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wedrifid comments on Expecting Short Inferential Distances - Less Wrong
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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.)