This time, pushing for a more clearly articulated position. Yes, I realize that I am not endearing myself by continuing this line of debate. However, I have good reasons for pursuing.
I really like LW and the idea of a place where objective, unbiased truth is The Way. Since I idealistically believe in Aumann’s Agreement theorem, I think that we are only a small number of debates away from agreement.
To the extent to which LW aligns itself with a particular point of view, it must be able to defend that view. I don’t want LW to be wrong, and am willing to be a nuisance to make sure.
If defending atheism is not a first priority, can we continue using religion as a convenient example of irrationality, even as the enemy of rationality?
There is a definite sense that theism is not worth debating, that the case is “open-and-shut”. If so, it should be straight-forward to draft a master argument. (Five separate posts of analogies is not strong evidence in my Bayesian calculation that the case is open-and-shut.)
A clear and definitive argument against theism would make it possible for theists (and yourselves, as devil’s advocates) to debate specific points that are not covered adequately in the argument. (If you are about to downvote me on this comment, think about how important it would be to permit debate on an ideology that is important to this group. Right now it is difficult to debate whether religion is rational because there is no central argument to argue with.)
Relative to the ‘typical view’, atheism is radical. How does a religious person visiting this site become convinced that you’re not just a rationality site with a high proportion of atheists?
(Um, this started as a reply to your comment but quickly became its own “idea I’m not ready to post” on deconversions and how we could accomplish them quickly.)
Upvoted. It took me months of reading to finally decide I was wrong. If we could put that “aha” moment in one document… well, we could do a lot of good.
Deconversions are tricky though. Did anyone here ever read Kissing Hank’s Ass? It’s a scathing moral indictment of mainline Christianity. I read it when I was 15 and couldn’t sleep for most of a night.
And the next day, I pretty much decided to ignore it. I deconverted seven years later.
I believe the truth matters, and I believe you do a person a favor by deconverting them. But if you’ve been in for a while, if you’ve grown dependent on, for example, believing in an eternal life… there’s a lot of pain in deconversion, and your mind’s going to work hard to avoid it. We need to be prepared for that.
If I were to distill the reason I became an atheist into a few words, it would look something like:
Ontologically fundamental mental things don’t make sense, but the human mind is wired to expect them. Fish swim in a sea of water, humans swim in a sea of minds. But mental things are complicated. In order to understand them you have to break them down into parts, something we’re still working hard to do. If you say “the universe exists because someone created it,” it feels like you’ve explained something, because agents are part of the most fundamental building blocks from which you build your world. But agency, intelligence, desire, and all the rest, are complicated properties which have a specific history here on earth. Sort of like cheesecake. Or the foxtrot. Or socialism.
If somebody started talking about the earth starting because of cheesecake, you’d wonder where the cheesecake came from. You’d look in a history book or a cook book and discover that the cheesecake has its origins in the roman empire, as a result of, well, people being hungry, and as a result of cows existing, and on and on, and you’d wonder how all those complex causes could produce a cheesecake predating the universe, and what sense it would make cut off from the rich causal net in which we find cheesecakes embedded today. Intelligence should not be any different. Agency trips up Occam’s rasor, because humans are wired to expect there to always be agents about. But an explanation of the universe which contains an agent is an incredibly complicated theory, which only presents itself to us for consideration because of our biases.
A complicated theory that you never would have thought of in the first place had you been less biased is not a theory that might still be right—it’s just plain wrong. In the same sense that, if you’re looking for a murderer in New York city, and you bring a suspect in on the advice of one of your lieutenants, and then it turns out the lieutenant picked the suspect by reading a horoscope, you have the wrong guy. You don’t keep him there because he might be the murderer after all, and you may as well make sure. With all of New York to canvas, you let him go, and you start over. So too with agency-based explanations of the universe’s beginning.
I’ve rambled terribly, and were that a top-level post, or a “master argument” it would have to be cleaned up considerably, but what I have just said is why I am an atheist, and not a clever argument I invented to support it.
Ontologically fundamental mental things don’t make sense, but the human mind is wired to expect them. Fish swim in a sea of water, humans swim in a sea of minds.
These two sentences, particularly the second, just explained for me why humans expect minds to be ontologically fundamental. Thank you!
If somebody started talking about the earth starting because of cheesecake, you’d wonder where the cheesecake came from. You’d look in a history book or a cook book and discover that the cheesecake has its origins in the roman empire, as a result of, well, people being hungry, and as a result of cows existing, and on and on, and you’d wonder how all those complex causes could produce a cheesecake predating the universe, and what sense it would make cut off from the rich causal net in which we find cheesecakes embedded today. Intelligence should not be any different. Agency trips up Occam’s rasor, because humans are wired to expect there to always be agents about. But an explanation of the universe which contains an agent is an incredibly complicated theory, which only presents itself to us for consideration because of our biases.
You’re right; yet no one ever sees it this way. Before Darwin, no one said, “This idea that an intelligent creator existed first doesn’t simplify things.”
Here is something I think would be useful: A careful information-theoretic explanation of why God must be complicated. When you explain, to Christians, that it doesn’t make sense to say complexity originated because God created it and God must be complicated, Christians reply (and I’m generalizing here because I’ve heard these replies so many times) one of 2 things:
God is outside of space and time, so causality doesn’t apply. (I don’t know how to respond to this.)
God is not complicated. God is simple. God is the pure essence of being, the First Cause. Think of a perfect circle. That’s what God is like.
It shouldn’t be hard to explain that, if God knows at least what is in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, God has at least enough complexity to store that information.
Of course, putting this explanation on LW might do no good to anybody.
It shouldn’t be hard to explain that, if God knows at least what is in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, God has at least enough complexity to store that information.
