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shokwave comments on 2013 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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I'm extremely surprised and confused. Is there an explanation for how these probabilities are so high?
Well, we apparently have 3.9% of "committed theists", 3.2% of "lukewarm theists", and 2.2% of "deists, pantheists, etc.". If these groups put Pr(God) at 90%, 60%, 40% respectively (these numbers are derived from a sophisticated scientific process of rectal extraction) then they contribute 6.3% of the overall Pr(God) requiring an average Pr(God) of about 3.1% from the rest of the LW population. If enough respondents defined "God" broadly enough, that doesn't seem altogether crazy.
If those groups put Pr(religion) at 90%, 30%, 10% then they contribute about 4.7% to the overall Pr(religion) suggesting ~1% for the rest of the population. Again, that doesn't seem crazy.
So the real question is more or less equivalent to: How come there are so many committed theists on LW? Which we can frame two ways: (1) How come LW isn't more effective in helping people recognize that their religion is wrong? or (2) How come LW isn't more effective in driving religious people away? To which I would say (1) recognizing that your religion is wrong is really hard and (2) I hope LW is very ineffective in driving religious people away.
(For those who expect meta-level opinions on these topics to be perturbed by object-level opinions and wish to discount or adjust: I am an atheist; I don't remember what probabilities I gave but they would be smaller than any I have mentioned above.)
When it comes to a hypothesis as extreme as 'an irreducible/magical mind like the one described in various religions created our universe', I'd say that if 3% credence isn't crazy, 9% isn't either. I took shokwave to be implying that a reasonable probability would be orders of magnitude smaller, not 2/3 smaller.
The reason why I think ~3% for some kind of God and ~1% for some kind of religion aren't crazy numbers (although, I repeat, my own estimates of the probabilities are much lower) is that there is a credible argument to be made that if something is seriously believed by a large number of very clever and well informed people then you shouldn't assign it a very low probability. I don't think this argument is actually correct, but it's got some plausibility to it and I've seen versions of it taken very seriously by big-name LW participants. Accordingly, I think it would be unsurprising and not-crazy if, say, 10% of LW allowed a 10% probability for God's existence on the basis that maybe something like 10% of (e.g.) first-rate scientists or philosophers believe in God.
Personally I would discount "believed by a large number of clever people" if there are memetic effects. There are traits of beliefs that are well-known to increase the number of believers for reasons unrelated to their truth. For any belief that has such traits, whether it's shooting unbelievers, teaching them to your children before they reach the age when they are likely to think rationally, or sending out missionaries, the large number of people who believe it is not much use in assessing its truth.
I would also discount anything which fits into certain patterns known to take advantage of flaws in human thought processes, particularly conspiracy theories.
There are just too many ways to fool oneself here. I could talk for quite a while about "memetic effects" that make e.g. atheism appeal to (a certain group of) people independent of its truth. Typically one only notices these "memetic effects" in ideas one already disagrees with.
I think for standard outside view reasons, it's better to have an exceptionless norm that anything believed by billions of people is worth taking seriously for at least 5 minutes.
I think that it's fairly obvious that there wouldn't be even the relatively small percentage of seriously Christian scientists there are today if it had not been for centuries of proselytization, conversion by the sword, teaching Christianity to children from when they could talk, crusades, etc. I think it's also fairly obvious that this is not true of the percentage of scientists who are atheists. I also think it's obvious that it's not true for the percentage of scientists who think that, for instance, there are an infinite number of twin primes.
Really? I haven't heard anyone say "nobody would think there are infinitely many twin primes if they hadn't been taught that as a 4 year old and forced to verbally affirm the infinity of twin primes every Sunday for the next few decades". It just is not something that is said, or can sensibly be said, for any idea that one disagrees with.
Your choice of twin primes as an example is kind of odd; implicitly, we are discussing the cluster of ideas that are controversial in some ideological sense.
To be clear, I agree that ideas often spread for reasons other than their truth. I agree that because of this, if you are careful, you can use the history of religion as ancillary evidence against theism.
But in general, you have to be really, really careful not to use "memetic effects" as just another excuse to stop listening to people (LessWrong's main danger is that it is full of such excuses). Sometimes true ideas spread for bad reasons. Sometimes what looks like a bad reason appears so because of your own ideology.
I'm not saying become a theist, or read huge treatises on theology. I'm saying give theism the 5 minutes of serious consideration (e.g., listening to a smart proponent) owed a belief held by a very large fraction of the planet.
This sort of thing is exactly why I don't think the argument in question is correct and why I'm comfortable with my own Pr(God) being orders of magnitude smaller than the fraction of theists in the educated population.
However, simplicio is right that by taking this sort of view one becomes more vulnerable to closed-mindedness. The price of being more confident when right is being less persuadable when wrong. I think simplicio's second paragraph has it pretty much exactly right: in cases where you're disagreeing starkly with a lot of smart people, don't adjust your probabilities, adjust your behaviour and give the improbable hypothesis more consideration and more time than your current estimate of its probability would justify on its own.
Our universe came from somewhere. Can you be 100% sure that no intelligence was involved? If there was an intelligence involved, it would probably qualify as supernatural and god, even if it was something technically mundane (such as the author of the simulation we call reality, or an intelligent race that created our universe or tweaked the result, possibly as an attempt to escape the heat death of their universe). Eg if you ask our community, "What are the odds that in the next million years humans be able to create whole world simulations?" I suspect they'll answer "very high".
For extra fun, you can wonder if the total number of simulated humans is expected to outnumber the total number of real humans.