g comments on The Lens That Sees Its Flaws - Less Wrong
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Comments (36)
CoA, if you "would argue that [faith, hope and love] are at the core of what it is to live a fully human life" then why don't you, rather than just asserting it? (Or, if the argument you'd make is much too long and convoluted, point us to somewhere where it's made in a non-question-begging way.)
"This website" doesn't reject anything. It can't. It's only a website. A lot of the posters and commenters here disagree with "the theistic understanding of faith and hope", but people who think otherwise aren't forbidden to contribute or anything.
Tom, CoA isn't saying "the apostles converted everyone to Christianity, so it must have been a miracle" (though he may well believe it); he's saying "Christianity took over much of the world from tiny beginnings; it seems likely that the people involved were more optimistic than the evidence would have seemed to warrant". He's probably right about that (see "Small Business Overconfidence"). The same is surely true of at least some of the people involved in the rise of communism. Optimism beyond the evidence probably *is* an advantage, if your goal is to have a belief that isn't well supported by the evidence become hugely popular and influential. Demagogues and revolutionaries and medical quacks all tend to be optimistic beyond the evidence.