1 - I can give you that one. Still disturbing to read in multiple posts people advocate lying rather than telling the truth to people that aren’t in the “in” crowd.
2, 6 - how familiar are you with Gnosticism?
4 - that is just quibbling with how immortality is defined. Same with 3.
8- yes, it was stretching from anyone else s perspective except the LDS one, so I will give you it.
Singularity seriously consider it likely to be a very bad thing for humanity
and
these scriptures to have been inspired by what, the supreme AI that doesn’t exist yet?
Again, how familiar are you with gnosticism?
7,10- Interesting points. That isn’t what I see happening on the main sequences but it does fit with the scoring of some of my comments. These are also the only two answers that actually address the argument to show that it is not a solidified religion, at least not on this site.
4 - I am setup for cryonics, and I do not ‘believe’ in ‘eternal life’. 1) Even if cryonics works, I am very unlikely to live forever; forever is a long time. I would probably live a long time though, and that sounds better than not. 2) I don’t think cryonics is very likely to work, but it has a high payoff and it’s not absurdly expensive, so it makes sense even if it has a (say) 5% chance of working.
9 - ‘believing’ in the singularity (I hate that word, but I am using it to refer to the time when an intelligence explosion (rapidly self improving intelligence) takes place) is more like Native Americans believing in European settlers after Columbus arrived. Big changes are coming. They might be good or they might be bad, but they’re coming, and you’d like to try to make them good.
This is an example of not being aware that your beliefs are beliefs. Where is the evidence of an intelligence explosion? Where is the AI that can pass a Turing test, leaving alone a strong AI doing so? Are you aware that AI is like Fusion in that it is always some 20 years in the future and has been for much more than 20 years?
Still disturbing to read in multiple posts people advocate lying rather than telling the truth to people that aren’t in the “in” crowd.
What are you referring to?
8- yes, it was stretching from anyone else s perspective except the LDS one, so I will give you it.
LDS aren’t the only religion that has ritual items of clothing (compare for example the tzizit warn by many Orthodox Jews) so that’s one of the less stretched examples in that respect. But it is still silly since people carry specific things for medical reasons all the time. Thus, people who have allergies to common medications will sometimes have armbands to let doctors know.
Again, how familiar are you with gnosticism?
Somewhat but I fail to see the relevancy. Can you expand?
These are also the only two answers that actually address the argument to show that it is not a solidified religion, at least not on this site.
Huh? Among other problems, see the remark that you are confusing transhumanism with ratonalism. You are taking a large different set of ideas some of which don’t normally even go together and putting them all together as an attempt to make something which (vaguely) resembles a religion.
Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People, many of the comments in Crises of Faith, there are other places but those are the two examples I have down for this.
Can you expand?
The tenets of Gnosticism is that the God of the Bible is evil (this is constantly being brought up in the mysterious answers sequence) and here to ensnare us who are the true gods. (Also, that the material world is evil (see uploads)). To free ourselves from this state we must create a god (or ourselves become god), not necessarily that we are to worship this god. Now comes the boot-strapping problem, where does this knowledge come from and how to create this god? The answer is that we have always had it and must merely rediscover it using those that have seen the way as our guides. It is really just a confusion of the temple ceremony (if one is LDS and believes the temple ceremonies were had anciently) with the standard twists.
Hopefully that clears up how I see a connection and don’t see your objections on those points as being arguments against it being a religion.
don’t normally even go together and putting them all together as an attempt to make something which (vaguely) resembles a religion.
Um, really? The primary point there point there doesn’t seem to be about whether only the in-crowd should know about things but whether knowing about cognitive biases is safe for anyone. But maybe that’s just me.
many of the comments in Crises of Faith
But that doesn’t fit with your claim that the truth is being reserved for some elect in-group. No one (from my quick reading of the thread) is talking about just telling things to people who are already members of some super-secret transhumanist rationalist amalgam, just that there are some people out there who aren’t going to respond productively to being told certain things. So the claimed in-group includes a large number of people who haven’t ever heard of Less Wrong.
