Hello. I come from HPMoR. I identify as Christian, though my belief and reasons for belief are a bit more complex than that. I’ll probably do a post on that later in ‘how to convince me 2+2=3’. I also get told that I over think things.
Anyway, that’s not the reason I joined. I was reading an article by Eliezer Yudkowsky and he stated that whatever can be destroyed by truth should be. This got me wondering in what context that was meant. My first thought was that it meant that we should strive to destroy all false beliefs, which has the side effect of not lying, but then I began to wonder if it wasn`t more personal. We should strive to let the truth that we observe destroy any beliefs that they are able to.
I realized that the difference between the two is that one is an end in and of itself (destroy all false belief), and one is a means to achieve a goal more effectively (don`t hold on to false belief when it has been proved false). I am really not sure how I feel about the first one, it seems very confrontational to no good purpose. There are a lot of false beliefs out there that people hold dear. However the second one is strange as well.
One of peoples goals is to be happy. Now there is an old saying that ignorance is bliss. While this is definitely not always a good policy I can think of several cases off the top of my head were a person would be happier with a false belief than with reality. For example what if everything that is happening to you right now is your mind constructing an elaborate fantasy to stop you from realizing that you are slowly being tortured to death? If you break free of said belief you are not happy, and you can do nothing to save yourself. The goal of being happy is actively opposed by the goal of learning the truth.
[disclaimer: I’ve read about the mind constructing such fantasies in books and have experienced it only once in my life to a limited degree when I was being beaten up as a child. I don’t know how scientifically accurate they are. This is just an example and if necessary I can come up with another one.]
So probably that wasn’t what Mr. Yudkowsky meant when he said that what can be destroyed by truth should be (and if it is, can someone explain to me why?). So what does it mean? I’ve run out of theories here.
Welcome to LessWrong. There’s a sizable contingent of people in this community who don’t think that uncomfortable truths need be confronted. But I think they are wrong.
As you say, one purpose of believing true things is to be better at achieving goals. To exaggerate slightly, if you believe “Things in motion tend to come to a stop,” then you will never achieve the goal of building a rocket to visit other planets. You might respond that none of your actual goals are prevented by your false beliefs. But you can’t know that in advance unless you know which of your beliefs are false. That’s not belief, that’s believing that you have a belief.. And adjusting your goals so that they never are frustrated by false beliefs is just a long-winded way of saying Not Achieving Your Original Goals.
In theory, there might be a time when you wouldn’t choose differently with a true belief that with a false belief. I certainly don’t endorse telling an imminently dying man that his beloved wife cheated on him years ago. But circumstances must be quite strange for you to be confident that your choices won’t change based on your beliefs. You, the person doing the believing, don’t know when you are in situations like that because—by hypothesis—you have an unknown false belief that prevents you from understanding what is going on.
Hi, I joined just to reply to this comment. I don’t think there is a lot of complexity hidden behind “whatever can be destroyed by truth should be”. If there is a false belief, we should try to replace it with a true one, or at least a less wrong one.
Your argument that goes “But what if you were being tortured to death” doesn’t really hold up because that argument can be used to reach any conclusion. What if you were experiencing perfect bliss, but then, your mind made up an elaborate fantasy which you believe to be your life… What if there were an evil and capricious deity who would torture you for eternity if you chose Frosted Flakes over Fruit Loops for breakfast? These kinds of “What if” statements followed by something of fundamentally unknowable probability are infinite in number and could be used to reach any conclusion you like and therefore, they don’t recomend any conclusion over any other conclusion. I don’t think it is more likely that I am being horribly tortured and fantasizing about writing this comment than I think it is likely that I am in perfect bliss and fantasizing about this, and so, this argument does nothing to recomend ignorance over knowledge.
In retrospect (say it turns out I am being tortured) I may be happier in ignorance, but I would be an inferior rationalist.
I think this applies to Christianity too. At the risk of being polemical, say I believed that Christianity is a scam whereby a select group of people convince the children of the faithful that they are in peril of eternal punishment if they don’t grow up to give 10% of their money to the church. Suppose I think that this is harmful to children and adults. Further, suppose I think the material claims of the religion are false. Now, you on the other hand suppose (I assume) that the material claims of the religion are true and that the children of the faithful are being improved by religious instruction.
Both of us can’t be right here. If we apply the saying “whatever can be destroyed by truth should be” then we should each try to rigorously expose our ideas to the truth. If one of our positions can be destroyed by the truth, it should be. This works no matter who is right (or if neither of us are right). If I am correct, then I destroy your idea, you stop believing in something false, stop assisting in the spread of false beliefs, stop contributing money to a scam, etc. If you are right then my belief will be destroyed, I can gain eternal salvation, stop trying to mislead people from the true faith, begin tithing etc.
In conclusion, I think the saying means exactly what it sounds like.
These kinds of “What if” statements followed by something of fundamentally unknowable probability...
Minor nitpick: these statements have a very low probability of being true due to the lack of evidence for them, not an unknowable probability of being true as your sentence would imply.
This works no matter who is right (or if neither of us are right).
Ok, but what about unfalsifiable (or incredibly unlikely to be falsified) claims ? Let’s imagine that I am a religious person, who believes that a). the afterlife exists, and b). the gods will reward people in this afterlife in proportion to the number of good deeds each person accomplished in his Earthly life.The exact nature of the reward doesn’t matter, whatever it is, I’d consider it awesome. Furthermore, let’s imagine that I believe c). no objective empirical evidence of this afterlife and these gods’ existence could ever be obtained; nonetheless, I believe in it wholeheartedly (perhaps the gods revealed the truth to me in an intensely subjective experience, or whatever). As a direct result of my beliefs, d). I am driven to become a better person and do more good things for more people, thus becoming generally nicer, etc.
In this scenario, should my belief be destroyed by the truth ?
Suppose we are neighbors. By some mixup, the power company is combining my electric bill to your own. You notice that your bill is unusually high, but you pay it anyway because you want electricity. In fact, you like electricity so much that you are happy to pay even the high bill to get continued power. Now, suppose that I knew all the details of the situation. Should I tell you about the error?
I think this case is pretty similar to the one you’ve described about the religion that makes you do good things. You pay my bill because you want a good for yourself. I am letting you incur a cost, that you may not want to, because it will benefit me.
I think in the electricity example I have some moral obligation to tell you our bills have been combined. I think this carries over to the religious example. There is a real benefit to me (and to society) to let you continue to labor under your false assumption that doing good deeds would result in magic rewards, but I still think it would be immoral to let this go on. I think the right thing to do would be to try and destroy your false belief with the truth and then try to convince you that altruism can be rewarding in and of itself. That way, you may still be an altruist, but you won’t be fooled into being one.
I think this case is pretty similar to the one you’ve described about the religion that makes you do good things.
Not entirely. In your example, the power bill is a zero-sum game; in order for you to gain a benefit (free power), someone has to experience a loss (I pay extra for your power in addition to mine). Is there a loss in my scenario, and if so, to whom ?
There is a real benefit to me (and to society) to let you continue to labor under your false assumption that doing good deeds would result in magic rewards, but I still think it would be immoral to let this go on.
Why do you think this would be immoral ? I could probably make a consequentialist argument that it would in fact be moral, but perhaps you’re using some other moral system ?
someone has to experience a loss (I pay extra for your power in addition to mine). Is there a loss in my scenario, and if so, to whom
The cost is to you. You are the one doing good deeds. I consider the time and effort (and money) you expend doing good deeds for other people to be the cost here.
Why do you think this would be immoral ?
My feeling is that this is an implicit corruption of your free will. You aren’t actually intending to pay my power, you are just doing it because you don’t realize you are. Similarly, in the religion example, what you actually intend to do is earn your way into heaven (or pay for your own power) but what you are actually doing is hard work to benefit others and you won’t go to heaven for it (paying for my electricity).
I don’t have the time to fully divulge my moral system here, but I think there is a class of actions which reduce the free will of other people. At the very extreme end of this class would be slavery “Do my work or I’ll hurt or kill you”. At the opposite end of the spectrum (but still a member of the same class) is something like letting people serve you, when they don’t intend to, because of a lie by omission.
One of the things I respect and value about human beings is their free will. By diminishing the free will of other people I would be diminishing the value of other human beings and I am calling that “immoral behavior”. This, I think, is why it is immoral to let you believe a lie which hurts you even if it helps me.
We might all benefit if we tricked Mark Zuckerburg into paying our power bills. He could afford to do so and to go on doing his thing and we would all be made better off. So, should we do so? If we should, why should we stop at the power bill? Why should we limit ourselves to tricking him? Why not just compel him through force?
The cost is to you. You are the one doing good deeds. I consider the time and effort (and money) you expend doing good deeds for other people to be the cost here.
Ah, I understand, that makes sense. In this case, the magnitude of the net loss/gain depends on whether “become a better person” is one of my goals. If it is, then belief in this kind of afterlife basically acts as a powerful anti-akrasia aid, motivating me to achieve this goal. In this scenario, would you say that taking this tool away from me would be the right thing to do ?
My feeling is that this is an implicit corruption of your free will.
What do you mean by “free will” ? Different people use this term to mean very different things.
Why not just compel him through force?
This is different from tricking him [1]. When we trick someone in the manner we were discussing (i.e., by conning him), we aren’t just taking away his stuff—we are giving him happiness in return. By contrast, when we take his stuff away by force, we’re giving him nothing but pain. Thus, even if we somehow established that conning people is morally acceptable, it does not follow that robbing them is acceptable as well.
[1] As Sophie from Leverage points out in one of the episodes.
then belief in this kind of afterlife basically acts as a powerful anti-akrasia aid, motivating me to achieve this goal
This depends very much on what you mean by “better person”. Returning a lost wallet because you know the pain of losing things and because you understand the wallet’s owner is a sapient being who will experience similar pain is the kind of thing a good person would do. Returning a lost wallet because you expect a reward is more of a morally neutral thing to do. So, if you are doing good deeds because you expect a heavenly reward then you aren’t really being a good person (according to me) - you are just performing actions you expect to get a reward for. I think this belief actually prohibits you from being a good person, because as long as you believe in it you can never be sure whether you are acting out of a desire to be good or out of a desire to go to heaven.
In this scenario, would you say that taking this tool away from me would be the right thing to do ?
I would. If you use this belief to trick yourself into believing you are a better person (see above) then this is just doubling down for me. False beliefs should be destroyed by the truth. I should first destroy the belief in the heavenly reward for good deeds and then let the truth test you. Do you still do good things without hope of eternal reward? If yes, then you are a good person. If not, then you aren’t and you never were.
What do you mean by “free will” ?
By “free will” I mean a person’s ability to choose the option they most prefer. So, if I tell my friend I want to eat at restaurant X—I don’t think I’m inhibiting his free will. I do hope I’m influencing his preferences. I assume somewhere in his decision making algorithm is a routine that considers the strength of preferences of friends and that evaluation is used to modify his preference to eat at restaurant X. I do think I’d be inhibiting his free will if I were to say falsely that “Well, we can’t go to Y because it burned down” (or let him continue to believe this without correcting him). I am subverting free will by distorting the apparent available options. I think this also fits if you use threat of harm (“I’ll shoot you if we don’t go to X”) to remove an option from someone’s consideration.
by conning him), we aren’t just taking away his stuff—we are giving him happiness in return
I know a mentally handicapped person. I think its very likely I could trick this person out of their money. I could con him with a lie that is very liable to make him happy but would result in me getting all of his money and his stuff. What is your moral evaluation of this action?
It seems to me, if it is possible to trick Zuckerberg into paying my power bill then it is possible because he is gullible enough to believe my con. If it is possible for me to trick the mentally disabled, then it is possible because they are gullible enough for me to con. So, I don’t see why there should be any moral difference between tricking the mentally disabled out of their wealth and tricking Zuckerberg out of his. Nigerian email scams should be okay too, right?
I suppose there is some difference here in that Zuckerberg could afford to be conned out of a power bill or two whereas the average Nigerian scam victim cannot. I interpret this difference as being one of scale though. I think it would be worse to trick the elderly or the mentally disabled out of their life savings than it would to trick Zuckerberg out of the same number of dollars. This doesn’t mean that it is morally permissible to trick Zuckerberg out of any money though. Instead, I think it shows that each of these actions are immoral but of different magnitudes.
This depends very much on what you mean by “better person”.
In this scenario, I mean, “someone who believes that doing nice things for people is a valuable goal, and who strives to act in accordance with this goal”. That said, does it really matter why I do nice things for people, as long as I do them ? Outside observers can’t tell what I’m thinking, after all, only what I’m doing.
Do you still do good things without hope of eternal reward?
In my scenario, the answer is either “no”, or “not as effectively”. I would like to do good things, but a powerful case of akrasia prevents me from doing them most of the time. Believing in the eternal reward cancels out the akrasia.
So, if I tell my friend I want to eat at restaurant X—I don’t think I’m inhibiting his free will. I do hope I’m influencing his preferences.
In this case, “free will” is a matter of degree. Sure, you aren’t inhibiting your friend’s choices by force, but you are still affecting them. Left to his own devices, he would’ve chosen restaurant Y—but you caused him to choose restaurant X, instead.
I could con him with a lie that is very liable to make him happy but would result in me getting all of his money and his stuff. What is your moral evaluation of this action?
This action is not entirely analogous, because, while your victim might experience a temporary boost in happiness, he will experience unhappiness once he finds out that his stuff is gone, and that you tricked him. Thus, the total amount of happiness he experiences throughout his life will undergo a net decrease.
The more interesting question is, “what if I could con the person in such a way that will grant him sustained happiness ?” I am not sure whether doing so would be moral or not; but I’m also not entirely sure whether such a feat is even possible.
Instead, I think it shows that each of these actions are immoral but of different magnitudes.
Agreed, assuming that the actions are, in fact, immoral.
That said, does it really matter why I do nice things for people, as long as I do them ?
From an economics standpoint it doesn’t matter. From a morality standpoint I would say it is all that does matter.
Consider, your friend asks you to get a cup of coffee—with sugar please! You go make the coffee and put in a healthy amount of the white powder. Unknown to you, this isn’t sugar, it is cyanide. Your friend drinks the coffee and falls down dead. What is your moral culpability here?
In a second instance, someone who thinks of you as a friend asks you for a cup of coffee—with sugar please! You actually aren’t this person’s friend though, you hate them. You make the cup of coffee, but instead of putting the sugar in it, you go to the back room, where you usually keep your cyanide powder. You find a bag of the white powder and put a large quantity into the coffee. Unknown to you, this isn’t cyanide, it has been switched with sugar. Your enemy drinks the coffee and enjoys it. What is your moral culpability here?
From the strict, bottom line, standpoint, you are a murderer in the first case and totally innocent in the second. And yet, that doesn’t feel right. Your intent in the first case was to help a friend. I would say that you have no moral culpability for his death. In the second case, your intent was to kill a person. I would say you bear the same moral culpability you would had you actually succeeded.
I think this example shows that what matters is not the consequences of your actions, but your intent when you take those actions. As such, if your intent on doing good is to benefit yourself I think it is fair to say that that is morally neutral (or at least less moral than it could be). If you intend simply to do good, then I think your actions are morally good, even if the consequences are not.
In my scenario, the answer is either “no”, or “not as effectively”.
I would say this is the light of truth shattering your illusion about being a good person then. Maybe that realization will drive you to overcome the akrasia and you can become a good person in fact as well in your desires.
Left to his own devices, he would’ve chosen restaurant Y—but you caused him to choose restaurant X, instead
What I hope is happening is that my friend’s preferences include a variable which account for the preferences of his friends. That way, when I tell him where I want to go, I am informing his decision making algorithm without actually changing his preferences. If I wanted to go to X less, then my friend would want to go to X less.
This action is not entirely analogous, … The more interesting question is...
Agreed. I don’t think this case would be moral though (though it would be a closer fit to the other situation). I think it still qualifies as a usurpation of another person’s free will and therefore is still immoral even if it makes people happy.
I can try again with another hypothetical. A girl wants to try ecstasy. She approaches a drug dealer, explains she has never tried it but would like to. The drug dealer supplies her with a pill which she takes. This isn’t ecstasy though, it is rohypnol. The girl blacks out and the drug dealer rapes her while she is unconscious, then cleans her up and leaves her on a couch. The girl comes to. Ecstasy wasn’t quite like it was described to her, but she is proud of herself for being adventurous and for trying new things. She isn’t some square who is too afraid to try recreational drugs and she will believe this about herself and attach a good feeling to this for the rest of her life. Has anyone done anything wrong here? The drug dealer was sexually gratified and the girl feels fulfilled in her experimentation. This feels like a case where every party is made happier and yet, I would still say that the drug dealer has done something immoral, even if he knew for sure how the girl would react.
I think this example shows that what matters is not the consequences of your actions, but your intent when you take those actions.
From whose point of view ? If you are committed to poisoning your hapless friend, then presumably you either don’t care about morality, or you’d determined that this action would be sufficiently moral. If, on the other hand, I am attempting to evaluate the morality of your actions, then I can only evaluate the actions you did, in fact, perform (because I can’t read your mind). Thus, if you gave your friend a cup of tea with sugar in it, and, after he drank it, you refrained from exclaiming “This cannot be ! So much cyanide would kill any normal man !”—then I would conclude that you’re just a nice guy who gives sugared tea to people.
I do agree with you that intent matters in the opposite case; this is how we can differentiate murder from manslaughter.
I would say this is the light of truth shattering your illusion about being a good person then. Maybe that realization will drive you to overcome the akrasia...
Maybe it won’t, though. Thus, we have traded some harmless delusions of goodness for a markedly reduced expected value of my actions in the future (I might still do good deeds, but the probability of this happening is lower). Did society really win anything ?
If I wanted to go to X less, then my friend would want to go to X less.
Sounds like this is still mind control, just to a (much) lesser degree. Instead of altering your friend’s preferences directly, you’re exploiting your knowledge of his preference table, but the principle is the same. You could’ve just as easily said, “I know that my friend wants to avoid pain, so if I threaten him with pain unless he goes to X less, then he’d want to go to X less”.
I can try again with another hypothetical. A girl wants to try ecstasy...
