In the world of science, I can reason by the results. My microwave oven works. What is the chance it would work, if we got physics wrong?
I believe the base rate of “a random machine doing seemingly miraculous things” is pretty low, otherwise we would be surrounded by magical machines built on theories often incompatible with the official physics. And I mean, magical machines that would work as obviously and reliably as my microwave oven does, or as my mobile phone does… not just something supposedly providing some invisble and hard-to-measure effects.
Now my personal life, and my everyday beliefs, that seems like a different kind of game. I see people with different beliefs, having not significantly worse or better results than myself. (A colleague of mine told me recently that he heard that the theory of evolution was disproved. Doesn’t have any impact on his programming skills, which is what he gets paid for. But a better example would be some idea outside of science.) I don’t have this kind of feedback for the correctness of my ideas. Thus it would be incorrect to put the same degree of faith in them.
Unfortunately, I have no mind-reading abilities, so I don’t know what the obviously successful people believe in. I can listen to what they tell me, but there are problems with this.
First, people compartmentalize (and that’s the charitable approach; sometimes they also just plainly lie), so what they tell me they believe may not be the same thing they actually believe or alieve. (For example, reading the books by Kiyosaki will not give me the recipe for how to be as rich as Kiyosaki. The true secret of Kiyosaki is more likely something like: Just pretend to know the secret of being rich, and let other people pay you for whatever soundbites you have for them. It’s not like someone would ever do a double-blind study to verify your teachings.)
Second, there could be a selection bias; even if most of the successful people believe the same thing, there may be even more unsuccessful people believing the very same thing. For example, “follow your passion” or “just buy a lottery ticket” may make a few people incredibly rich, and yet, it may be a poor strategy on average. But we will only hear the stories of the winners. “Yeah, I used to be a chicken like you, but then I decided to follow my gut, and played a few rounds of the Russian roulette, and look where I am now! If you are so smart, why aren’t you as rich as me?”
Thank you for giving me something challenging to work with that I cannot instantly respond to :) I will process and respond over the next day or two.
I can tell you a couple of elements the response will include. One is that men of science tend to over-extrapolate. Ie: that your microwave works means certain things, which are more probable to relate to other certain things. However, you can take these chains of logic out very far to where they become very flimsy, but justify the flimsy parts with the word SCIENCE.
Another element is something I will refer to casually for now as “solving the problem from the middle.” You can have a very logical and concrete beautiful thing that looks like a solution in the middle of a puzzle, that does not really relate to the beginning or end.
This is the classic logic fallacy that I see Less Wrongers engage in, such as the straw man argument in this comment.
He makes a beautiful point that everyone agrees with including me, that doesn’t have anything to do with the larger topic at hand. Because he does so in a way that is tangentially related to what I was actually saying, it appears to be a part of the larger topic at hand, it appears on the surface that he knows the answer.
men of science tend to over-extrapolate. Ie: that your microwave works means certain things, which are more probable to relate to other certain things. However, you can take these chains of logic out very far to where they become very flimsy
In other words: Physics is highly reliable. You believe in the standard scientific explanation of physics. This creates a feeling of great confidence in “what you believe”… and then you are prone to apply this confidence mistakenly to everything that seems to belong to the literary genre of science. -- Even if the scientific field is not as reliable as physics. Or if you are not an expert in the given field, so regardless of the reliability of the field itself, your understanding of what the field says is unreliable.
I know a few people like this… who have a degree in computer science, are good at maths, have read a few popular science books on physics… which makes them believe they are “experts on science” in general… and then they produce laughable simplifications of psychology, and crackpot theories of evolution. Everything they say follows “logically” from their long and convoluted thought chains. Everything you say, even if it is standard science 101, they dismiss as not sufficiently Popper-approved.
I don’t even know the question. The OP’s comparison with religious faith serves no clear purpose; the whole post seems more like an advertisement than an immediately useful suggestion. Compare and contrast this post.
I do appreciate the request for more clarity of purpose and useful suggestion.
I think that there is quite a lot that is implicit if you are reading this from an open rather than defensive perspective. However, I am in agreement that I could be much more explicit and that this would be of benefit. Rather than giving an off the cuff response, I will think this through and craft something more useful. Thanks!
I think that there is quite a lot that is implicit if you are reading this from an open rather than defensive perspective.
One thing that I have noticed—as a general rule—is that, in any debate, no two debaters will ever agree on what is implicit in any argument. Anything that needs to be said, that forms an important part of the desired point, pretty much has to be stated explicitly, or most of the readers will fail to notice it.
Or, to put it another way; I, too, agree that your post would be much improved if you were a lot more explicit about precisely what you meant.
Voted up for “One thing that I have noticed—as a general rule—is that, in any debate, no two debaters will ever agree on what is implicit in any argument.”.
Funny, I opened that post expecting something very logical and to the point, and was immediately surprised that it read like a long advertisement for CFAR :)
Yes. I will come back to this and fill in the missing piece, as I said to hairyfigment when they brought it to my attention.
To me the conclusion is obvious, but I can see how it is not to people who are not me, now that this has been pointed out to me. I want to take my time to figure out how to word it properly, and have been very busy with work. I will be getting to it either later tonight or tomorrow.
