A believer in God is an easy target. Can you find a deep belief in something that you are holding and go through the same steps you outlined above for Stephanie?
A believer in God is an easy target. Can you find a deep belief in something that you are holding and go through the same steps you outlined above for Stephanie?
It turns out to be hard to be clear and specific about the basic concepts of materialism, like time, space, matter and energy.
All I asked Stephanie to do is ground her term “God”. Terms like “space” are easily groundable in hundreds of ways.
For example for “space”: I can use my eyes to estimate the distance between people standing in a field. If the people then seem to be trying their hardest to run toward each other, I expect to observe a minimum amount of time before I’ll see their distances hit near-zero, proportional to the distance apart they are.
If tomorrow there were no space, one way I could distinguish that alternate reality from current reality is by observing the above grounding getting falsified.
Naively defining space as the gaps between stuff produces as much clarity and conviction as defining god as a warm fuzzy feeling. Which could conceivably go missing.
Yes “a warm fuzzy feeling triggered by me thinking of the word ‘God’” could be a valid grounding of “God”; in fact Stephanie’s character probably might ground it that way, since she’s intentionally written as a character who merely possesses belief in belief in God.
Then you have two problems. One of the is that the warm fuzzy feeling definition of God is a perfectly good grounding. The other is that large tracts of science and maths can’t be grounded in sensation. How do you ground imaginary numbers or infinity or the interior of an event horizon?
Yes, easy once armed with the tools of rationality.
LessWrong has the effect of gradually making people lose belief in God, and move beyond the whole frame of arguing about God to all kinds of interesting new framings and new arguments (e.g. simulation universes, decision theories, and AI alignment).
The goal of this post is to briefly encapsulate the typically longer experience of having LW dissolve “God” by asking what “God” specifically refers to in the mind of the believer.
Can you find a deep belief in something that you are holding and go through the same steps you outlined above for Stephanie?
I like to think that my deep beliefs all have specific referents to not be demolishable, so it’s hard for me to know where to start looking for one that doesn’t. Feel free to propose ideas. But if I don’t personally struggle with the weakness that I’m helping others overcome, that seems ok too.
I meant that a believer in God and supernatural in general is an easy target for a non-believer armed with the standard arguments of atheism.
LessWrong has the effect of gradually making people lose belief in God, and move beyond the whole frame of arguing about God to all kinds of interesting new framings and new arguments (e.g. simulation universes, decision theories, and AI alignment).
Yes and no. That’s how I moved from being an atheist to being an agnostic, given the options above. There are just too many “rational” possibilities instrumentally indistinguishable from God.
I like to think that my deep beliefs all have specific referents to not be demolishable, so it’s hard for me to know where to start looking for one that doesn’t. Feel free to propose ideas. But if I don’t personally struggle with the weakness that I’m helping others overcome, that seems ok too.
I call it the folly of a bright dilettante. You are human with all the human failings, which includes deeply held mind projection fallacies. A deeply held belief feels like an unquestionable truth from the inside, so much so, we are unlikely to even notice that it’s just a belief, and defend it against anyone who questions it. If you want an example, I’ve pointed out multiple times that privileging the model of objective reality (the map/territory distinction) over other models is one of those ubiquitous beliefs. Now that you have read this sentence, pause for a moment and notice your emotions about it. Really, take a few seconds. List them. Now compare it with the emotions a devout person would feel when told that God is just a belief. If you are honest with yourself, then you are likely to admit that there is little difference. Actually, a much likelier outcome is skipping the noticing entirely and either ignoring the uncomfortable question as stupid/naive/unenlightened, or rushing to come up with arguments defending your belief. So, if you have never demolished your own deeply held belief, and went through the emotional anguish of reframing your views unflinchingly, you are not qualified to advise others how to do it.
If you want an example, I’ve pointed out multiple times that privileging the model of objective reality (the map/territory distinction) over other models is one of those ubiquitous beliefs.
Ya I was hoping for an example, thanks :)
Now that you have read this sentence, pause for a moment and notice your emotions about it. Really, take a few seconds. List them.
My first emotion was “Come on, you want to challenge objective reality? That’s a quality belief that’s table stakes for almost all productive discussions we can have!”
Then I thought, “Okay fine, no problem, I’m mature and introspective enough to do this rationality exercise, I don’t want to be a hypocrite to change others’ minds about religion without allowing my own mind to be changed by the same sound methods, plus anyway this community will probably love me if I do by chance have a big fundamental mind change on this topic, so I don’t care much if I do or not, although it’ll become a more time-consuming exercise to have such an epiphany.”
Then I thought, “Okay but I don’t even know where to begin imagining what a lack of objective reality looks like, it just feels like confusion, similar to when I try to imagine e.g. a non-reductionist universe with ontologically fundamental mental entities.”