Keep in mind that if this complexity was derived from looking at external phenomena, or at the output of some simple computation, it doesn’t reduce the prior probability.
It shouldn’t be hard to explain that, if God knows at least what is in the Encyclopedia >Brittanica, God has at least enough complexity to store that information.
Except that the library of all possible books includes the Encyclopedia Brittanica but is far simpler.
Except that the library of all possible books includes the Encyclopedia Brittanica but is far simpler.
Presumably, God can also distinguish between “the set of books with useful information” and “the set of books containing only nonsense”. That is quite complex indeed.
I’m afraid I wasn’t clear. I am not arguing that “god” is simple or that it explains anything. I’m just saying that god’s knowledge is compressible into an intelligent generator (AI).
The source code isn’t likely to be 10 lines, but then again, it doesn’t have to include the Encyclopedia of Brittanica to tell you everything that the encyclopedia can once it grows up and learns.
F=m*a is enough to let you draw out all physically possible trajectories from the set of all trajectories, and it is still rather simple.
You say: You’re right; yet no one ever sees it this way. Before Darwin, no one said, “This idea that an intelligent creator existed first doesn’t simplify things.”
I may have to look up where before Darwin it gets argued, but I am pretty sure people challenged that before Darwin.
It might be why you’re an atheist, but do you think it would have swayed your christian self much? I highly doubt that your post would come near to deconverting anyone. Many religious people believe that souls are essential for creativity and intelligence, and they won’t accept the “you’re wired to see intelligence” argument if they disbelieve in evolution (not uncommon.)
To deconvert people to atheism quickly, I think you need a sledgehammer. I still haven’t found a really good one. Here are some areas that might be promising:
Ask them why God won’t drop a grapefruit from the sky to show he exists. “He loves me more than I can imagine, right? And more than anything he wants me to know him right? And he’s all powerful, right?” To their response: “Why does God consider blindly believing in him in the absence of evidence virtuous? Isn’t that sort of think a made-up religion would say about their god to keep people faithful?”
The Problem of Evil: why do innocent babies suffer and die from disease?
I’ve heard there are lots of contradictions in the bible. Maybe someone who is really dedicated could find some that are really compelling. Personally, I’m not interested enough in this topic to spend time reading religious texts, but more power to those who are.
A few moderately promising ones: Why does God heal cancer patients but not amputees? Why do different religious denominations disagree, when they could just ask God for the answer? Why would a benevolent God send people who happened to be unlucky enough not to hear about him to enternal damnation?
2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles are supposed to be parallels, telling the same story. Yet one of them probably lost or gained a zero along the way. Many christians that see this are foreced to retreat to a more ‘soft’ interpretation of the bible that allows for errors in transactiption etc. It’s the closest to a quick ‘n’ dirty sledgehammer I have ever had. And a folow-up: Why hasn’t this been discussed in your church? Surely, a group of truthseekers wouldn’t shy away from such fundamental criticisms, even to diffuse them.
Problem is, theists of reasonable intelligence spend a good deal of time honing and rehearsing their replies to these. They might be slightly uneasy with their replies, but if the alternative is letting go of all they hold dear, then they’ll hold to their guns. Catching them off guard is a slightly better tactic.
Or, to put it another way: if there were such a sledgehammer lying around, Richard Dawkins (or some other New Atheist) would be using it right now. Dawkins uses all the points you listed, and more; and the majority of people don’t budge.
do you think it would have swayed your christian self much?
Well...it did sway my Christian self. My Christian self generated those arguments and they, with help from Eliezer’s writings against self-deception, annihilated that self.
(x) : x is a possible entity. the more complicated x is the less likely it is to exist controlling for other evidence.
(x): x is a possible entity. the more intelligent x the more complicated x is, controlling for other properties.
God is maximally intelligent.
:. God’s existence is maximally unlikely unless there is other evidence or unless it has other properties that make its existence maximally more likely.
(Assume intelligent to refer to the possession of general intelligence)
I think most theists will consent to (1), especially given that its implicit in some of their favorite arguments. (3) They consent to, unless they mean “God” as merely a cosmological constant, or first cause. In which case we’re having a completely different debate. So the issue is (2). I’m sure some of the cognitive science types can give evidence for why intelligence is necessarily complicated. There is however, definitive evidence for the correlation of intelligence and complexity. Human brains are vastly more complex than the brains of other animals. Computers get more complicated the more information they hold, etc. It might actually be worth making the distinction, between intelligence and the holding of data. It is a lot easier to see how the more information something contains the more complicated something is since one can just compare two sets of data, one bigger than the other, and see that one is more complicated. Presumably, God needs to contain information on everyone’s behavior, the the events that happen at any point in time, prayer requests etc.
Btw, is there a way for me to us symbolic logic notation in xml?
Click that link, and you’ll get a rendered png of the LaTeX expression I’ve placed after the ?. Replace that expression with another and, well, you’ll get that too. If you’re writing a top-level post, you can use this to pretty quickly embed equations. Not sure how to make it useful in a comment though.
I think you are looking at this from an evolutionary point of view? Then it makes sense to make statements like “more and more complex states are less likely” (i.e., they take more time) and “intelligence increases with the complexity” (of organisms).
Outside this context, though, I have trouble understanding what is meant by “complicated” or why “more intelligent” should be more complex. In fact, you could skip right from (1) to (3) -- most theists would be comfortable asserting that God is maximally complex. However, is response to (1) they might counter with—if something does exist, you can’t use its improbability to negate that it exists.
