Theology was just an example, but a relevant one: in a forum devoted to the improvement of rationality, discussing about some flavor of thoughts that have by long being proved irrational should amount to trolling. I’m not talking trying to justify rationally theism, that had and might still have a place here, but discussing theology as if theism was true shouldn’t be allowed. On the other hand, you cannot explicitly ban everything that is off-topic, so that isn’t written anywhere shouldn’t be a proof against.
On the other hand, you cannot explicitly ban everything that is off-topic, so that isn’t written anywhere shouldn’t be a proof against.
LW never used to have an explicit or implicit ban against being off-topic. Off-topic posts used to get downvoted and not banned.
We delete spam, we delete advocacy of illegal violence and the Basilisk got deleted under the idea that it’s a harmful idea.
An off-topic post about theism would be noise and not harmful, so it’s not worth banning under our philosophy for banning posts.
In addition, I don’t think that it’s even true that a post about theology has to be off-topic. It’s quite common on LW that people use replacement Gods like Omega for exploring thought experiments. Those discussions do pretend that “Omega existence is true” and that doesn’t make them problematic in any way.
Taking a more traditional God instead of Omega wouldn’t be a problem.
It’s also even clear that theism has been proved irrational. In the census a significant portion allocates more than 0 percent to it being true.
I think at the first Double Crux we did at LW Berlin someone updated in the direction of theism. A CFAR person did move to theism after an elaborate experiment of the Reverse Turing test.
LW likely wouldn’t have existed if it wouldn’t be for the philanthropic efforts of a certain Evangelical Christian.
David Chapman made in his posts about post-rationality the point that his investigation of religious ideas like Tantra allowed him to make advances in AI while at MIT that he likely otherwise wouldn’t have made.
Theology was just an example, but a relevant one: in a forum devoted to the improvement of rationality, discussing about some flavor of thoughts that have by long being proved irrational should amount to trolling. I’m not talking trying to justify rationally theism, that had and might still have a place here, but discussing theology as if theism was true shouldn’t be allowed.
On the other hand, you cannot explicitly ban everything that is off-topic, so that isn’t written anywhere shouldn’t be a proof against.
LW never used to have an explicit or implicit ban against being off-topic. Off-topic posts used to get downvoted and not banned.
We delete spam, we delete advocacy of illegal violence and the Basilisk got deleted under the idea that it’s a harmful idea.
An off-topic post about theism would be noise and not harmful, so it’s not worth banning under our philosophy for banning posts.
In addition, I don’t think that it’s even true that a post about theology has to be off-topic. It’s quite common on LW that people use replacement Gods like Omega for exploring thought experiments. Those discussions do pretend that “Omega existence is true” and that doesn’t make them problematic in any way. Taking a more traditional God instead of Omega wouldn’t be a problem.
It’s also even clear that theism has been proved irrational. In the census a significant portion allocates more than 0 percent to it being true. I think at the first Double Crux we did at LW Berlin someone updated in the direction of theism. A CFAR person did move to theism after an elaborate experiment of the Reverse Turing test. LW likely wouldn’t have existed if it wouldn’t be for the philanthropic efforts of a certain Evangelical Christian.
David Chapman made in his posts about post-rationality the point that his investigation of religious ideas like Tantra allowed him to make advances in AI while at MIT that he likely otherwise wouldn’t have made.