Now compare it with the emotions a devout person would feel when told that God is just a belief. If you are honest with yourself, then you are likely to admit that there is little difference. … So, if you have never demolished your own deeply held belief, and went through the emotional anguish of reframing your views unflinchingly, you are not qualified to advise others how to do it.
For my first emotion, sure, there’s little difference in the reaction between me and a God-believer. But for my subsequent introspection, I think I’m doing better and being more rational than most God-believers. That’s why I consider myself a pretty skilled rationalist! Perhaps I have something to show for spending thousands of hours reading LW posts?
I think I have the power to have crises of faith. FWIW, I realized I personally do “believe in God” in the sense that I believe Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis has more than a 50% chance of being true, and it’s a serviceable grounding of the term “God” to refer to an intelligence running the simulation—although it may just be alien teenagers or something, so I certainly don’t like bringing in the connotations of the word “God”, but it’s something right?
I don’t even know where to begin imagining what a lack of objective reality looks like
Well. Now you have stumbled upon another standard fallacy, argument from the failure of imagination. If you look up various non-realist epistemologies, it could be a good start.
I think I’m doing better and being more rational than most God-believers. That’s why I consider myself a pretty skilled rationalist!
Uh. Depends on how you define being rational. If you follow Eliezer and define it as winning, then there are many believers that are way ahead of you.
Uh. Depends on how you define being rational. If you follow Eliezer and define it as winning, then there are many believers that are way ahead of you.
If you aren’t controlling for confounding factors, like being born into an extremely rich family, and instead just compare the most successful believers and the most successful rationalists (or, in this case, Liron in particular), of course we’re going to get blown out of the water. There are how many rationalists, again? The interesting thing is to ask, if we control for all relevant factors, does rationality training have a good effect size? This is a good question, with quite a bit of previous discussion.
If you’ll allow me to guess one potential response, let’s suppose there’s no effect. What then—are we all being “irrational”, and is the entire rationality project a failure? Not necessarily. This depends on what progress is being made (as benefits can be nonlinear in skill level). For example, maybe I’m learning Shaolin Kenpo, and I go from white to yellow belt. I go up to a buff guy on the street and get my ass kicked. Have I failed to learn any Shaolin Kenpo?
>> I don’t even know where to begin imagining what a lack of objective reality looks like
Well. Now you have stumbled upon another standard fallacy, argument from the failure of imagination. If you look up various non-realist epistemologies, it could be a good start.
Of course, I wasn’t trying to argue the claim, I was just reporting my experience.
Isn’t the map/territory distinction implied by minds not being fundamental to the universe, which follows from the heavily experimentally demonstrated hypothesis that the universe runs on math?
I don’t want to get into this discussion now, I’ve said enough about my views on the topic in other threads. Certainly “the heavily experimentally demonstrated hypothesis that the universe runs on math” is a vague enough statement to not even be worth challenging, too much wiggle room.
A believer in God is an easy target. Can you find a deep belief in something that you are holding and go through the same steps you outlined above for Stephanie?
It turns out to be hard to be clear and specific about the basic concepts of materialism, like time, space, matter and energy.
All I asked Stephanie to do is ground her term “God”. Terms like “space” are easily groundable in hundreds of ways.
For example for “space”: I can use my eyes to estimate the distance between people standing in a field. If the people then seem to be trying their hardest to run toward each other, I expect to observe a minimum amount of time before I’ll see their distances hit near-zero, proportional to the distance apart they are.
If tomorrow there were no space, one way I could distinguish that alternate reality from current reality is by observing the above grounding getting falsified.
Naively defining space as the gaps between stuff produces as much clarity and conviction as defining god as a warm fuzzy feeling. Which could conceivably go missing.
Yes “a warm fuzzy feeling triggered by me thinking of the word ‘God’” could be a valid grounding of “God”; in fact Stephanie’s character probably might ground it that way, since she’s intentionally written as a character who merely possesses belief in belief in God.
So whats superior about your epistemology?
Stephanie suffers from belief-in-belief (which she wrongly thinks is just an ordinary belief with an external referent) and I don’t
Are you sure? You seem to believe in materialism, without being able to give proper explanations of space, time, matter and energy.
I did give a valid grounding of “space”.
That would depend on the meaning of “grounding”.
I define “grounding” in How Specificity Works
Then you have two problems. One of the is that the warm fuzzy feeling definition of God is a perfectly good grounding. The other is that large tracts of science and maths can’t be grounded in sensation. How do you ground imaginary numbers or infinity or the interior of an event horizon?
I’d refer you to https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Highly_Advanced_Epistemology_101_for_Beginners
I’ve read it.
Yes, easy once armed with the tools of rationality.