It is true that if something does exist you can’t use its improbability to negate its existence. But this option is allowed for in the argument; “unless there is other evidence or it has other properties that make its existence maximally more likely”. So if God is, say, necessary, then he is going to exist no matter his likelihood. What this argument does is set a really low prior for the probability that God exists. There is never going to be one argument that proves atheism because no argument is going to rule out the existence of evidence the other way. The best we can do is give a really low initial probability and wait to hear arguments that swing us the other way AND show that some conceptions of God are contradictory or impossible.
Edit- You’re right though, if you mean that there is a problem with the phrasing “maximally unlikely” if there is still a chance for its existence. Certainly “maximally unlikely” cannot mean “0”.
really like LW and the idea of a place where objective, unbiased truth is The Way.
Something about this phrase bothers me. I think you may be confused as to what is meant by The Way.
It isn’t about any specific truth, much less Truth. It is about rationality, ways to get at the truth and update when it turns out that truth was incomplete, or facts change, and so on.
Promoting an abstract truth is very much -not- the point. I think it will help your confusion if you can wrap your head around this. My apologies if these words don’t help.
Theism is the first, and oldest problem. We have freed ourselves from it, yes, but that does not mean we have solved it. There are still churches.
If we really intend to make more rationalists, theism will be the first hurdle, and there will be an art to clearing that hurdle quickly, cleanly, and with a minimum of pain for the deconverted. I see no reason not to spend time honing that art.
First, the subject is discussed to death. Second, our target audience at this stage is almost entirely atheists; you start on the people who are closest. Insofar as there are theists we could draw in, we will probably deconvert them more effectively by raising the sanity waterline and having them drown religion without our explicit guidance on the subject; this will also do more to improve their rationality skills than explicit deconversion.
We should teach healthy habits of thought, not fight religion explicitly. People should be able to feel horrified by the insanity of supernatural beliefs for themselves, not argued into considering them inferior to the alternatives.
The problem with current techniques is that nothing works reliably. If you can go so high as to have a document that works to deconvert 10% of educated theists, then you can start examining for regularities in what worked and didn’t work. The trouble is reaching that high initial bar.
The problem with current techniques is that nothing works reliably. If you can go so high as to have a document that works to deconvert 10% of educated theists, then you can start examining for regularities in what worked and didn’t work. The trouble is reaching that high initial bar.
The first place that springs to mind to look is deconversion-oriented documents that theists warn each other off and which they are given prepared opinions on. The God Delusion is my favourite current example—if you ever hear a theist dissing it, ask if they’ve read it; it’s likely they won’t have, and will (hopefully) be embarrassed by having been caught cutting’n’pasting someone else’s opinions. What others are there that have produced this effect?
People are more willing than you might think to openly deride books they admit that they have never read. I know this because I write Twilight fanfiction.
I am very curious about your take on those who attack Twilight for being anti-feminist, specifically for encouraging young girls to engage in male-dependency fantasies.
I’ve heard tons of this sort of criticism from men and women alike, and since you appear to be the de facto voice of feminism on Lesswrong, I would very much appreciate any insight you might be able to give. Are these accusations simply overblown nonsense in your view? If you have already addressed this, would you be kind enough to post a link?
I really don’t want to be the voice of feminism anywhere. However, I’m willing to be the voice of Twilight apologism, so:
Bella is presented as an accident-prone, self-sacrificing human, frequently putting herself in legitimately dangerous situations for poorly thought out reasons. If you read into the dynamics of vampire pairing-off, which I think is sufficiently obvious that I poured it wholesale into my fic, this is sufficient for Edward to go a little nuts. Gender needn’t enter into it. He’s a vampire, nigh-indestructible, and he’s irrevocably in love with someone extremely fragile who will not stop putting herself in myriad situations that he evaluates as dangerous.
He should just turn her, of course, but he has his own issues with considering that a form of death, which aren’t addressed head-on in the canon at all; he only turns her when the alternative is immediate death rather than slow gentle death by aging. So instead of course he resorts to being a moderately controlling “rescuer”—of course he does things like disable her car so she can’t go visiting wolves over his warnings. Wolves are dangerous enough to threaten vampires, and Edward lives in a world where violence is a first or at least a second resort to everything. Bella’s life is more valuable to him than it is to her, and she shows it. It’s a miracle he didn’t go spare to the point of locking her in a basement, given that he refused to make her a vampire. (Am I saying Bella should have meekly accepted that he wanted to manage her life? No, I’m saying she should have gotten over her romantic notion that Edward needed to turn her himself and gotten it over with. After she’s a vampire in canon, she’s no longer dependent—emotionally attached, definitely, and they’re keeping an eye on her to make sure she doesn’t eat anybody, but she’s no longer liable to be killed in a car accident or anything and there’s no further attempt ever to restrict her movement. She winds up being a pivotal figure in the final battle, which no one even suggests keeping her away from.)
Note that gender has nothing to do with any of this. The same dynamic would play out with any unwilling-to-turn-people vampire who mated to any reckless human. It’s fully determined by those personality traits, this vampire tendency, and the relative fragility of humans. So, to hold that this dynamic makes Twilight anti-feminist is to hold one of the following ridiculous positions:
the mate bond as implied in the series is intrinsically anti-feminist (even though there’s nothing obviously stopping it from playing out with gay couples, or female vampires with male humans)
it was somehow irresponsible to choose to write a heterosexual human female perspective character (...?)
it was antifeminist to write a vampire love interest who wasn’t all for the idea of turning his mate immediately (it is completely unclear how Edward’s internal turmoil about whether turning is death has anything to do with feminism in the abstract, so his individual application of this quandary to Bella can’t be much more so)
Other feminist accusations fail trivially. Bella doesn’t get an abortion. So? She doesn’t want one! It’s called “pro-choice”, not “pro-attacking-a-pregnant-woman-because-your-judgment-overrides-hers”. Etcetera.