I don’t think this scenario is entirely analogous either, though it’s much closer. In this example, there was a very high probability that the girl sustained severe lasting damage (STDs, pregnancy, bruising, drug overdose or allergy, etc.). Less importantly, the girl received some misleading information about drugs, which may cause her to make harmful decisions in the future. Even if none of these things happened in this specific case, the probability of them happening is relatively high. Thus, we would not want to live in a society where acting like the drug dealer did is considered moral.
If there is no empirical evidence either way about a belief, how would one go about destroying it? Beliefs pay rent in anticipated experience, not anticipated actions.
In short, the religious person has adopted a terminal value of being a nicer person, but is confused an thinks this is an instrumental value in pursuit of the “real” terminal value of implementing the desires of a supernatural being. Epistemic rationality has no more to say about this terminal value than about any other terminal value.
If there is no empirical evidence either way about a belief, how would one go about destroying it?
One way you could go about destroying a belief like that is to use Ockham’s Razor: sure, it’s possible that all kinds of unfalsifiable beliefs are true, but why should you waste time in believing any of them, if they have no effect on anything ?
However, if the believer has some subjective evidence for the belief—f.ex., if he personally experienced the gods talking to him—then this attack cannot work. In this case, would you still say that his belief is “indestructible” ?
I think this applies to Christianity too. At the risk of being polemical, say I believed that Christianity is a scam whereby a select group of people convince the children of the faithful that they are in peril of eternal punishment if they don’t grow up to give 10% of their money to the church.
I think this is a rather misleading characterization, since calling it a scam implies that the people doing the convincing are perpetrating a deception they do not believe in themselves, which I doubt is true in any but an extremely small and unusual minority of cases.
I pose the question of what does being a superior rationalist do for you if you are about to die? And I’ll use a more real example because you don’t seem to like that one. Let us suppose that you are about a miles walk from your car and you cut yourself badly. You don’t have any means of communicating with people. You start walking back to your car. You suspect that you aren’t going to make it. Now does it make you happier to follow up on that thought and figure out the rate you are losing blood, realize you aren’t going to make it and die in fear and sadness, or is it better to put that suspicion aside and keep walking toward your car, sitting down for a quick rest when you get tired? One has you dieing in fear, the other in peace. All because of your choice to destroy your belief that you can get to the car. Is being a superior rationalist giving your more happiness that the knowledge of your own imminent death is taking away?
You can’t know in advance what beliefs you hold are false, however you can know which ones make you happy and don’t get in the way of your life. I believe that I am sitting in front of a computer enjoying a stimulating conversation. I could devote a lot of time trying to disprove it. I would probably not succeed, but who knows, I might. I however don’t see anything to be gained from attempting to disprove this. Again, I believe the sun will rise tomorrow morning. My belief might be false, however if it is, and the sun goes nova tonight, I would gain nothing but unhappiness (if I was an atheist, which I am in this argument). I could try to disprove it, and put resources towards seeing if it is or it isn’t. I could try to find out if there is a conspiracy to hide if from the public to stop rioting. But even if the sun was about to go nova, my knowledge of it would change nothing, and it would be unlikely I could find out anyway, so it would be a waste of resources to try to find out.
And I am trying to leave religion out of this. Your misconceptions about Christianity are show that you have never done any real research into the subject of religion, and that you are just copying what you have heard from others. If however you really want to get into it, let me know and I will. I admit, I have anti-anti-theist tendencies.
I pose the question of what does being a superior rationalist do for you
In the aggregate of all possible worlds, I expect it will let me lead a happier and more fulfilling life. This isn’t to say that there aren’t situations where it will disadvantage me to be a rationalist (a killer locks me and one other person in a room with a logic puzzle. He will kill the one who completes the puzzle first...) but in general, I think it will be an advantage. Its like in the game of poker, sometimes, the correct play will result in losing. That is okay though, if players play enough hands eventually superior skill will tell and the better player will come out on top. Being a superior rationalist may not always be best in every situation, but when the other choice (inferior rationalist) is worse in even more situations… the choice seems obvious.
You start walking back to your car. You suspect that you aren’t going to make it.
Then I could stop walking, conserve my energy and try to suppress the blood loss. Or, I could activate my rationalist powers earlier and store a first aid kit in my car, or a fully charged cell phone in my pocket, or not venture out into the dangerous wild by myself...
Your misconceptions about Christianity are show that you have never done any real research into the subject of religion, and that you are just copying what you have heard from others.
I’ll freely admit to a hostile stance on religion, but I think it is a deserved one. Whatever misconceptions I may have about Christianity are gained from growing up with a religious family and attending services “religiously” for the first two decades of my life. I have more than a passing familiarity with it. I don’t think anything I said about religion is wrong though. Religious instruction is targeted predominantly towards children. The claims of the religious are false. Threatening a child with eternal damnation is bad. A consequence of being a Christian is giving 10% of your money to the church. Am I missing anything here?
If you knew this to be the case, the rational thing to do would be to avoid solving the puzzle :-)
Agreed, but there is at least one possible scenario (where I don’t know it is the case) where it would hurt me to be a superior rationalist.
Religious people would disagree with you here, I’d imagine.
I imagine they would. Because they would disagree with me, I’d like for my beliefs to challenge theirs to trial by combat. That way, the wrong beliefs might be destroyed by the truth.
This is another minor nitpick, but AFAIK not all Christian sects demand tithing (though some do).
Sure, 10% is not true of all Christian groups. To my knowledge though, all such groups run on donations from the faithful. If the number isn’t 10% it is still greater than zero. Arguments here are over scale and not moral righteousness.
The claims of the religious are false. Religious people would disagree with you here, I’d imagine.
I’m not so sure. I mean, it’s not like all religious people agree about religious claims, any more than all political activists agree about political claims, or all sports fans agree about claims regarding sports teams. In fact, quite the contrary… I suspect that most religious people believe that the religious claims of most religious people are false.
Fair enough, though religious people would surely disagree with the statement, “All religious claims are false”—which is what I interpreted electricfistula’s comment to mean.
Tangentially, I know a couple of Catholic seminarians who would disagree with “Most religious claims are false”—they argue that claims which contradict certain tenets of Catholicism aren’t religious claims at all, though the people making them may falsely believe them to be.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t situations where it will disadvantage me to be a rationalist
Indeed. My entire point was that it might be possible to recognize these situations and then act in an appropriate manner. (Or would that be being meta-rationalist?)
Whatever misconceptions I may have about Christianity are gained from growing up with a religious family and attending services “religiously” for the first two decades of my life.
Anecdotal evidence shouldn’t be a cause to say something is horrible. If that were the case I could point to the secular schools I went to growing up where I was the only Christian in my class, and watched as the other kids fought, did hard drugs, had sex, and generally messed up their life and beat me up. On the other hand the Church was friendly, focused on working together and planning for the future. It focused on tolerance and accepting people who were hostile without hating them. If I was to go just from my childhood I would despise atheists with a passion.
Religious instruction is targeted predominantly towards children.
Depends on the church. The church that I go to most of the time has only 2 or three children in it and is mostly made up of members over 60. Besides, if you look at it from a Christian point of view, is it wrong to teach children when they are young? Would you advocate waiting till a person is 20 to start teaching them how to read, write and do math?
The claims of the religious are false.
I respectfully disagree. I would appreciate it if you could be respectful in turn.
Threatening a child with eternal damnation is bad.
Is it as bad as telling a child that if they play in traffic they could cease to exist? Or that if they are not careful around a lawnmower they could end up with pain and disabilities for the rest of their lives? Define ‘Bad’ for me so that we can discuss this point.
A consequence of being a Christian is giving 10% of your money to the church.
Not true for all churches. In fact I have yet to be in a single one that even suggests it. Usually it is more along the lines of “If you believe the work we are doing is good than please donate so that we may continue doing it.” You know, kind of like what Eliezer is doing right now with the workshops he is setting up.
I respectfully disagree. I would appreciate it if you could be respectful in turn.
Claims with a low Occamian prior are false (to within reasonable tolerances) by default to a rationalist. Deities in general tend to have extremely long minimum message lengths, since they don’t play nice with the rest of our model of the universe, and require significant additional infra-structure. I suspect you would not be overly put out by the assertion that Rama or Odin isn’t real. So, what makes your God different? I ask you honestly. If you can show strong, convincing evidence for why the existence of your God is special, I will be very, very interested. If you can demonstrate enough Bayesian evidence to bump the probability of Yahweh over 50%, you’ve got yourself a convert. Probably quite a few. But, the burden of evidence is on your shoulders.
If you can show strong, convincing evidence for why the existence of your God is special, I will be very, very interested.
Ah, now that is a funny thing isn’t it. Once upon a time I played a joke on a friend. I told him something that he would have never have believed unless it came from my own mouth, and then when he tried to tell others I just looked confused and denied it. He ended up looking like a fool. (For the record I asked him to tell nobody else).
Why is this relevant? Because if for example (and no, I’m not saying this is what happened), God came out of the sky, pointed at me, and said “I exist.” I would know that either he existed, or something else did that was trying to fool me into thinking he did. Either way I would have belief that something supernatural (outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts) had happened. Let’s say I came onto this board and told everyone that. How would I ‘prove’ it? I could say it happened, but I doubt anyone here would believe me. I could try a few tests, but I’d be hard pressed with how to prove that a something of a godlike intelligence exists if it didn’t want anyone else to find out. However I might not be smart enough, so I’ll pose the question to you:
How do you prove that a godlike entity exists if it doesn’t want to be proven? Assume that it has complete freedom to move through time so that tricking it doesn’t work because it can just go back in time (that’s what omnipotent means after all). And that you don’t know the reasons why it’s staying hidden so no argument to try to get it to show itself will work.
I look forward to suggestions. But unless there is something that works for that, I am just someone who believes because of experience, but knows of no way to prove it to others (though honestly I am making an assumption by saying god wants to stay hidden, it’s the only reason I can think of).
Why is this relevant? Because if for example (and no, I’m not saying this is what happened), God came out of the sky, pointed at me, and said “I exist.” I would know that either he existed, or something else did that was trying to fool me into thinking he did. Either way I would have belief that something supernatural (outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts) had happened.
Actually, my default response for this sort of thing is to immediately go to a hospital, and get a head CT and a chat with a certified psychiatrist. I mean, sure, it could be the supernatural, but we KNOW mental illness happens. The priors for me being crazy (especially given some unique family history) are not very low. Much, much higher than the odds of a deity actually existing, given the aforementioned Occamian priors.
How do you prove that a godlike entity exists if it doesn’t want to be proven? Assume that it has complete freedom to move through time so that tricking it doesn’t work because it can just go back in time (that’s what omnipotent means after all). And that you don’t know the reasons why it’s staying hidden so no argument to try to get it to show itself will work.
You don’t. Rationalism only works if God isn’t fucking with you. That said, there’s a huge space of possible constructs like that one (entities that conveniently eliminate all evidence for themselves). It’s not infinite, but it’s arbitrarily large. From a rationalist’s perspective, if any of them were real, we wouldn’t know, but the odds of them actually being real in the first place are… not high. Again with the Occamian prior. So, I’m not much moved by your analysis.
That said, I am curious what your personal experience was.
How do you prove that a godlike entity exists if it doesn’t want to be proven?
Proof is not typically necessary. People make claims about their experience all the time that they have no way of proving, as well as claims that they probably could prove but don’t in fact do so, and I believe many of those claims.
For example, I believe my officemate is married, although they have offered me no proof of this beyond their unsupported claim.
I would say a more useful question is, “how do I provide another person with sufficient evidence that such an entity exists that the person should consider it likely?” And of course the answer depends on the person, and what they previously considered likely. (The jargon around here would be “it depends on their priors.”)
Mostly I don’t think I can, unless their priors are such that they pretty much already believe that such an entity exists.
Another question worth asking is “how do I provide myself sufficient evidence that such an entity exists that I should consider it likely?”
I don’t think I can do that either.
Unrelatedly: Is “god exists, has the properties I believe it to have, and wants to stay hidden” really the only reason you can think of for the observable universe being as we observe it to be? I understand it’s the reason you believe, I’m asking whether it’s the only reason you can think of, or whether that was just hyperbole.
Is “god exists, has the properties I believe it to have, and wants to stay hidden” really the only reason you can think of for the observable universe being as we observe it to be?
My own belief is closer to: “Something very powerful and supernatural exists, doesn’t seem to be hostile, and doesn’t mind that I call it the Christian God.” And while I would answer ‘no’ to that question, the amount of evidence that there is something supernatural if far greater than the amount of evidence that there are millions of people lying about their experiences.
For instance, every culture has a belief in the supernatural. Now I would expect that social evolution would trend away from such beliefs. If you say, I can dance and make it rain, and then you fail, you would get laughed at. If you don’t believe me gather a bunch of your closest friends and try it. The reason for people to believe someone else is if they had proof to back it up, or they already had reason to believe. Humans aren’t stupid, and I don’t think we’ve become radically more intelligent in the last couple thousand years. Why then is belief in the supernatural* everywhere? Is it something in our makeup, how we think? I have heard such a thing discounted by both sides. So there must be some cause, some reason for people to have started believing.
And that’s without even getting into my experiences, or those close to me. As was suggested, misremembering, and group hallucination are possible, but if that is the case than I should probably check myself and some people I know into a medical clinic because I would be forced to consider myself insane. Seeing things that aren’t there wold be a sign of something being very wrong with me, but I do not any any other symptoms of insanity so I strongly doubt this is the case.
I suppose when I get right down to it, either I and some others are insane with an unknown form of insanity, or there is something out there.
*(outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts)
“Something very powerful and supernatural* exists, doesn’t seem to be hostile, and doesn’t mind that I call it the Christian God.”
For what it’s worth, I’m .9+ confident of the following claims: 1) there exist phenomena in the universe that “human science” (1) doesn’t commonly accept. 2) for any such phenomenon X, X doesn’t mind that you call it the Christian God 3) for any such phenomenon X, X doesn’t mind that you call it a figment of your imagination 4) for any such phenomenon X, X is not “hostile” (2) to humans
So it seems we agree on that much. Indeed, I find it likely that most people on this site would agree on that much.
the amount of evidence that there is something supernatural* if far greater than the amount of evidence that there are millions of people lying about their experiences.
As above, I think the evidence supporting the idea that there exist phenomena in the universe that “human science” (1) doesn’t commonly accept is pretty strong. The evidence supporting the idea that people lie about their experiences, confabulate their experiences, and have experiences that don’t map to events outside their own brains despite seeming to, is also pretty strong. These aren’t at all conflicting ideas; I am confident of them both.
Do you mean to suggest that, because there exist such phenomena, human reports are therefore credible? I don’t see how you get from one to the other.
Seeing things that aren’t there wold be a sign of something being very wrong with me
Not really, no. It happens to people all the time. I had the experience once of being visited by Prophetic Beings from Outside Time who had a Very Significant Message for me to impart to the masses. That doesn’t mean I’m crazy. It also doesn’t mean that Prophetic Beings from Outside Time have a Very Significant Message for me to impart to the masses.
either I and some others are insane with an unknown form of insanity, or there is something out there.
Again: there are almost certainly many things out there. That doesn’t mean that every experience you have is an accurate report of the state of the universe. And if the particular experience you had turns out not to be an accurate report of the state of the universe, that doesn’t mean you’re insane.
==========
(1) Given what I think you mean by that phrase. For example, nuclear physics was outside the realm of what human science commonly accepted in the year 1750, so was supernatural then by this definition, although it is not now.
(2) Given what I think you mean by that phrase. For example, I assume the empty void of interstellar space is not considered hostile, even though it will immediately kill an unprotected human exposed to it.
As already pointed out, would it change either my beliefs or your beliefs? I’ve already recounted a medical mystery with my foot and blood loss. It comes down in the end to my word, and that of people I know. We could all be lying. There is no long term proof, so I don’t see any need to explain it. That was my point. What is strong proof to me, is weak proof to others because I know that I am not lying. I have no way to prove I am not lying however so what would be the point?
I have no way to prove I am not lying however so what would be the point?
If you have evidence that could overcome the low prior for God’s existence were you not lying, then that would be worth hearing even if we would believe you’re lying. I’m not aware of such evidence for particular deities.
Honestly mine really isn’t any different than what you hear on the internet all the time. If you want to hear it go ahead. When my grandfather died all the people in the room said that they saw a light enter the room. It didn’t say anything but they all agreed that they felt peace come over them. My grandfather was a Christian, as were the people in the room. I wasn’t in the room, however I did check their stories individually and they matched. Also these were people who haven’t lied to me before or since (well, other than stuff like april fools… though one of them never even does that). That, along with my foot, and my Mothers ability to know when her friends are in trouble and make phone calls that I have related in other posts give me reasonably strong belief in the supernatural* world
*(Supernatural yada yada, not understood by science yada yada. Do I need to keep making these disclaimers?)
And while I would answer ‘no’ to that question, the amount of evidence that there is something supernatural* if far greater than the amount of evidence that there are millions of people lying about their experiences.
Surprisingly, no. That said, religious people aren’t lying. They’re not even a lot crazier than baseline. I’ve had experiences which I recognize from my reading to be neurological that I might otherwise attribute to some kind of religious intervention. And those are coming from an atheist’s brain not primed to see angels or gods or anything of that kind.
As for why belief in the supernatural is everywhere, a lot of it has to do with how bad our brains are at finding satisfactory explanations, and at doing rudimentary probability theory. We existed as a species for a hundred thousand years before we got around to figuring out why there was thunder. Before then, the explanation that sounded the simplest was ‘there’s a big ape in the sky who does it.’ And, even when we knew the real reason, we were so invested in those explanations that they didn’t go away. Add in a whole bunch of glitches native to the human brain, and boom, you’ve a thousand generations of spooky campfire stories.
As was suggested, misremembering, and group hallucination are possible, but if that is the case than I should probably check myself and some people I know into a medical clinic because I would be forced to consider myself insane.
If I were you, I would be terrified of that possibility. I would at least go to a psychiatrist and try to rule it out. It is a real possibility, and potentially the most likely one. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
The reason for people to believe someone else is if they had proof to back it up, or they already had reason to believe. Humans aren’t stupid, and I don’t think we’ve become radically more intelligent in the last couple thousand years. Why then is belief in the supernatural* everywhere? Is it something in our makeup, how we think? I have heard such a thing discounted by both sides.
