Aren’t Europeans and Asians more likely to be open to rationality, if only because of their atheism?
Assuming you consider believing in zero gods rational… Why privilege one number out of infinitely many? On the other hand, maybe you meant agnostic.
People without the need to believe in supernatural, whether organized or not, whether called God or Communism or Dear Leader or Fair Universe, have always been a small minority, a tail of the Bell curve of belief strength. Thus I would not expect the mainstream beliefs to affect the fraction of people looking for non-mysterious answers. Of course, this model might be bad, I have not done any research in the area.
If we want Friendly-AI to be developed, should we be translating the sequences into Chinese and Hindu as quickly as possible?
One could just as easily argue that exposing more people to EY’s ideas could lead to more dangerous AI research by rogue groups, so maybe they should be kept under wraps!
While I think I see why the parent was downvoted, I would add that in my experience atheism doesn’t correlate very strongly with rationality, insofar as rationaltiy can be said to mean anything. I know plenty of successful scientists who are Christian. I know plenty of atheists who repeatedly make poor life choices. Telling me someone is religious does not help me predict whether I will be able to beat them on any practical contest of wits or reasoning.
The majority of Chinese I have encountered both inside and outside of China believe in traditional Chinese medicine, including the healing powers of chi and all the other aspects that are no better than homeopathy. Of course all of these individuals have claimed to be atheists. There are many flavors of systematic irrationality.
While I think I see why the parent was downvoted, I would add that in my experience atheism doesn’t correlate very strongly with rationality, insofar as rationaltiy can be said to mean anything. I know plenty of successful scientists who are Christian. I know plenty of atheists who repeatedly make poor life choices. Telling me someone is religious does not help me predict whether I will be able to beat them on any practical contest of wits or reasoning.
It should do so but it is only a weak predictor. See for example,the GSS data which shows a correlation between vocab (as measured by WORDSUM) and lack of belief in God. Vocabulary is a predictor of general intelligence (high correlation with IQ and Wonderlic for example) whether or not one one corrects for education level (although some complicated things happen in terms of parental education level). The GSS is not the only data set which shows this sort of pattern. The result is weak but statistically robust.
Your argument was atheism is weakly correlated with vocab. Vocab is weakly correlated with intelligence. Therefore, atheism is weakly correlated with intelligence.
Ah, I see your point. However, a) vocab is highly correlated with intelligence, not weakly so, b) vocab is not just highly correlated with a single intelligence metric, but is correlated with such in a variety of different metrics of intelligence. While it is possible to construct variables such that A and B are correlated, with B and C correlated, and A and C anti-correlated, it is quite difficult to do so with a large set of distinct variables that all have such correlations with each other and have a single pair be anti-correlated, especially when one has the same set of correlations even when one controls for a variety of other variables. Moreover, as a probabilistic matter if one as three variables with two pairs correlated, it is much more likely that the remaining pair will be correlated than anti-correlated, assuming that variables don’t have too pathological a distribution.
Moreover, as a probabilistic matter if one as three variables with two pairs correlated, it is much more likely that the remaining pair will be correlated than anti-correlated, assuming that variables don’t have too pathological a distribution.
Where you you get that? The intended probability space isn’t clear, but if I take three random directions in N-dimensional space for large N, I find that the chance of two pairs having an angle less than pi/2 and the third an angle greater than pi/2 is about 1.4 times the chance of all three being less than pi/2. The ratio rises to about 3 if I add the requirement that the corresponding correlations are in the range +/- 0.8 (the upper liit of correlations generally found in psychology).
Hmm, that’s a good point. I’m aware vaguely of theorems that say what I want but I don’t have any references or descriptions off hand. It may just be that one is assuming somewhat low N, but that would be in this sort of context not helpful. I do seem to remember that some version of my statement is true if the variables match bell curves, but I’m not able at the moment to construct or find a precise statement. Consider the claim withdrawn until I’ve had more time to look into the matter.
I would add that in my experience atheism doesn’t correlate very strongly with rationality, insofar as rationaltiy can be said to mean anything. I know plenty of successful scientists who are Christian. I know plenty of atheists who repeatedly make poor life choices. Telling me someone is religious does not help me predict whether I will be able to beat them on any practical contest of wits or reasoning.
Refuting a statistical claim with anecdotal data is usually not very helpful.
Caring about a hypothesis isn’t an aspect of simplicity for evaluating the hypotheses. Obviously some questions are more or less interesting. But the idea that questions concerning the existence or nature of deities as uninteresting doesn’t make much sense. If any form of classical deity exists then the deity has serious concerns about how we act and it will impact our lives in this life or the next life. At the same time, if such a deity does exist then issues of existential risk are either irrelevant or minimal. But if no such deity exists then existential risk becomes a severe concern. Acting like these questions don’t matter is irrational for almost any goal-set.
