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Larks comments on Thoughts On The Relationship Between Life and Intelligence - Less Wrong
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Comments (33)
Knowing for sure is not possible: even if there was only a 0.01 chance God wrote it, you'd still want to read it, given the 1) low cost of reading and 2) high potential payoff. Reading the bible would probably also be helpful in establishing authorship.
Knowing for sure doesn't actually matter here. The problem is with singling out a single target from a universe of alternatives, and then justifying the choice of that target with an argument that can just as readily be used to justify any of the alternatives.
Just to highlight the difficulty, imagine someone arguing that if God exists you should read "Mein Kampf," because even if there's only a very small chance that God wrote it, you can't be sure He didn't, and the cost of reading it is low, and there's a high potential payoff, and reading it would help establish authorship.
I expect you don't find that argument compelling, even though it's the same argument you cite here. So if you find that argument compelling as applied to the Bible, I expect that's because you're attributing other attributes to the Bible that you haven't mentioned here.
I didn't say "read the bible" would be compelling, I said it would be good advice. "Stop doing heroin" is good advice for a destructive heroin addict, but unlikely to be followed.
By "God" I mean "the all powerful being who flung Adam and Eve from Eden, spoke to Abraham, fathered Jesus, etc., etc., etc.", as is the common meaning of "God" in our culture. Had I said "god" things would have been different. As it is, I think we can say that, if God existed, he wrote the bible, and that my injunction would be better advice than the Mein Kampf advice.
I don't think it makes much sense to call advice which is unlikely to be useful to the recipient good advice. The standard people generally measure advice by is its helpfulness, not how good the results would be if it were followed.
I agree that you didn't say that.
I agree that if the God described in the Bible exists, then "read the Bible" is uniquely good advice.
It is an interesting failure mode conversations can get in:
(shrug) If they can agree that (X & ¬Y), it terminates pretty quickly. I find it's only a serious failure mode if Alice and Bob insist on continuing to disagree about something.