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Rationality Quotes March 2014
Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
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Comments (326)
-- James Dean
I find this a useful quote to keep in mind when I'm experiencing mental states that I don't want to experience.
Scott Aaronson in reply to Max Tegmark replying to Scott's review of Max's book. He goes on:
(Emphasis mine.)
This sounds similar to the view that is sometimes called the fragility of deduction. It was why John Stuart Mill distrusted "long chains of logical reasoning" and according to Paul Samuelson it is why "Marshall treated such chains as if their truth content was subject to radioactive decay and leakage."
And that is why the long chains of logical reasoning used in the UFAI argument should not be regarded as terminating in conclusions of near certainty or high probability.
You could say that about anything.
Maybe, but it would not be very painful in many cases. In most cases, people who put forward highly conjunctive arguments don't put out them forward as urgent, near certainties which require immediate and copious funding.Moreover, most audiences have enough common sense to implications as lossy.
MIRI/LW presen ts an unusual set of circa,stances which is worth pointing out.
-- José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado
-Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
--Scott Adams, Interview with Julia Galef, February 10, 2014
What? Scientists do use models. Assuming charitably that he's not mistaken or bullshitting about what scientists do, by “model” he must mean something different -- what?
— Paul Krugman, "Sergeant Friday Was Not A Fox"
I'm fairly certain that's actually horrible advice. It boils down to "substitute your judgement over professionals on those problems that are hardest."
More like "discount status on problems where expertise is a poor predictor of accuracy".
I think this steelman is not quite true to the spirit of the original. The contrast he draws between "using a model" and "looking at data like a scientist" is especially strange. One wonders what he thinks of meteorology.
"Just looking at the data like a scientist" does not give you magic scientist powers. Models of the world are what allow you to predict it, without need for magic scientist vision.
I ... think he's talking about basic correlation, statistical analysis, that sort of thing?
(I enjoy Scott's writing, but I didn't upvote the grandparent.)
Adams doesn't elaborate on this point, but I read him as saying, if you've actually measured things and taken data that goes to your point, then your model is more likely to be correct.
For example, suppose a model says that raising the minimum wage reduces employment. That's a pretty common model in economics and it can be backed up with a lot of math. However I would not find that alone convincing. On the other hand, if an economist goes out into the world and looks at what actually happened when the minimum wage was raised, that would be more convincing. If they can figure out a way to do an experiment in which, for example, 5 nearby towns raise their minimum wage, 5 keep it the same, and another 5 lower it, that would be even more convincing.
Another example: consider a model that says
Those three statements are reasonably well established and backed up by data. However if you throw in a model that says dietary cholesterol causes in-body cholesterol, and in-body cholesterol causes heart disease, and therefore eating eggs reduces life expectancy; you've jumped way beyond what the data supports. On the other hand, if you compare the levels of all-cause morbidity among people who eat eggs and people who don't or, better yet, do a multiyear controlled experiment in which
the only diet variation between groups is that some people eat eggs and others don't, the answers you get are far more likely to be correct.
Here's another one: you have lots of detailed calculations that say if you smash two protons together at .999999c relative velocity, and you do it a few million times, then you'll see certain particles show up in the debris with very precise probabilities. Only when you run the experiment, you discover that the fractions of different particles you see don't quite match what you expected because there's an additional resonance you didn't know about and didn't include in the model.
In other words, empirical data beats mere models. Models can be self-consistent and plausible, but not fully reflect the real world. Models that go beyond what the data says run the risk of assuming causal connections that don't exist (dietary cholesterol to in-body cholesterol) or missing factors outside the model (maybe eggs do increase the risk of heart disease but reduce the risk of cancer) that are more important.
Of course all these experiments are really hard to do, and take years of time and millions, even billions, of dollars, so often we muddle along with seriously flawed models instead. However we need to remember that models are just models, not data, and be reasonably skeptical of their recommendations. In particular, if we're about to do something really expensive and difficult like changing a nation's dietary preferences based on nothing more than a model, maybe we should step back and spend the money and the time needed to collect real data before we go full speed ahead.
