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TheOtherDave comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong
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Well, I don't strongly identify as a theist, so it's hard for me to have an opinion here.
That said, if I imagine myself reading a variant version of the sequences (and LW discourse more generally) which are anti-some-group-I-identify-with in the same ways.... for example, if I substitute every reference to the superiority of atheism to theism (or the inadequacy of theism more generally) with a similar reference to the superiority of, say, heterosexuality to homosexuality (or the inadequacy of homosexuality more generally), my emotional response is basically "yeah, fuck that shit."
Perhaps that's simply an indication of my inadequate rationality.
That's possible. Another possibility is that when tribe members talk about their tribe, they frequently do so charitably (for example, in nonridiculous language, emphasizing the nonridiculous aspects of their tribe), while when ex-members talk about their ex-tribe, the frequently do so non-charitably.
This is similar to what happens when you compare married people's descriptions of their spouses to divorced people's descriptions of their ex-spouses... the descriptions are vastly different, even if the same person is being described.
I can confirm that it is indeed annoying, and worse still can act to reduce the persuasiveness of a point (for example, talking about how large groups of people/experts/insert other heuristic here fails with regard to religion.) Interestingly, it's annoying even if I agree with the criticism in question, which would suggest it's probably largely irrational, and certain rationality techniques reduce it, like the habit of ironmanning people's points by, say, replacing "religion" with racism or the education system or some clinically demonstrated bias or whatever.
There's probably a bit of that too, but (in my experience) most atheists believed an oddly ... variant ... version of their faith, whether it's because they misunderstood as a child or simply belonged to a borderline splinter group. Mind you, plenty of theists are the same, just unexamined.
These examples are not at all analogous. Claims about the existence of divine agents - or the accuracy of old textbooks - are epistemological claims about the world and not up to personal preferences. What do I know and how do I know it?
Claims about preferences can by definition not be objectively right or wrong, but only be accurate or inaccurate relative to their frame of reference, to the agent they are ascribed to. Even if that agent were some divine entity. Jesus would like you to do X, but Bob wouldn't.
Or, put differently:
"There is a ball in the box" - Given the same evidence, Clippy and an FAI will come to the same conclusion. Personal theist claims mostly fall in this category ("This book was influenced by being X", "the universe was created such-and-such", "I was absolved from my sins by a god dying for me").
"I prefer a ball in the box over no ball in the box" - Given the same evidence, rational actors do not have to agree, their preferences can be different. Sexual preferences, for example.
The reason that theists are generally regarded as irrational in their theism is because there is no reason to privilege the hypothesis that any particular age old cultural text somehow accurately describes important aspects of the universe, even if you'd ascribe to some kind of first mover. Like watching William Craig debates, who goes from some vague "First Cause" argument all the way to "the Bible is right because of the ?evidence? of a supernatural resurrection". That's a long, long way to skip and gloss over. Arguing for a first mover (no restriction other than "something that started the rest") is to arguing for the Abrahamic god what predicting the decade of your time of death would be to predicting the exact femtosecond of your death.
Such motivated cognition compromises many other aspects of one's reasoning unless it's sufficiently cordoned off, just like an AI that steadfastly insisted that human beings are all made of photons, and needed to somehow warp all its other theories to accommodate that belief.
Well, this explains the mystery of why that got downvoted by someone.
Firstly, you're replying to an old version of my comment - the section you're replying to is part of a quote which had a formatting error, which is why it forms a complete non-sequitur taken as a reply. I did not write that, I merely replied to it.
You know, I agree with you, homosexuality isn't a great example there. However, it's trivially easy to ironman as "homosexuality is moral" or some other example involving the rationality skills of the of the general populace.
The fact that something is true only relative to a frame of reference does not mean it "can by definition not be objectively right or wrong". For example, if I believe it is correct (by my standards) to fly a plane into a building full of people, I am objectively wrong - this genuinely, verifiably doesn't satisfy my preferences. I may have been persuaded a Friendly superintelligence has concluded that it is, or that it will cause me to experience subjective bliss (OK, this one is harder to prove outright, we could be in a simulation run by some very strange people. It is, however, irrational to believe it based on the available evidence.)
Ayup.
As I said earlier, it's trivially easy to ironman that reference to mean one of the political positions regarding the sexual preference. If he had said "abortion", would you tell him that a medical procedure is a completely different thing to an empirical claim?
Forgive me if I disagree with that particular empirial claim about how our community thinks.
"The Bible is right because of the evidence of a supernatural resurrection" is an argument in itself, not something one derives from the First Cause. However, the prior of supernatural resurrections might be raised by a particular solution to the First Cause problem, I suppose, requiring that argument to be made first.
I guess I can follow that analogy - you require more evidence to postulate a specific First Mover than the existence of a generalized First Cause - but I have no idea how it bears on your misreading of my comment.
Source? I find most rationalists encounter more irrational beliefs being protected off from rational ones than the inverse.
How is that example any different, how is it not also a matter of your individual moral preferences? Again, you can imagine a society or species of rational agents that regard homosexuality as moral, just as you can imagine one that regards it as immoral.