Existence or non-existence of a deity is not a question that can be answered experimentally
That’s wrong for at least three reasons.
First, while certain deific claims that are so vague as to be close to meaningless cannot be falsified, most deities don’t fall into that category. For example, all the classical Abrahamic religions make testable claims. Religions have only adapted to more generic, harder to test claims when those claims failed. There’s a relevant bit in the sequences about this.
Second, even weaker claims like vaguely just deities who watch over everything easily lead to essentially testable consequences. Indeed, some of these, like the existential risk issue mentioned earlier are not only testable but are highly relevant to society: if a deity is watching over in any way then we don’t need to worry nearly as much about existential risk. If there is no such entity, things become a lot more serious. So actual allocation of resources is impacted by this.
Third, many deity claims also are connected to specific claims about the afterlife, which makes the claims testable if one simply waits a while. Moreover, many of those claims have far reaching consequences. If Jack Chick is correct about how reality works then it is quite worth figuring that out before one is subject to eternal torment.
It may be true that the entire superset of deity hypotheses may be so broad as to be not really falsifiable, but that’s largely due to the more vague terms that are classified as deities like people saying things like “God is the transcendent morality inside us all” or something like that.
As an aside, I’m mildly curious if you’ve downvoted the comment that I made above as well as the comment two above. I don’t particularly care about karma, but I did notice that both comments received a downvote within a few seconds of your reply. There’s no particular rule about downvoting comments made by people one is talking to, but if one is having an extended disagreement, downvoting is probably not a good idea since, given standard cognitive biases (especially issues of cognitive dissonance), it will likely make one more set in one’s opinion. So downvoting in such contexts is probably not a great idea if one wants to have productive discussion.
As an aside, I’m mildly curious if you’ve downvoted the comment that I made above as well as the comment two above.
Yes, I did, based on a 5-sec negative reaction that I immediately rationalized for myself, so now it seems like a perfectly rational action to me (now I think I did it because you totally missed my point). I don’t feel like addressing your argument point-by-point, though, as it clearly failed the first two times.
Yes, I did, based on a 5-sec negative reaction that I immediately rationalized for myself, so now it seems like a perfectly rational action to me (now I think I did it because you totally missed my point).
Huh? Are you saying that they you are completely aware of your rationalization but are still sticking to that belief despite knowing it is a rationalization?
I don’t feel like addressing your argument point-by-point, though, as it clearly failed the first two times.
None of your replies have been longer than a sentence, so I’m not sure where you think you’ve addressed any points earlier. A longer reply might help clear up confusion or point out why I’m wrong.
Huh? Are you saying that they you are completely aware of your rationalization but are still sticking to that belief despite knowing it is a rationalization?
At least I’m aware of my thought process. Quite a few replies I get to my comments bear all the hallmarks of the same cognitive dissonance, but without the poster being aware of it.
Anyway, here is my point, again, since you insist: given that faith is largely belief-in-belief, it cannot be refuted experimentally. The simulation argument gives one model where supernatural influence may well be “real”, so hard atheism fails there. Realizing that worrying about whether God is real is a waste of time lets you concentrate on more pragmatic matters, including existential risks. And yeah, Laplace said it better.
Anyway, here is my point, again, since you insist: given that faith is largely belief-in-belief, it cannot be refuted experimentally.
Ok. This isn’t true for everyone and isn’t true for quite a few people. For example, Eliezer, myself and Dr. Manhattan are all former Orthodox Jews who (at least by our descriptions and best knowledge) left in part due to actual evidence issues. So people really do care about evidence. Moreover, most humans are pretty complicated so even if someone has some amount of belief-in-belief they often also care about evidence issues.
The simulation argument gives one model where supernatural influence may well be “real”, so hard atheism fails there
I’m not sure what you mean by “hard atheism” in this context and wonder if differences in meaning are relevant here. Most atheists aren’t going to claim that there’s a 100% chance that there is no deity (even Richard Dawkins won’t do that). So if that’s what you mean then there’s no disagreement. Do you mean that or do you mean something else?
Realizing that worrying about whether God is real is a waste of time lets you concentrate on more pragmatic matters, including existential risks
And if Jack Chick turns out to be correct, not only will all that effort put into existential risk be a complete waste, but you will have wasted a tremendous amount of resources that could have gone to prevent eternal torture. And this applies to less sadistic or less interventionary deities also. If you are worried about existential risk, then one is already operating on a framework that assigns a low probability to most notions of “God”.
