This post raises a whole constellation of connected questions, so here are my thoughts on all of them:
If the question is “Can Wednesday be religious and still be a smart person who’s good at using rationality?”, the answer is empirically yes (eg Robert Aumann).
If the question is “Can we still call Wednesday rational if she’s religious?” the answer is to taboo “rational” and let the problem take care of itself.
If the question is “Should Wednesday choose to believe religion?” the answer is that you don’t voluntarily choose your beliefs so it doesn’t matter.
If the question is “Should Wednesday, while not exactly choosing to believe religion, avoid thinking about it too hard because she thinks doing so will make her an atheist?,” then she’s already an atheist on some level because she thinks knowing more will make her more atheist, which implies atheism is true. This reduces to the case of deception, which you seem to be against unconditionally.
If the question is “Should I, as an outside observer, do my best to convince Wednesday religion is wrong?” the answer depends on your moral system. I’m a utilitarian, so I would say no—I think it’s a background assumption here that she’s happier being deceived. I know you’re not a utilitarian, so you’d have to work it out in whatever system you use.
If the question is “Should we at Less Wrong exclude all theists?”, my answer is of course not. If they want to come here and talk about prisoners dilemmas or the Singularity or something, then of course we should welcome their opinions.
If the question is “Should we at Less Wrong tell all theists they can’t talk about how great religion is?” my answer is a qualified “yes”. Not because we specifically hate religion, but for the same reason we don’t allow posts explicitly about politics. There are places for those debates, this isn’t one of those places, and having them completely changes the feel of a community and saps its energy.
If the question is “Should we at Less Wrong stop acting like atheism is an open-and-shut case?,” my answer is “no”. Sometimes in order to move on, we’ve got to accept certain assumptions. For example, even though there are a few hard-core steady state theorists out there, most astronomers have accepted the Big Bang as a default assumption because they can get more done by building on Big Bang theory and working out its exact implications then they can debating the last few steady-staters ad nauseum or refusing to even mention the beginning of the universe because it might exclude someone. Christians work in exactly the same way; when they want to discuss obscure points of theology, they start from the assumption that God exists and work from there, although they’ll discard that assumption when they’re debating an atheist. I don’t hold it against these Christians—they’d hardly be able to do theology without it—and I hope they don’t hold it against us.
If the question is “Should we at Less Wrong stop saying mean things about religion?” then my answer is that we should never deliberately say mean things just for the sake of saying mean things, but that if it’s absolutely necessary to condemn religion to make some greater point (like to use it as an example of a bias towards anthropomorphism) then it’s not worth refraining from it to prevent potentially some hypothetical theist from feeling excluded. However, writers should make sure to phrase it as neutrally and non-insultingly as possible, something atheists are generally bad at.
If the question is “What kind of person would name their daughter Wednesday?”, I have no good answer. Maybe someone who really, really liked the Thursday Next books?
Also, this wins my prize for most intriguing title on LW so far.
If the question is “Should Wednesday, while not exactly choosing to believe religion, avoid thinking about it too hard because she thinks doing so will make her an atheist?,” then she’s already an atheist on some level because she thinks knowing more will make her more atheist, which implies atheism is true. This reduces to the case of deception, which you seem to be against unconditionally.
That’s not necessarily true. Perhaps she believes Mormonism is almost certainly right, but acknowledges that she’s not fully rational and might be misled if she read too many arguments against it. Most Christians believe in the idea that God (or Satan) tempts people to sin, and that avoiding temptation is a useful tactic to avoid sin. Kind of like avoiding stores where candy is on display if you’re trying to lose weight, say. You know what’s right in advance, but you’re afraid of losing resolve.
Certainly whatever your beliefs, some people who disagree with you are sufficiently charismatic and good at rhetoric that they might persuade you if you give them the chance. (Well, for most of us, anyway.) How many atheist Less Wrongers would be able to withstand lengthy debate with very talented missionaries? Some, certainly. Most, probably. All? I doubt it.
Overall, though, an excellent response, and I agree with almost all the rest of it.
I used to think this way. “I won’t read Mein Kampf because I might turn out a Nazi.” This is actually a very insidiously bad mindset. You should believe any argument that can convince you (in fair conditions—reading Mein Kampf in a calm frame of mind in your own living room, as opposed to under conditions of intimidation in Nazi Germany.) If Nazism is awful, it will still be awful even when you know more about it. And, indeed, most of us don’t turn into neo-Nazis when we read Mein Kampf.
Sure, we have bounded rationality. But I don’t see how, in probabilistic terms, you can be more likely to get it right without accumulating more evidence. (Maybe your priors are wrong.) If you really think you couldn’t stand up to debate with a talented missionary, maybe you aren’t really an atheist; maybe you should be glad to change your mind.
Psychologically, I think it’s much better for people to trust their reason in this way. It makes it possible to live with more courage. I don’t want to live with my head down hoping I won’t be exposed to the wrong things.
Sorry for doing such an insane necro here, and I’ll delete if asked, but I don’t think this is right at all. Broadly, in the real world, I accept the premise “avoiding listening to opposing positions is bad.” I do not believe that “if you really don’t think you could stand up to debate with a talented missionary, maybe you aren’t really an atheist” because I don’t think it scales up.
I am a human, I have mechanisms for deciding what I believe that are not based on rationality. I have worked very hard to break and adapt some of those mechanisms to align more with rationality, but they still exist. An arbitrarily good debater/absurdly charismatic person could absolutely, with time, override all of the work that has been done to make me accept things like logic and evidence as the basis for the world. In truth, I’m not sure that such a charismatic or intelligent person exists on Earth, and if they did I don’t know why they would want to convince me of these things, but I can imagine a person who would and could. And I do not think that being able to imagine that person means I should stop believing in what I believe, because I am not a perfect rationalist.
