What do you need or want to do that your current tech tools don't let you do, or don't do well/conveniently/efficiently enough?

Examples would be things like:

• watch movies in bed

• do work on a train/plane

• home improvement

• listen to music

• keep a calendar/reminders/to-do list

• play games

• internet stuff (obviously there are subcategories here, but you'll know if there's an internet-shaped hole in some part of your life)

• talk on the phone while doing something else (e.g. walking)

• take photos/videos of stuff

• scan documents onto your computer to send or store digitally

Don't spend more than 15-30 minutes on this.

Once you know what you want, you can start asking which things will give you what you want.

I was given a GPS as a present. I've long had issues with navigation in cars and not liking to go places, but I didn't realize just how bad those issues were until the GPS eliminated most of them. Before being given it, I wouldn't've paid more than $50 for it. After, I would easily have paid $200+.

A tablet or PDA with Wifi capabilities could improve your life even without a data plan, depending on your usual surroundings. A good one will support e-readers and probably the Anki mobile app (I have benefited from the ability to study anywhere), and probably other software to help organize your life. If you don't see this kind of device being useful and you don't come up with something else that you think will be more useful, consider arranging to buy a prize someone you know wants. The loss-aversion bias may make you reluctant to part with your prize, but you may get more utility out of money that can be used elsewhere than out of anything Best Buy sells.

This might be the most blatant misuse of "rational" in a post title I've ever seen.

Now that's a challenge ...

• Rational snorkeling
• Rational hash brownie preparation¹
• Rational weasel appreciation
• Rational captchaloguing
• Rational cache flushing
• Rational cash flashing
• Rational rasher rationing

¹ Actually there was an article about this in a recent Erowid newsletter. Kinda.

By "memetically related" I do not mean "memetically similar" (although I don't think there's much similarity either); I mean "related" in the sense of ancestry/inheritance. Bostrom's and Tegmark's arguments are not a branch of religion; they do not belong in that cluster.

I think you're wrong on similarity [1] and irrelevant on ancestry/inheritance. Only some among currently active religions are clearly "related" in the sense you employ (e.g. Judaism and Christianity); there's no strong evidence that most or all are so related. Since you presumably have no problem lumping them together under "religion", the claim that BTanism (grouped and named so purely for convenience) has no common ancestry with these religions is irrelevant to whether it should be judged a religion.

Also, I don't read the post as claiming "you guys are so dismissive of religion, but you're big on BTanism which is just as much a religion, so there!". Instead, I read the post as claiming "you guys are unreasonable in your overt dismissal of theism and your forceful insistence on it being a closed question, considering many of you are big on BTanism which has similar epistemological status to some varieties of theism". So it doesn't matter much whether BTanism is a religion or not; if that bothers you too much, just employ Taboo and talk about something like "a sentient being responsible for the creation of the observable universe" instead.

I don't fully agree with this idea (the post's argument as I read it), but I find myself somewhat sympathetic to it. It is indeed true in my opinion that the overt and insistent dismissal of theism on LW is a community-cohesiveness driven phenomenon. There's illuminating prior discussion at The uniquely awful example of theism.

You think I don't believe what I'm writing?

No, I have no doubt that you believe what you're writing. Rather, I think that the strongly dismissive claims in your first comment in the thread, unbacked by any convincing argument or evidence, cause me to think that a strong cognitive bias is at work.

[1] Really, the similarity is so strong that I see no need for a detailed argument; but if one is desired, I think Lem's story, to which I linked earlier, serves admirably as one.

We don't have to pursue this more, but I'd be interested in how you think Catholics are so good. Is it, as you said before, by epistemic luck, or because they actually have some sort of connection to a divine being's will/intention?

