Jay, I can certainly empathize with your concern for your friend. However, as a practicing Catholic I can assure you that your friend will not be surrounded by people trying to convince her that she needs to “repent” of her sexuality. There’s less that I can say about dark side epistemology (since you would probably consider me to be an adherent of it!) but I can assure you that Leah is not going to have piles of nonsensical doctrine shoved down her throat. She will be introduced to many ideas, but ultimately she herself will decide what to accept and what to reject (and I highly doubt that she will accept absolutely everything that the Church teaches—many Catholics don’t).
I must confess that, as an outsider to (but occasional reader of) Less Wrong, I find certain statements and arguments on this site to be just as totalizing and dogmatic as the most dangerous religious fundamentalism. There’s also a fair amount that I find personally offensive to my value system. However, whenever I find myself going into a nasty tirade against LW, my atheist rationalist friend (who introduced me to this site in the first place) urges me to remember that not all Less Wrongers are the same. Opinions about things like the Singularity vary greatly, as do values. And, there are even some theists on this site.
I can tell you that the same is true about Catholicism. It’s a very large organization with many people who interpret their religion in many different ways. Yes, there are many things wrong with the Church as an institution, but people know this and some are trying to reform these flaws (indeed, if Leah does convert, she will be a great one to do this). As for the epistemological side...I don’t think that Leah is going to reject scientific truths, if that is what worries you. She might just come to view them in a somewhat different way.
Having read Leah’s blog for a while, I know that she will respond very well to any challenge/debate you put forward. However, I would advise against trying to thwart her conversion. Ultimately, she has to make her own decisions. As others have said, listen to her and try your to understand the reasons for her conversion. Also, if you haven’t already, get to know a few Catholics. We could be wrong, but that doesn’t make us bad people.
I must confess that, as an outsider to (but occasional reader of) Less Wrong, I find certain statements and arguments on this site to be just as totalizing and dogmatic as the most dangerous religious fundamentalism.
That seems like a surprising claim! I’d like to explore it further.
The most dangerous religious fundamentalisms lead people to do things such as blowing up buildings, committing mass murders, jailing and torturing people for apostasy, and throwing acid in the faces of schoolchildren. This occurs both when dangerous religious fundamentalists occupy positions of formal political power (governments), and when they do not (terrorist groups, militias, abortion-clinic bombers).
(Note, I’m not asserting that religions or fundamentalisms in general promote those sorts of things. You specifically said “the most dangerous religious fundamentalism”, and I’m taking that limitation in good faith.)
Somehow, nobody around here seems to be doing those sort of things. Indeed, that sort of behavior seems to be pretty rare in the Traditional Rationality community too — the skeptics movement; the New Atheists; etc.
Is that just because we are totalizing and dogmatic about making people happy instead of about hating and killing them? (I am reminded of a Barry Goldwater quote about extremism and moderation.)
The most dangerous religious fundamentalisms lead people to do things such as blowing up buildings, committing mass murders, jailing and torturing people for apostasy, and throwing acid in the faces of schoolchildren. This occurs both when dangerous religious fundamentalists occupy positions of formal political power (governments), and when they do not (terrorist groups, militias, abortion-clinic bombers).
Well, LW has only been around for a couple years, give it time. I’ve definitely seen ideas here that, if taken to their logical conclusion, would imply that under the right circumstances one has a moral imperative to do comparable things. There is also a norm against flinching from taking things to their logical conclusions.
Indeed, that sort of behavior seems to be pretty rare in the Traditional Rationality community too — the skeptics movement; the New Atheists; etc.
Notice how you need to add the qualifier “New” to “Atheist movement” there in order to exclude all theatrocities committed by the old atheists.
Notice how you need to add the qualifier “New” to “Atheist movement” there in order to exclude all the atrocities committed by the old atheists.
Although linking the atrocities of 20th-century Communism to atheism seems to be a favorite trope of contemporary reaction, I’m confused as to why you chose to bring it up in the context of traditional rationality. Marxism might claim an empirical basis, but it’s quite hostile to skepticism, and neither its atheism nor its claimed empiricism seem foundational to its social aims. Likewise, Dawkins et al. don’t inherit from any of the major philosophers in the socialist family tree that I know of; they’re both products of the Enlightenment, but they took quite different paths on their way here.
Moreover, the broader socialist movement isn’t at all incompatible with religion: consider liberation theology.
Marxism might claim an empirical basis, but it’s quite hostile to skepticism
I’ve read Marxist stuff (the old man himself, Gramsci, Adorno, Zizek, my boyfriend’s incomprehensible paper on Lacan...) and the LAST thing I’d describe (non-USSR-sponsored) Marxist thought as is “hostile to skepticism”. It looks hyper-skeptical to me! At least when describing everything outside of a communist utopia that might or might not be envisioned in their writing. When observing contemporary social phenomena—from family life to academia—they’ve historically been rather cynical and tried to look for base motives of power, dominiance and greed affecting them.
Did you know that Gramsci, a Marxist through and through (although a liberal and idealist one), developed the highly LW-relevant concept of cultural hegemony? [1]
(I disagree with those dudes on quite a few issues, it’s just that strawmanning them as blindly orthodox fanatics is unfair.)
[1] “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.”—Philip K. Dick
It looks hyper-skeptical to me! At least when describing everything outside of a communist utopia
I guess the Pope is also skeptical about Buddhist reincarnation.
When observing contemporary social phenomena—from family life to academia—they’ve historically been rather cynical and tried to look for base motives of power, dominiance and greed affecting them.
If one believes that “everything is a class fight” (I know this is oversimplification), then finding elements of class fight in everything is not an evidence for their skepticism.
Shortly, skepticism does not mean “a belief that your opponents are wrong”.
Speaking of which, communists were also extreme utilitarians. The problem with utilitarians, really, is that self described utilitarians are not the people who calculate utilities so much better than everyone else. It is the people who think they calculate utilities so much better than anyone else. Throw Dunning-Kruger into the mix, and people who actually have troubles evaluating utility are utilitarians, whereas those who can evaluate utility also process uncertainty and tend to act in more deontological manner due to incorporating empirical knowledge on outcome of strategies, or due to concern for societal values like trust etc. I blogged some about that
Exactly. For a sociopath it is very useful to (pretend to?) be utilitarian—one good rationalization, and anything becomes morally OK.
First, let’s kill all our enemies, or more precisely anyone who refuses to obey us. Then, we will build a paradise with infinite utility, because there will be no one to stop us. Net result: huge positive utility. From utilitarian viewpoint, we are the good guys, which means that anyone who opposes us deserves to be killed.
Add some technical details, and you have communism; add different details and you have something else. Focus the attention of people to those technical details to avoid the outside view comparison.
Exactly. For a sociopath it is very useful to (pretend to?) be utilitarian—one good rationalization, and anything becomes morally OK.
Well I think it is fairly complicated. It may be that the lack of understanding of what it takes to think straight leads to sociopathy in some instances (I see sociopathy as a symptom of a multitude of abnormalities).
I wrote another blog post on that: http://dmytry.com/blog/?p=268 . What I think happens, is that people with strongly deficient utility evaluation—people who do not even see what it takes to evaluate utility, people who will evaluate utility on any partial outcome that popped up in their mind, or was even suggested from outside (without even any explicit assertion that it is complete!) - tend to end up self describing as utilitarian, and in some sense, actually believing that they are, and that they are highly moral (and everyone else is flawed).