By objectively right or wrong I meant right or wrong regardless of the frame of reference (as it's usually interpreted as far as I know). Of course you can be mistaken about your own preferences, and other agents can be mistaken when describing your preferences.
"Agent A has preference B" can be correct or incorrect / right or wrong / accurate or inaccurate, but "Preference B is moral, period, for all agents" would be a self-contradictory nonsense statement.
Of course "I think abortion is moral" can widely differ from rational agent to rational agent. Clippy talking to AbortAI (the abortion maximizing AI) could easily agree about what constitutes an abortion, or how that procedure is usually done. Yet they wouldn't need to agree about the morality each of them ascribes to that procedure. They would need to agree on how others ("this human in 21th century America") morally judge abortion, but they could still judge it differently. It is like "I prefer a ball in the box over no ball in the box", not like "There is a ball in the box".
I forgive you, though I won't die for your sins.
It is ... an argument ... strictly formally speaking. What else could explain some eye witness testimony of an empty grave, if not divine intervention?
Only when some nonsense about "that cause must be a non-physical mind" (without defining what a non-physical mind is, and reaching that conclusion by saying "either numbers or a mind could be first causes, and it can't be numbers") is dragged in, even then the effect on the prior of some particular holy text on some planet in some galaxy in some galactic cluster would be negligible.
"I can confirm that it is indeed annoying", although I of course admit that this is branching out on a tangent - but why shouldn't we, it's a good place for branching out without having to start a new topic, or PMs.
Not everything I write needs to be controversial between us, it can be related to a comment I respond to, and you can agree or disagree, engage or disengage at your leisure.
What do you mean, protected off in the sense of compartmentalized / cordoned off?
We seem to be using "moral" differently. You're using it to refer to any preference, whereas I'm using it to refer to human ethical preferences specifically. I find this is more useful, for the reasons EY puts forth in the sequences.
If you can be mistaken - objectively mistaken - then you are in a state known as "objectively wrong", yes?
Again, I think we're arguing over terminology rather than meaning here.
Zing!
Because that's the only eyewitness testimony contained in the Bible.
Well, since neither of actually have a solution to the First Cause argument (unless you're holding out on me) that's impossible to say. However, yes, if you believed that the solution involved extra-universal superintelligence, it would raise the prior of someone claiming to be such a superintelligence and exhibiting apparently supernatural power being correct in these claims.
What does the relative strength of evidence required for various "godlike" hypotheses have to do with the annoyance of seeing a group you identify with held up as an example of something undesirable?
Uh ... sure ... I don't exactly reply to most comments you make.
Yup.
Which humans? Medieval peasants? Martyrs? Witch-torturers? Mercenaries? Chinese? US-Americans? If so, which party, which age-group?
The term is overloaded. I was referring to ideas such as e.g. moral universalism. An alien society - or really just different human societies - will have their own ethical preferences, and while they or you can be wrong in describing those preferences, they cannot be wrong in having them, other than their preferences being incompatible with someone else's preferences. There is no universal reference frame, even if a god existed, his preferences would just amount to an argument from authority.
Negligibly so, especially if it's non verifiable second hand stories passed down through the ages, and when the whole system is ostentatiously based on non-falsifiability in an empirical sense.
You realize that your fellow Christians from a few centuries back would burn you for heresy if you told them that many of the supernatural magic tricks were just meant as metaphors. Copernicus didn't doubt Jesus Christ was a god-alien-human. They may not even have considered you to be a Christian. Nevermind that, the current iteration has gotten it right, doesn't it? Your version, I mean.
There are three little pigs who saw the big bad wolf blowing away their houses, that's three eyewitnesses right there.
Do Adam and Eve count as eyewitnesses for the Garden of Eden?
OK. So moral realism is false, and moral relativism is true and that's provable in a paragraph. Hmmm. Aliens and other societies might have all sorts of values, but that does not necessarily mean they have all sorts of ethical values. "Murder is good" might not be a coherent ethical principle, any more than "2+2=5" is a coherent mathematical one. The says-so of authorities, or Authorities is not the only possible source of objectivity.
So if you constructed an artificial agent, you would somehow be stopped from encoding certain actions and/or goals as desirable? Or that agent would just be wrong when describing his own preferences when he then tells you "killing is good"?
Certain headwear must be worn by pious women. Light switches must not be used on certain days by god-abiding men. Infidels must be killed. All of those are ethical from even some human's frame of reference. Seems pretty variable.
It would be correctly describing its preferences, and its preferences would not be ethically correct. You could construct an AI that frimly believed 2+2=5. And it would be wrong. As before, you are glibly assuming that the word "ethical" does no work, and can be dropped from the phrase "ethical value".
All of those are believed ethical. It's very shallow to argue for relativism by ignoring the distinction between believed-to-be-true and true.
It's a real position, if one based on rather questionable arguments.
OTOH, there really are some "values" that (sufficiently advanced) consequentialists will hold unless they specifically value not doing them, for instrumental reasons.