I haven’t read Twilight, and I don’t criticize books I haven’t read, but I do object in general to the idea that something can’t be ideologically offensive just because it’s justified in-story.
Birth of a Nation, for example, depicts the founding of the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic response to a bestial, aggressive black militia that’s been terrorizing the countryside. In the presence of a bestial, aggressive black militia, forming the KKK isn’t really a racist thing to do. But the movie is still racist as all hell for contriving a situation where forming the KKK makes sense.
Similarly, I’d view a thriller about an evil international conspiracy of Jewish bankers with profound suspicion.
Well, sure, but men who think women need to stay in the kitchen for their own good are. What makes Twilight sound bad is that it’s recreating something that actually happens, and something that plenty of people think should happen more, in a context where it makes more sense.
There are other female characters in the story. Alice can see enough to dance circles around the average opponent. Rosalie runs around doing things. Esme’s kind of ineffectual, but then, her husband isn’t made out to be great shakes in a fight either. Victoria spends two books as the main antagonist. Jane is scary as hell. And—I repeat—the minute Bella is not fragile, there is no more of the objectionable attitude.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that the Edward/Bella dynamic wasn’t written to appeal to patriarchal tendencies, and just arose naturally from the plot. I’m completely unequipped to argue about whether or not this was the case. But I’m pretty confident the reason people who haven’t read the book think it sounds anti-feminist is that we assume that Stephenie Meyer started with the Edward-Bella relationship and built the characters and the world around it.
First of all, thanks for taking the time to give an in-depth response.
I personally have misgivings similar to those expressed by HonoreDB, insofar as it seems that although the fantastical elements of the story do ‘justify’ the situation in a sense, they appear to be designed to do so.
I felt that these sort of plot devices were essentially a post hoc excuse to perpetuate a sort of knight-in-shining-armor dynamic in order to tantalize a somewhat young and ideologically vulnerable audience in the interest of turning a quick buck.
Then again, I may be being somewhat oversensitive, or I may be letting my external biases (I personally don’t care for the young adult fantasy genre) cloud my judgment.
I don’t credit Stephenie Meyer with enough intelligence to have figured out this line of reasoning. I think it’s most likely that Meyer created situations so that Edward could save Bella, and due to either lack of imagination or inability to notice, the preponderance of dangerous situations (and especially dangerous people) ended up very high—high enough to give smarter people ideas like violence is just more common in that world.
That said, my views on Twilight are extremely biased by my social group.
My idea that violence is common in the Twilight world is not primarily fueled by danger to Bella in particular. I was mostly thinking of, say, Bree’s death, or the stories about newborn armies and how they’re controlled, or the fact that the overwhelming majority of vampires commit murder on a regular basis.
I have a friend currently researching this precise topic; she adores reading Twilight and simultaneously thinks that it is completely damaging for young women to be reading. The distinction she drew, as far as I understood it, was that (1) Twilight is a very, very alluring fantasy—one day an immortal, beautiful man falls permanently in love with you for the rest of time and (2) canon!Edward is terrifying when considered not through the lens of Bella. Things like him watching her sleep before they’d spoken properly; he’s not someone you want to hold up as a good candidate for romance.
(I personally have not read it, though I’ve read Alicorn’s fanfic and been told a reasonable amount of detail by friends.)
The problem with current techniques is that nothing works reliably. If you can go so high as to have a document that works to deconvert 10% of educated theists, then you can start examining for regularities in what worked and didn’t work. The trouble is reaching that high initial bar.
It seems to me that Derren Brown once did some sort of demonstration in which he mass-converted some atheists to theists, and/or vice versa. Perhaps we should investigate what he did. ;-)
Even where it’s obvious, you should add textual description for the links you give. This is the same courtesy as not saying just “Voted up”, but adding at least some new content in the same note.
That only rules out the most surface-obvious of patterns. And I doubt anyone has tried deconverting someone in an MRI machine. It’s too early to give up.
They are potential future rationalists. They’re even (something like) potential present rationalists; that is, someone can be a pretty good rationalist in most contexts while remaining a theist. This is precisely because the internal forces discouraging them from changing can be so strong.
Theism is the first, and oldest problem. We have freed ourselves from it, yes, but that does not mean we have solved it. There are still churches.
Indeed. When a community contains more than a critical number of theists, their irrational decision making can harm themselves and the whole community. By deconverting theists, we help them and everyone else.
I’d like to see a discussion on the best ways to deconvert theists.
Here’s the open-and-shut case against theism: People often tell stories to make themselves feel better. Many of these stories tell of various invisible and undetectable entities. Theory 1 is that all such stories are fabrications; Theory 2 is that an arbitrary one is true and the rest are fabrications. Theory 2 contains more burdensome detail but doesn’t predict the data better than Theory 1.
Although to theists this isn’t a very convincing argument, it is a knock-down argument if you’re a Bayesian wannabe with sane priors.
Y’all are misunderstanding theists main reason for belief when you attack it’s likelihood. They don’t think God sounds likely, but that it’s better to assume God exists so you can at least pretend one’s happiness is justified; god gives hope and hopelessness is the enemy. That’s the argument you’d need to undermine to deconvert people. I’m not articulate to do that, so I link someone who writes for a living instead.
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2008/11/a-safe-place-to-land.html
Thank you. Eliezer’s an interesting read, but I prefer to link to rationalists outside this community when possible… enough people have already read his work that I’d want to get in some new ideas, and because we need more girls.
Yet another post from me about theism?
