As a convert, you apparently experienced a major shift in belief, especially since you committed to a mission soon after. What in particular changed your mind?
What is your perspective on the role of faith in belief? How much of your belief would you say is due to feelings attributed to the Holy Ghost vs weighing other evidence?
What would be evidence to substantially revise your belief in the church downwards?
What have you thought of your reception here? Have you been surprised by any reactions?
What are you studying at Stanford?
I’m particularly interested in what you have to say as a convert. I know how the process works in the other direction (leaving the church at 17), but it’s important to know why people change their minds in general.
ETA: After looking at your blog, I’ll be frank and admit I was hoping for something a little more sophisticated to engage with. Your conversion appears to be based on a feeling of rightness without really grappling why or why not it might be true. Since learning the technical meaning of evidence, I no longer dismiss “feeling the Spirit” completely. Spiritual experiences are more likely if religion is true than if it is not, but not significantly more so. Hence it’s very weak evidence, nowhere necessary to overcome even basic evidence against.
LDS theology does have a veneer of rationality, saying “the glory of God is intelligence”, encouraging learning, and claiming there are universal laws that God works within, but the substance isn’t there. In your post on reading Dialogue, you acknowledge there are issues, but seem satisfied with acknowledgement rather than tracing out their implications.
I don’t want to hold you to blog posts that are a couple years old though. I’m still eager to learn any insights you might have. Please stick around. However, (speaking to everyone else here) I’m remembering how direct discussion of religion isn’t productive, even as a case study about how thinking can go awry. The mistakes you are making are too basic to be relevant to most people here. Thanks for opening yourself up to questions, but people (including myself) have been too eager in asking.
Also, economics and math! Always nice to meet another member of the tribe.
I was rather disappointed by the story; it struck me as a regular conversion, driven by positive affect, social reinforcement, fuzzy feelings, motivated cognition, and characterized by a profound lack of truth-seeking. I expected something more unique or something strangely appealing.
I ignored base rates when evaluating how useful or interesting his story might be. While someone who is intelligent, attends a good school, and is attracted to rationality is more likely to have not converted for the reasons you mention, the base rate is still very low.
My previous judgment about the utility of this AMA was too high. Now I wonder if I’ve swung too far in the other direction or if I’m still giving him too much of a benefit of the doubt. We’ll have to see once his replies come in.
I have a facebook friend who writes thoughtfully, seems reasonably clever and cares about deep questions. He is a speaking-in-tongues, deeply religious, Prosperity, Charismatic, Word of Faith, Christian. A few of his interests and landmark-experiences match my own.
I was excited to talk to him because I thought he would be able to teach me something about religious people that ‘normal people’ couldn’t.
I also thought the skeleton of his personality was similar enough to mine that he might have made an ‘interesting mistake’. Due to the similarities between us, I wondered if I could also be susceptible to whatever ‘wrong turn’ his thinking took. I wanted to identify and analyze that ‘interesting mistake’, so I wouldn’t make it, and because I expected it to be weird and interesting.
It turned out his mistake wasn’t interesting and I was disappointed.
I’m curious whether writing something to rationalists (my response above) you feel the style is significantly different than when I’m not writing to them. As in, my line of thinking and way of explaining things.
For positive reinforcement: I’ve found your writing on less wrong good enough to be here so far. Reinforced bits: organization, use of emphasis, footnotes, engaging style, neutral tone, not taking incompatibility personally, a focus on sharing compatible, mutually useful knowledge.
The organizational problems you have written about here are concrete and easily supported. When I read your organizational writing and I come to a place where I need to evaluate if what you’re saying is true, the problem is transformed into a question of whether I believe that churches and missionary groups are successful at these things. So far you’ve been distilling and translating institutional knowledge.
I haven’t seen you write about harder issues here. Issues that require weighing competing mental processes, avoiding self-deception, tracing several levels of implication, being careful about what constitutes evidence, etc.
