These kinds of games just remind me of this Monty Python skit. There's no rules by which to play, so you're just trying to guess what the author is thinking.
I don't like this paper. It's wholly scathing for no reason other than to justify ignoring all of philosophy. Some philosophy is valuable and some is not, and of his 40 statements about three, I'd say 6 of them are claims I would take seriously and would hear arguments for, were I interested in the nature of three.
Generally, continental philosophy is trash, but I wouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
From what anecdotal evidence I have, I'd say it doesn't have much to do with argument. People who discard their religious beliefs do so after feeling emotional alienation. The antagonistic context of a "my side versus their side" debate isn't amenable to that.
It's one thing to be told some (presumably good) reason to reject the God hypothesis. It's another to be honestly forced to reconcile it with events in your life story. Maybe they just don't "feel it" anymore; God's presence in their life isn't what it used to be. Or maybe the...
I'll take your word for it.
My intuition would be that nobody jumps the fence as a result of these sorts of things. They were either the sort who would have agreed with the conclusion without any argument anyway, or they will do mental gymnastics of all kinds in order to avoid believing the conclusion. But, having never really been religious, I'm probably wrong about that.
QualiaSoup has some great videos, although many of them are in the excessively tired "trying to convince Christians that their religion isn't right" genre.
edit: Perhaps that's not the best name for the genre; it's more a kind of rational argumentation against ideas floating around the Christian memeosphere. But I'm still skeptical that it does very much good.
I often find that there's not any satisfactory way to calibrate my expectations for things like this anyway. I was once emailed by someone who wanted to buy a domain name from me. He refused to give an offer, asking me to provide a price. I found it impossible to gauge what it was actually worth to me, or what I thought it would be worth to him, so I said I wouldn't sell it unless he made an offer. I never heard from him again.
So, sure. My future self can be convinced of a new minimum, for all I care. I apparently hold my ideas about this very lightly anyway. I'm not even sure he'd (I'd) be "wrong," even if I currently think of it as a lie.
I don't think "Not sending in your $200 rebate" and "not writing in an article to Overcomingbias" are the same phenomena at all.
It's not that people who are now writing all these LW posts felt like it was too much of a hassle to send an email to Overcomingbias; it's that deliberately and unusually sticking your neck out to contribute has a different social connotation than simply participating in the expected community behavior.
Contributing to Overcomingbias is like getting on stage: walking up to the stage is a socially loaded act in a...
If you pose someone the Monty Hall Problem, and their response is "It doesn't matter whether I switch doors or not! They're going to move the prize so that I don't end up getting it anyway!" Do you think they've understood the point of the exercise?
Hi everybody. I'm a student who keeps changing fields. I have background in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and statistics. I grew up with a passion for knowledge, and independently rejected religion for naturalism at an early age, so I guess being a rationalist just came naturally. I'm a transhumanist; to be more precise, I think we'll have smarter-than-human cyborgs/bioborgs/uploads by about 2070, and I'd like to become one. I'm also optimistic about nanotechnology and the continued advancement of computing machinery.
I found Overcomingbia...
I try to cut down on the meat of mammals. The few times it's come up, I've refused to eat octopus.
I find that if I eat beef without concern, I start eating it all the damn time. Like, multiple times a day. So, partly out of concern for my health, and partly out of a personal-bordering-on-ethical decision.
Not very strictly at all. I'll eat what I feel like, although I make a mild conscious effort.
I don't know that I'll have children, but if I do, they can eat what they please. Not that it'll be on the dinner table very often if it's not my thing
I took your survey, it was interesting. I'm still a little skeptical that my thoughts on various propositions take the form of probabilities in the first place. It seems absolutist to say there's zero chance of supernatural beings, but "ontologically basic mental entities" fit so poorly into my worldview that you might as well have said "What is the probability that you are wrong about everything?" So, I said zero, although I wouldn't ascribe such absolute confidence to myself if asked in some other way, I think. Similarly, your quest...
"And if we can't win, it means we weren't such good rationalists as we thought, and ought to try something different the next time around."
This attitude, that somehow, every single obstacle to success or happiness is solved by rationality, is a mistake, I think. People are not in control of the amount of opportunity they have, and i don't think being supremely rational is a sure way to triumph. Victims of slavery and car crashes are extreme examples, but I think there's more subtle situations in which no reasoned plan of action can straightforwardly help you "win."
Hi there.
I used to comment once in a while, but I find myself less and less interested in the topics of conversation around here. For a short while, people were going on a lot about dating (wtf?) and then more recently there's been a fair amount of what is essentially self-help for the scientifically inclined. I dunno, I guess I was just more into thought experiments and Yudkowsky posts.