In practice, your answer is almost always right. If Adolf Hitler is charismatic and convincing enough to override your “nazism is bad” belief, you probably didn’t hold it very strongly or are not doing rationalism very well, or he is right (just to clarify, he is not). You should expect that he cannot convince you, and if you have a decent reason to read his work you should not avoid it for fear of being convinced. But the argument doesn’t generalize 100% of the time, is all I’m saying
If the question is “Should I, as an outside observer, do my best to convince Wednesday religion is wrong?” the answer depends on your moral system. I’m a utilitarian, so I would say no—I think it’s a background assumption here that she’s happier being deceived.
( I hope it’s ok to respond to such an old comment...)
Um, but IMO most humans will be happier if they become atheists ( eventually). AND, what is far more important, with every new atheist the Sanity Waterline will raise which in turn increases the likelihood of surviving existential risks. And that should be ( or at least close to) the primary concern of every utilitarian.
There are many more reasons I can think of, but these should suffice;)
Or do I miss something?
If the question is “What kind of person would name their daughter Wednesday?”, I have no good answer. Maybe someone who really, really liked the Thursday Next books?
Actually, they got the name from Wednesday Addams. If the kid doesn’t like the name they will call her Wendy instead. (They want two girls and a boy: Wednesday, Christabel, and Nicodemus.)
If they want to come here and talk about prisoners dilemmas or the Singularity or something, then of course we should welcome their opinions.
also disagreeing here. I don’t value a religious person’s arguments relating to the singularity at all, and whilst I think we should tolerate them in the interest of free speech, this should be done grudgingly and with disclaimers like “this person cannot have a sensible view on the singularity, treat their output on the subject as noise”.
This is because, if you are religious (in the theistic sense, which is really what we’re likely to encounter and what I’m talking about), you believe that there is a divine agent watching over us. This has obvious false implications concerning the singularity.
Suppose you tell a theist that there’s a serious risk that smarter than human AI could wipe out the whole human race. They’ll be thinking “this couldn’t happen, God would prevent it” or “oh, it’s ok, I’ll go to heaven if this happens”. Wherever the argument goes next, you are talking to someone who has such radically different background assumptions to you that you won’t get anything useful out of them.
Why is this differs from most other subjects is that the religious conception of divine intervention is tailored so that it is consistent with our everyday observations. Thus any religious person who is vaguely sane will have some argument as to why God doesn’t prevent earthquakes from killing random people. So God allows small injustices and crimes, but the main point is that everything will be OK in the end, i.e. the ultimate fate of our world is not in question. The debate concerning the Singularity is directly about this question.
There are other failure modes which theists will have disproportionately over atheists, of course. To me it seems that an unerring and (essentially) non-evidence based belief that everything will turn out OK is indictment enough.
Amongst the other failure modes: belief in existence of souls and of the divine place of human intelligence is likely to produce skewed beliefs about the possibility of synthetic intelligence. Various results of dark-side epistemology such as disbelief of evolution, belief in “free will”, belief in original sin and belief in moral realism (“god given morality”) preventing something like CEV. I’ve heard the following fallacious argument against the transhumanist project from a lot of theists: humans are imperfect, so the only way to improve ourselves is to take advice from a perfect being. Imperfection cannot lead to less-imperfection.
Treat everyone’s opinions as noise, unless you are about to make a decision. Consider each argument on its own merits, not as data, but as a metaphorical construction that allows you to recognize a way to move forward your own understanding of the facts you already know.
The fact that a believer in a loving and all powerful god can’t really be taken seriously on the singularity is not a claim about their character, and thus doesn’t qualify as ad-hominem. It is a claim about the arguments they are going to put forward: in the presence of the background assumption that there’s a loving god watching over us, you can’t make sensible decisions about the singularity.
Discounting an argument because of the person making it is pretty much the textbook definition of ad hominem fallacy.
Also, it should go without saying that being a theist doesn’t automatically mean one believes in a loving and all-powerful god watching over us. And anyway, I still don’t follow the logic that being a theist means one can’t make sensible decisions about the Singularity (insofar as one can say there are “sensible decisions” to be made about something that’s basically a sci-fi construct at this point.)
What distinguishes the topic of singularity from any other pursuits in which theists are empirically known to be able to excel? In each case, knowing that a person is a theist somewhat decreases your confidence in the accuracy of their judgment, but not dramatically. Is there something specific that places this topic in different light? (I think there is, but I don’t feel like spinning a lengthy argument right now, and I’m curious about how thought-through that harshly-downvoted sentiment above was.)
If you are religious (in the theistic sense, which is really what we’re likely to encounter and what I’m talking about), you believe that there is a divine agent watching over us. This has obvious false implications concerning the singularity.
Suppose you tell a theist that there’s a serious risk that smarter than human AI could wipe out the whole human race.They’ll be thinking “this couldn’t happen, God would prevent it” or “oh, it’s ok, I’ll go to heaven if this happens”. Wherever the argument goes next, you are talking to someone who has such radically different background assumptions to you that you won’t get anything useful out of them.
Why is this differs from most other subjects is that the religious conception of divine intervention is tailored so that it is consistent with our everyday observations. Thus any religious person who is vaguely sane will have some argument as to why God doesn’t prevent earthquakes from killing random people. So God allows small injustices and crimes, but the main point is that everything will be OK in the end, i.e. the ultimate fate of our world is not in question.
The debate concerning the Singularity is directly about this question.
