All of r_claypool's Comments + Replies

Yeah, but 'Just Plain Wrong' is how I would describe thinking Hawaii is in the Caribbean; It's not how I would describe having followers that think you are God in flesh.

1Rob Bensinger
The question is whether it's possible to simply be mistaken about having divine powers, without having an underlying mental disorder. And clearly the answer is 'yes;' and clearly this possibility has a higher prior probability than 'Jesus is Lord.' So neglecting the option is unconscionable, and is where the trilemma gets nearly all of its plausibility as an argument for Christianity. Suppose a few really unlikely events happened, and caused everyone around you to think you were the messiah and/or divine. Would it be inconceivable, barring true insanity or deliberate deception, to come to think oneself the messiah and/or divine? Do you think that every psychic, every cult leader, is either (independently) insane or deliberately lying? It just ain't so; self-deception is stronger than that.

Oops, I meant to choose "Accept: turn" instead of "Accept: straight"

DanArmak420

Too late, and now they're dead.

This was really well written. Thanks for posting it.

4Peter Wildeford
You're welcome. Thanks for the encouraging feedback!

Yeah, it was a false dichotomy. I see that now.

Do you (r_claypool) have reason to suspect that Christianity is much more likely to be true than other, (almost-) mutually exclusive supernatural worldviews like, say, Old Norse Paganism?

No, I've read way more Christian apologetics than I care to admit, and the basic tenants of the Bible like -- "God could find no better way to forgive humans than to have one tortured on a cross" -- are no more substantiated by apologists than whatever is part of Old Norse Paganism.

If not, then 5% for Christianity is absurdly high.

But it still doesn't feel absurdly high.

1duckduckMOO
it might not feel absurdly high because absuridty is often a heuristic about what should be laughed at rather than what is unlikely. When people say something is absurd they mean it should be laughed at along with its claimer. 5% is a "respectable" estimate except perhaps in some very untheist countries. (I don't know and am too lazy to look it up is why I am saying perhaps, not because I know and want to make the fact seem small.) The other difference I see between old norse paganism and religion is that there are all sorts of people who don't otherwise appear to be crazy who say christianity is true and you can't properly internalise the idea that they are all wrong/lying. Oh and this just occured to me. It could be you are sort of/on some level afraid of hell. You may have had the idea of someone being wrong, in contravention to" popular wisdom raised to your attention and be unconciously avoiding conclusions that leave you in that scenario especially when the punishment for being wrong is hell. The question that stopped me thinking christianity, while unlikely, was unlikelier than the other religions was was: If you were raised by old norse pagan/aztec/muslim/hindu parents in an old norse pagan/etc place do you think you would have a higher instinctive estimate of its probability? Another thing to consider is that the people telling you that Jesus is a resurrected God say all kinds of other stupid stuff which is probably untrue (so p(christianity in general) is low for that reason and the probability that Jesus is a resurrected God goes way down if christianity is not true otherwise. Also, christians are in fact, on further inspection, generally visibly crazy, for a relevantly/appropriately strict definition of sane and present as their evidence a book that it has somehow become doctrine is God's word despite being tampered with by humans all the time.
3Shmi
Have you tried tracing your reasoning that leads to this feeling, step-by-step, and see which step bumps the odds to 5%? For a programmer, the analogy would be "the output of this code is 5%, which is suspiciously high, let's trace the program with a debugger and see which instruction is responsible". More often than not, you find that there is a path through your code that you haven't thought of before, or a step that seemed innocuous enough has a different effect from what you expected. Another standard technique is to work backwards from the final answer and see where it comes from.

That's about right. Five percent was basically a buffer for, "I don't have full confidence in my epistemology, maybe I'm confused and Christian faith actually is a virtue."

But I get what everyone has said about privileging the hypothesis. If by faith I'm supposed to choose a religion, after choosing I'd have no answer for, "Why did you trust in those unverifiable claims as opposed to some other unverifiable claims?" This would be true of all religions and supernatural claims, or at least the ones I'm aware of.