This time, pushing for a more clearly articulated position. Yes, I realize that I am not endearing myself by continuing this line of debate. However, I have good reasons for pursuing.
I really like LW and the idea of a place where objective, unbiased truth is The Way. Since I idealistically believe in Aumann’s Agreement theorem, I think that we are only a small number of debates away from agreement.
To the extent to which LW aligns itself with a particular point of view, it must be able to defend that view. I don’t want LW to be wrong, and am willing to be a nuisance to make sure.
If defending atheism is not a first priority, can we continue using religion as a convenient example of irrationality, even as the enemy of rationality?
There is a definite sense that theism is not worth debating, that the case is “open-and-shut”. If so, it should be straight-forward to draft a master argument. (Five separate posts of analogies is not strong evidence in my Bayesian calculation that the case is open-and-shut.)
A clear and definitive argument against theism would make it possible for theists (and yourselves, as devil’s advocates) to debate specific points that are not covered adequately in the argument. (If you are about to downvote me on this comment, think about how important it would be to permit debate on an ideology that is important to this group. Right now it is difficult to debate whether religion is rational because there is no central argument to argue with.)
Relative to the ‘typical view’, atheism is radical. How does a religious person visiting this site become convinced that you’re not just a rationality site with a high proportion of atheists?
(Um, this started as a reply to your comment but quickly became its own “idea I’m not ready to post” on deconversions and how we could accomplish them quickly.)
Upvoted. It took me months of reading to finally decide I was wrong. If we could put that “aha” moment in one document… well, we could do a lot of good.
Deconversions are tricky though. Did anyone here ever read Kissing Hank’s Ass? It’s a scathing moral indictment of mainline Christianity. I read it when I was 15 and couldn’t sleep for most of a night.
And the next day, I pretty much decided to ignore it. I deconverted seven years later.
I believe the truth matters, and I believe you do a person a favor by deconverting them. But if you’ve been in for a while, if you’ve grown dependent on, for example, believing in an eternal life… there’s a lot of pain in deconversion, and your mind’s going to work hard to avoid it. We need to be prepared for that.
If I were to distill the reason I became an atheist into a few words, it would look something like:
Ontologically fundamental mental things don’t make sense, but the human mind is wired to expect them. Fish swim in a sea of water, humans swim in a sea of minds. But mental things are complicated. In order to understand them you have to break them down into parts, something we’re still working hard to do. If you say “the universe exists because someone created it,” it feels like you’ve explained something, because agents are part of the most fundamental building blocks from which you build your world. But agency, intelligence, desire, and all the rest, are complicated properties which have a specific history here on earth. Sort of like cheesecake. Or the foxtrot. Or socialism.
If somebody started talking about the earth starting because of cheesecake, you’d wonder where the cheesecake came from. You’d look in a history book or a cook book and discover that the cheesecake has its origins in the roman empire, as a result of, well, people being hungry, and as a result of cows existing, and on and on, and you’d wonder how all those complex causes could produce a cheesecake predating the universe, and what sense it would make cut off from the rich causal net in which we find cheesecakes embedded today. Intelligence should not be any different. Agency trips up Occam’s rasor, because humans are wired to expect there to always be agents about. But an explanation of the universe which contains an agent is an incredibly complicated theory, which only presents itself to us for consideration because of our biases.
A complicated theory that you never would have thought of in the first place had you been less biased is not a theory that might still be right—it’s just plain wrong. In the same sense that, if you’re looking for a murderer in New York city, and you bring a suspect in on the advice of one of your lieutenants, and then it turns out the lieutenant picked the suspect by reading a horoscope, you have the wrong guy. You don’t keep him there because he might be the murderer after all, and you may as well make sure. With all of New York to canvas, you let him go, and you start over. So too with agency-based explanations of the universe’s beginning.
I’ve rambled terribly, and were that a top-level post, or a “master argument” it would have to be cleaned up considerably, but what I have just said is why I am an atheist, and not a clever argument I invented to support it.
These two sentences, particularly the second, just explained for me why humans expect minds to be ontologically fundamental. Thank you!
Thank you for bringing this post to my attention! I’m going to use those lines.
You’re right; yet no one ever sees it this way. Before Darwin, no one said, “This idea that an intelligent creator existed first doesn’t simplify things.”
Here is something I think would be useful: A careful information-theoretic explanation of why God must be complicated. When you explain, to Christians, that it doesn’t make sense to say complexity originated because God created it and God must be complicated, Christians reply (and I’m generalizing here because I’ve heard these replies so many times) one of 2 things:
God is outside of space and time, so causality doesn’t apply. (I don’t know how to respond to this.)
God is not complicated. God is simple. God is the pure essence of being, the First Cause. Think of a perfect circle. That’s what God is like.
It shouldn’t be hard to explain that, if God knows at least what is in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, God has at least enough complexity to store that information.
Of course, putting this explanation on LW might do no good to anybody.
Keep in mind that if this complexity was derived from looking at external phenomena, or at the output of some simple computation, it doesn’t reduce the prior probability.
Except that the library of all possible books includes the Encyclopedia Brittanica but is far simpler.
Presumably, God can also distinguish between “the set of books with useful information” and “the set of books containing only nonsense”. That is quite complex indeed.
I’m afraid I wasn’t clear. I am not arguing that “god” is simple or that it explains anything. I’m just saying that god’s knowledge is compressible into an intelligent generator (AI).
The source code isn’t likely to be 10 lines, but then again, it doesn’t have to include the Encyclopedia of Brittanica to tell you everything that the encyclopedia can once it grows up and learns.
F=m*a is enough to let you draw out all physically possible trajectories from the set of all trajectories, and it is still rather simple.
