= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ibidem comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1750)
Hello, Less Wrong world. (Hi, ibidem.)
I'm pretty new here. I heard about this site a few months ago and now I've read a few sequences, many posts, and all of HP:MoR.
About a week ago I created an account and introduced myself on the Open Thread along with a difficult question. Some people answered my question helpfully and honestly, but most of them mostly just wanted to argue. The discussion, which now includes over two hundred comments, was very interesting, but at the end it appeared we just disagreed about a lot of things.
It began to be clear that I don't fully accept some important tenets of the thinking on this site—I warned I might fundamentally disagree—but a few community members became upset and decided to make me feel unwelcome on the site. My Karma dropped from 6 (+13, -7) to -25 in just a couple hours, and someone actually came out and told me I'd better leave the site for good. (Don't let this person's status influence your opinion of the appropriateness of such a comment, in either direction.)
Don't worry, I'm not offended. I knew there might be a bit of backlash (though one can always hope not, because there doesn't have to be) and I'm certainly not going to be scared away by one openly hostile user.
Now, before everyone reads the comments and takes sides because of the nature of the issue, I'd like to think about how and why this all happened. I have several different ways of thinking about it ("hypotheses"):
The easy justification for those opposing me is to blame my discourse: my opinions are not a problem as long as I present them reasonably. However, I have consistently been "incoherent" etc. and that's why I got downvoted. Never mind that I managed to keep up hundreds of comments' worth of intelligent discussion in the meantime.
The "contrarian" hypothesis: I am a troll. I never had anything helpful or constructive to say, and in fact everyone who participated in my discussion (e.g. shminux, TheOtherDave, Qiaochu_Yuan) ought to be downvoted for engaging with me.
The "enforcer" hypothesis: I came in here as a newbie, unaware that actually substantive disagreement is highly discouraged. The experienced community members were just trying to tell me that, and decided that being militant and aggressive would be the best way to do so.
The "militant atheist" hypothesis: my opinions are mostly fine, but I managed to really touch a nerve with a few people, who started unnecessarily attacking me (calling me irrational) and making the entire LW community look unreasonable and intolerant.
The "martyr" hypothesis: The LW community as a whole is not open to alternate ways of thinking, and can't even say so honestly. They should have been nicer to me.
What do you think? Which of these are most accurate? Other explanations?
Here is a link to my original comment.
These are the most honest and helpful responses I received,
and this is the most hostile one.
My generally impression has been—trying not to offend anyone—that the thinking here is sometimes pretty rigid.
I have found that there is a general consensus here that belief in God (and even a possibility that there could be a God) is fundamentally incompatible with fully rational thinking. (Though people have been reluctant to admit it because I personally think it's unhealthy and reflects poorly on the site.)
But in any case, I've enjoyed the discussion and I'd guess that some other people have too. I'm definitely not going to leave as some have tried to coerce me to do; I like the way of thinking on this site, and it's the best place I know of to find smart people who are willing to talk about things like this. I'll keep reading at the very least.
I'm still undecided as to what I think generally of the people here.
Yours truly,
ibid.
(Oh, and I'm a Mormon. And intend to remain that way in the near future.)
There are threads about theism, etc. in which theists have received positive net karma. It should be possible to learn which features of discourse tend to accrue upvotes on this site.
Having seen my karma fluctuate hundreds of points in the last 24 hours, I've lost all faith in karma as a general indication.
Even if someone's overall karma fluctuates a lot, karma can still be a good indicator of how LW feels about one of their comments if the comment's score is reasonably stable.
I think probably none of those hypotheses are correct. I think you mean well and I think your comments have been stylistically fine. I also obviously don't think people here are are opposed to substantive disagreement, close-minded or intolerant (or else I wouldn't have stuck around this long). What you've encountered is a galaxy sized chasm of inferential distance. I'm sure you've had a conversation before with someone who seemed to think you knew much less about the subject than you actually did. You disagree with him and try to demonstrate you familiarity with the issue but he is so behind he doesn't even realize that you know more than he does.
I realize it is impossible for this not to sound smug and arrogant to you: but that is how you come off to us. Really, your model of us, that we have not heard good, non-strawman arguments for the existence of God is very far off. There may be users who wouldn't be familiar with your best argument but the people here most familiar with the existence of God debate absolutely would. And they could almost certainly fix whatever argument you provided and rebut that (which is approximately what I did in my previous reply to you).
