What I find remarkable about this discussion is that even though it is among rationalists, the claim is being made and defended that theists are less rational without appealing to evidence. Instead, atheists seem to speculate that theists must be less rational.
However you define rational, what is some evidence that theists are less that than atheists are?
It is generally agreed upon by most people here that theism, as a belief about the objective nature of reality, is less rational than atheism for all sorts of reasons that shouldn’t really need rehashing.
The jump from that point of consensus to theists being intrinsically less rational than atheists is to my eye wholly unsupported. Someone whose one and only rational belief is that there are no supernatural entities is, on the whole, not very rational at all.
What is the rational significance (significance in the context of rationality) of a belief being rational or irrational if it has no correlation with rational or irrational outcomes?
[I qualify here that I am referring to some kind of theism which is consistent with, though not supported by, all empirical evidence.]
What is the rational significance (significance in the context of rationality) of a belief being rational or irrational if it has no correlation with rational or irrational outcomes?
[I really should qualify here that I am referring to some kind of theism which is consistent with, though not supported by, all empirical evidence.]
I’m not sure what you mean by rational or irrational outcomes; there are only outcomes that a belief predicts. If a belief predicts results identical to its own negation (that is, does not correlate with results at all), it is useless and can be safely culled by Occam’s Razor.
Also, the only theistic hypotheses thus far that have not produced poorer results than some non-theistic hypothesis are ones positing supernatural entities that either do not interact measurably with the universe or do so only in ways indistinguishable from random chance, neither of which is a particularly common idea among actual theists, so it’s something of a distraction to limit ourselves only to theistic beliefs that are not reflective of a typical theist.
If a belief predicts results identical to its own negation (that is, does not correlate with results at all), it is useless and can be safely culled by Occam’s Razor.
I believe that of the last 100 people I’ve friended on Facebook, at least one was conceived with a sperm cell originating from their father’s left testicle and at least one was conceived with a sperm cell originating from their father’s right testicle.
This belief does not correlate with results, and I agree it’s useless, but I don’t think it “can be safely culled by Occam’s Razor”.
so it’s something of a distraction to limit ourselves only to theistic beliefs that are not reflective of a typical theist.
When you defend an assertion X=Y, you must defend it for the most difficult case. I have no objections to the claim that most religious views are irrational.
When you defend an assertion X=Y, you must defend it for the difficult case. I have no objections to the claim that some religious views are irrational.
And I said above why even so the views would be irrational. Do you disagree that it is not rational to hold beliefs with no predictive power?
Do you disagree that it is not rational to hold beliefs with no predictive power?
Well, I did yesterday. What I mean is, I sat with that idea for a while and believed it the extent that it was convincing, but now I would like to challenge/test it more carefully.
So right now I am considering the hypothesis that it makes no difference to being rational if you hold certain beliefs, if they hold no predictive power.
I always feel uncomfortable with anything relying on Occam’s Razor: Occam’s Razor is meant to indicate the probability of something, it doesn’t have the power to decide things one way or the other. (For example the probability of picking a number from an infinite set is 0 -- not close to 0, but actually 0 -- but that doesn’t mean it would be impossible to pick a number from an infinite set if there was such a thing as an infinite set. I’m just not sure.)
What convinced me before, instead, was the argument that if there is no reason to believe something, then it is irrational to unnecessarily assume it. Now I am wondering if there could be any harm in doing so.
what is some evidence that theists are less that than atheists are?
All the evidence that theism is false is also evidence that theists are irrational, given the assumption that rational people tend to believe true things rather than false things.
Yes. With a small change in words, I convinced myself your logic is not circular:
Evidence supports: Atheism is true and theism is false.
Therefore, atheism is a rational belief (based on evidence) and theism is an irrational belief (not based on evidence).
Given the assumption that rational people tend to hold rational beliefs rather than irrational ones…
Theism is evidence that a person is irrational.
