LESSWRONG
LW

All of Jakinbandw's Comments + Replies

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Once again, sorry, didn't mean to drop out, but I stayed up way to late and even now I am recovering from sleep deprivation and still have an annoying headache. My body seems to want to wake up 2 hours before it should. I'll be back o... (read more)

1Bugmaster13y

Don't sweat it, I don't think anyone here expects you to answer all posts in an extremely rapid fashion. Ok, maybe some do, but you don't owe those people anything, anyway. This is a discussion site, not a job :-)

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Jakinbandw13y40

You test a large number of these against placebo rituals, where elements of the rituals are changed in ways that ought to invalidate them according to the traditional beliefs, in ways that the patients won't notice, and you find that all of the rituals you test perform no better than placebo.

But but what if you get inconsistent result? Let's say you try the ritual 5 times and the placebo 5 times and it works 2 times for the the ritual and twice for the ritual. Furthermore consider that nothing changed in any of these tests that you could measure. You sa... (read more)

8Desrtopa13y

Any test with such a small sample size is barely worth the bother of conducting. You'd want to try many times more than that at least before you start to have enough information to draw reliable inferences from, unless the effect size is really large and obvious, say, all five people on the real ritual get better the next day and none of the five on the placebo recover within a week. People recover from most ailments on their own for perfectly natural reasons. Some people fail to recover from ailments that other people recover from, but it's not as if this is an incomprehensible phenomenon that flies in the face of our naturalistic models. If no proposed supernatural intervention changes a person's likelihood of recovery relative to placebo, then it could be that there's no way of isolating supernatural intervention between groups, but a much simpler explanation to account for the observations is that no supernatural interventions are actually happening. People used to see the appearance of supernatural intervention everywhere, but the more we've learned about nature, the less room there's been for supernatural causes to explain anything, and the more they've become a burden on any model that contains them. It's possible that some phenomena which are unexplained today can only be explained in the future with recourse to supernatural causes, but given the past performance of supernatural explanations, and the large amount of informational complexity they entail, this is almost certainly an unwise thing to bet on. I'm glad you're comfortable with this sort of environment. If you're going to make judgments on the basis of your own experience though, it's good to try to incorporate the evidence of others' experience as well. Personally, from around the age of ten to twelve or so, I experimented a lot with the possibility of god(s). I tried to open myself up to communication with higher intelligences, perform experiments with prayer and requests for signs, and so on

0thomblake13y

Positing a divine being is a more complex explanation than any physical explanation I can conceive of. Don't be fooled by what your brain labels "easy".

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Jakinbandw13y20

Has your mother ever called anyone when she felt they were in trouble, only to find out that they weren't, in fact, in trouble ? Confirmation bias is pretty strong in most humans.

Not that I remember. My memory could be faulty, but thinking long and hard about it I don't remember it happening.

Wait... she predicted that she would call someone, and then went ahead and called someone ? This doesn't sound like much of a prediction; I don't think I'm parsing your sentence correctly.

She predicted they were in trouble. I think the phrase she used was "... (read more)

0Bugmaster13y

Oh yeah, that makes more sense than what I was thinking. Anyway, as the others on this thread have pointed out, there could be many explanations for why you remember events the way you do. Among them, are things like "my mother has supernatural powers", "a god exists and he is using his powers on my mother", "aliens exist and are using their power on my mother", etc. The most probable explanation, though, is "my memory is faulty due to a cognitive bias that is well understood by modern psychologists". That said, I must acknowledge that if you have already determined, for some other unrelated reason, that the probability of psionic powers / gods / aliens existing is quite high; then it would be perfectly rational of you to assign a much higher probability to one of these other explanations.

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Jakinbandw13y00

Even if that were true, and not a misremembrance or a post-hoc rationalization

I did state that she predicted one in advance to me. Also when my mother called me the first thing she asked was "are you alright?"

You should expect in advance to hear more anecdotes about the times that someone really was in trouble, than anecdotes about the times they were not, so having heard them is very little evidence.

