Hi, I’m Alia and I live with my husband in San Jose, California. I found this site via SlateStarCodex and having read Rationality:From AI to Zombies I think this is a fascinating and useful set of concepts and that using this type of reasoning more often is something to aspire to. I want to do more Bayesian calculations so I get more of a feel for them.
I’m also a fundamentalist* Christian. I’m perfectly ready to discuss and defend these beliefs, but I wouldn’t always bring up these beliefs in threads. I’m not trying to deceive or trick anyone, I just don’t want to derail a thread that is actually about something else. I do think it’s possible to be both a rationalist and a Christian as to stay reasonably intellectually consistent.
*(a note on why I choose the identification fundamentalist. Not long after American Christians split into mainline and fundamentalist groups, the fundamentalists got a bunch of bad press focused on certain sub-groups that were anti-intellectual. The other fundamentalists dealt with this by splitting off and re-branding themselves as evangelical. I’m not anti-intellectual and generally in the group that would self identify as evangelical, but I’m choosing to stick with the fundamentalist label for three reasons. 1) I don’t think changing the label or re-branding is a good way to deal with negative affect attached to a word. At best it just avoids the issue rather than solving the problem. 2) I don’t believe in disavowing people because they are unpopular with third parties. While I dis-agree with the anti-intellectuals on some things, the agreement on common core beliefs that lead to the fundamentalist label in the beginning is still there. 3) I think the fundamentalist label provides more clarity. The evangelicals worked hard and successfully to avoid getting over identified with and sub-group or coincidental characteristic. But as a result the label evangelical stayed vague, Individuals and groups that are more in the mainline tradition sometimes call themselves or get called evangelical. On the other hand opponents who wanted to hang on to the negative affect kept calling anything from the original fundamentalist tradition ‘fundamentalist.’ So on the I think fundamentalist will convey the most accurate idea of where I’m coming from theologically.)
Welcome! I applaud your decision to embrace hostile terminology. I don’t think you should feel any obligation to bring up your religious beliefs all the time.
If you’re interested in the interactions between unashamedly traditionalist religion and rationalism, you might want to drop into the ongoing discussion of talking snakes. Most of it lately, though, has been discussion between people who agree that the story in question is almost certainly hopelessly wrong and disagree about exactly which bits of it offer most evidence against the religion(s) it’s a part of, which you might find merely annoying...
[EDITED to add: Aha, I see you’ve already found that. My apologies for not having noticed that you were already participating actively there.]
Just out of curiosity (and you should feel free not to answer), how “typically fundamentalist” are your positions? E.g., are you a young-earth creationist, do you believe that a large fraction of the human race is likely to spend eternity in torment, do you believe in “verbal plenary inspiration” of the Christian scriptures, etc.?
(Meta-note that in a better world would be unnecessary: it happens that one disgruntled LessWronger has taken to downvoting almost everything I post, sometimes several times by means of sockpuppets. I mention this only so that if you see this comment sitting there with a negative score you don’t take it to mean that the LW community generally disapproves of my welcoming you or disagrees with what I said above.)
Fairly typically fundamentalist, I believe in young earth creationism with a roughly estimated confidence level of 70%, a large fraction of the human race destined for eternal torment at about 85% and verbal plenary inspiration at about 90%.
I’m a little more theologically engaged then average but (as is typical in my circles) that mean’s I’m more theologically conservative, not less.
Are those figures derived from any sort of numerical evidence-weighing process, or are they quantifications of gut feelings? (I do not intend either of those as a value judgement. Different kinds of probability estimate are appropriate on different occasions.)
These are more gut feelings, I had already considered a lot of evidence for and against these before I found out about Bayesian updating, so the bottom line was really already written. If I tried to do a numerically rigorous calculation now, I would just end up double counting evidence. This is just a ’if I had to make a hundred statements of this type that I was this confident about, how often would I be right guess.
I’ve found the Welcome thread!
