To those who know Sam Harris' views on free will, how do they compare to the LW solution?

I'll get around to reading his eBook eventually, but it's not the highest priority in my backlog unless a few people say, "Yeah, read that. It's awesome."

The Old Testament [...] was busy laying down the death penalty for women who wore men's clothing

But Deuteronomy 22:5 says nothing about the death penalty. It's just an abomination, which presumably means, "You're going to hell, but we won't necessarily stone you."

A better argument would be, "The Old Testament [...] was busy laying down the death penalty for victims of rape."

"If there be a damsel that is a virgin betrothed unto a husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her; then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them to death with stones; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbor's wife: so thou shalt put away the evil from the midst of thee." -- Deuteronomy 22:23-24, ASV

I guess they thought it unlikely that the girl tried to scream or that she was threatened with immediate violence. And if she's not already engaged (28-29), she is forced to marry her rapist without the possibility of divorce.

Hm. This... doesn't seem particularly convincing.

Agreed. The actually-written-up-somewhere arguments that I know of can at most move supernaturalism from "only crazy or overly impressionable people would treat it as a live hypothesis" to "otherwise reasonable people who don't obviously appear to have a bottom line could defensibly treat it as a Jamesian live hypothesis". There are arguments that could easily be made that would fix specific failure modes, e.g. some LW folk (including I think Eliezer and lukeprog) mistakenly believe that algorithmic probability theory implies a low prior for supernaturalism, and Randi-style skeptics seem to like fully general explanations/counterarguments too much. But once those basic hurdles are overcome there still seems to be a wide spread of defensible probabilities for supernaturalism based off of solely communicable evidence.

So it sounds like whatever convinced you is incommunicable - something that you know would be unconvincing to anyone else, but which is still enough to convince you despite knowing the alternate conclusions others would come to if informed of it?

Essentially, yes.

If anyone wants to know what some of the highest voted sequence posts are, send me a personal message. (Sorry, I can't link to the page that computes them without overwhelming the server.)

/me shrugs

I'd give the argument from evil. If there were a God like the one that Christians worship, the world wouldn't suck as much as it does.

That's probably equally true the other way around -- that is, most atheist literature makes no sense to Christians.

How long is it? If it's short, I'll take a look.

I stopped believing in God a few years ago, and - like this tradition - I'm writing an essay to explain how that happened.

I need some constructive, critical feedback on the current draft. Is anyone interested?

Overall, LW rationalists, self-reporting, seem to have a much easier time dealing with wood-burning apostasy than Sam Harris' friends.

Rationality aside, we're collectively younger and have less attachment to our fireplaces, assuming we even have them. it's not really a good measure of our ability to handle discomforting facts.

I don't have much beef with that guy who killed and ate a few kilograms of a human volunteer he found on the Internet; eating a cow with human smarts that wants to be eaten doesn't seem qualitatively worse.