Those are interesting questions you ask, thanks! I’m more interested in the philosophy stuff, but if I have time I will ask those.
I like your “ritual challenge” idea, but I think it is pretty arrogant to be so disparaging about someone who is paid to think rationally about this sort of thing, and who is recognized to be very good at doing so. For that reason I don’t expect these people to fall prey to that sort of thinking. But I’ll try to keep an eye out for it; it would be very interesting if true. How would I recognize it? Their responses not making sense is a poor signal since there are many other reasons why their responses might not make sense to me.
It’s not that the typical theist response is going to make no sense in some absolute way. I’m sure they have plenty of good arguments to make. If you want to learn about what makes for a good argument, then their responses will be very helpful.
This is merely a case of the bottom line. Arguments reached by arguing backwards from a desired conclusion are not useful as statements about the world—their use is as a sort of verbal theater. If you want to evaluate their claims fairly, you should try to understand what arguments and circumstances were most influential to them.
Epistemically useful arguments, arguments that aren’t games or politics, aren’t like combat. Instead, they are like inviting your enemy into your own home, to see what you see.
If you want to evaluate their claims fairly, you should try to understand what arguments and circumstances were most influential to them.
If someone doesn’t pursue this question about themselves, for themselves, it’s useless for someone else to (merely) ask it, as even if somehow you learn the truth, it probably won’t have the form of a good argument. Arguments need to be designed, they won’t describe the structure of a system as complicated as human mind (with influences of culture), unless there are laws of reasoning firmly in place that ensure that beliefs (by construction) result from arguments.
When a person becomes skilled at careful (correct/useful) argument, that point is reached already in motion, with some of their beliefs formed by something other than careful argument. After epistemic habits become moderately healthy at working on new questions, they aren’t automatically healthy enough to purge the mind of convictions that were previously put in place by less reliable processes (and studying the details of those processes isn’t necessarily a good use of your time; just ask the questions again, not forgetting the question of whether the questions are important enough to work on, to prepare beliefs about).
(In particular, God-related issues seem to be primarily a problem of distorted relevance. If you only observe the world and try to understand it, any specific supernatural hypothesis (i.e. with well-designed meaning) won’t become important enough to worry about. So a healthy way of discarding God, if you find yourself affected, seems to be about realizing that the meaning of the concept is unclear and there is no particular reason to focus on any clarification of it, rather than about falsity of related arguments.)
E.g., you could check whether there’s anything of pragmatic relevance in ideas like the convertibility of transcendentals. Just ditching convertibility of transcendentals can easily imply a God that is not similar to the God of e.g. Aquinas, to a lesser extent Aristotle, to a lesser extent Leibniz. This doesn’t take much time and quickly rules out large portions of the “God” conceptspace. (Also, people who believe in vague “God”s (e.g. “God isn’t a person, God is the Goodness inherent in the structure of the universe”) are forced to refine their concepts; of course, most people think of God ideologically and so the questions most immediately relevant to them would be more sociological than metaphysical, for better or worse.)
(Presumably I disagree with Vladimir_Nesov about the value of thinking about the problem in such terms in the first place; I can only argue that most folks aren’t decision theorists and so must grasp at morality and eternity in other ways, and that I am on the side of epistemic humility.)
Well said. This is why I distinguish “Why do you believe in God” from “What are the best arguments for Theism?” I think I’ll try to tailor my questions to be more personal. Some of these people actually were raised atheist, so we have prima facie no more reason to ascribe “working backwards from a desired conclusion” to them than to ourselves.
Theistic philosophers raised as atheists? Hmm, here is a question you could ask:
“Remember your past self, 3 years before you became a theist. And think, not of the reasons for being a theist you know now, but the one that originally convinced you. What was the reason, and if you could travel back in time and describe that reason, would that past self agree that that was a good reason to become a theist?”
someone who is paid to think rationally about this sort of thing, and who is recognized to be very good at doing so
Does rational mean the same in this context than how the word is usually used on LW? Or does ‘rational’ mean something that is academic, uses certain kind of words, seems rational to outsiders etc..