Of your writing elsewhere, it feels like you are snorkeling with fins and a mask. You’re staying on the surface in warm water and are checking out the beautiful tropical fish. You can see some of the terrain below you because your mask isn’t that foggy, but you don’t touch it because that just isn’t the activity you’re doing. You’re not surface diving, or deep water diving, and you’re having fun with your current activity.
Since learning the technical meaning of evidence, I no longer dismiss “feeling the Spirit” completely. Spiritual experiences are more likely if religion is true than if it is not, but not significantly more so.
I don’t think it’s clear that this is the case. Do we have any meaningful measure of how often we ought to expect spiritual experiences to happen if religion were true, relative to how often we would expect them to happen if religion were not true?
If any religion were true though, we should probably expect that spiritual experiences would be clustered around that particular religion.
In particular, I’m saying Pr(calcsam experiences warm feelings after reading the Book of Mormon | LDS church is true, social interaction with members) > Pr(warm, glowy feelings | LDS church is false, social interaction with members).
I agree that it’s really difficult to say exactly what these probabilities are. If you forced me to assign numbers, I would assign something close to 1 for the former and .1-.8 for the latter. To be valid, these should really be the result of probability flows through an entire network of beliefs, but I think the direction of the inequality is apparent. I agree that spiritual experiences for different religions will tend to offset one another. Whether these in total constitute net positive or negative evidence for a god in general depends of your prior about how these experiences are distributed. Based on my interpretation of LDS doctrine, many non-LDS individuals would feel the spirit, even during non-LDS services, just not as strongly.
In any other forum but this one, I wouldn’t go around saying this is evidence, but it is, if only weakly.
Well, thanks for taking the time to read my posts. I wrote a longer post, but you already read a bunch of my stuff so I’ll condense.
As to why people change their minds in general, one comment that might help is that I first came to view the religious worldview as coherent, in that people’s actions seemed to be in accord with their professed beliefs, it seemed to produce generally desirable results. Only after that did I come to believe that it was true.
Another way of saying that, and perhaps an anwer to your second question, As to the second question, is that the non-spiritual experiences—veracity of texts, ability to teach me something useful or have positive effects on me, established plausibility, perhaps .05 < p < 0.3. And experiences-which-I-interpret-as-the-Holy-Ghost took me from there to my current state.
I’m going to reply to your later stuff. I think there’s a basic epistemological difference in that I lend more credence to experience here.
I would disagree that I didn’t “trace out the implications” of issues that I discovered. To me, the main implication was that everything wasn’t neat, tidy and perfect the way most church members thought it was. But truth claims depend on the Book of Mormon. Seer stones, divining rods and polygamy are all true but irrelevant to this question; I wasn’t convinced by the View of the Hebrews/ Solomon Spaulding/ anachronisms arguments. (This is the short version of a long story as I’m sure you realize)
Badger, possibly you’re right in that everyone else’s hopes were too high. If you’re looking for a general theory of “why all religious people are wrong,” hopefully the first two paragraphs are useful to you. But the last stuff is more “my judgment of a very particular set of evidence.”
I first came to view the religious worldview as coherent, in that people’s actions seemed to be in accord with their professed beliefs, it seemed to produce generally desirable results.
This seems tangential. I agree that living a non-hypocritical, coherent narrative leads to overall better mental health. But there are many ways to live coherently, most of which don’t match the truth.
non-spiritual experiences … established plausibility, perhaps .05 < p < 0.3. And experiences-which-I-interpret-as-the-Holy-Ghost took me from there to my current state. … I think there’s a basic epistemological difference in that I lend more credence to experience here.
Of course, I’ll dispute getting to that base level, but focusing on the personal experiences, I hope we don’t have different views on how to weigh experience. This should be weighed as evidence exactly the same way everything else is: by the odds ratio of it occurring when the hypothesis is true over when it isn’t. Taking your numbers at face value, your odds on the church were between 1:20 and 1:2. Adding feelings of peace, rightness, reassurance, etc, these odds moved to say 10:1 (p~0.9). For this to work out, feelings of this sort had to be between 20 and 200 times more likely if the church is true than if it isn’t. Given human psychology, I think this is implausibly high. Like I said, I do think what you experienced is evidence, but I wouldn’t put the odds much higher than 5:1.
