Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
If it's the rational conversion hypothesis, then while people are more likely to rationally convert to positions they've been exposed to, it doesn't seem to me that they are enough more likely to explain the way conversions actually work. Furthermore, he supposedly got an experience directly from God. It wasn't a rational conversion in the sense of having been deduced from things he already knew, it was a new experience, and I wouldn't expect such things to be correlated with cultural context in the same way that ordinary rational conversions are. God can easily send Catholic experiences to Muslims and Muslim experiences to Catholics after all. Brain malfunctions, on the other hand, would be correlated with cultural context.
If it's the Catholiicism is true hypothesis, then this example would be unsurprising, but other examples involving other religions would be even more surprising than they are now.