As far as my mother goes I have never once seen her mistake a prediction. Now 2 predictions (and 2 more that she told me about) sounds small,... (read more)

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Jakinbandw13y00

Honestly mine really isn't any different than what you hear on the internet all the time. If you want to hear it go ahead. When my grandfather died all the people in the room said that they saw a light enter the room. It didn't say anything but they all agreed that they felt peace come over them. My grandfather was a Christian, as were the people in the room. I wasn't in the room, however I did check their stories individually and they matched. Also these were people who haven't lied to me before or since (well, other than stuff like april fools... though ... (read more)

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Jakinbandw13y20

We can look at folk medicine, and see if there are examples of cures which have been passed down through cultures which perform no better than placebo in double blind tests.

Point.

though I would point out that not all of them are wrong either. Just the good majority. That's neither here nor there though.

Out of curiosity how does science explain people feeling knowing that people they care about are in trouble? My mother has made 4 phone calls, and I have witnessed 2 where she felt that someone was in trouble and called them. One of those calls was to me ... (read more)

6Desrtopa13y

I don't know if this is something that has been explained, or even if it's something that needs to be explained. It could be that you're operating under an unrepresentative dataset. Keep in mind that if you hadn't experienced a number of phone calls where the caller's intuition that something was wrong was correct, you wouldn't treat it as a phenomenon in need of explanation, but if you had experienced some other set of improbable occurrences, simply by chance, then that would look like a phenomenon in need of explanation. I personally have no experiences with acquaintances making phone calls on an intuition that something is wrong and being right, although I have experience with acquaintances getting worried and making phone calls and finding out there was really nothing to worry about. There's a significant danger of selection bias in dealing with claims like this, because people who experience, say, a sudden premonition that something has happened to their loved on across the sea at war, and then find out a couple weeks later that they're still alive and well, are probably not going to record the experience for posterity. I've encountered plenty of claims of improbable events before which were attributed to supernatural causes. If I consistently encountered ones that took the form of people correctly intuiting that a distant loved one was in trouble and calling them, I would definitely start to suspect that this was a real phenomenon in need of explanation, although I would also be interested in seeing how often people intuited that a distant loved one was in trouble, called them, found out they were wrong, and didn't think it was worth remembering. Maybe some of the improbable events I've heard about really are the result of more than chance, and have some underlying explanation that I'm not aware of, but I don't have the evidence to strongly suspect this. If you multiply a day times the population experiencing it, that's about 82,000 years of human experience

2Bugmaster13y

Has your mother ever called anyone when she felt they were in trouble, only to find out that they weren't, in fact, in trouble ? Confirmation bias is pretty strong in most humans. Wait... she predicted that she would call someone, and then went ahead and called someone ? This doesn't sound like much of a prediction; I don't think I'm parsing your sentence correctly. If your loved one is fighting in WWII, it's very likely that he or she would die, sadly... Why did you end up picking "god" over "psionics", then ?

2thomblake13y

Even if that were true, and not a misremembrance or a post-hoc rationalization, you must take note of the many other people who have those feelings and no one was in trouble. You should expect in advance to hear more anecdotes about the times that someone really was in trouble, than anecdotes about the times they were not, so having heard them is very little evidence.

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Jakinbandw13y00

As already pointed out, would it change either my beliefs or your beliefs? I've already recounted a medical mystery with my foot and blood loss. It comes down in the end to my word, and that of people I know. We could all be lying. There is no long term proof, so I don't see any need to explain it. That was my point. What is strong proof to me, is weak proof to others because I know that I am not lying. I have no way to prove I am not lying however so what would be the point?

2thomblake13y

If you have evidence that could overcome the low prior for God's existence were you not lying, then that would be worth hearing even if we would believe you're lying. I'm not aware of such evidence for particular deities.

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Jakinbandw13y00

Many, possibly even all religions though, make claims of supernatural events being witnessed by large numbers of people, and religions make enough mutually exclusive claims that they cannot all be true, so we know that claims of large scale supernatural observations are something that must at least sometimes arise in religions that are false.