I don’t believe this is a valid thought in this form, or maybe you failed to formalize your intuition enough to communicate it. You list a few specific failure modes, which I don’t believe can cover enough of the theistic people to reduce the probability of a theistic person producing valid singularity thinking down to nothingness. Also, some of these failure modes overlap with related failure modes of non-theistic people, thus not figuring into the likelihood ratio as much as they would otherwise.
There are other failure modes which theists will have disproportionately over atheists, of course. To me it seems that an unerring and (essentially) non-evidence based belief that everything will turn out OK is indictment enough.
Amongst the other failure modes: belief in existence of souls and of the divine place of human intelligence is likely to produce skewed beliefs about the possibility of synthetic intelligence. Various results of dark-side epistemology such as disbelief of evolution, belief in “free will”, belief in original sin and belief in moral realism (“god given morality”) preventing something like CEV. I’ve heard the following fallacious argument against the transhumanist project from a lot of theists: humans are imperfect, so the only way to improve ourselves is to take advice from a perfect being. Imperfection cannot lead to less-imperfection.
Also, I didn’t claim that the average atheist has sensible opinions about the subject. Just that “theist” is a useful filter.
Your conception of “theism”—a tremendously broad concept—is laughably caricatured and narrow, and it pollutes whatever argument you’re trying to make: absolutely none of the logic in the above post follows in the way you think it does.
“Can Wednesday be religious and still be a smart person who’s good at using rationality?”, the answer is empirically yes (eg Robert Aumann).
Disagree here. If Aumann really is religious, and isn’t just pretending to be, then he doesn’t qualify as “smart” in my book. I would classify him more as “mad scientist with mental health issues”
Fine. Taboo “smart” and say “Could Wednesday be the sort of person who could win a Nobel Prize in science and make great advances in rationality?” In that case, the answer is empirically yes.
Your definition of “smart” seems to be “is an atheist”. Since that’s not the way most people would use it, and defining it that way serves an agenda by implying that non-atheists can’t make great scientific contributions when you translate it into the definition everyone else does, I would change your definition unless you want to confuse people.
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.
“Could Wednesday be the sort of person who could win a Nobel Prize in science and make great advances in rationality?” In that case, the answer is empirically yes.
we should note that most scientists are atheists, so making Wednesday a devoutly deluded believer would quite possibly decrease the probability of her achieving these great things.
Of course, I should add that I think it is unlikely that Wednesday would benefit by being an atheist. She is probably not going to be naturally intelligent enough to attain a Nobel prize anyway. I must admit, in terms of living the good life, religion wins over atheism at the moment.
Nevertheless, the following still supports the statement that Wednesday is less likely to be a scientist, given that she is religious:
“With little doubt, scientists at major research universities are less religious—at least according to traditional forms of religion—than members of the general public.” (same source)
No, classifying Aumann as smart doesn’t adequately capture my intuition as to what the word “smart” means. Suppose, for example, that Grigori Perelman literally believed in the existence of the flying spaghetti monster, and believed that drinking a mixture of his own urine and rats blood every morning would allow him to fly through space. Well, Perelman can certainly own your ass at algebraic topology and differential geometry, but I don’t quite think that you’d be prepared to call him smart if he held the beliefs I described above. Perhaps “seriously good at some specialized subject but overall quite messed up” would capture your intuition. What do others think? Am I misusing the word “smart”?
The Aumann situation seems analogous to me. Indeed, the fact that Aumann supposedly studies rationality, yet still cannot see that religion is false makes me worry about his sanity even more than I would worry about the sanity of the fictional Perelman above.
My definition of “smart” is not equivalent to “is an atheist”, but in the background of the overwhelming evidence available to someone like Aumann, I would list atheism as a necessary condition.
Roko, do you think someone who is raised a theist but has all of your other necessary and (otherwise) jointly sufficient conditions for smartness, and then deconverts, becomes smart in that moment?
If we model the human mind as a consistent logical system with empirical input from reality, this is impossible. Why? Well, the religious claim is incompatible with our observations—wildly so.
For example, I’d list conditions for smartness as: a good grasp of logical thinking, avoidance of fallacies and contradications, ability to make plans, incorporate what you see around you into your worldview, spot when someone is pulling some trick of sophistry on you (i.e. not be easily fooled), understand what you want out of life and go about getting it in a sensible manner, etc.
A person with all these qualities cannot look at the world we see around us, be exposed to evolutionary theory, modern science (including cognitive science), the history of religion, etc and believe in a loving God.
What tends to happen, I think, is that someone picks up almost all of the above traits with the exception of the “a good grasp of logical thinking, avoidance of fallacies and contradictions” bit. Then something pushes them a little bit on the “clear, logical thinking” axis, and they deconvert.
Now that Roko’s actually explained Roko::smart, we don’t need to keep arguing about what counts as “smart” vs. Roko::smart. It’s enough to note that when Roko uses the term, the above nonstandard definition is what is meant. Let’s not argue over semantics if we don’t have to.
It would seem to follow from this that you don’t think the following people can be “smart”:
children
people who have not been educated on the subjects you mention
people who are good at partitioning, possibly because of a considered belief in fideism
people who have conflicting desires and have not worked out which they prefer to endorse on a second-order level
people who self-deceive on some level, or avoid thinking about the subject of religion very hard, in order to achieve a good quality of life, after having established that they consider the quality of life their top priority
As for children, we tend to judge them in relation to other children. A child can be relatively smart, but not smart. For example, if you want to insult the intelligence of an adult, you say that they display “child-like naivety”.
people who have not been educated on the subjects you mention
Typically one picks these things up. Very few people have actually been educated in “not being easily fooled”, for example.
possibly because of a considered belief in fideism
Wikipedia: “Fideism is an epistemological theory which maintains that faith is independent of reason, or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths”
If you think that blindly believing something is a good way to get to the truth, then in my book you are an idiot. “Not smart” isn’t even strong enough.
people who self-deceive on some level, or avoid thinking about the subject of religion very hard, in order to achieve a good quality of life, after having established that they consider the quality of life their top priority
This is a good one. But if you realize that you’re deceiving yourself, but not that this weakens your belief in the thing you are deceiving yourself about, then you must be pretty slow, really?! Sure, it’s great if you can get this to work, but if you can get it to work then you have to be a bit dumb.