Prediction is going beyond the data, so a model that never goes beyond the data isn't going to be much use.
Climate change models incorporated data, so they are not purely theoretical like the economic model you mentioned.
Fair enough - political conditioning has caused me to assume that any non-specialist saying "don't trust models, just 'look at the data'," is the victim of some sort of anti-epistemology.
In context, it's less likely that that's the case, but I still think this quote is painting with much too wide a brush.
-- Francis Bacon, Novum Organum
-- John Stuart Mill
That last sentence makes it sound like it makes you selfish and hard-hearted. I noticed it could be interpreted to be that it will make you at least one, which seems more accurate. If you desire to be kind-hearted and help others, you will either have to accept that you can't help others if you're kind-hearted, or stop trying to help others. You don't have to be selfish and you don't have to be hard-hearted, but you do have to be selfish or hard-hearted.
Also, considering Mill is considered the father of Utilitarianism, it seems unlikely that he was preaching egoism.
"Therefore, this kind of experiment can never convince me of the reality of Mrs Stewart's ESP; not because I assert Pf=0 dogmatically at the start, but because the verifiable facts can be accounted for by many alternative hypotheses, every one of which I consider inherently more plausible than Hf, and none of which is ruled out by the information available to me.
Indeed, the very evidence which the ESP'ers throw at us to convince us, has the opposite effect on our state of belief; issuing reports of sensational data defeats its own purpose. For if the prior probability for deception is greater than that of ESP, then the more improbable the alleged data are on the null hypothesis of no deception and no ESP, the more strongly we are led to believe, not in ESP, but in deception. For this reason, the advocates of ESP (or any other marvel) will never succeed in persuading scientists that their phenomenon is real, until they learn how to eliminate the possibility of deception in the mind of the reader. As (5.15) shows, the reader's total prior probability for deception by all mechanisms must be pushed down below that of ESP."
ET Jaynes, Probability Theory (S 5.2.2)
I found this (and the preceding bit) noteworthy on two points; first in the obvious mathematical respect that explains the relationship between favored hypotheses and less favored hypotheses which are both supported by data;
Second, by the realization that researchers favoring ESP most likely fail to apprehend the hypothesis that they are testing, w/r to their critics. In the case in question, they collected 37100 predictions, which seems a little excessive considering it had essentially no persuasive power to skeptics.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte.
What's that from?
I made it up based on Eliezer's saying. I'm much too Gryffindor/Sunshine to call it world optimization.
My bad. Deleting.
Context: Aang ("A") is a classic Batman's Rule (never kill) hero, as a result of his upbringing in Air Nomad culture. It appears to him that he must kill someone in order to save the world. He is the only one who can do it, because he's currently the one and only avatar. Yangchen ("Y") is the last avatar to have also been an Air Nomad, and has probably faced similar dilemmas in the past. Aang can communicate with her spirit, but she's dead and can't do things directly anymore.
The story would have been better if Aang had listened to her advice, in my opinion.
Edwin Lyngar at Salon
I don't think certainty is an emotion in the first place. The emotion that people who are certain feel is confidence.
Even then I think it's frequently better than anger.
Confidence in oneself, or confidence in someone or something external? The two feel quite different to me, subjectively -- something like a feeling of lightness and elevation vs. groundedness and solidity, although English doesn't have a very good vocabulary for this sort of thing.
May I make a general request to people posting quotes? Please include not just the author's name but sufficient information to enable a reader to find the relevant quote. This doesn't necessarily have to be full MLA format; but a title, journal or book name if from a print source, page number or URL, and date would be helpful. Hyperlinked URLs are excellent if available but do not substitute for the rest of this information since these threads will likely outlive the location of some of the sources.
Doing so enables the reader not just to get a brief hit of rationality but to say, "Gee, that's interesting. I'd like to learn more," and read further in the source.