I probably should have clarified to say, "the chance that Jesus of Nazareth is a resurrected God." I think all modern Christianities have this belief in common, and my estimations are based on this lowest common denominator.

2Emile
They may all profess that belief, but is it the real reason they're Christians and not atheists? What if metaphysical claims are just identity markers, that Christians hold because they are completely abstract and divorced from reality? The "religion is good for social and individual well-being" argument is a bit of a steel man; it's easy to make fun of stupid arguments by Christians, but maybe Christianity is actually beneficial for complicated reasons, and many Christians see the benefits but mistakenly believe in simpler reasons (and those that can articulate complex reasons are ignored, because complex explanations are boring and look like tortuous rationalizations). The important question shouldn't be "is such-and-such point of Christian doctrine factually true?", but rather, "is it better for me and society that I identify as an atheist rather than as a Christian?" . Reducing the second question to the first is a cheap way out. Sure, there are good arguments for why secularism is better than religion, but those are waaay less overwhelming than the arguments of physics and biology (and frickin' common sense) over theology.

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/Deuteronomy#22) 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 t

... (read more)

LW folk (including I think Eliezer and lukeprog) mistakenly believe that algorithmic probability theory implies a low prior for supernaturalism

As lukeprog says here.

The older posts seem to have fewer votes. Even posts that I consider mediocre get upwards of 20 votes these days, yet Occam's Razor has only 24 right now.

1CronoDAS
Yeah, YHVH can be a right bastard at times...

I talked with more than 20 Christians during my deconversion, and actually, they acted as if the standard skeptical arguments made a lot of sense.

The response was never "no way, that doesn't even make sense." Rather it was, "well of course we might expect God to do X, but Yahweh works in mysterious ways". Another was, "you need to stop trusting your intellect so much and trust God/TheBible/Jesus instead."

4Dmytry
The interesting thing is that this works beyond the talk. Most Christians act as if they have a perfectly good model of the godless universe inside of them, which they utilize to come up with expectations for the 'mysterious' ways in which their God acts. Perhaps when most people lie (engage in (semi-)fraudulent signalling), people usually have p-zombie style non-self-aware attitude towards the process of lie construction. I wonder what happens if the hemispheres of religious person are questioned independently. How strongly does religiosity of one side correlate with religiosity of the other side.
1gwern
http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/archives/2012/02/results-of-the-.html
3Shmi
How does one deal with this fully general counterargument, "God works in mysterious ways"?

Good question, about 10 pages. Message me if you are still interested.

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?

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

A better measure would be evidence that video games are harmful.

8faul_sname
Or that staring at a computer screen is harmful.

I would not want that guy in my neighborhood. I want to live around people who will not eat me, even if I go crazy.

Your target audience is probably not Christian, but anything-mas is going to sound like a rip off of Christmas.

I would hesitate saying to my mother "I'm celebrating Baconmas with the kids". I'd rather say "I'm celebrating Francis Bacon Day with the kids". It's more descriptive, does not feel like an attack on Christmas, and has a natural followup question: "Who is Francis Bacon?"

0orthonormal
Hmm, good point. I haven't yet taken any flak on this, but I'll keep an ear open.
5Nornagest
The -mas suffix indicates Mass in the Christian sense, as you might have expected; so yes, it has definite religious overtones. It's not completely inappropriate if you dig deep enough into the etymology (it suggests a mission; spreading the good news, so to speak), but I'd expect relatively few people to do so.
5Xachariah
By the name, I assumed it was a holiday for the delicious kind of bacon, rather than Sir Francis Bacon. I can only imagine how it would be for those even less familiar with science than the average Less-Wrongian.

Also Raising the Sanity Waterline

If you can't fight religion directly, what do you teach that raises the general waterline of sanity to the point that religion goes underwater? ...