But truth claims depend on the Book of Mormon. Seer stones, divining rods and polygamy are all true but irrelevant to this question.
I agree completely. Well, I think it depends on more than the BoM, but polygamy, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the church’s opposition to Prop 8, and other things that can get people riled up are irrelevant to this. I admit I haven’t read much Dialogue (although I have one issue with a friend’s fiction sitting on my shelf), so maybe the matters presented are simply embarrassments and not evidence against the church. I was thinking more along the lines of Adam/God or the Book of Abraham papyri, which I assume you’ve been exposed to. And of course Native American genetics and BoM related matters.
I wasn’t convinced by the View of the Hebrews/ Solomon Spaulding/ anachronisms arguments.
I actually think these are (very weak) evidence for the Book of Mormon. They might provide an explanation for how the BoM came about if it wasn’t inspired, but it seems more likely that others would think Indians were descended from Hebrews if they really were.
Badger, possibly you’re right in that everyone else’s hopes were too high
Well, this was useful for me to practice thinking about what does or does not constitute evidence. I hope it’s been useful for you one way or another.
This is extremely helpful. I understand (and understood) the P(A|B) = P(AB)/P(B) part of Bayes’ theorem. I did not, however, get the odds ratio part until this post prompted me to go through EY’s Bayes Theorem explanation. Thank you.
I am thinking through the implications at the moment, but (this is to everyone else, not you) don’t get your hopes up for me to deconvert.
So, you’ve recognized that the explicit basis for your faith is insufficient, but you believe that you will not deconvert. What does this tell you? (There are a number of possible things.)
So, you’ve recognized that the explicit basis for your faith is insufficient, but you believe that you will not deconvert.
Hold on, you’re jumping the gun a bit there; calcsam hasn’t said anything (yet?) to indicate that he agrees with the statement that “the explicit basis for [his] faith” is insufficient.
I interpreted calcsam’s comment as indicating that an acknowledgement that the numbers above are indeed “implausibly high”. You are correct that I may have misinterpreted!
I hope we don’t have different views on how to weigh experience. This should be weighed as evidence exactly the same way everything else is: by the odds ratio of it occurring when the hypothesis is true over when it isn’t.
For this to work out, feelings of this sort had to be between 20 and 200 times more likely if the church is true than if it isn’t. Given human psychology, I think this is implausibly high. Like I said, I do think what you experienced is evidence, but I wouldn’t put the odds much higher than 5:1.
I agree with this assessment on the basis of internal LDS Theology. That is the Spirit testifies of the truth to all men everywhere and testifies of whatever portion of the truth they have. Thus it can be assumed that some such Spiritual experiences should be had in pretty much any religion and among those that mingle scripture with philosophy to get gain.
This is why it is important to ask for oneself and receive a personal confirmation for specific questions. However, even this doesn’t give high levels of certainty, as Alma points out in Alma 32. It does give enough to act upon what has been given so far which can then be used to get much higher degrees of confidence. Furthermore, it shouldn’t be a one time thing but one should be continually receiving such experiences as we are given line upon line, precept on precept.
Assuming people are acting rationally after receiving such an experience, even praying specifically only appears to provide odds of something like 7:1. Of course, having occurred once they may have changed their assessment of its likelihood in other religions, especially since so many (theist and atheist alike) place such high probability on the LDS being wrong.
Other types of experiences are also possible and do happen (angels and so forth) but are rarer for reasons described in Alma 32 and elsewhere.
Adam/God
I know where this idea is coming from but it contradicts such scriptures as Christ saying He only did what He saw His Father do and the entire idea of resurrection and immortality as given in scripture. Even Christ had to grow in grace and truth and was not given the fullness at once, so human prophets when not speaking directly from prophecy are completely fallible. Adam is certainly a god but is not God the Father.
Book of Abraham papyri
Given that the Bible was similarly translated and the pattern of how that happened is given in the D&C it is very safe to assume that a literal translation of the text as it appears on the fragments of papyri used was not intended. Some of it does appear to match, but only slightly (the Popol Vuh has things closer to temple ceremony and knowledge from the book of Abraham then the literal translation of the papyri).