In fact, why don't we add a fifth bullet point to the header:
That's what archive.org is for. (Okay, it's not perfectly reliable, but...)
If you want to avoid that problem, whenever you post a link you should submit it to archive.org or archive.is.
"As I fear not a child with a weapon he cannot lift, I will never fear the mind of a man who does not think.’”
Words of Radiance, Brandon Sanderson, page 795
Both the metaphor and its literal application only make sense if "cannot" and "does not" means "never", and they really don't.
While I'd never fear the mind of a man who literally is in a coma and doesnt think at all, I'd have plenty of reason to fear the mind of a man whose ability to think is merely limited. He can be a stupid moral reasoner and a clever killer at the same time.
In that case, though, you're afraid of the man's axe more than his mind.
No, because it works as metaphor too.
It's certainly possible to convince people of a proposition that is false; consider Eliezer doing the Ai-box experiment. In the Ai-box example, Eliezer understands that the proposition is false, but that need not be true in general; you can be bad at thinking in one way (and thus not understand that some proposition is false) but good at thinking in other ways (and thus be able to readily convince other people of the false proposition).
In other words, instead of a stupid reasoner and a clever killer, a stupid reasoner and a clever convincer.
I recall one Sherlock Holmes book, where Holmes said that he has a lot of trouble predicting the actions of idiots; an intelligent man, Holmes can work out what actions he would take in a given situation, but an idiot could do anything.
Of course, this presumes that one knows the goals of said intelligent agent.
Warren Buffett
Bernard and Sir Humphrey are British government functionaries in the comedy show 'Yes Minister'
Bernard: If it's our job to carry out government policies, shouldn't we believe in them?
Sir Humphrey: Oh, what an extraordinary idea! I have served 11 governments in the past 30 years. If I'd believed in all their policies, I'd have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to joining it. I'd have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel and of denationalising it and renationalising it. Capital punishment? I'd have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolitionist. I'd have been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac, but above all, I would have been a stark-staring raving schizophrenic!
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
It's pretty remarkable to detect yourself in that kind of mistake; most people are very good at finding confirming evidence for whatever judgments they've made about people, and ignoring any contrary indications.
Yes. This can happen, but what you describe is more common. Once a coworker was sure that I was an ultra-right-wing militiaman, based on one indirect, misleading bit of evidence, ignoring all else.
Merely declaring my general political alignment and support and opposition to various candidates was totally inadequate. I had to explicitly enumerate several political positions to get him to adjust, and even then he seized on the nuances to try to interpret it as my secretly being a right-wing nut.
Yes, this is a good point - we generally don't realise that we are (self-)deceived, so we can't even begin to think about where we went wrong.
Of course, Elinor Dashwood is something of an authorial stand-in, so it's not really surprising that she's incredibly wise and perspicacious like that.
I think those mistakes usually happen for an entirely different reason. New people remind us of ones we've already met, and we unconsciously "fill in the blanks" in what we know about the new person with what we know about person we know, or some kind of average-ish judgement about the group of comparable people we know.
-- Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), Savitri - A Legend and a Symbol
Quotes from the Screwtape Letters have not been terribly well-received in this thread. So, perversely, I decided I had to take a turn:
-- The demon Screwtape, on how best to tempt a human being to destruction.
The existence of souls notwithstanding, Screwtape is clearly right: if you are charitable to almost everybody--except for those your see every day!--then you are not practicing the virtue of charity and are ill-served to imagine otherwise. You cannot fantasize good mental habits into being; they must be acted upon.
Of course, it's a lot harder to be charitable to the man on the train - or worse, to one's own ~~exploiter~~ employer - than to one's mother. For one thing, the wider the circle of charity, the deeper a pit to fill with one's efforts!
Which was precisely why, during my internship last summer, I eventually just picked one homeless guy and gave him my loose $1 bills every day during my commute.
Who does more good with their life--the person who contributes a large amount of money to efficient charities while avoiding the people nearby, or the person who ignores anyone more than 100 miles away while being nice to his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train?