And yeah, Laplace said it better.
It may help to reread what Laplace is saying. Laplace isn’t saying that he’s not thinking about the hypothesis, he’s saying he doesn’t need it. The God-of-the-gaps created by Newton to explain planets not falling drastically out of orbit is something Laplace doesn’t need. That’s not at all the same thing as saying one isn’t thinking about the issue.
To me you seem as if you’re trying to find clever ways by which you may allow yourself to be stupid. Something being even worse than wrong isn’t something to brag about.
I think he’s saying that beliefs that by their nature can’t be refuted empirically are worse than wrong, so there’s plenty reason to be concerned not to have such beliefs.
Assuming you consider believing in zero gods rational… Why privilege one number out of infinitely many? On the other hand, maybe you meant agnostic.
People without the need to believe in supernatural, whether organized or not, whether called God or Communism or Dear Leader or Fair Universe, have always been a small minority, a tail of the Bell curve of belief strength. Thus I would not expect the mainstream beliefs to affect the fraction of people looking for non-mysterious answers. Of course, this model might be bad, I have not done any research in the area.
One could just as easily argue that exposing more people to EY’s ideas could lead to more dangerous AI research by rogue groups, so maybe they should be kept under wraps!
While I think I see why the parent was downvoted, I would add that in my experience atheism doesn’t correlate very strongly with rationality, insofar as rationaltiy can be said to mean anything. I know plenty of successful scientists who are Christian. I know plenty of atheists who repeatedly make poor life choices. Telling me someone is religious does not help me predict whether I will be able to beat them on any practical contest of wits or reasoning.
The majority of Chinese I have encountered both inside and outside of China believe in traditional Chinese medicine, including the healing powers of chi and all the other aspects that are no better than homeopathy. Of course all of these individuals have claimed to be atheists. There are many flavors of systematic irrationality.
It should do so but it is only a weak predictor. See for example,the GSS data which shows a correlation between vocab (as measured by WORDSUM) and lack of belief in God. Vocabulary is a predictor of general intelligence (high correlation with IQ and Wonderlic for example) whether or not one one corrects for education level (although some complicated things happen in terms of parental education level). The GSS is not the only data set which shows this sort of pattern. The result is weak but statistically robust.
BTW, correlation is not an equivalence relation, especially weak correlation.
Er, of course not. What’s your point?
Your argument was atheism is weakly correlated with vocab. Vocab is weakly correlated with intelligence. Therefore, atheism is weakly correlated with intelligence.
Ah, I see your point. However, a) vocab is highly correlated with intelligence, not weakly so, b) vocab is not just highly correlated with a single intelligence metric, but is correlated with such in a variety of different metrics of intelligence. While it is possible to construct variables such that A and B are correlated, with B and C correlated, and A and C anti-correlated, it is quite difficult to do so with a large set of distinct variables that all have such correlations with each other and have a single pair be anti-correlated, especially when one has the same set of correlations even when one controls for a variety of other variables. Moreover, as a probabilistic matter if one as three variables with two pairs correlated, it is much more likely that the remaining pair will be correlated than anti-correlated, assuming that variables don’t have too pathological a distribution.
Where you you get that? The intended probability space isn’t clear, but if I take three random directions in N-dimensional space for large N, I find that the chance of two pairs having an angle less than pi/2 and the third an angle greater than pi/2 is about 1.4 times the chance of all three being less than pi/2. The ratio rises to about 3 if I add the requirement that the corresponding correlations are in the range +/- 0.8 (the upper liit of correlations generally found in psychology).
Hmm, that’s a good point. I’m aware vaguely of theorems that say what I want but I don’t have any references or descriptions off hand. It may just be that one is assuming somewhat low N, but that would be in this sort of context not helpful. I do seem to remember that some version of my statement is true if the variables match bell curves, but I’m not able at the moment to construct or find a precise statement. Consider the claim withdrawn until I’ve had more time to look into the matter.
Refuting a statistical claim with anecdotal data is usually not very helpful.
Not necessarily saying you’re wrong, though.
Depends on the quality of statistical evidence supporting the claim.
Occam’s razor. Deity hypotheses are both very complicated and don’t offer much in the way of useful predictions.
I was going to make a joke about zero being the additive identity of the rational numbers, but enh.
Arguably, not caring about divine existence is even simpler.
Caring about a hypothesis isn’t an aspect of simplicity for evaluating the hypotheses. Obviously some questions are more or less interesting. But the idea that questions concerning the existence or nature of deities as uninteresting doesn’t make much sense. If any form of classical deity exists then the deity has serious concerns about how we act and it will impact our lives in this life or the next life. At the same time, if such a deity does exist then issues of existential risk are either irrelevant or minimal. But if no such deity exists then existential risk becomes a severe concern. Acting like these questions don’t matter is irrational for almost any goal-set.