To the extent that theism is ever taken under consideration here it is only in the context of the rationalist and materialist paradigm that is dominant here. E.g. We might talk about the possibility of our universe being a simulation created by an evolved superintelligence and the extent to which that possibility mirrors theism in it's implications. Or (as I take it shminux believes) about how atheism is, like religion, just a special case of privileging the hypothesis. But you don't appear to have spent enough time here to have added these concepts to your tool box and outside that framework the theism debate is old-hat to nearly all of us. It's not that we're close minded: it's that we think the question is about as settled as it can be.
Moreover, while this is a place that discusses many things, we don't enjoy retreading the basics constantly. So while a number of us politely responded to answer your question, an extended conversation about theism or our ability to consider theism is not really welcome. This isn't because we are unwilling to consider it: it's because we have considered it and now want to discuss newer ideas.
You don't have to agree with this perspective. Maybe you feel like you have evidence and concepts that we're totally unfamiliar with. But bracket those issues for now. It is nothing that will be resolvable until you've gotten to know us better and figured out how you might translate those concepts to us. So if you want to stick around here you're welcome to. Learn more about our perspective, become familiar with the concepts we spend time on and feel free to discuss narrower topics that come up. But people here aren't generally interested in extended debates about God with newcomers. That's why you've been down voted. Not because we're against dissent, just because we're not here to do that. There are lots of places on the internet dedicated to debating theism.
Don't mind wedrifid's tone. That's the way he is with everyone. But take his actual point seriously. Don't preach your way of thinking until you've become a lot more familiar with our way of thinking. And a new handle at some point wouldn't be a terrible idea.
Well put. I agree with all of this, except maybe for the need for a new nick, as people who appear to learn from their experience ("update on evidence", in the awkward local parlance) are likely to be upvoted more generously.
I'm sure Ibidem could get more upvotes, perhaps even a great number of them, but negative one-hundred and twenty-eight is an awfully steep karma hill to climb.
Chaosmosis has a few hundred karma now after dropping at least that deep, being accused of being a troll, and facing a number of suggestions that he leave. It's certainly not un-doable.
Good, thank you.
However, it's important to note that I did not come in here expressly arguing my religion. I recognize how bad an idea that would be, and you've explained it well. So of course, anyone aiming to convert this lot of atheists is certainly going to fail. But that was * never * my goal, and in fact I never argued in favor of my particular God.
Look at my very first comment—it was not "this is why you are wrong," it was "do you guys have any ideas how you could be wrong?" and the response was "no, we're definitely not wrong." My first comment presented a question, albeit a difficult one.
I mentioned up front that I was religious, though, as I don't think trying to hide it would have helped anything. The community was therefore eager to argue with me, and I was happy to argue for some time. At the end, though, it was clear we simply disagreed and I said several times I wasn't interested in a full-blown debate about religion.
To summarize, you just gave a very good explanation of why I was mistaken to come on here arguing for religion. But I didn't come on here arguing for religion.
I'll tell you what made me think that: I asked the community if they had any good, non-strawman arguments for God, and the overwhelming response was "Nah, there aren't any."
Well, if there were any that we knew of, then no one here would remain an atheist for very long. We'd all convert to whichever religion made the most sense, given the strength of its arguments. IMO you should have anticipated such a response, given that atheists do, in fact, still exist on this site.
So far, we have heard many terrible arguments for religion (we're talking logical fallacies galore), and few if any good ones. Thus, we are predisposed to thinking that the next argument for religion is going to be terrible, as well, based on past experience.
I'm not sure if anyone's brought this up yet, but one of the site's best-known contributors once ran a site dedicated to these sorts of things, though it does of course have a very atheist POV. That said, even there the arguments aren't amazingly convincing (which you can guess by the fact that lukeprog hasn't reconverted yet) though it does acknowledge that the other side has some very good debaters.
I'm not sure why you think it's indicative of a problem with us that we haven't found good arguments for the existence of God. It's not a law that there be good arguments in favor of false propositions. I suppose you could make the naïve argument that if the position were as indefensible as it seems no one would believe in it, but unfortunately not many people judge arguments very rationally.
I agree with Jack here, but I'm going to add the piece of advice that used to be very common for newcomers here, although it's dropped off over time as people called attention to the magnitude of the endeavor, and suggest that you finish reading the sequences before trying to engage in further religious debate here.
