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Lumifer comments on Rationality Quotes September 2014 - Less Wrong
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"Can't know" is misses the point. Doesn't know, is much more about what Taleb speaks about.
Robin Hanson lately wrote a post against being a rationalist. The core of Nassim arguments is to focus your skepticism where it matters. The cost of mistakenly being a Christian is low. The cost of mistakenly believing that your retirement portfolio is secure is high. According to Taleb people like the New Atheists should spend more of their time on those beliefs that actually matter.
It's also worth noting that the new atheists aren't skeptics in the sense that they believe it's hard to know things. Their books are full of statements of certainity. Taleb on the other hand is a skeptic in that sense.
For him religion also isn't primarily about believing in God but about following certain rituals. He doesn't believe in cutting Chelstrons fence with Ockham's razor.
That's not self-evident to me at all.
It's not self-evident, but the new atheists don't make a good argument that it has a high cost. Atheist scientists in good standing like Rob Baumeister say that being religious helps with will power.
Being a Mormon correlates with characteristics and therefore Mormon sometimes recognize other Mormons. Scientific investigation found that the use marker of being healthy for doing so and those markers can't be used for identifying Mormons.
There's some data that being religious correlates with longevity.
Of course those things aren't strong evidence that being religious is beneficial, but that's where Chesterton's fence comes into play for Taleb. He was born Christian so he stays Christian.
While my given name is Christian, I wasn't raised a Christian or believed in God at any point in my life and the evidence doesn't get my to start being a Christian but I do understand Taleb's position. Taleb doesn't argue that atheists should become Christians either.
(If there is something called "Chelston's Fence" (which my searches did not turn up), apologies.)
Chesterton's Fence isn't about inertia specifically, but about suspecting that other people had reasons for their past actions even though you currently can't see any, and finding out those reasons before countering their actions. In Christianity's case the reasons seem obvious enough (one of the main ones: trust in a line of authority figures going back to antiquity + antiquity's incompetence at understanding the universe) that Chesterton's Fence is not very applicable. Willpower and other putative psychological benefits of Christianity are nowhere in the top 100 reasons Taleb was born Christian.
If Christianity would lower the willpower of it's members then it would be at a disadvantage in memetic competition against other worldviews that increase willpower.
Predicting complex systems like memetic competition over the span of centuries between different memes is very hard. In cognitive psychology experiments frequently invalidate basic intuitions about the human mind.
Trust bootstrapping is certainly one of the functions of religion but it's not clear that's bad. Bootstrapping trust is generally a hard problem. Trust makes people cooperate. If I remember right Taleb makes somewhere the point that the word believe derives from a word that means trust.
As far as "antiquity's incompetence at understanding the universe" goes, understanding the universe is very important to people like the New Atheists but it's for Taleb it's not the main thing religion is about. For him it's about practically following a bunch of rituals such as being at church every Sunday.
I often see this argument from religions themselves or similar sources, not from those opposed to religion. Not this specific argument, but this type of argument--the idea of using the etymology of a word to prove something about the concept represented by the word. As we know or should know, a word's etymology may not necessarily have much of a connection to what it means or how it is used today. ("malaria" means "bad air" because of the belief that it was caused by that. "terrific" means something that terrifies.)
Also consider that by conservation of expected evidence if the etymology of the word is evidence for your point, if that etymology were to turn out to be false, that would be evidence against your point. Would you consider it to be evidence against your point if somehow that etymology were to be shown false?
In this case the debate is about how people in the past thought about religion. Looking at etymology helps for that purpose. But that not the most important part of my argument.
It can also help to illustrate ideas. Taleb basically says that religion1 is a very useful concept. New atheists spend energy arguing that religion2 is a bad concept. That's pointless if they want to convince someone who believes in religion1. If they don't want to argue against a strawman they actually have to switch to talking about religion1.
In general when someone says: "We should do A.", that person has freedom to define what he means with A. It's not a matter of searching for Bayesian evidence. It's a matter of defining a concept. If you want to define A saying: A is a bit like B in regard X and like C in regard Y is quite useful. Looking at etymology can help with that quest.
Overestimating the ability to understand what the other person means is a common failure mode. If you aren't clear about concepts than looking at evidence to validate concepts isn't productive.
But you could say that the new atheists do want to argue against what Taleb might call a strawman, because what they're trying to do really is to argue against religion2. They're speaking to the public at large, to the audience. Does the audience also not care about the factual claims of religion? If that distinction about the word "religion" is being made, I don't see why Taleb isn't the one being accused of trying to redefine it mid-discussion.
If you look at priorities of most people that they show through their actions, truth isn't on top of that list. Most people lie quite frequently and optimize for other ends.
Just take any political discussion and see how many people are happy to be correctly informed that their tribal beliefs are wrong. That probably even goes for this discuss and you have a lot of motivated cognition going on that makes you want to believe that people really care about truth.
When speaking on the subject of religion Taleb generally simply speaks about his own motivation for believing what he believes. He doesn't argue that other people should start believing in religion. Taleb might child people for not being skeptic where it matters but generally not for being atheists.
Nearly any religious person while grant you that some religions are bad. As long as the new atheists argue against a religion that isn't really his religion he has no reason to change.
I would also add that it's quite okay when different people hold different beliefs.
I agree with the apparent LW consensus that much of religion is attire, habit, community/socializing, or "belief in belief", if that's what you mean. But then again, people actually do care about the big things, like whether God exists, and also about what is or isn't morally required of them.
I bet they will also take Taleb's defense as an endorsement of God's existence and the other factual claims of Christianity. I don't recall him saying that he's only a cultural Christian and doesn't care whether any of it is actually true.
Well, I won't force anyone to change, but there's good and bad epistemology.
Also, the kind of Chesterton's fences that the new atheists are most interested in bringing down aren't just sitting there, but are actively harmful (and they may be there as a result of people practicing what you called religion1, but their removal is opposed with appeals to religion2).
Sorry for the typo.