Regarding the issues with gnosticism, that’s not an accurate summary of gnosticism in that gnostics thought that there was a God superior to the Demiurge. This seems pretty different from a view which has no deity at all and a plan to construct something that if you squint at it in a funny way might sort of resemble a deity if certain results occur. And no one, absolutely no one, would claim that we somehow have to rediscover pre-existing knowledge to be more rational to help make Friendly AI. Indeed, Eliezer has repeatedly emphasized that an important part of science and actual productivity is to realize that there aren’t any ancient sources of hidden knowledge, and that a logician today is really much more worth listening to than anything in Aristotle. (See, e.g. his comments here).
don’t normally even go together and putting them all together as an attempt to make something which (vaguely) resembles a religion.
They are all here on this site.
So the argument is that they are all mentioned here and that some people subscribe to some or all of them? Sure, and some people here like the Red Sox. And a lot of others think that studying pure math is fun. And we have a sizable fraction that thinks that everyone should know how to use Spivak pronons. The presence of certain classes of opinions in some fraction of a population doesn’t necessarily tell you very much.
gnostics thought that there was a God superior to the Demiurge
Only some of them thought this, others thought that they were the superior gods and had been tricked by the demiurge to give up their positions of power. Still others thought that their was no superior god but that they needed to make or become the superior god.
ancient sources of hidden knowledge,
Prexisting is not the same as ancient. The gnostics themselves had to have come up with the ideas of gnosticism without someone previously having come up with that exact idea before. Eliezer has claimed to have seen the need for a friendly AI that goes foom, hence for this thing he is a guide. He claims to have come to this conclusion logically, which the rationality that allows for the use of logic was preexisting within himself. No one else previously needs to have thought of the need for friendly AI (with the notable exception of Science Fiction writers...).
everyone should know how to use Spivak pronons.
I am fine with using one for undetermined gender. I am not going to start using Spivak pronouns.
The presence of certain classes of opinions in some fraction of a population doesn’t necessarily tell you very much.
I am not arguing that everyone is part of this particular religious group. I believe that almost all forms of transhumanism are religious, but not all of them follow the same patterns.
Yes ok. But it seems clear that the most common form didn’t. So right now, we’re cherry picking specific parts of a vague transhumanist cluster and then attaching them to a specific cherry picked gnostic beliefs. Do you see why that might not be persuasive?
Prexisting is not the same as ancient.
Granted. But the point still holds. None of what Eliezer has said claims to have anything to do with deep pre-existing sources of knowledge.
everyone should know how to use Spivak pronons.
I am fine with using one for undetermined gender. I am not going to start using Spivak pronouns.
Missing my point. I don’t care what pronouns you use. The point is that there are a lot of non-standard beliefs that are common here and some standard beliefs too. You can’t just pick the specific set that you think most resembles a religion and act like those are the relevant dominant beliefs. Or rather you can, but it isn’t very productive if you are trying to answer some question of the form “Does the cluster of beliefs common among users at Less Wrong resemble what is generally called a religion?”
Does the cluster of beliefs common among users at Less Wrong resemble what is generally called a religion?
Given that Confucianism is not a religion then as currently constituted neither Less Wrong or Transhumanism is in general a religion. Although, the Singularity2045 people are one if it is more then one guy being very enthusiastic about things.
Unless you want to argue that Less Wrong is a religion, that isn’t helpful. These are still separate things. As it happens most people here endorse both of them—this isn’t a coincidence, the transhumanism is a result of the rationalism—but in general they are still separate. In other places too you seem to have conflated transhumanism in general or rationalism in general with Less Wrong in particular; do you think most transhumanists have ever heard of Eliezer’s sequences? Nor do they necessarily expect a technological singularity or that cryonics will work.
Hm—now that I look at your original comment, you actually wrote
Transhumanism, at least as expressed on this site, is as far as I can tell a religion.
But from there on out you’ve just referred to “transhumanism” rather than this website. Please stop doing this; use the proper terms for what you’re referring to so people actually know what you’re talking about.
Having defined that I was restricting the comments to Transhumanism as expressed on this site I saw no reason to continue restating the issue. Also, many, but not all, of the points brought up are not restricted to transhumanism as found on this site, as has been established with in this discussion, but to transhumanism in general.
