Lumifer comments on The Puzzle of Faith and Belief - Less Wrong

-11 [deleted] 28 September 2014 03:21PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (88)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Lumifer 29 September 2014 03:25:59PM 1 point [-]

all four of those words are pointing at roughly the same concept

Very VERY roughly. Too roughly for any use, I think. In particular, these words are not interchangeable -- to say that deciding to get out of bed in the morning is a matter of faith is a misuse of the language.

The different people who use the different words generally think that their way of thinking is superior

That's a non sequitur.

illustrate the "everyone is biased" theory

That theory is generally accepted on LW and has people like Kahneman popularizing it in the wide world :-)

The solution I'm alluding to is to be more open minded about what the possibilities actually are.

That's a platitude and a part of all self-help advice since times immemorial. So what else is new?

Comment author: ShannonFriedman 29 September 2014 03:42:21PM 0 points [-]

Yes. My understanding of Less Wrong is that there is a general viewpoint that everyone is biased and people on this site are "Less Wrong." Its not an official viewpoint, but its the attitude I see.

The reason I gave the examples and not the platitude is so that people might actually get it, and not just consider it a platitude that they dismiss. I seem to have failed on this blog at this time :)

Comment author: Lumifer 29 September 2014 04:14:59PM *  2 points [-]

Platitudes are platitudes not because people don't get them -- they are platitudes because everybody has already heard them many times and repeating them once more is not helping.

I am still not sure what are you trying to get to. Is it, basically, better living through self-hacking? Or through being hacked by you?

Comment author: ShannonFriedman 29 September 2014 06:10:43PM 0 points [-]

A certain type of self hacking. I added a summary, does it help?

Comment author: hairyfigment 29 September 2014 08:07:37PM 1 point [-]

Before this, I read your post as saying mainly, 'You should believe true claims instead of false ones,' without any non-commercial way of distinguishing truth from falsehood. Likewise, I saw no guidelines for how to choose "functional" belief systems.

If I read the summary charitably, it seems to mean that 'When people pride themselves on their rationality due to their atheism, this tends to get in the way of optimizing for truth and/or functionality.' This is technically progress. But I get the impression the LW community already hates people patting themselves on the back for atheism, and may actually discourage it too strongly.