When I am inclined to call someone childish, it’s because I want to express an opinion about their maturity, not their intelligence. Smart people can be immature and mature people can be pretty dim.
Some people really seem to be able to self-deceive without obviously weakening the belief they’re deceiving themselves about. It’s not a skill I have, but I shouldn’t assume that no one has it. I don’t think it’s obvious at all that these people are necessarily dumb.
Strongly believing X, whilst at the same time believing that you are deceiving yourself into believing X and ignoring the evidence, with the background assumption that randomly formed beliefs are not likely to be true, is a logical contradiction.
Yup. In general usage, “smart” means “good at one or some mental tasks”. (Your hypothetical example of Grigori Perelman is roughly analogous to the real example of Srinivasa Ramanujan.)
Isn’t that why we have the smart/rational distinction? One way you might see it: smart = generates relevant logical information at a high rate, rational = processes this information in the right way so as to come to true beliefs. (This is vague but I hope you can see the intuition.) Aumann and hypothetical-Perelman both seem able to generate interesting pieces of reasoning better than almost all people, but seem to sometimes have trouble fully stitching together and accepting the implications of the interesting true ones when not disciplined by standards of mathematical proof.
I’ll agree to that, perhaps taboo’ing “smart” and replacing it with “clever”. Smart has too many connotations of “rational” to me. It is generally accepted that you can be “very clever but not very smart”
You believe that it is impossible to hold a “wrong belief” and still be “smart”?
Have you ever believed your car keys to be one place, when they were in another?
Are there any issues that you have a known bias about, or are you claiming all your beliefs are 100% rational all time? Even when you change your mind?
If you accept the claim that theism is irrational or less rational then atheism, is it not still possible for Wednesday to be rational on most other subjects?
But it is an example of a wrong belief. Which, if we assume that theism is a wrong belief, we must equate the two as both being false statements. If you don’t like the car key example, simply substitute it for any other belief that you hold that has a high likely hood of being false; or do you claim you have none.
Further, You still ignore the fundamental argument, and stick on the example. If it not possible to have a blind spot in reason, but be reasonable in all (is anyone really reasonable in all instances? -- let’s say many instead) other instances.
You do realize that on any list of historically significant “geniuses,” the majority are going to be theists, right? I’m sure it must be nice to pat yourself on the back for being “smarter” than people like Goethe, Thomas Aquinas, and Kierkegaard, but that would seem to be a reductio ad absurdum against the use of theism as an automatic disqualifier for “smartness,” to my mind.
God’s non-existence isn’t predicated on any positive evidence for the proposition, but on lack of any evidence whatsoever, which was just as lacking in previous centuries as it is today.
Anyway, a list of Nobel Prize winners in the sciences is going have a substantial number of theists on it (probably a majority).
God’s non-existence isn’t predicated on any positive evidence for the proposition, but on lack of any evidence whatsoever, which was just as lacking in previous centuries as it is today.
FWIW, the thing that pushed me over into atheism vs. a vague agnostic “maybe there’s something” point of view was my study of the human mind. Nothing debunks the idea of a loving creator better than examining just how f*ed up he built his “children”. So for me at least, there was definitely positive evidence that wasn’t available in previous centuries.
(Technically, that’s not really rational, of course; lowering the probability of a creator deity really shouldn’t have affected my probability of “maybe there’s something”. I suppose it’s more that it confirmed for me the absence of the need for that “something” to exist, or at least the improbability of that “something” sharing human values in any relevant way.)
You know, before Darwin, the Argument from Design really was a good reason to accept some form of theism, although most versions of Christianity should still have been considered stupid. (To be blunt, the world looks more like it was designed by a group of assholes like the Greek gods than it would if it really was made by the single “loving God” of the New Testament.) People were only aware of one kind of optimization process—human intelligence—that was capable of creating complicated artifacts, so it was reasonable to believe that the optimized artifacts present in the natural world were also the product of an intelligent designer. Hence, the Deism of Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries.
Then humans discovered the alien god and theism became much, much less rational.
Consider the hypothesis that religions represent paradigms for our relationship with the universe. Obviously, science is the best description of how the universe actually is, but religion may be a heuristic that achieves averaged results. Sort of like non-epistemic rationality taken to an extreme. Within this hypothesis, I think that the “loving god” is a more mature understanding of the universe than Greek polytheism, just like “turn the other cheek” is a more sophisticated sense of social justice than “an eye for an eye”. While counter-intuitive, life experiences of a certain kind (not all, surely) point to these paradigms as being more true than the intuitive ones. Religion biases thinking, but also your worldview creates your religion, which is why some people change religions or deconvert.
Consider the hypothesis that religions represent paradigms for our relationship with the universe.
I am confused by that sentence; I have no idea what that means.
Within this hypothesis, I think that the “loving god” is a more mature understanding of the universe than Greek polytheism, just like “turn the other cheek” is a more sophisticated sense of social justice than “an eye for an eye”.
I understand what “an eye for an eye” refers to (and, yes, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” and all that), but I’m not sure how to interpret “turn the other cheek,” because the first one that comes to mind seems, well, stupid. Not being willing to use force, or have others use force on your behalf, simply leaves you at the mercy of those that are. Pacifism is especially stupid when someone like Charles Whitman decides to start shooting people until someone kills him. It’s absurd to “turn the other cheek” to the smallpox virus, or a hunting cougar that thinks you would make a good meal.
