Do you suppose this could be a tension between epistemic and instrumental rationality, where ‘religion’ is recast as ‘social organization for value promotion and individual welfare’, rather than as assertions about the factual nature of the doctrine? It’s entirely possible I am simply missing the pro-faith posts/comments because I am dismissing them at a level beneath the one that I notice, but I have observed two things in the community over time:
1) In the Sequences, religion was specifically cited as worthy of emulation: directly related to this post and the Meta-tations post was the comparison with explanation-less contributions at temple, and also the comparison to the Catholic Church in the context of charity.
2) I noticed posts which simply re-cast religious preferences in the language of instrumental rationality, which appeared to boil down to asserting that belief-in-belief was rational.
In the old LW immediately before I made the switch to LW2, there were posts appearing which expressly advocated supernatural practices as instrumentally rational, with little disagreement. That was when I personally jumped ship for LW2.
Do you suppose this could be a tension between epistemic and instrumental rationality, where ‘religion’ is recast as ‘social organization for value promotion and individual welfare’, rather than as assertions about the factual nature of the doctrine? It’s entirely possible I am simply missing the pro-faith posts/comments because I am dismissing them at a level beneath the one that I notice, but I have observed two things in the community over time:
1) In the Sequences, religion was specifically cited as worthy of emulation: directly related to this post and the Meta-tations post was the comparison with explanation-less contributions at temple, and also the comparison to the Catholic Church in the context of charity.
2) I noticed posts which simply re-cast religious preferences in the language of instrumental rationality, which appeared to boil down to asserting that belief-in-belief was rational.
In the old LW immediately before I made the switch to LW2, there were posts appearing which expressly advocated supernatural practices as instrumentally rational, with little disagreement. That was when I personally jumped ship for LW2.
Very interested in links of the last type.