Eliezer wrote them in order to bring potential members of this community up to speed so that when we discuss matters, we could do it with a common background, so that everyone is on the same page and we can work out interesting disagreements without rehashing the same points over and over again. We don't all agree with all the contents of every article in the sequences, but they do contain a lot of core ideas that you have to understand to make sense of the things we think here. Reading them should help give you some idea, not just what we believe, but why we think that it makes more sense to believe those things than the alternatives.
The "rigidity" which you detect is not a product of particular closedmindedness, but rather a deliberate discarding of certain things we believe we have good reason not to put stock in, and reading the sequences should give you a much better idea of why. On the other hand, if you don't stick so closely to the topic of religion, I think you'll find that we're also open to a lot of ideas that most people aren't open to.
If we're to liken rationality to a martial art, then it would be one after the pattern of Jeet Kune Do; "Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless." A person trained in a style or school which lacked grounding in real life effectiveness might say "At my school, we learned techniques to knock guys out with 720 degree spinning kicks and stab people with knives launched from our toes, and they were awesome, but you guys just reject them out of hand. Your style seems really rigid and closed-minded to me." And the Jeet Kune Do practitioner might respond "Fancy spinning kicks and launching knives from your toes might be awesome, but they're awesome for things like displaying your gymnastic ability and finesse, not for defending yourself or defeating an opponent. If we want to learn to do those things, we'll take up gymnastics or toe-knife-throwing as hobbies, but when it comes to martial arts techniques, we want to stick to ones which are awesome at the things martial arts techniques are supposed to be for. And when it comes to those, we're not picky at all. "
Oh, and since I currently have negative karma, I'm unable to directly respond to your other comments.
In response to this one:
It's a very important question and one I need to think about more. In the next few days I'll write a Discussion post addressing my beliefs, including why I'm planning not to lose my faith at the moment.
And this one:
Perhaps it's not fair of me to ask for your evidence without providing any of my own. However I really don't want to just become the irrational believer hopelessly trying to convince everyone else.
I didn't come here expecting people to be rigid. But when I asked people what the best arguments for theism were, they either told me that there were none, or they rehashed bad ones that are refuted easily.
Yes, I definitely am. In an intellectual debate I could probably defend atheism better than belief; I was originally looking for good arguments in favor of theism and I thought that you guys of all people ought to know some. Suffice it to say that I was largely wrong about that.
Sorry, I can't tell you what I don't know. All the arguments for theism that I've ever heard were either chock-full of logical fallacies, or purely instrumental, of the form "I don't care if any of this stuff is true or not, but I'm going to pretend that it is because doing so helps me in some way". I personally believe that there's a large performance penalty associated with believing false things, and thus arguments of the second sort are entirely unconvincing for me.
I am looking forward to your discussion post, however. Hopefully, I'll finally get to see some solid arguments for theism in there !
How does this response mean that we're rigid?
I've read most of the sequences. If you believe there are core ideas I'm missing, tell me which ones and I'd be happy to research them. But chances are I've read that sequence already, especially if you mention ones about religion.
It's an important point. If you demand that a user read every word Dear Leader has ever written, you're not going to get many new voices willing to contribute, which as we all know is bad for the intellectual diversity of the group.
See, the problem here is a difference in the perception of what is "useful." If you only learn martial arts because you want to defeat opponents, then sure, it's fine to reject 720 degree spinning kicks. But self-defense is not in fact the only point of martial arts. There is often an element of theater or even ritual that is lost when you reject what Jeet Kune Do thinks is "useless."
Says who? That's the sort of thing that a lot of people tend to disagree about, and there is absolute right answer to such a question. In fact, I'll quote Wikipedia's lead sentence: "The martial arts are codified systems and traditions of combat practices, which are practiced for a variety of reasons: self-defense, competition, physical health and fitness, entertainment, as well as mental, physical, and spiritual development."
I'm going to unify a couple comment threads here.
Honestly, I think you'd be coming across as much more reasonable if you were actually willing to discuss the evidence than you do by skirting around it. There are people here who wouldn't positively receive comments standing behind evidence that they think is weak, but at least some people would respect your willingness to engage in a potentially productive conversation. I don't think anyone here is going to react positively to "There's some really strong evidence, and I'm not going to talk about it, but you really ought to have come up with it already yourself."
Will Newsome gets like that sometimes, and when he does, his karma tends to plummet even faster than yours has, and he's built up a lot of it to begin with.
If you want to judge whether our inability to provide "good" arguments really is due to our lack of familiarity with the position we're rejecting, then there isn't really a better way than to expose us to the arguments you think we ought to be aware of and see if we're actually familiar with them.