Gandhi got lucky that he was dealing with the British and not, say, the Mongols, who would just slaughter anyone who wouldn’t pay tribute. Indeed, Jesus himself wasn’t as fortunate—as everyone knows, the Romans had him crucified.
This post raises a whole constellation of connected questions, so here are my thoughts on all of them:
If the question is “Can Wednesday be religious and still be a smart person who’s good at using rationality?”, the answer is empirically yes (eg Robert Aumann).
If the question is “Can we still call Wednesday rational if she’s religious?” the answer is to taboo “rational” and let the problem take care of itself.
If the question is “Is it okay for Wednesday to be religious?” the question is confused in the first place and any answer would be equally confused.
If the question is “Should Wednesday choose to believe religion?” the answer is that you don’t voluntarily choose your beliefs so it doesn’t matter.
If the question is “Should Wednesday, while not exactly choosing to believe religion, avoid thinking about it too hard because she thinks doing so will make her an atheist?,” then she’s already an atheist on some level because she thinks knowing more will make her more atheist, which implies atheism is true. This reduces to the case of deception, which you seem to be against unconditionally.
If the question is “Should I, as an outside observer, do my best to convince Wednesday religion is wrong?” the answer depends on your moral system. I’m a utilitarian, so I would say no—I think it’s a background assumption here that she’s happier being deceived. I know you’re not a utilitarian, so you’d have to work it out in whatever system you use.
If the question is “Should we at Less Wrong exclude all theists?”, my answer is of course not. If they want to come here and talk about prisoners dilemmas or the Singularity or something, then of course we should welcome their opinions.
If the question is “Should we at Less Wrong tell all theists they can’t talk about how great religion is?” my answer is a qualified “yes”. Not because we specifically hate religion, but for the same reason we don’t allow posts explicitly about politics. There are places for those debates, this isn’t one of those places, and having them completely changes the feel of a community and saps its energy.
If the question is “Should we at Less Wrong stop acting like atheism is an open-and-shut case?,” my answer is “no”. Sometimes in order to move on, we’ve got to accept certain assumptions. For example, even though there are a few hard-core steady state theorists out there, most astronomers have accepted the Big Bang as a default assumption because they can get more done by building on Big Bang theory and working out its exact implications then they can debating the last few steady-staters ad nauseum or refusing to even mention the beginning of the universe because it might exclude someone. Christians work in exactly the same way; when they want to discuss obscure points of theology, they start from the assumption that God exists and work from there, although they’ll discard that assumption when they’re debating an atheist. I don’t hold it against these Christians—they’d hardly be able to do theology without it—and I hope they don’t hold it against us.
If the question is “Should we at Less Wrong stop saying mean things about religion?” then my answer is that we should never deliberately say mean things just for the sake of saying mean things, but that if it’s absolutely necessary to condemn religion to make some greater point (like to use it as an example of a bias towards anthropomorphism) then it’s not worth refraining from it to prevent potentially some hypothetical theist from feeling excluded. However, writers should make sure to phrase it as neutrally and non-insultingly as possible, something atheists are generally bad at.
If the question is “What kind of person would name their daughter Wednesday?”, I have no good answer. Maybe someone who really, really liked the Thursday Next books?
Also, this wins my prize for most intriguing title on LW so far.
That’s not necessarily true. Perhaps she believes Mormonism is almost certainly right, but acknowledges that she’s not fully rational and might be misled if she read too many arguments against it. Most Christians believe in the idea that God (or Satan) tempts people to sin, and that avoiding temptation is a useful tactic to avoid sin. Kind of like avoiding stores where candy is on display if you’re trying to lose weight, say. You know what’s right in advance, but you’re afraid of losing resolve.
Certainly whatever your beliefs, some people who disagree with you are sufficiently charismatic and good at rhetoric that they might persuade you if you give them the chance. (Well, for most of us, anyway.) How many atheist Less Wrongers would be able to withstand lengthy debate with very talented missionaries? Some, certainly. Most, probably. All? I doubt it.
Overall, though, an excellent response, and I agree with almost all the rest of it.
I used to think this way. “I won’t read Mein Kampf because I might turn out a Nazi.” This is actually a very insidiously bad mindset. You should believe any argument that can convince you (in fair conditions—reading Mein Kampf in a calm frame of mind in your own living room, as opposed to under conditions of intimidation in Nazi Germany.) If Nazism is awful, it will still be awful even when you know more about it. And, indeed, most of us don’t turn into neo-Nazis when we read Mein Kampf.
Sure, we have bounded rationality. But I don’t see how, in probabilistic terms, you can be more likely to get it right without accumulating more evidence. (Maybe your priors are wrong.) If you really think you couldn’t stand up to debate with a talented missionary, maybe you aren’t really an atheist; maybe you should be glad to change your mind.
Psychologically, I think it’s much better for people to trust their reason in this way. It makes it possible to live with more courage. I don’t want to live with my head down hoping I won’t be exposed to the wrong things.
Sorry for doing such an insane necro here, and I’ll delete if asked, but I don’t think this is right at all. Broadly, in the real world, I accept the premise “avoiding listening to opposing positions is bad.” I do not believe that “if you really don’t think you could stand up to debate with a talented missionary, maybe you aren’t really an atheist” because I don’t think it scales up.
