Hi! I’m also sort of new here (only recently created an account but have been reading sporadically for years). For most of my life, I was actually a young-earth creationist, so I know a bit about coming from a closed-minded religious environment. Ironically, I first started to read LessWrong while I was still an ardent YEC (well before LessWrong 2.0), but I didn’t feel that my position was in contradiction to rational thinking. In fact, I prided myself in being able to see through the flaws in creationist arguments whose conclusions agreed with my beliefs and in being able to grasp “evolutionists’” arguments from their perspective (but of course, being able to see the flaws in them as well). Even now, I would say that I understood evolution better back then than most non-biologists who accept it.
The only thing keeping me a YEC for so long (until the end of grad school, if you can believe it) was a very powerful prior moral obligation to maintain a biblically consistent worldview that had been thoroughly indoctrinated into me growing up. It took way more weight of evidence than it should have to convince me (1) that mutation + selection pressure is an effective way of generating diverse and viable designs, (2) that gene regulatory networks produce sufficient abstraction in biological feature space to allow evolutionary search methods to overcome the curse of dimensionality, (3) that the origin of all species from a common ancestor is mathematically possible, (4) that it is statistically inevitable over Earth history, (5) that evolution is in fact homeomorphic to reinforcement learning and thus demonstrably plausible, (6) that all possible ways of classifying species result in the same exact branching tree pattern, (7) that if God did create life, He had to have done so using an evolutionary algorithm indistinguishable in its breadth and detail from the real world, and (8) that the evidence for evolution as a matter of historical fact is irrefutable. It was after realizing all of this that I had a real crisis of faith, which led me to stumble across Eliezer’s Crisis of Faith article after a years of not reading LessWrong. I remember that article, among many others, helped me quite a bit to sort through what I believe and why.
I’m not sure precisely why I stopped reading LessWrong back when I was a YEC, but I think it may have had something to do with me being uncomfortable with Eliezer’s utter certainty in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Such a view would completely destroy the idea that this world is the special creation of an Omni-Max God who has carefully been steering Earth history as part of His Grand Design. Although, I did consider the possibility that the quantum multiverse could be God’s way of running through infinite hypothetical scenarios before creating the One True Universe with maximum expected Divine Utility. However, this didn’t comfort me much since it means that with probability = 1, everything we have ever known and valued is just one of God’s hypothetical scenarios, to be forgotten forever once this scenario plays out to heat death. I’ve since learned to make peace with Many Worlds QM, though.
Thanks. I think it’s important not to forget the path I’ve taken. It’s a major part of my identity even though I no longer endorse what were once my most cherished beliefs, and I feel that it helps connect me with the greater human experience. My parents and (ironically) my training in apologetics instilled in me a thirst for truth and an alertness toward logical fallacies that took me quite far from where I started in life. I guess that a greater emphasis on overcoming confirmation bias would have accelerated my truth-seeking journey a bit more. Unfortunately and surprisingly for a certain species of story-telling social primates, the truth is not necessarily what is believed and taught by the tribe. An idea is not true just because people devote lifetimes to defending it. And an idea is not false just because they spend lifetimes mocking it.
The one thing that held me back the most, I think, is my rather strong deontological instinct. I always saw it as my moral duty to apply the full force of my rational mind to defending the Revealed Truth. I was willing to apply good epistemology to modify my beliefs arbitrarily far, as long as it did not violate the moral constraint that my worldview remain consistent with the holistic biblical narrative. Sometimes that meant radically rethinking religious doctrines in light of science (or conflicting scriptures), but more often it pushed me to rationalize scientific evidence to fit with my core beliefs.
I always recognized that all things that are true are necessarily mutually consistent, that we all inhabit a single self-consistent Reality, and that the Truth must be the minimum-energy harmonization of all existing facts. However, it wasn’t until I was willing to let go of the moral duty to retain the biblical narrative in my set of brute facts that the free energy of my worldview dropped dramatically. It was like a thousand high-tension cables binding all my beliefs to a single (misplaced) epistemological hub were all released at once. Suddenly, everything else in my worldview began to fall into place as all lines of evidence I had already accumulated pulled things into a much lower-energy configuration.
It’s funny how a single powerful prior or a single moral obligation can skew everything else. I wish it were a more widely held virtue to deeply scrutinize one’s most cherished beliefs and to reject them if necessary. Oh well. Maybe in the next million years if we can set up the social selection pressures right.
[T]he many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Such a view would completely destroy the idea that this world is the special creation of an Omni-Max God who has carefully been steering Earth history as part of His Grand Design.
One planet. A hundred billion souls. Four thousand years. Such small ambitions for an ultimate being of infinite power like Vishnu, Shiva or Yahweh. It seems more appropriately scoped for a minor deity.
Well, at the time I had assumed that Earth history was a special case, a small stage temporarily under quarantine from the rest of the universe where the problem of evil could play itself out. I hoped that God had created the rest of the universe to contain innumerable inhabited worlds, all of which would learn the lesson of just how good the Creator’s system of justice is after contrasting against a world that He had allowed to take matters into its own hands. However, now that I’m out of that mindset, I realize that even a small Type-I ASI could easily do a much better job instilling such a lesson into all sentient minds than Yahweh has purportedly done (i.e., without all the blood sacrifices and genocides).
