What similar operation can you perform on your god, such that the belief is a useful one?
What a great question! Traditionally, the operations performed on a god are:
None of these, except the last one, could be performed on a god-as-a-mathematical-like-entity, I think.
Actually I think grounding morality can be performed on a god-as-a-mathematical-like-entity if you wanted to. For certain settings of God you even get interesting and neat properties, which can be pretty useful (in a sense similar to this) if FAI is not near or possible and you question moral progress.
You can also use God to avoid certain kinds of blackmail and do other neat superrational tricks. Who knows it may even be the best implementation for this that we can currently build on some human brains.
I recognize the title could be more informative. At the same time I believe it says what is important.
I believe in a deity, I believe in mathematical entities in the same way.
The community of LessWrong (from whenceforth: LessWrong) is deeply interesting to me, appearing as a semi-organized atheist, reductionist community.
LessWrong seems very interested in promoting rationality, which I applaud. The effort does seem scattered, though, and this is the reason I post.
One has Eliezer's website with some interesting posts. The same of this community. The community links to some posts when you are coming for the first time into it, and you also have a filter for top posts. One has the blog. And recently, the center for modern rationality (in the same page as harrypoter fanfiction about rationality).
The point being there is no defined roadmap to go from AIC (average irrational chump to make an analogy to Game - which also seems to come up around quite a bit) to RA (again, rationality artist).
I write this post as to maybe generate a discussion on how the efforts could be concentrated and a new direction taken.
Should the creation of the Center for Modern Rationality envision this same concentration, this post may and should be disregard.
If it does not, then I leave it to your consideration.
Hang.