I don’t think you’ll find such a thing readily discounted here. There are plenty of well established cognitive biases that come to play in assessment of supernatural claims. The sequences discuss this to some degree, but you might also be interested in reading this book which discusses some of the mechanisms which contribute to supernatural belief which are not commonly discussed here.
We don’t even need to raise the issue of the supernatural to examine whether people are likely to pass down beliefs and rituals when they don’t really work. We can look at folk medicine, and see if there are examples of cures which have been passed down through cultures which perform no better than placebo in double blind tests. In fact, there is an abundance of such.
We can look at folk medicine, and see if there are examples of cures which have been passed down through cultures which perform no better than placebo in double blind tests.
Point.
though I would point out that not all of them are wrong either. Just the good majority. That’s neither here nor there though.
Out of curiosity how does science explain people feeling knowing that people they care about are in trouble? My mother has made 4 phone calls, and I have witnessed 2 where she felt that someone was in trouble and called them. One of those calls was to me and it helped me greatly. While she has missed calling people that were in trouble, she has never once called someone with that intent and been wrong.She told me that it feels like someone is telling her to call them because they are in trouble. I can’t know if that is true or not, but I can’t think of her ever lying to me. This is even more interesting because one time she told me that she felt she needed to make the call just before she did, thereby predicting it.
I know that she isn’t the only person that does this, because I have read many accounts of people who believed a loved one had died when they were across the ocean during WWII.
Personally I would go with psyonics if not god, but that might be because I played to many role-playing games.
Sorry if this seems odd, it was just something that came to mind as I was thinking about supernatural* things.
*(outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts)
Out of curiosity how does science explain people feeling knowing that people they care about are in trouble?
I don’t know if this is something that has been explained, or even if it’s something that needs to be explained. It could be that you’re operating under an unrepresentative dataset. Keep in mind that if you hadn’t experienced a number of phone calls where the caller’s intuition that something was wrong was correct, you wouldn’t treat it as a phenomenon in need of explanation, but if you had experienced some other set of improbable occurrences, simply by chance, then that would look like a phenomenon in need of explanation. I personally have no experiences with acquaintances making phone calls on an intuition that something is wrong and being right, although I have experience with acquaintances getting worried and making phone calls and finding out there was really nothing to worry about. There’s a significant danger of selection bias in dealing with claims like this, because people who experience, say, a sudden premonition that something has happened to their loved on across the sea at war, and then find out a couple weeks later that they’re still alive and well, are probably not going to record the experience for posterity.
I’ve encountered plenty of claims of improbable events before which were attributed to supernatural causes. If I consistently encountered ones that took the form of people correctly intuiting that a distant loved one was in trouble and calling them, I would definitely start to suspect that this was a real phenomenon in need of explanation, although I would also be interested in seeing how often people intuited that a distant loved one was in trouble, called them, found out they were wrong, and didn’t think it was worth remembering. Maybe some of the improbable events I’ve heard about really are the result of more than chance, and have some underlying explanation that I’m not aware of, but I don’t have the evidence to strongly suspect this.
If you multiply a day times the population experiencing it, that’s about 82,000 years of human experience in America alone. That’s a lot of time for improbable stuff to happen in, and people tend to remember the improbable stuff and forget the ordinary, and draw patterns erroneously. So I don’t treat seeming patterns of unusual events as needing explanation unless I have reliable reason to conclude that they’re actually going on.
My mother has made 4 phone calls, and I have witnessed 2 where she felt that someone was in trouble and called them.
Has your mother ever called anyone when she felt they were in trouble, only to find out that they weren’t, in fact, in trouble ? Confirmation bias is pretty strong in most humans.
This is even more interesting because one time she told me that she felt she needed to make the call just before she did, thereby predicting it.
Wait… she predicted that she would call someone, and then went ahead and called someone ? This doesn’t sound like much of a prediction; I don’t think I’m parsing your sentence correctly.
because I have read many accounts of people who believed a loved one had died when they were across the ocean during WWII.
If your loved one is fighting in WWII, it’s very likely that he or she would die, sadly...
Personally I would go with psyonics if not god...
Why did you end up picking “god” over “psionics”, then ?
Has your mother ever called anyone when she felt they were in trouble, only to find out that they weren’t, in fact, in trouble ? Confirmation bias is pretty strong in most humans.
Not that I remember. My memory could be faulty, but thinking long and hard about it I don’t remember it happening.
Wait… she predicted that she would call someone, and then went ahead and called someone ? This doesn’t sound like much of a prediction; I don’t think I’m parsing your sentence correctly.
She predicted they were in trouble. I think the phrase she used was “I think XXXX is in trouble and needs help.” I could be misremembering though.
Why did you end up picking “god” over “psionics”, then ?
It’s a close call honestly, but if god exists, which I believe he does from other evidence listed in this over-sized thread, then adding psionics on top would be added complexity for no gain. If you already know that the earth goes around the sun because of gravity, why bother coming up with an alternate explanation for why Saturn goes around the sun? It might have another reason, but the simplest explanation is more likely to be right.
Oh yeah, that makes more sense than what I was thinking.
Anyway, as the others on this thread have pointed out, there could be many explanations for why you remember events the way you do. Among them, are things like “my mother has supernatural powers”, “a god exists and he is using his powers on my mother”, “aliens exist and are using their power on my mother”, etc. The most probable explanation, though, is “my memory is faulty due to a cognitive bias that is well understood by modern psychologists”.
That said, I must acknowledge that if you have already determined, for some other unrelated reason, that the probability of psionic powers / gods / aliens existing is quite high; then it would be perfectly rational of you to assign a much higher probability to one of these other explanations.
My mother has made 4 phone calls, and I have witnessed 2 where she felt that someone was in trouble and called them.
Even if that were true, and not a misremembrance or a post-hoc rationalization, you must take note of the many other people who have those feelings and no one was in trouble. You should expect in advance to hear more anecdotes about the times that someone really was in trouble, than anecdotes about the times they were not, so having heard them is very little evidence.
Even if that were true, and not a misremembrance or a post-hoc rationalization
I did state that she predicted one in advance to me. Also when my mother called me the first thing she asked was “are you alright?”
You should expect in advance to hear more anecdotes about the times that someone really was in trouble, than anecdotes about the times they were not, so having heard them is very little evidence.
As far as my mother goes I have never once seen her mistake a prediction. Now 2 predictions (and 2 more that she told me about) sounds small, but consider the amount of times that she didn’t mistakenly call the probability that something is going on is quite high. For example if you have a deck with 996 blue cards in it, and 4 red cards in it, and you call a red card before it flips once, but never call it before a blue card flips, the chances of you succeeding on are… Um… Do you guys want me to do the math? It’s pretty small.
And just because some people think that they can do it and can’t, doesn’t mean that a person can’t do it. Look at all the people who think they are wonderful singers.
Of course I could be misremembering. I could go ask my mother, and my father and see what they say if you like. (Yes I am close to my parents. We have a tight nit family even though I am 24). Of course we could all be misremembering, or lying. Again, you have no way to know, and you really shouldn’t even consider taking my word for this.
For instance, every culture has a belief in the supernatural.
Every culture has some different things they believe in, and call supernatural. That doesn’t prove there really is a category of things that actually are supernatural. By analogy, belief by Himalayan people that the Yeti is real is not evidence that Bigfoot (in the northwestern United States) is real. Likewise, a Hindu’s fervent belief is not evidence of the resurrection of Jesus.
In short, the shortfalls in human understanding completely explain why primitive cultures believed “supernatural” was a real and useful label, even though that belief is false.
I’m not sure whether it is the case that primitive cultures have a category of things they think of as “supernatural”—pagan religions were certainly quite literal: they lived on Olympus, they mated with humans, they were birthed. I wonder whether the distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” only comes about when it becomes clear that gods don’t belong in the former category.
I had a paragraph about that, citing Explain/Worship/Ignore, but I decided that it detracted from the point I was trying to make.
If you already think that primitives did not use the label “supernatural,” then you already think there isn’t much evidence of supernatural phenomena—at least compared to the post I was responding to.
If you say, I can dance and make it rain, and then you fail, you would get laughed at.
I don’t believe you’ve read much of the content on this site. There are a host of human cognitive biases that would lead to belief in the supernatural. Perhaps most notably, we attribute agency to non-agents. It’s easy to see how that would be adaptive in the ancestral environment; just look at the truth table for “That sound was an animal and I believe that sound was an animal” and the outcomes of each possibility.
Because if for example (and no, I’m not saying this is what happened), God came out of the sky, pointed at me, and said “I exist.” I would know that either he existed, or something else did that was trying to fool me into thinking he did. Either way I would have belief that something supernatural (outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts) had happened.
Not really. There are plenty of plausible explanations for that description that don’t require positing something supernatural.
And now if all you have is one event in your faulty human memory to go on, it counts for practically nothing. Given the low prior for the existence of most particular deities, updating on that piece of evidence should still give you a ridiculously low posterior. “I’m hallucinating” would probably be my winning hypothesis at the time it’s happening, and “I’m misremembering” afterwards.
So what I’m getting from you is that you would ignore your own observations to conform to what others expect? That your belief in a universe without god is so strong that even if I did show you something like this you would refuse to believe it because it didn’t fit with your expectations? Then I fail to see how I could ever convince you.
Addendum: Have group hallucinations been proven or disproven?
Well, mass hysteria is a real thing, but if a large group of people who have no prior reason to cooperate all claim the same unusual observations, it’s certainly much stronger evidence that something unusual was going on than one individual making such claims.
Many, possibly even all religions though, make claims of supernatural events being witnessed by large numbers of people, and religions make enough mutually exclusive claims that they cannot all be true, so we know that claims of large scale supernatural observations are something that must at least sometimes arise in religions that are false.
In terms of the falsifiability of religion, it’s important to remember that we’re essentially working with a stacked deck. In a world with one globally accepted religion, with a god that made frequent physical appearances, answered prayers for unlikely things with sufficient regularity that we had no more need to question whether prayer works than whether cars work, gave verifiable answers to things that humans could not be expected to know without its help, and gave an account of the provenance of the world which was corroborated by the physical record, then obviously the prior for any claims of miraculous events being the result of genuine supernatural intervention would be completely different than in our own.
If a pilgrim child in America in 1623 claimed to have spoken to a person from China when nobody else was around, the adults in their community would probably conclude that they were lying, confused or deluded in some way, unless presented with a huge preponderance of evidence that the child would be highly unlikely to be able to produce, and it’s completely reasonable that they would behave this way, whereas today, an American child claiming to have spoken to a person from China demands a very low burden of evidence.
In a world where the primary evidence offered in favor of religion is subjective experiences which have a pronounced tendency to be at odds with each other (people of different religions have experiences with mutually incompatible implications,) if a person who claims highly compelling religious experiences is unable to persuade other people, it does not indicate a failing in the other people’s rationality.
Many, possibly even all religions though, make claims of supernatural events being witnessed by large numbers of people, and religions make enough mutually exclusive claims that they cannot all be true, so we know that claims of large scale supernatural observations are something that must at least sometimes arise in religions that are false.
That may be the case, and I won’t disagree that some claims are fabricated. However for the rest imagine the following:
A parent has two children, and he gives a present (say a chocolate that they eat) to each child without the other child knowing. Each child takes this to mean that they are the parents favorite. After all they have proof in the gift. They get into an argument over it. However because their beliefs about why the gifts were given are wrong, the fact that the gifts were given remains.
In the same way it is possible that a supernatural* being is out there, and people are just misinterpreting what the gifts it bestows mean. As far as I can tell it doesn’t mind when someone calls themselves a Christian, and follows the Christian faith, so I identify as Christian.
...if a person who claims highly compelling religious experiences is unable to persuade other people, it does not indicate a failing in the other people’s rationality.
I would never dream to claim otherwise. I wouldn’t even try to convince people that have not had their own experiences. It would prove that you were rather inferior rationalists if I could. Unless you have proof, you should not believe. I am not here to try to convince anyone otherwise. The only reason that I talk about it is that you seem interested in how I could believe, and I suspect that I can point out why I believe to you in such a way that you will understand.
Why does everyone think that I want to convert them to Christianity? Even the churches I go, though they are not super rationalist agree that such a thing is pointless unless the person has some experience in their life that would lead them to believe. Do you often get Christians here trying to convert you?
*(outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts)
That may be the case, and I won’t disagree that some claims are fabricated. However for the rest imagine the following: A parent has two children, and he gives a present (say a chocolate that they eat) to each child without the other child knowing. Each child takes this to mean that they are the parents favorite. After all they have proof in the gift. They get into an argument over it. However because their beliefs about why the gifts were given are wrong, the fact that the gifts were given remains.
In the same way it is possible that a supernatural* being is out there, and people are just misinterpreting what the gifts it bestows mean. As far as I can tell it doesn’t mind when someone calls themselves a Christian, and follows the Christian faith, so I identify as Christian.
It’s possible, but there is no necessity that any of them be true. If natural human cognitive function can explain claims of religious experiences (both willfully deceptive and otherwise,) in the absence of real supernatural events, then positing real supernatural events creates a large complexity burden (something that needs a lot of evidence to raise to the point where we can consider it probable,) without doing any explanatory work.
Let’s say you have a large number of folk rituals which are used for treating illnesses, which appear to demand supernatural intervention to work. You test a large number of these against placebo rituals, where elements of the rituals are changed in ways that ought to invalidate them according to the traditional beliefs, in ways that the patients won’t notice, and you find that all of the rituals you test perform no better than placebo. However, you can’t test the remaining rituals, because there’s nothing about them you can change that would invalidate them according to traditional beliefs that the patients wouldn’t notice. You could conclude that some of the rituals have real supernatural power, but only the ones you weren’t able to test, but you could explain your observations more simply by concluding that all the rituals worked by placebo.
Why does everyone think that I want to convert them to Christianity? Even the churches I go, though they are not super rationalist agree that such a thing is pointless unless the person has some experience in their life that would lead them to believe. Do you often get Christians here trying to convert you?
Occasionally, but not that often. But the fact that members here are trying to change your mind doesn’t necessarily mean they think you’re trying to change theirs. This is a community blog dedicated to refining human rationality. When we have disagreements here, we generally try to hammer them out, as long as it looks like we have a chance of making headway. On this site, we generally don’t operate on a group norm that people shouldn’t confront others’ beliefs without explicit invitation.
You test a large number of these against placebo rituals, where elements of the rituals are changed in ways that ought to invalidate them according to the traditional beliefs, in ways that the patients won’t notice, and you find that all of the rituals you test perform no better than placebo.
But but what if you get inconsistent result? Let’s say you try the ritual 5 times and the placebo 5 times and it works 2 times for the the ritual and twice for the ritual. Furthermore consider that nothing changed in any of these tests that you could measure. You said the ritual was spiritual, and there for asking for divine intervention. It could be that the ritual was unnecessary and that the divine being decides when it intervenes. If you can’t figure out why it sometimes works, or sometimes doesn’t than maybe it’s because you are asking a sentient being to make a choice and you don’t understand their reasoning.
You could say that there was no divine intervention at all, but then you are left trying to come up with more and more complex theories about why it sometimes works and sometimes does not. This might not be a bad thing, but one shouldn’t discount the easy solution just because it doesn’t match their expectations, nor should they stop looking for another solution just because any easy one that is hard to test is present.
On this site, we generally don’t operate on a group norm that people shouldn’t confront others’ beliefs without explicit invitation.
Oooh! I like it! Yeah sure, I can get behind that. The reason that i am not trying to convince people here of Christianity is because I don’t have proof that I feel should convince other people. If I did convince anyone here, with the proof that I have, then I would feel that I had made you inferior rationalists. On the other hand I cannot just ignore my own observations and tests and agree with you when I perceive that you are mistaken. I hope that one day I might find some way of proving that god exists to people without needing them to experience something supernatural themselves. But unfortunately as I believe that I am dealing with a sentient intelligence I feel that is unlikely.
But but what if you get inconsistent result? Let’s say you try the ritual 5 times and the placebo 5 times and it works 2 times for the the ritual and twice for the ritual.
Any test with such a small sample size is barely worth the bother of conducting. You’d want to try many times more than that at least before you start to have enough information to draw reliable inferences from, unless the effect size is really large and obvious, say, all five people on the real ritual get better the next day and none of the five on the placebo recover within a week.
You said the ritual was spiritual, and there for asking for divine intervention. It could be that the ritual was unnecessary and that the divine being decides when it intervenes. If you can’t figure out why it sometimes works, or sometimes doesn’t than maybe it’s because you are asking a sentient being to make a choice and you don’t understand their reasoning.
People recover from most ailments on their own for perfectly natural reasons. Some people fail to recover from ailments that other people recover from, but it’s not as if this is an incomprehensible phenomenon that flies in the face of our naturalistic models.
If no proposed supernatural intervention changes a person’s likelihood of recovery relative to placebo, then it could be that there’s no way of isolating supernatural intervention between groups, but a much simpler explanation to account for the observations is that no supernatural interventions are actually happening.
People used to see the appearance of supernatural intervention everywhere, but the more we’ve learned about nature, the less room there’s been for supernatural causes to explain anything, and the more they’ve become a burden on any model that contains them. It’s possible that some phenomena which are unexplained today can only be explained in the future with recourse to supernatural causes, but given the past performance of supernatural explanations, and the large amount of informational complexity they entail, this is almost certainly an unwise thing to bet on.
Oooh! I like it! Yeah sure, I can get behind that. The reason that i am not trying to convince people here of Christianity is because I don’t have proof that I feel should convince other people. If I did convince anyone here, with the proof that I have, then I would feel that I had made you inferior rationalists. On the other hand I cannot just ignore my own observations and tests and agree with you when I perceive that you are mistaken. I hope that one day I might find some way of proving that god exists to people without needing them to experience something supernatural themselves. But unfortunately as I believe that I am dealing with a sentient intelligence I feel that is unlikely.