The logic seems OK, but for some reason, I don’t find that satisfying. I don’t feel convinced in the way I usually do when something is true. Can anyone help me identify why? (will only be grateful if you identify an idiosyncratic irrationality)
Later: The reason why I don’t find this satisfying, after thinking about it a while, is because I would like “true” to have more significance. I guess I don’t care if something is true or not if it has no predictive consequence. And I think that that is a rational stance.
It’s because (“Theism is evidence that a person is irrational.”) theism is evidence that is very easily screened off by other easily noted characteristics. Suppose for the sake of argument that given no other knowledge about a person than their label “theist” rather than “atheist” it is more likely they will be wrong about some other subject than if their label was “atheist”.
Fine and dandy, but trace the flow of evidence through the causal diagram: “theist” is less likely given that “they’re rational”, so now it’s more likely that “they’re irrational”. In particular, by irrational here I mean they have some set of cognitive algorithms not shared by all humans which makes them wrong about many subjects. This then directly propagates evidence that they will be wrong about some other specific subject. But it is screened off by evidence that these counterfactual cognitive algorithms do not in fact make them be wrong about that other specific subject. And that evidence is readily gathered by reading a post or two of theirs on the subject in question.
You could’ve said it simpler: Reading a couple of essays on the subject written by a person is more informative about whether the person is reasonable about that subject than learning whether the person is a theist.
Well, that’s true, but it misses the point that not only is the “reading essays” evidence more informative than the “theist” evidence, the former radically changes how you should update on the latter. If most of the probability flow from “theist” to “wrong about other subject” flows through the bit that “reading essays” makes improbable, then to make up arbitrary exaggerated numbers with the right qualitative behavior:
given the assumption that rational people tend to believe true things rather than false things
I would say it’s the above assumption is irrational, being as it goes quite against the evidence we have.
Everyone above a certain baseline level of mental functioning believes at least some irrational and/or false things.… including you. Some of the things you believe are at least as irrational as theism, and some subset of them have at least as much influence on your behavior as theism does on the average theist.
(By “you”, I don’t only mean Roko, but whoever is reading this comment. Unless of course “you” are Omega, in which case I might give you the benefit of the doubt. ;-) )
Everyone above a certain baseline level of mental functioning believes at least some irrational and/or false things.… including you. Some of the things you believe are at least as irrational as theism, and some subset of them have at least as much influence on your behavior as theism does on the average theist.
My point is that rationalism doesn’t automatically grant a person the ability to extinguish every irrational idea they’ve ever had, nor to become instantly aware of all the beliefs they currently hold.
One must distinguish between ability to reason, and one’s accomplishments in a given field of reasoning. Throwing off theism is an accomplishment, but the lack of that accomplishment doesn’t automatically mean a lack of ability.
And I don’t see how that relates to the Fallacy of Grey in any way, since my point was that people not only make different choices about which fields to apply their rationality to, but also that people have differing levels of awareness about what beliefs might need the application, entirely independent of their ability.
I think the relation to the Fallacy of Gray is that you used “rational people believe some false things” to refute “rational people TEND to believe true things”. Still, IAWYC.
″...what is some evidence that theists are less [rational] than atheists are?” is an incomplete question.
(tl;dr By talking about theists as a group, we are organizing people around their belief in something false that they generally should not believe in that both causes and is correlated with more general irrationality. Other than the criteria we used to organize the group, we shouldn’t expect to find many other universals, just significant patterns with exceptions.)
Are all theists less rational than all atheists are? Obviously not, under any important definition, for the same reason each person who eats 4000 calories and less than 50g protein daily is not less healthy than each person who eats fewer calories and more protein, and each person looking at a Japanese newspaper does not speak better Japanese than each person not looking at a Japanese newspaper speaks Japanese.
We can still say important things about the basis by which we organized people into these groups. They can have both direct causal effects and statistical significance from indirect links to other measurable things. For example, looking at a Japanese newspaper can cause one to get better at speaking Japanese, and looking at a Japanese newspaper is correlated with having Japanese relatives who help one learn Japanese.
Finally: all else equal, looking at a Japanese newspaper is better than nothing for learning Japanese, and it’s also better than what most people are doing now for learning Japanese.