Well, if you want to learn techniques for historical value, to show off your gymnastic ability, etc. learning Jeet Kune Do doesn't preclude that, but it's important to be aware of what the techniques are useful for and what they're not.
Similarly, being a rationalist by no means precludes appreciating tradition, participating in a tight knit community, appreciating the power of a thematic message, etc. But it's important to be aware of what information increases the likelihood that a belief is actually true, and what doesn't.
I second this recommendation.
Ibidem, it seems that you don't want to be put in the position of defending your beliefs among people who might consider them weird, or stupid, or even harmful. I empathize a lot with that; I've been in the same situation enough times to know how nasty and unfun it can get.
But unfortunately, I don't think there's another way the conversation can continue. You've said a few times that you expected us to know of some good arguments for theism, and that you're disappointed that we don't have any. Well, what can anyone say in response to that but "Okay, please show us what we're missing"?
I think you can at least trust the community here to take what you say seriously, and not just dismiss you out of hand or use it as an opportunity to score tribal points and virtual high-fives. We're at least self-aware enough to avoid those discussion traps most of the time.
Okay.
I'd be happy to end the conversation here, as you're right that it's no longer getting anywhere, but I realize that that would be lame and unsportsmanlike of me. Everyone here is expecting me to provide good arguments. I said from the start that I didn't have any, and hoped you would, but when you guys couldn't help meI said "but there must be some out there." I acknowledge now that I have little choice but to come up with some, and I'll do my best.
I will try to explain my position, and since everyone is asking I'll include formal debate-style arguments in favor of religion.
Please, though, give me a few days. I'm still unsure where I stand in many ways, but in the last week has my views have evolved on a lot of issues.
So I'm going to write about a) my arguments in favor or religion, though I don't feel they are sufficient and I want to improve them, and b) why I don't fully accept the LW way of thinking.
I'm still thinking about it, and will be until I post to the Discussion thread in a few days or, perhaps (but not likely), weeks.
And then on a topic that seems to be mostly unrelated, I want to know what everyone thinks of my response to EY concerning the appropriateness of religious discussion on this website.
(I'm assuming that everyone interested in my other threads will see this here through "recent comments.")
EDIT: I on second thought, my arguments and my thoughts probably ought to be in two separate posts.
I expect this is a bad idea. The post will probably get downvoted, and might additionally provoke another spurt of useless discussion. Lurk for a few more months instead, seeking occasional clarification without actively debating anything.
I've now had an overwhelming request to hear my supposed strong arguments. It would be awfully lame of me to drop out now.
People want to discuss this, which means they don't think it's useless.
Just say "Oops" and move on. My point is that you almost certainly don't have good arguments, which is why your post won't be well-received. If it is so, it's better to notice that it is so in advance and act accordingly.
Have you tested the strength of these arguments?
I know you've heard this from several other people in this thread, but I feel it's important to reiterate: this seems to be a really obvious case of putting the cart before the horse. It just doesn't make sense to us that you are interested only in finding arguments that bolster a particular belief, rather than looking for the best arguments available in general, for all the beliefs you might choose among.
I'm not asking you to respond to this right now, but please keep it firmly in mind for your Discussion post, as it's probably going to be the #1 source of disagreement.
This is a very odd epistemic position to be in.
If you expect there to be strong evidence for something, that means you should already strongly believe it. Whether or not you will find such evidence or what it is, is not the interesting question. The interesting question is why do you have that strong belief now? What strong evidence do you already posses that leads you to believe this thing?
If you haven't got any reason to believe a thing, then it's just like all the other things you don't have reason to believe, of which there are very many, and most of them are false. Why is this one different?.
The correct response, when you notice that a belief is unsupported, is to say oops and move on. The incorrect response is to go looking specifically for confirming evidence. That is writing the bottom line in the wrong place, and is not a reliable truth-finding procedure.
Also, "debate style" arguments are generally frowned upon around here. Epistemology is between you and God, so to speak. Do your thing, collect your evidence, come to your conclusions. This community is here to help you learn to find the truth, not to debate your beliefs.
That's a very good point. From what I've seen, most Christians who debate atheists end up using all kinds of convoluted philosophical arguments to support their position -- whereas in reality, they don't care about these arguments one way or another, since these are not the arguments that convinced them that their version of Christianity is true. Listening to such arguments would be a waste of my time, IMO.