Other issue, is that historically it is not in the slightest bit positive when someone pushing a bad idea is not simply being selfish. In practice, to do the most evil, selfishness does not suffice. It takes certain degree of selflessness in the name of a bad idea and sloppy thought. It takes narcissist love with intellectual self. A particular form of incompetence is far superior to malice when it comes to actually doing large scale evil.
Long ago (I don’t remember the source) I read an interesting thought: that people who speak about great ideas or strong emotions are probably intelectually and emotionally pretty weak, and when they get any result in such area, they are overwhelmed by the contrast. (It’s like Dunning-Kruger on steroids.)
For example a smart person will have dozen smart ideas every day, so “having a smart idea” is no big deal for them, it’s life as usual. Even if they find something extraordinarily interesting, they have a large reference class, so instead of greatness of the idea, they will speak about specific details that make this idea interesting.
On the other hand, when a rather dumb person hears a non-trivial idea and understands it, it is a shocking experience, a unique uncomparable thing. So the person will treat it as the greatest idea ever, the dividing line between stupid and smart, and will be obsessed about it.
Analogically, if a person with supressed emotions or mostly negative emotions suddenly falls in love, they will perceive their emotion as overwhelming, unique in the whole universe, unrepeatable. A person with a larger emotional scale would see the same emotion as a point in a continuum, so there is e.g. smaller chance they would do something stupid if their love is not reciprocated. The former person would (by a mind projection fallacy) think that the latter person’s feelings are much smaller, because the reactions are less dramatic.
So maybe the same effect is at play here—people who never thought too much about morality suddenly understand some moral rule, and (their interpretation of) it immediately becomes the moral rule, the dividing line between immoral and moral. (And if the rule is not based on emotions or traditions, it is convenient to label it as “utilitarian”.)
That’s an interesting thought. On the ideas, the other issue is that e.g. with certain fairly advanced mathematics, fuzzy and inaccurate understanding may easily be more amazing than any coherent understanding can ever be; the condition that is normally quite short lived if one has sufficiently thorough understanding of base level concepts and can study the idea formally, but this condition can be perpetual otherwise. Same can happen with morality.
First, let’s kill all our enemies, or more precisely anyone who refuses to obey us.
...add some technical details, and you have communism
U mindkilled, bro. Yes, that was what the people who called themselves “communists” did in the 20th century. But name any other system, no matter which one, that wouldn’t kill everyone who refuses to obey it in certain matters.
E.g. fleeing from a battlefield; every nation that grok’d total war gave its court-martials the powers of swift summary execution in the 20th century. It’s what the “communists” were trying to regulate, and from what perspective, and how much, and what processes this led to—that’s what you have a problem with, not with the fact of enforcement itself.
Everyone has to resort to murder sooner or later, it’s the actual internal details of the system (like the type and amount of murder, and what incentives the “undesirables” have to surrender and avoid it, if any) that make the difference.
You have a good point. But there is a difference between people who see killing others as a regrettable last choice (e.g. in self-defence), and those who see killing others as “no big deal” (sociopaths, and their happy-death-spiralled followers). Although there probably is a continuum.
EDIT: The difference is that a non-sociopathic utilitarian considers a possibility of running on a corrupted hardware, if they are a rationalist, or simply deflect the thought by an “ugh field” if they aren’t.
When observing contemporary social phenomena—from family life to academia—they’ve historically been rather cynical and tried to look for base motives of power, dominiance and greed affecting them.
This is getting a little too politically charged for my liking, but cynicism does not imply skepticism, at least in the sense I intended. Now, Marxism is built on a set of social theories expressed largely in terms of self-interest or group self-interest, and Marxist scholars have gotten fairly inventive within that framework. The ideology wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful as it has been if it wasn’t credible as social criticism, or if it didn’t speak to people skeptical of the status quo. So it does speak the language to some degree, and I probably should have been more accommodating of that in the grandparent.
But for me to call it open to skepticism, I’d have to see evidence that Marxist thinkers engaged in good-faith questioning of the theory’s own social and economic assumptions or at least engaged with skeptics on even ground, and of that I’ve seen very little. In fact, most strains of Marxism seem to actively discourage these lines of thinking—a tendency predictably most pronounced in Marxist political regimes, but which goes all the way back to Marx and Engels’ writings on ideology. False consciousness and related concepts offer a fully general alternative.
This is all true, but we’re comparing the rationality record between various creeds and not imagining how well one such creed would do in a vacuum.
E.g. something a bit like that description of “false consciousness” clearly does happen, not as to provide a convenient reason why capitalism must be the unseen Ultimate Evil, just as a matter of human nature—something psychosocial and fairly disturbing, else we why would see e.g. realistic/cynical poor workers voting against progressive tax. (I’m not arguing its virtues here, just pointing out that it’s obviously a big mid-term gain for lower class people who realistically expect little relative social mobility for their family.)
In Marxist theory, false consciousness is essentially a result of ideological control which the proletariat either do not know they are under or which they disregard with a view to their own POUM (probability/possibility of upward mobility). POUM or something like it is required in economics with its presumption of rational agency; otherwise wage laborers would be the conscious supporters of social relations antithetical to their own interests, violating that presumption.
=
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”—John Steinbeck
And yet ideologies saying e.g. that people in “nice” countries act in “enlightened self-interest”, and are generally special snowflakes that shouldn’t be stirred in their beautiful arrangements, are respected and highly popular. Clearly a dose of Marxist cynicism could serve as a good counterweight to such happy individualist fantasies. People—most of all people who want to be “normal”—are fucking delusional as to their immediate or long-term personal interest, that’s what Marxism is saying. Hell, that was what George Carlin often said too. (I don’t agree that a Marxist dictatorship should decide everyone’s best interest, I’m not a strawman commie.)
This is all true, but we’re comparing the rationality record between various creeds and not imagining how well one such creed would do in a vacuum.
Frankly, I’d rather not compare the rationality record between various unspecified creeds, at least here; that sort of thing has a way of taking over threads, and in its general form seems almost completely orthogonal to Catholic deconversion or anything related to it. This business about skepticism came up in the context of Marx’s proximity to traditional rationality of the Dawkins/Randi school, particularly in terms of approach to atheism, and that’s where I’d like to keep it.
Dawkins et al. seem to be skeptical in methodology: presented with a set of supernaturalist beliefs, their normal procedure is to look at the claimed evidence for them, look for replications or attempt to perform a replication if it’s convenient, and proceed to deprecate the beliefs in question when they predictably fail. They do tend to be fairly apolitical (Penn and Teller notwithstanding), and I’m not even sure what a proper extrapolation of this methodology to the social realm would look like, but I am pretty sure it wouldn’t start with a future history (sketchy though Marx’s is) or a complete theory of class interaction. And I’m also pretty sure most Marxists wouldn’t appreciate a Randi-style analysis of their own foundational beliefs.
I wouldn’t say you’re wrong, but as I haven’t seen anyone in this thread encouraging the lady in the OP to reject her conversion on transhumanist grounds, I’m again not sure why you’re bringing it up.
Well, Hitchens always considered himself a socialist.
(BTW, many socialists would deny him the honor. Me, I think his reputation was certainly quite spotty from any ideological view—not that I hate him or anything.)
The most dangerous religious fundamentalisms lead people to do things such as blowing up buildings, committing mass murders, jailing and torturing people for apostasy, and throwing acid in the faces of schoolchildren. This occurs both when dangerous religious fundamentalists occupy positions of formal political power (governments), and when they do not (terrorist groups, militias, abortion-clinic bombers).