If he actually donates the money then the charity is not constrained to fantasy. By the miracle of the world banking network, people thousands of literal miles away can be brought as close as the sphere of action. Those concentric rings are measured in frequency and impactfulness of interaction, not physical distance.
What Screwtape is advocating is that he simply intend to donate the money once Givewell publishes a truely definitive report (which they never will). Or better, that he feel great compassion for people so many steps removed that he could not possibly do anything for them (perhaps the people of North Korea, who are beyond the reach of most charities due to government interdiction).
A tricky question.
The obvious, and trivially true, answer is that he who does both does more good than either. But that's not what you asked.
So. It can be hard to compare the two options when considering the actions of a single person, since the beneficiaries of the actions do not overlap. Therefore I shall employ a simple heuristic; I shall assume that the option which does the most good when one person does it is also the option that does the most good when everyone does it.
So, the first option; everyone (who can afford it) makes large donations to efficient charities, while everyone avoids those nearby and is unpleasant when forced to deal with someone else directly.
If I make a few assumptions about the effectiveness (and priorities) of the charities and the sum of the donations, I find myself considering a world where everyone is sufficiently fed, clothed, sheltered, medically cared for and educated. However, the fact that everyone is unpleasant to everyone else leads to everyone being grumpy, irritated, and mildly unhappy.
Considering the second option; charitable donations drastically decrease, but everyone is pleasant and helpful to everyone they meet face-to-face. In this possible world, there are people who go hungry, naked, homeless. But probably fewer than in our current world; because everyone they meet will be helpful, aiding if they can in their plight. And because everyone's pleasant and tries to uplift the mood of those they meet, a large majority of people consider themselves happy.
Yvain in these two old blog posts of his makes the case that it's not clear that a world with grumpy people is worse than a world with hungry people.
You are correct. It is by no means clear which is better.
This assumption seems trivially false to me, and despite being labeled as a mere 'heuristic', it is the crucial step in your argument. Can you explain why I should take it seriously?
Well, for most choices between "is this good?" and "is this bad?" the assumption is true. For example, is it good for me to drop my chocolate wrapper on the street instead of finding a rubbish bin? If I assume everyone were to do that, I get the idea of a street awash in chocolate wrappers, and I consider that reason enough to find a rubbish bin.
Furthermore, and more importantly, the aim here is not to produce an argument that one action is better than the other in a single, specific case; rather, it is to produce a general principle (whether it is generally better to be charitable to those nearby, or to those further away).
And if option A is generally better than option B, then I think it is very probable that universal application of A will remain better than universal application of B; and vice versa.
When you ask what it's like if everyone were to "do that", the answer you get is going to be determined by how you define "that". For instance, if everyone were to drop chocolate wrappers on the lawn of your annoying neighbor, you might be happy. So is it okay to drop the wrapper on your neighbor's lawn?
It's tempting to reply to this by saying "'doing the same thing' means removing all self-serving qualifiers, so the correct question is whether you would like it if people dropped wrappers wherever they wanted, not specifically on your neighbor's lawn". This reply doesn't work, because there are are plenty of situations where you want the qualifier--for instance, putting criminals in jail when the qualifier "criminal" excludes yourself.
(And what's your stance on homosexuality? If everyone were to do that, humanity would be extinct.)
I do need to be careful to define "that" as a generally applicable rule. In this case, the generally applicable rule would be, is it okay to drop chocolate wrappers on the lawn of people one finds annoying?
So I need to consider the world in which everyone drops chocolate wrappers on the lawn of people they find annoying. Considering this, the chances of someone dropping a wrapper on my lawn becomes dependent on the probability that someone will find me annoying.
So, in short, I can put as many qualifiers on the rule as I like. However, I have to be careful to attach my qualifiers to the true reason for my formulation of the rule; I cannot select the rule "it is acceptable to drop chocolate wrappers on that exact specific lawn over there" without referencing the process by which I chose that exact specific lawn.