If we’re organizing people into “theist” group and a second group made of everyone else, “theists are less [rational] than atheists are,” represents some different notions that have different proper responses among them.
If the assertion is “being a theist is correlated with being irrational (and/or playing the banjo, etc.),” then that claim needs to defer to science and new evidence, as I think you are saying.
I say “defer to” because there is an appropriate confidence someone with my amount of evidence should have in the claim. I feel very comfortable claiming that the top contributors to lesswrong are almost certainly not also the top contributors to the magazine Seventeen, despite a dearth of scientific studies on the subject.
It may be worthwhile to discuss the amount of confidence someone with a certain amount of evidence should have in a specific claim. My first response to a claim like “People who believe the soul influences some human speech (or theists, or whoever) are, on average, as rational as those who believe speech is not influenced by a soul,” or “The (first? I’m not sure what conspiracies are popular) moon landing was faked,” is to ask about what evidence the claimant currently possesses and how they process it. This is often more important than determining the truth of the original claim, which often will be best determined by gathering new evidence. In such a case, what’s really being discussed is not the truth of the original proposition, but the reasonableness of the original statement, so no evidence on its truth is relevant.
If the assertion is “being a theist causes irrationality,” truths are entangled. That’s not a dogma I cling to, and each individual has other influences in his or her life that may make them an exception, but I’d like to hear some kind of response to those arguments or I won’t feel obliged to go looking for evidence (unless something important hinges on my being right).
This depends on theism being irrational, which I think it is for most people—not having conducted studies, of course. For many people, theism is rational, particularly the very young, who should notice a pattern forming in which their parents are eventually right about things the child does not understand because they are too complex.
This does not depend on acts (such as thoughts) designed to induce a belief in theism being irrational.
If the assertion is “all else equal, a person with a given set of beliefs is more rational without the additional belief of theism,” then yes, on average...if we have organized all human minds by their belief in a proposition that most should think false, then those who are inappropriately theist are many, those who are inappropriately atheist are few, those who are appropriately theist are few, those who are appropriately atheist are comparatively many.
If the assertion is “based on the knowledge held by the reader of this sentence, he or she is almost certainly being irrational if he or she is theistic,” that is true with a good deal of help from selection bias, but one could say a similar thing about American adults.
What I find remarkable about this discussion is that even though it is among rationalists, the claim is being made and defended that theists are less rational without appealing to evidence. Instead, atheists seem to speculate that theists must be less rational.
However you define rational, what is some evidence that theists are less that than atheists are?
It is generally agreed upon by most people here that theism, as a belief about the objective nature of reality, is less rational than atheism for all sorts of reasons that shouldn’t really need rehashing.
The jump from that point of consensus to theists being intrinsically less rational than atheists is to my eye wholly unsupported. Someone whose one and only rational belief is that there are no supernatural entities is, on the whole, not very rational at all.
What is the rational significance (significance in the context of rationality) of a belief being rational or irrational if it has no correlation with rational or irrational outcomes?
[I qualify here that I am referring to some kind of theism which is consistent with, though not supported by, all empirical evidence.]
I’m not sure what you mean by rational or irrational outcomes; there are only outcomes that a belief predicts. If a belief predicts results identical to its own negation (that is, does not correlate with results at all), it is useless and can be safely culled by Occam’s Razor.
Also, the only theistic hypotheses thus far that have not produced poorer results than some non-theistic hypothesis are ones positing supernatural entities that either do not interact measurably with the universe or do so only in ways indistinguishable from random chance, neither of which is a particularly common idea among actual theists, so it’s something of a distraction to limit ourselves only to theistic beliefs that are not reflective of a typical theist.
I believe that of the last 100 people I’ve friended on Facebook, at least one was conceived with a sperm cell originating from their father’s left testicle and at least one was conceived with a sperm cell originating from their father’s right testicle.
This belief does not correlate with results, and I agree it’s useless, but I don’t think it “can be safely culled by Occam’s Razor”.
