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Douglas_Knight comments on Steelmanning Young Earth Creationism - Less Wrong
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Comments (57)
What was the point of this exercise? Did you learn anything from it? I'm not sure I understood your essay, but I think you wound up retreating to general-purpose skepticism. That's an important topic, but the YEC doesn't seem to have contributed. Did you at least learn something about steelmanning, a topic you recently asked about?
I learned that there seems to be general agreement on LW that you shouldn't bother steelmanning stupid positions, but I left wondering under what circumstances I'm allowed to reply to "You should steelman X before criticizing it" with "X is a stupid position, so no."
This should've been in the post - I suspected you were meta-trolling or something, for a while.
Huh? What he learned about LW appears to be learned from the responses, so how could he have put it in the post ahead of time?
Oops, I misread. What I intended to communicate was that I didn't understand the point of the post - I kept trying to reply to comments, but there was an inferential silence where I kept stopping, thinking 'What is the point of this post and discussion?'. There seems to be no reason to steelman creationism like this.
Admittedly, it would be nice to have an explanation of what Chris is thinking at the top, about when it is okay to not bother steelmanning, because otherwise people may be really confused about what's going on. I certainly was.
(Not that I'm sure not-steelmanning is the correct position, but while it feels so intuitively, I didn't realise that was being questioned here. It just felt unnecessary.)
Was the point to learn about LW?
Concepts are fuzzy. Do you have a hard time seeing the difference between a YECist and a deist, in terms of stupidity level?
It sounds like you are implying there is a necessarily large gap—and I don't think so.
In both cases, at some level, the almost-athiest deist and YECist are simply unwilling or unable to rule out the possibility of a hyper-poweful entity. The more sophisticated YECist tends to believe the nature of that entity is such that humans do not posess the capability to derive the reality of the universe, rather they must use faith to find the Truth.
A deist is more willing to use reason in their assessment of the nature and character of the Entity. In that way, you may say they are more rational according to LW's definition of the word. But the fundamental axiom both deists and YECists is the same: I'm too little and God is too big for me to settle on atheism.