The problem is that using one term to mean something closely related is bound to cause confusion even if you explicitly redefine it at the outset. I would really advise against doing that. And you weren’t even entirely explicit about it; you wrote “Transhumanism, at least as expressed on this site, is as far as I can tell a religion” and then used “transhumanism” thereafter. It would have been clearer had you written something like “Transhumanism, at least as expressed on this site (which hereafter I will just refer to as transhumanism)”, but even then I would advise against it for the reason above. (Especially because people often join these discussions in the middle.)
Added the parenthesis. It is too late in the discussion to go through and relabel everything in my opinion. Doing so would also require more of an explanation of what was being talked about in my opinion.
OK, thanks, that’s at least a little helpful. I’ll disappear from this discussion now.
EDIT: To clarify, this is because really I think this whole discussion is pointless and as TheOtherDave and Vladimir Nesov have pointed out, for reasons that should be clear if you’ve read Eliezer’s 37 ways that words can be wrong. :)
I have read 37 ways that words can be wrong. Your argument is that I violated 20, 20 I feel is a valid point so I attempted to fix it. Not all of the points on that list are valid in my opinion. For instance it is necessary to agree on a definition of what is a religion for my argument to make sense and I have attempted to present that argument in detail in my response to TheOtherDave. I have also attempted to show how this discussion is not pointless, but if you disagree with me then we will have to agree to disagree, which I can do because I don’t accept Eliezer as an authority figure.
Yes; #11 was what I considered to be the problem here. I wasn’t thinking about “defying common usage without a reason” as something where the problem was nonobvious; though he happens to have written about it, referring to the sequences for that would be a cannon-to-kill-a-mosquito sort of thing and didn’t even occur to me.
Which doesn’t seem to be a term you’ve defined at all.
Which is why I haven’t brought it up before, I would say go look it up but then I would be violating a few more of the items on that list. It is also much harder to point to an example and say this is a pseudoreligion, but not a religion and not just some other form of association (at least it is harder for me).
Yes, I’ve seen the term before. The reason I’m asking you to define it if you are going to use it is because like the term “religion” it has different meanings in different contexts when different people are using it (although as far as I can tell most people use it to mean “recent religion that I don’t like” in a way similar to how some people use the term “cult”.) So without expanding out precisely what you mean it isn’t a helpful term.
As far as I can tell a pseudoreligion is a religion that hasn’t coalesced as of yet into a distinct set of shared beliefs. That is how I would use the term.
However, this contradicts many of the ways that it is used generally, which seem to match your view of how people use the term. I am therefore not sure that it is helpful term given the common usage and connotations to that usage. Cult is similarly a difficult word, it is useful in a technical sense to define the worship of something but commonly has a very different meaning.
1 - I can give you that one. Still disturbing to read in multiple posts people advocate lying rather than telling the truth to people that aren’t in the “in” crowd.
2, 6 - how familiar are you with Gnosticism?
4 - that is just quibbling with how immortality is defined. Same with 3.
8- yes, it was stretching from anyone else s perspective except the LDS one, so I will give you it.
and
Again, how familiar are you with gnosticism?
7,10- Interesting points. That isn’t what I see happening on the main sequences but it does fit with the scoring of some of my comments. These are also the only two answers that actually address the argument to show that it is not a solidified religion, at least not on this site.
4 - I am setup for cryonics, and I do not ‘believe’ in ‘eternal life’. 1) Even if cryonics works, I am very unlikely to live forever; forever is a long time. I would probably live a long time though, and that sounds better than not. 2) I don’t think cryonics is very likely to work, but it has a high payoff and it’s not absurdly expensive, so it makes sense even if it has a (say) 5% chance of working.
9 - ‘believing’ in the singularity (I hate that word, but I am using it to refer to the time when an intelligence explosion (rapidly self improving intelligence) takes place) is more like Native Americans believing in European settlers after Columbus arrived. Big changes are coming. They might be good or they might be bad, but they’re coming, and you’d like to try to make them good.
This is an example of not being aware that your beliefs are beliefs. Where is the evidence of an intelligence explosion? Where is the AI that can pass a Turing test, leaving alone a strong AI doing so? Are you aware that AI is like Fusion in that it is always some 20 years in the future and has been for much more than 20 years?
What are you referring to?
