Chill with the downvotes, guys. Houshalter’s new, looks to be participating well in other threads, and is just stating a belief for the first time.
Houshalter, this is a tangent to the current… tangent. It might be better to discuss theism in its own Open Thread comment or within a past discussion on the topic.
On a related note, have you looked through the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence yet? Not to throw a short book’s worth of stuff at you, but there’s a lot of stuff taken for granted around here when discussing theism, the supernatural, and evidence for such.
Chill with the downvotes, guys. Houshalter’s new, looks to be participating well in other threads, and is just stating a belief for the first time.
Uh… thanks?
Houshalter, this is a tangent to the current… tangent. It might be better to discuss theism in its own Open Thread comment or within a past discussion on the topic.
I have debated my religion before, but ironically this looks like a bad place to make a stand because everyones against me and theres a karma system.
On a related note, have you looked through the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence yet? Not to throw a short book’s worth of stuff at you, but there’s a lot of stuff taken for granted around here when discussing theism, the supernatural, and evidence for such.
D: GAHHH!!! D: Hundreds of links to pages that contain hundreds of more links. D:
I have debated my religion before, but ironically this looks like a bad place to make a stand because everyones against me and theres a karma system.
Don’t take the adversarial attitude: “taking a stand”, “against me”. This leads to a broken mode of thought. Just study the concepts that will allow you to cut through semantic stopsigns and decide for yourself. Taking advice on an efficient way to learn may help as well.
Chill with the downvotes, guys. Houshalter’s new, looks to be participating well in other threads, and is just stating a belief for the first time.
Uh… thanks?
Occasionally someone will show up here and try to flame-bait us, not really arguing (or not responding to counterarguments) but just trying to provoke people with contrary opinions. (This is, after all, the Internet.) It’s obvious from your other contributions that you’re not doing that, but someone who’d only seen your two comments above might have wrongly assumed otherwise. I was explaining why the downvotes should be taken back, as it appears they were.
By the way, the mainstream view among Less Wrong readers is that any evidence we’ve seen for theism is far too weak to overcome the prior improbability of such a sneakily complex hypothesis (and that much of the evidence that we might expect from such a hypothesis is absent); but there are a few generally respectedtheists around here. The community norm on theism has more to do with how people conduct themselves in disputes than with the fact of disagreement— but you should be prepared for a lot of us to talk amongst ourselves as if atheism is a settled question, and not be too offended by that. (Consider it a role reversal from an atheist’s social interactions with typical Americans.)
I’ve enjoyed my exchanges with you so far, and look forward to more!
It’s considered poor form to delete a post or comment on LW, since it makes it impossible to tell what the replies were talking about. (Also, it doesn’t restore the karma.)
What’s preferable, if one regrets a comment, is to edit it in a manner that keeps it clear what the original comment was, or to add a disclaimer. Here’s one example— note that if cousin_it had just deleted the post, it would be more difficult to understand the comments on it.
Or a fake example:
Oh yeah, well your MOM coherently extrapolated my volition last night
It might be better to just spend some time reading the sequences. A lot of people here like myself disagree with the LW consensus views on a fair number of issues, but we have a careful enough understanding of what those consensus views are to know when to be explicit about what assumptions and what methods of reasoning we are using.
I have debated my religion before, but ironically this looks like a bad place to make a stand because everyones against me and theres a karma system.
Awwwww, I’m not against you. I just think you’re incorrect.
If you post on Less Wrong a lot, you’ll eventually say something several posters will disagree with, and some of them will say so. Try not to interpret it as a personal attack—taking it personally makes it harder to rationally evaluate new arguments and evidence.
I wouldn’t expect the karma system to be much of a problem, by the way. If I remember rightly, your karma can’t go below 0, so you can continue posting comments even if it falls to zero.
So it is. On the bright side, it looks like your karma loss is from getting downvoted on quite a lot of comments (about a dozen over the past 4 days, it looks like) rather than arguing about God as such. And I see you can still post. :-)
I downvoted several of Houshalter’s comments for containing multiple spelling and punctuation errors, though I’d upvote a well-written defense of theism.