Hi! I’m also sort of new here (only recently created an account but have been reading sporadically for years). For most of my life, I was actually a young-earth creationist, so I know a bit about coming from a closed-minded religious environment. Ironically, I first started to read LessWrong while I was still an ardent YEC (well before LessWrong 2.0), but I didn’t feel that my position was in contradiction to rational thinking. In fact, I prided myself in being able to see through the flaws in creationist arguments whose conclusions agreed with my beliefs and in being able to grasp “evolutionists’” arguments from their perspective (but of course, being able to see the flaws in them as well). Even now, I would say that I understood evolution better back then than most non-biologists who accept it.
The only thing keeping me a YEC for so long (until the end of grad school, if you can believe it) was a very powerful prior moral obligation to maintain a biblically consistent worldview that had been thoroughly indoctrinated into me growing up. It took way more weight of evidence than it should have to convince me (1) that mutation + selection pressure is an effective way of generating diverse and viable designs, (2) that gene regulatory networks produce sufficient abstraction in biological feature space to allow evolutionary search methods to overcome the curse of dimensionality, (3) that the origin of all species from a common ancestor is mathematically possible, (4) that it is statistically inevitable over Earth history, (5) that evolution is in fact homeomorphic to reinforcement learning and thus demonstrably plausible, (6) that all possible ways of classifying species result in the same exact branching tree pattern, (7) that if God did create life, He had to have done so using an evolutionary algorithm indistinguishable in its breadth and detail from the real world, and (8) that the evidence for evolution as a matter of historical fact is irrefutable. It was after realizing all of this that I had a real crisis of faith, which led me to stumble across Eliezer’s Crisis of Faith article after a years of not reading LessWrong. I remember that article, among many others, helped me quite a bit to sort through what I believe and why.
I’m not sure precisely why I stopped reading LessWrong back when I was a YEC, but I think it may have had something to do with me being uncomfortable with Eliezer’s utter certainty in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Such a view would completely destroy the idea that this world is the special creation of an Omni-Max God who has carefully been steering Earth history as part of His Grand Design. Although, I did consider the possibility that the quantum multiverse could be God’s way of running through infinite hypothetical scenarios before creating the One True Universe with maximum expected Divine Utility. However, this didn’t comfort me much since it means that with probability = 1, everything we have ever known and valued is just one of God’s hypothetical scenarios, to be forgotten forever once this scenario plays out to heat death. I’ve since learned to make peace with Many Worlds QM, though.
Welcome! That’s an interesting path you’ve followed.
Thanks. I think it’s important not to forget the path I’ve taken. It’s a major part of my identity even though I no longer endorse what were once my most cherished beliefs, and I feel that it helps connect me with the greater human experience. My parents and (ironically) my training in apologetics instilled in me a thirst for truth and an alertness toward logical fallacies that took me quite far from where I started in life. I guess that a greater emphasis on overcoming confirmation bias would have accelerated my truth-seeking journey a bit more. Unfortunately and surprisingly for a certain species of story-telling social primates, the truth is not necessarily what is believed and taught by the tribe. An idea is not true just because people devote lifetimes to defending it. And an idea is not false just because they spend lifetimes mocking it.
The one thing that held me back the most, I think, is my rather strong deontological instinct. I always saw it as my moral duty to apply the full force of my rational mind to defending the Revealed Truth. I was willing to apply good epistemology to modify my beliefs arbitrarily far, as long as it did not violate the moral constraint that my worldview remain consistent with the holistic biblical narrative. Sometimes that meant radically rethinking religious doctrines in light of science (or conflicting scriptures), but more often it pushed me to rationalize scientific evidence to fit with my core beliefs.
I always recognized that all things that are true are necessarily mutually consistent, that we all inhabit a single self-consistent Reality, and that the Truth must be the minimum-energy harmonization of all existing facts. However, it wasn’t until I was willing to let go of the moral duty to retain the biblical narrative in my set of brute facts that the free energy of my worldview dropped dramatically. It was like a thousand high-tension cables binding all my beliefs to a single (misplaced) epistemological hub were all released at once. Suddenly, everything else in my worldview began to fall into place as all lines of evidence I had already accumulated pulled things into a much lower-energy configuration.
It’s funny how a single powerful prior or a single moral obligation can skew everything else. I wish it were a more widely held virtue to deeply scrutinize one’s most cherished beliefs and to reject them if necessary. Oh well. Maybe in the next million years if we can set up the social selection pressures right.
Welcome!
One planet. A hundred billion souls. Four thousand years. Such small ambitions for an ultimate being of infinite power like Vishnu, Shiva or Yahweh. It seems more appropriately scoped for a minor deity.
Well, at the time I had assumed that Earth history was a special case, a small stage temporarily under quarantine from the rest of the universe where the problem of evil could play itself out. I hoped that God had created the rest of the universe to contain innumerable inhabited worlds, all of which would learn the lesson of just how good the Creator’s system of justice is after contrasting against a world that He had allowed to take matters into its own hands. However, now that I’m out of that mindset, I realize that even a small Type-I ASI could easily do a much better job instilling such a lesson into all sentient minds than Yahweh has purportedly done (i.e., without all the blood sacrifices and genocides).