Before I say anything, I’d like to say that convincing other people to become atheist is really hard. Really hard. I wish you the best of luck if you want to go through with it.
I think that if someone isn’t already atheist, explaining to them why they should be will need to cover a lot of ground before its likely to work, and will probably need to be really long.
You never know until you correct a previously false belief. If you care about anything, you should try and hold only true beliefs, because one false belief can be enough to destroy what you hold dear.
This conclusion isn’t obvious to non-LW readers, so you should try unpacking your thinking a little bit. I think you should stick a real life example in here to make it more tangible, ideas like this tend to be glossed over when read casually.
one false belief can be enough to destroy what you hold dear.
Many people hold beliefs dear.
If someone proposes you to adopt one, do not drink that cup, it’s poisoned.
If you have any advice about how to detect flaws in reading, tell them how. Most people would that they shouldn’t adopt obviously fallacious modes of thought, but most don’t know that they have cognitive biases built-in.
Note that all three answers share a common structure.
Most people will not leap to probability from this.
Also, it might help to make it clearer that “I don’t know” means that you spread out your probability.
There is hope however: if we are both reasonable, don’t have flaws in our reasoning, have roughly equal access to evidence, and honestly attempt to reach the truth together, then we will eventually agree. At least one of us will radically change his mind.
Let’s say that halfway through such a quest, you are still 99.999% confident the Earth is spherical, but I am only 60% confident. It means two things:
I changed my mind.
We still disagree.
This time, the disagreament is not as srong, but still significant: you estimate that flat Earth is barely worth considering. I on the other hand, think sailing West means 40% chances of falling at the edge of the world, which is just too risky.
This sweeps all of the math behind Aumann’s Agreement Theorem under the carpet, and does so before people are convinced of the whole probability as belief point.
Also, there are very many visceral reasons that someone disagreeing with you feels like they’re attacking you which you don’t address.
Other notes:
I’d suggest that you talk about what constitutes proper evidence for a belief. Almost every religious person I know insists that something in their life shows them that God exists. I suggest mentioning (and explaining) belief in belief.
I’d suggest that you talk about what constitutes proper evidence for a belief. Almost every religious person I know insists that something in their life shows them that God exists. I suggest mentioning (and explaining) belief in belief.
One of the key pieces to this that I find is surprisingly nonobvious to a lot of people is the difference between concluding that event E is evidence for belief B on the one hand, and concluding that if I perceive E then B must be true on the other.
I am reminded of tutoring high-school physics, where an astonishing number of people have trouble with the idea that when you toss a ball in the air, it immediately starts to accelerate downward, even though it is traveling up. The idea that the acceleration vector and the velocity vector can point in opposite directions just seems to be hard for some people to wrap their brains around, and until they get it their thinking about ballistics is deeply confused.
I think something similar happens with people’s understanding of the relationship between evidence and beliefs, and it is perhaps worth addressing explicitly before you get into examples where people have something emotionally at stake.
One way to short-circuit this is to train the habit of thinking in terms of confidence intervals rather than binary beliefs, but I suspect that’s even more inferential steps away for most of your audience.
So I recommend spending some time on this aspect explicitly,
One of the key pieces to this that I find is surprisingly nonobvious to a lot of people is the difference between concluding that event E is evidence for belief B on the one hand, and concluding that if I perceive E then B must be true on the other.
Good point, will keep in mind.
I once told my Dad that his car accident was only proof of God because he was looking to find evidence to support God, when really it was just medical science and his own body’s repair mechanisms that saved him.
Before I say anything, I’d like to say that convincing other people to become atheist is really hard. Really hard.
I have to completely disagree, although in practice this will make no difference.
Convincing other people to become atheist is so easy that you don’t even have to do it. They will do it all by themselves, given one condition. That one condition is that they value knowing what’s real (which includes verification of “How do I know that what I know is true?”) more than they value almost anything else—including fitting comfortably into the social groups they’ve been raised in. If you can get them to place such a high value on truth then you don’t even need to bring up the question of god. At some point they’ll stumble upon it themselves and then they are trapped—they won’t be able to stop until they’ve completely disabused themselves of the notion.