That may be the case, and I won't disagree that some claims are fabricated. However for the rest imagine the following: A parent has two children, and he gives a present (say a chocolate that they eat) to each child... (read more)

6Desrtopa13y

It's possible, but there is no necessity that any of them be true. If natural human cognitive function can explain claims of religious experiences (both willfully deceptive and otherwise,) in the absence of real supernatural events, then positing real supernatural events creates a large complexity burden (something that needs a lot of evidence to raise to the point where we can consider it probable,) without doing any explanatory work. Let's say you have a large number of folk rituals which are used for treating illnesses, which appear to demand supernatural intervention to work. You test a large number of these against placebo rituals, where elements of the rituals are changed in ways that ought to invalidate them according to the traditional beliefs, in ways that the patients won't notice, and you find that all of the rituals you test perform no better than placebo. However, you can't test the remaining rituals, because there's nothing about them you can change that would invalidate them according to traditional beliefs that the patients wouldn't notice. You could conclude that some of the rituals have real supernatural power, but only the ones you weren't able to test, but you could explain your observations more simply by concluding that all the rituals worked by placebo. Occasionally, but not that often. But the fact that members here are trying to change your mind doesn't necessarily mean they think you're trying to change theirs. This is a community blog dedicated to refining human rationality. When we have disagreements here, we generally try to hammer them out, as long as it looks like we have a chance of making headway. On this site, we generally don't operate on a group norm that people shouldn't confront others' beliefs without explicit invitation.

2Bugmaster13y

Sure, it's possible, but lots of things are possible, even if we limit them to the things we humans can imagine. We can imagine quite a lot: Cthulhu, Harry Potter, the Trimurti, Gasaraki, werewolves of all kinds, etc. etc. The better question is: how likely is it that a supernatural being exists ?

4thomblake13y

You claim to have evidence that should convince you to be a Christian. We want to know that evidence. The Litany of Tarski applies: if God exists, I wish to believe that God exists. If God does not exist, I wish to believe that God does not exist.

2TimS13y

I don't agree that supernatural should be defined as "outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts." There are lots of phenomena that science can't explain, or for which there is no commonly accepted explanation. That's not particularly interesting. What would be interesting is a phenomena that science admits it will never be able to explain.

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Jakinbandw13y10

Is "god exists, has the properties I believe it to have, and wants to stay hidden" really the only reason you can think of for the observable universe being as we observe it to be?

My own belief is closer to: "Something very powerful and supernatural exists, doesn't seem to be hostile, and doesn't mind that I call it the Christian God." And while I would answer 'no' to that question, the amount of evidence that there is something supernatural if far greater than the amount of evidence that there are millions of people lying about thei... (read more)

4Dolores198413y

Surprisingly, no. That said, religious people aren't lying. They're not even a lot crazier than baseline. I've had experiences which I recognize from my reading to be neurological that I might otherwise attribute to some kind of religious intervention. And those are coming from an atheist's brain not primed to see angels or gods or anything of that kind. As for why belief in the supernatural is everywhere, a lot of it has to do with how bad our brains are at finding satisfactory explanations, and at doing rudimentary probability theory. We existed as a species for a hundred thousand years before we got around to figuring out why there was thunder. Before then, the explanation that sounded the simplest was 'there's a big ape in the sky who does it.' And, even when we knew the real reason, we were so invested in those explanations that they didn't go away. Add in a whole bunch of glitches native to the human brain, and boom, you've a thousand generations of spooky campfire stories. If I were you, I would be terrified of that possibility. I would at least go to a psychiatrist and try to rule it out. It is a real possibility, and potentially the most likely one. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't true.

TheOtherDave13y120

"Something very powerful and supernatural* exists, doesn't seem to be hostile, and doesn't mind that I call it the Christian God."

For what it's worth, I'm .9+ confident of the following claims:
1) there exist phenomena in the universe that "human science" (1) doesn't commonly accept.
2) for any such phenomenon X, X doesn't mind that you call it the Christian God
3) for any such phenomenon X, X doesn't mind that you call it a figment of your imagination
4) for any such phenomenon X, X is not "hostile" (2) to humans

So it seems we... (read more)

0thomblake13y

I don't believe you've read much of the content on this site. There are a host of human cognitive biases that would lead to belief in the supernatural. Perhaps most notably, we attribute agency to non-agents. It's easy to see how that would be adaptive in the ancestral environment; just look at the truth table for "That sound was an animal and I believe that sound was an animal" and the outcomes of each possibility.

