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Arandur comments on Expecting Short Inferential Distances - Less Wrong
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Comments (91)
When you say "A clear argument has to lay out an inferential pathway, starting from what the audience already knows or accepts. If you don't recurse far enough, you're just talking to yourself."
this strongly reminds me of what it is like to try talking, as an atheist, with a christian about any religious issue. I have concluded years ago that I just shouldn't try anymore, that reasonable verbal exchange is not possible...
I suppose that I should recurse... but how and how far where I am not sure.
I'm sure that the Christian feels the same way. ;D The problem there isn't inferential differences. It's belief in belief. The best way to disabuse a Christian of any false notions - under the assumption that those notions are false - would be to lead them to Less Wrong. :P
Of course, you can lead a horse to water...
I don't agree. I think the best way to disabuse them of such notions would be to lead them to extremely high status atheists including a community of highly attractive potential mates. You change group affiliation beliefs by changing desired group affiliation.
I think our disagreement stems from a fuzzy definition of the word "best". I believe that it is better to believe something for good (read: valid) reasons than to believe it for bad reasons, regardless of the truth value of the thing being believed. So yes, your suggestion may lead more Christians to toss their Christianity, but mine makes them more rational thinkers, which (under the assumption that their Christian beliefs are wrong, which assumption I decline to assign a truth value in this post) leads them to atheism as a side benefit.
Essentially, this is the question posed: Which is the greater sin, if Christianity is wrong? Christianity, or irrationality?
The same influences that make people toss Christianity are also what will influence people to become more rational. Leading people to lesswrong on average makes them scoff then add things to their stereotype cache.
If Christianity is wrong then I'd say neither. ;)
This, if true, is horribly sad, and I concede the point, letting go of my faith in the inherent open-mindedness of humanity. Of course, I might have known better; my own efforts have reaped no fruit except my wife thinking of Eliezer Yudkowsky as a rabid crackpot. :/
Ha! Then let me elucidate, and define the term "sin" to mean that action which runs against a given moral code.
You often say things with a certain simple realism that jives with me. I've definitely learned to appreciate the style more since I joined LW, and 10 times moreso since really absorbing a few subskills of a few SingInst folk. How much social psychology-like stuff have you studied? I get a weak impression that it's not much more than the average LW regular but that unlike the average LW regular you have the good habit of regularly explicitly talking about (and thus assuredly explicitly thinking about) certain simple but oft-ignored phenomena of standard social epistemology---or perhaps they'd generally be better described as signalling games/competitions with an epistemic flavor. The very-related skill of "being constantly up a meta level" is really the only prerequisite skill for building the master-skill of being able to automatically immediately generate decent models of any real or imagined social epistemic scenario or automatically with-some-effort generate thorough complex models. You strike me as one of the people on LW who could build up this skill and make it a very sharp weapon, which would be generally useful to any community or organization in the coming years that is trying to raise its sanity waterline. (Vladimir_M also obviously has some kind of related skillset.)
I could link you to a concrete example or two in LW comments if you don't quite follow what skill it is I'm getting at or how it's cool.
Quite a lot but it is not specialised (into PUA etc). I've also probably forgotten a lot, since my interest peaked a few years back.
This is probably because of the site design and not necessary.
That no doubt makes a difference but my appeal was to universal human behavior. Exposure to new, unusual behaviours from a foreign tribe will most often invoke a rejection and tweaking of social/political positions rather than an object level epistemic update. Because that's what humans care about.
(This doesn't preclude directing interested parties to lesswrong or other sources of object level information. We must just allow that there will be an extremely low rate of updating.)
I think this would depend considerably on which particular non-Christian set of beliefs turned out to be right. Asking "how should we behave in a non-Christian universe?" sounds to me like asking "what should we feed to a non-cat?".
I'll ask you to review the child of this post wherein I provide a clearer definition of the term "sin". It is a generally held consensus that there is in fact an objective morality which is causally disconnected from (or at least causally unaffected by) any extant religion. In that sense, my question is, I believe, sensical.
The above is predicated upon my inference, from your comment, that you read into my use of the word "sin" a religious connotation. Another possible inference is that you legitimately believe that we live in a Christian universe, and therefore that supposing counterfactuals is useless. In that case, I wonder how you get by during the day without making any plans based upon hypothetical events.
.... and I also, in that case, appreciate not being the only Christian on this site. ;D But that doesn't forgive your error.
I did see the comment in which you defined sin.
I'm not sure where our assumptions disconnect, so I'll just try to spell out as many of mine as I can think of.
I assume that Christianity contains or constitutes claims about what the correct moral code is, such that accepting Christianity is true necessarily implies accepting a certain standard of right and wrong. I further assume that there exist at least two mutually-incompatible non-Christian claims about what the correct moral code is.
That is, if we reject Christian moral values, we still have to decide between Buddhism and Hinduism.
Let me verify your meaning before I respond in earnest: You are operating under the proposition that morality necessarily derives from religion?
...not exactly. It would be more accurate to say that I'm assuming that most religions, and Christianity in particular, imply moralities, but there may also be nonreligious moralities.
I realize I'm hugely oversimplifying (for example, by treating "Christianity" as internally homogeneous), but I need to omit most of the variables in order to get anything done in finite time.
This started with the phrase "if Christianity is wrong"; are you saying that this was not meant to imply anything along the lines of "if Christian morality is wrong", that it was meant entirely as an empirical proposition, holding moral values constant? [edit: ...holding terminal moral values constant?]
Oh! I see. :3 Yes, that is what I'm saying. If I wasn't Christian, I certainly wouldn't start murdering people.
Is reviving dead threads frowned upon here? That was an incredibly insightful comment to me because it explains my deconversion (from Catholicism) and Leah Libresco's conversion to it (she has a blog on patheos called unequally yoked)*. I wonder how general this is?
*Status is obviously defined by the person whose group affiliation is changing. The high status atheists that changed my desired group affiliation were some atheists on debate.org, who were a lot more like me than any catholics I had met. The high status Catholics that changed Leah's desired group affiliation were her friends, the people in her debating club and her Catholic boyfriend, whom she went to mass with (willingly) for more than a year.
No, by all means go ahead and comment wherever you have something to say.
As wedrifid said, reviving "dead threads" is fully acceptable and even encouraged in many occasions, AFAICT.
The one thing to be careful of is to enter argument mode or ask questions or offer specific, targeted insight to a particular poster on a very old post. Many of us have wasted some time early on by answering the questions or debating the assertions of an old comment originally made on Overcoming Bias before the transfer and where the author is long gone or never came to LessWrong in the first place.
That is what happened to me.