I’m not sure exactly what you were hoping for in response to your introduction but I hoped my experience might be interesting to you.
I wasn’t hoping for anything. I had expectations that I had assigned prior probabilities to, and could have happily continued on reading without ever mentioning anything of my epistemology. To my mind that was not the rational approach—and the guidelines that are offered are to lay your underlying assumptions bare for discussion so that people can avoid straw-manning one another. This is what I have done.
There is too much else in your comment to dissect each part, and I can’t deal with it fairly without dealing with all of it. I do appreciate your experience, and your frankness with me regarding it. It is not my experience though and you have misrepresented me in your mental model here:
To me it feels like you’ve been discovering something new (rationality) and found a way to fit it into your existing belief system.
We must be wary of what things feel like to us. Toward the end of the story section I wrote that I was doing my best to not believe—and pursued mathematics, rationality, and science toward those ends.
It sounds like you’ve discovered something new (rationality) and it has dissolved your previously felt cognitive dissonance regarding your belief. The dissolving of cognitive dissonance feels like it is confirming the side that you end up on, even though the actual evidence is sketchy at best.
***
Corrections to my previous comments:
1. Where I said:
method for choosing a prior
I should have said “method for calculating a likelihood”
2. I talk about my belief in Christianity being on a scale but this is unhelpful because of the issues discussed in No, really, I’ve deceived myself. I should have talked about “How likely I though it was that Christianity was true” being measured on a scale. This sounds the same but means I actually assessed the truth of the statement, not just my level of belief.
I wasn’t hoping for anything. I had expectations that I had assigned prior probabilities to, and could have happily continued on reading without ever mentioning anything of my epistemology. To my mind that was not the rational approach—and the guidelines that are offered are to lay your underlying assumptions bare for discussion so that people can avoid straw-manning one another. This is what I have done.
There is too much else in your comment to dissect each part, and I can’t deal with it fairly without dealing with all of it. I do appreciate your experience, and your frankness with me regarding it. It is not my experience though and you have misrepresented me in your mental model here:
We must be wary of what things feel like to us. Toward the end of the story section I wrote that I was doing my best to not believe—and pursued mathematics, rationality, and science toward those ends.
Thank you again for your response.
I’ll rephrase:
It sounds like you’ve discovered something new (rationality) and it has dissolved your previously felt cognitive dissonance regarding your belief. The dissolving of cognitive dissonance feels like it is confirming the side that you end up on, even though the actual evidence is sketchy at best.
***
Corrections to my previous comments:
1. Where I said:
I should have said “method for calculating a likelihood”
2. I talk about my belief in Christianity being on a scale but this is unhelpful because of the issues discussed in No, really, I’ve deceived myself. I should have talked about “How likely I though it was that Christianity was true” being measured on a scale. This sounds the same but means I actually assessed the truth of the statement, not just my level of belief.