But in the interest of truth?
When you defend an assertion X=Y, you must defend it for the most difficult case. I have no objections to the claim that most religious views are irrational.
And I said above why even so the views would be irrational. Do you disagree that it is not rational to hold beliefs with no predictive power?
Well, I did yesterday. What I mean is, I sat with that idea for a while and believed it the extent that it was convincing, but now I would like to challenge/test it more carefully.
So right now I am considering the hypothesis that it makes no difference to being rational if you hold certain beliefs, if they hold no predictive power.
I always feel uncomfortable with anything relying on Occam’s Razor: Occam’s Razor is meant to indicate the probability of something, it doesn’t have the power to decide things one way or the other. (For example the probability of picking a number from an infinite set is 0 -- not close to 0, but actually 0 -- but that doesn’t mean it would be impossible to pick a number from an infinite set if there was such a thing as an infinite set. I’m just not sure.)
What convinced me before, instead, was the argument that if there is no reason to believe something, then it is irrational to unnecessarily assume it. Now I am wondering if there could be any harm in doing so.
All the evidence that theism is false is also evidence that theists are irrational, given the assumption that rational people tend to believe true things rather than false things.
Yes. With a small change in words, I convinced myself your logic is not circular:
Evidence supports: Atheism is true and theism is false. Therefore, atheism is a rational belief (based on evidence) and theism is an irrational belief (not based on evidence).
Given the assumption that rational people tend to hold rational beliefs rather than irrational ones…
Theism is evidence that a person is irrational.
The logic seems OK, but for some reason, I don’t find that satisfying. I don’t feel convinced in the way I usually do when something is true. Can anyone help me identify why? (will only be grateful if you identify an idiosyncratic irrationality)
Later: The reason why I don’t find this satisfying, after thinking about it a while, is because I would like “true” to have more significance. I guess I don’t care if something is true or not if it has no predictive consequence. And I think that that is a rational stance.
It’s because (“Theism is evidence that a person is irrational.”) theism is evidence that is very easily screened off by other easily noted characteristics. Suppose for the sake of argument that given no other knowledge about a person than their label “theist” rather than “atheist” it is more likely they will be wrong about some other subject than if their label was “atheist”.
Fine and dandy, but trace the flow of evidence through the causal diagram: “theist” is less likely given that “they’re rational”, so now it’s more likely that “they’re irrational”. In particular, by irrational here I mean they have some set of cognitive algorithms not shared by all humans which makes them wrong about many subjects. This then directly propagates evidence that they will be wrong about some other specific subject. But it is screened off by evidence that these counterfactual cognitive algorithms do not in fact make them be wrong about that other specific subject. And that evidence is readily gathered by reading a post or two of theirs on the subject in question.
You could’ve said it simpler:
Reading a couple of essays on the subject written by a person is more informative about whether the person is reasonable about that subject than learning whether the person is a theist.
Well, that’s true, but it misses the point that not only is the “reading essays” evidence more informative than the “theist” evidence, the former radically changes how you should update on the latter. If most of the probability flow from “theist” to “wrong about other subject” flows through the bit that “reading essays” makes improbable, then to make up arbitrary exaggerated numbers with the right qualitative behavior:
log(P(wrong|theist)/P(wrong|~theist)) = L(wrong|theist) = 0.1
L(wrong|reasonableessays) = −1.0
L(wrong|theist&reasonableessays) = −0.99 rather than −0.9.
I would say it’s the above assumption is irrational, being as it goes quite against the evidence we have.
Everyone above a certain baseline level of mental functioning believes at least some irrational and/or false things.… including you. Some of the things you believe are at least as irrational as theism, and some subset of them have at least as much influence on your behavior as theism does on the average theist.
(By “you”, I don’t only mean Roko, but whoever is reading this comment. Unless of course “you” are Omega, in which case I might give you the benefit of the doubt. ;-) )
This is useless blurring, Fallacy of Gray.
My point is that rationalism doesn’t automatically grant a person the ability to extinguish every irrational idea they’ve ever had, nor to become instantly aware of all the beliefs they currently hold.