I am a human, I have mechanisms for deciding what I believe that are not based on rationality. I have worked very hard to break and adapt some of those mechanisms to align more with rationality, but they still exist. An arbitrarily good debater/absurdly charismatic person could absolutely, with time, override all of the work that has been done to make me accept things like logic and evidence as the basis for the world. In truth, I’m not sure that such a charismatic or intelligent person exists on Earth, and if they did I don’t know why they would want to convince me of these things, but I can imagine a person who would and could. And I do not think that being able to imagine that person means I should stop believing in what I believe, because I am not a perfect rationalist.
In practice, your answer is almost always right. If Adolf Hitler is charismatic and convincing enough to override your “nazism is bad” belief, you probably didn’t hold it very strongly or are not doing rationalism very well, or he is right (just to clarify, he is not). You should expect that he cannot convince you, and if you have a decent reason to read his work you should not avoid it for fear of being convinced. But the argument doesn’t generalize 100% of the time, is all I’m saying
( I hope it’s ok to respond to such an old comment...)
Um, but IMO most humans will be happier if they become atheists ( eventually). AND, what is far more important, with every new atheist the Sanity Waterline will raise which in turn increases the likelihood of surviving existential risks. And that should be ( or at least close to) the primary concern of every utilitarian. There are many more reasons I can think of, but these should suffice;) Or do I miss something?
Actually, they got the name from Wednesday Addams. If the kid doesn’t like the name they will call her Wendy instead. (They want two girls and a boy: Wednesday, Christabel, and Nicodemus.)
I know your comment is quite old, but I just wanted to say that this was my favorite comment on LW so far.
However, isn’t this the question we want to know the answer to? Will rationalism not answer it, nor even allow us to ask it?
also disagreeing here. I don’t value a religious person’s arguments relating to the singularity at all, and whilst I think we should tolerate them in the interest of free speech, this should be done grudgingly and with disclaimers like “this person cannot have a sensible view on the singularity, treat their output on the subject as noise”.
This is because, if you are religious (in the theistic sense, which is really what we’re likely to encounter and what I’m talking about), you believe that there is a divine agent watching over us. This has obvious false implications concerning the singularity.
Suppose you tell a theist that there’s a serious risk that smarter than human AI could wipe out the whole human race. They’ll be thinking “this couldn’t happen, God would prevent it” or “oh, it’s ok, I’ll go to heaven if this happens”. Wherever the argument goes next, you are talking to someone who has such radically different background assumptions to you that you won’t get anything useful out of them.
Why is this differs from most other subjects is that the religious conception of divine intervention is tailored so that it is consistent with our everyday observations. Thus any religious person who is vaguely sane will have some argument as to why God doesn’t prevent earthquakes from killing random people. So God allows small injustices and crimes, but the main point is that everything will be OK in the end, i.e. the ultimate fate of our world is not in question. The debate concerning the Singularity is directly about this question.
There are other failure modes which theists will have disproportionately over atheists, of course. To me it seems that an unerring and (essentially) non-evidence based belief that everything will turn out OK is indictment enough.
Amongst the other failure modes: belief in existence of souls and of the divine place of human intelligence is likely to produce skewed beliefs about the possibility of synthetic intelligence. Various results of dark-side epistemology such as disbelief of evolution, belief in “free will”, belief in original sin and belief in moral realism (“god given morality”) preventing something like CEV. I’ve heard the following fallacious argument against the transhumanist project from a lot of theists: humans are imperfect, so the only way to improve ourselves is to take advice from a perfect being. Imperfection cannot lead to less-imperfection.
Treat everyone’s opinions as noise, unless you are about to make a decision. Consider each argument on its own merits, not as data, but as a metaphorical construction that allows you to recognize a way to move forward your own understanding of the facts you already know.
You’ve never heard of the ad hominem fallacy, I take it?
The fact that a believer in a loving and all powerful god can’t really be taken seriously on the singularity is not a claim about their character, and thus doesn’t qualify as ad-hominem. It is a claim about the arguments they are going to put forward: in the presence of the background assumption that there’s a loving god watching over us, you can’t make sensible decisions about the singularity.
Discounting an argument because of the person making it is pretty much the textbook definition of ad hominem fallacy.
Also, it should go without saying that being a theist doesn’t automatically mean one believes in a loving and all-powerful god watching over us. And anyway, I still don’t follow the logic that being a theist means one can’t make sensible decisions about the Singularity (insofar as one can say there are “sensible decisions” to be made about something that’s basically a sci-fi construct at this point.)
What distinguishes the topic of singularity from any other pursuits in which theists are empirically known to be able to excel? In each case, knowing that a person is a theist somewhat decreases your confidence in the accuracy of their judgment, but not dramatically. Is there something specific that places this topic in different light? (I think there is, but I don’t feel like spinning a lengthy argument right now, and I’m curious about how thought-through that harshly-downvoted sentiment above was.)
If you are religious (in the theistic sense, which is really what we’re likely to encounter and what I’m talking about), you believe that there is a divine agent watching over us. This has obvious false implications concerning the singularity.
Suppose you tell a theist that there’s a serious risk that smarter than human AI could wipe out the whole human race.They’ll be thinking “this couldn’t happen, God would prevent it” or “oh, it’s ok, I’ll go to heaven if this happens”. Wherever the argument goes next, you are talking to someone who has such radically different background assumptions to you that you won’t get anything useful out of them.
Why is this differs from most other subjects is that the religious conception of divine intervention is tailored so that it is consistent with our everyday observations. Thus any religious person who is vaguely sane will have some argument as to why God doesn’t prevent earthquakes from killing random people. So God allows small injustices and crimes, but the main point is that everything will be OK in the end, i.e. the ultimate fate of our world is not in question.
The debate concerning the Singularity is directly about this question.