The same is the case for a lot of atheist arguments.
See my comment here.
Yeah, you make a good point when you say that we need "Bayesian evidence", not just the folk kind of "evidence". However, most people don't know what "Bayesian evidence" means, because this is a very specific term that's common on Less Wrong but approximately nowhere else. I don't know a better way to put it, though.
That said, my comment wasn't about different kinds of evidence necessarily. What I would like to hear from a Christian debater is a statement like, "This thing right here ? This is what caused me to become a Reformed Presbilutheran in the first place." If that thing turns out to be something like, "God spoke to me personally and I never questioned the experience" or "I was raised that way and never gave it a second thought", that's fine. What I don't want to do is sit there listening to some new version of the Kalaam Cosmological Argument (or whatever) for no good reason, when even the person advancing the argument doesn't put any stock in it.
The problem here is that there is confusion between two senses of the word 'evidence':
a) any Bayesian evidence
b) evidence that can be easily communicated across an internet forum.
Easily communicated in a "ceteris paribus, having communicated my evidence across teh internets, if you had the same priors I do, just by you reading my description of the evidence you'd update similarly as I did when perceiving the evidence first hand", yea that would be a tall order.
However, all evidence can at least be broadly categorized / circumscribed.
Consider: "I have strong evidence for my opinion which I do not present, since I cannot easily communicate it over a forum anyways" would be a copout, in that same sentence (119 characters) one could have said "My strong evidence partly consists of a perception of divine influence, when I felt the truth rather than deduced it." (117 letters) - or whatever else may be the case. That would have informed the readers greatly, and appropriately steered the rest of the conversation.
If someone had a P=NP proof / a "sophisticated" (tm) qualia theory, he probably wouldn't fully present it in a comment. However, there is a lot that could be said meaningfully (an abstract, a sketch, concepts drawn upon), which would inform the conversation and move it along constructively.
"What strong evidence do you already posses (sic) that leads you to believe this thing" is a valid question, and generally deserves at least a pointer as an answer, even when a high fidelity reproduction of the evidence qua fora isn't feasible.
Unfortunately, I've seen people around here through the Aumann's agreement theorem in the face of people who refuse to provide it. Come to think of it, I don't believe I've ever seen Aumann's agreement theorem used for any other purpose around here.
Yes there are two senses. I meant "a". If ibidem has some bayesian evidence, good for him. If it's not communicable across the internet (perhaps it's divine revelation), that's no problem, because we aren't here to convert each other.
The thing is (b) is a common definition on internet forums so it might not be clear to a newcomer what you meant.
Edit: also I suspect ibidem means "b", most people don't even realize "a" is a thing.
I think it's confused.
If I were part of a forum that self-identified as Modern Orthodox Jewish, and a Christian came along and said "you should identify yourselves as Jewish and anti-Jesus, not just Jewish, since you reject the divinity of Jesus", that would be confused. While some Orthodox Jews no doubt reject the divinity of Jesus a priori, others simply embrace a religious tradition that, on analysis, turns out to entail the belief that Jesus was not divine.
Similarly, we are a forum that self-identifies as rational and embraces a cognitive style (e.g., one that considers any given set of evidence to entail a specific confidence in any given conclusion, rather than entailing different, equally valid, potentially mutually exclusive levels of confidence in a given conclusion depending on "paradigm") which, on analysis, turns out to entail high confidence in the belief that Jesus was not divine. And that Zeus was not divine. And that Krishna was not divine. And that there is no X such that X was divine.
It is similarly confused to say on that basis that we are a rationality-and-atheism-centric community rather than a rationality-centric community.
I guess the core of the confusion is treating atheism like an axiom of some kind. Modelling an atheist as someone who just somehow randomly decided that there are no gods, and is not thinking about the correctness of this belief anymore, only about the consequences of this belief. At least this is how I decode the various "atheism is just another religion" statements. As if in our belief graphs, the "atheism" node only has outputs, no inputs.
I am willing to admit that for some atheists it probably is exactly like this. But that is not the only way it can be. And it is probably not very frequent at LW.
The ideas really subversive to theism are reductionism, and the distinction between the map and the territory (specifically that the "mystery" exists only in the map, that it is how an ignorant or a confused mind feels from inside). At first there is nothing suspicious about them, but unless stopped by compartmentalization, they quickly grow to materialism and atheism.