I can't attach a qualifier to a specific person; but I can attach a qualifier to a specific quality, like being annoying, when considering a proposal.
Yeah, that's been confusing: I meant this principle of charity.
Why the Hell would I want to practice the virtue of charity? If anything, I want to help people. And hating people from a foreign country could be an excellent way to do damage!
I'm sorry, my original post was not quite precise. I meant charity in the sense of the Principle of Charity, not charitable contributions. If you prefer, substitute "kind" for "charitable"; it's not quite the same but illustrates the point just as well.
Keep in mind, we're talking about the damage you do to yourself. Hating people you've never met is not a very efficient way to damage yourself. Much better is to hate people you know intimately and see every day. That way you can practice your vices efficiently, and will have as many opportunities as possible to act them out.
Except, with that attitude you won't. You'll sit around telling yourself how virtuous you are for liking people you've never met, while being a misanthrope to everyone you personally know. Furthermore, if (or when) you mean one of the foreign people you supposedly love, you'll wind up being a misanthrope to them as well.
Really? How does you, personally, hating people from a foreign country do damage?
And why would I care about that if my donations produce a giant net benefit? When did I even claim to love anyone?
If you don't love people, why would your utility function include a term for their wellbeing?
Where did he claim that his utility function included a term for the stranger's well-being?
I think it's implicit from when he said "if anything, I want to help people", and when he described donations that are efficient at helping anonymous strangers as "produc[ing] a giant net benefit".
If Stalin didn't love his own people, why would he mildly prefer not to throw them at Hitler?
The people of the soviet union were a resource that Stalin had a great amount of control over, and so even if he was perfectly selfish and uncaring towards his people, he would prefer to preserve that resource. The selfish benefit to be gained from saving a life in Africa is negligible, and is vastly outweighed by the cost.
I suppose I should clarify that I'm taking "love" in this context to basically mean the same thing as "like" - in many contexts it's not just a mere difference of degree, but in the context of "loving humanity" and such phrases I think it probably is.
To self-modify, perhaps?
"Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That’s exactly how you look to them." - Scott Adams
I sense an asymmetry when both sides are express mere high confidence in their primary conclusions, but they keep on claiming I've got some sort of absolute faith.
"The fragilista falls for the Soviet-Harvard delusion, the (unscientific) overestimation of the reach of scientific knowledge. Because of such delusion, he is what is called a naive rationalist, a rationalizer, or sometimes just a rationalist, in the sense that he believes that the reasons behind things are automatically accessible to him. And let us not confuse rationalizing with rational—the two are almost always exact opposites. Outside of physics, and generally in complex domains, the reasons behind things have had a tendency to make themselves less obvious to us, and even less to the fragilista." - Nassim Taleb
"Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed." - Daniel Kahneman
"This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution." - Daniel Kahneman
"Luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome." - Daniel Kahneman
.
It's from a book: Thinking Fast and Slow.
Anonymous commenter
-- Dan Geer
(rationality applicability: antifragility & disjunctive prediction vs. optimization for conjunctive prediction)
-The Wise Man in Darkside, a radio play by Tom Stoppard
I. This Is Not A Game.
II. Here And Now, You Are Alive.
-- Om and many other gods, Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
Funny. I came up with almost the exact same line:
This quote reminded me of a quote from an anime called Kaiji, albeit your quote is much more succinct.
More succinctly...
-- John Lennon, “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)”
This is not a drill. Therefore, make sure you have drills for the really important bits.
And bits for the really important drills.
And make sure that the bit is properly secured and the chuck key is removed before operating the drill.
And when someone tries to be the wall the stands in your way, you'll have something that will open a hole in them every time: your drill.
(In a related matter, if there's a wall in your way, smash it down. If there isn't a path, carve one yourself.)
--Kamina, in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
Just who the hell do you think we are!? </mandatory>
I like the sentiment, but you do realize that breaking walls has costs.
