gjm comments on AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Will_Newsome 12 January 2014 02:18AM

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Comment author: Will_Newsome 14 January 2014 01:44:43AM *  6 points [-]

I believe so for reasons you wouldn't find compelling, because the gods apparently do not want there to be common knowledge of their existence, and thus do not interact with humans in a manner that provides communicable evidence. (Yes, this is exactly what a world without gods would look like to an impartial observer without firsthand incommunicable evidence. This is obviously important but it is also completely obvious so I wish people didn't harp on it so much.) People without firsthand experience live in a world that is ambiguous as to the existence or lack thereof of god-like beings, and any social evidence given to them will neither confirm nor deny their picture of the world, unless they're falling prey to confirmation bias, which of course they often do, especially theists and atheists. I think people without firsthand incommunicable evidence should be duly skeptical but should keep the existence of the supernatural (in the everyday sense of that word, not the metaphysical sense) as a live hypothesis. Assigning less than 5% probability to it is, in my view, a common but serious failure of social epistemic rationality, most likely caused by arrogance. (I think LessWrong is especially prone to this kind of arrogance; see IlyaShpitser's comments on LessWrong's rah-rah-Bayes stance to see part of what I mean.)

As for me, and as to my personal decision policy, I am ninety-something percent confident. The scenarios where I'm wrong are mostly worlds where outright complex hallucination is a normal feature of human experience that humans are for some reason blind to. I'm not talking about normal human memory biases and biases of interpretation, I'm saying some huge fraction of humans would have to have a systemic disorder on the level of anosognosia. Given that I don't know how we should even act in such a world, I'm more inclined to go with the gods hypothesis, which, while baffling, at least has some semblance of graspability.

Comment author: gjm 15 January 2014 02:39:29AM 2 points [-]

You are arguing, if I understand you aright, (1) that the gods don't want their existence to be widely known but (2) that encounters with the gods, dramatic enough to demand extraordinary explanations if they aren't real, are commonplace.

This seems like a curious combination of claims. Could you say a little about why you don't find their conjunction wildly implausible? (Or, if the real problem is that I've badly misunderstood you, correct my misunderstanding?)