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ChristianKl comments on The Ten Commandments of Rationality - Less Wrong
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Comments (73)
Given that you have 2000 karma I don't think you are truely an outsider.
The Jusos are the youth organisation of Germany's SPD, which is the left party that's currently part of the government.
At one Jusos meeting I attended we sang the Internationale. It's a ritual. It's useful for group bonding. That doesn't make it religious.
Could you be more specific? What behaviors are you talking about?
You know, Israel defines a Jew to be someone who considers themselves a Jew.
I ignore karma. I am not convinced by the idea of rationality or consistent beliefs. I am not a Bayesian with a capital B. I don't subscribe to the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. I am not an atheist. I don't believe UFAI is an issue worth spending a lot of resources on at the moment. I attended a total of 1 LW meetup (in Boston -- I think Scott Aaronson and Michael Vassar were there).
I do think LW is a good and valuable community, and I think there are many very useful concepts in circulation here (for example tabooing and steelmanning -- these are useful enough to have been reinvented elsewhere), which is why I participate here. Also some folks connected to LW think about and write about interesting things.
Things like point 1 in this post:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jne/a_fervent_defense_of_frequentist_statistics/ajwa
A guru speaks from a position of authority, a scientist communicates/argues with peers. I think the modern academic approach has a lot less failure modes than the guru approach (which has been tried extensively in the past of our species).
edit: To clarify my thinking a bit. A "guru" is a kind of memetic feudal lord. I am suspicious of attempts to revert to feudalism, our species does it far too easily. I think we can do better than feudal forms.
Being an outsider is more than just not subscribing to the label of belonging to an ingroup.
I don't think disagreeing on things like consistent beliefs makes you an outsider. I think the last longer post on the topic even argued against having consistent beliefs.
I don't think what makes a true citizen of Lesswrong is that a person treats Eliezer as his guru and simply copies his beliefs.
If you decide that this community is good, that you find participation valuable and think for yourself that makes you perfect member.
Then what are you and if you already like religion why do you see a problem with the same pattern appearing in LW?
I don't think it's useful to pretend that everyone understand what you mean with a concept. It can seem authoritative to say that the person you are talking to just doesn't understand what you mean, but it often directly addresses the core issue of a disagreement.
Communication is also not something where you have to pick one style for all your communication needs. One day you can be more intellectual and the other day you can use more simple language.
Would you mind to elaborate on this?
Absolutely -- I think things like (a)theism, and things like interpretations of QM are "questions of taste." I think it is a waste of time to argue about taste. I also think that tolerance of diverse tastes that agree on all empirical predictions (and agree that empirical predictions is how we go about evaluating things) has advantages.
Thanks. Outside of communities that entertain ideas such as acausal trade and ancestor simulations, I mostly interpret "atheism" to be an imprecise but useful term to communicate the beliefs that (a) any given religion has a negligible probability of being true, and that (b) empirical predictions is how we should go about evaluating things.
Typically, atheism is distinguished from agnosticism and what you're describing is on the agnosticism side of the spectrum.
Atheism is commonly interpreted as "I know there are no gods".
Such a distinction is technically correct and appropriate within communities such as this one. But under most circumstances it amounts to the kind of hairsplitting that the average person does not understand. Yes, it is possible that gods exist, or that Catholicism is true. But these possibilities are unlikely enough, or practically irrelevant enough, that most of the time it is appropriate to communicate "I know there are no gods".
Even here I find it very strange if someone argues that he is not an atheist based on hairsplitting arguments such as that 0 is not a probability or that we might live in a simulation.
Of course I agree that technically atheism is as irrational as believing that Jehovah exists with probability 1.
Dude the difference between "meaningless question" and "no Gods" is not hairsplitting, it's epistemology vs ontology. Do you really not see the difference?
I am about as interested in what a young earther thinks about God as what Aristotle thinks about acceleration. It is bad hygiene to throw out a concept because someone screwed it up badly.
Philosophically it is not hairsplitting. In other words, if you are a philosopher, then in the context of doing philosophy, it is of practical importance to make this distinction. But in most contexts it seems meaningless to make such a distinction. In most contexts it would amount to hairsplitting, because it would make a distinction that's too fine to have practical consequences.
Your resources are limited. You have to constantly choose who you are listening to, and who you should ignore. It is possible that given certain goals (e.g. studying religion or psychology), it would make sense to listen to a young earth creationist.
One of the worst habits that LessWrong features is taking ideas too seriously. Any agent whose resources are limited is forced to use crude heuristics to filter out nonsense (such as basilisks).
If the distinction between what's out there, and what your beliefs are is too fine for a person, that person can be put to a better use than talking about God, because talking about God is above their pay grade.
Atheists don't get to appropriate people who disagree with them. It will just annoy people, and end up being counterproductive.
Perhaps my resources are less limited than yours, in the sense that I am perfectly happy to listen to anyone who has something interesting to say, whether they put up a political banner on their beliefs you are happy with, or not. I like history in general, and I have a lot of respect for many religious thinkers, or thinkers who were motivated by religious questions. At one point the vast majority of the world's smart people were affiliated with a religion in some way.
A fair point.
But do note that this subthread is about you asking IlyaShpitser to elaborate on what does his "I'm not an atheist" mean and within this context the distinction might be relevant.
Yes, and I gave an explanation (without being asked) of why I asked him to elaborate on it in the first place. My guess was that he simply made this technically correct distinction. But I wanted to make sure that he does mean that he is a theist instead. Since most of the time, when people say that they do not subscribe to atheism, as opposed to saying that they are agnostics, they mean that they hold certain irrational beliefs.
If I said I was a theist, would I be ran out of town? I already said I wasn't sure about this whole rationality business.