BUT keep Chesterton's Fence in mind: if you don't know why there is a wall on your way, don't go blindly smashing it down. It might be there for a reason. First make absolutely sure you know why the wall exists in the first place; only then you may proceed with the smashing.
-- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
-- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
I admit, I get horribly mind-killed whenever I realize I'm reading something by CS Lewis, especially anything from The Screwtape Letters. That's because years ago, the arguments in this book were used against me by a girl I was dating as a means to end our relationship (me being non-religious), who herself was convinced by her friends and family that we should break up.
That said, I was able to read this and appreciate it more clearly if I substituted the quote like so:
If we are attempting to spread good rationality around, would it be efficient to not try to convince people that rationality was "true", but instead attempt to promote good rationality by saying that rationality is "strong, stark, or courageous -- that it is the philosophy of the future"?
We aren't trying to promote the idea that rationality is true. We are trying to promote that it is useful.
More accurately, we have defined "rational" to mean "useful", and when we argue that something is rational, we are arguing that it's useful.
If you are, you are being irresponsible because you are not checking what people are going to do with this useful thing.
I can't know for sure that it won't come back to bite me, but I suspect helping people generally tends to be helpful. There are things that are easier to use to cause harm than to help, like nuclear weaponry, but in general helpful things seem to have improved humanity's standard of living, and made them care more about morality.
I don't actually think that teaching rationality is dangerous. I think that LW expects it to have an edifying effect, to change values for the better. So it is the claim of purely instrumental rationality that is the problem.
The only senses in which you wouldn't say it's true are those in which that would be a type error.
We are trying to promote the idea that it is useful because it is true.
So you propose to spread rationality by encouraging irrationality?
Even assuming that this will work — that is, not just get people to buy into rationality (that part is simple) but actually become more rational, after this initial dose of irrational motivation — what do you suggest we do when our new recruits turn around and go "Hey, wait a tick; you guys got me into this through blatantly irrational arguments! You cynically and self-servingly pandered to my previously-held biases to get me on your side! You tricked me, you bastards!"? Grin and say "worked, didn't it"?
That seems to be what the quote is arguing.
The speaker does not himself believe that materialism is true; he is giving advice on how to make another believe a falsehood.
And do you think it's a good idea?
The quote is spoken by a devil, who's deliberately seeking to destroy and devour a person...
This is better than the other Screwtape quote, but - given the example of Ayn Rand - I think Lewis still gets causality backwards where smart Marxists were concerned. I think they started by being right about God and "materialism" when most people were insistently wrong (or didn't care about object-level truth.) This gave them an inflated view of their own intelligence and the explanatory power of Marxism.
While it is true that you shouldn't be a materialist just because it's fashionable, there's a fine line between saying "you shouldn't be a materialist just because it's fashionable" and "my opponents are just materialists because it's fashionable". The second is a straw man argument, and given that this is CS Lewis putting words in the mouth of Satan, I read this as the straw man argument. Needless to say, a straw man argument is not a good rationalist quote.
That sounds to me like you're assuming that Lewis wrote the book so that he could put the devil to say strawmannish things, in order to mock the devil. Which is not the case at all - the demon writing the letters is much more similar to MoR!Quirrel, displaying a degree of rationality-mixed-with-cynicism which it uses to point out ways by which the lives of humans can be made miserable, or by which humans make their own lives miserable. Much of it can be read as a treatise on various biases and cognitive mistakes to avoid, made more compelling by them being explained by someone who wants those mistakes to be exploited for actively harming people.
I read that quote as saying that the Devil (or a demon) deceives people by making them believe those things, not that the Devil believes these things himself. That's how demons behave, they lie to people. This one lies to people about why one should be a materialist and the people fall for it. The point is not to mock the demon, who in the quote is acting as a liar rather than a materialist, but to mock materialists themselves by implying that they are materialists for spurious reasons.
Of course, Lewis has plausible deniability. One can always claim he's not attributing anything to materialists in general--you're supposed to infer that; it's not actually stated.