It's not that I a priori deny the existence of spiritual beings or whatever. I am okay with using this label for starters; I just want an explanation about how they interact with the ordinary matter, what parts do they consist of, how those parts interact with each other, et cetera. I want a model that makes sense. And suddenly, there are no meaningful answers; and the few courageous attempts are obviously wrong. And then I'm like: okay guys, the problem is not that I don't believe you; the problem is that I don't even know what do you want me to believe, because obviously you don't know it either. You just want me to repeat your passwords and become a member of your tribe; and to stop reflecting on this whole process. Thanks, but no; I value my sanity more than a membership in your tribe (although if I lived a few centuries ago or in some unfortunate country, my self-preservation instinct would probably make me choose otherwise).
Wait a minute.
You came here without any good reasons to believe in the truth of religion, and then were surprised when we, a group of (mostly) atheists, told you that we hadn't heard of any good reasons to believe in religion either?
I am honestly curious: what makes you think such good reasons exist? Why must there be some good arguments for religion out there? You, a religious person, have none, and you are (apparently?) still religious despite this.
P.S. For what it's worth, I hope you continue to participate in the discussion here, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts, and how your views have evolved.
See my distinction here.
Sure, that distinction exists. I gather your point is that it explains why ibidem is religious? That was not mysterious to me. However what he wanted from us, evidently, was (by definition, it seems to me) the sort of arguments that could be communicated via an internet forum; but he himself had no such arguments. It's not clear to me why he thought such things must exist.
Actually, having written that, I suspect that I'm not entirely grasping what you're getting at by pointing me to that comment. Clarify?
My point is that he feels like he has some (Bayesian) arguments (although he wouldn't phrase it that way) and is trying to figure out how to state them explicitly.
Also, going around saying that beliefs need to be supported by "evidence" tends to result in two failure modes,
1) the person comes away with the impression that "rationality" is a game played by clever arguers intimidating people with their superior arguing and/or rhetorical skill skill.
2) the person agrees interpreting "evidence" overly narrowly and becomes a straw Vulcan and/or goes on to spend his time intimidating people with his superior arguing and/or rhetorical skill.
The tendency to dismiss personal experience as statistical flukes and/or hallucinations doesn't help.
When you write your argument "in favor of religion", consider potential objections that this forum is likely to offer, steelman them, then counter them the best you can, using the language of the forum, then repeat. Basically, try to minimize the odds of a valid (from the forum's point of view) objection not being already addressed in your post. You are not likely to succeed completely, unless you are smarter than the collective intelligence of LW (not even Eliezer is that smart). But it goes a long way toward presenting a good case. The mindset should be "how would DSimoon/Desrtopa/TheOtherDave/... likely reply after reading what I write?". Now, this is very hard, much harder than what most people here usually do, which is to present their idea and let others critique it. But if you can do that, you are well on your way to doing the impossible, which is basically what you have to do to convince people here that your arguments in favor of theism have merit.
EDIT: When you think you are done, read Common Sense Atheism for Christians and see if you did your best to address every argument there to the author's (not your) satisfaction and clearly state the basis for the disagreement where you think no agreement is possible. Asking someone here for a feedback on your draft might also be a good idea.
This terminology would probably be obscure to a newcomer. For ibidem (and any confused others), here's the explanation, on the Less Wrong wiki.
(I think your response link is broken, could you fix it? I'm interested in following it.)
Ha ha sorry, forgot to finish that, I'll put it up.
Welcome.
I'd like to point to myself as a data point; I'm a theist, specifically a Roman Catholic, and I consider myself a rationalist. I know that there's a strong atheistic atmosphere here, but I just thought I should point out that it's not all-inclusive.
Of course, that's to be expected for a community that defines itself as rationalist. There are ways of thinking that are more accurate than others, that, to put it inexactly, produce truth. It's not just a "Think however you like and it will produce truth," kind of game.
The obsession that some people have with being open minded and considering all ways of thinking and associated ideas equally is, I suspect, unsustainable for anyone who has even the barest sliver of intellectual honesty. I don't consider it laudable at all. That's not to say they have to be a total arse about it, but I think at best you can hope that they ignore you or lie to you.
Are you saying it's more rational not ever to consider some ways of thinking?
(I'm pretty sure I'm not completely confused about what it means to be a rationalist.)
Yes. Rationality isn't necessarily about having accurate beliefs. It just tends that way because they seem to be useful. Rationality is about achieving your aims in the most efficient way possible.
