thomblake comments on The Wonder of Evolution - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 November 2007 08:49PM

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Comment author: Bugmaster 02 May 2012 09:09:30PM 5 points [-]

FWIW, I have heard a more generalized version of Ghazzali's argument, which goes something like this:

The way a person sees the world is colored by his preferences and biases. We all have them. You personally place a very high value on empirically reproducible results; this is what you call "truth", and you are strongly biased in favor of it; your insistence on proper logic and evidence stems from this core belief. There's nothing wrong with that, but I personally don't value this specific notion of "truth" as much as you do. Instead, I place a higher value on personal happiness/simplicity/social approval/niceness/whatever. Thus, I choose to believe in an unseen designer/universal consciousness/karma/etc., and it doesn't matter to me whether there's any evidence for it or not. Evidence is your thing, not mine.

I'm not endorsing this worldview (and I'm probably not even rendering it properly here), but I do believe it to be pretty much argument-proof. You can't have a rational discussion with someone who denies the value of rational discussions.

Comment author: thomblake 02 May 2012 09:15:05PM 4 points [-]

You can't have a rational discussion with someone who denies the value of rational discussions.

That's not quite true. You can't use evidence to convince a machine that runs on anti-induction, but luckily humans are at least somewhat intuitively swayed by evidence, even when they claim not to be.

Comment author: Bugmaster 02 May 2012 09:25:42PM 2 points [-]

That's a good point; humans are not perfect "anti-induction machines". That said, each person who'd presented this argument to me had spent a lot of mental effort during his or her life to embrace and perfect this worldview. In the same way as a rationalist would train himself to use Bayesian reasoning and distrust his biases, the anti-rationalist trains himself to trust his faith/emotions/ESP/etc., and ignore scientific evidence. Thus, even when the anti-rationalist feels the intuitive sway of evidence, he or she will strive to ignore it.

BTW, I'm using slash-separated lists in my posts because I'd heard this argument multiple times, from multiple people, each of whom had a different set of ancillary beliefs. Thus, it seems like this worldview is not tied to any particular religion or philosophy.

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