I’m glad you’re comfortable with this sort of environment. If you’re going to make judgments on the basis of your own experience though, it’s good to try to incorporate the evidence of others’ experience as well.
Personally, from around the age of ten to twelve or so, I experimented a lot with the possibility of god(s). I tried to open myself up to communication with higher intelligences, perform experiments with prayer and requests for signs, and so on. I never received anything that could be interpreted as a positive result, even by generous standards. I certainly don’t dismiss other people’s claims of experiences associated with the supernatural, I think for the most part people who report such experiences are telling the truth about their own recollection of such events. Indeed, given what I’ve since learned about the workings of the human brain, it would be surprising to me if people didn’t report supernatural experiences. But given that people reporting supernatural experiences can be accounted for without recourse to actual supernatural events, as a consequence of human psychology, the question I’m inclined to ask is “does the world look more like what I ought to expect if reports of supernatural events are at least partly due to an actual supernatural reality, or like I ought to expect if the supernatural doesn’t really exist?”
There are some things in the world that I can’t explain, which could, theoretically, have supernatural causes. But there are no things in the world I have encountered which I would have firmly predicted in advance to be true if supernatural claims were real, and false if they were not. For instance, if some maladies, such as amputation, only recovered when people called for divine intervention, and never when they did not, I would think that the prospect of an underlying supernatural cause was worth taking very seriously. Or if people all over the world had religious experiences, which all pointed them in the direction of one particular religion, even if they had no cultural exposure to it, that would be indicative of an underlying supernatural cause. But when viewed together, I think that the totality of humans’ religious experiences suggest that what’s going on is a matter of human psychology, not an underlying supernatural reality.
But but what if you get inconsistent result? Let’s say you try the ritual 5 times and the placebo 5 times and …
Any test with such a small sample size is barely worth the bother of conducting.
Well, it’s standard in medicine to have large RCTs because of various reasons(*), but I’d hardly say “barely worth the bother of conducting”. Every bit of randomized data gives you evidence about cause and effect that, while sometimes weak, does let you update your posterior (a little or a lot) without worrying about the myriad issues of confounding that plague any observational data. Randomization is very useful even in small doses. [though getting consent of the participants is usually hard, even when the preliminary evidence is still very shaky.]
(*) the reasons include the clear ulterior motives of drug companies, the need to consent individuals to randomization combined with delicate arguments around the ethics of “equipoise”, the difficulties of “meta-analysis”, a long history of frequentist statistics, the standards of journals vs. the possibilities of free and open science (based hypothetically on privacy-secure but comprehensively integrated health records), safety issues, etc… But another large reason is that doctors really really like “certainty” and would rather let “best practice” to tell them what to do rather than collect evidence, condition, and decide what’s best for the patient themselves. [some of this seems to be training, but also that they must defend themselves against malpractice. In the end, maybe this isn’t so bad. Thinking is hard and probably all in all it’s better not to trust them to do it most of the time, so I’m not rallying for change in clinical practice here, except to have as much randomization as possible.]
It’s true that you could get evidence from such an experiment which would allow you to update your posterior (although if you’re using significance testing like most experiments, you’re very unlikely to achieve statistical significance, and your experiment almost certainly won’t get published.) But even if you’re doing it purely for your own evidence, the amount of evidence you’d collect is likely to be so small that it hardly justifies the effort of conducting the experiment.
You could say that there was no divine intervention at all, but then you are left trying to come up with more and more complex theories about why it sometimes works and sometimes does not.
Positing a divine being is a more complex explanation than any physical explanation I can conceive of. Don’t be fooled by what your brain labels “easy”.
Positing a divine being is a more complex explanation than any physical explanation I can conceive of.
Really? Can you not, by way of conception, take the divine being scenario, hack around with it so that it can no longer be considered a divine being then tack on some arbitrary and silly complexity? (Simulations may be involved, for example.)
Conceiving of complex stuff seems to be a trivial task, so long as the complexity is not required to be at all insightful.
Why does everyone think that I want to convert them to Christianity?
You claim to have evidence that should convince you to be a Christian. We want to know that evidence. The Litany of Tarski applies: if God exists, I wish to believe that God exists. If God does not exist, I wish to believe that God does not exist.
You claim to have evidence that should convince you to be a Christian. We want to know that evidence.
Or I would, if I assigned non-negligible probability to the possibility that (strong forms of) such evidence actually existed—without such expectation it doesn’t feel correct to say that I ‘want it’.
In the same way it is possible that a supernatural* being is out there, and people are just misinterpreting what the gifts it bestows mean.
Sure, it’s possible, but lots of things are possible, even if we limit them to the things we humans can imagine. We can imagine quite a lot: Cthulhu, Harry Potter, the Trimurti, Gasaraki, werewolves of all kinds, etc. etc. The better question is: how likely is it that a supernatural being exists ?
I don’t agree that supernatural should be defined as “outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts.”
There are lots of phenomena that science can’t explain, or for which there is no commonly accepted explanation. That’s not particularly interesting. What would be interesting is a phenomena that science admits it will never be able to explain.
I can’t speak for thomblake, but there are experiences that could convince me that there was a powerful entity that intervened on behalf of humanity. They just haven’t happened. And I have reasons to believe that they will never happen, including the fact that they haven’t happened before—absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
A single experience of that kind would be terrible evidence for Christianity, and merely poor evidence for the supernatural. A coherent set of experiences indicative of a consistent, ongoing supernatural world (or specifically a Christian world) would be much more convincing.
My entire point was that it might be possible to recognize these situations and then act in an appropriate manner.
I think this is called “behaving rationally”. I understand “rationality” as using reason to my benefit. If there comes a time when it would be beneficial for me to do something, and I arrive at that conclusion through reason, then I’d consider that a triumph of rationality. I think if you are able to anticipate an advantage that could be gained by a behavior then refusing to perform that behavior would be irrational.
Anecdotal evidence shouldn’t be a cause to say something is horrible.
You misunderstand me. It isn’t my anecdotal evidence that makes me think the church is horrible. I just pointed out that I had spent a lot of time in churches to show that I have more than the passing familiarity with them that you attributed to me. I think the church is horrible because it threatens children, promotes inaccurate material and takes money from the gullible.
The church that I go to most of the time has only 2 or three children in it and is mostly made up of members over 60
While this is good that your church isn’t abusing more children, it is still terrible to consign “2 or three children” to such mistreatment. Telling children that there is a hell and that they will go to it if they don’t believe in something which is obviously flawed is a terrible thing to do. It is psychological child abuse and I don’t think it says very much in your church’s favor that it only abuses two or three kids.
Besides, if you look at it from a Christian point of view, is it wrong to teach children when they are young?
A child lacks the intellectual maturity to understand or evaluate complex ideas. A child is more trusting than an adult. If your parents tell you something is true, or that you should believe this minister when he talks about heaven, you are more likely to believe it. If your parents came to you now and told you about how they had just found out about Krishna and you should read the Bhagavad Gita you probably wouldn’t be very receptive. And yet, your parents managed to convince you that the Bible was true. Why was that? Was it because through random chance you were born into a family that already believed in the one true religion? Or was it just that you adopted the religion you were exposed to. Because, when you were young your mind wasn’t discriminating enough to realize that, wait a second, this isn’t making sense!
Would you advocate waiting till a person is 20 to start teaching them how to read, write and do math?
No, but the usefulness of reading is well established. Mathematics is axiomatic. Religion is, as the most polite thing I could say about it, highly suspect. I don’t think its right for adults to have sex with children, because children aren’t mature enough to make informed decisions about consent. Similarly, I don’t think its okay for people to teach religion to children because children aren’t mature enough to make informed decisions about ontology.
I respectfully disagree. I would appreciate it if you could be respectful in turn.
I apologize if you have found me disrespectful so far. It isn’t my intention to be disrespectful to you. That said, I have no intention of being respectful to a set of beliefs which I consider first to be wrong and second to be pernicious. If you have an argument which you think is compelling as to the truth of Christianity, please tell me. I promise that if I am swayed by your argument I will begin to show Christianity due deference.
Is it as bad as telling a child that if they play in traffic they could cease to exist?
This is a true statement that is designed to protect a child. Saying something like “You’ll writhe in agony for all time if you don’t believe in the truth of this thousands of years old document compiled over hundreds of years by an unknown but large number of authors” isn’t the same kind of statement. Even if you don’t explicitly say that to a child, convincing them to believe in Christianity is implicitly making that statement.
As far as “bad” goes, I don’t have a ready definition. I have to fall back on Justice Potter Stewart “I know it when I see it”. Threatening children and teaching them things that are at best highly suspect as if they were true is bad.
Not true for all churches. In fact I have yet to be in a single one that even suggests it
Tithing (giving a tenth) is explicitly recommended in the Bible. If the churches you are going to endorse the Bible then they are at least implicitly asking for 10%.
You know, kind of like what Eliezer is doing right now with the workshops he is setting up.
I don’t think Eliezer has a school for children where he teaches them that unless they grow up to believe in his set of rules that an Unfriendly AI will punish them for all time. I have less against evangelism to adults. If Eliezer asks for money like this, that is fair, because the people he is asking can evaluate whether or not they believe in the cause and donate accordingly. There is nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong with compelling donations through threats of damnation.
I think this is called “behaving rationally”. I understand “rationality” as using reason to my benefit.
Thus my point that sometimes you should not question one of your own beliefs is preserved. You agree that it would be the rational thing to do in some situations.
As far as “bad” goes, I don’t have a ready definition.
If you can’t explain what bad is, then I am unable to discuss this with you. You might have a good definition, or you might be just saying that whatever makes you mad is automatically bad. I can’t know, so I can’t form any arguments about it.
If you can’t explain what bad is, then I am unable to discuss this with you
Bad is causing harm to people who don’t deserve it. Convincing someone in the existence of hell is harmful—you are theatening them with the worst thing possible, convincing someone of a lie to compel them to serve the chruch through donations of time or money is harmful, convincing someone that they are innately sinful is harmful psychologically, convincing someone that morality is tied to religious institution is harmful. Children are least deserving of harm and so harming them is bad.
You start walking back to your car. You suspect that you aren’t going to make it. Now does it make you happier to follow up on that thought and figure out the rate you are losing blood...
In the long run, and on average, yes. There are several courses of action open to me, such as “give up”, “keep walking”, “attempt to make a tourniquet”, etc. Once I know the rate of the blood loss, I can determine which of these actions is most likely to be optimal. You say that “you suspect that you aren’t going to make it”, but I can’t make an informed decision—f.ex., whether to spend valuable time on making this tourniquet, or to instead invest this time into walking—based on suspicion alone.
I sympathize somewhat with your argument as it applies to religion, but this example you brought up is not analogous.
You can’t know in advance what beliefs you hold are false, however you can know which ones make you happy and don’t get in the way of your life.
Perhaps not “in advance”, but there are many beliefs that can be tested (though not all beliefs can be). To use a trivial example, believing that a lost Nigerian prince can transfer a million dollars to your bank account in exchange for a small fee might make you happy. However, should you act on this belief, you would very likely end up a lot less happy. Testing the belief will allow you to make an informed decision, and thus end up happier in the long run.
But even if the sun was about to go nova...
This is an off-topic nitpick, but the sun is incredibly unlikely to go nova; it will die in a different way.
[Note: Skip stuff in brackets if religious talk annoys or offends you]
(Why does everyone assume that this has to do with religion? If I was asking this about religion wouldn’t that already signify that I didn’t believe, I just wanted to? My belief comes from actual events that I have witnessed, and tested, and been unable to falsify. )
The example with the bleeding out was sort of a personal one because it happened to me. I cut my foot with an axe. I was far from help, and a helicopter wouldn’t pick me up for another 4 hours. If I had been off to the side by 3 mm I would have hit an artery and bled out, and nothing was going to stop it. I did tie it off, raise it up, and stop moving, but it was down to chance. At the time I believed I was going to die and it quite distressed me. If I was to be in the same situation again, lying on the ground, foot supported and tied off, even if I was going to die I would rather not know and believe I was going to make it. That might make me a sub-optimal rationalist, but at that point as there was nothing more to do it would have made me a happier person. (Gasp! Yes, a religious person said they didn’t want to die. It might sound like a logical fallacy, but it was in fact (if I recall correctly, it was sort of a traumatic experience) empathy for my father and mother, who I had just seen about half an hour before I cut my foot.)
(I will further note that either I was lied to a lot, or that there were several inconsistencies with the entire event. I was told that I should have been unconscious with the amount of blood I lost 6 hours later when I made it in to the hospital. I had of course been doing such activities such as hopping around on my one foot to go places, and didn’t feel in the slightest bit woozy. Nor did I have any symptoms of shock when it happened. Finally I never felt any pain from the wound, though this last I suspect was because I severed the nerve endings. Yet doing that in such a way that I never felt pain seems unlikely to me using something as unwieldy as an axe, and I have not come across similar stories. How does one interpret events? That the doctors lied to me or were mistaken? It’s possible. That a lot of things went just right? The likely hood of that happening falls well within the realm of the possible as well. On the other and there is another explication that does not require lies, mistakes or luck to be involved. I feel that how you see it strongly depends on your bias.(And then there is the possibility that I am lying. I know I’m not, but over the internet I’d be hard pressed to prove it))
As for the Nigerian prince example, I am specifically talking about situations where there is no long run, and you are not affecting other people with your decisions. I agree that in most cases trying to know the truth is better than not knowing it.
The sun going nova was just an example. Big asteroid hitting earth, thermal nuclear war, there are all sorts of stuff that falls into the category of things I can’t do anything about that will end my life.
[Note: Skip stuff in brackets if religious talk annoys or offends you]
I personally operate by Crocker’s Rules, but others may not be, so I appreciate the warning nonetheless.
Why does everyone assume that this has to do with religion?
It’s probably because you said you identify as a Christian, and Christians tend to advance this sort of argument more often than non-theists, regarding Christianity specifically. That said, your argument is general enough to apply to non-religious topics, as well.
At this point, I should mention that I didn’t mean to bring up your personal traumatic experience, and I apologize. If you think that discussing it would be too distressing, please stop reading beyound this point.
If I was to be in the same situation again, lying on the ground, foot supported and tied off...
If you truly believed you were about to die no matter what, why would you waste time on tying off your foot ? It sounds to me like you weighed the chances of you dying, and made a decision to spend some time on tying off the foot, instead of spending it in contemplation or something similar.
On the other and there is another explication that does not require lies, mistakes or luck to be involved.
What is it ?
I am specifically talking about situations where there is no long run, and you are not affecting other people with your decisions.
Can you describe some examples ? Your own experience with the bleeding foot is not one of them, because your death would’ve negatively affected quite a few people (including yourself).
The sun going nova was just an example. … there are all sorts of stuff that falls into the category of things I can’t do anything about that will end my life.
Understood. However, if everyone thought like you do, no one would be tracking near-Earth asteroids right now. Some people are doing just that, though, in the expectation that if a dangerous asteroid were to be detected, we’d have enough time to find a solution that does not involve all of us dying.
It’s probably because you said you identify as a Christian, and Christians tend to advance this sort of argument more often than non-theists, regarding Christianity specifically.
That tends so show that they don’t actually believe in Christianity. Rather they want to believe. I feel sorry for those people. Of course as I tend to sit on the other side of the fence I try to help them believe, but belief is a hard thing to cultivate and an easy thing to destroy. If you were in a group and you were shown a box with 5 dice in it for a brief moment, but later everyone agreed that there were only 4 dice, most people would start to doubt their memories. I know that I would. If the people were very smart and showed the box again, and this time it only had 4 dice in it many people would be very hard pressed not to doubt their memories and be convinced they remembered wrong. They might want to believe that they were right about 5 dice, but they would have a hard time believing it. They would want to believe in the truth, but wouldn’t.
Of course that is coming at it from a strictly religious point of view. Atheist would use the same argument in the exact opposite fashion with the proof of no god being the 5 dice and the religious people around them saying that there were 4.
If you truly believed you were about to die no matter what, why would you waste time on tying off your foot?
Because I wasn’t thinking about if I would live or die, I was thinking that to live I needed to do this. It was only after I had done everything that I could that I stopped and considered my chances and figured that I was probably going to die. Even so though I believe that it is my biological duty to do everything possible to survive no matter how hopeless the situation.
Honestly from this side of it, I don’t really have any post traumatic stress. I remember how I felt at the time, but the memories have no sting to them. Don’t worry about it. Generally I’m able to discuss anything that I bring up.
What is it ?
That something outside of what is generally accepted by science stepped in and helped me. Could have been anything, but it makes the most sense that since I was praying at the time it was God. Of course it could have been aliens that wiped my memory, or a host of other things, but the possibility exists that something stepped in, and it makes for a simpler explanation. However I am aware that simple explanations are not always the right ones.
Can you describe some examples ? Your own experience with the bleeding foot is not one of them, because your death would’ve negatively affected quite a few people (including yourself).
I could argue that if that hadn’t have saved my life (that I was going to die no matter what), than at that point my actions and thoughts would have very little meaning. I suppose honestly I could have written a note to my parents, but at the time I didn’t think of it. Other than that I could have believed, or done anything I wanted and not have really effected the outcome.
However the examples I was thinking of were extinction level events.
Understood. However, if everyone thought like you do, no one would be tracking near-Earth asteroids right now.
Fair point. And I hope that our leaders are wise enough to know that blowing up the world would be a bad idea. However if there was an asteroid going to hit tomorrow, I am not sure what help I could offer humanity even if I did know. Wouldn’t it just cause me pointless suffering? If no one else knew I could tell them about it, but after that I couldn’t really do anything about it. And I don’t know anything about this, but is there anything out there that shows that some people enjoy worrying? They would be perfect to do that sort of thing. I personally am happier not worrying about things I can’t change.
If you were in a group and you were shown a box with 5 dice in it for a brief moment, but later everyone agreed that there were only 4 dice...
This is a pretty standard example of reasoning under uncertainty. You have two possible events, “there were 5 dice” vs. “there were 4 dice”. You want to assign a probability to each event, because, not being omniscient, you don’t know how many dice there actually were. You have several percepts, meaning pieces of evidence: your memories and the claims of the other people. Each of these percepts has some probability of being true: your memories are not infallible, the other people could be wrong or lying, etc. You could run all these numbers through Bayes’ Rule, and determine which of the events (“5 dice” vs. “4 dice”) is more likely to be true.