1lukeprog
I wish I had time, but no.

I usually respond "No thank you, not today". Adding "not today" reminds me that I contribute to charity on many other days, and I pick those organizations more carefully.

I don't know if the engine uses a higher score for tags. Tags I would use for this post are "scholarship", "training" and "learning".

Some of the tags like "weaving" will not be helpful categories.

0Arkanj3l
How would it negatively impact a search? I mean that in all earnest.

I urge that, with full knowledge of our limitations, we vastly increase our knowledge of the Solar System and then begin to settle other worlds.

These are the missing practical arguments: safeguarding the Earth from otherwise inevitable catastrophic impacts and hedging our bets on the many other threats, known and unknown, to the environment that sustains us. Without these arguments, a compelling case for sending humans to Mars and elsewhere might be lacking. But with them - and the buttressing arguments involving science, education, perspective, and hope

... (read more)
3Jayson_Virissimo
Why?

I just finished the survey. My estimate for the Calibration Year was 200 years wrong. How embarrassing, I need to learn the basics.

2Emile
That's only embarrassing if you gave a probability of 75% of being +- 15 years. If you put 10 or 20%, you're fine.

I would like to hear your disagreements too, even if Lydia McGrew is not interested.

lessdazed150

Obviously, outputting numbers like 10^39 is a sign that your argument is flawed. Nonetheless, I have sympathy for McGrew because so many are misunderstanding her argument.

Christian: If they were independent, the chances of the disciples coming up with the same story are tiny. So it is most likely they are all reporting reality.

Non-Christian: I agree that would be the case if they were independent, but it is more likely that they were in communication and conspired than that there is a supernatural/Jesus rose from the dead/etc.

C: If they were in communicat... (read more)

I write overly convoluted sentence structures.

YAKiToMe has helped me with this problem. Hearing the text as speech gives me a new perspective on what I have written; it makes the awkward stuff more obvious.

0orthonormal
Hmm. On the one hand, I'd get pretty impatient with that really quickly, especially given how many words I use that wouldn't be in its dictionary. On the other hand, if it inspires me to err on the side of terse and simple English, that might be a good thing. It does give me another good idea, though: I can print out a paper copy. With my academic papers, at least, I notice all sorts of things in print that I gloss over when it's on a screen.
2Jonathan_Graehl
Is closing your eyes and listening to someone read a better test of intelligibility than reading aloud to yourself? I think so, in that it can be easier to fool yourself into thinking that you've understood something when you flyby-eyeball it.

This is a good opportunity to introduce your friends to LessWrong: "Hey, did you know today is the day Stanislav Petrov saved the world? http://lesswrong.com/lw/jq/926_is_petrov_day/" Chance are, they will click around.

8gwern
I actually did submit a link to EY's post to Hacker News, where it seemed to do well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3039221

Here's an MP3 of the interview (text-to-speech conversion).

(If you think this is not a fair use of copyright, let me know and I'll take it down.)

I have not signed up, although I have talked with Rudi Hoffman about the costs and I think about it often.

On a related note, I wonder about the ethics of enrolling a child (I have children). Any thoughts on that?

7CharlesR
Would you give them a choice when it came to health insurance?
3Eneasz
Enroll the child. It's much cheaper, and they'll thank you when they're older.

404: Page Not Found / This video has been removed by the user.

XiXiDu110

It finally paid off that I save all videos I watch. Download here (play with VLC player).

ETA: The YouTube video is back and embedded in the original post.

Lydia McGrew responded to you saying:

... the earlier commentator who says that the probability is "approximately 1" that there would be made-up resurrection stories (and apparently thinks that this applies to the gospels) ignores various obvious distinctions. For example, the distinction between stories by people who had nothing to gain and everything to lose for making up such stories and people who had nothing to lose and something to gain by doing so. Also, the distinction between people's elaborating stories when they themselves were in a p

... (read more)
9Scott Alexander
Thanks for pointing that out. Needless to say I don't agree, but I respect her decision not to get in an endless internet argument about it.