2TimS13y

Every culture has some different things they believe in, and call supernatural. That doesn't prove there really is a category of things that actually are supernatural. By analogy, belief by Himalayan people that the Yeti is real is not evidence that Bigfoot (in the northwestern United States) is real. Likewise, a Hindu's fervent belief is not evidence of the resurrection of Jesus. In short, the shortfalls in human understanding completely explain why primitive cultures believed "supernatural" was a real and useful label, even though that belief is false.

4Desrtopa13y

I don't think you'll find such a thing readily discounted here. There are plenty of well established cognitive biases that come to play in assessment of supernatural claims. The sequences discuss this to some degree, but you might also be interested in reading this book which discusses some of the mechanisms which contribute to supernatural belief which are not commonly discussed here. We don't even need to raise the issue of the supernatural to examine whether people are likely to pass down beliefs and rituals when they don't really work. We can look at folk medicine, and see if there are examples of cures which have been passed down through cultures which perform no better than placebo in double blind tests. In fact, there is an abundance of such.

5APMason13y

Well, don't be coy. There's no point in withholding your strongest piece of evidence. Please, get into it.

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Jakinbandw13y00

So what I'm getting from you is that you would ignore your own observations to conform to what others expect? That your belief in a universe without god is so strong that even if I did show you something like this you would refuse to believe it because it didn't fit with your expectations? Then I fail to see how I could ever convince you.

Addendum: Have group hallucinations been proven or disproven?

2CuSithBell13y

A single experience of that kind would be terrible evidence for Christianity, and merely poor evidence for the supernatural. A coherent set of experiences indicative of a consistent, ongoing supernatural world (or specifically a Christian world) would be much more convincing.

6Desrtopa13y

Well, mass hysteria is a real thing, but if a large group of people who have no prior reason to cooperate all claim the same unusual observations, it's certainly much stronger evidence that something unusual was going on than one individual making such claims. Many, possibly even all religions though, make claims of supernatural events being witnessed by large numbers of people, and religions make enough mutually exclusive claims that they cannot all be true, so we know that claims of large scale supernatural observations are something that must at least sometimes arise in religions that are false. In terms of the falsifiability of religion, it's important to remember that we're essentially working with a stacked deck. In a world with one globally accepted religion, with a god that made frequent physical appearances, answered prayers for unlikely things with sufficient regularity that we had no more need to question whether prayer works than whether cars work, gave verifiable answers to things that humans could not be expected to know without its help, and gave an account of the provenance of the world which was corroborated by the physical record, then obviously the prior for any claims of miraculous events being the result of genuine supernatural intervention would be completely different than in our own. If a pilgrim child in America in 1623 claimed to have spoken to a person from China when nobody else was around, the adults in their community would probably conclude that they were lying, confused or deluded in some way, unless presented with a huge preponderance of evidence that the child would be highly unlikely to be able to produce, and it's completely reasonable that they would behave this way, whereas today, an American child claiming to have spoken to a person from China demands a very low burden of evidence. In a world where the primary evidence offered in favor of religion is subjective experiences which have a pronounced tendency to be at odds with

4TimS13y

I can't speak for thomblake, but there are experiences that could convince me that there was a powerful entity that intervened on behalf of humanity. They just haven't happened. And I have reasons to believe that they will never happen, including the fact that they haven't happened before - absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Jakinbandw13y30

If you can show strong, convincing evidence for why the existence of your God is special, I will be very, very interested.

Ah, now that is a funny thing isn't it. Once upon a time I played a joke on a friend. I told him something that he would have never have believed unless it came from my own mouth, and then when he tried to tell others I just looked confused and denied it. He ended up looking like a fool. (For the record I asked him to tell nobody else).

Why is this relevant? Because if for example (and no, I'm not saying this is what happened), God ca... (read more)

4Dolores198413y

Actually, my default response for this sort of thing is to immediately go to a hospital, and get a head CT and a chat with a certified psychiatrist. I mean, sure, it could be the supernatural, but we KNOW mental illness happens. The priors for me being crazy (especially given some unique family history) are not very low. Much, much higher than the odds of a deity actually existing, given the aforementioned Occamian priors. You don't. Rationalism only works if God isn't fucking with you. That said, there's a huge space of possible constructs like that one (entities that conveniently eliminate all evidence for themselves). It's not infinite, but it's arbitrarily large. From a rationalist's perspective, if any of them were real, we wouldn't know, but the odds of them actually being real in the first place are... not high. Again with the Occamian prior. So, I'm not much moved by your analysis. That said, I am curious what your personal experience was.