Arguably, these kinds of acts follow a normal distribution (where acts of extreme altruism are on the opposite tail), so if Less Wrong had much larger numbers we should expect to observe these kind of things. Do you really think if Less Wrong had over 1 billion members (like Catholic Church) we wouldn’t have members that commit violent acts (such as assassinating AI researchers not using FAI safeguards)? If anything, I would expect there to be greater variance of good and bad acts among Less Wrongers since they are explicitly trained not to compartmentalize.
Do very many Catholics assassinate government-funded mass murdering genocidaires? I refer of course to abortion clinics.
No, not really. According to Le Wik, only 8 people (less than 1 every 2 years) in the US have been killed as the result of “anti-abortion violence” since 1993. Two of the actual killings were attributed to Catholics (although another did try to ram an abortion clinic with his vehicle which resulted in no injuries but did cause some property damage).
In any case, it seems clear that “anti-abortion violence” occurs with much greater frequency in fiction than in reality. But then again, this shouldn’t surprise us given the predominance of the Hollywood Atheist and Straw-Vulcan archetypes.
EDIT: I made a factual correction and added context.
No; I made a mistake. Eric Robert Rudolph and James Charles Kopp (who, interestingly, had a masters degree in embryology, so was something of a “domain expert”) were self-identified Roman Catholics. Also, it is tricky determining who is or is not of a particular denomination. For instance, Paul Jennings Hill was excommunicated before commiting murder. Should that count in favor of or against the church that excommunicated him (in this case, Presbyterianism)? I’m not sure.
Should that count in favor of or against the church that excommunicated him (in this case, Presbyterianism)?
Of course in favor.
Assuming conservation of evidence, if there exists an action that would count against them (such as declaring him a saint), there must also exist an action that would count in favor of them. So what exactly were they supposed to do—burn him at a stake?
EDIT: Oops, now I see that the question can refer to the whole “former membership + excommunication” package, not just the “excommunication” part. Still, unless other churches had excommunicated such people (before the murder, or at least after), the fact that this one did is an evidence in favor or hypothesis that they disagree with such acts.
I think a good explanation for saying things like “just as totalizing and dogmatic” is that the question is getting substituted, in the regular sort of way.
That is, when we talk about how of course we should discourage people from being catholics, this sort of assumption that part of dymphna’s identity is bad makes them feel attacked, and feel bad about the attack on their group. And because dymphna is a smart person, they use ideas like “just as totalizing and dogmatic” to communicate the badness they perceive.
And yes, I’m not being charitable at all.
TO HATERS: Oh? You think you’d do better than dymphna in a similar situation? Heck, I know I don’t a lot of the time.
“The most dangerous religious fundamentalisms lead people to do things such as blowing up buildings, committing mass murders, jailing and torturing people for apostasy, and throwing acid in the faces of schoolchildren. This occurs both when dangerous religious fundamentalists occupy positions of formal political power (governments), and when they do not (terrorist groups, militias, abortion-clinic bombers).”
Point taken. The phrase “most dangerous” iis hyperbolic. No, so far I don’t see any Less Wrongers blowing up buildings or committing mass murders. But, what is it that drives people to do such things? Is it as simple as, “God told me to do this?” I don’t think it’s usually that simple. I’m not sure what drives it, but I think that part of it is a basic human tendency to divide people up into groups of “we” and “they.” Most of us construct this kind of division to some degree, whether we realize it or not, but fundamentalists take it to the extreme. On LW I encounter this division quite often (sometimes in the tone of posts more than the content). I probably notice it so strongly because, as Manfred comments, I feel myself to be among the “them,” (and my natural reaction is to make the same sort of division in my own mind. While this division is nowhere near the extreme in the rationalist communities, I can definitely imagine it becoming so, particularly if technology advances in the ways that many Less Wrongers predict it will.
Some Less Wrongers appear to express the viewpoint that the world would be a better and happier place if all of us were to become rationalists, and I think that this is the attitude that I had in mind when I let the phrase “most dangerous fundamentalists” slip out. Medieval Catholics (and some contemporary ones) wanted to make the whole world Catholic. Stalinists wanted to make the whole world Stalinist. In either case, I think the world would have turned out a much worse place had either one succeeded. To you, rationalism, empiricism and positivism might seem to exist in a different category, but to me any ideology or thought system that gets universalized will probably turn into More’s Utopia or Plato’s Republic. And, while interesting for a while, such places hardly seem very habitable in the long term.
“Is it that just because we are totalizing and dogmatic about making people happy instead of about hating and killing them? (I am reminded of a Barry Goldwater quote about extremism and moderation.)”
I’d be interested in seeing that Goldwater quote. But, if Less Wrongers are totalizing and dogmatic about making people happy, then why on earth would you want to deconvert people from religion? Religious beliefs, practices, rituals, spiritualities, aesthetics, values, and communities bring vast amounts of happiness to people all over the world, every day. No, it’s not for everyone, but why try and take it away from the people who find so much happiness in it?
(A meta remark: The usual way to quote another person’s post here is to
prefix lines with the > character, not to use quotation marks.)
Point taken. The phrase “most dangerous” iis hyperbolic. No, so far I don’t see any Less Wrongers blowing up buildings or committing mass murders.
Of which I am very glad.
But, what is it that drives people to do such things? Is it as simple as, “God told me to do this?” I don’t think it’s usually that simple. I’m not sure what drives it, but I think that part of it is a basic human tendency to divide people up into groups of “we” and “they.”
Tribalism is powerful and problematic indeed. But I’m not convinced
that tribalism alone is sufficient to create eliminationism — here
borrowing Daniel Goldhagen’s term for the belief that it is morally
right and necessary to exterminate the Other. There are lots of places
in the world where distinct tribes coexist, maintaining us/them
distinctions, without massacring each other constantly.
So there must be something else involved.
Most of us construct this kind of division to some degree, whether we realize it or not, but fundamentalists take it to the extreme.
It isn’t really clear to me that all the things that we might label
“fundamentalism” are really the same social phenomena. Sociologically,
there may be different things going on in Fundamentalist Protestantism
(the trope namer); in theocratic regimes such as Iranian Shia or Saudi
Wahhabism; in medieval Catholicism in its persecution of the Cathars,
Albigensians, and conversos — and for that matter in the Stalinist
purges or other “secular” “fundamentalisms”.
Tribalism may be part of it; but doctrinal intolerance — the notion that
people who believe differently should get
bullet — seems
to be another; and authoritarian loyalty seems to be another still.
We could talk about intolerance in general, rather than
“fundamentalism”; but even this raises the difficulty that some people
take peaceful disagreement with their beliefs to be a form of
“intolerance”. There’s not a word for this idea that isn’t fraught
with political conflict.
While this division is nowhere near the extreme in the rationalist communities, I can definitely imagine it becoming so, particularly if technology advances in the ways that many Less Wrongers predict it will.
This is actually an area where I suspect the LW-cluster is much more
universalist than most religionists expect secularists to be. The whole
concept of “the coherent extrapolated volition of mankind” explicitly
takes in all human experience as significant — thus including religious
experience. Religious claims don’t have to be true in order for
religious experience to be significant as an element of human value;
after all, Hamlet isn’t true either ….
(Mind you, I also think that most secularists are more universalist than religionists expect secularists to be.)