My own personal belief (not that you were asking me) is that any religion around long enough during periods of intellectual progress will get some sort of internally consistent formulation, however much violence it may do to a naive reading of the original texts. Catholicism is a good example, with the reconstruction of theology by the Scholastics on top of the original revisionism of Paul and later Greek-influenced scholars like Augustine. But you could as easily point to Buddhism, which in areas has some pretty excellent philosophizing to back up its beliefs. (Reading Nagarjuna's Verses on the Heart of the Middle Way, I had the eerie feeling I was reading Sextus Empiricus's sharp logical paradoxes, just with different vocabulary.) Confucianism didn't do too shabbily after 2+ millennia of development, and even something as crude as Shintoism got some pretty heavy intellectual development during the Meiji era and run up to WWII, becoming part of the quasi-fascist nationalist ideology of those periods which apparently convinced the Japanese public and many intellectuals. (Nor did Japanese Buddhism escape this process of rationalizing - read Zen at War.)

I didn't mean to ask whether you accept their belief as providing evidence for theism... only whether or not you think their belief is justified given the level of knowledge you expect from me not to believe.

Oh, no, not really; I think on the whole their reasons for believing what they do aren't very good, and that if their belief is justified it's mostly the result of epistemic luck rather than their personal epistemic abilities as such.

But I still don't understand the meaning of that default explanation... and so I just meant "what types of things count as fitting the definition of 'largely-unconscious far-sighted social pragmatics'?"

Sorry, misinterpreted you. I think the question of "why do people generally (profess that they) believe what they (profess that they) believe" is a very interesting question and worth serious study, but that any simple answer I attempt to give will be laughably oversimplified.

My deconversion was significantly in motion prior to finding LessWrong

Okay, then my points re LessWrong don't apply at all. It's probable that my default model doesn't apply and that your reasons for deconversion are largely due to your philosophical and general epistemic intuitions.

...the actual deciding factors tend to be unconscious or sentimental drives.

How would I identify whether this is or is not the case, especially if they are unconscious?

By noticing conscious rationalization, mostly. That would at least clue you in that something funny is going on, if it is.

You continue to return to social/pragmatic aspects, which continues to leave me puzzled as to whether you think the Catholic Church's primary advantage is that it's most aligned with the wishes/truths concerning a god of some sort, or whether it's beliefs are just a side effect and what really matters is that it has the best social/pragmatic rules/suggestions for human beings of any competing religion.

I think that if you're trying to optimize for truthful and useful doctrine about morality and theology then Catholicism is the best bet unless you're astoundingly good at discovering the truth on your own. But I'm not highly confident in this judgment; you should learn from whoever is wise, and if for some reason the wisest person who's easily available is a Zen Buddhist, then you should likely become a Zen Buddhist. If there are no wise individual people around then I think Catholicism has the most reliably good infrastructure of doctrine, but again I may be wrong.

After reading all that, though, it still leaves me puzzled that a being who wants us to know about it would reveal itself (bible) in a time when we had none of these probability and game theories, and no formal study of social psychology.

If YHWH is around then He is indeed playing a subtle and puzzling game.

As in, you strike me as being rather confident in theism (or various theistic tenets) while typically offering very vague statements about specifically what they are

I'm not very confident of theism; I think it's a problem of English that it's very difficult to consistently make claims of >10% but <50% certainty. And what my intuitions say and what my betting odds are are two different things; I know better than to just trust my intuition. The reason my statements are so vague is because it would take a lot of writing to explain my intuitions about moral philosophy and decision theory to people on LessWrong whose perspective differs greatly from mine. Even people who have much of the relevant knowledge and who I would expect to easily see what I believe and why, like Vladimir_Nesov, seem to not really understand the underlying intuitions nor where they would lead if correct.

My read of this post/threads suggest that what happened is that you came out and asked "Why is theism wrong?" Then a bunch (like ~500) comments took place explaining various objections, and you concluded that everyone was attacking someone else's theism, which isn't what you hold or think is really theism.

I think that's a mischaracterization; many of the most highly upvoted comments agreed that it is possible that theism isn't wrong if by theism we mean simulationism (which is what I had contended), and the majority of the objections were along the lines of requesting that we not call simulationism by the name of theism, which is a reasonable request but not an objection to theism.

Perhaps a new post with specifics might help more (or point me to more of that if it already exists).

I think that local beliefs are stacked against mine to such an extent that an extreme burden of proof would be on me to provide strong justification and explanations for all of my claims, which just isn't feasible for me personally in the near future.

Thanks for the dialog.

