Rationality Quotes February 2013

arundelo

Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Well... as something completely and obviously deterministic (the amount of money you have at the end of the month is the amount you had at the beginning of the month, plus the amount you've earned, minus the amount you've spent, for a sufficiently broad definition of “earn” and “spend”), that's about the last situation in which I'd expect people to rely on God. With stuff which is largely affected by factors you cannot control directly (e.g. your health) I would be much less surprised.

...that's about the last situation in which I'd expect people to rely on God

Does this cause you to doubt the veracity of the claim in the parent, or to update towards your model of what people rely on God for being wrong? I guess it should probably be both, to some extent. It's just not really clear from your post which you're doing.

0Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)13y

"Praying for healing" was quite a common occurrence at my friend's church. I didn't pick that as an example because's it's a lot less straightforward. Praying for healing probably does appear to help sometimes (placebo effect), and it's hard enough for people who don't believe in God to be rational about health–there aren't just factor you cannot control, there are plenty of factors we don't understand.

8CCC13y

Once you have those figures, it is deterministic; however, at the start of the month, those figures are not yet determined. One might win a small prize in a lottery; the price of some staple might unexpectedly increase or decrease; an aunt may or may not send an expensive gift; a minor traffic accident may or may not happen, requiring immediate expensive repairs. So there are factors that you cannot control that affect your finances.