You say: You’re right; yet no one ever sees it this way. Before Darwin, no one said, “This idea that an intelligent creator existed first doesn’t simplify things.”
I may have to look up where before Darwin it gets argued, but I am pretty sure people challenged that before Darwin.
It might be why you’re an atheist, but do you think it would have swayed your christian self much? I highly doubt that your post would come near to deconverting anyone. Many religious people believe that souls are essential for creativity and intelligence, and they won’t accept the “you’re wired to see intelligence” argument if they disbelieve in evolution (not uncommon.)
To deconvert people to atheism quickly, I think you need a sledgehammer. I still haven’t found a really good one. Here are some areas that might be promising:
Ask them why God won’t drop a grapefruit from the sky to show he exists. “He loves me more than I can imagine, right? And more than anything he wants me to know him right? And he’s all powerful, right?” To their response: “Why does God consider blindly believing in him in the absence of evidence virtuous? Isn’t that sort of think a made-up religion would say about their god to keep people faithful?”
The Problem of Evil: why do innocent babies suffer and die from disease?
I’ve heard there are lots of contradictions in the bible. Maybe someone who is really dedicated could find some that are really compelling. Personally, I’m not interested enough in this topic to spend time reading religious texts, but more power to those who are.
A few moderately promising ones: Why does God heal cancer patients but not amputees? Why do different religious denominations disagree, when they could just ask God for the answer? Why would a benevolent God send people who happened to be unlucky enough not to hear about him to enternal damnation?
I think a very straightforward contradiction is here: http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/horsemen.html
2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles are supposed to be parallels, telling the same story. Yet one of them probably lost or gained a zero along the way. Many christians that see this are foreced to retreat to a more ‘soft’ interpretation of the bible that allows for errors in transactiption etc. It’s the closest to a quick ‘n’ dirty sledgehammer I have ever had. And a folow-up: Why hasn’t this been discussed in your church? Surely, a group of truthseekers wouldn’t shy away from such fundamental criticisms, even to diffuse them.
Problem is, theists of reasonable intelligence spend a good deal of time honing and rehearsing their replies to these. They might be slightly uneasy with their replies, but if the alternative is letting go of all they hold dear, then they’ll hold to their guns. Catching them off guard is a slightly better tactic.
Or, to put it another way: if there were such a sledgehammer lying around, Richard Dawkins (or some other New Atheist) would be using it right now. Dawkins uses all the points you listed, and more; and the majority of people don’t budge.
Well...it did sway my Christian self. My Christian self generated those arguments and they, with help from Eliezer’s writings against self-deception, annihilated that self.
That’s as good of an exposition of this point as any I’ve seen. It deserves to be cleaned up and posted visibly, here on LW or somewhere else.
thanks =)
So
(x) : x is a possible entity. the more complicated x is the less likely it is to exist controlling for other evidence.
(x): x is a possible entity. the more intelligent x the more complicated x is, controlling for other properties.
God is maximally intelligent.
:. God’s existence is maximally unlikely unless there is other evidence or unless it has other properties that make its existence maximally more likely.
(Assume intelligent to refer to the possession of general intelligence)
I think most theists will consent to (1), especially given that its implicit in some of their favorite arguments. (3) They consent to, unless they mean “God” as merely a cosmological constant, or first cause. In which case we’re having a completely different debate. So the issue is (2). I’m sure some of the cognitive science types can give evidence for why intelligence is necessarily complicated. There is however, definitive evidence for the correlation of intelligence and complexity. Human brains are vastly more complex than the brains of other animals. Computers get more complicated the more information they hold, etc. It might actually be worth making the distinction, between intelligence and the holding of data. It is a lot easier to see how the more information something contains the more complicated something is since one can just compare two sets of data, one bigger than the other, and see that one is more complicated. Presumably, God needs to contain information on everyone’s behavior, the the events that happen at any point in time, prayer requests etc.
Btw, is there a way for me to us symbolic logic notation in xml?
hmm...if we can get embedded images to work, we’re set.
http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?\int_a^b\frac{1}{\sqrt{x}}dx
Click that link, and you’ll get a rendered png of the LaTeX expression I’ve placed after the ?. Replace that expression with another and, well, you’ll get that too. If you’re writing a top-level post, you can use this to pretty quickly embed equations. Not sure how to make it useful in a comment though.
Here it is: ∫ba1√xdx
Source code:
(It was mentioned before.)
awesome =)
I think you are looking at this from an evolutionary point of view? Then it makes sense to make statements like “more and more complex states are less likely” (i.e., they take more time) and “intelligence increases with the complexity” (of organisms).
Outside this context, though, I have trouble understanding what is meant by “complicated” or why “more intelligent” should be more complex. In fact, you could skip right from (1) to (3) -- most theists would be comfortable asserting that God is maximally complex. However, is response to (1) they might counter with—if something does exist, you can’t use its improbability to negate that it exists.
I’m not sure most theists would be comfortable asserting that God is maximally complex.
The wikipedia article Complexity looks helpful.
It is true that if something does exist you can’t use its improbability to negate its existence. But this option is allowed for in the argument; “unless there is other evidence or it has other properties that make its existence maximally more likely”. So if God is, say, necessary, then he is going to exist no matter his likelihood. What this argument does is set a really low prior for the probability that God exists. There is never going to be one argument that proves atheism because no argument is going to rule out the existence of evidence the other way. The best we can do is give a really low initial probability and wait to hear arguments that swing us the other way AND show that some conceptions of God are contradictory or impossible.
Edit- You’re right though, if you mean that there is a problem with the phrasing “maximally unlikely” if there is still a chance for its existence. Certainly “maximally unlikely” cannot mean “0”.