You too; I'm glad there exists a place like LessWrong where a prospective Catholic convert and a prospective Catholic deconvert can have civil and productive discourse about epistemology and theology.

This is sort of off-topic, but from the blog post you linked to:

The implicit assumption behind this tactic is that criticizing or denying a religion should require more knowledge about its teachings than joining it. But in reality and in logic, the opposite should be true: Assent should require a larger amount of evidence than denial, if only because the person who makes a positive claim always has the burden of proof to support it. An atheist is perfectly justified in saying that they disbelieve a religion because they know of no evidence in its favor, but a theist is never justified in saying that they believe a religion because they know of no evidence against it.

Why does this argument apply to Christianity but not to, say, big bang cosmology? Why am I not only allowed to profess belief in big bang cosmology but am positively expected to profess belief in big bang cosmology, despite the fact that I have very little understanding of the relevant arguments? If it's for reasons that are particular to Christianity, then why are we playing outside view burden of proof tennis?

If you don't accept my apostasy as legit, do you accept the beliefs of most of your fellow Catholics as such?

I don't accept them as individually providing very much evidence at all; in the vast majority of cases other factors screen off any evidence.

...the default explanation for conversion, i.e. largely-unconscious far-sighted social pragmatics...

Could you provide some more specifics? Like I want to sin or don't like my friends or what?

Well it's a default explanation so I don't have anything for you specifically in mind. But that you're a member of LessWrong means there's a fair bit of pressure on you to believe whatever LessWrong thinks it's good to believe, and if your brain has decided that you're not getting much benefit or a feeling of recognition and status from the Catholic social sphere then it's liable to find ways to play up the importance of meshing with alternative social spheres like LessWrong. I don't deny that you've searched for truth in good faith, but you can search in good faith for ages and still be unsure what to do; the actual deciding factors tend to be unconscious or sentimental drives.

I think you'd have to be at a Michael Vassar or Nick Tarleton level...

And are they Catholic or non-religious? If non-religious... do you accept their apostasy?

I think they are both religious in the relevant sense, but not specifically Catholic. I accept their non-Catholicism as evidence against something but not really against the truth of Catholicism as such; it's more evidence against the benefit of tying yourself to Catholicism specifically rather than trying to forge a new religion. I think they have more agency than I do right now and so I don't think their non-Catholicism is much evidence that I'd be wrong to convert to Catholicism or that they think that I'd be wrong to convert to Catholicism. Ultimately I would like to make a new religion, which is I think what they'd like to do, but in the meantime I think Catholicism is the best religion around. I think this idea of a religion being true or false is clearly misguided; it's more a question of how you interpret the world and what institutions allow for more and more-justified optimization of the world, which is heavily contingent on pragmatics of human psychology.

While I'm not smart enough to do it (yet), I would love to see a Bayesian analysis (since you mentioned it) on the probability that a god who values the salvation of souls in the highest degree would require the subject comprehension and intellectual dedication you demand to order to believe (or not). Or require the words of a book spread on foot as the only means toward knowing which specific god is real. Or even that given one true god, the other fake ones would also use the means of an inspired text to spread knowledge of themselves.

This is why I emphasized social psychology and game theory, because doing thorough analyses of questions like these is simply too difficult. We have to find a way to take people's impressions and cultural traditions and use them correctly as evidence, because so much thought has implicitly gone into answering questions like these that there's no easy way to directly access. And maybe the way we're posing the questions involves presuppositions that aren't in fact accurate, e.g. maybe we think that others believe something that they only say they believe when really they believe this other thing that is more reasonable but if we deny the former then that means unjustifiably denying the latter. This sort of thing happens constantly, and without very good models of social psychology, game theory, cognitive science, and hermeneutics generally we simply can't even come close to getting the right answers.

Oh, and I meant to ask: feel free to provide links/references to what you find most convincing concerning theism.

I don't think there are references that explain the sorts of things that got me interested in theism in the first place, specifically various intuitions about moral philosophy and decision theory. After I had those I could look into Kant or Aquinas and be impressed, but I don't know if I would have realized the depth of their arguments if I hadn't thought about the moral philosophy and decision theory on my own first.