3TheOtherDave13y

Proof is not typically necessary. People make claims about their experience all the time that they have no way of proving, as well as claims that they probably could prove but don't in fact do so, and I believe many of those claims. For example, I believe my officemate is married, although they have offered me no proof of this beyond their unsupported claim. I would say a more useful question is, "how do I provide another person with sufficient evidence that such an entity exists that the person should consider it likely?" And of course the answer depends on the person, and what they previously considered likely. (The jargon around here would be "it depends on their priors.") Mostly I don't think I can, unless their priors are such that they pretty much already believe that such an entity exists. Another question worth asking is "how do I provide myself sufficient evidence that such an entity exists that I should consider it likely?" I don't think I can do that either. Unrelatedly: Is "god exists, has the properties I believe it to have, and wants to stay hidden" really the only reason you can think of for the observable universe being as we observe it to be? I understand it's the reason you believe, I'm asking whether it's the only reason you can think of, or whether that was just hyperbole.

2thomblake13y

Not really. There are plenty of plausible explanations for that description that don't require positing something supernatural. And now if all you have is one event in your faulty human memory to go on, it counts for practically nothing. Given the low prior for the existence of most particular deities, updating on that piece of evidence should still give you a ridiculously low posterior. "I'm hallucinating" would probably be my winning hypothesis at the time it's happening, and "I'm misremembering" afterwards.

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Jakinbandw13y00

I think this is called "behaving rationally". I understand "rationality" as using reason to my benefit.

Thus my point that sometimes you should not question one of your own beliefs is preserved. You agree that it would be the rational thing to do in some situations.

As far as "bad" goes, I don't have a ready definition.

If you can't explain what bad is, then I am unable to discuss this with you. You might have a good definition, or you might be just saying that whatever makes you mad is automatically bad. I can't know, so I can't form any arguments about it.

0electricfistula13y

Bad is causing harm to people who don't deserve it. Convincing someone in the existence of hell is harmful - you are theatening them with the worst thing possible, convincing someone of a lie to compel them to serve the chruch through donations of time or money is harmful, convincing someone that they are innately sinful is harmful psychologically, convincing someone that morality is tied to religious institution is harmful. Children are least deserving of harm and so harming them is bad.

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Jakinbandw13y10

This isn't to say that there aren't situations where it will disadvantage me to be a rationalist

Indeed. My entire point was that it might be possible to recognize these situations and then act in an appropriate manner. (Or would that be being meta-rationalist?)

Whatever misconceptions I may have about Christianity are gained from growing up with a religious family and attending services "religiously" for the first two decades of my life.

Anecdotal evidence shouldn't be a cause to say something is horrible. If that were the case I could point... (read more)

2electricfistula13y

I think this is called "behaving rationally". I understand "rationality" as using reason to my benefit. If there comes a time when it would be beneficial for me to do something, and I arrive at that conclusion through reason, then I'd consider that a triumph of rationality. I think if you are able to anticipate an advantage that could be gained by a behavior then refusing to perform that behavior would be irrational. You misunderstand me. It isn't my anecdotal evidence that makes me think the church is horrible. I just pointed out that I had spent a lot of time in churches to show that I have more than the passing familiarity with them that you attributed to me. I think the church is horrible because it threatens children, promotes inaccurate material and takes money from the gullible. While this is good that your church isn't abusing more children, it is still terrible to consign "2 or three children" to such mistreatment. Telling children that there is a hell and that they will go to it if they don't believe in something which is obviously flawed is a terrible thing to do. It is psychological child abuse and I don't think it says very much in your church's favor that it only abuses two or three kids. A child lacks the intellectual maturity to understand or evaluate complex ideas. A child is more trusting than an adult. If your parents tell you something is true, or that you should believe this minister when he talks about heaven, you are more likely to believe it. If your parents came to you now and told you about how they had just found out about Krishna and you should read the Bhagavad Gita you probably wouldn't be very receptive. And yet, your parents managed to convince you that the Bible was true. Why was that? Was it because through random chance you were born into a family that already believed in the one true religion? Or was it just that you adopted the religion you were exposed to. Because, when you were young your mind wasn't discriminating enough to

