gjm comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (8th thread, July 2015) - Less Wrong

13 Post author: Sarunas 22 July 2015 04:49PM

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Comment author: gjm 09 May 2016 11:35:12AM *  -2 points [-]

Welcome! I applaud your decision to embrace hostile terminology. I don't think you should feel any obligation to bring up your religious beliefs all the time.

If you're interested in the interactions between unashamedly traditionalist religion and rationalism, you might want to drop into the ongoing discussion of talking snakes. Most of it lately, though, has been discussion between people who agree that the story in question is almost certainly hopelessly wrong and disagree about exactly which bits of it offer most evidence against the religion(s) it's a part of, which you might find merely annoying...

[EDITED to add: Aha, I see you've already found that. My apologies for not having noticed that you were already participating actively there.]

Just out of curiosity (and you should feel free not to answer), how "typically fundamentalist" are your positions? E.g., are you a young-earth creationist, do you believe that a large fraction of the human race is likely to spend eternity in torment, do you believe in "verbal plenary inspiration" of the Christian scriptures, etc.?

(Meta-note that in a better world would be unnecessary: it happens that one disgruntled LessWronger has taken to downvoting almost everything I post, sometimes several times by means of sockpuppets. I mention this only so that if you see this comment sitting there with a negative score you don't take it to mean that the LW community generally disapproves of my welcoming you or disagrees with what I said above.)

Comment author: Alia1d 09 May 2016 07:35:14PM 1 point [-]

Fairly typically fundamentalist, I believe in young earth creationism with a roughly estimated confidence level of 70%, a large fraction of the human race destined for eternal torment at about 85% and verbal plenary inspiration at about 90%.

I'm a little more theologically engaged then average but (as is typical in my circles) that mean's I'm more theologically conservative, not less.

Comment author: gjm 09 May 2016 09:24:36PM -1 points [-]

Are those figures derived from any sort of numerical evidence-weighing process, or are they quantifications of gut feelings? (I do not intend either of those as a value judgement. Different kinds of probability estimate are appropriate on different occasions.)

Comment author: Alia1d 10 May 2016 12:20:14AM *  0 points [-]

These are more gut feelings, I had already considered a lot of evidence for and against these before I found out about Bayesian updating, so the bottom line was really already written. If I tried to do a numerically rigorous calculation now, I would just end up double counting evidence. This is just a 'if I had to make a hundred statements of this type that I was this confident about, how often would I be right guess.

Comment author: gjm 10 May 2016 12:42:05AM -1 points [-]

so the bottom lie was already written

Much though this amuses atheist-curmudgeon me, may I suggest that you might want to fix the typo?

Comment author: Alia1d 10 May 2016 05:32:33AM 0 points [-]

Oops, thnks

Comment author: gjm 09 May 2016 08:27:05PM -1 points [-]

Interesting! Thanks.