I don’t believe this is a valid thought in this form, or maybe you failed to formalize your intuition enough to communicate it. You list a few specific failure modes, which I don’t believe can cover enough of the theistic people to reduce the probability of a theistic person producing valid singularity thinking down to nothingness. Also, some of these failure modes overlap with related failure modes of non-theistic people, thus not figuring into the likelihood ratio as much as they would otherwise.
There are other failure modes which theists will have disproportionately over atheists, of course. To me it seems that an unerring and (essentially) non-evidence based belief that everything will turn out OK is indictment enough.
Amongst the other failure modes: belief in existence of souls and of the divine place of human intelligence is likely to produce skewed beliefs about the possibility of synthetic intelligence. Various results of dark-side epistemology such as disbelief of evolution, belief in “free will”, belief in original sin and belief in moral realism (“god given morality”) preventing something like CEV. I’ve heard the following fallacious argument against the transhumanist project from a lot of theists: humans are imperfect, so the only way to improve ourselves is to take advice from a perfect being. Imperfection cannot lead to less-imperfection.
Also, I didn’t claim that the average atheist has sensible opinions about the subject. Just that “theist” is a useful filter.
Your conception of “theism”—a tremendously broad concept—is laughably caricatured and narrow, and it pollutes whatever argument you’re trying to make: absolutely none of the logic in the above post follows in the way you think it does.
Disagree here. If Aumann really is religious, and isn’t just pretending to be, then he doesn’t qualify as “smart” in my book. I would classify him more as “mad scientist with mental health issues”
Fine. Taboo “smart” and say “Could Wednesday be the sort of person who could win a Nobel Prize in science and make great advances in rationality?” In that case, the answer is empirically yes.
Your definition of “smart” seems to be “is an atheist”. Since that’s not the way most people would use it, and defining it that way serves an agenda by implying that non-atheists can’t make great scientific contributions when you translate it into the definition everyone else does, I would change your definition unless you want to confuse people.
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.
we should note that most scientists are atheists, so making Wednesday a devoutly deluded believer would quite possibly decrease the probability of her achieving these great things.
Of course, I should add that I think it is unlikely that Wednesday would benefit by being an atheist. She is probably not going to be naturally intelligent enough to attain a Nobel prize anyway. I must admit, in terms of living the good life, religion wins over atheism at the moment.
Not true.
Nevertheless, the following still supports the statement that Wednesday is less likely to be a scientist, given that she is religious:
“With little doubt, scientists at major research universities are less religious—at least according to traditional forms of religion—than members of the general public.” (same source)
No, classifying Aumann as smart doesn’t adequately capture my intuition as to what the word “smart” means. Suppose, for example, that Grigori Perelman literally believed in the existence of the flying spaghetti monster, and believed that drinking a mixture of his own urine and rats blood every morning would allow him to fly through space. Well, Perelman can certainly own your ass at algebraic topology and differential geometry, but I don’t quite think that you’d be prepared to call him smart if he held the beliefs I described above. Perhaps “seriously good at some specialized subject but overall quite messed up” would capture your intuition. What do others think? Am I misusing the word “smart”?
The Aumann situation seems analogous to me. Indeed, the fact that Aumann supposedly studies rationality, yet still cannot see that religion is false makes me worry about his sanity even more than I would worry about the sanity of the fictional Perelman above.
My definition of “smart” is not equivalent to “is an atheist”, but in the background of the overwhelming evidence available to someone like Aumann, I would list atheism as a necessary condition.
Roko, do you think someone who is raised a theist but has all of your other necessary and (otherwise) jointly sufficient conditions for smartness, and then deconverts, becomes smart in that moment?
If we model the human mind as a consistent logical system with empirical input from reality, this is impossible. Why? Well, the religious claim is incompatible with our observations—wildly so.
For example, I’d list conditions for smartness as: a good grasp of logical thinking, avoidance of fallacies and contradications, ability to make plans, incorporate what you see around you into your worldview, spot when someone is pulling some trick of sophistry on you (i.e. not be easily fooled), understand what you want out of life and go about getting it in a sensible manner, etc.
A person with all these qualities cannot look at the world we see around us, be exposed to evolutionary theory, modern science (including cognitive science), the history of religion, etc and believe in a loving God.
What tends to happen, I think, is that someone picks up almost all of the above traits with the exception of the “a good grasp of logical thinking, avoidance of fallacies and contradictions” bit. Then something pushes them a little bit on the “clear, logical thinking” axis, and they deconvert.
Now that Roko’s actually explained Roko::smart, we don’t need to keep arguing about what counts as “smart” vs. Roko::smart. It’s enough to note that when Roko uses the term, the above nonstandard definition is what is meant. Let’s not argue over semantics if we don’t have to.
So it is kind of important that I use words in a standard way. I’ll stop saying “smart” and just use “narrowly-clever” and “rational”
I’d say that’s an eminently rational policy.
It would seem to follow from this that you don’t think the following people can be “smart”:
children
people who have not been educated on the subjects you mention
people who are good at partitioning, possibly because of a considered belief in fideism
people who have conflicting desires and have not worked out which they prefer to endorse on a second-order level
people who self-deceive on some level, or avoid thinking about the subject of religion very hard, in order to achieve a good quality of life, after having established that they consider the quality of life their top priority
Am I reading you incorrectly?
As for children, we tend to judge them in relation to other children. A child can be relatively smart, but not smart. For example, if you want to insult the intelligence of an adult, you say that they display “child-like naivety”.
Typically one picks these things up. Very few people have actually been educated in “not being easily fooled”, for example.
Wikipedia: “Fideism is an epistemological theory which maintains that faith is independent of reason, or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths”
If you think that blindly believing something is a good way to get to the truth, then in my book you are an idiot. “Not smart” isn’t even strong enough.