Mormonism is a good explanation for your non-spiritual experiences?
the Book of Mormon is accurate with respect to metaphysical claims?
Mormonism is a good explanation for your experiences-which-you-interpret-as-the-Holy-Ghost? (Keeping in mind that the majority of people who have religious beliefs based on personal spiritual / faith experiences are incorrect.)
As a convert, you apparently experienced a major shift in belief, especially since you committed to a mission soon after. What in particular changed your mind?
What is your perspective on the role of faith in belief? How much of your belief would you say is due to feelings attributed to the Holy Ghost vs weighing other evidence?
What would be evidence to substantially revise your belief in the church downwards?
What have you thought of your reception here? Have you been surprised by any reactions?
What are you studying at Stanford?
I’m particularly interested in what you have to say as a convert. I know how the process works in the other direction (leaving the church at 17), but it’s important to know why people change their minds in general.
ETA: After looking at your blog, I’ll be frank and admit I was hoping for something a little more sophisticated to engage with. Your conversion appears to be based on a feeling of rightness without really grappling why or why not it might be true. Since learning the technical meaning of evidence, I no longer dismiss “feeling the Spirit” completely. Spiritual experiences are more likely if religion is true than if it is not, but not significantly more so. Hence it’s very weak evidence, nowhere necessary to overcome even basic evidence against.
LDS theology does have a veneer of rationality, saying “the glory of God is intelligence”, encouraging learning, and claiming there are universal laws that God works within, but the substance isn’t there. In your post on reading Dialogue, you acknowledge there are issues, but seem satisfied with acknowledgement rather than tracing out their implications.
I don’t want to hold you to blog posts that are a couple years old though. I’m still eager to learn any insights you might have. Please stick around. However, (speaking to everyone else here) I’m remembering how direct discussion of religion isn’t productive, even as a case study about how thinking can go awry. The mistakes you are making are too basic to be relevant to most people here. Thanks for opening yourself up to questions, but people (including myself) have been too eager in asking.
Also, economics and math! Always nice to meet another member of the tribe.
Some of your questions have answers on calcsam’s blog. Specifically, his conversion story is here.
I was rather disappointed by the story; it struck me as a regular conversion, driven by positive affect, social reinforcement, fuzzy feelings, motivated cognition, and characterized by a profound lack of truth-seeking. I expected something more unique or something strangely appealing.
What should we learn from our disappointment?
I ignored base rates when evaluating how useful or interesting his story might be. While someone who is intelligent, attends a good school, and is attracted to rationality is more likely to have not converted for the reasons you mention, the base rate is still very low.
My previous judgment about the utility of this AMA was too high. Now I wonder if I’ve swung too far in the other direction or if I’m still giving him too much of a benefit of the doubt. We’ll have to see once his replies come in.
Me too. I’ve even done it before:
I have a facebook friend who writes thoughtfully, seems reasonably clever and cares about deep questions. He is a speaking-in-tongues, deeply religious, Prosperity, Charismatic, Word of Faith, Christian. A few of his interests and landmark-experiences match my own.
I was excited to talk to him because I thought he would be able to teach me something about religious people that ‘normal people’ couldn’t.
I also thought the skeleton of his personality was similar enough to mine that he might have made an ‘interesting mistake’. Due to the similarities between us, I wondered if I could also be susceptible to whatever ‘wrong turn’ his thinking took. I wanted to identify and analyze that ‘interesting mistake’, so I wouldn’t make it, and because I expected it to be weird and interesting.
It turned out his mistake wasn’t interesting and I was disappointed.
I’m curious whether writing something to rationalists (my response above) you feel the style is significantly different than when I’m not writing to them. As in, my line of thinking and way of explaining things.
For positive reinforcement: I’ve found your writing on less wrong good enough to be here so far. Reinforced bits: organization, use of emphasis, footnotes, engaging style, neutral tone, not taking incompatibility personally, a focus on sharing compatible, mutually useful knowledge.