Something about this phrase bothers me. I think you may be confused as to what is meant by The Way. It isn’t about any specific truth, much less Truth. It is about rationality, ways to get at the truth and update when it turns out that truth was incomplete, or facts change, and so on.
Promoting an abstract truth is very much -not- the point. I think it will help your confusion if you can wrap your head around this. My apologies if these words don’t help.
I would prefer us not to talk about theism all that much. We should be testing ourselves against harder problems.
Theism is the first, and oldest problem. We have freed ourselves from it, yes, but that does not mean we have solved it. There are still churches.
If we really intend to make more rationalists, theism will be the first hurdle, and there will be an art to clearing that hurdle quickly, cleanly, and with a minimum of pain for the deconverted. I see no reason not to spend time honing that art.
First, the subject is discussed to death. Second, our target audience at this stage is almost entirely atheists; you start on the people who are closest. Insofar as there are theists we could draw in, we will probably deconvert them more effectively by raising the sanity waterline and having them drown religion without our explicit guidance on the subject; this will also do more to improve their rationality skills than explicit deconversion.
sigh You’re probably right.
I have a lot of theists in my family and in my social circle, and part of me still wants to view them as potential future rationalists.
We should teach healthy habits of thought, not fight religion explicitly. People should be able to feel horrified by the insanity of supernatural beliefs for themselves, not argued into considering them inferior to the alternatives.
When you don’t have a science, the first step is to look for patterns. How about assembling an archive of de-conversions that worked?
The problem with current techniques is that nothing works reliably. If you can go so high as to have a document that works to deconvert 10% of educated theists, then you can start examining for regularities in what worked and didn’t work. The trouble is reaching that high initial bar.
The first place that springs to mind to look is deconversion-oriented documents that theists warn each other off and which they are given prepared opinions on. The God Delusion is my favourite current example—if you ever hear a theist dissing it, ask if they’ve read it; it’s likely they won’t have, and will (hopefully) be embarrassed by having been caught cutting’n’pasting someone else’s opinions. What others are there that have produced this effect?
People are more willing than you might think to openly deride books they admit that they have never read. I know this because I write Twilight fanfiction.
Almost as if their are other means than just personal experience by which to collect evidence.
“Standing on the shoulders of giants hurling insults at Stephenie Meyer’s.”
I am very curious about your take on those who attack Twilight for being anti-feminist, specifically for encouraging young girls to engage in male-dependency fantasies.
I’ve heard tons of this sort of criticism from men and women alike, and since you appear to be the de facto voice of feminism on Lesswrong, I would very much appreciate any insight you might be able to give. Are these accusations simply overblown nonsense in your view? If you have already addressed this, would you be kind enough to post a link?
I really don’t want to be the voice of feminism anywhere. However, I’m willing to be the voice of Twilight apologism, so:
Bella is presented as an accident-prone, self-sacrificing human, frequently putting herself in legitimately dangerous situations for poorly thought out reasons. If you read into the dynamics of vampire pairing-off, which I think is sufficiently obvious that I poured it wholesale into my fic, this is sufficient for Edward to go a little nuts. Gender needn’t enter into it. He’s a vampire, nigh-indestructible, and he’s irrevocably in love with someone extremely fragile who will not stop putting herself in myriad situations that he evaluates as dangerous.
He should just turn her, of course, but he has his own issues with considering that a form of death, which aren’t addressed head-on in the canon at all; he only turns her when the alternative is immediate death rather than slow gentle death by aging. So instead of course he resorts to being a moderately controlling “rescuer”—of course he does things like disable her car so she can’t go visiting wolves over his warnings. Wolves are dangerous enough to threaten vampires, and Edward lives in a world where violence is a first or at least a second resort to everything. Bella’s life is more valuable to him than it is to her, and she shows it. It’s a miracle he didn’t go spare to the point of locking her in a basement, given that he refused to make her a vampire. (Am I saying Bella should have meekly accepted that he wanted to manage her life? No, I’m saying she should have gotten over her romantic notion that Edward needed to turn her himself and gotten it over with. After she’s a vampire in canon, she’s no longer dependent—emotionally attached, definitely, and they’re keeping an eye on her to make sure she doesn’t eat anybody, but she’s no longer liable to be killed in a car accident or anything and there’s no further attempt ever to restrict her movement. She winds up being a pivotal figure in the final battle, which no one even suggests keeping her away from.)
Note that gender has nothing to do with any of this. The same dynamic would play out with any unwilling-to-turn-people vampire who mated to any reckless human. It’s fully determined by those personality traits, this vampire tendency, and the relative fragility of humans. So, to hold that this dynamic makes Twilight anti-feminist is to hold one of the following ridiculous positions:
the mate bond as implied in the series is intrinsically anti-feminist (even though there’s nothing obviously stopping it from playing out with gay couples, or female vampires with male humans)
it was somehow irresponsible to choose to write a heterosexual human female perspective character (...?)
it was antifeminist to write a vampire love interest who wasn’t all for the idea of turning his mate immediately (it is completely unclear how Edward’s internal turmoil about whether turning is death has anything to do with feminism in the abstract, so his individual application of this quandary to Bella can’t be much more so)
Other feminist accusations fail trivially. Bella doesn’t get an abortion. So? She doesn’t want one! It’s called “pro-choice”, not “pro-attacking-a-pregnant-woman-because-your-judgment-overrides-hers”. Etcetera.
I haven’t read Twilight, and I don’t criticize books I haven’t read, but I do object in general to the idea that something can’t be ideologically offensive just because it’s justified in-story.