Edit: Also, remember when Lewis wrote that. 1942 wasn't like today, when it's possible to say you don't believe in the supernatural and (if you live in the right area) not suffer too many consequences except not ever being able to run for political office. Any materialist at the time who claimed he was courageous could easily be just responding to persecution, not claiming that that was his reason for being a materialist. Mocking materialists for that would be like mocking gay pride parades today on the grounds that pride is a sin and a form of arrogance--pride in a vacuum is, but pride in response to someone telling you you're shameful isn't.
Being proud of something that is actually shameful strikes me as particularly sinful.
How about being ashamed of something that is actually prideworthy?
I don't think he was mocking, but I do think he was correct. I claim that it's perfectly true that most materialists today are materialists for spurious, non-object-level reasons. The same goes for all other widespread philosophies. People in general are biased and also don't care about philosophical truth much.
I think the non-object-level reasons that the devil names are interesting.
I think few new atheists care about whether atheism is strong or courageous. They rather care about the fact that it's what the intelligent people believe and they also want to be intelligent.
I suspect that most members of the Democratic Party are Democrats for spurious reasons too. But a Republican who lists a bunch of human foibles and writes a scenario that specifically names Democrats as being subject to them is probably attacking Democrats, at least in passing, not just attacking human beings.
Don't let yourself be mindkilled. Arguments aren't soldiers.
Focus on the true things you can say about the the world.
See filtered evidence. It is completely possible to mislead people by giving them only true information... but only those pieces of information which support the conclusion you want them to make.
If you had a perfect superhuman intelligence, perhaps you could give them dozen information about why X is wrong, a zero information about why Y is wrong, and yet the superintelligence might conclude: "Both X and Y are human political sides, so I will just take this generally as an evidence that humans are often wrong, especially when discussing politics. Because humans are so often wrong, it is very likely that the human who is giving this information to me is blind to the flaws of one side (which in this specific case happens to be Y), so all this information is only a very weak evidence for X being worse than Y."
But humans don't reason like this. Give them dozen information about why X is wrong, and zero information about why Y is wrong; in the next chapter give them dozen information about why Y is good and zero information about why X is good... and they will consider this a strong evidence that X is worse than Y. -- And Lewis most likely understands this.
I doubt that any LW member would take all of his information about the value of atheism from Lewis. If you let yourself convince that atheism is wrong by reading Lewis than your belief in atheism was very weak in the first place.
I have a hard time imagine pushing anyone in LW into a crisis of faith about atheism in which we wouldn't come out with better belief system than he started. If someone discovers that he actually follows in atheism because it's cool and works through his issues, he might end up in following atheism for better reasons.
I am tempted to reply to this with "May the Force be with you", but instead I'll ask "just what are you trying to say?" You just gave me a reply which consists entirely of slogans, with no hint as to how you think they apply.
I think the argument I made was fairly obvious, but let me break it down.
You care about who's attacking whom. If you are in that mindset arguments are soldiers. You treat the argument that there are atheists who are atheists because it's cool to be an atheist as a foreign soldier that has to be fought. A foreign soldier that doesn't play according to the rules.
Those considerations don't matter if you want to decide whether there are atheists who are motivated by the coolness of being an atheist. If you care about truth, you want to have true beliefs about how much atheists are motivated by the coolness factor of atheism. It doesn't matter for this discussion whether that argument is fair. What matters is whether it's true.
Your understanding of 1942 is amazingly flawed. No-one in the developed world was persecuted for being a materialist at that time, but plenty were for their religion. Moreover, the fashionable belief at the time was dialectical materialism, and part of the claim made for it, by dialectical materialists themselves, was that it was the philosophy of the future.
Well, my first thought was Bertrand Russell being fired from CUNY, which was around 1940, although that was mostly because of his beliefs about sex (which are still directly related to his disbelief in religion). Religion classes in public schools were legal until 1948, and compulsory school prayer was legal until 1963. "In God We Trust" was declared the national motto of the US in 1956.