The organizational problems you have written about here are concrete and easily supported. When I read your organizational writing and I come to a place where I need to evaluate if what you’re saying is true, the problem is transformed into a question of whether I believe that churches and missionary groups are successful at these things. So far you’ve been distilling and translating institutional knowledge.
I haven’t seen you write about harder issues here. Issues that require weighing competing mental processes, avoiding self-deception, tracing several levels of implication, being careful about what constitutes evidence, etc.
Of your writing elsewhere, it feels like you are snorkeling with fins and a mask. You’re staying on the surface in warm water and are checking out the beautiful tropical fish. You can see some of the terrain below you because your mask isn’t that foggy, but you don’t touch it because that just isn’t the activity you’re doing. You’re not surface diving, or deep water diving, and you’re having fun with your current activity.
Said much better and more technically by Kutta above, your writing elsewhere:
Thank you for that.
thanks.
I don’t think it’s clear that this is the case. Do we have any meaningful measure of how often we ought to expect spiritual experiences to happen if religion were true, relative to how often we would expect them to happen if religion were not true?
If any religion were true though, we should probably expect that spiritual experiences would be clustered around that particular religion.
In particular, I’m saying
Pr(calcsam experiences warm feelings after reading the Book of Mormon | LDS church is true, social interaction with members) > Pr(warm, glowy feelings | LDS church is false, social interaction with members).I agree that it’s really difficult to say exactly what these probabilities are. If you forced me to assign numbers, I would assign something close to 1 for the former and .1-.8 for the latter. To be valid, these should really be the result of probability flows through an entire network of beliefs, but I think the direction of the inequality is apparent. I agree that spiritual experiences for different religions will tend to offset one another. Whether these in total constitute net positive or negative evidence for a god in general depends of your prior about how these experiences are distributed. Based on my interpretation of LDS doctrine, many non-LDS individuals would feel the spirit, even during non-LDS services, just not as strongly.
In any other forum but this one, I wouldn’t go around saying this is evidence, but it is, if only weakly.
Well, thanks for taking the time to read my posts. I wrote a longer post, but you already read a bunch of my stuff so I’ll condense.
As to why people change their minds in general, one comment that might help is that I first came to view the religious worldview as coherent, in that people’s actions seemed to be in accord with their professed beliefs, it seemed to produce generally desirable results. Only after that did I come to believe that it was true.
Another way of saying that, and perhaps an anwer to your second question, As to the second question, is that the non-spiritual experiences—veracity of texts, ability to teach me something useful or have positive effects on me, established plausibility, perhaps .05 < p < 0.3. And experiences-which-I-interpret-as-the-Holy-Ghost took me from there to my current state.
I’m going to reply to your later stuff. I think there’s a basic epistemological difference in that I lend more credence to experience here.
I would disagree that I didn’t “trace out the implications” of issues that I discovered. To me, the main implication was that everything wasn’t neat, tidy and perfect the way most church members thought it was. But truth claims depend on the Book of Mormon. Seer stones, divining rods and polygamy are all true but irrelevant to this question; I wasn’t convinced by the View of the Hebrews/ Solomon Spaulding/ anachronisms arguments. (This is the short version of a long story as I’m sure you realize)
Badger, possibly you’re right in that everyone else’s hopes were too high. If you’re looking for a general theory of “why all religious people are wrong,” hopefully the first two paragraphs are useful to you. But the last stuff is more “my judgment of a very particular set of evidence.”
This seems tangential. I agree that living a non-hypocritical, coherent narrative leads to overall better mental health. But there are many ways to live coherently, most of which don’t match the truth.
Of course, I’ll dispute getting to that base level, but focusing on the personal experiences, I hope we don’t have different views on how to weigh experience. This should be weighed as evidence exactly the same way everything else is: by the odds ratio of it occurring when the hypothesis is true over when it isn’t. Taking your numbers at face value, your odds on the church were between 1:20 and 1:2. Adding feelings of peace, rightness, reassurance, etc, these odds moved to say 10:1 (p~0.9). For this to work out, feelings of this sort had to be between 20 and 200 times more likely if the church is true than if it isn’t. Given human psychology, I think this is implausibly high. Like I said, I do think what you experienced is evidence, but I wouldn’t put the odds much higher than 5:1.
