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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The ethics of breaking belief - Less Wrong Discussion

16 Post author: thelittledoctor 08 May 2012 08:34PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 May 2012 02:49:32PM * 0 points [-]

You're welcome to try and break my atheism, but I'm saying that only because I'm reasonably darned sure you can't do that by any conversational means (so long as we're actually in a universe that doesn't have a God, of course, I'm not stating a blind belief known to me to be blind).

Edit: oh, wait, didn't realize you were using actual hypnotism rather than conversation. Permission retracted; I don't know enough about how that works.

Comment author: jimmy 13 May 2012 07:15:55PM * 3 points [-]

I'm reasonably darned sure you can't do that by any conversational means

Agreed. The only way I’d see myself as having a fighting chance would be if you had a strong reason to go into hypnosis and you didn’t know my intentions.

If the world really were at stake, I think I could help you with the red panda problem - though I still have fairly wide confidence intervals on how difficult that would be because I haven't tried something like this. I have yet to find a real life example where I’d encourage self deception and a surprisingly large fraction of problems go away when you remove the self deception.

I have been having a lot of fun using hypnosis and techniques inspired by hypnosis to improve rationality - and successfully. I was a bit disappointed that you didn’t respond to my email offering to show what hypnosis says about training rationality. And now I’m a bit confused with the retraction because I had figured you had completely written me off as a crackpot.

Will Ryan mentioned that you were skeptical of “this stuff”. Can you elaborate on what specifically you’re skeptical about and what kinds of evidence you’d like to see?

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 13 May 2012 07:46:29PM 1 point [-]

I hope you don't think you are actually "giving amnesia" or doing anything other than roleplaying mind-controller and mind-controllee, in dialogues like these. Those teenagers are just playing along for their own reasons.