LDS aren’t the only religion that has ritual items of clothing (compare for example the tzizit warn by many Orthodox Jews) so that’s one of the less stretched examples in that respect. But it is still silly since people carry specific things for medical reasons all the time. Thus, people who have allergies to common medications will sometimes have armbands to let doctors know.
Somewhat but I fail to see the relevancy. Can you expand?
Huh? Among other problems, see the remark that you are confusing transhumanism with ratonalism. You are taking a large different set of ideas some of which don’t normally even go together and putting them all together as an attempt to make something which (vaguely) resembles a religion.
Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People, many of the comments in Crises of Faith, there are other places but those are the two examples I have down for this.
The tenets of Gnosticism is that the God of the Bible is evil (this is constantly being brought up in the mysterious answers sequence) and here to ensnare us who are the true gods. (Also, that the material world is evil (see uploads)). To free ourselves from this state we must create a god (or ourselves become god), not necessarily that we are to worship this god. Now comes the boot-strapping problem, where does this knowledge come from and how to create this god? The answer is that we have always had it and must merely rediscover it using those that have seen the way as our guides. It is really just a confusion of the temple ceremony (if one is LDS and believes the temple ceremonies were had anciently) with the standard twists.
Hopefully that clears up how I see a connection and don’t see your objections on those points as being arguments against it being a religion.
They are all here on this site.
Um, really? The primary point there point there doesn’t seem to be about whether only the in-crowd should know about things but whether knowing about cognitive biases is safe for anyone. But maybe that’s just me.
But that doesn’t fit with your claim that the truth is being reserved for some elect in-group. No one (from my quick reading of the thread) is talking about just telling things to people who are already members of some super-secret transhumanist rationalist amalgam, just that there are some people out there who aren’t going to respond productively to being told certain things. So the claimed in-group includes a large number of people who haven’t ever heard of Less Wrong.
Regarding the issues with gnosticism, that’s not an accurate summary of gnosticism in that gnostics thought that there was a God superior to the Demiurge. This seems pretty different from a view which has no deity at all and a plan to construct something that if you squint at it in a funny way might sort of resemble a deity if certain results occur. And no one, absolutely no one, would claim that we somehow have to rediscover pre-existing knowledge to be more rational to help make Friendly AI. Indeed, Eliezer has repeatedly emphasized that an important part of science and actual productivity is to realize that there aren’t any ancient sources of hidden knowledge, and that a logician today is really much more worth listening to than anything in Aristotle. (See, e.g. his comments here).
So the argument is that they are all mentioned here and that some people subscribe to some or all of them? Sure, and some people here like the Red Sox. And a lot of others think that studying pure math is fun. And we have a sizable fraction that thinks that everyone should know how to use Spivak pronons. The presence of certain classes of opinions in some fraction of a population doesn’t necessarily tell you very much.
Only some of them thought this, others thought that they were the superior gods and had been tricked by the demiurge to give up their positions of power. Still others thought that their was no superior god but that they needed to make or become the superior god.
Prexisting is not the same as ancient. The gnostics themselves had to have come up with the ideas of gnosticism without someone previously having come up with that exact idea before. Eliezer has claimed to have seen the need for a friendly AI that goes foom, hence for this thing he is a guide. He claims to have come to this conclusion logically, which the rationality that allows for the use of logic was preexisting within himself. No one else previously needs to have thought of the need for friendly AI (with the notable exception of Science Fiction writers...).
I am fine with using one for undetermined gender. I am not going to start using Spivak pronouns.
I am not arguing that everyone is part of this particular religious group. I believe that almost all forms of transhumanism are religious, but not all of them follow the same patterns.
Yes ok. But it seems clear that the most common form didn’t. So right now, we’re cherry picking specific parts of a vague transhumanist cluster and then attaching them to a specific cherry picked gnostic beliefs. Do you see why that might not be persuasive?
Granted. But the point still holds. None of what Eliezer has said claims to have anything to do with deep pre-existing sources of knowledge.
Missing my point. I don’t care what pronouns you use. The point is that there are a lot of non-standard beliefs that are common here and some standard beliefs too. You can’t just pick the specific set that you think most resembles a religion and act like those are the relevant dominant beliefs. Or rather you can, but it isn’t very productive if you are trying to answer some question of the form “Does the cluster of beliefs common among users at Less Wrong resemble what is generally called a religion?”
