When I found Less Wrong and started reading, when I made my first post, when I went to my first meetup….
It was a little like coming home.
And mostly it wasn’t. Mostly I felt a lot more out of place than I have in, say, church youth groups. It was hard to pinpoint the difference, but as far as I can tell, it comes down to this: a significant proportion of the LW posters are contrarians in some sense. And I’m a conformist, even if I would prefer not to be, even if that’s a part of my personality that I’m working hard to change. I’m much more comfortable as a follower than as a leader. I like pre-existing tradition, the reassuring structure of it. I like situations that allow me to be helpful and generous and hardworking, so that I can feel like a good person. Emotionally, I don’t like disagreeing with others, and the last thing I have to work hard to do is tolerate others' tolerance.
And, as evidenced by the fact that I attend church youth groups, I don’t have the strong allergy that many of the community seem to have against religion. This is possibly because I have easily triggered mystical experiences when, for example, I sing in a group, especially when we are singing traditional ‘sacred’ music. In a previous century, I would probably have been an extremely happy nun.
Someone once expressed surprise that I was able to become a rationalist in spite of this neurological quirk. I’ve asked myself this a few times. My answer is that I don’t think I deserve the credit. If anything, I ended up on the circuitous path towards reading LessWrong because I love science, and I love science because, as a child, reading about something as beautiful as general relativity gave me the same kind of euphoric experience as singing about Jesus does now. My inability to actual believe in any religion comes from a time before I was making my own decisions about that kind of thing.
I was raised by atheist parents, not anti-theist so much as indifferent. We attended a Unitarian Universalist church for a while, which meant I was learning about Jesus and Buddha and Native American spirituality all mixed together, all the memes watered down to the point that they lost their power. I was fourteen when I really encountered Christianity, still in the mild form of the Anglican Church of Canada. I was eighteen when I first encountered the ‘Jesus myth’ in its full, meme-honed-to-maximum-virulence form, and the story arc captivated me for a full six months. I still cry during every Good Friday service. But I must have missed some critical threshold, because I can’t actually believe in that story. I’m not even sure what it would mean to believe in a story. What does that feel like?
I was raised by scientists. My father did his PhD in physical chemistry, my mother in plant biology. I grew up reading SF and pop science, and occasionally my mother or my father’s old textbooks. I remember my mother’s awe at the beautiful electron-microscope images in my high school textbooks, and how she sat patiently while I fumblingly talked about quantum mechanics, having read the entire tiny physics section of our high school library. My parents responded to my interest in science with pride and enthusiasm, and to my interest in religion with indulgent condescension. That was my structure, my tradition. And yes, that has everything to do with why I call myself an atheist. I wouldn’t have had the willpower to disagree with my parents in the long run.
Ultimately, I have an awfully long way to go if I want to be rational, as opposed to being someone who’s just interested in reading about math and science. Way too much of my motivation for ‘having true beliefs’ breaks down to ‘maybe then they’ll like me.’ This is one of the annoying things about my personality, just as annoying as my sensitivity to religious memes and my inability to say no to anyone. Luckily, my personality also comes with the ability to get along with just about anyone, and in a forum of mature adults, no one is going to make fun of me because I’m wearing tie-dye overalls. No one here has yet made fun of me for my interest in religion, even though I expect most people disagree with it.
And there’s one last conclusion I can draw, albeit from a sample size of one. Not everyone can be a contrarian rationalist. Not everyone can rebel against their parents’ religion. Not everyone can disagree with their friends and family and not feel guilty. But everyone can be rational if they are raised that way.
I've known people like that. From what I've seen, for many people it's a game to make social interaction more interesting. I play it very poorly (for example, I almost never get sarcasm unless it's pointed out to me, and even if I do, I'm usually too lazy to come up with something sarcastic to say in return, so I just ignore it, which is awfully boring for the person being sarcastic.) Is this why you do this?
I am very good at engaging in dialogue with just about anybody and presenting my points in such a way that it's natural for them to agree. I think the most important component is making it obvious to people that "I don't dislike you because you disagree with me; if anything, I like the fact that we disagree, because maybe I can learn something new from you." Even confrontational people usually respond well to that kind of attitude, and it's a win-win situation because I get to engage in the discussion that I want.
I disagree. After spending some very formative years of my adolescence singing in the church choir, I've found that the ministers do seem to...well, maybe know more about morality isn't the right phrase, but they've thought about it more. A large percentage of the population never thinks about morality. Some because they just live their life without really questioning anything (like at least 50% of my fellow pool staff), some because they base their values off selfishness and don't want to have to change it. The Church morality has its flaws, for example the implicit biblical attitudes towards sex before marriage, women, homosexuality, etc. But in the Anglican church anyway, and even in the more conservative Pentecostal church, I know hardly any actual Christians who believe that someone is inherently bad for being homosexual. There are a lot of "good" memes in the Christian morality complex, ideas of being radically generous and loving your enemies. I have seen some incredible acts of generosity in the Pentecostal church especially.
There's also a sample bias in the kind of people who become ministers, especially Anglican ministers (this branch of Christianity is already extremely liberal; they do gay marriages and everything.) They tend to be fairly intellectual, i.e. introspective and likely to meditate on moral principles, and they tend to already like people and want to help them. And they spend years studying the material. Thus, compared to Joe Smith who works at the movie theater, I think most pastors do know more about morality and ethics. Of course, someone who's put in the same amount of time thinking about it but isn't limited to agreeing with a book written two thousand years ago is still more likely to be right, but I don't know that many people like that firsthand.
Partially perhaps, but it's hardly the main reason. Language nearly always carries with it a frequency that conveys social status and a lot of talk and argument isn't much more than a renegotiation or affirmation of the social contract between people. So quite a lot of the actual content of any given typical conversation you're likely to hear is quite braindead and only superficially appears to be civilized. That kind of smalltalk is boring if it's transparent to you, and controversy spices things up for sure - so yes, there may ... (read more)