Lydia McGrew addresses your post saying:

"The fellow who sneers at our combined Bayes factor on the grounds that we are assuming independence appears to have overlooked the fact that we have an entire section discussing that very issue and offering, as far as I know, a new technical point in the literature concerning the question of whether assuming independence strengthens or weakens a case and relating this to the question of situations of duress." - link

7lessdazed
Just from very quickly skimming the paper, what bentam said seems denotatively true but connotatively very incomplete, not totally untrue though. McGrew argues that, assuming independence, the Bayes Factor would be 10^39, and they do use it throughout the paper. It is a silly number, and they do reach it by assuming independence - which is a ridiculous hypothesis. bentam implies that, had they not done so, they would have reached a more sensible figure, and that by assuming the generous (to them) hypothesis in the paper, true they have not argued against the least convenient likely position for them, which makes the paper dismissible. What they actually do is conclude that, the less independent the testimony of the apostles, the more likely the whole story is to be true, by virtue of the evidence going from the likelihood of the supposed apparent conviction of them to the likelihood of the event's truth swamping out that of the evidence going the other way. Yes, you read what I wrote correctly, and I didn't misspeak. I think that's what she's saying. So McGrew does her intellectual duty by arguing throughout the paper for what she believes to be the lower bounds of the Bayes Factor, the true least convenient possible world, contrary to as implied by bentam. She's not arguing dishonestly, so she has to compensate with unreasonable assumptions that lead to conclusions like 10^39 being the lower bound.

John DePoe, Western Michigan University has a paper on this too. He calculates the probability of the resurrection, given 10 fair and independent testimonies ≈ 0.9999.

I'd like to quote one of the comments on lukeprog's post:

These sorts of statements are, unfortunately, generally the refuge of the intellectually lazy and dishonest: “If you just knew this stuff [usually related to math and science, though other things among certain continentally inclined segments of the population] you’d see that your religious beliefs were false! I don’t have to explain why this is the case, it just is.” I don’t think you’re intellectually lazy or dishonest, so I’m hoping this is a temporary lapse of judgment. In any case you know, as

... (read more)
2Zed
Questions about deities must fade away just like any other issue fades away after it's been dissolved. Compartmentalization is the last refuge for religious beliefs for an educated person. Once compartmentalization is outlawed there is no defense left. The religious beliefs just have to face a confrontation of the rational part of the brain and then the religious beliefs will evaporate. If somebody has internalized the sequences they must (at least): 1. be adapt at reductionism, 2. be comfortable with Bayes and MML, Kolmogorov complexity, 3. be acutely aware of which cognitive processes are running. If you habitually ask yourself "Why am I feeling this way?", "Am I rationalizing right now?", "Am I letting my ego get in the way of admitting I'm wrong?", "Did I just shift the goal post?", "Did I make the fundamental attribution error?", "Is this a cached thought?" and all those other questions you become very good at telling which feeling corresponds to which of those cognitive mistakes. So, let's assume that for these reasons the theist at least comes to this point where he realizes his earlier reasoning was unsound and decides to honestly re-evaluate his position. A typical educated person who likes a belief he will continue to believe it until he's proven wrong (he's a reasonable person after all). If he doesn't like a belief he will reject it until the evidence is so overwhelming he has no choice but to accept it (he's open minded after all!). This is a double standard where the things you believe are dominated by whichever information enters your brain first. The next step is to realize that religious beliefs are essentially just an exercise in privileging the hypothesis. If you take a step back and look at the data and try to go from there to the best hypothesis that conforms to the data there's just no way you're going to arrive at Hinduism, Taoism, Christianity or any other form of spirituality. All those holy books contain thousands of claims each o
0Richard_Kennaway
I'm not making an argument that it must, just an empirical observation that sometimes it does.