Existence or non-existence of a deity is not a question that can be answered experimentally, so arguing either way is a waste of bits.
That’s wrong for at least three reasons.
First, while certain deific claims that are so vague as to be close to meaningless cannot be falsified, most deities don’t fall into that category. For example, all the classical Abrahamic religions make testable claims. Religions have only adapted to more generic, harder to test claims when those claims failed. There’s a relevant bit in the sequences about this.
Second, even weaker claims like vaguely just deities who watch over everything easily lead to essentially testable consequences. Indeed, some of these, like the existential risk issue mentioned earlier are not only testable but are highly relevant to society: if a deity is watching over in any way then we don’t need to worry nearly as much about existential risk. If there is no such entity, things become a lot more serious. So actual allocation of resources is impacted by this.
Third, many deity claims also are connected to specific claims about the afterlife, which makes the claims testable if one simply waits a while. Moreover, many of those claims have far reaching consequences. If Jack Chick is correct about how reality works then it is quite worth figuring that out before one is subject to eternal torment.
It may be true that the entire superset of deity hypotheses may be so broad as to be not really falsifiable, but that’s largely due to the more vague terms that are classified as deities like people saying things like “God is the transcendent morality inside us all” or something like that.
As an aside, I’m mildly curious if you’ve downvoted the comment that I made above as well as the comment two above. I don’t particularly care about karma, but I did notice that both comments received a downvote within a few seconds of your reply. There’s no particular rule about downvoting comments made by people one is talking to, but if one is having an extended disagreement, downvoting is probably not a good idea since, given standard cognitive biases (especially issues of cognitive dissonance), it will likely make one more set in one’s opinion. So downvoting in such contexts is probably not a great idea if one wants to have productive discussion.
Yes, I did, based on a 5-sec negative reaction that I immediately rationalized for myself, so now it seems like a perfectly rational action to me (now I think I did it because you totally missed my point). I don’t feel like addressing your argument point-by-point, though, as it clearly failed the first two times.
Huh? Are you saying that they you are completely aware of your rationalization but are still sticking to that belief despite knowing it is a rationalization?
None of your replies have been longer than a sentence, so I’m not sure where you think you’ve addressed any points earlier. A longer reply might help clear up confusion or point out why I’m wrong.
At least I’m aware of my thought process. Quite a few replies I get to my comments bear all the hallmarks of the same cognitive dissonance, but without the poster being aware of it.
Anyway, here is my point, again, since you insist: given that faith is largely belief-in-belief, it cannot be refuted experimentally. The simulation argument gives one model where supernatural influence may well be “real”, so hard atheism fails there. Realizing that worrying about whether God is real is a waste of time lets you concentrate on more pragmatic matters, including existential risks. And yeah, Laplace said it better.
Ok. This isn’t true for everyone and isn’t true for quite a few people. For example, Eliezer, myself and Dr. Manhattan are all former Orthodox Jews who (at least by our descriptions and best knowledge) left in part due to actual evidence issues. So people really do care about evidence. Moreover, most humans are pretty complicated so even if someone has some amount of belief-in-belief they often also care about evidence issues.
I’m not sure what you mean by “hard atheism” in this context and wonder if differences in meaning are relevant here. Most atheists aren’t going to claim that there’s a 100% chance that there is no deity (even Richard Dawkins won’t do that). So if that’s what you mean then there’s no disagreement. Do you mean that or do you mean something else?
And if Jack Chick turns out to be correct, not only will all that effort put into existential risk be a complete waste, but you will have wasted a tremendous amount of resources that could have gone to prevent eternal torture. And this applies to less sadistic or less interventionary deities also. If you are worried about existential risk, then one is already operating on a framework that assigns a low probability to most notions of “God”.
It may help to reread what Laplace is saying. Laplace isn’t saying that he’s not thinking about the hypothesis, he’s saying he doesn’t need it. The God-of-the-gaps created by Newton to explain planets not falling drastically out of orbit is something Laplace doesn’t need. That’s not at all the same thing as saying one isn’t thinking about the issue.
To me you seem as if you’re trying to find clever ways by which you may allow yourself to be stupid.
Something being even worse than wrong isn’t something to brag about.
No idea what you mean…
I think he’s saying that beliefs that by their nature can’t be refuted empirically are worse than wrong, so there’s plenty reason to be concerned not to have such beliefs.
I thought that was my point about faith...