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IlyaShpitser comments on Rationality Quotes December 2014 - Less Wrong
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Why are you arguing about taste? People adapt metaphors to help them think and act effectively. Human brains like agent-metaphors a lot: witness the popularity of the Moloch essay.
Your problem with classical religion might be that a lot of silly people are classically religious.
"But is the metaphor true" is kind of a silly question, imo.
Also, if there is an agenty God, it/she/he made sure to construct a world where nudges here and there are hard to trace.
No, my actual problem here is that these metaphors are not useful for making predictions.
Is that your line for good language use, prediction effectiveness? Do you have an issue with Scott's Moloch metaphor also? What about poetic language more generally?
Look: I am not a major fan of using poetic language to describe real life. Really. Just don't like it. And the problem with Scott's "metaphor" is that it wasn't a metaphor: he actually explicitly tagged the post as having an epistemic status of Fanciful Visionary Visions. It wasn't supposed to be anything approaching a useful sociological analysis that cuts reality at the joints. It wasn't supposed to be a rational way to think about the world.
But because it told a colorful story that stirs the emotions, people remember it far more prominently than any of Scott's writing on mere statistics that actually addresses reality, and now I have to put up with people pretending there's a demon at work in the world.
Fair enough. Why insist others share this preference? I like poetry (T. S. Eliot for example).
A ton of math is about metaphors (Lakoff wrote a book about this).