Some Less Wrongers appear to express the viewpoint that the world would be a better and happier place if all of us were to become rationalists, and I think that this is the attitude that I had in mind when I let the phrase “most dangerous fundamentalists” slip out.
Here I wonder if we (by which I mean the LW-cluster) have been failing
to communicate what we mean by “rationalist” and “rationality”. One
iteration of our Litany of Tarski goes as follows:
If there is a God who loves me, I desire to believe there is a God who loves me. If there is not a God who loves me, I desire to believe there is not a God who loves me. Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
This is a position of profound submission to the universe. When we
say “rationalist” here, we primarily don’t mean someone who has a
commitment to a particular set of beliefs. We mean someone who wants
their beliefs to be caused by the facts of the universe, whatever those
might turn out to be.
Medieval Catholics (and some contemporary ones) wanted to make the whole world Catholic. Stalinists wanted to make the whole world Stalinist. In either case, I think the world would have turned out a much worse place had either one succeeded. To you, rationalism, empiricism and positivism might seem to exist in a different category, but to me any ideology or thought system that gets universalized will probably turn into More’s Utopia or Plato’s Republic. And, while interesting for a while, such places hardly seem very habitable in the long term.
One might then ask, what sort of world is most likely to cultivate and
promote the kind of diversity you’re advocating here?
But, if Less Wrongers are totalizing and dogmatic about making people happy, then why on earth would you want to deconvert people from religion? Religious beliefs, practices, rituals, spiritualities, aesthetics, values, and communities bring vast amounts of happiness to people all over the world, every day. No, it’s not for everyone, but why try and take it away from the people who find so much happiness in it?
I, personally, don’t spend any particular effort on deconverting anyone.
Not much point: anyone who can be deconverted by less than sufficient
evidence can probably be reconverted by less than sufficient evidence.
I would like, however, to find ways to offer more comfort to people who
have deconverted and lost their religious social support structure, e.g.
been rejected by family. That sort of thing strikes me as acutely unfortunate.
But then, my own Christian family didn’t give me any particularly acute trouble
through my migration from Christian to pagan to atheist.
This is a position of profound submission to the universe. When we say “rationalist” here, we primarily don’t mean someone who has a commitment to a particular set of beliefs. We mean someone who wants their beliefs to be caused by the facts of the universe, whatever those might turn out to be.
Thank you for re-clarifying this (yes, I was aware that this was the LW position). But, do most LW’ers think that it should be everyone’s position?
Medieval Catholics (and some contemporary ones) wanted to make the whole world Catholic. Stalinists wanted to make the whole world Stalinist. In either case, I think the world would have turned out a much worse place had either one succeeded. To you, rationalism, empiricism and positivism might seem to exist in a different category, but to me any ideology or thought system that gets universalized will probably turn into More’s Utopia or Plato’s Republic. And, while interesting for a while, such places hardly seem very habitable in the long term.
One might then ask, what sort of world is most likely to cultivate and promote the kind of diversity you’re advocating here?
Heh, now there’s a question! I personally don’t believe in utopias, but I do believe in making the world better. The difficulty is that “better” means different things to different people, and this is something we can’t ever forget. To answer your question, I think that a society based on moderation and mutual respect/ tolerance for different beliefs is the best one. Canada’s multiculturalism policy comes to mind. There are many flaws with multiculturalism, as it certainly doesn’t guarantee that all social groups are treated fairly by those in power. However, having lived in Canada for some years, I find that this attempt at creating a multicultural society (where people are encouraged to maintain their cultural heritage and language) leads to a more diverse and interesting society than does the assimilationist attitude of the US (my home country) where there is greater pressure to give up old identities/values in order to fit in.
But, do most LW’ers think that it should be everyone’s position?
I won’t presume to speak for most LWers. Speaking for myself, I think we would all be better off if more people’s beliefs were more contingent on mutually observable events. So, yeah. I could be wrong, but I’d love to see the experiment done.
I don’t really think it would be possible to do an experiment here because the very definition of “better” is a question of values, and different people have different values.
And yet, there are many situations in which an observer does in fact look at two groups of people and claim that group A is better off than group B. On your view, are all such observers unjustified in all such claims, or are some of them sometimes justified? (And, if the latter, is there any reason we can’t affect the world so as to create such a situation, wherein we are justified in claiming that people are better off after our intervention than they were before?)
Well, there’s the anthropological concept of the psychic unity of humankind — we may have different values, but our ways of thinking (including our values) are not wholly alien from one another, but have a lot in common.
And there are also things we can say about human values that descend from cultural evolution: we would not expect, for instance, that any culture would exist that did not value its own replication into the next generation. So we would expect that people would want to teach their ideas to their children (or converts), merely because societies that don’t do that would tend to die out and we wouldn’t get to observe them.
But, do most LW’ers think that it should be everyone’s position?
Good question. I haven’t conducted a poll. But more problematically, what does that “should” mean?
It could mean:
“Would everyone be better off if they were more rationalist?” — I think yes, they would, because they would be better equipped to change the world in directions positive for themselves, and for humanity in general. And I think that this notion is pretty strong in the LW-community. Aside from problems such as becoming a clever arguer, we expect that greater rationality should generally help people.
“Is it worthwhile for me to try to get everyone to be more rationalist?” — It isn’t clear to me how much influence over other people’s rationality I can directly have; although I haven’t really tried outside of the LW-community and my (already rather rationalist-friendly) workplace yet. I intend to support CFAR’s educational program, though.
“Would I benefit from treating people as more virtuous, trustworthy, or righteous if they agree with my position regarding rationality than if they don’t?” — No, I don’t really think so. Doing that sort of thing seems more likely to lead to Blue/Green political nonsense than to any beneficial result. (Although it sure is nice to hang out with / be friends with / date people who share some metaphysics and reference points ….)
If none of these, what did you mean by “should” there?
The difficulty is that “better” means different things to different people, and this is something we can’t ever forget.
Sure; however, some of those different things are compatible and others aren’t. Politics shows up when we have to deal with the incompatible ones.
I’m predisposed to like multiculturalism in a lot of ways; it’s pretty, interesting, and yields a wide range of social forms — and cultural products such as food, music, and philosophy. It does pose some serious problems, though, when different cultures have incompatible views of things such as human rights, human dignity, or dispute resolution; or when it’s used as an excuse to restrain people from choosing to leave their local culture in favor of one of their choice; or when politically well-established cultures are valued highly above less well-connected ones.
Rationality in the LW-sense doesn’t presume to tell anyone what their values should be, except insofar as they shouldn’t be self-contradictory. We have a strong notion of the complexity of human value and a healthy suspicion of anyone who tries to simplify it. (A fellow came to my local LW meetup recently and tried to argue that the only value worth speaking of is personal survival. I think “wide-eyed horror” would fairly describe the general reaction that idea received.)
But there’s a large gap between complexity and irreducibility.
Yes, there are many things wrong with the Church as an institution, but people know this and some are trying to reform these flaws (indeed, if Leah does convert, she will be a great one to do this).
I’m probably an outlier that I find some redeeming qualities in Catholicism precisely in the Church as an institution and not very much worthwhile in the beliefs of regular modern Western Christians.
I must confess that, as an outsider to (but occasional reader of) Less Wrong, I find certain statements and arguments on this site to be just as totalizing and dogmatic as the most dangerous religious fundamentalism. There’s also a fair amount that I find personally offensive to my value system. However, whenever I find myself going into a nasty tirade against LW, my atheist rationalist friend (who introduced me to this site in the first place) urges me to remember that not all Less Wrongers are the same. Opinions about things like the Singularity vary greatly, as do values. And, there are even some theists on this site.