4Dolores198413y

Claims with a low Occamian prior are false (to within reasonable tolerances) by default to a rationalist. Deities in general tend to have extremely long minimum message lengths, since they don't play nice with the rest of our model of the universe, and require significant additional infra-structure. I suspect you would not be overly put out by the assertion that Rama or Odin isn't real. So, what makes your God different? I ask you honestly. If you can show strong, convincing evidence for why the existence of your God is special, I will be very, very interested. If you can demonstrate enough Bayesian evidence to bump the probability of Yahweh over 50%, you've got yourself a convert. Probably quite a few. But, the burden of evidence is on your shoulders.

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Jakinbandw13y00

It's probably because you said you identify as a Christian, and Christians tend to advance this sort of argument more often than non-theists, regarding Christianity specifically.

That tends so show that they don't actually believe in Christianity. Rather they want to believe. I feel sorry for those people. Of course as I tend to sit on the other side of the fence I try to help them believe, but belief is a hard thing to cultivate and an easy thing to destroy. If you were in a group and you were shown a box with 5 dice in it for a brief moment, but later ... (read more)

4Bugmaster13y

This is a pretty standard example of reasoning under uncertainty. You have two possible events, "there were 5 dice" vs. "there were 4 dice". You want to assign a probability to each event, because, not being omniscient, you don't know how many dice there actually were. You have several percepts, meaning pieces of evidence: your memories and the claims of the other people. Each of these percepts has some probability of being true: your memories are not infallible, the other people could be wrong or lying, etc. You could run all these numbers through Bayes' Rule, and determine which of the events ("5 dice" vs. "4 dice") is more likely to be true. It also helps to know that all humans have a bias when it comes to peer pressure; our memories become especially faulty when we perceive a strong group consensus that contradicts them. Knowing this can help you calibrate your probabilities. Anyways, you say that "belief is a hard thing to cultivate", but in your dice scenario, there's no need to cultivate anything, because you don't care about beliefs, you care about how many dice there were; i.e., you care specifically about the truth. I am not sure what "biological duty" means, but still, it sounds like you do care whether you live or die; i.e., you want to live. This is a goal, and you can take actions in order to further this goal, and you want to make sure your actions are as optimal as possible, right ? It depends on what you mean by "simple"; according to Ockham's Razor, "God did it" is a vastly less simple explanation than most others, due to the number of implicit assumptions you will end up making. That said, it sounds like you have several possible events ("God did it", "aliens did it", "I got lucky", etc.), and several pieces of evidence; so this scenario is similar to your example with the dice. If you cared about the truth, you could assign a probability to each event based on the evidence. Of course, you don't have to care about the truth in this case; but

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Jakinbandw13y10

[Note: Skip stuff in brackets if religious talk annoys or offends you]

(Why does everyone assume that this has to do with religion? If I was asking this about religion wouldn't that already signify that I didn't believe, I just wanted to? My belief comes from actual events that I have witnessed, and tested, and been unable to falsify. )

The example with the bleeding out was sort of a personal one because it happened to me. I cut my foot with an axe. I was far from help, and a helicopter wouldn't pick me up for another 4 hours. If I had been off to the side b... (read more)

1Bugmaster13y

I personally operate by Crocker's Rules, but others may not be, so I appreciate the warning nonetheless. It's probably because you said you identify as a Christian, and Christians tend to advance this sort of argument more often than non-theists, regarding Christianity specifically. That said, your argument is general enough to apply to non-religious topics, as well. At this point, I should mention that I didn't mean to bring up your personal traumatic experience, and I apologize. If you think that discussing it would be too distressing, please stop reading beyound this point. If you truly believed you were about to die no matter what, why would you waste time on tying off your foot ? It sounds to me like you weighed the chances of you dying, and made a decision to spend some time on tying off the foot, instead of spending it in contemplation or something similar. What is it ? Can you describe some examples ? Your own experience with the bleeding foot is not one of them, because your death would've negatively affected quite a few people (including yourself). Understood. However, if everyone thought like you do, no one would be tracking near-Earth asteroids right now. Some people are doing just that, though, in the expectation that if a dangerous asteroid were to be detected, we'd have enough time to find a solution that does not involve all of us dying.