Oh, someone may have to look into some ways of thinking, if people who use them start showing signs of being unusually effective at achieving relevant ends in some way. Those people would become super-dominant, it would be obvious that their way of thinking was superior. However, there's no reason that it makes sense for any of us to do it at the moment. And if they never show those signs then it will never be rational to look into them.
It's a massive waste of time and resources for individuals to consider every idea and every way of thinking before making a decision. You're getting closer to death every day. You have to decide which ways of thinking you are going to invest your time in - which ones have the greatest evidence of giving you something you want.
That's the thing for rationalists really, I think - chances of giving you what you want. It's entirely possible that if you don't want to achieve anything in this world with your life that it may just be a mistake for you personally to pursue rationality very far at all - at the end of the day you're probably not going to get anything from it if all you really want to do is feel justified in believing in god.
What does it mean to be a rationalist?
I suppose what Estarlio and I are actually referring to (as in "a community that defines itself as rationalist") is "good epistemic hygiene."
Given your earlier claims about how the meaning of reliably evaluating evidence depends on your paradigm, I have no confidence that you and I share an understanding of what "good epistemic hygiene" means either, so that doesn't really help me understand what you're saying.
Can you give me some representative concrete examples of good epistemic hygiene, on your account?
Articles like this one, obviously.
Or carefully evaluating both sides of an issue, for instance. Even if it's not specifically a LW thing it's considered essential for good judgment in the larger academic community.
Are we ever allowed to say "okay, we have evaluated this issue thoroughly, and this is our conclusion; let's end this debate for now"? Are we allowed to do it even if some other people disagree with the conclusion? Or do we have to continue the debate forever (of course, unless we reach the one very specific predetermined answer)?
Sometimes we probably should doubt even whether 2+2=4. But not all the time! Not even once in a month. Once or twice in a (pre-Singularity) lifetime is probably more than necessary. -- Well, it's very similar for the religion.
There are thousands of issues worth thinking about. Why waste the limited resources on this specific topic? Why not something useful... such as curing the cancer, or even how to invent a better mousetrap?
Most of us have evaluated the both sides of this issue. Some of us did it for years. We did it. It's done. It's over. -- Of course, unless there is something really new and really unexpected and really convincing... but so far, there isn't anything. Why debate it forever? Just because some other people are obsessed?
So, I basically agree with you, but I choose to point out the irony of this as a response to a thread gone quiet for months.
LOL
I guess instead of the purple boxes of unread comments, we should have two colors for unread new comments and unread old comments. (Or I should learn to look at the dates, but that seems less effective.)
OK. Thanks for answering my question.
I'm curious too. Can you give me an example of a particular way of thinking that you considered, yet ended up rejecting ? I'm not sure what you mean by "ways of thinking", so that might help.
OK, I'm ready to entertain new ideas: What's sacred about Mormon underwear?
You're free to answer, or you may notice that not all ideas deserve to be elevated above background noise by undue consideration. Rejecting an Abrahamic God as (is ludicrous too harsh?) ... not all too likely helps in demoting a host of associated and dependent beliefs into insignificance.
Only that God makes it sacred. But I'm actually too young to be wearing it myself, so I don't know if I'm qualified to talk. And I think it would be better for me not to get into defending my particular religion.
I'm not a Mormon, and I actually don't know that much about their underwear, but this is still rather a silly question. A Mormon might answer that, given that the Mormon god does exist and does care about his followers, the underwear symbolizes the commitment that the follower made to his God. It serves as a physical reminder to the wearer that he must abide by certain rules of conduct, in exchange for divine protection.
Such an answer may make perfect sense in the context of the Mormon religion (as I said, I'm not a Mormon so I don't claim this answer is correct). It may sound silly to you, but that's because you reject the core premise that the Mormon god exists. So, by hearing the answer you haven't really learned anything, and thus your question had very little value.
Which is the point I was trying to make when talking about that question in the second paragraph. As goes "is there an Abrahamic god", so goes a majority of assorted 'new' - but in fact dependent on that core premise - ideas.
I didn't get the impression that ibidem was talking about specific tenets of any particular religion when he mentioned "new ideas", but I could be wrong.
The same applies to many ideas that build upon other concepts being the case. You could probably make an argument that no ideas at all are wholly independent facts in the sense that they do not depend on the truth value of other ideas. Often you can skip dealing with a large swath of ideas simply by rejecting some upstream idea they all rely upon.
Religion, in this case, was a good example. That, and there's always some chance of hearing something interesting about holy underwear.
