JoshuaZ comments on Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted - Less Wrong
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There a lot of problems with this. Confirmation bias is a major one (people are likely to remember the times that their perceived/claimed revelations turned out to be correct and not think as much about the misses), as is the fact that people do engage in unconscious processing.
Personally, I've had dreams where I've talked to dead mathematicians. They've been helpful. Does that mean one should believe that I was talking to those spirits? Or, more relevantly for this purpose, do you think that Ramanujan's beliefs that his math came from Hindu deities were justified given the correct, novel mathematical results he received?
Moreover, when Mormons do speak of personal revelation, they aren't almost ever testable claims (e.g. will this coin flip land heads or tails), but personal life advice issues, just like in many other religions, making it essentially impossible to tell if the revelation was at all helpful.
This also is connected to the fairly serious problem that if the LDS church wants to be tested based on its capacity for correct revelation, one needs to deal with both the fact that the revealed claimed in the LDS texts (such as the claimed ancient civilizations) don't fit with archeology at all.
Except that shunning isn't just something that is done by some members of the LDS. It is a practice that is so common that separate communities have been built for such individuals (The LDS church is not the only example of such, Charedi(ultra-Orthodox Jews) have the same thing but that's not what is relevant here.)
You may want to be aware that in general, at Less Wrong, we aren't terribly interested in LDS apologetics or apologetics from any other religion. As far as we're concerned almost all traditional notions of deities have very low probabilities, and general apologetica is unlikely to do much. There are forums to discuss that sort of thing; we are not one of them. In the case of the Wednesday post, the point had very little to do with Mormonism, but was using that example to point out a general possible problem in a certain common heuristic. Trying to argue that Wednesday would have other reasons to believe in Mormonism is both not compelling and misses the point of Alicorn's post.