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terasinube comments on Rational Evangelism - Less Wrong
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A master was once unmoved by the complaints of his disciples that, though they listened with pleasure to his parables and stories, they were also frustrated for they longed for something deeper. To all their objections he would simply reply: "You have yet to understand, my friends, that the shortest distance between a human being and truth is a story."
You need a good story. That's all. A good story.
2 things come to my mind as examples:
The first one is about the past and comes from a novel called "Quo Vadis" which is about early christianity. There is a scene there where a roman guy searching a girl he wanted stumbles on a christians meeting and there was Peter retelling the story of Jesus. The power of his words as a living witness made the guy forget what he was looking for. Personal testimony is one huge attention grabber if is done right.
The second one is from Dune. Pardot Kynes, the planetologist, tells to the fremen the story of Arrakis could become and tells it so well that Uliet, the guy in charge of killing him chose to take his own life and with this self-sacrifice started the terraforming process.
So, what would a rational story be about? Health and Happiness sound like good bets. It should incorporate elements described by religious mysticism, stuff like Love, Joy, Strength, Peace, Trust, etc. It should position itself to the current effort to find common ground... like the Charter for Compassion. It should be about a long journey of discovering the power of love.
"What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but expressing them. And so we cannot avoid this conclusion: it is biologically evident that to gain control of passion and so make it serve spirit must be a condition of progress. Sooner or later, then, the world will brush aside our incredulity and take this step : because whatever is the more true comes out into the open, and whatever is better is ultimately realized. The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Notably, both are fiction.
<rolls eyes> And what exactly would make that story "rational"? Pray to St.Bayes to discover the power of love? X-0
I think a fidelity to the truth will make the story rational. I would love a story without slips into magikal thinking.
What do you call "the truth" in the context of a fictional story?
The truth I was referring in the previous comment is Scientific understanding.
Also, when I said story I did not meant a work of fiction but more like an work of vision.
Something like a reimagining of what life could be for the human race and the commitment to implement that vision as expressed by the people telling the story and living the story.
I don't understand what these words mean to you.
I still don't understand. What does "fidelity to the truth" mean in the context of ideology? Science doesn't tell you what your values should be.
I find I can always count on you to make pointlessly snarky comments.
I would prefer to be more specific, and say 'understanding, acceptance, confidence, control, and love' (with clear definitions for each, probably similar to the ones in the GROW Blue Book). Not all of these things can be used to make clever, snappy remarks to wow outsiders, but they are all necessary for a satisfying life, and therefore must be addressed effectively by any sound philosophy of life. The parent comment was only vague, not wrong.
One of the services I provide :-P
I don't see how understanding, acceptance, and love follow from rationality. Confidence and control are more reasonable.
Are you saying that rationalism is a "philosophy of life", even leaving the soundness aside for a minute?
The parent comment said: "You need a good story. That's all. A good story."
That's not vague. That's wrong.
They do not follow from it, they are necessary to it.
No. But a story that is trying to have broad appeal needs these things, whether it's a story about rationality or about watching paint dry. A story conveys a sense of life.
That depends on what you think 'good' is supposed to imply there. If 'convincing' is the intended connotation, then yeah, wrong. If 'consistent' is the intended connotation, that is not obviously wrong, People need stories to help them get stuff done, even though stories are overall pretty terrible.
Science, for example, has methods, but overall science is a story about how to get accurate data and interpret it accurately in spite of our human failings. The way that the elements of that story were obtained does not make it any less of a story. History itself is a story, no matter how accurate you get, it remains a narrative rather than a fact. Reality exists, but all descriptions of it are stories; there are no facts found in stories; Facts are made of reality, not of words.
HPMOR is a good rational story.
I think a rational story in which the protagonist uses CBT from The Feeling Good Handbook to become happy and end his depression, would be a good project.
I don't think it's an easy project but there a possibility for high impact. In case anybody feels the call for writing that story and wants help with getting the narrative right, I would be happy to do it as a joint project or just advice.
The problem is that a lot of the people in this community don't like the idea of emotions let alone deep ones like love. This community would have to shift quite a bit.