I often see this in discussions or debates on religion. The only use for it is to bring disagreements onto a plane of relativism and thereby removing any possibility of conclusion. “I believe this, and you believe that, but aren’t we so similar in many ways? Let’s be tolerant of each other and allow for whatever beliefs we like.”
So, yes, you can draw parallels, some of them accurate, however you can’t soundly claim to have the preponderance of impersonal evidence on your side. We haven’t reason to treat your beliefs with respect. You should have reason to respect our beliefs if you respect impersonal evidence.
Now, given the assumption that our beliefs are reasonably accurate, are we really totalizing and dogmatic? Is it totalizing and dogmatic to say “young earth creationists are wrong,” even when they have more than enough personal evidence for such beliefs? Even when we sound like them? I think it only appears totalizing and dogmatic if you ignore context—if you draw the argument onto relativistic ground.
* I’m giving away more than I should by allowing for coherency in personal evidence for the proposition of a God as described by X religion. The fact is is that even accounting for personal evidence, such as personal revelation, their beliefs are wrong in the Bayesian sense when accounting for non-personal evidence.
I often see this in discussions or debates on religion. The only use for it is to bring disagreements onto a plane of relativism and thereby removing any possibility of conclusion. “I believe this, and you believe that, but aren’t we so similar in many ways? Let’s be tolerant of each other and allow for whatever beliefs we like.”
What’s wrong with this scenario? I thought that a big part of living in a liberal democracy involves tolerating those who are different from us. Why is a conclusion needed?
Depends on what we mean by “allow for” conflicting beliefs, and it depends on what’s at stake.
If we’re trying to have lunch, and I believe hamburger tastes better than sausage, and you believe sausage tastes better than hamburger, there’s no difficulty. You can order sausage, and I can order hamburger, and we’re good.
If we’re both trying to disarm a ticking bomb, and you believe cutting the red wire will disarm it and cutting the blue wire will set it off, and I believe cutting the red wire will set it off and the blue wire will disarm it, a different strategy is called for.
So one question becomes, what is disagreement about religious issues like? What does it mean to allow for different beliefs, and what’s at stake?
Yes, there are many things wrong with the Church as an institution, but people know this and some are trying to reform these flaws (indeed, if Leah does convert, she will be a great one to do this).
Jay, I can certainly empathize with your concern for your friend. However, as a practicing Catholic I can assure you that your friend will not be surrounded by people trying to convince her that she needs to “repent” of her sexuality. There’s less that I can say about dark side epistemology (since you would probably consider me to be an adherent of it!) but I can assure you that Leah is not going to have piles of nonsensical doctrine shoved down her throat. She will be introduced to many ideas, but ultimately she herself will decide what to accept and what to reject (and I highly doubt that she will accept absolutely everything that the Church teaches—many Catholics don’t).
I must confess that, as an outsider to (but occasional reader of) Less Wrong, I find certain statements and arguments on this site to be just as totalizing and dogmatic as the most dangerous religious fundamentalism. There’s also a fair amount that I find personally offensive to my value system. However, whenever I find myself going into a nasty tirade against LW, my atheist rationalist friend (who introduced me to this site in the first place) urges me to remember that not all Less Wrongers are the same. Opinions about things like the Singularity vary greatly, as do values. And, there are even some theists on this site.
I can tell you that the same is true about Catholicism. It’s a very large organization with many people who interpret their religion in many different ways. Yes, there are many things wrong with the Church as an institution, but people know this and some are trying to reform these flaws (indeed, if Leah does convert, she will be a great one to do this). As for the epistemological side...I don’t think that Leah is going to reject scientific truths, if that is what worries you. She might just come to view them in a somewhat different way.
Having read Leah’s blog for a while, I know that she will respond very well to any challenge/debate you put forward. However, I would advise against trying to thwart her conversion. Ultimately, she has to make her own decisions. As others have said, listen to her and try your to understand the reasons for her conversion. Also, if you haven’t already, get to know a few Catholics. We could be wrong, but that doesn’t make us bad people.
That seems like a surprising claim! I’d like to explore it further.
The most dangerous religious fundamentalisms lead people to do things such as blowing up buildings, committing mass murders, jailing and torturing people for apostasy, and throwing acid in the faces of schoolchildren. This occurs both when dangerous religious fundamentalists occupy positions of formal political power (governments), and when they do not (terrorist groups, militias, abortion-clinic bombers).
(Note, I’m not asserting that religions or fundamentalisms in general promote those sorts of things. You specifically said “the most dangerous religious fundamentalism”, and I’m taking that limitation in good faith.)
Somehow, nobody around here seems to be doing those sort of things. Indeed, that sort of behavior seems to be pretty rare in the Traditional Rationality community too — the skeptics movement; the New Atheists; etc.
Is that just because we are totalizing and dogmatic about making people happy instead of about hating and killing them? (I am reminded of a Barry Goldwater quote about extremism and moderation.)
Or do you think there is some other reason?
Well, LW has only been around for a couple years, give it time. I’ve definitely seen ideas here that, if taken to their logical conclusion, would imply that under the right circumstances one has a moral imperative to do comparable things. There is also a norm against flinching from taking things to their logical conclusions.
Notice how you need to add the qualifier “New” to “Atheist movement” there in order to exclude all the atrocities committed by the old atheists.
Although linking the atrocities of 20th-century Communism to atheism seems to be a favorite trope of contemporary reaction, I’m confused as to why you chose to bring it up in the context of traditional rationality. Marxism might claim an empirical basis, but it’s quite hostile to skepticism, and neither its atheism nor its claimed empiricism seem foundational to its social aims. Likewise, Dawkins et al. don’t inherit from any of the major philosophers in the socialist family tree that I know of; they’re both products of the Enlightenment, but they took quite different paths on their way here.
Moreover, the broader socialist movement isn’t at all incompatible with religion: consider liberation theology.
I’ve read Marxist stuff (the old man himself, Gramsci, Adorno, Zizek, my boyfriend’s incomprehensible paper on Lacan...) and the LAST thing I’d describe (non-USSR-sponsored) Marxist thought as is “hostile to skepticism”. It looks hyper-skeptical to me! At least when describing everything outside of a communist utopia that might or might not be envisioned in their writing. When observing contemporary social phenomena—from family life to academia—they’ve historically been rather cynical and tried to look for base motives of power, dominiance and greed affecting them.
Did you know that Gramsci, a Marxist through and through (although a liberal and idealist one), developed the highly LW-relevant concept of cultural hegemony? [1]
(I disagree with those dudes on quite a few issues, it’s just that strawmanning them as blindly orthodox fanatics is unfair.)
[1] “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.”—Philip K. Dick
I guess the Pope is also skeptical about Buddhist reincarnation.
If one believes that “everything is a class fight” (I know this is oversimplification), then finding elements of class fight in everything is not an evidence for their skepticism.
Shortly, skepticism does not mean “a belief that your opponents are wrong”.
Speaking of which, communists were also extreme utilitarians. The problem with utilitarians, really, is that self described utilitarians are not the people who calculate utilities so much better than everyone else. It is the people who think they calculate utilities so much better than anyone else. Throw Dunning-Kruger into the mix, and people who actually have troubles evaluating utility are utilitarians, whereas those who can evaluate utility also process uncertainty and tend to act in more deontological manner due to incorporating empirical knowledge on outcome of strategies, or due to concern for societal values like trust etc. I blogged some about that
Exactly. For a sociopath it is very useful to (pretend to?) be utilitarian—one good rationalization, and anything becomes morally OK.
