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eternal_neophyte comments on Test Driven Thinking - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (26)
Atheism can be legitimately viewed as a lack of belief, if you properly hedge your claims about whether or not it's possible for gods or other ethereal beings to exist.
Also testing a belief doesn't necessarily mean testing it in full. You've probably tested your belief in the lethality of long drops partially by falling out of trees as a child (or at least, I did).
Not quite, that goes by the name of agnosticism. An atheist answers the question "Do gods exist?" by saying "No".
The results of all these tests point out that falls are not lethal, of course :-P
Provisionally accepting your distinction between atheism and agnosticism, in what way is the former useful and the latter not?
That's where an untested auxiliary belief figures in - "if something hurts in proportion to variable x (i.e. the height of the drop), experiencing that thing when x is very large will probably kill you".
That's basically the Duhem-Quine spiel right? Which is why strict falsificationism doesn't quite work. But that's not to say a weaker form of falsificationism can't work: a network of ideas is useful to the degree that nodes in the network are testable. A fully isolated network (such as a system of theology) is useless.
Your definition of atheism doesn't seem to reflect the way the word is used. A good portion of self-identified atheists would in fact be agnostics under your definition. In fact, every flavour of atheism I would consider compatible with general LW beliefs would be agnosticism since we can only claim that P(god) is very small.
Very few people reason in a way that uses probabilities.
True, but I would consider the most common chain of reasoning for atheism (Occam's razor, therefore no God) equivalent to thinking in terms of probabilities even if probabilities aren't explicitly mentioned.
Occam's razor has little to do with probabilities.
Then why accept the simplest solution instead of say, the most beautiful solution, or the most intuitive solution?
Good question. I'd argue that actually accepting the most elegant solution is a better heuristic than accepting the simplest.
Because you decide to accept the simplest solution. At least that's true for most people. Very few people reason with probabilities.
As an atheist, I answer the question "Do gods exist?" by saying "With the evidence we have right now, it is most likely that they do not."