Given that Confucianism is not a religion then as currently constituted neither Less Wrong or Transhumanism is in general a religion. Although, the Singularity2045 people are one if it is more then one guy being very enthusiastic about things.
Unless you want to argue that Less Wrong is a religion, that isn’t helpful. These are still separate things. As it happens most people here endorse both of them—this isn’t a coincidence, the transhumanism is a result of the rationalism—but in general they are still separate. In other places too you seem to have conflated transhumanism in general or rationalism in general with Less Wrong in particular; do you think most transhumanists have ever heard of Eliezer’s sequences? Nor do they necessarily expect a technological singularity or that cryonics will work.
Hm—now that I look at your original comment, you actually wrote
But from there on out you’ve just referred to “transhumanism” rather than this website. Please stop doing this; use the proper terms for what you’re referring to so people actually know what you’re talking about.
Would you rather I use “Less Wrong”ism?
If that’s what you mean, yes.
Having defined that I was restricting the comments to Transhumanism as expressed on this site I saw no reason to continue restating the issue. Also, many, but not all, of the points brought up are not restricted to transhumanism as found on this site, as has been established with in this discussion, but to transhumanism in general.
The problem is that using one term to mean something closely related is bound to cause confusion even if you explicitly redefine it at the outset. I would really advise against doing that. And you weren’t even entirely explicit about it; you wrote “Transhumanism, at least as expressed on this site, is as far as I can tell a religion” and then used “transhumanism” thereafter. It would have been clearer had you written something like “Transhumanism, at least as expressed on this site (which hereafter I will just refer to as transhumanism)”, but even then I would advise against it for the reason above. (Especially because people often join these discussions in the middle.)
Added the parenthesis. It is too late in the discussion to go through and relabel everything in my opinion. Doing so would also require more of an explanation of what was being talked about in my opinion.
OK, thanks, that’s at least a little helpful. I’ll disappear from this discussion now.
EDIT: To clarify, this is because really I think this whole discussion is pointless and as TheOtherDave and Vladimir Nesov have pointed out, for reasons that should be clear if you’ve read Eliezer’s 37 ways that words can be wrong. :)
I have read 37 ways that words can be wrong. Your argument is that I violated 20, 20 I feel is a valid point so I attempted to fix it. Not all of the points on that list are valid in my opinion. For instance it is necessary to agree on a definition of what is a religion for my argument to make sense and I have attempted to present that argument in detail in my response to TheOtherDave. I have also attempted to show how this discussion is not pointless, but if you disagree with me then we will have to agree to disagree, which I can do because I don’t accept Eliezer as an authority figure.
For what it is worth, there may be issues with #9 and #11 also.
Yes; #11 was what I considered to be the problem here. I wasn’t thinking about “defying common usage without a reason” as something where the problem was nonobvious; though he happens to have written about it, referring to the sequences for that would be a cannon-to-kill-a-mosquito sort of thing and didn’t even occur to me.
It might be closer to a Pseudoreligion.
I thought I already answered the issue with 11?
Which doesn’t seem to be a term you’ve defined at all.
Some of them. I’m confused with some of your apparent answers to that so I’m not completely sure. It may be a failing on my part.
Which is why I haven’t brought it up before, I would say go look it up but then I would be violating a few more of the items on that list. It is also much harder to point to an example and say this is a pseudoreligion, but not a religion and not just some other form of association (at least it is harder for me).
Yes, I’ve seen the term before. The reason I’m asking you to define it if you are going to use it is because like the term “religion” it has different meanings in different contexts when different people are using it (although as far as I can tell most people use it to mean “recent religion that I don’t like” in a way similar to how some people use the term “cult”.) So without expanding out precisely what you mean it isn’t a helpful term.
As far as I can tell a pseudoreligion is a religion that hasn’t coalesced as of yet into a distinct set of shared beliefs. That is how I would use the term.
However, this contradicts many of the ways that it is used generally, which seem to match your view of how people use the term. I am therefore not sure that it is helpful term given the common usage and connotations to that usage. Cult is similarly a difficult word, it is useful in a technical sense to define the worship of something but commonly has a very different meaning.