I have debated my religion before, but ironically this looks like a bad place to make a stand because everyones against me and theres a karma system.
You’re probably getting most downvotes because, as orthonormal said, you’re going off a tangent to the current tangent, and with a somewhat adverserial stance.
Chill with the downvotes, guys. Houshalter’s new, looks to be participating well in other threads, and is just stating a belief for the first time.
Houshalter, this is a tangent to the current… tangent. It might be better to discuss theism in its own Open Thread comment or within a past discussion on the topic.
On a related note, have you looked through the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence yet? Not to throw a short book’s worth of stuff at you, but there’s a lot of stuff taken for granted around here when discussing theism, the supernatural, and evidence for such.
Uh… thanks?
I have debated my religion before, but ironically this looks like a bad place to make a stand because everyones against me and theres a karma system.
D: GAHHH!!! D: Hundreds of links to pages that contain hundreds of more links. D:
Don’t take the adversarial attitude: “taking a stand”, “against me”. This leads to a broken mode of thought. Just study the concepts that will allow you to cut through semantic stopsigns and decide for yourself. Taking advice on an efficient way to learn may help as well.
Occasionally someone will show up here and try to flame-bait us, not really arguing (or not responding to counterarguments) but just trying to provoke people with contrary opinions. (This is, after all, the Internet.) It’s obvious from your other contributions that you’re not doing that, but someone who’d only seen your two comments above might have wrongly assumed otherwise. I was explaining why the downvotes should be taken back, as it appears they were.
By the way, the mainstream view among Less Wrong readers is that any evidence we’ve seen for theism is far too weak to overcome the prior improbability of such a sneakily complex hypothesis (and that much of the evidence that we might expect from such a hypothesis is absent); but there are a few generally respected theists around here. The community norm on theism has more to do with how people conduct themselves in disputes than with the fact of disagreement— but you should be prepared for a lot of us to talk amongst ourselves as if atheism is a settled question, and not be too offended by that. (Consider it a role reversal from an atheist’s social interactions with typical Americans.)
I’ve enjoyed my exchanges with you so far, and look forward to more!
I recently found out that you can’t downvote someone past zero, so that must be why they stopped :)
I might just delete the post anyways. Ah well.
It’s considered poor form to delete a post or comment on LW, since it makes it impossible to tell what the replies were talking about. (Also, it doesn’t restore the karma.)
What’s preferable, if one regrets a comment, is to edit it in a manner that keeps it clear what the original comment was, or to add a disclaimer. Here’s one example— note that if cousin_it had just deleted the post, it would be more difficult to understand the comments on it.
Or a fake example:
should probably be edited to
if the content is to be removed.
I enjoyed that example. I would hope it wouldn’t get deleted.
It might be better to just spend some time reading the sequences. A lot of people here like myself disagree with the LW consensus views on a fair number of issues, but we have a careful enough understanding of what those consensus views are to know when to be explicit about what assumptions and what methods of reasoning we are using.
Awwwww, I’m not against you. I just think you’re incorrect.
If you post on Less Wrong a lot, you’ll eventually say something several posters will disagree with, and some of them will say so. Try not to interpret it as a personal attack—taking it personally makes it harder to rationally evaluate new arguments and evidence.
I wouldn’t expect the karma system to be much of a problem, by the way. If I remember rightly, your karma can’t go below 0, so you can continue posting comments even if it falls to zero.
It was at 20 yesterday, now its at zero.
So it is. On the bright side, it looks like your karma loss is from getting downvoted on quite a lot of comments (about a dozen over the past 4 days, it looks like) rather than arguing about God as such. And I see you can still post. :-)
I downvoted several of Houshalter’s comments for containing multiple spelling and punctuation errors, though I’d upvote a well-written defense of theism.
Hm, had you not noticed the sequences yet? The “sequences” button is next to the “about” button. There’s quite a few more of them. :)
You’re probably getting most downvotes because, as orthonormal said, you’re going off a tangent to the current tangent, and with a somewhat adverserial stance.