First, let’s kill all our enemies, or more precisely anyone who refuses to obey us. Then, we will build a paradise with infinite utility, because there will be no one to stop us. Net result: huge positive utility. From utilitarian viewpoint, we are the good guys, which means that anyone who opposes us deserves to be killed.
Add some technical details, and you have communism; add different details and you have something else. Focus the attention of people to those technical details to avoid the outside view comparison.
Well I think it is fairly complicated. It may be that the lack of understanding of what it takes to think straight leads to sociopathy in some instances (I see sociopathy as a symptom of a multitude of abnormalities).
I wrote another blog post on that: http://dmytry.com/blog/?p=268 . What I think happens, is that people with strongly deficient utility evaluation—people who do not even see what it takes to evaluate utility, people who will evaluate utility on any partial outcome that popped up in their mind, or was even suggested from outside (without even any explicit assertion that it is complete!) - tend to end up self describing as utilitarian, and in some sense, actually believing that they are, and that they are highly moral (and everyone else is flawed).
Other issue, is that historically it is not in the slightest bit positive when someone pushing a bad idea is not simply being selfish. In practice, to do the most evil, selfishness does not suffice. It takes certain degree of selflessness in the name of a bad idea and sloppy thought. It takes narcissist love with intellectual self. A particular form of incompetence is far superior to malice when it comes to actually doing large scale evil.
Long ago (I don’t remember the source) I read an interesting thought: that people who speak about great ideas or strong emotions are probably intelectually and emotionally pretty weak, and when they get any result in such area, they are overwhelmed by the contrast. (It’s like Dunning-Kruger on steroids.)
For example a smart person will have dozen smart ideas every day, so “having a smart idea” is no big deal for them, it’s life as usual. Even if they find something extraordinarily interesting, they have a large reference class, so instead of greatness of the idea, they will speak about specific details that make this idea interesting.
On the other hand, when a rather dumb person hears a non-trivial idea and understands it, it is a shocking experience, a unique uncomparable thing. So the person will treat it as the greatest idea ever, the dividing line between stupid and smart, and will be obsessed about it.
Analogically, if a person with supressed emotions or mostly negative emotions suddenly falls in love, they will perceive their emotion as overwhelming, unique in the whole universe, unrepeatable. A person with a larger emotional scale would see the same emotion as a point in a continuum, so there is e.g. smaller chance they would do something stupid if their love is not reciprocated. The former person would (by a mind projection fallacy) think that the latter person’s feelings are much smaller, because the reactions are less dramatic.
So maybe the same effect is at play here—people who never thought too much about morality suddenly understand some moral rule, and (their interpretation of) it immediately becomes the moral rule, the dividing line between immoral and moral. (And if the rule is not based on emotions or traditions, it is convenient to label it as “utilitarian”.)
That’s an interesting thought. On the ideas, the other issue is that e.g. with certain fairly advanced mathematics, fuzzy and inaccurate understanding may easily be more amazing than any coherent understanding can ever be; the condition that is normally quite short lived if one has sufficiently thorough understanding of base level concepts and can study the idea formally, but this condition can be perpetual otherwise. Same can happen with morality.
U mindkilled, bro. Yes, that was what the people who called themselves “communists” did in the 20th century. But name any other system, no matter which one, that wouldn’t kill everyone who refuses to obey it in certain matters.
E.g. fleeing from a battlefield; every nation that grok’d total war gave its court-martials the powers of swift summary execution in the 20th century. It’s what the “communists” were trying to regulate, and from what perspective, and how much, and what processes this led to—that’s what you have a problem with, not with the fact of enforcement itself.
Everyone has to resort to murder sooner or later, it’s the actual internal details of the system (like the type and amount of murder, and what incentives the “undesirables” have to surrender and avoid it, if any) that make the difference.
You have a good point. But there is a difference between people who see killing others as a regrettable last choice (e.g. in self-defence), and those who see killing others as “no big deal” (sociopaths, and their happy-death-spiralled followers). Although there probably is a continuum.
EDIT: The difference is that a non-sociopathic utilitarian considers a possibility of running on a corrupted hardware, if they are a rationalist, or simply deflect the thought by an “ugh field” if they aren’t.
If you mean that Marxists are all furiously agreeing with each other, I can assure you that they’re not.
If you mean that they all agree on whatever one makes the minimal criteria for calling someone Marxist, well, trivially yes.
If you mean that they’re really confident in their conclusions, that seems to be temperamental.
This is why I avoid the term when I can (unless I’m referring specifically to the ancient school of philosophy).
This is getting a little too politically charged for my liking, but cynicism does not imply skepticism, at least in the sense I intended. Now, Marxism is built on a set of social theories expressed largely in terms of self-interest or group self-interest, and Marxist scholars have gotten fairly inventive within that framework. The ideology wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful as it has been if it wasn’t credible as social criticism, or if it didn’t speak to people skeptical of the status quo. So it does speak the language to some degree, and I probably should have been more accommodating of that in the grandparent.
But for me to call it open to skepticism, I’d have to see evidence that Marxist thinkers engaged in good-faith questioning of the theory’s own social and economic assumptions or at least engaged with skeptics on even ground, and of that I’ve seen very little. In fact, most strains of Marxism seem to actively discourage these lines of thinking—a tendency predictably most pronounced in Marxist political regimes, but which goes all the way back to Marx and Engels’ writings on ideology. False consciousness and related concepts offer a fully general alternative.
This is all true, but we’re comparing the rationality record between various creeds and not imagining how well one such creed would do in a vacuum.
E.g. something a bit like that description of “false consciousness” clearly does happen, not as to provide a convenient reason why capitalism must be the unseen Ultimate Evil, just as a matter of human nature—something psychosocial and fairly disturbing, else we why would see e.g. realistic/cynical poor workers voting against progressive tax. (I’m not arguing its virtues here, just pointing out that it’s obviously a big mid-term gain for lower class people who realistically expect little relative social mobility for their family.)
=
And yet ideologies saying e.g. that people in “nice” countries act in “enlightened self-interest”, and are generally special snowflakes that shouldn’t be stirred in their beautiful arrangements, are respected and highly popular. Clearly a dose of Marxist cynicism could serve as a good counterweight to such happy individualist fantasies. People—most of all people who want to be “normal”—are fucking delusional as to their immediate or long-term personal interest, that’s what Marxism is saying. Hell, that was what George Carlin often said too. (I don’t agree that a Marxist dictatorship should decide everyone’s best interest, I’m not a strawman commie.)
Frankly, I’d rather not compare the rationality record between various unspecified creeds, at least here; that sort of thing has a way of taking over threads, and in its general form seems almost completely orthogonal to Catholic deconversion or anything related to it. This business about skepticism came up in the context of Marx’s proximity to traditional rationality of the Dawkins/Randi school, particularly in terms of approach to atheism, and that’s where I’d like to keep it.
Dawkins et al. seem to be skeptical in methodology: presented with a set of supernaturalist beliefs, their normal procedure is to look at the claimed evidence for them, look for replications or attempt to perform a replication if it’s convenient, and proceed to deprecate the beliefs in question when they predictably fail. They do tend to be fairly apolitical (Penn and Teller notwithstanding), and I’m not even sure what a proper extrapolation of this methodology to the social realm would look like, but I am pretty sure it wouldn’t start with a future history (sketchy though Marx’s is) or a complete theory of class interaction. And I’m also pretty sure most Marxists wouldn’t appreciate a Randi-style analysis of their own foundational beliefs.
