti-rational.
If you wish to proceed in that way, go ahead. My guess is that (1) rationalists in general will not do well using techniques that go so badly against the grain, (2) rationalists who do what it takes to use such techniques will tend to corrupt their own rationalism in so doing (because, e.g., the most effective way to fool others is to fool yourself first), and (3) the loss -- e.g., from people noticing that they've been tricked and deciding not to trust anything you've ever told them -- might well turn out to be greater than the gain anyway.
I remain unconvinced of the need, anyway: most people agree, at least in theory and in general, that rationality is good and useful. Convincing someone to be rationalist might be harder; so focus instead on showing them how to be rational more effectively in particular cases where they are agreed that being rational is good. The principles generalize, after all.
They cheat. Persuasion per se is not involved.
Is it cheating to suggest to a theist that the tools of rational thought can help them more fully understand God?
It would be a truth in the denotation and a dirty trick in the connotation, but it isn't what I meant by "cheating".
How do they cheat? Can/should we cheat in a similar fashion?
They exploit brain hacks. Teaching kids. Guilt or shame and the promise of absolution. Peer pressure. Tribal cohesiveness. Force, fear, and pain-reinforcement. Mere exposure effect. Etc etc.
Basically you're asking "is the dark side stronger", and I refer you to Yoda.
Appeal to fictional evidence, that's dangerous too. Involving the dark side of star wars will elicit cached thoughts. The force is a fictional contraption devised by people for a story, and it doesn't work in the same way as rationality do.
That said, is it still ok to rob a bank to give to a charity though ? We must be damn sure of our truth, and of the nobleness of our purposes, to lie others into the same understanding as ours.
I wonder if there's a bit of Aumann agreement in there. We might disagree with other people, but to just hack their brains cancels any useful updates we might have got from their unique knowledge.
That is much too complicated to be solved in one sentence. However, ultimately, we'll make a bet, on the assurance that we must be right. If we indeed are, it makes sense to convert other people to our worldview, provided their objectives are similar to ours, since that will help them.
Historically, though, it has been shown that people believing they were right, were not even close to being that. Would we be repeating that mistake if we said that what we advocate is the truth ?
What do we advocate anyway ? It seems our vision of truth is much more flexible than any other seen so far. We don't even have a fixed vision, anything we believe at this point, is liable to be rewritten.
It seems to me that to be a good rationalist, you should ideally not need someone else to show you unique knowledge, that might change your mind. You should be able to do it yourself. But that idea can be potentially abused too.
Yoda is an unabashed religious, moral realist. In his world, you can measure someone's goodness by the color of their lightsaber.
It is irrational to label a set of tools "dark arts" and place them off limits to us. EY has a justification for not using the "dark arts", but it's (my interpretation) supposed to be a lot more sophisticated than just calling them evil - and hence has many more possible exceptions or failure points.
I'm sure a rationalist society would teach its kids. That hack is hardly avoidable - people have to start from somewhere.
The other stuff has an obvious downside: it makes the victim dumber. Zombies are useful to theists but not to us. Also, it tangles the dark-sider in nonsense that they must subsequently defend. It makes them a practicing anti-rationalist in order to shore up their gains. In the end and with a sufficiently smart victim, it's simply fated to collapse, leaving bad odor all around.
Actually, i think that might be the best part: somebody starts to notice that it's nonsense, you take them aside and say, "Congratulations! Most of what I taught you was lies, and, of course, you can't trust me to say which is which. You'll just have to look at the evidence, figure it out for yourself."
I think the same argument could be made against using anything other than Biblical principles to win converts to Christianity. A Christian church that believed those arguments would lose.
And aren't rationalists supposed to win?
Rationality is supposed to score a win (whenever it is possible). Rationalists only try to use rationality, to the best of the capability, to win. They may or may not succeed.
Looks to me like Christianity has the more winning strategy (where winning = gaining converts).
What same argument? I don't follow.
Rationality is to a Christian somewhat as the Dark Arts are to us. Christians have often made conversions based on reason, even though giving reason legitimacy makes their converts "dumber" and less-able to resist the temptation of reason.
They haven't said "these practices are off-limits to us". They strive for an optimal tradeoff between winning converts and corrupting their religion. We can consider their policies to have been selected by evolution. So we should be suspicious of claims that we, using reason, can find tradeoffs better than 2000 years of cultural evolution can. Particularly when our tradeoff ax + by involves suspicious numbers like a=0 and b=1.
I'm not sure sweet reason will work. I do remember a sophisticated theist friend coming back from visiting our local Church of England, which is low enough church to be about one notch above the local Pentecostal churches, and includes recruits from the higher end of there. People who quite literally believe in a simplistic karmic model of the world, where good things happen to good people, so if bad things or good things happen to you it's because you're bad or good. He was horrified. I then ran EY's concentric series of retcons theory of religion past him and he had to concur to some degree. I've since given him The God Delusion to read, after I caught him bitching about it without having read it. I am now biding my time. Muwahahaha.