Birth of a Nation, for example, depicts the founding of the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic response to a bestial, aggressive black militia that’s been terrorizing the countryside. In the presence of a bestial, aggressive black militia, forming the KKK isn’t really a racist thing to do. But the movie is still racist as all hell for contriving a situation where forming the KKK makes sense.
Similarly, I’d view a thriller about an evil international conspiracy of Jewish bankers with profound suspicion.
I think it’s relevant here that vampires are not real.
Well, sure, but men who think women need to stay in the kitchen for their own good are. What makes Twilight sound bad is that it’s recreating something that actually happens, and something that plenty of people think should happen more, in a context where it makes more sense.
There are other female characters in the story. Alice can see enough to dance circles around the average opponent. Rosalie runs around doing things. Esme’s kind of ineffectual, but then, her husband isn’t made out to be great shakes in a fight either. Victoria spends two books as the main antagonist. Jane is scary as hell. And—I repeat—the minute Bella is not fragile, there is no more of the objectionable attitude.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that the Edward/Bella dynamic wasn’t written to appeal to patriarchal tendencies, and just arose naturally from the plot. I’m completely unequipped to argue about whether or not this was the case. But I’m pretty confident the reason people who haven’t read the book think it sounds anti-feminist is that we assume that Stephenie Meyer started with the Edward-Bella relationship and built the characters and the world around it.
Alicorn,
First of all, thanks for taking the time to give an in-depth response.
I personally have misgivings similar to those expressed by HonoreDB, insofar as it seems that although the fantastical elements of the story do ‘justify’ the situation in a sense, they appear to be designed to do so.
I felt that these sort of plot devices were essentially a post hoc excuse to perpetuate a sort of knight-in-shining-armor dynamic in order to tantalize a somewhat young and ideologically vulnerable audience in the interest of turning a quick buck.
Then again, I may be being somewhat oversensitive, or I may be letting my external biases (I personally don’t care for the young adult fantasy genre) cloud my judgment.
I don’t credit Stephenie Meyer with enough intelligence to have figured out this line of reasoning. I think it’s most likely that Meyer created situations so that Edward could save Bella, and due to either lack of imagination or inability to notice, the preponderance of dangerous situations (and especially dangerous people) ended up very high—high enough to give smarter people ideas like violence is just more common in that world.
That said, my views on Twilight are extremely biased by my social group.
My idea that violence is common in the Twilight world is not primarily fueled by danger to Bella in particular. I was mostly thinking of, say, Bree’s death, or the stories about newborn armies and how they’re controlled, or the fact that the overwhelming majority of vampires commit murder on a regular basis.
I have a friend currently researching this precise topic; she adores reading Twilight and simultaneously thinks that it is completely damaging for young women to be reading. The distinction she drew, as far as I understood it, was that (1) Twilight is a very, very alluring fantasy—one day an immortal, beautiful man falls permanently in love with you for the rest of time and (2) canon!Edward is terrifying when considered not through the lens of Bella. Things like him watching her sleep before they’d spoken properly; he’s not someone you want to hold up as a good candidate for romance.
(I personally have not read it, though I’ve read Alicorn’s fanfic and been told a reasonable amount of detail by friends.)
Yes, but catching them out can be fun :-)
It seems to me that Derren Brown once did some sort of demonstration in which he mass-converted some atheists to theists, and/or vice versa. Perhaps we should investigate what he did. ;-)
Textual description of what Brown did
Video discussion
(Updated following Vladimir_Nesov’s comment—thanks!)
Even where it’s obvious, you should add textual description for the links you give. This is the same courtesy as not saying just “Voted up”, but adding at least some new content in the same note.
Fixed, thanks!
You sound real sure of that. Since it’s you saying it, you probably have data. Can you link it so I can see?
If something worked that reliably, wouldn’t we know about it? Wouldn’t it, for example, be seen many times in one of these lists of deconversion stories?
That only rules out the most surface-obvious of patterns. And I doubt anyone has tried deconverting someone in an MRI machine. It’s too early to give up.
No-one’s giving up, but until we find such a way we have to proceed in its absence.
They are potential future rationalists. They’re even (something like) potential present rationalists; that is, someone can be a pretty good rationalist in most contexts while remaining a theist. This is precisely because the internal forces discouraging them from changing can be so strong.
Indeed. When a community contains more than a critical number of theists, their irrational decision making can harm themselves and the whole community. By deconverting theists, we help them and everyone else.
I’d like to see a discussion on the best ways to deconvert theists.
Capture bonding seems to be an effective method of changing beliefs.
Here’s the open-and-shut case against theism: People often tell stories to make themselves feel better. Many of these stories tell of various invisible and undetectable entities. Theory 1 is that all such stories are fabrications; Theory 2 is that an arbitrary one is true and the rest are fabrications. Theory 2 contains more burdensome detail but doesn’t predict the data better than Theory 1.
Although to theists this isn’t a very convincing argument, it is a knock-down argument if you’re a Bayesian wannabe with sane priors.
Y’all are misunderstanding theists main reason for belief when you attack it’s likelihood. They don’t think God sounds likely, but that it’s better to assume God exists so you can at least pretend one’s happiness is justified; god gives hope and hopelessness is the enemy. That’s the argument you’d need to undermine to deconvert people. I’m not articulate to do that, so I link someone who writes for a living instead. http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2008/11/a-safe-place-to-land.html
Right, it would be easier to deconvert if you give some hope about the other side. An analogous idea at LW is leaving a line of retreat.
Note: for editing (italics, etc), there’s a Help button on the lower right hand corner of the comment box.
Thank you. Eliezer’s an interesting read, but I prefer to link to rationalists outside this community when possible… enough people have already read his work that I’d want to get in some new ideas, and because we need more girls.