And “rational” with “faithful”, and “evidence” with “feeling”, and “thought about” with “prayed for”, etc. With that many substitutions, you could turn it into just about anything.
Thanks, I’m actually glad to see your kind of comment here. The point you make is something I am very wary off, since I’ve had dramatic swings like that in the past. From Christianity to Buddhism, back to Christianity, then to Agnosticism. Each one felt final, each one felt like the most right and definite step. I’ve learned not to trust that feeling, to be a bit more skeptical and cautious.
You are correct that my post was full of non-sequiturs. That’s because I wrote it in a stream-of-thought kind of way. (I’ve also omitted a lot of thoughts.) It wasn’t meant to be an argument for anything other than “think really hard about your goals, and then do the absolute best to fulfill them.”
tl;dr: If you can spot non-sequiturs in your writing, and you put a lot of weight on the conclusion it’s pointing at, it’s a really good idea to take the time to fill in all the sequiturs.
Writing an argument in detail is a good way to improve the likelihood that your argument isn’t somewhere flawed. Consider:
Writing allows reduction. By pinning the argument to paper, you can separate each logical step, and make sure that each step makes sense in isolation.
Writing gives the argument stability. For example, the argument won’t secretly change when you think about it while you’re in a different mood. This can help to prevent you from implicitly proving different points of your argument from contradictory claims.
Writing makes your argument vastly easier to share. Like in open source software, enough eyeballs makes all bugs trivial.
Further, notice that we probably underestimate the value of improving our arguments, and are overconfident in apparently-solid logical arguments. If an argument contains 20 inferences in sequence, and you’re wrong about such inferences 5% without noticing the misstep, then you have about a 64% chance of being wrong somewhere in the argument. If you can reduce your chance of a misstep in logic to 1% per inference, then you only have an 18% chance of being wrong, somewhere. Improving the reliability of the steps in your arguments, then, has a high value-of-information—even when 1% and 5% both feel like similar amounts of uncertainty. Conjunction fallacy. It is probable, then, that we underestimate the value of information attained by subjecting ourselves to processes that improve our arguments.
If being wrong about an argument is highly costly—if you would stand to lose much by believing incorrectly—then it is well worth writing these sorts of arguments formally, and ensuring that you’re getting them right.
All that said… I suspect I know exactly what you’re talking about. I haven’t performed a similar, convulsive update myself, but I can practically feel the pressure for it in my own head, growing. I fight that update longer than parts of me think I should, because I’m afraid of strong mental attractors. If you can write the sound, solid argument publicly, I will be happy to double-check your steps.
Replace FAI with Rapture and LW with Born Again, and you can publish this “very personal account” full of non-sequiturs on a more mainstream site.
And “rational” with “faithful”, and “evidence” with “feeling”, and “thought about” with “prayed for”, etc. With that many substitutions, you could turn it into just about anything.
Thanks, I’m actually glad to see your kind of comment here. The point you make is something I am very wary off, since I’ve had dramatic swings like that in the past. From Christianity to Buddhism, back to Christianity, then to Agnosticism. Each one felt final, each one felt like the most right and definite step. I’ve learned not to trust that feeling, to be a bit more skeptical and cautious.
You are correct that my post was full of non-sequiturs. That’s because I wrote it in a stream-of-thought kind of way. (I’ve also omitted a lot of thoughts.) It wasn’t meant to be an argument for anything other than “think really hard about your goals, and then do the absolute best to fulfill them.”
tl;dr: If you can spot non-sequiturs in your writing, and you put a lot of weight on the conclusion it’s pointing at, it’s a really good idea to take the time to fill in all the sequiturs.
Writing an argument in detail is a good way to improve the likelihood that your argument isn’t somewhere flawed. Consider:
Writing allows reduction. By pinning the argument to paper, you can separate each logical step, and make sure that each step makes sense in isolation.
Writing gives the argument stability. For example, the argument won’t secretly change when you think about it while you’re in a different mood. This can help to prevent you from implicitly proving different points of your argument from contradictory claims.
Writing makes your argument vastly easier to share. Like in open source software, enough eyeballs makes all bugs trivial.
Further, notice that we probably underestimate the value of improving our arguments, and are overconfident in apparently-solid logical arguments. If an argument contains 20 inferences in sequence, and you’re wrong about such inferences 5% without noticing the misstep, then you have about a 64% chance of being wrong somewhere in the argument. If you can reduce your chance of a misstep in logic to 1% per inference, then you only have an 18% chance of being wrong, somewhere. Improving the reliability of the steps in your arguments, then, has a high value-of-information—even when 1% and 5% both feel like similar amounts of uncertainty. Conjunction fallacy. It is probable, then, that we underestimate the value of information attained by subjecting ourselves to processes that improve our arguments.
If being wrong about an argument is highly costly—if you would stand to lose much by believing incorrectly—then it is well worth writing these sorts of arguments formally, and ensuring that you’re getting them right.
All that said… I suspect I know exactly what you’re talking about. I haven’t performed a similar, convulsive update myself, but I can practically feel the pressure for it in my own head, growing. I fight that update longer than parts of me think I should, because I’m afraid of strong mental attractors. If you can write the sound, solid argument publicly, I will be happy to double-check your steps.
Yes. Even if this one is right, you’re still running on corrupt hardware and need to know when to consciously lower your enthusiasm.