It also helps to know that all humans have a bias when it comes to peer pressure; our memories become especially faulty when we perceive a strong group consensus that contradicts them. Knowing this can help you calibrate your probabilities.
Anyways, you say that “belief is a hard thing to cultivate”, but in your dice scenario, there’s no need to cultivate anything, because you don’t care about beliefs, you care about how many dice there were; i.e., you care specifically about the truth.
Even so though I believe that it is my biological duty to do everything possible to survive no matter how hopeless the situation.
I am not sure what “biological duty” means, but still, it sounds like you do care whether you live or die; i.e., you want to live. This is a goal, and you can take actions in order to further this goal, and you want to make sure your actions are as optimal as possible, right ?
However I am aware that simple explanations are not always the right ones.
It depends on what you mean by “simple”; according to Ockham’s Razor, “God did it” is a vastly less simple
explanation than most others, due to the number of implicit assumptions you will end up making. That said, it sounds like you have several possible events (“God did it”, “aliens did it”, “I got lucky”, etc.), and several pieces of evidence; so this scenario is similar to your example with the dice. If you cared about the truth, you could assign a probability to each event based on the evidence. Of course, you don’t have to care about the truth in this case; but if you did, there are ways you could approach it.
Other than that I could have believed, or done anything I wanted and not have really effected the outcome.
It’s possible that tying that tourniquet did save your life, so there’s at least one thing you did do which likely affected the outcome.
However if there was an asteroid going to hit tomorrow, I am not sure what help I could offer humanity even if I did know.
I think I see where you’re coming from: there’s no point in spending a lot of effort on worrying about low-probability events which you’d be powerless to affect even if they did happen. As you said, the Sun could die tomorrow, but I can safely ignore this fact. However, I think you’re making an unwarranted leap of faith when you precommit to never worrying about such events, regardless of circumstances.
For example, there’s nothing you could do about that asteroid today, and in fact it’s very likely not even coming. But if we knew that the asteroid was, indeed, heading for Earth, there could be lots of things you could do—you could donate money to the anti-asteroid fund, volunteer at the anti-asteroid missile factory, etc. If you had more information about the asteroid, you could re-evaluate your decisions, and determine the best course of action; but you can’t do that if you have committed yourself to not doing anything regardless of circumstances. You also can’t do that if you have no access to that information in the first place, which is why caring about the truth is sometimes important.
Just a minor update. This thread has grown to big for me to follow easily. I am ready every post in it, but real life is taking up a lot of my time right now so I will be very slow to reply. I found the limit of multiple conversations I can hold at one time before I get a headache, and it appears to be less than I suspected.
Once again, sorry, didn’t mean to drop out, but I stayed up way to late and even now I am recovering from sleep deprivation and still have an annoying headache. My body seems to want to wake up 2 hours before it should. I’ll be back once I get my sleeping back to normal, and get some more time. Even then though I am going to try to limit myself to only a couple posts a day because while I enjoy discussions, it’s very easy for me to forget everything else when I get drawn into them.
Don’t sweat it, I don’t think anyone here expects you to answer all posts in an extremely rapid fashion. Ok, maybe some do, but you don’t owe those people anything, anyway. This is a discussion site, not a job :-)
Getting beaten up as a child sucks. Hope your life is a whole lot better now.
A somewhat related personal story: I was a Christian. I was plagued by doubts, and decided that I wanted to know what the truth was, even if it was something I didn’t want to believe. I knew that I wanted Christianity to be true, but I didn’t want to just believe for the sake of it.
So I started doing more serious reading. Not rationalist writings, but a thoughtful theologian and historian, NT Wright, who I’ve also seen appear on documentaries about New Testament history. I read the first two in what he was planning as an epic 5 part series: “The New Testament and the People of God” and “Jesus and the Victory of God”.
I loved the way he explained history, and how to think about history (i.e. historiography). Also language, and ideas about the universe. He wrote very well, and warmly—you got the sense that this was a real human being, but he lacked the hubris that I’d often found in religious writers, and he seemed more interested in seeking truth than in claiming that he had it. He was the most rationalist of Christian writers that I came across.
In the end, the essence of his argument seemed to be that there is a way of understanding the Bible that could tell us something about God—if we believe in a personal god who is involved in the universe… and that if we believe in that kind of god, described in the Old Testament, then the idea of taking human form, and becoming the embodiment of everything that Israel was meant to be, does make sense. (He went into much, much more depth here about , and I can’t do him justice at all, 15 years after I read it.) He didn’t push the reader to believe—he just stated that it was something that made sense to him, and he did believe it.
He painted a picture and told a story which I found very appealing, to be honest. But in the end it didn’t fit with how I understood the universe, based on the more solid ground of science.
I finally accepted that—my increasingly shaky belief was destroyed. It was hard, and I was upset—I’d been finding life hard, personally, and my beliefs were the framework that I’d used to attempt to make sense of things, such as an unhappy childhood and the death of both parents as a young adult. But I also felt freed, and after a couple of weeks, it didn’t seem so bad. Years later, I’m much happier, and couldn’t imagine myself as a Christian.
That’s where I see the value personally in destroying false beliefs—I was freed to live without the restrictions imposed by a false belief system. The restrictions, in many cases, didn’t have any sound basis outside the belief system, and I was better without them. There were positive aspects of Christianity, but I didn’t need the beliefs to hold onto what I’d learnt about being compassionate and understanding, or about the value of community.
I felt that NT Wright told an honest, complex and interesting story, but in terms the reality (or non-reality) of a god, he made an intuitive judgement which I don’t see as sound (and which was different from my own intuition). But he helped me think things through at a time when I wasn’t getting satisfactory answers from other Christians, and I really enjoyed his writing. I might even go back and read him some day.
That’s wide of the topic, I know, but it’s kind of relevant, and a welcome thread seems like a good place to go on tangents :-).
Hello. I come from HPMoR. I identify as Christian, though my belief and reasons for belief are a bit more complex than that. I’ll probably do a post on that later in ‘how to convince me 2+2=3’. I also get told that I over think things.
Anyway, that’s not the reason I joined. I was reading an article by Eliezer Yudkowsky and he stated that whatever can be destroyed by truth should be. This got me wondering in what context that was meant. My first thought was that it meant that we should strive to destroy all false beliefs, which has the side effect of not lying, but then I began to wonder if it wasn`t more personal. We should strive to let the truth that we observe destroy any beliefs that they are able to.
I realized that the difference between the two is that one is an end in and of itself (destroy all false belief), and one is a means to achieve a goal more effectively (don`t hold on to false belief when it has been proved false). I am really not sure how I feel about the first one, it seems very confrontational to no good purpose. There are a lot of false beliefs out there that people hold dear. However the second one is strange as well.
One of peoples goals is to be happy. Now there is an old saying that ignorance is bliss. While this is definitely not always a good policy I can think of several cases off the top of my head were a person would be happier with a false belief than with reality. For example what if everything that is happening to you right now is your mind constructing an elaborate fantasy to stop you from realizing that you are slowly being tortured to death? If you break free of said belief you are not happy, and you can do nothing to save yourself. The goal of being happy is actively opposed by the goal of learning the truth. [disclaimer: I’ve read about the mind constructing such fantasies in books and have experienced it only once in my life to a limited degree when I was being beaten up as a child. I don’t know how scientifically accurate they are. This is just an example and if necessary I can come up with another one.]
So probably that wasn’t what Mr. Yudkowsky meant when he said that what can be destroyed by truth should be (and if it is, can someone explain to me why?). So what does it mean? I’ve run out of theories here.
Welcome to LessWrong. There’s a sizable contingent of people in this community who don’t think that uncomfortable truths need be confronted. But I think they are wrong.
As you say, one purpose of believing true things is to be better at achieving goals. To exaggerate slightly, if you believe “Things in motion tend to come to a stop,” then you will never achieve the goal of building a rocket to visit other planets. You might respond that none of your actual goals are prevented by your false beliefs. But you can’t know that in advance unless you know which of your beliefs are false. That’s not belief, that’s believing that you have a belief.. And adjusting your goals so that they never are frustrated by false beliefs is just a long-winded way of saying Not Achieving Your Original Goals.
In theory, there might be a time when you wouldn’t choose differently with a true belief that with a false belief. I certainly don’t endorse telling an imminently dying man that his beloved wife cheated on him years ago. But circumstances must be quite strange for you to be confident that your choices won’t change based on your beliefs. You, the person doing the believing, don’t know when you are in situations like that because—by hypothesis—you have an unknown false belief that prevents you from understanding what is going on.
Hi, I joined just to reply to this comment. I don’t think there is a lot of complexity hidden behind “whatever can be destroyed by truth should be”. If there is a false belief, we should try to replace it with a true one, or at least a less wrong one.
Your argument that goes “But what if you were being tortured to death” doesn’t really hold up because that argument can be used to reach any conclusion. What if you were experiencing perfect bliss, but then, your mind made up an elaborate fantasy which you believe to be your life… What if there were an evil and capricious deity who would torture you for eternity if you chose Frosted Flakes over Fruit Loops for breakfast? These kinds of “What if” statements followed by something of fundamentally unknowable probability are infinite in number and could be used to reach any conclusion you like and therefore, they don’t recomend any conclusion over any other conclusion. I don’t think it is more likely that I am being horribly tortured and fantasizing about writing this comment than I think it is likely that I am in perfect bliss and fantasizing about this, and so, this argument does nothing to recomend ignorance over knowledge.
In retrospect (say it turns out I am being tortured) I may be happier in ignorance, but I would be an inferior rationalist.
I think this applies to Christianity too. At the risk of being polemical, say I believed that Christianity is a scam whereby a select group of people convince the children of the faithful that they are in peril of eternal punishment if they don’t grow up to give 10% of their money to the church. Suppose I think that this is harmful to children and adults. Further, suppose I think the material claims of the religion are false. Now, you on the other hand suppose (I assume) that the material claims of the religion are true and that the children of the faithful are being improved by religious instruction.
Both of us can’t be right here. If we apply the saying “whatever can be destroyed by truth should be” then we should each try to rigorously expose our ideas to the truth. If one of our positions can be destroyed by the truth, it should be. This works no matter who is right (or if neither of us are right). If I am correct, then I destroy your idea, you stop believing in something false, stop assisting in the spread of false beliefs, stop contributing money to a scam, etc. If you are right then my belief will be destroyed, I can gain eternal salvation, stop trying to mislead people from the true faith, begin tithing etc.
In conclusion, I think the saying means exactly what it sounds like.
Minor nitpick: these statements have a very low probability of being true due to the lack of evidence for them, not an unknowable probability of being true as your sentence would imply.
Ok, but what about unfalsifiable (or incredibly unlikely to be falsified) claims ? Let’s imagine that I am a religious person, who believes that a). the afterlife exists, and b). the gods will reward people in this afterlife in proportion to the number of good deeds each person accomplished in his Earthly life.The exact nature of the reward doesn’t matter, whatever it is, I’d consider it awesome. Furthermore, let’s imagine that I believe c). no objective empirical evidence of this afterlife and these gods’ existence could ever be obtained; nonetheless, I believe in it wholeheartedly (perhaps the gods revealed the truth to me in an intensely subjective experience, or whatever). As a direct result of my beliefs, d). I am driven to become a better person and do more good things for more people, thus becoming generally nicer, etc.
In this scenario, should my belief be destroyed by the truth ?
Suppose we are neighbors. By some mixup, the power company is combining my electric bill to your own. You notice that your bill is unusually high, but you pay it anyway because you want electricity. In fact, you like electricity so much that you are happy to pay even the high bill to get continued power. Now, suppose that I knew all the details of the situation. Should I tell you about the error?
I think this case is pretty similar to the one you’ve described about the religion that makes you do good things. You pay my bill because you want a good for yourself. I am letting you incur a cost, that you may not want to, because it will benefit me.
I think in the electricity example I have some moral obligation to tell you our bills have been combined. I think this carries over to the religious example. There is a real benefit to me (and to society) to let you continue to labor under your false assumption that doing good deeds would result in magic rewards, but I still think it would be immoral to let this go on. I think the right thing to do would be to try and destroy your false belief with the truth and then try to convince you that altruism can be rewarding in and of itself. That way, you may still be an altruist, but you won’t be fooled into being one.
Not entirely. In your example, the power bill is a zero-sum game; in order for you to gain a benefit (free power), someone has to experience a loss (I pay extra for your power in addition to mine). Is there a loss in my scenario, and if so, to whom ?
Why do you think this would be immoral ? I could probably make a consequentialist argument that it would in fact be moral, but perhaps you’re using some other moral system ?
The cost is to you. You are the one doing good deeds. I consider the time and effort (and money) you expend doing good deeds for other people to be the cost here.
My feeling is that this is an implicit corruption of your free will. You aren’t actually intending to pay my power, you are just doing it because you don’t realize you are. Similarly, in the religion example, what you actually intend to do is earn your way into heaven (or pay for your own power) but what you are actually doing is hard work to benefit others and you won’t go to heaven for it (paying for my electricity).
I don’t have the time to fully divulge my moral system here, but I think there is a class of actions which reduce the free will of other people. At the very extreme end of this class would be slavery “Do my work or I’ll hurt or kill you”. At the opposite end of the spectrum (but still a member of the same class) is something like letting people serve you, when they don’t intend to, because of a lie by omission.
One of the things I respect and value about human beings is their free will. By diminishing the free will of other people I would be diminishing the value of other human beings and I am calling that “immoral behavior”. This, I think, is why it is immoral to let you believe a lie which hurts you even if it helps me.
We might all benefit if we tricked Mark Zuckerburg into paying our power bills. He could afford to do so and to go on doing his thing and we would all be made better off. So, should we do so? If we should, why should we stop at the power bill? Why should we limit ourselves to tricking him? Why not just compel him through force?
Ah, I understand, that makes sense. In this case, the magnitude of the net loss/gain depends on whether “become a better person” is one of my goals. If it is, then belief in this kind of afterlife basically acts as a powerful anti-akrasia aid, motivating me to achieve this goal. In this scenario, would you say that taking this tool away from me would be the right thing to do ?
What do you mean by “free will” ? Different people use this term to mean very different things.
This is different from tricking him [1]. When we trick someone in the manner we were discussing (i.e., by conning him), we aren’t just taking away his stuff—we are giving him happiness in return. By contrast, when we take his stuff away by force, we’re giving him nothing but pain. Thus, even if we somehow established that conning people is morally acceptable, it does not follow that robbing them is acceptable as well.
[1] As Sophie from Leverage points out in one of the episodes.
This depends very much on what you mean by “better person”. Returning a lost wallet because you know the pain of losing things and because you understand the wallet’s owner is a sapient being who will experience similar pain is the kind of thing a good person would do. Returning a lost wallet because you expect a reward is more of a morally neutral thing to do. So, if you are doing good deeds because you expect a heavenly reward then you aren’t really being a good person (according to me) - you are just performing actions you expect to get a reward for. I think this belief actually prohibits you from being a good person, because as long as you believe in it you can never be sure whether you are acting out of a desire to be good or out of a desire to go to heaven.
I would. If you use this belief to trick yourself into believing you are a better person (see above) then this is just doubling down for me. False beliefs should be destroyed by the truth. I should first destroy the belief in the heavenly reward for good deeds and then let the truth test you. Do you still do good things without hope of eternal reward? If yes, then you are a good person. If not, then you aren’t and you never were.
By “free will” I mean a person’s ability to choose the option they most prefer. So, if I tell my friend I want to eat at restaurant X—I don’t think I’m inhibiting his free will. I do hope I’m influencing his preferences. I assume somewhere in his decision making algorithm is a routine that considers the strength of preferences of friends and that evaluation is used to modify his preference to eat at restaurant X. I do think I’d be inhibiting his free will if I were to say falsely that “Well, we can’t go to Y because it burned down” (or let him continue to believe this without correcting him). I am subverting free will by distorting the apparent available options. I think this also fits if you use threat of harm (“I’ll shoot you if we don’t go to X”) to remove an option from someone’s consideration.
I know a mentally handicapped person. I think its very likely I could trick this person out of their money. I could con him with a lie that is very liable to make him happy but would result in me getting all of his money and his stuff. What is your moral evaluation of this action?
It seems to me, if it is possible to trick Zuckerberg into paying my power bill then it is possible because he is gullible enough to believe my con. If it is possible for me to trick the mentally disabled, then it is possible because they are gullible enough for me to con. So, I don’t see why there should be any moral difference between tricking the mentally disabled out of their wealth and tricking Zuckerberg out of his. Nigerian email scams should be okay too, right?
I suppose there is some difference here in that Zuckerberg could afford to be conned out of a power bill or two whereas the average Nigerian scam victim cannot. I interpret this difference as being one of scale though. I think it would be worse to trick the elderly or the mentally disabled out of their life savings than it would to trick Zuckerberg out of the same number of dollars. This doesn’t mean that it is morally permissible to trick Zuckerberg out of any money though. Instead, I think it shows that each of these actions are immoral but of different magnitudes.
In this scenario, I mean, “someone who believes that doing nice things for people is a valuable goal, and who strives to act in accordance with this goal”. That said, does it really matter why I do nice things for people, as long as I do them ? Outside observers can’t tell what I’m thinking, after all, only what I’m doing.
In my scenario, the answer is either “no”, or “not as effectively”. I would like to do good things, but a powerful case of akrasia prevents me from doing them most of the time. Believing in the eternal reward cancels out the akrasia.
In this case, “free will” is a matter of degree. Sure, you aren’t inhibiting your friend’s choices by force, but you are still affecting them. Left to his own devices, he would’ve chosen restaurant Y—but you caused him to choose restaurant X, instead.
This action is not entirely analogous, because, while your victim might experience a temporary boost in happiness, he will experience unhappiness once he finds out that his stuff is gone, and that you tricked him. Thus, the total amount of happiness he experiences throughout his life will undergo a net decrease.
The more interesting question is, “what if I could con the person in such a way that will grant him sustained happiness ?” I am not sure whether doing so would be moral or not; but I’m also not entirely sure whether such a feat is even possible.