Well, Hitchens always considered himself a socialist.
I could say the same about transhumanism.
I wouldn’t say you’re wrong, but as I haven’t seen anyone in this thread encouraging the lady in the OP to reject her conversion on transhumanist grounds, I’m again not sure why you’re bringing it up.
(BTW, many socialists would deny him the honor. Me, I think his reputation was certainly quite spotty from any ideological view—not that I hate him or anything.)
Arguably, these kinds of acts follow a normal distribution (where acts of extreme altruism are on the opposite tail), so if Less Wrong had much larger numbers we should expect to observe these kind of things. Do you really think if Less Wrong had over 1 billion members (like Catholic Church) we wouldn’t have members that commit violent acts (such as assassinating AI researchers not using FAI safeguards)? If anything, I would expect there to be greater variance of good and bad acts among Less Wrongers since they are explicitly trained not to compartmentalize.
Do very many Catholics assassinate government-funded mass murdering genocidaires? I refer of course to abortion clinics.
No, not really. According to Le Wik, only 8 people (less than 1 every 2 years) in the US have been killed as the result of “anti-abortion violence” since 1993. Two of the actual killings were attributed to Catholics (although another did try to ram an abortion clinic with his vehicle which resulted in no injuries but did cause some property damage).
In any case, it seems clear that “anti-abortion violence” occurs with much greater frequency in fiction than in reality. But then again, this shouldn’t surprise us given the predominance of the Hollywood Atheist and Straw-Vulcan archetypes.
EDIT: I made a factual correction and added context.
All the murderers were Protestants?
No; I made a mistake. Eric Robert Rudolph and James Charles Kopp (who, interestingly, had a masters degree in embryology, so was something of a “domain expert”) were self-identified Roman Catholics. Also, it is tricky determining who is or is not of a particular denomination. For instance, Paul Jennings Hill was excommunicated before commiting murder. Should that count in favor of or against the church that excommunicated him (in this case, Presbyterianism)? I’m not sure.
Of course in favor.
Assuming conservation of evidence, if there exists an action that would count against them (such as declaring him a saint), there must also exist an action that would count in favor of them. So what exactly were they supposed to do—burn him at a stake?
EDIT: Oops, now I see that the question can refer to the whole “former membership + excommunication” package, not just the “excommunication” part. Still, unless other churches had excommunicated such people (before the murder, or at least after), the fact that this one did is an evidence in favor or hypothesis that they disagree with such acts.
It sounds like it would follow from this account that the most dangerous religious fundamentalisms are also the most popular ones.
Have I understood you properly?
On an absolute level, yes, but per capita, no.
I think a good explanation for saying things like “just as totalizing and dogmatic” is that the question is getting substituted, in the regular sort of way.
That is, when we talk about how of course we should discourage people from being catholics, this sort of assumption that part of dymphna’s identity is bad makes them feel attacked, and feel bad about the attack on their group. And because dymphna is a smart person, they use ideas like “just as totalizing and dogmatic” to communicate the badness they perceive.
And yes, I’m not being charitable at all.
TO HATERS: Oh? You think you’d do better than dymphna in a similar situation? Heck, I know I don’t a lot of the time.
Hypothesis: religions not predicated on “specialness” will not generate dangerous fundamentalism.
If I believe I am average or not special in any way, then I want to work towards futures in which people who are average get goodies.
Let’s start by killing the people who are special and taking their goodies. ;)
better dead than red.
They’re dead, we’re red! (Until someone makes us prove that we’re not special ourselves, that is...)
“The most dangerous religious fundamentalisms lead people to do things such as blowing up buildings, committing mass murders, jailing and torturing people for apostasy, and throwing acid in the faces of schoolchildren. This occurs both when dangerous religious fundamentalists occupy positions of formal political power (governments), and when they do not (terrorist groups, militias, abortion-clinic bombers).”
Point taken. The phrase “most dangerous” iis hyperbolic. No, so far I don’t see any Less Wrongers blowing up buildings or committing mass murders. But, what is it that drives people to do such things? Is it as simple as, “God told me to do this?” I don’t think it’s usually that simple. I’m not sure what drives it, but I think that part of it is a basic human tendency to divide people up into groups of “we” and “they.” Most of us construct this kind of division to some degree, whether we realize it or not, but fundamentalists take it to the extreme. On LW I encounter this division quite often (sometimes in the tone of posts more than the content). I probably notice it so strongly because, as Manfred comments, I feel myself to be among the “them,” (and my natural reaction is to make the same sort of division in my own mind. While this division is nowhere near the extreme in the rationalist communities, I can definitely imagine it becoming so, particularly if technology advances in the ways that many Less Wrongers predict it will.
Some Less Wrongers appear to express the viewpoint that the world would be a better and happier place if all of us were to become rationalists, and I think that this is the attitude that I had in mind when I let the phrase “most dangerous fundamentalists” slip out. Medieval Catholics (and some contemporary ones) wanted to make the whole world Catholic. Stalinists wanted to make the whole world Stalinist. In either case, I think the world would have turned out a much worse place had either one succeeded. To you, rationalism, empiricism and positivism might seem to exist in a different category, but to me any ideology or thought system that gets universalized will probably turn into More’s Utopia or Plato’s Republic. And, while interesting for a while, such places hardly seem very habitable in the long term.
“Is it that just because we are totalizing and dogmatic about making people happy instead of about hating and killing them? (I am reminded of a Barry Goldwater quote about extremism and moderation.)”
I’d be interested in seeing that Goldwater quote. But, if Less Wrongers are totalizing and dogmatic about making people happy, then why on earth would you want to deconvert people from religion? Religious beliefs, practices, rituals, spiritualities, aesthetics, values, and communities bring vast amounts of happiness to people all over the world, every day. No, it’s not for everyone, but why try and take it away from the people who find so much happiness in it?
I suspect the quote in question is “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
″… and moderation in the defense of liberty is no virtue.”
(A meta remark: The usual way to quote another person’s post here is to prefix lines with the > character, not to use quotation marks.)
Of which I am very glad.
Tribalism is powerful and problematic indeed. But I’m not convinced that tribalism alone is sufficient to create eliminationism — here borrowing Daniel Goldhagen’s term for the belief that it is morally right and necessary to exterminate the Other. There are lots of places in the world where distinct tribes coexist, maintaining us/them distinctions, without massacring each other constantly.
So there must be something else involved.
It isn’t really clear to me that all the things that we might label “fundamentalism” are really the same social phenomena. Sociologically, there may be different things going on in Fundamentalist Protestantism (the trope namer); in theocratic regimes such as Iranian Shia or Saudi Wahhabism; in medieval Catholicism in its persecution of the Cathars, Albigensians, and conversos — and for that matter in the Stalinist purges or other “secular” “fundamentalisms”.
Tribalism may be part of it; but doctrinal intolerance — the notion that people who believe differently should get bullet — seems to be another; and authoritarian loyalty seems to be another still.
We could talk about intolerance in general, rather than “fundamentalism”; but even this raises the difficulty that some people take peaceful disagreement with their beliefs to be a form of “intolerance”. There’s not a word for this idea that isn’t fraught with political conflict.