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Jakinbandw13y-20

I pose the question of what does being a superior rationalist do for you if you are about to die? And I'll use a more real example because you don't seem to like that one. Let us suppose that you are about a miles walk from your car and you cut yourself badly. You don't have any means of communicating with people. You start walking back to your car. You suspect that you aren't going to make it. Now does it make you happier to follow up on that thought and figure out the rate you are losing blood, realize you aren't going to make it and die in fear and sad... (read more)

4electricfistula13y

In the aggregate of all possible worlds, I expect it will let me lead a happier and more fulfilling life. This isn't to say that there aren't situations where it will disadvantage me to be a rationalist (a killer locks me and one other person in a room with a logic puzzle. He will kill the one who completes the puzzle first...) but in general, I think it will be an advantage. Its like in the game of poker, sometimes, the correct play will result in losing. That is okay though, if players play enough hands eventually superior skill will tell and the better player will come out on top. Being a superior rationalist may not always be best in every situation, but when the other choice (inferior rationalist) is worse in even more situations... the choice seems obvious. Then I could stop walking, conserve my energy and try to suppress the blood loss. Or, I could activate my rationalist powers earlier and store a first aid kit in my car, or a fully charged cell phone in my pocket, or not venture out into the dangerous wild by myself... I'll freely admit to a hostile stance on religion, but I think it is a deserved one. Whatever misconceptions I may have about Christianity are gained from growing up with a religious family and attending services "religiously" for the first two decades of my life. I have more than a passing familiarity with it. I don't think anything I said about religion is wrong though. Religious instruction is targeted predominantly towards children. The claims of the religious are false. Threatening a child with eternal damnation is bad. A consequence of being a Christian is giving 10% of your money to the church. Am I missing anything here?

0Bugmaster13y

In the long run, and on average, yes. There are several courses of action open to me, such as "give up", "keep walking", "attempt to make a tourniquet", etc. Once I know the rate of the blood loss, I can determine which of these actions is most likely to be optimal. You say that "you suspect that you aren't going to make it", but I can't make an informed decision -- f.ex., whether to spend valuable time on making this tourniquet, or to instead invest this time into walking -- based on suspicion alone. I sympathize somewhat with your argument as it applies to religion, but this example you brought up is not analogous. Perhaps not "in advance", but there are many beliefs that can be tested (though not all beliefs can be). To use a trivial example, believing that a lost Nigerian prince can transfer a million dollars to your bank account in exchange for a small fee might make you happy. However, should you act on this belief, you would very likely end up a lot less happy. Testing the belief will allow you to make an informed decision, and thus end up happier in the long run. This is an off-topic nitpick, but the sun is incredibly unlikely to go nova; it will die in a different way.

Lawful Uncertainty

Jakinbandw13y31

[The following is just me being slightly insane about probability and has no bearing on the point of the artical]

I have to point out some flaws with the probability that you are using here. For the most part betting blue all the time works. However Cards don't work quite like that. Each draw of the cards reduces the total number of the card that was drawn. For instance if you have 10 cards, 7 blue, 3 red, and after the first 7 draws there have been 6 blue cards drawn, but only one red card drawn then the probability now favors drawing a red card. In fact, ... (read more)

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Jakinbandw13y30

Hello. I come from HPMoR. I identify as Christian, though my belief and reasons for belief are a bit more complex than that. I'll probably do a post on that later in 'how to convince me 2+2=3'. I also get told that I over think things.

Anyway, that's not the reason I joined. I was reading an article by Eliezer Yudkowsky and he stated that whatever can be destroyed by truth should be. This got me wondering in what context that was meant. My first thought was that it meant that we should strive to destroy all false beliefs, which has the side effect of not l... (read more)

3Jakinbandw13y

Just a minor update. This thread has grown to big for me to follow easily. I am ready every post in it, but real life is taking up a lot of my time right now so I will be very slow to reply. I found the limit of multiple conversations I can hold at one time before I get a headache, and it appears to be less than I suspected. Once again, sorry, didn't mean to drop out, but I stayed up way to late and even now I am recovering from sleep deprivation and still have an annoying headache. My body seems to want to wake up 2 hours before it should. I'll be back once I get my sleeping back to normal, and get some more time. Even then though I am going to try to limit myself to only a couple posts a day because while I enjoy discussions, it's very easy for me to forget everything else when I get drawn into them. I'll be back later. JAKInBAndW