One must distinguish between ability to reason, and one’s accomplishments in a given field of reasoning. Throwing off theism is an accomplishment, but the lack of that accomplishment doesn’t automatically mean a lack of ability.
And I don’t see how that relates to the Fallacy of Grey in any way, since my point was that people not only make different choices about which fields to apply their rationality to, but also that people have differing levels of awareness about what beliefs might need the application, entirely independent of their ability.
I think the relation to the Fallacy of Gray is that you used “rational people believe some false things” to refute “rational people TEND to believe true things”. Still, IAWYC.
The concept of all else equal/ceteris paribus might be useful here.
What do you mean?
″...what is some evidence that theists are less [rational] than atheists are?” is an incomplete question.
(tl;dr By talking about theists as a group, we are organizing people around their belief in something false that they generally should not believe in that both causes and is correlated with more general irrationality. Other than the criteria we used to organize the group, we shouldn’t expect to find many other universals, just significant patterns with exceptions.)
Are all theists less rational than all atheists are? Obviously not, under any important definition, for the same reason each person who eats 4000 calories and less than 50g protein daily is not less healthy than each person who eats fewer calories and more protein, and each person looking at a Japanese newspaper does not speak better Japanese than each person not looking at a Japanese newspaper speaks Japanese.
We can still say important things about the basis by which we organized people into these groups. They can have both direct causal effects and statistical significance from indirect links to other measurable things. For example, looking at a Japanese newspaper can cause one to get better at speaking Japanese, and looking at a Japanese newspaper is correlated with having Japanese relatives who help one learn Japanese.
Finally: all else equal, looking at a Japanese newspaper is better than nothing for learning Japanese, and it’s also better than what most people are doing now for learning Japanese.
If we’re organizing people into “theist” group and a second group made of everyone else, “theists are less [rational] than atheists are,” represents some different notions that have different proper responses among them.
If the assertion is “being a theist is correlated with being irrational (and/or playing the banjo, etc.),” then that claim needs to defer to science and new evidence, as I think you are saying.
I say “defer to” because there is an appropriate confidence someone with my amount of evidence should have in the claim. I feel very comfortable claiming that the top contributors to lesswrong are almost certainly not also the top contributors to the magazine Seventeen, despite a dearth of scientific studies on the subject.
It may be worthwhile to discuss the amount of confidence someone with a certain amount of evidence should have in a specific claim. My first response to a claim like “People who believe the soul influences some human speech (or theists, or whoever) are, on average, as rational as those who believe speech is not influenced by a soul,” or “The (first? I’m not sure what conspiracies are popular) moon landing was faked,” is to ask about what evidence the claimant currently possesses and how they process it. This is often more important than determining the truth of the original claim, which often will be best determined by gathering new evidence. In such a case, what’s really being discussed is not the truth of the original proposition, but the reasonableness of the original statement, so no evidence on its truth is relevant.
If the assertion is “being a theist causes irrationality,” truths are entangled. That’s not a dogma I cling to, and each individual has other influences in his or her life that may make them an exception, but I’d like to hear some kind of response to those arguments or I won’t feel obliged to go looking for evidence (unless something important hinges on my being right).
This depends on theism being irrational, which I think it is for most people—not having conducted studies, of course. For many people, theism is rational, particularly the very young, who should notice a pattern forming in which their parents are eventually right about things the child does not understand because they are too complex.
This does not depend on acts (such as thoughts) designed to induce a belief in theism being irrational.
If the assertion is “all else equal, a person with a given set of beliefs is more rational without the additional belief of theism,” then yes, on average...if we have organized all human minds by their belief in a proposition that most should think false, then those who are inappropriately theist are many, those who are inappropriately atheist are few, those who are appropriately theist are few, those who are appropriately atheist are comparatively many.
If the assertion is “based on the knowledge held by the reader of this sentence, he or she is almost certainly being irrational if he or she is theistic,” that is true with a good deal of help from selection bias, but one could say a similar thing about American adults.