Like Salemicus said, no one of those things are persecutions. The closest of your examples is Bertrand Russell's firing, but even you admit that wasn't over his materialism.
By way of contrast there were in fact places in the developed world during the 1930's-1940's where one could be prosecuted for not being a materialist. And by prosecuted, I mean religious people were being semi-systematically arrested and/or executed (not necessarily in that order).
Saying "people in this time period are persecuted for their religion" implicitly limits it to Western democracies unless you specifically are talking about something else. It's like claiming that "in the 1980's, women weren't allowed to vote". That's literally true, because there are countries where in the 1980's (or even today) women could not vote, but it's not what most people would mean by saying such a thing.
Furthermore, the existence of laws implies persecution. If school prayer is compulsory, that means that people in schools are punished for not praying or have to pray against their will for fear of punishment. That's what "compulsory" means.
(Besides, if you're going to interpret it that way. I could point out that in countries like Saudi Arabia, people could be killed for not believing in God, and that this wasn't any better in the 1930's in most of those countries.)
Spain was certainly a democracy at the time this prosecutions were happening, granted it was engaged in a civil war, but it was the democratic side whose partisans were doing the prosecution. Furthermore, "Western democracies" wasn't a stable category during the period in question, so it was perfectly reasonable for a religious person living in a western democracy to worry that his country would stop being democratic shortly.
So can you cite an example of someone being imprisoned or executed for refusing to engage in school prayer?
I didn't say people were imprisoned or executed; I used it as an example of persecution. It certainly was that. You may think that persecution only means being imprisoned or executed, but I don't agree with that.
Bertrand Russell wasn't a materialist; he believed in Universals. I think you are confusing "materialist" with "people I agree with".
If accepting universals made one not a materialist, that would rule out some of the great Australian materialists, such as David Armstrong. Thus, that would clearly be a non-standard use of the label "materialist." Perhaps there are details of Russell's account of universals which are not shared by Armstrong's which make it anti-materialist, but you don't specify any. I know that Russell's views changed over the years, which of course complicates things, but he certainly didn't believe in spooky souls, and most of the doctrines of his I can think of which seem to be in possible tension with materialism are either susceptible to varying interpretations or matters he changed his mind on at different points or both.
So given that none of these are examples of people being persecuted for their materialism, can I take it that you agree?
Lewis' point of reference is the UK, not the US. I don't know how much that changes the picture.
I think the US counts as part of "the developed world", however.
The demon is not just lying at random - the demon is lying with the purpose of getting a certain reaction (in this case, getting the human to subscribe to the philosophy of materialism). The original quote is advice on how to use the human's cognitive biases against him, in order to better achieve that goal.
The point of the quote isn't materialism. That could be replaced with any other philosophy, quite easily. The point of the quote is that, for many people, subscribing to a philosophy isn't about whether that philosophy is true at all; it's more about whether that philosophy is popular, or cool, or daring.
The point isn't to mock the demon, or the materialist. The point is to highlight a common human cognitive mistake.
If someone is a materialist just because it's fashionable, that's trouble. Lewis may be wrong on whether or not the Church is 'true,' but I don't think Lewis is wrong on calling out compartmentalization and inconsistency rather than thinking about whether or not doctrines are true or false.
--Edward Said, Beginnings, Intention and Method, p. 75, 1985
The first sentence seems excellent to me, and probably true of a great many things. I have trouble focusing on the rest, and more trouble making sense out of it. Anyone care to take a crack at a summary?
-- Betty Medsger
How did they know they considered leaving a thank-you note? Did they confess afterwards?
Yes.
Well. Sort of. Not exactly.
They were stealing government files on domestic surveillance in order to leak them - the quote comes from the journalist who was their press contact (see the link beneath the quote.)
Tears in my eyes... awesome beyond words. The fact that this wasn't fictional makes it brilliant. The fact that the burglars were acting against an over-reaching institution is just icing on the cake. It's been sometime since I heard a story that warmed my heart so much.
Eric Raymound