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gwern comments on Rationality Quotes October 2013 - Less Wrong
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The point of the quote stands. For that matter, apart from the times that Wright specifically talks about religious doctrine, he seems to have much the same views on other things and be much the same person as before his conversion, at least judging from his blog. (It starts in March 2003; he reports his conversion as a recent event in December 2003.)
If you read his conversion story, it is clear that to say "oh well, something went wrong with his brain" is facile. He had been moving in that direction for many years. He writes of himself before that episode:
As indeed it drove C.S. Lewis before him. I note that Lewis, Chesterton, and, for that matter, Wright enjoy a certain popularity at LessWrong, all of them having been frequently quoted with approval. People have also talked of the practical usefulness of spiritual exercises, and the concept of sin.
As I said on an earlier occasion, Lewis is laughing in his grave; and perhaps Wright will get the last laugh long before his.
Might i suggest a sweepstake on the date of the first long-time member of LW to announce their religious conversion? Personally I remain an unbeliever, but who can foretell their own future?
My objection here is not to the 'willpower yay!' bit, but to the multiple political digs interspersed in it, which substantially reduce the value of the quote for me, and I thought people were not noticing.
I am skeptical of his account. Everything is obvious in retrospect, and when someone is writing their conversion story, superimposing a 'journey to Catholicism' is easy. Just cherrypick.
He says he beat friends in arguments and showed their argument were bad? So what? I have beaten other LWers in arguments and show their understanding poor many times over the years, but if tomorrow I suffer brain damage and start worshipping Allah, it would be very easy for me to write 'despite being a frequent writer at transhumanist websites, I was nevertheless drifting away and routinely showing that my fellow transhumanists were horribly comically wrong about every basic point of philosophy, ethics and logic'; all it requires is a change of perspective.
We can see this hindsight on display right now in discussions of Silk Road. All over the place people are saying that the FBI knew who Ulbricht was from the start since there was a connection from his email address to an early mention of Silk Road, and how easy it would have been to de-anonymize Dread Pirate Roberts. Plausible... until we remember that no one in the world actually managed this despite intense interest by many people and organizations in SR, that if we had noticed the connection we had no good reason to believe that altoid/Ulbricht hadn't heard about SR through the Hidden Wiki or another discussion forum we simply didn't have access to or on a page that had linkrotted, that the indictments indicate that the FBI only managed to make the link much later after assigning someone fulltime to sift all Internet traces, and we're still not clear on whether they were sure DPR==Ulbricht until as late as June 2013.
(Assuming you believe that he's recounting the facts basically right. I believe Wright when he writes about his heart attack and hallucination as the reason for the conversion because it's a shockingly embarrassing way to convert, which invites even believers to write him off as believing due to neurological problems, and this has to be obvious to him; but that doesn't apply to his claims of having been tending toward Catholicism for years before.)