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MileyCyrus comments on Best shot at immortality? - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: tomme 22 March 2012 10:29AM

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Comment author: MileyCyrus 22 March 2012 09:54:44PM -2 points [-]

Though I strongly suspect that if MileyCyrus had properly signaled distaste for religious ideas and proposed prayer as a possible avenue or immortality without making an apparently high estimate of their probability, s/he wouldn't have been downvoted.

You think my 2% estimate was high? Richard Dawkins assigned theism approximately the same probability. I can understand if you think my confidence in atheism is low, but is so ludicrously low that it deserves 9 downvotes?

What probability would you assign theism?

Comment author: pedanterrific 22 March 2012 11:20:21PM *  5 points [-]

This is disingenuous to the point of being dishonest. Reference:

Williams: “You I think, Richard, believe you have a disproof of god.”

Dawkins: No, I don’t! you were wrong when you said that. I constructed in The God Delusion a 7-point scale, of which ’1′ was, ‘I know god exists’, ’7′ was ‘I know god doesn’t exist’ and I called myself a ’6′.

[...]

Dawkins: “I believe that when you talk about agnosticism, It’s very important to make a distinction between ‘I don’t know whether X is true or not, therefore it’s 50-50 likely or unlikely’ and that’s the kind of agnostic which I don’t-which I’m definitely not. I think one can place estimates of probability on these things and I think the probability of any supernatural creator existing is very very low. So I’m-let’s say I’m a 6.9.

..

On pp50-1 of The God Delusion, Dawkins lays out the 7 point scale he referred to in this conversation. Here are points 6 and 7 of the 7-point scale:

\6. Very low probability [of the existence of god] but short of zero. De facto atheist: ‘I cannot know for certain, but I think god is very improbable, and live my life on the assumption that he is not there.

\7. Strong atheist. ‘I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung “knows” there is one.

Dawkins goes on to say:

I count myself in category 6, but leaning toward 7 – I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 22 March 2012 10:46:06PM *  1 point [-]

"6.9 out of 7" is such a weird probability that I wonder if Dawkins just made it up on the fly or something.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 March 2012 11:18:31PM 4 points [-]

It comes from his 7 point scale for measuring belief along the theist/atheist spectrum.

Comment author: Zetetic 23 March 2012 09:38:31PM *  3 points [-]

That makes sense. It still seems to be more of a rhetorical tool to illustrate that there is a spectrum of subjective belief. People tend to lump important distinctions like these together: "all atheists think they know for certain there isn't a god" or "all theists are foaming at the mouth and have absolute conviction", so for a popular book it's probably a good idea to come up with this sort of scale like this, to encourage people to refine their categorization process. I kind of doubt that he meant it to be used as a tool for inferring Bayesian confidence (in particular, I doubt 6.9 out of 7 is meant to be fungible with P(god exists) = .01428).

Comment author: Zetetic 22 March 2012 11:11:25PM *  1 point [-]

Given that he's pretty disposed to throwing out rhetorical statements, I'd say that's a reasonable hypothesis. I'd be surprised if there was more behind it than simply recognizing that his subjective belief in any religion was 'very, very low', and just picking a number that seemed to fit.

Comment author: michaelcurzi 23 March 2012 01:48:39AM 0 points [-]

Richard Dawkins assigned theism approximately the same probability.

Well, if we're going to start dropping names, Eliezer would "be substantially more worried about a lottery device with a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance of destroying the world, than a device which destroyed the world if the Judeo-Christian God existed." It's not the same hypothesis, but it's close, and it's stupid to use ethos so much anyway.

I can understand if you think my confidence in atheism is low, but is so ludicrously low that it deserves 9 downvotes?

No, it's not so low that it deserves 9 downvotes. The fact that it has received so many is disturbing.

What probability would you assign theism?

I think I'll side with the perspective advanced by Eliezer here:

Any numerical founding at all is likely to be better than a vague feeling of uncertainty; humans are terrible statisticians. But pulling a number entirely out of your butt, that is, using a non-numerical procedure to produce a number, is nearly no foundation at all; and in that case you probably are better off sticking with the vague feelings of uncertainty.

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