Jiro comments on Rationality Quotes March 2014 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: malcolmocean 01 March 2014 03:34PM

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Comment author: Jiro 10 March 2014 08:39:46PM *  2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: ChristianKl 10 March 2014 09:57:19PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: Jiro 10 March 2014 10:22:56PM *  0 points [-]

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.

  1. I also want to have true beliefs about Lewis and about Lewis's writings. Whether the statement is an attack matters for those beliefs.
  2. Whether the statement is an attack also matters for whether it is a rationalist quote. A proper rationalist quote should only be about its apparent subject and should not try to sneak in such an attack under the radar.
  3. It is possible to produce an endless sequence of statements with truth values (or to go through literature and extract an endless sequence of prewritten statements with truth values). Nobody has the time to evaluate all of them; we must pick and choose between them.
  4. The implicit attack "all materialists are materialists because they are flawed humans who make mistakes" also has a truth value, and this truth value is something that I can care about just as much as the truth value of the statement's literal words. Pointing out the attack is not ignoring truth in favor of something else, it's recognizing that there's something else there whose truth may be in question as well.
Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 29 March 2014 03:31:11PM *  2 points [-]

4 is wrong. The demon is talking about THIS GUY. The subject (or object as appropriate) is "Your man", "He", "him", throughout. Neither the demon nor Lewis is talking about people who really think things through, nor implying that they don't exist.

Comment author: Jiro 29 March 2014 04:46:50PM -1 points [-]

Neither the demon nor Lewis is saying words which literally read like that, but words have implications beyond the literal.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 30 March 2014 11:51:01AM 0 points [-]

Ehhh. The consistency of the pronoun usage is so strong that I would expect him to have generalized somewhere if he (either one) meant it.

The class he's a part of is 'philosophically weak borderline Christians', not 'Materialists'. After all, they guy isn't a materialist. And if you're a philosophically weak borderline Christian, the easiest route to materialism is indeed how useful it is, not a philosophical argument, because these folks don't give a whit about philosophy.

Comment author: ChristianKl 11 March 2014 08:47:17AM 0 points [-]

I also want to have true beliefs about Lewis and about Lewis's writings.

Judging authors by a single quote without knowing the context is a bad idea. Rousseau begins one of his works by saying ""Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."

Taken on it's own you might think that Rousseau is somehow criticizing that man is in chains. He isn't. He advocates that man is chained by the social contract. I really had a hard time with ideas like this because I had read the book and my history teacher hadn't, so discussing Rousseau was really hard.

Why do you care about Lewis?

A proper rationalist quote should only be about its apparent subject and should not try to sneak in such an attack under the radar.

We are a group of smart people. There nothing wrong with a quote having multiple layers of meaning and saying something in addition to it's apparent subject.

Nobody has the time to evaluate all of them; we must pick and choose between them.

On LW we care about rationality. Having accurate beliefs about what makes people become atheists is useful for that purpose.

On the other hand having accurate beliefs about CS Lewis is less important.

The implicit attack "all materialists are materialists because they are flawed humans who make mistakes" also has a truth value, and this truth value is something that I can care about just as much as the truth value of the statement's literal words.

The truth value of that statement matters a great deal but that in no way implies that we shouldn't take about that statement and it has no place on LW.

You didn't attack it on grounds that it's wrong and that there evidence that it's wrong but on the grounds that it's an unfair attack.

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