FWIW, I neither upvoted nor downvoted your posts; I think they are typical for a newcomer to the community. However, I must admit that your closing line comes across as being very poorly thought out:
This makes it sound like your Mormonism is a foregone conclusion, and that you're going to disregard whatever evidence or argumentation comes along, unless it is compatible with Mormonism. That is not a very rational way of thinking. Then again, that's just what your closing statement sounds like, IMO; you probably did not mean it that way.
Just as I've been told repeatedly that your atheism is a foregone conclusion.
Told by someone other than myself, hopefully. While I do not expect to become a theist of any kind in the near future, neither do I intend to remain an atheist. Instead, I intend to hold a set of beliefs that are most likely to be true. If I gain sufficient evidence that the answer is "Jesus" or "Trimurti", then this is what I will believe.
Can you point to where you've been told that?
What I think most of us would agree on, and what it seems to me that people here have told you, is that they consider atheism to be a settled question, which is not at all the same thing.
If you want to raise my openness to the possibility of a god-level power, then provide me with evidence of consistent, accurate, specific prophecies made hundreds of years in advance of the events. Or provide me of evidence of multiple strong rationalists who are also religious and claim that their religion is based on assessment of the evidence/available arguments.
My atheism isn't a foregone conclusion. It's simply that no-one's ever seriously challenged it and at this point I've heard so many bad arguments that people need to come up with evidence before I'm prepared to take them seriously. But you could totally change my mind, if you had the right things.
I suspect what people mean when they say their atheism is a settled question or whatever is that they don't have time to listen to yet another bad argument for theism. That you need some evidence before they're prepared to take you seriously. Which seems quite reasonable.
When your comments get downvoted, respond by refraining from making similar comments in the future and/or abandoning the topic (this is a simple heuristics whose implementation doesn't require figuring out the reasons for downvoting). Given the current trend, if that doesn't happen, in a while your future comments will start getting banned. (You are currently at minus 128, 17% positive. This reflects the judgment of many users.)
Excuse me, but I watched my Karma drop a hundred points in three minutes. Look me in the eye and tell me that's the coincidental result of "the judgment of many users." Even if I were a brilliant, manipulative troll, I doubt I could get to -128 without someone deliberately and systematically doing so.
Someone has probably just discovered your work and found it systematically wanting. By "many users" I mean that many of the more recent comments are at minus 2-3 and there are only a few upvotes, so other people don't generally disagree.
You essentially accused the community of being ashamed of being atheist when you said:
We aren't ashamed. As Jack said to you in a parallel comment, we generally think the question is a solved problem. We aren't interested in having the same basic conversation over and over again.
Accusing us of being ashamed of the position because we don't throw our atheism in your face makes it hard to interpret the rest of your comments as saying anything beyond repeating the basic apologetics. And we've heard the basic apologetics a million times.
Once the lurkers think you aren't interesting, they'll downvote - and there are WAY more lurkers than commenters. Given that, your karma loss isn't all that surprising.
Possible, but given that all your comments are on only a small number of threads and arguing for the same basic points, it is also plausible that someone just went through those threads an downvoted most of your comments while upvoting others. I for example got about +20 karma from what as far as I can tell is primarily upvotes on my replies to you.
The site culture treats serious adherence to supernatural beliefs associated with a religion as a disease. First it will try to cure you. If that doesn't seem to be working, it will start quarantining you.
Thanks for this honest assessment; it seems pretty accurate. (You also didn't make any judgment as to the appropriateness of such a mindset.)
I think it's a rather uncharitable assessment of the situation, though it's possible some people do feel that way.
Being wrong is not the same thing as being a disease.
Actually, the behavior Risto_Saarelma described fits the standard pattern. People who cannot be helped are ignored or rejected. Take any stable community, online or offline, and that's what you see.
For example, f someone comes to, say, the freenode ##physics IRC channel and starts questioning Relativity, they will be pointed out where their beliefs are mistaken, offered learning resources and have their basic questions answered. If they persist in their folly and keep pushing crackpot ideas, they will be asked to leave or take it to the satellite off-topic channel. If this doesn't help, they get banned.
Again, this pattern appears in every case where a community (or even a living organism) is viable enough to survive.
Not being a disease. Having one.
Being wrong is not the same as having a disease, either.
I started responding to you, but then I decided I wanted you to remain religious. For the benefit of others, here's why. (Also note that this guy is Mormon, and as far as I can tell, Mormonism is pretty great as religions go.)