This is actually an area where I suspect the LW-cluster is much more universalist than most religionists expect secularists to be. The whole concept of “the coherent extrapolated volition of mankind” explicitly takes in all human experience as significant — thus including religious experience. Religious claims don’t have to be true in order for religious experience to be significant as an element of human value; after all, Hamlet isn’t true either ….
(Mind you, I also think that most secularists are more universalist than religionists expect secularists to be.)
Here I wonder if we (by which I mean the LW-cluster) have been failing to communicate what we mean by “rationalist” and “rationality”. One iteration of our Litany of Tarski goes as follows:
If there is a God who loves me,
I desire to believe there is a God who loves me.
If there is not a God who loves me,
I desire to believe there is not a God who loves me.
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
This is a position of profound submission to the universe. When we say “rationalist” here, we primarily don’t mean someone who has a commitment to a particular set of beliefs. We mean someone who wants their beliefs to be caused by the facts of the universe, whatever those might turn out to be.
One might then ask, what sort of world is most likely to cultivate and promote the kind of diversity you’re advocating here?
I, personally, don’t spend any particular effort on deconverting anyone. Not much point: anyone who can be deconverted by less than sufficient evidence can probably be reconverted by less than sufficient evidence.
I would like, however, to find ways to offer more comfort to people who have deconverted and lost their religious social support structure, e.g. been rejected by family. That sort of thing strikes me as acutely unfortunate. But then, my own Christian family didn’t give me any particularly acute trouble through my migration from Christian to pagan to atheist.
Thank you for re-clarifying this (yes, I was aware that this was the LW position). But, do most LW’ers think that it should be everyone’s position?
Heh, now there’s a question! I personally don’t believe in utopias, but I do believe in making the world better. The difficulty is that “better” means different things to different people, and this is something we can’t ever forget. To answer your question, I think that a society based on moderation and mutual respect/ tolerance for different beliefs is the best one. Canada’s multiculturalism policy comes to mind. There are many flaws with multiculturalism, as it certainly doesn’t guarantee that all social groups are treated fairly by those in power. However, having lived in Canada for some years, I find that this attempt at creating a multicultural society (where people are encouraged to maintain their cultural heritage and language) leads to a more diverse and interesting society than does the assimilationist attitude of the US (my home country) where there is greater pressure to give up old identities/values in order to fit in.
I won’t presume to speak for most LWers.
Speaking for myself, I think we would all be better off if more people’s beliefs were more contingent on mutually observable events. So, yeah.
I could be wrong, but I’d love to see the experiment done.
I don’t really think it would be possible to do an experiment here because the very definition of “better” is a question of values, and different people have different values.
And yet, there are many situations in which an observer does in fact look at two groups of people and claim that group A is better off than group B. On your view, are all such observers unjustified in all such claims, or are some of them sometimes justified? (And, if the latter, is there any reason we can’t affect the world so as to create such a situation, wherein we are justified in claiming that people are better off after our intervention than they were before?)
Well, there’s the anthropological concept of the psychic unity of humankind — we may have different values, but our ways of thinking (including our values) are not wholly alien from one another, but have a lot in common.
And there are also things we can say about human values that descend from cultural evolution: we would not expect, for instance, that any culture would exist that did not value its own replication into the next generation. So we would expect that people would want to teach their ideas to their children (or converts), merely because societies that don’t do that would tend to die out and we wouldn’t get to observe them.
Good question. I haven’t conducted a poll. But more problematically, what does that “should” mean?
It could mean:
“Would everyone be better off if they were more rationalist?” — I think yes, they would, because they would be better equipped to change the world in directions positive for themselves, and for humanity in general. And I think that this notion is pretty strong in the LW-community. Aside from problems such as becoming a clever arguer, we expect that greater rationality should generally help people.
“Is it worthwhile for me to try to get everyone to be more rationalist?” — It isn’t clear to me how much influence over other people’s rationality I can directly have; although I haven’t really tried outside of the LW-community and my (already rather rationalist-friendly) workplace yet. I intend to support CFAR’s educational program, though.
“Would I benefit from treating people as more virtuous, trustworthy, or righteous if they agree with my position regarding rationality than if they don’t?” — No, I don’t really think so. Doing that sort of thing seems more likely to lead to Blue/Green political nonsense than to any beneficial result. (Although it sure is nice to hang out with / be friends with / date people who share some metaphysics and reference points ….)
If none of these, what did you mean by “should” there?
Sure; however, some of those different things are compatible and others aren’t. Politics shows up when we have to deal with the incompatible ones.
I’m predisposed to like multiculturalism in a lot of ways; it’s pretty, interesting, and yields a wide range of social forms — and cultural products such as food, music, and philosophy. It does pose some serious problems, though, when different cultures have incompatible views of things such as human rights, human dignity, or dispute resolution; or when it’s used as an excuse to restrain people from choosing to leave their local culture in favor of one of their choice; or when politically well-established cultures are valued highly above less well-connected ones.
Rationality in the LW-sense doesn’t presume to tell anyone what their values should be, except insofar as they shouldn’t be self-contradictory. We have a strong notion of the complexity of human value and a healthy suspicion of anyone who tries to simplify it. (A fellow came to my local LW meetup recently and tried to argue that the only value worth speaking of is personal survival. I think “wide-eyed horror” would fairly describe the general reaction that idea received.)
But there’s a large gap between complexity and irreducibility.
I’m probably an outlier that I find some redeeming qualities in Catholicism precisely in the Church as an institution and not very much worthwhile in the beliefs of regular modern Western Christians.
Can you point to somewhere you’ve explained this already—or failing that, would you be so kind as to unpack it a little?
Yes, I’d also really like to hear your thoughts.
I often see this in discussions or debates on religion. The only use for it is to bring disagreements onto a plane of relativism and thereby removing any possibility of conclusion. “I believe this, and you believe that, but aren’t we so similar in many ways? Let’s be tolerant of each other and allow for whatever beliefs we like.”
So, yes, you can draw parallels, some of them accurate, however you can’t soundly claim to have the preponderance of impersonal evidence on your side. We haven’t reason to treat your beliefs with respect. You should have reason to respect our beliefs if you respect impersonal evidence.
Now, given the assumption that our beliefs are reasonably accurate, are we really totalizing and dogmatic? Is it totalizing and dogmatic to say “young earth creationists are wrong,” even when they have more than enough personal evidence for such beliefs? Even when we sound like them? I think it only appears totalizing and dogmatic if you ignore context—if you draw the argument onto relativistic ground.
* I’m giving away more than I should by allowing for coherency in personal evidence for the proposition of a God as described by X religion. The fact is is that even accounting for personal evidence, such as personal revelation, their beliefs are wrong in the Bayesian sense when accounting for non-personal evidence.
What’s wrong with this scenario? I thought that a big part of living in a liberal democracy involves tolerating those who are different from us. Why is a conclusion needed?
Depends on what we mean by “allow for” conflicting beliefs, and it depends on what’s at stake.
If we’re trying to have lunch, and I believe hamburger tastes better than sausage, and you believe sausage tastes better than hamburger, there’s no difficulty. You can order sausage, and I can order hamburger, and we’re good.
If we’re both trying to disarm a ticking bomb, and you believe cutting the red wire will disarm it and cutting the blue wire will set it off, and I believe cutting the red wire will set it off and the blue wire will disarm it, a different strategy is called for.
So one question becomes, what is disagreement about religious issues like? What does it mean to allow for different beliefs, and what’s at stake?
I don’t think this is necessarily a worthwhile goal.