Yep, it means the same thing, or close enough. Of course there are measurement problems, but the intent behind the pay is for it to reward rational thinking in the usual sense.
Those are interesting questions you ask, thanks! I’m more interested in the philosophy stuff, but if I have time I will ask those.
I like your “ritual challenge” idea, but I think it is pretty arrogant to be so disparaging about someone who is paid to think rationally about this sort of thing, and who is recognized to be very good at doing so. For that reason I don’t expect these people to fall prey to that sort of thinking. But I’ll try to keep an eye out for it; it would be very interesting if true. How would I recognize it? Their responses not making sense is a poor signal since there are many other reasons why their responses might not make sense to me.
It’s not that the typical theist response is going to make no sense in some absolute way. I’m sure they have plenty of good arguments to make. If you want to learn about what makes for a good argument, then their responses will be very helpful.
This is merely a case of the bottom line. Arguments reached by arguing backwards from a desired conclusion are not useful as statements about the world—their use is as a sort of verbal theater. If you want to evaluate their claims fairly, you should try to understand what arguments and circumstances were most influential to them.
Epistemically useful arguments, arguments that aren’t games or politics, aren’t like combat. Instead, they are like inviting your enemy into your own home, to see what you see.
If someone doesn’t pursue this question about themselves, for themselves, it’s useless for someone else to (merely) ask it, as even if somehow you learn the truth, it probably won’t have the form of a good argument. Arguments need to be designed, they won’t describe the structure of a system as complicated as human mind (with influences of culture), unless there are laws of reasoning firmly in place that ensure that beliefs (by construction) result from arguments.
When a person becomes skilled at careful (correct/useful) argument, that point is reached already in motion, with some of their beliefs formed by something other than careful argument. After epistemic habits become moderately healthy at working on new questions, they aren’t automatically healthy enough to purge the mind of convictions that were previously put in place by less reliable processes (and studying the details of those processes isn’t necessarily a good use of your time; just ask the questions again, not forgetting the question of whether the questions are important enough to work on, to prepare beliefs about).
(In particular, God-related issues seem to be primarily a problem of distorted relevance. If you only observe the world and try to understand it, any specific supernatural hypothesis (i.e. with well-designed meaning) won’t become important enough to worry about. So a healthy way of discarding God, if you find yourself affected, seems to be about realizing that the meaning of the concept is unclear and there is no particular reason to focus on any clarification of it, rather than about falsity of related arguments.)
E.g., you could check whether there’s anything of pragmatic relevance in ideas like the convertibility of transcendentals. Just ditching convertibility of transcendentals can easily imply a God that is not similar to the God of e.g. Aquinas, to a lesser extent Aristotle, to a lesser extent Leibniz. This doesn’t take much time and quickly rules out large portions of the “God” conceptspace. (Also, people who believe in vague “God”s (e.g. “God isn’t a person, God is the Goodness inherent in the structure of the universe”) are forced to refine their concepts; of course, most people think of God ideologically and so the questions most immediately relevant to them would be more sociological than metaphysical, for better or worse.)
(Presumably I disagree with Vladimir_Nesov about the value of thinking about the problem in such terms in the first place; I can only argue that most folks aren’t decision theorists and so must grasp at morality and eternity in other ways, and that I am on the side of epistemic humility.)
Well said. This is why I distinguish “Why do you believe in God” from “What are the best arguments for Theism?” I think I’ll try to tailor my questions to be more personal. Some of these people actually were raised atheist, so we have prima facie no more reason to ascribe “working backwards from a desired conclusion” to them than to ourselves.
Theistic philosophers raised as atheists? Hmm, here is a question you could ask:
“Remember your past self, 3 years before you became a theist. And think, not of the reasons for being a theist you know now, but the one that originally convinced you. What was the reason, and if you could travel back in time and describe that reason, would that past self agree that that was a good reason to become a theist?”
Does rational mean the same in this context than how the word is usually used on LW? Or does ‘rational’ mean something that is academic, uses certain kind of words, seems rational to outsiders etc..
Yep, it means the same thing, or close enough. Of course there are measurement problems, but the intent behind the pay is for it to reward rational thinking in the usual sense.