... establish that Christianity is the true formulation of what [God] wants ... by examining revealed theistic truths (aka the Bible)

This traditional line of apologetics is all very weird to me, a committed Christian of nearly 30 years. Seriously studying the scriptures is just what convinced me the Bible is not inspired by an intelligent or loving God.

I don't have the knowledge (yet) to answer your questions, but I'm very interested in what others will say.

1jwhendy
Thanks for providing that link. Loved reading through the comments and the first set was really refreshing (What reasons do you have for accepting the supernatural?).

I just want to say thank you for pointing this out. I used to think the trilemma was a terrible argument, but your interpretation reduces my criticism.

Still it's worth noting that Lewis assumed the gospels accurate. He missed an obvious fourth alternative: That Jesus was misquoted and misunderstood.

Lord, Liar, Lunatic, Legend. I'm not a full-blown mythicist, but I think it's very likely Jesus life and sayings were embellished by others.

3Rob Bensinger
A fifth alternative: Lord, Liar, Lunatic, Legend, or Just Plain Wrong. It's amazing that the simplest explanations -- that someone might simply be mistaken, that they might have sanely and honestly misinterpreted the data -- gets so completely ignored and erased.
3[anonymous]
True, but again that works for Lewis' argument - if our only sources on him are incorrect, then you still have no basis for saying "Well, he was a specially decent human who did good things..." Lewis is one of the few religious apologists for whom I have any time, because he at least tried to make decent arguments, and wasn't interested in convincing people by fraud.

If by "high regard for the Bible" he means inerrancy, I recommend The Human Faces of God as a first step.

It covers disturbing passages that I believe damage the credibility of the Bible as a whole. Biblical genocide, slavery, propaganda, early Israelite polytheism, contradictions, and failed prophesies of Jesus are all discussed with footnotes to additional literature. Most of this material is "standard fare" among critical scholars - even the idea that Jesus was a failed prophet - but church-going people are still in the dark on most... (read more)

That's interesting. Do you have references and the time to post them?

3JoshuaZ
The rebellious child is discussed in the Babylonian Talmud starting at I think Sanhedrin 68b. Wikipedia claims that the eye-for-an-eye discussion is Baba Kamma 83b-84a. I do remember it being in Baba Kamma but not precisely where so that citation is probably correct.

They can be a small, unnecessary barrier for newcomers to LW, LessWrong.

Yes, that's one of the layout options on the Wordle website.

Rationalists here are not so cold-hearted after all. ;-)

9steven0461
It mostly just reflects that 2 out of the last 3 posts happened to be about philanthropy, though, right?

Other questions to resolve:

  • Where should the files be hosted? (Does LW have the bandwidth)
  • Is LW exempt from MP3 licensing? (I hope so)
  • Where should the download links be placed? (A wiki page is fine, but it will be less discoverable.)
  • Which posts should be completed first?
0wedrifid
Probably but I know less than you. A wiki page sounds good for now. If people find it especially useful we can work from there. (I may create an RSS feed or podcast at some stage if I feel inspired.) Whatever you happen to care about.

I have price quotes for Acapela, Cepstral, Wizzard (AT&T Voices), Neospeech, and Nuance RealSpeak. The range is from $1,000 to $15,000 USD.

Open source options are eSpeak (robotic), Festival (robotic), FreeTTS (robotic), Pico and others.

Pico is part of Android and it sounds more natural than other open source options I tried. Pico is licensed under Apache 2.0. Here's a demo.

The commercial voices are definately better; Loquendo is a good example.

So now I can start converting via Pico or try to get funding for a more natural voice. Thoughts?

0wedrifid
Start with pico I guess. Then we can possibly upgrade in the future.

I'm slowly working on the sequences in MP3 format. Commercial text-to-speech solutions start out at $1,000 USD, so I need to find funding or an open alternative.

1jsalvatier
Thanks :)
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