Dave Chapman's article going down on the phenomenon illustrates an ideal of love for science that I consider worthy of being spread.
Getting the narrative right to make that ideal of love is acceptable to the average LW person is a hard task.
Feeling Rational seems to be endorsed more often than not, and straw Vulcans are often condemned.
"Rational" is not a word that correspond to something that commonly considered an emotion.
You can feel love, you can feel anger but you can't really feel rational in the same sense. You do endorse the idea of feeling but the fact that you speak about feeling something that's no emotion illustrates the core issue.
There a lot of talk about utility functions that people supposedly use and Bayesian calculations, when in reality humans usually make decisions based on emotions.
When challenged by Dave Chapman that maybe Bayesianism isn't the one true solution, few of the senior LW people that responded to him even got what he meant. I highlite the "going down on the phenomenon"-post because it's what Chapman wrote at the end after his critique of Bayesianism.
On a superficial level quite a few people admit that emotions are important but they don't take them seriously. LW as it currently exists is no place that radiates love and peace.
There are cool people at meetups but on the level of what story LW tells at the moment there's no love and peace. Certainly not enough love and peace to compete on that level with an established religion.
I was referring to the post Feeling Rational, which I've found the community to generally agree with. Rationality and emotions aren't necessarily opposed, because emotions are often something that the truth can't destroy.
I think the way the post ends is quite telling:
That's the core problem, on a philosophical level many agree that emotions are a good thing, but they still feel badly speaking about emotions.
You can reason perfectly well that emotions are okay and rationality and emotions aren't opposed. That doesn't mean that you like them. Of course recognizing that you feel bad about the concept of emotions requires you to notice what you feel.
But this is not a specific problem of rationalists.. It's a broader problem with Western culture. Feeling strongly about things is not 'cool' or impressive. Plenty of people enjoy complaining, but passion makes you an alien.. perhaps an inspiring one, but ultimately an alien.. a person of whom people say 'oh, I could never do that', even if in the other breath they praise your passion and dedication.
I hesitate to assign a definite cause for that, but I am willing to comment that Western society somewhat deifies disaffected sociopathy, through its presentations in media, and also that I have a strong impression that most people have encountered enflamed evangelists, and they don't want to be that person. Whether they recognize it as ugly or not, they treat it as ugly, though spectacular.
Sport fans do have strong feelings while watching basketball and that's socially acceptable. As a result children want to go into the NFL instead of becoming scientists.
Yes. That means that if you manage to have community where having strong positive feeling is the norm, all sorts of people should have an interest into joining that community. If you manage to succeed at that task you have a pretty big lever on your hand to produce large societal changes.
The problem with evangelism is that it's usually targeted at outsiders. Instead it's much better to target people who are receptive to your message and give them a narrative that allows them to feel more positive emotions by being part of your cause.
As your cause grows and people who are unhappy with their lives have a valid reason to come to your movement and believe your narrative to become happy. You don't go to them and force your narrative on them but you let them come to you.
If a journalist comes and wants an interview and you have 2-3 free hours you gives them his interview but you don't really need to go out and try to persuade outsiders. The most important work is getting the community itself right.
Well... it depends on what you point at.
Love, as I view it is not something that can be easily defined. To me it's a way of being into this world. This video describes it.
As for emotions... why would anyone dislike the joy of figuring things out? the post flow feeling of accomplishment? They are wired into our positive reinforcement system and as long as the thing they are reinforcing is a thing worth investing in, why not let nature run its course?
That just means that you don't have a well defined concept of the term you are speaking about. I would guess the same is true for most Lesswrongers for most emotions.
But as far as your link goes, I would predict that most people on LW won't be receptive to that kind of talk. I would be very surprised to be proven wrong.
If you want a fancy answer: Second-order cybernetics.
A simple answer would be because you can't feel a strong emotion while wearing a mask. It requires you to give up control and get out of your head. I mean something specific with the phrase "get out of your head", but I would guess that a good portion of LW don't know exactly what I'm talking about and I know of no way to make it clear via this medium.
I could probably come up with a bunch of more reasons if I would invest time.
Good point. It made me realise that I haven't investigated this more seriously lately.