LessWrong has the effect of gradually making people lose belief in God, and move beyond the whole frame of arguing about God to all kinds of interesting new framings and new arguments (e.g. simulation universes, decision theories, and AI alignment).
The goal of this post is to briefly encapsulate the typically longer experience of having LW dissolve “God” by asking what “God” specifically refers to in the mind of the believer.
I like to think that my deep beliefs all have specific referents to not be demolishable, so it’s hard for me to know where to start looking for one that doesn’t. Feel free to propose ideas. But if I don’t personally struggle with the weakness that I’m helping others overcome, that seems ok too.
I meant that a believer in God and supernatural in general is an easy target for a non-believer armed with the standard arguments of atheism.
Yes and no. That’s how I moved from being an atheist to being an agnostic, given the options above. There are just too many “rational” possibilities instrumentally indistinguishable from God.
I call it the folly of a bright dilettante. You are human with all the human failings, which includes deeply held mind projection fallacies. A deeply held belief feels like an unquestionable truth from the inside, so much so, we are unlikely to even notice that it’s just a belief, and defend it against anyone who questions it. If you want an example, I’ve pointed out multiple times that privileging the model of objective reality (the map/territory distinction) over other models is one of those ubiquitous beliefs. Now that you have read this sentence, pause for a moment and notice your emotions about it. Really, take a few seconds. List them. Now compare it with the emotions a devout person would feel when told that God is just a belief. If you are honest with yourself, then you are likely to admit that there is little difference. Actually, a much likelier outcome is skipping the noticing entirely and either ignoring the uncomfortable question as stupid/naive/unenlightened, or rushing to come up with arguments defending your belief. So, if you have never demolished your own deeply held belief, and went through the emotional anguish of reframing your views unflinchingly, you are not qualified to advise others how to do it.
Ya I was hoping for an example, thanks :)
My first emotion was “Come on, you want to challenge objective reality? That’s a quality belief that’s table stakes for almost all productive discussions we can have!”
Then I thought, “Okay fine, no problem, I’m mature and introspective enough to do this rationality exercise, I don’t want to be a hypocrite to change others’ minds about religion without allowing my own mind to be changed by the same sound methods, plus anyway this community will probably love me if I do by chance have a big fundamental mind change on this topic, so I don’t care much if I do or not, although it’ll become a more time-consuming exercise to have such an epiphany.”
Then I thought, “Okay but I don’t even know where to begin imagining what a lack of objective reality looks like, it just feels like confusion, similar to when I try to imagine e.g. a non-reductionist universe with ontologically fundamental mental entities.”
For my first emotion, sure, there’s little difference in the reaction between me and a God-believer. But for my subsequent introspection, I think I’m doing better and being more rational than most God-believers. That’s why I consider myself a pretty skilled rationalist! Perhaps I have something to show for spending thousands of hours reading LW posts?
I think I have the power to have crises of faith. FWIW, I realized I personally do “believe in God” in the sense that I believe Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis has more than a 50% chance of being true, and it’s a serviceable grounding of the term “God” to refer to an intelligence running the simulation—although it may just be alien teenagers or something, so I certainly don’t like bringing in the connotations of the word “God”, but it’s something right?
I would think it is like dreaming.. an individual having experiences that aren’t shared with or comparable to anyone else’s.
Well. Now you have stumbled upon another standard fallacy, argument from the failure of imagination. If you look up various non-realist epistemologies, it could be a good start.
Uh. Depends on how you define being rational. If you follow Eliezer and define it as winning, then there are many believers that are way ahead of you.
If you aren’t controlling for confounding factors, like being born into an extremely rich family, and instead just compare the most successful believers and the most successful rationalists (or, in this case, Liron in particular), of course we’re going to get blown out of the water. There are how many rationalists, again? The interesting thing is to ask, if we control for all relevant factors, does rationality training have a good effect size? This is a good question, with quite a bit of previous discussion.
If you’ll allow me to guess one potential response, let’s suppose there’s no effect. What then—are we all being “irrational”, and is the entire rationality project a failure? Not necessarily. This depends on what progress is being made (as benefits can be nonlinear in skill level). For example, maybe I’m learning Shaolin Kenpo, and I go from white to yellow belt. I go up to a buff guy on the street and get my ass kicked. Have I failed to learn any Shaolin Kenpo?
Of course, I wasn’t trying to argue the claim, I was just reporting my experience.
Great! Well done! Noticing your own emotions is a great step most aspiring rationalists lack.
Thanks
Isn’t the map/territory distinction implied by minds not being fundamental to the universe, which follows from the heavily experimentally demonstrated hypothesis that the universe runs on math?
I don’t want to get into this discussion now, I’ve said enough about my views on the topic in other threads. Certainly “the heavily experimentally demonstrated hypothesis that the universe runs on math” is a vague enough statement to not even be worth challenging, too much wiggle room.