This is a good one. But if you realize that you’re deceiving yourself, but not that this weakens your belief in the thing you are deceiving yourself about, then you must be pretty slow, really?! Sure, it’s great if you can get this to work, but if you can get it to work then you have to be a bit dumb.
When I am inclined to call someone childish, it’s because I want to express an opinion about their maturity, not their intelligence. Smart people can be immature and mature people can be pretty dim.
Some people really seem to be able to self-deceive without obviously weakening the belief they’re deceiving themselves about. It’s not a skill I have, but I shouldn’t assume that no one has it. I don’t think it’s obvious at all that these people are necessarily dumb.
Well it depends what you mean by “dumb”.
Strongly believing X, whilst at the same time believing that you are deceiving yourself into believing X and ignoring the evidence, with the background assumption that randomly formed beliefs are not likely to be true, is a logical contradiction.
Roko, could you give more detail in your reasoning here? Is any religious claim incompatible with observations, or are you thinking of a specific one?
This is false, wildly so. Or what do you mean by ‘the religious claim’?
Yup. In general usage, “smart” means “good at one or some mental tasks”. (Your hypothetical example of Grigori Perelman is roughly analogous to the real example of Srinivasa Ramanujan.)
Isn’t that why we have the smart/rational distinction? One way you might see it: smart = generates relevant logical information at a high rate, rational = processes this information in the right way so as to come to true beliefs. (This is vague but I hope you can see the intuition.) Aumann and hypothetical-Perelman both seem able to generate interesting pieces of reasoning better than almost all people, but seem to sometimes have trouble fully stitching together and accepting the implications of the interesting true ones when not disciplined by standards of mathematical proof.
I’ll agree to that, perhaps taboo’ing “smart” and replacing it with “clever”. Smart has too many connotations of “rational” to me. It is generally accepted that you can be “very clever but not very smart”
You believe that it is impossible to hold a “wrong belief” and still be “smart”? Have you ever believed your car keys to be one place, when they were in another? Are there any issues that you have a known bias about, or are you claiming all your beliefs are 100% rational all time? Even when you change your mind?
If you accept the claim that theism is irrational or less rational then atheism, is it not still possible for Wednesday to be rational on most other subjects?
Forgetting where your car keys are is not really an example of irrationality.
But it is an example of a wrong belief. Which, if we assume that theism is a wrong belief, we must equate the two as both being false statements. If you don’t like the car key example, simply substitute it for any other belief that you hold that has a high likely hood of being false; or do you claim you have none.
Further, You still ignore the fundamental argument, and stick on the example. If it not possible to have a blind spot in reason, but be reasonable in all (is anyone really reasonable in all instances? -- let’s say many instead) other instances.
You do realize that on any list of historically significant “geniuses,” the majority are going to be theists, right? I’m sure it must be nice to pat yourself on the back for being “smarter” than people like Goethe, Thomas Aquinas, and Kierkegaard, but that would seem to be a reductio ad absurdum against the use of theism as an automatic disqualifier for “smartness,” to my mind.
Irrelevant, they didn’t have the evidence that we do today.
God’s non-existence isn’t predicated on any positive evidence for the proposition, but on lack of any evidence whatsoever, which was just as lacking in previous centuries as it is today.
Anyway, a list of Nobel Prize winners in the sciences is going have a substantial number of theists on it (probably a majority).
FWIW, the thing that pushed me over into atheism vs. a vague agnostic “maybe there’s something” point of view was my study of the human mind. Nothing debunks the idea of a loving creator better than examining just how f*ed up he built his “children”. So for me at least, there was definitely positive evidence that wasn’t available in previous centuries.
(Technically, that’s not really rational, of course; lowering the probability of a creator deity really shouldn’t have affected my probability of “maybe there’s something”. I suppose it’s more that it confirmed for me the absence of the need for that “something” to exist, or at least the improbability of that “something” sharing human values in any relevant way.)
You know, before Darwin, the Argument from Design really was a good reason to accept some form of theism, although most versions of Christianity should still have been considered stupid. (To be blunt, the world looks more like it was designed by a group of assholes like the Greek gods than it would if it really was made by the single “loving God” of the New Testament.) People were only aware of one kind of optimization process—human intelligence—that was capable of creating complicated artifacts, so it was reasonable to believe that the optimized artifacts present in the natural world were also the product of an intelligent designer. Hence, the Deism of Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries.
Then humans discovered the alien god and theism became much, much less rational.
Consider the hypothesis that religions represent paradigms for our relationship with the universe. Obviously, science is the best description of how the universe actually is, but religion may be a heuristic that achieves averaged results. Sort of like non-epistemic rationality taken to an extreme. Within this hypothesis, I think that the “loving god” is a more mature understanding of the universe than Greek polytheism, just like “turn the other cheek” is a more sophisticated sense of social justice than “an eye for an eye”. While counter-intuitive, life experiences of a certain kind (not all, surely) point to these paradigms as being more true than the intuitive ones. Religion biases thinking, but also your worldview creates your religion, which is why some people change religions or deconvert.
I am confused by that sentence; I have no idea what that means.
I understand what “an eye for an eye” refers to (and, yes, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” and all that), but I’m not sure how to interpret “turn the other cheek,” because the first one that comes to mind seems, well, stupid. Not being willing to use force, or have others use force on your behalf, simply leaves you at the mercy of those that are. Pacifism is especially stupid when someone like Charles Whitman decides to start shooting people until someone kills him. It’s absurd to “turn the other cheek” to the smallpox virus, or a hunting cougar that thinks you would make a good meal.
Gandhi got lucky that he was dealing with the British and not, say, the Mongols, who would just slaughter anyone who wouldn’t pay tribute. Indeed, Jesus himself wasn’t as fortunate—as everyone knows, the Romans had him crucified.