Hi, I’m Alia and I live with my husband in San Jose, California. I found this site via SlateStarCodex and having read Rationality:From AI to Zombies I think this is a fascinating and useful set of concepts and that using this type of reasoning more often is something to aspire to. I want to do more Bayesian calculations so I get more of a feel for them.
I’m also a fundamentalist* Christian. I’m perfectly ready to discuss and defend these beliefs, but I wouldn’t always bring up these beliefs in threads. I’m not trying to deceive or trick anyone, I just don’t want to derail a thread that is actually about something else. I do think it’s possible to be both a rationalist and a Christian as to stay reasonably intellectually consistent.
*(a note on why I choose the identification fundamentalist. Not long after American Christians split into mainline and fundamentalist groups, the fundamentalists got a bunch of bad press focused on certain sub-groups that were anti-intellectual. The other fundamentalists dealt with this by splitting off and re-branding themselves as evangelical. I’m not anti-intellectual and generally in the group that would self identify as evangelical, but I’m choosing to stick with the fundamentalist label for three reasons. 1) I don’t think changing the label or re-branding is a good way to deal with negative affect attached to a word. At best it just avoids the issue rather than solving the problem. 2) I don’t believe in disavowing people because they are unpopular with third parties. While I dis-agree with the anti-intellectuals on some things, the agreement on common core beliefs that lead to the fundamentalist label in the beginning is still there. 3) I think the fundamentalist label provides more clarity. The evangelicals worked hard and successfully to avoid getting over identified with and sub-group or coincidental characteristic. But as a result the label evangelical stayed vague, Individuals and groups that are more in the mainline tradition sometimes call themselves or get called evangelical. On the other hand opponents who wanted to hang on to the negative affect kept calling anything from the original fundamentalist tradition ‘fundamentalist.’ So on the I think fundamentalist will convey the most accurate idea of where I’m coming from theologically.)
Welcome! I applaud your decision to embrace hostile terminology. I don’t think you should feel any obligation to bring up your religious beliefs all the time.
If you’re interested in the interactions between unashamedly traditionalist religion and rationalism, you might want to drop into the ongoing discussion of talking snakes. Most of it lately, though, has been discussion between people who agree that the story in question is almost certainly hopelessly wrong and disagree about exactly which bits of it offer most evidence against the religion(s) it’s a part of, which you might find merely annoying...
[EDITED to add: Aha, I see you’ve already found that. My apologies for not having noticed that you were already participating actively there.]
Just out of curiosity (and you should feel free not to answer), how “typically fundamentalist” are your positions? E.g., are you a young-earth creationist, do you believe that a large fraction of the human race is likely to spend eternity in torment, do you believe in “verbal plenary inspiration” of the Christian scriptures, etc.?
(Meta-note that in a better world would be unnecessary: it happens that one disgruntled LessWronger has taken to downvoting almost everything I post, sometimes several times by means of sockpuppets. I mention this only so that if you see this comment sitting there with a negative score you don’t take it to mean that the LW community generally disapproves of my welcoming you or disagrees with what I said above.)
Fairly typically fundamentalist, I believe in young earth creationism with a roughly estimated confidence level of 70%, a large fraction of the human race destined for eternal torment at about 85% and verbal plenary inspiration at about 90%.
I’m a little more theologically engaged then average but (as is typical in my circles) that mean’s I’m more theologically conservative, not less.
Are those figures derived from any sort of numerical evidence-weighing process, or are they quantifications of gut feelings? (I do not intend either of those as a value judgement. Different kinds of probability estimate are appropriate on different occasions.)
These are more gut feelings, I had already considered a lot of evidence for and against these before I found out about Bayesian updating, so the bottom line was really already written. If I tried to do a numerically rigorous calculation now, I would just end up double counting evidence. This is just a ’if I had to make a hundred statements of this type that I was this confident about, how often would I be right guess.
Much though this amuses atheist-curmudgeon me, may I suggest that you might want to fix the typo?
Oops, thnks
Interesting! Thanks.
Do you believe that both Black and White people who live currently descend from one individual that lived around 6000 years ago?
Welcome Alia! You sure sound like one of us. Hope you like it here.