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Phil_Goetz4 comments on Crisis of Faith - Less Wrong
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Eliezer:
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.
Agreed.
Every time I changed my mind about something, it felt like "quitting," like ceasing the struggle to come up with evidence for something I wanted to be true but wasn't. Realizing "It's so much easier to give up and follow the preponderance of the evidence."
Examples: taking an economics class made it hard to believe that government interventions are mostly harmless. Learning about archaeology and textual analysis made it hard to believe in the infallibility of the Bible. Hearing cognitive science/philosophy arguments made it hard to believe in Cartesian dualism. Reading more papers made it hard to believe that looking at the spectrum of the Laplacian is a magic bullet for image processing. Extensive conversations with a friend made it hard to believe that I was helping him by advising him against pursuing his risky dreams.
When something's getting hard to believe, consider giving up the belief. Just let the weight fall. Be lazy. If you're working hard to justify an idea, you're probably working too hard.
One of the problems with your examples in both economics and archeology is that less is known on the subject then what you think is known, especially if you have just taken introductory courses on the subject.
From "Twelve virtues of rationality" by Eliezer:
Eliezer uses almost the same words as you do.( Oh, and this document is from 2006, so he has not copied your lines.) Some posts earlier Eliezer accused you of not reading his writings and just making stuff up regarding his viewpoints.......
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.