I agree completely. Well, I think it depends on more than the BoM, but polygamy, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the church’s opposition to Prop 8, and other things that can get people riled up are irrelevant to this. I admit I haven’t read much Dialogue (although I have one issue with a friend’s fiction sitting on my shelf), so maybe the matters presented are simply embarrassments and not evidence against the church. I was thinking more along the lines of Adam/God or the Book of Abraham papyri, which I assume you’ve been exposed to. And of course Native American genetics and BoM related matters.
I actually think these are (very weak) evidence for the Book of Mormon. They might provide an explanation for how the BoM came about if it wasn’t inspired, but it seems more likely that others would think Indians were descended from Hebrews if they really were.
Well, this was useful for me to practice thinking about what does or does not constitute evidence. I hope it’s been useful for you one way or another.
This is extremely helpful. I understand (and understood) the P(A|B) = P(AB)/P(B) part of Bayes’ theorem. I did not, however, get the odds ratio part until this post prompted me to go through EY’s Bayes Theorem explanation. Thank you.
I am thinking through the implications at the moment, but (this is to everyone else, not you) don’t get your hopes up for me to deconvert.
So, you’ve recognized that the explicit basis for your faith is insufficient, but you believe that you will not deconvert. What does this tell you? (There are a number of possible things.)
Hold on, you’re jumping the gun a bit there; calcsam hasn’t said anything (yet?) to indicate that he agrees with the statement that “the explicit basis for [his] faith” is insufficient.
I interpreted calcsam’s comment as indicating that an acknowledgement that the numbers above are indeed “implausibly high”. You are correct that I may have misinterpreted!
It’s worth getting the log-odds-ratio version of the theory down; only then does the phrase “weight of evidence” really start to make sense.
I don’t have my hopes up because you are yet to answer what is by far the most important question.
This is very important.
I agree with this assessment on the basis of internal LDS Theology. That is the Spirit testifies of the truth to all men everywhere and testifies of whatever portion of the truth they have. Thus it can be assumed that some such Spiritual experiences should be had in pretty much any religion and among those that mingle scripture with philosophy to get gain.
This is why it is important to ask for oneself and receive a personal confirmation for specific questions. However, even this doesn’t give high levels of certainty, as Alma points out in Alma 32. It does give enough to act upon what has been given so far which can then be used to get much higher degrees of confidence. Furthermore, it shouldn’t be a one time thing but one should be continually receiving such experiences as we are given line upon line, precept on precept.
Assuming people are acting rationally after receiving such an experience, even praying specifically only appears to provide odds of something like 7:1. Of course, having occurred once they may have changed their assessment of its likelihood in other religions, especially since so many (theist and atheist alike) place such high probability on the LDS being wrong.
Other types of experiences are also possible and do happen (angels and so forth) but are rarer for reasons described in Alma 32 and elsewhere.
I know where this idea is coming from but it contradicts such scriptures as Christ saying He only did what He saw His Father do and the entire idea of resurrection and immortality as given in scripture. Even Christ had to grow in grace and truth and was not given the fullness at once, so human prophets when not speaking directly from prophecy are completely fallible. Adam is certainly a god but is not God the Father.
Given that the Bible was similarly translated and the pattern of how that happened is given in the D&C it is very safe to assume that a literal translation of the text as it appears on the fragments of papyri used was not intended. Some of it does appear to match, but only slightly (the Popol Vuh has things closer to temple ceremony and knowledge from the book of Abraham then the literal translation of the papyri).
So why do you think that
Mormonism is a good explanation for your non-spiritual experiences?
the Book of Mormon is accurate with respect to metaphysical claims?
Mormonism is a good explanation for your experiences-which-you-interpret-as-the-Holy-Ghost? (Keeping in mind that the majority of people who have religious beliefs based on personal spiritual / faith experiences are incorrect.)