Agreed, assuming that the actions are, in fact, immoral.
From an economics standpoint it doesn’t matter. From a morality standpoint I would say it is all that does matter.
Consider, your friend asks you to get a cup of coffee—with sugar please! You go make the coffee and put in a healthy amount of the white powder. Unknown to you, this isn’t sugar, it is cyanide. Your friend drinks the coffee and falls down dead. What is your moral culpability here?
In a second instance, someone who thinks of you as a friend asks you for a cup of coffee—with sugar please! You actually aren’t this person’s friend though, you hate them. You make the cup of coffee, but instead of putting the sugar in it, you go to the back room, where you usually keep your cyanide powder. You find a bag of the white powder and put a large quantity into the coffee. Unknown to you, this isn’t cyanide, it has been switched with sugar. Your enemy drinks the coffee and enjoys it. What is your moral culpability here?
From the strict, bottom line, standpoint, you are a murderer in the first case and totally innocent in the second. And yet, that doesn’t feel right. Your intent in the first case was to help a friend. I would say that you have no moral culpability for his death. In the second case, your intent was to kill a person. I would say you bear the same moral culpability you would had you actually succeeded.
I think this example shows that what matters is not the consequences of your actions, but your intent when you take those actions. As such, if your intent on doing good is to benefit yourself I think it is fair to say that that is morally neutral (or at least less moral than it could be). If you intend simply to do good, then I think your actions are morally good, even if the consequences are not.
I would say this is the light of truth shattering your illusion about being a good person then. Maybe that realization will drive you to overcome the akrasia and you can become a good person in fact as well in your desires.
What I hope is happening is that my friend’s preferences include a variable which account for the preferences of his friends. That way, when I tell him where I want to go, I am informing his decision making algorithm without actually changing his preferences. If I wanted to go to X less, then my friend would want to go to X less.
Agreed. I don’t think this case would be moral though (though it would be a closer fit to the other situation). I think it still qualifies as a usurpation of another person’s free will and therefore is still immoral even if it makes people happy.
I can try again with another hypothetical. A girl wants to try ecstasy. She approaches a drug dealer, explains she has never tried it but would like to. The drug dealer supplies her with a pill which she takes. This isn’t ecstasy though, it is rohypnol. The girl blacks out and the drug dealer rapes her while she is unconscious, then cleans her up and leaves her on a couch. The girl comes to. Ecstasy wasn’t quite like it was described to her, but she is proud of herself for being adventurous and for trying new things. She isn’t some square who is too afraid to try recreational drugs and she will believe this about herself and attach a good feeling to this for the rest of her life. Has anyone done anything wrong here? The drug dealer was sexually gratified and the girl feels fulfilled in her experimentation. This feels like a case where every party is made happier and yet, I would still say that the drug dealer has done something immoral, even if he knew for sure how the girl would react.
From whose point of view ? If you are committed to poisoning your hapless friend, then presumably you either don’t care about morality, or you’d determined that this action would be sufficiently moral. If, on the other hand, I am attempting to evaluate the morality of your actions, then I can only evaluate the actions you did, in fact, perform (because I can’t read your mind). Thus, if you gave your friend a cup of tea with sugar in it, and, after he drank it, you refrained from exclaiming “This cannot be ! So much cyanide would kill any normal man !”—then I would conclude that you’re just a nice guy who gives sugared tea to people.
I do agree with you that intent matters in the opposite case; this is how we can differentiate murder from manslaughter.
Maybe it won’t, though. Thus, we have traded some harmless delusions of goodness for a markedly reduced expected value of my actions in the future (I might still do good deeds, but the probability of this happening is lower). Did society really win anything ?
Sounds like this is still mind control, just to a (much) lesser degree. Instead of altering your friend’s preferences directly, you’re exploiting your knowledge of his preference table, but the principle is the same. You could’ve just as easily said, “I know that my friend wants to avoid pain, so if I threaten him with pain unless he goes to X less, then he’d want to go to X less”.
I don’t think this scenario is entirely analogous either, though it’s much closer. In this example, there was a very high probability that the girl sustained severe lasting damage (STDs, pregnancy, bruising, drug overdose or allergy, etc.). Less importantly, the girl received some misleading information about drugs, which may cause her to make harmful decisions in the future. Even if none of these things happened in this specific case, the probability of them happening is relatively high. Thus, we would not want to live in a society where acting like the drug dealer did is considered moral.
If there is no empirical evidence either way about a belief, how would one go about destroying it? Beliefs pay rent in anticipated experience, not anticipated actions.
In short, the religious person has adopted a terminal value of being a nicer person, but is confused an thinks this is an instrumental value in pursuit of the “real” terminal value of implementing the desires of a supernatural being. Epistemic rationality has no more to say about this terminal value than about any other terminal value.
One way you could go about destroying a belief like that is to use Ockham’s Razor: sure, it’s possible that all kinds of unfalsifiable beliefs are true, but why should you waste time in believing any of them, if they have no effect on anything ?
However, if the believer has some subjective evidence for the belief—f.ex., if he personally experienced the gods talking to him—then this attack cannot work. In this case, would you still say that his belief is “indestructible” ?
I think this is a rather misleading characterization, since calling it a scam implies that the people doing the convincing are perpetrating a deception they do not believe in themselves, which I doubt is true in any but an extremely small and unusual minority of cases.
I pose the question of what does being a superior rationalist do for you if you are about to die? And I’ll use a more real example because you don’t seem to like that one. Let us suppose that you are about a miles walk from your car and you cut yourself badly. You don’t have any means of communicating with people. You start walking back to your car. You suspect that you aren’t going to make it. Now does it make you happier to follow up on that thought and figure out the rate you are losing blood, realize you aren’t going to make it and die in fear and sadness, or is it better to put that suspicion aside and keep walking toward your car, sitting down for a quick rest when you get tired? One has you dieing in fear, the other in peace. All because of your choice to destroy your belief that you can get to the car. Is being a superior rationalist giving your more happiness that the knowledge of your own imminent death is taking away?
You can’t know in advance what beliefs you hold are false, however you can know which ones make you happy and don’t get in the way of your life. I believe that I am sitting in front of a computer enjoying a stimulating conversation. I could devote a lot of time trying to disprove it. I would probably not succeed, but who knows, I might. I however don’t see anything to be gained from attempting to disprove this. Again, I believe the sun will rise tomorrow morning. My belief might be false, however if it is, and the sun goes nova tonight, I would gain nothing but unhappiness (if I was an atheist, which I am in this argument). I could try to disprove it, and put resources towards seeing if it is or it isn’t. I could try to find out if there is a conspiracy to hide if from the public to stop rioting. But even if the sun was about to go nova, my knowledge of it would change nothing, and it would be unlikely I could find out anyway, so it would be a waste of resources to try to find out.
And I am trying to leave religion out of this. Your misconceptions about Christianity are show that you have never done any real research into the subject of religion, and that you are just copying what you have heard from others. If however you really want to get into it, let me know and I will. I admit, I have anti-anti-theist tendencies.
Still, the original question has been answered.
In the aggregate of all possible worlds, I expect it will let me lead a happier and more fulfilling life. This isn’t to say that there aren’t situations where it will disadvantage me to be a rationalist (a killer locks me and one other person in a room with a logic puzzle. He will kill the one who completes the puzzle first...) but in general, I think it will be an advantage. Its like in the game of poker, sometimes, the correct play will result in losing. That is okay though, if players play enough hands eventually superior skill will tell and the better player will come out on top. Being a superior rationalist may not always be best in every situation, but when the other choice (inferior rationalist) is worse in even more situations… the choice seems obvious.
Then I could stop walking, conserve my energy and try to suppress the blood loss. Or, I could activate my rationalist powers earlier and store a first aid kit in my car, or a fully charged cell phone in my pocket, or not venture out into the dangerous wild by myself...
I’ll freely admit to a hostile stance on religion, but I think it is a deserved one. Whatever misconceptions I may have about Christianity are gained from growing up with a religious family and attending services “religiously” for the first two decades of my life. I have more than a passing familiarity with it. I don’t think anything I said about religion is wrong though. Religious instruction is targeted predominantly towards children. The claims of the religious are false. Threatening a child with eternal damnation is bad. A consequence of being a Christian is giving 10% of your money to the church. Am I missing anything here?
If you knew this to be the case, the rational thing to do would be to avoid solving the puzzle :-)
Religious people would disagree with you here, I’d imagine.
This is another minor nitpick, but AFAIK not all Christian sects demand tithing (though some do).
Agreed, but there is at least one possible scenario (where I don’t know it is the case) where it would hurt me to be a superior rationalist.
I imagine they would. Because they would disagree with me, I’d like for my beliefs to challenge theirs to trial by combat. That way, the wrong beliefs might be destroyed by the truth.
Sure, 10% is not true of all Christian groups. To my knowledge though, all such groups run on donations from the faithful. If the number isn’t 10% it is still greater than zero. Arguments here are over scale and not moral righteousness.
I’m not so sure.
I mean, it’s not like all religious people agree about religious claims, any more than all political activists agree about political claims, or all sports fans agree about claims regarding sports teams.
In fact, quite the contrary… I suspect that most religious people believe that the religious claims of most religious people are false.
Fair enough, though religious people would surely disagree with the statement, “All religious claims are false”—which is what I interpreted electricfistula’s comment to mean.
Yah.
Tangentially, I know a couple of Catholic seminarians who would disagree with “Most religious claims are false”—they argue that claims which contradict certain tenets of Catholicism aren’t religious claims at all, though the people making them may falsely believe them to be.
Indeed. My entire point was that it might be possible to recognize these situations and then act in an appropriate manner. (Or would that be being meta-rationalist?)
Anecdotal evidence shouldn’t be a cause to say something is horrible. If that were the case I could point to the secular schools I went to growing up where I was the only Christian in my class, and watched as the other kids fought, did hard drugs, had sex, and generally messed up their life and beat me up. On the other hand the Church was friendly, focused on working together and planning for the future. It focused on tolerance and accepting people who were hostile without hating them. If I was to go just from my childhood I would despise atheists with a passion.
Depends on the church. The church that I go to most of the time has only 2 or three children in it and is mostly made up of members over 60. Besides, if you look at it from a Christian point of view, is it wrong to teach children when they are young? Would you advocate waiting till a person is 20 to start teaching them how to read, write and do math?
I respectfully disagree. I would appreciate it if you could be respectful in turn.
Is it as bad as telling a child that if they play in traffic they could cease to exist? Or that if they are not careful around a lawnmower they could end up with pain and disabilities for the rest of their lives? Define ‘Bad’ for me so that we can discuss this point.
Not true for all churches. In fact I have yet to be in a single one that even suggests it. Usually it is more along the lines of “If you believe the work we are doing is good than please donate so that we may continue doing it.” You know, kind of like what Eliezer is doing right now with the workshops he is setting up.
Claims with a low Occamian prior are false (to within reasonable tolerances) by default to a rationalist. Deities in general tend to have extremely long minimum message lengths, since they don’t play nice with the rest of our model of the universe, and require significant additional infra-structure. I suspect you would not be overly put out by the assertion that Rama or Odin isn’t real. So, what makes your God different? I ask you honestly. If you can show strong, convincing evidence for why the existence of your God is special, I will be very, very interested. If you can demonstrate enough Bayesian evidence to bump the probability of Yahweh over 50%, you’ve got yourself a convert. Probably quite a few. But, the burden of evidence is on your shoulders.
Ah, now that is a funny thing isn’t it. Once upon a time I played a joke on a friend. I told him something that he would have never have believed unless it came from my own mouth, and then when he tried to tell others I just looked confused and denied it. He ended up looking like a fool. (For the record I asked him to tell nobody else).
Why is this relevant? Because if for example (and no, I’m not saying this is what happened), God came out of the sky, pointed at me, and said “I exist.” I would know that either he existed, or something else did that was trying to fool me into thinking he did. Either way I would have belief that something supernatural (outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts) had happened. Let’s say I came onto this board and told everyone that. How would I ‘prove’ it? I could say it happened, but I doubt anyone here would believe me. I could try a few tests, but I’d be hard pressed with how to prove that a something of a godlike intelligence exists if it didn’t want anyone else to find out. However I might not be smart enough, so I’ll pose the question to you:
How do you prove that a godlike entity exists if it doesn’t want to be proven? Assume that it has complete freedom to move through time so that tricking it doesn’t work because it can just go back in time (that’s what omnipotent means after all). And that you don’t know the reasons why it’s staying hidden so no argument to try to get it to show itself will work.
I look forward to suggestions. But unless there is something that works for that, I am just someone who believes because of experience, but knows of no way to prove it to others (though honestly I am making an assumption by saying god wants to stay hidden, it’s the only reason I can think of).
Actually, my default response for this sort of thing is to immediately go to a hospital, and get a head CT and a chat with a certified psychiatrist. I mean, sure, it could be the supernatural, but we KNOW mental illness happens. The priors for me being crazy (especially given some unique family history) are not very low. Much, much higher than the odds of a deity actually existing, given the aforementioned Occamian priors.
You don’t. Rationalism only works if God isn’t fucking with you. That said, there’s a huge space of possible constructs like that one (entities that conveniently eliminate all evidence for themselves). It’s not infinite, but it’s arbitrarily large. From a rationalist’s perspective, if any of them were real, we wouldn’t know, but the odds of them actually being real in the first place are… not high. Again with the Occamian prior. So, I’m not much moved by your analysis.
That said, I am curious what your personal experience was.
Proof is not typically necessary. People make claims about their experience all the time that they have no way of proving, as well as claims that they probably could prove but don’t in fact do so, and I believe many of those claims.
For example, I believe my officemate is married, although they have offered me no proof of this beyond their unsupported claim.
I would say a more useful question is, “how do I provide another person with sufficient evidence that such an entity exists that the person should consider it likely?” And of course the answer depends on the person, and what they previously considered likely. (The jargon around here would be “it depends on their priors.”)
Mostly I don’t think I can, unless their priors are such that they pretty much already believe that such an entity exists.
Another question worth asking is “how do I provide myself sufficient evidence that such an entity exists that I should consider it likely?”
I don’t think I can do that either.
Unrelatedly: Is “god exists, has the properties I believe it to have, and wants to stay hidden” really the only reason you can think of for the observable universe being as we observe it to be? I understand it’s the reason you believe, I’m asking whether it’s the only reason you can think of, or whether that was just hyperbole.
My own belief is closer to: “Something very powerful and supernatural exists, doesn’t seem to be hostile, and doesn’t mind that I call it the Christian God.” And while I would answer ‘no’ to that question, the amount of evidence that there is something supernatural if far greater than the amount of evidence that there are millions of people lying about their experiences.
For instance, every culture has a belief in the supernatural. Now I would expect that social evolution would trend away from such beliefs. If you say, I can dance and make it rain, and then you fail, you would get laughed at. If you don’t believe me gather a bunch of your closest friends and try it. The reason for people to believe someone else is if they had proof to back it up, or they already had reason to believe. Humans aren’t stupid, and I don’t think we’ve become radically more intelligent in the last couple thousand years. Why then is belief in the supernatural* everywhere? Is it something in our makeup, how we think? I have heard such a thing discounted by both sides. So there must be some cause, some reason for people to have started believing.
And that’s without even getting into my experiences, or those close to me. As was suggested, misremembering, and group hallucination are possible, but if that is the case than I should probably check myself and some people I know into a medical clinic because I would be forced to consider myself insane. Seeing things that aren’t there wold be a sign of something being very wrong with me, but I do not any any other symptoms of insanity so I strongly doubt this is the case.
I suppose when I get right down to it, either I and some others are insane with an unknown form of insanity, or there is something out there.
*(outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts)
For what it’s worth, I’m .9+ confident of the following claims:
1) there exist phenomena in the universe that “human science” (1) doesn’t commonly accept.
2) for any such phenomenon X, X doesn’t mind that you call it the Christian God
3) for any such phenomenon X, X doesn’t mind that you call it a figment of your imagination
4) for any such phenomenon X, X is not “hostile” (2) to humans
So it seems we agree on that much.
Indeed, I find it likely that most people on this site would agree on that much.
As above, I think the evidence supporting the idea that there exist phenomena in the universe that “human science” (1) doesn’t commonly accept is pretty strong. The evidence supporting the idea that people lie about their experiences, confabulate their experiences, and have experiences that don’t map to events outside their own brains despite seeming to, is also pretty strong. These aren’t at all conflicting ideas; I am confident of them both.
Do you mean to suggest that, because there exist such phenomena, human reports are therefore credible? I don’t see how you get from one to the other.
Not really, no. It happens to people all the time. I had the experience once of being visited by Prophetic Beings from Outside Time who had a Very Significant Message for me to impart to the masses. That doesn’t mean I’m crazy. It also doesn’t mean that Prophetic Beings from Outside Time have a Very Significant Message for me to impart to the masses.
Again: there are almost certainly many things out there.
That doesn’t mean that every experience you have is an accurate report of the state of the universe.
And if the particular experience you had turns out not to be an accurate report of the state of the universe, that doesn’t mean you’re insane.
==========
(1) Given what I think you mean by that phrase. For example, nuclear physics was outside the realm of what human science commonly accepted in the year 1750, so was supernatural then by this definition, although it is not now.
(2) Given what I think you mean by that phrase. For example, I assume the empty void of interstellar space is not considered hostile, even though it will immediately kill an unprotected human exposed to it.
Well, don’t be coy. There’s no point in withholding your strongest piece of evidence. Please, get into it.
As already pointed out, would it change either my beliefs or your beliefs? I’ve already recounted a medical mystery with my foot and blood loss. It comes down in the end to my word, and that of people I know. We could all be lying. There is no long term proof, so I don’t see any need to explain it. That was my point. What is strong proof to me, is weak proof to others because I know that I am not lying. I have no way to prove I am not lying however so what would be the point?
If you have evidence that could overcome the low prior for God’s existence were you not lying, then that would be worth hearing even if we would believe you’re lying. I’m not aware of such evidence for particular deities.
