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JulianMorrison comments on Marketing rationalism - Less Wrong
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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."
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).
It may well be that Christianity is winning (in that sense). That doesn't mean that it has a winning strategy: it might (and clearly does) have other advantages which rationalism doesn't have and either couldn't or shouldn't get.
Yes, where winning equates gaining converts. But gaining converts, for us, ought to be only instrumental to a greater purpose. Many strategies may win on the short or mid term, being more explosive or efficient, but still lead to a dead end.
So what religion uses to gain converts, may not work for us, as it destroys our long term purposes. Though I find it difficult to disentangle what in those methods we could use, and what we couldn't.
What use is a dumbed down, brain-hacked convert? Are you using them to keep score, or something?
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.
Actually quite a few Christians are very rational people. It is possible to use only some of the tools or rationality, to dig your own grave even deeper than you could if you knew nothing of it.
Becoming a more sophisticate debater for instance.
Those people don't consider "rationality" as something negative, far from it. They have their own idea of what rationality is, of course, but that idea overlaps ours enough that those two concepts can be considered to be similar.