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Desrtopa comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong
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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.
I was raised Roman Catholic. I did give it a second thought; I found, through my life, very little evidence against the existence of God, and some slight evidence for the existence of God. (It doesn't communicate well; it's all anecdotal).
I do find, on occasion, that the actions of God are completely mysterious to me. However, an omniscient being would have access to a whole lot of data that I do not have access to; in light of that, I tend to assume that He knows what He is doing.
The existence of God also implies that the universe has some purpose, for which it is optimised. I'm not quite sure what that purpose is; the major purpose of the universe may be something that won't happen for the next ten billion years. However, trying to imagine what the purpose could be is an interesting occasional intellectual exercise.
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.
Well, the subject of "arguments" for or against the existence of God was first brought up in this thread by ibidem, I believe. I entirely agree that verbal reasoning is not the only or even the main sort of evidence we should examine in this matter, unless you count as "arguments" things like verbal reports or summaries of various other sorts of evidence. It's just that verbal "arguments" are how we communicate our reasons for belief to each other in venues like Less Wrong.
That having been said, it's not clear to me what you think the alternative is to saying that beliefs need to be supported by "evidence". Saying beliefs... don't need to be supported by evidence? But that's... well, false. Of course we do need to make it clear that "evidence" encompasses more than "clever verbal proofs".
Personal experience of supernatural things does tend to be statistical flukes and/or hallucinations, so dismissing it as such seems reasonable as a general policy. Extraordinary claims require etc. If someone's reason for believing in a god entirely boils down to "God appeared to me, told me that he exists, and did some personal miracles for me which I can't demonstrate or verify for you", then they do not, in fact, have a very good reason for holding that belief.
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.