Unfortunately, getting people to care more about knowing what’s real than almost anything else is really hard. Really hard. So in practice, the difficulty of the task hasn’t been altered at all.
I care quite a lot about knowing what’s real, but not more than almost anything else. Yet, I was still able to become atheist—by reading this website, and especially Eliezer’s post Excluding the Supernatural. I was full-blown religious, and becoming atheist was very painful, and still is.
Before I say anything, I’d like to say that convincing other people to become atheist is really hard. Really hard. I wish you the best of luck if you want to go through with it.
I think that if someone isn’t already atheist, explaining to them why they should be will need to cover a lot of ground before its likely to work, and will probably need to be really long.
This conclusion isn’t obvious to non-LW readers, so you should try unpacking your thinking a little bit. I think you should stick a real life example in here to make it more tangible, ideas like this tend to be glossed over when read casually.
Many people hold beliefs dear.
If you have any advice about how to detect flaws in reading, tell them how. Most people would that they shouldn’t adopt obviously fallacious modes of thought, but most don’t know that they have cognitive biases built-in.
Most people will not leap to probability from this.
Also, it might help to make it clearer that “I don’t know” means that you spread out your probability.
This sweeps all of the math behind Aumann’s Agreement Theorem under the carpet, and does so before people are convinced of the whole probability as belief point.
Also, there are very many visceral reasons that someone disagreeing with you feels like they’re attacking you which you don’t address.
Other notes:
I’d suggest that you talk about what constitutes proper evidence for a belief. Almost every religious person I know insists that something in their life shows them that God exists. I suggest mentioning (and explaining) belief in belief.
I hope that helps.
One of the key pieces to this that I find is surprisingly nonobvious to a lot of people is the difference between concluding that event E is evidence for belief B on the one hand, and concluding that if I perceive E then B must be true on the other.
I am reminded of tutoring high-school physics, where an astonishing number of people have trouble with the idea that when you toss a ball in the air, it immediately starts to accelerate downward, even though it is traveling up. The idea that the acceleration vector and the velocity vector can point in opposite directions just seems to be hard for some people to wrap their brains around, and until they get it their thinking about ballistics is deeply confused.
I think something similar happens with people’s understanding of the relationship between evidence and beliefs, and it is perhaps worth addressing explicitly before you get into examples where people have something emotionally at stake.
One way to short-circuit this is to train the habit of thinking in terms of confidence intervals rather than binary beliefs, but I suspect that’s even more inferential steps away for most of your audience. So I recommend spending some time on this aspect explicitly,
Good point, will keep in mind.
I once told my Dad that his car accident was only proof of God because he was looking to find evidence to support God, when really it was just medical science and his own body’s repair mechanisms that saved him.
It had no effect.
I have to completely disagree, although in practice this will make no difference.
Convincing other people to become atheist is so easy that you don’t even have to do it. They will do it all by themselves, given one condition. That one condition is that they value knowing what’s real (which includes verification of “How do I know that what I know is true?”) more than they value almost anything else—including fitting comfortably into the social groups they’ve been raised in. If you can get them to place such a high value on truth then you don’t even need to bring up the question of god. At some point they’ll stumble upon it themselves and then they are trapped—they won’t be able to stop until they’ve completely disabused themselves of the notion.
Unfortunately, getting people to care more about knowing what’s real than almost anything else is really hard. Really hard. So in practice, the difficulty of the task hasn’t been altered at all.
I care quite a lot about knowing what’s real, but not more than almost anything else. Yet, I was still able to become atheist—by reading this website, and especially Eliezer’s post Excluding the Supernatural. I was full-blown religious, and becoming atheist was very painful, and still is.
Agreed. Though, this seems to be more of a personality trait.
I find that most people I’ve met who seem prone to becoming atheistic already are, or will quickly become so once its sufficiently supported.
People who claim to be agnostic or believe in some divine force seem swayable.
Its a rare few who seem willing to become atheistic, but are full-blown religious.
Granted, I’m trying to figure out how to deal with that, but it seems difficult.