Honestly mine really isn’t any different than what you hear on the internet all the time. If you want to hear it go ahead. When my grandfather died all the people in the room said that they saw a light enter the room. It didn’t say anything but they all agreed that they felt peace come over them. My grandfather was a Christian, as were the people in the room. I wasn’t in the room, however I did check their stories individually and they matched. Also these were people who haven’t lied to me before or since (well, other than stuff like april fools… though one of them never even does that). That, along with my foot, and my Mothers ability to know when her friends are in trouble and make phone calls that I have related in other posts give me reasonably strong belief in the supernatural* world
*(Supernatural yada yada, not understood by science yada yada. Do I need to keep making these disclaimers?)
Surprisingly, no. That said, religious people aren’t lying. They’re not even a lot crazier than baseline. I’ve had experiences which I recognize from my reading to be neurological that I might otherwise attribute to some kind of religious intervention. And those are coming from an atheist’s brain not primed to see angels or gods or anything of that kind.
As for why belief in the supernatural is everywhere, a lot of it has to do with how bad our brains are at finding satisfactory explanations, and at doing rudimentary probability theory. We existed as a species for a hundred thousand years before we got around to figuring out why there was thunder. Before then, the explanation that sounded the simplest was ‘there’s a big ape in the sky who does it.’ And, even when we knew the real reason, we were so invested in those explanations that they didn’t go away. Add in a whole bunch of glitches native to the human brain, and boom, you’ve a thousand generations of spooky campfire stories.
If I were you, I would be terrified of that possibility. I would at least go to a psychiatrist and try to rule it out. It is a real possibility, and potentially the most likely one. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
I don’t think you’ll find such a thing readily discounted here. There are plenty of well established cognitive biases that come to play in assessment of supernatural claims. The sequences discuss this to some degree, but you might also be interested in reading this book which discusses some of the mechanisms which contribute to supernatural belief which are not commonly discussed here.
We don’t even need to raise the issue of the supernatural to examine whether people are likely to pass down beliefs and rituals when they don’t really work. We can look at folk medicine, and see if there are examples of cures which have been passed down through cultures which perform no better than placebo in double blind tests. In fact, there is an abundance of such.
Point.
though I would point out that not all of them are wrong either. Just the good majority. That’s neither here nor there though.
Out of curiosity how does science explain people feeling knowing that people they care about are in trouble? My mother has made 4 phone calls, and I have witnessed 2 where she felt that someone was in trouble and called them. One of those calls was to me and it helped me greatly. While she has missed calling people that were in trouble, she has never once called someone with that intent and been wrong.She told me that it feels like someone is telling her to call them because they are in trouble. I can’t know if that is true or not, but I can’t think of her ever lying to me. This is even more interesting because one time she told me that she felt she needed to make the call just before she did, thereby predicting it.
I know that she isn’t the only person that does this, because I have read many accounts of people who believed a loved one had died when they were across the ocean during WWII.
Personally I would go with psyonics if not god, but that might be because I played to many role-playing games.
Sorry if this seems odd, it was just something that came to mind as I was thinking about supernatural* things.
*(outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts)
I don’t know if this is something that has been explained, or even if it’s something that needs to be explained. It could be that you’re operating under an unrepresentative dataset. Keep in mind that if you hadn’t experienced a number of phone calls where the caller’s intuition that something was wrong was correct, you wouldn’t treat it as a phenomenon in need of explanation, but if you had experienced some other set of improbable occurrences, simply by chance, then that would look like a phenomenon in need of explanation. I personally have no experiences with acquaintances making phone calls on an intuition that something is wrong and being right, although I have experience with acquaintances getting worried and making phone calls and finding out there was really nothing to worry about. There’s a significant danger of selection bias in dealing with claims like this, because people who experience, say, a sudden premonition that something has happened to their loved on across the sea at war, and then find out a couple weeks later that they’re still alive and well, are probably not going to record the experience for posterity.
I’ve encountered plenty of claims of improbable events before which were attributed to supernatural causes. If I consistently encountered ones that took the form of people correctly intuiting that a distant loved one was in trouble and calling them, I would definitely start to suspect that this was a real phenomenon in need of explanation, although I would also be interested in seeing how often people intuited that a distant loved one was in trouble, called them, found out they were wrong, and didn’t think it was worth remembering. Maybe some of the improbable events I’ve heard about really are the result of more than chance, and have some underlying explanation that I’m not aware of, but I don’t have the evidence to strongly suspect this.
If you multiply a day times the population experiencing it, that’s about 82,000 years of human experience in America alone. That’s a lot of time for improbable stuff to happen in, and people tend to remember the improbable stuff and forget the ordinary, and draw patterns erroneously. So I don’t treat seeming patterns of unusual events as needing explanation unless I have reliable reason to conclude that they’re actually going on.
Has your mother ever called anyone when she felt they were in trouble, only to find out that they weren’t, in fact, in trouble ? Confirmation bias is pretty strong in most humans.
Wait… she predicted that she would call someone, and then went ahead and called someone ? This doesn’t sound like much of a prediction; I don’t think I’m parsing your sentence correctly.
If your loved one is fighting in WWII, it’s very likely that he or she would die, sadly...
Why did you end up picking “god” over “psionics”, then ?
Not that I remember. My memory could be faulty, but thinking long and hard about it I don’t remember it happening.
She predicted they were in trouble. I think the phrase she used was “I think XXXX is in trouble and needs help.” I could be misremembering though.
It’s a close call honestly, but if god exists, which I believe he does from other evidence listed in this over-sized thread, then adding psionics on top would be added complexity for no gain. If you already know that the earth goes around the sun because of gravity, why bother coming up with an alternate explanation for why Saturn goes around the sun? It might have another reason, but the simplest explanation is more likely to be right.
Oh yeah, that makes more sense than what I was thinking.
Anyway, as the others on this thread have pointed out, there could be many explanations for why you remember events the way you do. Among them, are things like “my mother has supernatural powers”, “a god exists and he is using his powers on my mother”, “aliens exist and are using their power on my mother”, etc. The most probable explanation, though, is “my memory is faulty due to a cognitive bias that is well understood by modern psychologists”.
That said, I must acknowledge that if you have already determined, for some other unrelated reason, that the probability of psionic powers / gods / aliens existing is quite high; then it would be perfectly rational of you to assign a much higher probability to one of these other explanations.
Even if that were true, and not a misremembrance or a post-hoc rationalization, you must take note of the many other people who have those feelings and no one was in trouble. You should expect in advance to hear more anecdotes about the times that someone really was in trouble, than anecdotes about the times they were not, so having heard them is very little evidence.
I did state that she predicted one in advance to me. Also when my mother called me the first thing she asked was “are you alright?”
As far as my mother goes I have never once seen her mistake a prediction. Now 2 predictions (and 2 more that she told me about) sounds small, but consider the amount of times that she didn’t mistakenly call the probability that something is going on is quite high. For example if you have a deck with 996 blue cards in it, and 4 red cards in it, and you call a red card before it flips once, but never call it before a blue card flips, the chances of you succeeding on are… Um… Do you guys want me to do the math? It’s pretty small.
And just because some people think that they can do it and can’t, doesn’t mean that a person can’t do it. Look at all the people who think they are wonderful singers.
Of course I could be misremembering. I could go ask my mother, and my father and see what they say if you like. (Yes I am close to my parents. We have a tight nit family even though I am 24). Of course we could all be misremembering, or lying. Again, you have no way to know, and you really shouldn’t even consider taking my word for this.
Every culture has some different things they believe in, and call supernatural. That doesn’t prove there really is a category of things that actually are supernatural. By analogy, belief by Himalayan people that the Yeti is real is not evidence that Bigfoot (in the northwestern United States) is real. Likewise, a Hindu’s fervent belief is not evidence of the resurrection of Jesus.
In short, the shortfalls in human understanding completely explain why primitive cultures believed “supernatural” was a real and useful label, even though that belief is false.
I’m not sure whether it is the case that primitive cultures have a category of things they think of as “supernatural”—pagan religions were certainly quite literal: they lived on Olympus, they mated with humans, they were birthed. I wonder whether the distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” only comes about when it becomes clear that gods don’t belong in the former category.
I had a paragraph about that, citing Explain/Worship/Ignore, but I decided that it detracted from the point I was trying to make.
If you already think that primitives did not use the label “supernatural,” then you already think there isn’t much evidence of supernatural phenomena—at least compared to the post I was responding to.
I don’t believe you’ve read much of the content on this site. There are a host of human cognitive biases that would lead to belief in the supernatural. Perhaps most notably, we attribute agency to non-agents. It’s easy to see how that would be adaptive in the ancestral environment; just look at the truth table for “That sound was an animal and I believe that sound was an animal” and the outcomes of each possibility.
Not really. There are plenty of plausible explanations for that description that don’t require positing something supernatural.
And now if all you have is one event in your faulty human memory to go on, it counts for practically nothing. Given the low prior for the existence of most particular deities, updating on that piece of evidence should still give you a ridiculously low posterior. “I’m hallucinating” would probably be my winning hypothesis at the time it’s happening, and “I’m misremembering” afterwards.
So what I’m getting from you is that you would ignore your own observations to conform to what others expect? That your belief in a universe without god is so strong that even if I did show you something like this you would refuse to believe it because it didn’t fit with your expectations? Then I fail to see how I could ever convince you.
Addendum: Have group hallucinations been proven or disproven?
Well, mass hysteria is a real thing, but if a large group of people who have no prior reason to cooperate all claim the same unusual observations, it’s certainly much stronger evidence that something unusual was going on than one individual making such claims.
Many, possibly even all religions though, make claims of supernatural events being witnessed by large numbers of people, and religions make enough mutually exclusive claims that they cannot all be true, so we know that claims of large scale supernatural observations are something that must at least sometimes arise in religions that are false.
In terms of the falsifiability of religion, it’s important to remember that we’re essentially working with a stacked deck. In a world with one globally accepted religion, with a god that made frequent physical appearances, answered prayers for unlikely things with sufficient regularity that we had no more need to question whether prayer works than whether cars work, gave verifiable answers to things that humans could not be expected to know without its help, and gave an account of the provenance of the world which was corroborated by the physical record, then obviously the prior for any claims of miraculous events being the result of genuine supernatural intervention would be completely different than in our own.
If a pilgrim child in America in 1623 claimed to have spoken to a person from China when nobody else was around, the adults in their community would probably conclude that they were lying, confused or deluded in some way, unless presented with a huge preponderance of evidence that the child would be highly unlikely to be able to produce, and it’s completely reasonable that they would behave this way, whereas today, an American child claiming to have spoken to a person from China demands a very low burden of evidence.
In a world where the primary evidence offered in favor of religion is subjective experiences which have a pronounced tendency to be at odds with each other (people of different religions have experiences with mutually incompatible implications,) if a person who claims highly compelling religious experiences is unable to persuade other people, it does not indicate a failing in the other people’s rationality.
That may be the case, and I won’t disagree that some claims are fabricated. However for the rest imagine the following: A parent has two children, and he gives a present (say a chocolate that they eat) to each child without the other child knowing. Each child takes this to mean that they are the parents favorite. After all they have proof in the gift. They get into an argument over it. However because their beliefs about why the gifts were given are wrong, the fact that the gifts were given remains.
In the same way it is possible that a supernatural* being is out there, and people are just misinterpreting what the gifts it bestows mean. As far as I can tell it doesn’t mind when someone calls themselves a Christian, and follows the Christian faith, so I identify as Christian.
I would never dream to claim otherwise. I wouldn’t even try to convince people that have not had their own experiences. It would prove that you were rather inferior rationalists if I could. Unless you have proof, you should not believe. I am not here to try to convince anyone otherwise. The only reason that I talk about it is that you seem interested in how I could believe, and I suspect that I can point out why I believe to you in such a way that you will understand.
Why does everyone think that I want to convert them to Christianity? Even the churches I go, though they are not super rationalist agree that such a thing is pointless unless the person has some experience in their life that would lead them to believe. Do you often get Christians here trying to convert you?
*(outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts)
It’s possible, but there is no necessity that any of them be true. If natural human cognitive function can explain claims of religious experiences (both willfully deceptive and otherwise,) in the absence of real supernatural events, then positing real supernatural events creates a large complexity burden (something that needs a lot of evidence to raise to the point where we can consider it probable,) without doing any explanatory work.
Let’s say you have a large number of folk rituals which are used for treating illnesses, which appear to demand supernatural intervention to work. You test a large number of these against placebo rituals, where elements of the rituals are changed in ways that ought to invalidate them according to the traditional beliefs, in ways that the patients won’t notice, and you find that all of the rituals you test perform no better than placebo. However, you can’t test the remaining rituals, because there’s nothing about them you can change that would invalidate them according to traditional beliefs that the patients wouldn’t notice. You could conclude that some of the rituals have real supernatural power, but only the ones you weren’t able to test, but you could explain your observations more simply by concluding that all the rituals worked by placebo.
Occasionally, but not that often. But the fact that members here are trying to change your mind doesn’t necessarily mean they think you’re trying to change theirs. This is a community blog dedicated to refining human rationality. When we have disagreements here, we generally try to hammer them out, as long as it looks like we have a chance of making headway. On this site, we generally don’t operate on a group norm that people shouldn’t confront others’ beliefs without explicit invitation.
But but what if you get inconsistent result? Let’s say you try the ritual 5 times and the placebo 5 times and it works 2 times for the the ritual and twice for the ritual. Furthermore consider that nothing changed in any of these tests that you could measure. You said the ritual was spiritual, and there for asking for divine intervention. It could be that the ritual was unnecessary and that the divine being decides when it intervenes. If you can’t figure out why it sometimes works, or sometimes doesn’t than maybe it’s because you are asking a sentient being to make a choice and you don’t understand their reasoning.
You could say that there was no divine intervention at all, but then you are left trying to come up with more and more complex theories about why it sometimes works and sometimes does not. This might not be a bad thing, but one shouldn’t discount the easy solution just because it doesn’t match their expectations, nor should they stop looking for another solution just because any easy one that is hard to test is present.
Oooh! I like it! Yeah sure, I can get behind that. The reason that i am not trying to convince people here of Christianity is because I don’t have proof that I feel should convince other people. If I did convince anyone here, with the proof that I have, then I would feel that I had made you inferior rationalists. On the other hand I cannot just ignore my own observations and tests and agree with you when I perceive that you are mistaken. I hope that one day I might find some way of proving that god exists to people without needing them to experience something supernatural themselves. But unfortunately as I believe that I am dealing with a sentient intelligence I feel that is unlikely.
Any test with such a small sample size is barely worth the bother of conducting. You’d want to try many times more than that at least before you start to have enough information to draw reliable inferences from, unless the effect size is really large and obvious, say, all five people on the real ritual get better the next day and none of the five on the placebo recover within a week.
People recover from most ailments on their own for perfectly natural reasons. Some people fail to recover from ailments that other people recover from, but it’s not as if this is an incomprehensible phenomenon that flies in the face of our naturalistic models.
If no proposed supernatural intervention changes a person’s likelihood of recovery relative to placebo, then it could be that there’s no way of isolating supernatural intervention between groups, but a much simpler explanation to account for the observations is that no supernatural interventions are actually happening.
People used to see the appearance of supernatural intervention everywhere, but the more we’ve learned about nature, the less room there’s been for supernatural causes to explain anything, and the more they’ve become a burden on any model that contains them. It’s possible that some phenomena which are unexplained today can only be explained in the future with recourse to supernatural causes, but given the past performance of supernatural explanations, and the large amount of informational complexity they entail, this is almost certainly an unwise thing to bet on.
I’m glad you’re comfortable with this sort of environment. If you’re going to make judgments on the basis of your own experience though, it’s good to try to incorporate the evidence of others’ experience as well.
Personally, from around the age of ten to twelve or so, I experimented a lot with the possibility of god(s). I tried to open myself up to communication with higher intelligences, perform experiments with prayer and requests for signs, and so on. I never received anything that could be interpreted as a positive result, even by generous standards. I certainly don’t dismiss other people’s claims of experiences associated with the supernatural, I think for the most part people who report such experiences are telling the truth about their own recollection of such events. Indeed, given what I’ve since learned about the workings of the human brain, it would be surprising to me if people didn’t report supernatural experiences. But given that people reporting supernatural experiences can be accounted for without recourse to actual supernatural events, as a consequence of human psychology, the question I’m inclined to ask is “does the world look more like what I ought to expect if reports of supernatural events are at least partly due to an actual supernatural reality, or like I ought to expect if the supernatural doesn’t really exist?”
There are some things in the world that I can’t explain, which could, theoretically, have supernatural causes. But there are no things in the world I have encountered which I would have firmly predicted in advance to be true if supernatural claims were real, and false if they were not. For instance, if some maladies, such as amputation, only recovered when people called for divine intervention, and never when they did not, I would think that the prospect of an underlying supernatural cause was worth taking very seriously. Or if people all over the world had religious experiences, which all pointed them in the direction of one particular religion, even if they had no cultural exposure to it, that would be indicative of an underlying supernatural cause. But when viewed together, I think that the totality of humans’ religious experiences suggest that what’s going on is a matter of human psychology, not an underlying supernatural reality.
Well, it’s standard in medicine to have large RCTs because of various reasons(*), but I’d hardly say “barely worth the bother of conducting”. Every bit of randomized data gives you evidence about cause and effect that, while sometimes weak, does let you update your posterior (a little or a lot) without worrying about the myriad issues of confounding that plague any observational data. Randomization is very useful even in small doses. [though getting consent of the participants is usually hard, even when the preliminary evidence is still very shaky.]
(*) the reasons include the clear ulterior motives of drug companies, the need to consent individuals to randomization combined with delicate arguments around the ethics of “equipoise”, the difficulties of “meta-analysis”, a long history of frequentist statistics, the standards of journals vs. the possibilities of free and open science (based hypothetically on privacy-secure but comprehensively integrated health records), safety issues, etc… But another large reason is that doctors really really like “certainty” and would rather let “best practice” to tell them what to do rather than collect evidence, condition, and decide what’s best for the patient themselves. [some of this seems to be training, but also that they must defend themselves against malpractice. In the end, maybe this isn’t so bad. Thinking is hard and probably all in all it’s better not to trust them to do it most of the time, so I’m not rallying for change in clinical practice here, except to have as much randomization as possible.]
