Kenny comments on Crisis of Faith - Less Wrong

57 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 October 2008 10:08PM

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Comment author: Phil_Goetz4 11 October 2008 05:48:03PM 3 points [-]

Eliezer:

If a belief is true you will be better off believing it, and if it is false you will be better off rejecting it.

I think you should try applying your own advice to this belief of yours. It is usually true, but it is certainly not always true, and reeks of irrational bias.

My experience with my crisis of faith seems quite opposite to your conceptions. I was raised in a fundamentalist family, and I had to "make an extraordinary effort" to keep believing in Christianity from the time I was 4 and started reading through the Bible, and finding things that were wrong; to the time I finally "came out" as a non-Christian around the age of 20. I finally gave up being Christian only when I was worn out and tired of putting forth such an extraordinary effort.

So in some cases your advice might do more harm than good. A person who is committed to making "extraordinary efforts" concerning their beliefs is more likely to find justifications to continue to hold onto their belief, than is someone who is lazier, and just accepts overwhelming evidence instead of letting it kick them into an "extraordinary effort." In other words, you are advocating a combative, Western approach; I am bringing up a more Eastern approach, which is not to be so attached to anything in the first place, but to bend if the wind blows hard enough.

Comment author: Kenny 10 June 2013 12:13:21PM 0 points [-]

The posts on making an extraordinary effort didn't explicitly exclude preserving the contents of one's beliefs as an effort worth being made extraordinarily, so you've definitely identified a seeming loophole, and yet you've simultaneously seemed to ignore all of the other posts about epistemic rationality.