2CWG13y

Welcome. Getting beaten up as a child sucks. Hope your life is a whole lot better now. A somewhat related personal story: I was a Christian. I was plagued by doubts, and decided that I wanted to know what the truth was, even if it was something I didn't want to believe. I knew that I wanted Christianity to be true, but I didn't want to just believe for the sake of it. So I started doing more serious reading. Not rationalist writings, but a thoughtful theologian and historian, NT Wright, who I've also seen appear on documentaries about New Testament history. I read the first two in what he was planning as an epic 5 part series: "The New Testament and the People of God" and "Jesus and the Victory of God". I loved the way he explained history, and how to think about history (i.e. historiography). Also language, and ideas about the universe. He wrote very well, and warmly - you got the sense that this was a real human being, but he lacked the hubris that I'd often found in religious writers, and he seemed more interested in seeking truth than in claiming that he had it. He was the most rationalist of Christian writers that I came across. In the end, the essence of his argument seemed to be that there is a way of understanding the Bible that could tell us something about God - if we believe in a personal god who is involved in the universe... and that if we believe in that kind of god, described in the Old Testament, then the idea of taking human form, and becoming the embodiment of everything that Israel was meant to be, does make sense. (He went into much, much more depth here about , and I can't do him justice at all, 15 years after I read it.) He didn't push the reader to believe - he just stated that it was something that made sense to him, and he did believe it. He painted a picture and told a story which I found very appealing, to be honest. But in the end it didn't fit with how I understood the universe, based on the more solid ground of science. I finally

7TimS13y

Welcome to LessWrong. There's a sizable contingent of people in this community who don't think that uncomfortable truths need be confronted. But I think they are wrong. As you say, one purpose of believing true things is to be better at achieving goals. To exaggerate slightly, if you believe "Things in motion tend to come to a stop," then you will never achieve the goal of building a rocket to visit other planets. You might respond that none of your actual goals are prevented by your false beliefs. But you can't know that in advance unless you know which of your beliefs are false. That's not belief, that's believing that you have a belief.. And adjusting your goals so that they never are frustrated by false beliefs is just a long-winded way of saying Not Achieving Your Original Goals. In theory, there might be a time when you wouldn't choose differently with a true belief that with a false belief. I certainly don't endorse telling an imminently dying man that his beloved wife cheated on him years ago. But circumstances must be quite strange for you to be confident that your choices won't change based on your beliefs. You, the person doing the believing, don't know when you are in situations like that because - by hypothesis - you have an unknown false belief that prevents you from understanding what is going on.

5electricfistula13y

Hi, I joined just to reply to this comment. I don't think there is a lot of complexity hidden behind "whatever can be destroyed by truth should be". If there is a false belief, we should try to replace it with a true one, or at least a less wrong one. Your argument that goes "But what if you were being tortured to death" doesn't really hold up because that argument can be used to reach any conclusion. What if you were experiencing perfect bliss, but then, your mind made up an elaborate fantasy which you believe to be your life... What if there were an evil and capricious deity who would torture you for eternity if you chose Frosted Flakes over Fruit Loops for breakfast? These kinds of "What if" statements followed by something of fundamentally unknowable probability are infinite in number and could be used to reach any conclusion you like and therefore, they don't recomend any conclusion over any other conclusion. I don't think it is more likely that I am being horribly tortured and fantasizing about writing this comment than I think it is likely that I am in perfect bliss and fantasizing about this, and so, this argument does nothing to recomend ignorance over knowledge. In retrospect (say it turns out I am being tortured) I may be happier in ignorance, but I would be an inferior rationalist. I think this applies to Christianity too. At the risk of being polemical, say I believed that Christianity is a scam whereby a select group of people convince the children of the faithful that they are in peril of eternal punishment if they don't grow up to give 10% of their money to the church. Suppose I think that this is harmful to children and adults. Further, suppose I think the material claims of the religion are false. Now, you on the other hand suppose (I assume) that the material claims of the religion are true and that the children of the faithful are being improved by religious instruction. Both of us can't be right here. If we apply the saying "whatever can be