It’s true that you could get evidence from such an experiment which would allow you to update your posterior (although if you’re using significance testing like most experiments, you’re very unlikely to achieve statistical significance, and your experiment almost certainly won’t get published.) But even if you’re doing it purely for your own evidence, the amount of evidence you’d collect is likely to be so small that it hardly justifies the effort of conducting the experiment.
Positing a divine being is a more complex explanation than any physical explanation I can conceive of. Don’t be fooled by what your brain labels “easy”.
Really? Can you not, by way of conception, take the divine being scenario, hack around with it so that it can no longer be considered a divine being then tack on some arbitrary and silly complexity? (Simulations may be involved, for example.)
Conceiving of complex stuff seems to be a trivial task, so long as the complexity is not required to be at all insightful.
You claim to have evidence that should convince you to be a Christian. We want to know that evidence. The Litany of Tarski applies: if God exists, I wish to believe that God exists. If God does not exist, I wish to believe that God does not exist.
Or I would, if I assigned non-negligible probability to the possibility that (strong forms of) such evidence actually existed—without such expectation it doesn’t feel correct to say that I ‘want it’.
Sure, it’s possible, but lots of things are possible, even if we limit them to the things we humans can imagine. We can imagine quite a lot: Cthulhu, Harry Potter, the Trimurti, Gasaraki, werewolves of all kinds, etc. etc. The better question is: how likely is it that a supernatural being exists ?
I don’t agree that supernatural should be defined as “outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts.”
There are lots of phenomena that science can’t explain, or for which there is no commonly accepted explanation. That’s not particularly interesting. What would be interesting is a phenomena that science admits it will never be able to explain.
I can’t speak for thomblake, but there are experiences that could convince me that there was a powerful entity that intervened on behalf of humanity. They just haven’t happened. And I have reasons to believe that they will never happen, including the fact that they haven’t happened before—absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
A single experience of that kind would be terrible evidence for Christianity, and merely poor evidence for the supernatural. A coherent set of experiences indicative of a consistent, ongoing supernatural world (or specifically a Christian world) would be much more convincing.
I think this is called “behaving rationally”. I understand “rationality” as using reason to my benefit. If there comes a time when it would be beneficial for me to do something, and I arrive at that conclusion through reason, then I’d consider that a triumph of rationality. I think if you are able to anticipate an advantage that could be gained by a behavior then refusing to perform that behavior would be irrational.
You misunderstand me. It isn’t my anecdotal evidence that makes me think the church is horrible. I just pointed out that I had spent a lot of time in churches to show that I have more than the passing familiarity with them that you attributed to me. I think the church is horrible because it threatens children, promotes inaccurate material and takes money from the gullible.
While this is good that your church isn’t abusing more children, it is still terrible to consign “2 or three children” to such mistreatment. Telling children that there is a hell and that they will go to it if they don’t believe in something which is obviously flawed is a terrible thing to do. It is psychological child abuse and I don’t think it says very much in your church’s favor that it only abuses two or three kids.
A child lacks the intellectual maturity to understand or evaluate complex ideas. A child is more trusting than an adult. If your parents tell you something is true, or that you should believe this minister when he talks about heaven, you are more likely to believe it. If your parents came to you now and told you about how they had just found out about Krishna and you should read the Bhagavad Gita you probably wouldn’t be very receptive. And yet, your parents managed to convince you that the Bible was true. Why was that? Was it because through random chance you were born into a family that already believed in the one true religion? Or was it just that you adopted the religion you were exposed to. Because, when you were young your mind wasn’t discriminating enough to realize that, wait a second, this isn’t making sense!
No, but the usefulness of reading is well established. Mathematics is axiomatic. Religion is, as the most polite thing I could say about it, highly suspect. I don’t think its right for adults to have sex with children, because children aren’t mature enough to make informed decisions about consent. Similarly, I don’t think its okay for people to teach religion to children because children aren’t mature enough to make informed decisions about ontology.
I apologize if you have found me disrespectful so far. It isn’t my intention to be disrespectful to you. That said, I have no intention of being respectful to a set of beliefs which I consider first to be wrong and second to be pernicious. If you have an argument which you think is compelling as to the truth of Christianity, please tell me. I promise that if I am swayed by your argument I will begin to show Christianity due deference.
This is a true statement that is designed to protect a child. Saying something like “You’ll writhe in agony for all time if you don’t believe in the truth of this thousands of years old document compiled over hundreds of years by an unknown but large number of authors” isn’t the same kind of statement. Even if you don’t explicitly say that to a child, convincing them to believe in Christianity is implicitly making that statement.
As far as “bad” goes, I don’t have a ready definition. I have to fall back on Justice Potter Stewart “I know it when I see it”. Threatening children and teaching them things that are at best highly suspect as if they were true is bad.
Tithing (giving a tenth) is explicitly recommended in the Bible. If the churches you are going to endorse the Bible then they are at least implicitly asking for 10%.
I don’t think Eliezer has a school for children where he teaches them that unless they grow up to believe in his set of rules that an Unfriendly AI will punish them for all time. I have less against evangelism to adults. If Eliezer asks for money like this, that is fair, because the people he is asking can evaluate whether or not they believe in the cause and donate accordingly. There is nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong with compelling donations through threats of damnation.
Thus my point that sometimes you should not question one of your own beliefs is preserved. You agree that it would be the rational thing to do in some situations.
If you can’t explain what bad is, then I am unable to discuss this with you. You might have a good definition, or you might be just saying that whatever makes you mad is automatically bad. I can’t know, so I can’t form any arguments about it.
Bad is causing harm to people who don’t deserve it. Convincing someone in the existence of hell is harmful—you are theatening them with the worst thing possible, convincing someone of a lie to compel them to serve the chruch through donations of time or money is harmful, convincing someone that they are innately sinful is harmful psychologically, convincing someone that morality is tied to religious institution is harmful. Children are least deserving of harm and so harming them is bad.
In the long run, and on average, yes. There are several courses of action open to me, such as “give up”, “keep walking”, “attempt to make a tourniquet”, etc. Once I know the rate of the blood loss, I can determine which of these actions is most likely to be optimal. You say that “you suspect that you aren’t going to make it”, but I can’t make an informed decision—f.ex., whether to spend valuable time on making this tourniquet, or to instead invest this time into walking—based on suspicion alone.
I sympathize somewhat with your argument as it applies to religion, but this example you brought up is not analogous.
Perhaps not “in advance”, but there are many beliefs that can be tested (though not all beliefs can be). To use a trivial example, believing that a lost Nigerian prince can transfer a million dollars to your bank account in exchange for a small fee might make you happy. However, should you act on this belief, you would very likely end up a lot less happy. Testing the belief will allow you to make an informed decision, and thus end up happier in the long run.
This is an off-topic nitpick, but the sun is incredibly unlikely to go nova; it will die in a different way.
[Note: Skip stuff in brackets if religious talk annoys or offends you]
(Why does everyone assume that this has to do with religion? If I was asking this about religion wouldn’t that already signify that I didn’t believe, I just wanted to? My belief comes from actual events that I have witnessed, and tested, and been unable to falsify. )
The example with the bleeding out was sort of a personal one because it happened to me. I cut my foot with an axe. I was far from help, and a helicopter wouldn’t pick me up for another 4 hours. If I had been off to the side by 3 mm I would have hit an artery and bled out, and nothing was going to stop it. I did tie it off, raise it up, and stop moving, but it was down to chance. At the time I believed I was going to die and it quite distressed me. If I was to be in the same situation again, lying on the ground, foot supported and tied off, even if I was going to die I would rather not know and believe I was going to make it. That might make me a sub-optimal rationalist, but at that point as there was nothing more to do it would have made me a happier person. (Gasp! Yes, a religious person said they didn’t want to die. It might sound like a logical fallacy, but it was in fact (if I recall correctly, it was sort of a traumatic experience) empathy for my father and mother, who I had just seen about half an hour before I cut my foot.)
(I will further note that either I was lied to a lot, or that there were several inconsistencies with the entire event. I was told that I should have been unconscious with the amount of blood I lost 6 hours later when I made it in to the hospital. I had of course been doing such activities such as hopping around on my one foot to go places, and didn’t feel in the slightest bit woozy. Nor did I have any symptoms of shock when it happened. Finally I never felt any pain from the wound, though this last I suspect was because I severed the nerve endings. Yet doing that in such a way that I never felt pain seems unlikely to me using something as unwieldy as an axe, and I have not come across similar stories. How does one interpret events? That the doctors lied to me or were mistaken? It’s possible. That a lot of things went just right? The likely hood of that happening falls well within the realm of the possible as well. On the other and there is another explication that does not require lies, mistakes or luck to be involved. I feel that how you see it strongly depends on your bias.(And then there is the possibility that I am lying. I know I’m not, but over the internet I’d be hard pressed to prove it))
As for the Nigerian prince example, I am specifically talking about situations where there is no long run, and you are not affecting other people with your decisions. I agree that in most cases trying to know the truth is better than not knowing it.
The sun going nova was just an example. Big asteroid hitting earth, thermal nuclear war, there are all sorts of stuff that falls into the category of things I can’t do anything about that will end my life.
I personally operate by Crocker’s Rules, but others may not be, so I appreciate the warning nonetheless.
It’s probably because you said you identify as a Christian, and Christians tend to advance this sort of argument more often than non-theists, regarding Christianity specifically. That said, your argument is general enough to apply to non-religious topics, as well.
At this point, I should mention that I didn’t mean to bring up your personal traumatic experience, and I apologize. If you think that discussing it would be too distressing, please stop reading beyound this point.
If you truly believed you were about to die no matter what, why would you waste time on tying off your foot ? It sounds to me like you weighed the chances of you dying, and made a decision to spend some time on tying off the foot, instead of spending it in contemplation or something similar.
What is it ?
Can you describe some examples ? Your own experience with the bleeding foot is not one of them, because your death would’ve negatively affected quite a few people (including yourself).
Understood. However, if everyone thought like you do, no one would be tracking near-Earth asteroids right now. Some people are doing just that, though, in the expectation that if a dangerous asteroid were to be detected, we’d have enough time to find a solution that does not involve all of us dying.
That tends so show that they don’t actually believe in Christianity. Rather they want to believe. I feel sorry for those people. Of course as I tend to sit on the other side of the fence I try to help them believe, but belief is a hard thing to cultivate and an easy thing to destroy. If you were in a group and you were shown a box with 5 dice in it for a brief moment, but later everyone agreed that there were only 4 dice, most people would start to doubt their memories. I know that I would. If the people were very smart and showed the box again, and this time it only had 4 dice in it many people would be very hard pressed not to doubt their memories and be convinced they remembered wrong. They might want to believe that they were right about 5 dice, but they would have a hard time believing it. They would want to believe in the truth, but wouldn’t.
Of course that is coming at it from a strictly religious point of view. Atheist would use the same argument in the exact opposite fashion with the proof of no god being the 5 dice and the religious people around them saying that there were 4.
Because I wasn’t thinking about if I would live or die, I was thinking that to live I needed to do this. It was only after I had done everything that I could that I stopped and considered my chances and figured that I was probably going to die. Even so though I believe that it is my biological duty to do everything possible to survive no matter how hopeless the situation.
Honestly from this side of it, I don’t really have any post traumatic stress. I remember how I felt at the time, but the memories have no sting to them. Don’t worry about it. Generally I’m able to discuss anything that I bring up.
I could argue that if that hadn’t have saved my life (that I was going to die no matter what), than at that point my actions and thoughts would have very little meaning. I suppose honestly I could have written a note to my parents, but at the time I didn’t think of it. Other than that I could have believed, or done anything I wanted and not have really effected the outcome.
However the examples I was thinking of were extinction level events.
Fair point. And I hope that our leaders are wise enough to know that blowing up the world would be a bad idea. However if there was an asteroid going to hit tomorrow, I am not sure what help I could offer humanity even if I did know. Wouldn’t it just cause me pointless suffering? If no one else knew I could tell them about it, but after that I couldn’t really do anything about it. And I don’t know anything about this, but is there anything out there that shows that some people enjoy worrying? They would be perfect to do that sort of thing. I personally am happier not worrying about things I can’t change.
This is a pretty standard example of reasoning under uncertainty. You have two possible events, “there were 5 dice” vs. “there were 4 dice”. You want to assign a probability to each event, because, not being omniscient, you don’t know how many dice there actually were. You have several percepts, meaning pieces of evidence: your memories and the claims of the other people. Each of these percepts has some probability of being true: your memories are not infallible, the other people could be wrong or lying, etc. You could run all these numbers through Bayes’ Rule, and determine which of the events (“5 dice” vs. “4 dice”) is more likely to be true.
It also helps to know that all humans have a bias when it comes to peer pressure; our memories become especially faulty when we perceive a strong group consensus that contradicts them. Knowing this can help you calibrate your probabilities.
Anyways, you say that “belief is a hard thing to cultivate”, but in your dice scenario, there’s no need to cultivate anything, because you don’t care about beliefs, you care about how many dice there were; i.e., you care specifically about the truth.
I am not sure what “biological duty” means, but still, it sounds like you do care whether you live or die; i.e., you want to live. This is a goal, and you can take actions in order to further this goal, and you want to make sure your actions are as optimal as possible, right ?
It depends on what you mean by “simple”; according to Ockham’s Razor, “God did it” is a vastly less simple explanation than most others, due to the number of implicit assumptions you will end up making. That said, it sounds like you have several possible events (“God did it”, “aliens did it”, “I got lucky”, etc.), and several pieces of evidence; so this scenario is similar to your example with the dice. If you cared about the truth, you could assign a probability to each event based on the evidence. Of course, you don’t have to care about the truth in this case; but if you did, there are ways you could approach it.
It’s possible that tying that tourniquet did save your life, so there’s at least one thing you did do which likely affected the outcome.
I think I see where you’re coming from: there’s no point in spending a lot of effort on worrying about low-probability events which you’d be powerless to affect even if they did happen. As you said, the Sun could die tomorrow, but I can safely ignore this fact. However, I think you’re making an unwarranted leap of faith when you precommit to never worrying about such events, regardless of circumstances.
For example, there’s nothing you could do about that asteroid today, and in fact it’s very likely not even coming. But if we knew that the asteroid was, indeed, heading for Earth, there could be lots of things you could do—you could donate money to the anti-asteroid fund, volunteer at the anti-asteroid missile factory, etc. If you had more information about the asteroid, you could re-evaluate your decisions, and determine the best course of action; but you can’t do that if you have committed yourself to not doing anything regardless of circumstances. You also can’t do that if you have no access to that information in the first place, which is why caring about the truth is sometimes important.
Just a minor update. This thread has grown to big for me to follow easily. I am ready every post in it, but real life is taking up a lot of my time right now so I will be very slow to reply. I found the limit of multiple conversations I can hold at one time before I get a headache, and it appears to be less than I suspected.
Once again, sorry, didn’t mean to drop out, but I stayed up way to late and even now I am recovering from sleep deprivation and still have an annoying headache. My body seems to want to wake up 2 hours before it should. I’ll be back once I get my sleeping back to normal, and get some more time. Even then though I am going to try to limit myself to only a couple posts a day because while I enjoy discussions, it’s very easy for me to forget everything else when I get drawn into them.
I’ll be back later. JAKInBAndW
Don’t sweat it, I don’t think anyone here expects you to answer all posts in an extremely rapid fashion. Ok, maybe some do, but you don’t owe those people anything, anyway. This is a discussion site, not a job :-)
Welcome.
Getting beaten up as a child sucks. Hope your life is a whole lot better now.
A somewhat related personal story: I was a Christian. I was plagued by doubts, and decided that I wanted to know what the truth was, even if it was something I didn’t want to believe. I knew that I wanted Christianity to be true, but I didn’t want to just believe for the sake of it.
So I started doing more serious reading. Not rationalist writings, but a thoughtful theologian and historian, NT Wright, who I’ve also seen appear on documentaries about New Testament history. I read the first two in what he was planning as an epic 5 part series: “The New Testament and the People of God” and “Jesus and the Victory of God”.
I loved the way he explained history, and how to think about history (i.e. historiography). Also language, and ideas about the universe. He wrote very well, and warmly—you got the sense that this was a real human being, but he lacked the hubris that I’d often found in religious writers, and he seemed more interested in seeking truth than in claiming that he had it. He was the most rationalist of Christian writers that I came across.
In the end, the essence of his argument seemed to be that there is a way of understanding the Bible that could tell us something about God—if we believe in a personal god who is involved in the universe… and that if we believe in that kind of god, described in the Old Testament, then the idea of taking human form, and becoming the embodiment of everything that Israel was meant to be, does make sense. (He went into much, much more depth here about , and I can’t do him justice at all, 15 years after I read it.) He didn’t push the reader to believe—he just stated that it was something that made sense to him, and he did believe it.
He painted a picture and told a story which I found very appealing, to be honest. But in the end it didn’t fit with how I understood the universe, based on the more solid ground of science.
I finally accepted that—my increasingly shaky belief was destroyed. It was hard, and I was upset—I’d been finding life hard, personally, and my beliefs were the framework that I’d used to attempt to make sense of things, such as an unhappy childhood and the death of both parents as a young adult. But I also felt freed, and after a couple of weeks, it didn’t seem so bad. Years later, I’m much happier, and couldn’t imagine myself as a Christian.
That’s where I see the value personally in destroying false beliefs—I was freed to live without the restrictions imposed by a false belief system. The restrictions, in many cases, didn’t have any sound basis outside the belief system, and I was better without them. There were positive aspects of Christianity, but I didn’t need the beliefs to hold onto what I’d learnt about being compassionate and understanding, or about the value of community.
I felt that NT Wright told an honest, complex and interesting story, but in terms the reality (or non-reality) of a god, he made an intuitive judgement which I don’t see as sound (and which was different from my own intuition). But he helped me think things through at a time when I wasn’t getting satisfactory answers from other Christians, and I really enjoyed his writing. I might even go back and read him some day.
That’s wide of the topic, I know, but it’s kind of relevant, and a welcome thread seems like a good place to go on tangents :-).