That said, I personally find it laughable that hairyfigment linked a piece that is clearly advertising propaganda IMHO after claiming that my post sounded like advertisement. Perhaps if I call myself an executive director this would not bother people? :) I had better be careful or I’m going to get this post entirely deleted… ;)
It’s not clear to me—I’m not even sure what you think it’s advertising!
( ETA: I wrote a bunch of irrelevant stuff, but then I scrolled up and saw (again, but it somehow slipped my mind even though I friggin’ quoted it in the grandparent, I’m going senile at the tender age of 36) that you specifically think it’s advertising for CFAR, so I’ve deleted the irrelevant stuff. )
Advertising for CFAR seems like a stretch, because—although very nice things are said about Anna Salamon—the actual product CFAR sells isn’t mentioned at all.
Is the intended point simply that people have more confidence in their beliefs than would be optimal? People should change their assumptions more often and see what happens?
One of several. I wrote a couple of others here. In retrospect, it is a very good point that I was writing my thoughts more than writing to a specific conclusion, and that I made a writing error in not specifying an action oriented conclusion.
I want to add one in, but since there are actually several different points I’m making in the article, I need to think it through and decide which to include or not in the official conclusion.
I somewhat wish I could help many people on this site learn to be a lot nicer about pointing these things out, as you have been here. However, as they would say to me, it is my choice to post on this site, and thus to the degree I’m here, I it behooves me to play by, or at least tolerate, the cultural rules.
To me, I was being nice and empathizing with the point made. This feels like I expressed vulnerability and you decided to sink your teeth in and/or rub my nose in shit to tell me what I’ve done wrong, except I don’t actually understand what you’re even trying to show me.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to be so abrasive. It’s just that communication is, practically by definition, communication with people who are not oneself. It seemed to me that you were surprised to come up against this.
As for the original post itself, it seems to me, as it has to some others who have commented, that it talks around something that sounds like it might be interesting, but never says the thing itself.
I just saw this, sorry about the delay in response.
Yes, I was surprised by the response, because my assumptions about other people’s assumptions were wrong in this case.
I do of course understand that no one else has the same mental model I do—my mistake was in that I did not model correctly quite how different my mental models are from the majority of Less Wrong readers on this topic.
Given the hostility of the responses I received in response to my attempt to share something I find valuable, I’m really not inclined to keep going.
Yes, I did make a mistake, but I do not feel an obligation to keep paying and paying for it to ungrateful people… why would I want to teach them anything?
It is work to better articulate—to figure out what the difference is between our models and be able to name it in a way that the group can understand.
I do not feel that I have adequate reason at this point in time to make that investment of my time and energy, when the only payment is contempt and ridicule.
In the world of science, I can reason by the results. My microwave oven works. What is the chance it would work, if we got physics wrong?
So, I assume the reason you’re asking this is because you assume that belief in physics and mystical beliefs are incompatible. This is a false assumption.
As one of my favorite examples of this being false, I happen to be friends with someone who is a Tibetan grand master of Reiki, who is also a quantum physicist, with a Ph.D from Oxford. She is obviously extremely spiritual, identifies as a believer in the laws of physics, and knows what the laws of physics are in far more detail and with greater understanding than almost anyone who may read this blog.
I believe the base rate of “a random machine doing seemingly miraculous things” is pretty low, otherwise we would be surrounded by magical machines built on theories often incompatible with the official physics. And I mean, magical machines that would work as obviously and reliably as my microwave oven does, or as my mobile phone does… not just something supposedly providing some invisble and hard-to-measure effects.
Okay, so this is more elaboration based on the first assumption made, which I already addressed.
Now my personal life, and my everyday beliefs, that seems like a different kind of game. I see people with different beliefs, having not significantly worse or better results than myself. (A colleague of mine told me recently that he heard that the theory of evolution was disproved. Doesn’t have any impact on his programming skills, which is what he gets paid for. But a better example would be some idea outside of science.) I don’t have this kind of feedback for the correctness of my ideas. Thus it would be incorrect to put the same degree of faith in them.
Okay, so this is said to contrast the initial statement, again, doesn’t need a response now.
Unfortunately, I have no mind-reading abilities, so I don’t know what the obviously successful people believe in. I can listen to what they tell me, but there are problems with this.
Perhaps time to start asking? :)
First, people compartmentalize (and that’s the charitable approach; sometimes they also just plainly lie), so what they tell me they believe may not be the same thing they actually believe or alieve. (For example, reading the books by Kiyosaki will not give me the recipe for how to be as rich as Kiyosaki. The true secret of Kiyosaki is more likely something like: Just pretend to know the secret of being rich, and let other people pay you for whatever soundbites you have for them. It’s not like someone would ever do a double-blind study to verify your teachings.)
Agreed that the true secret may be different than that given. Agreed that people also sometimes compartmentalize. True of everyone whether a rationalist or not. Gathering data and finding ways to test for truth and compartmentalization seems like a good idea.
Second, there could be a selection bias; even if most of the successful people believe the same thing, there may be even more unsuccessful people believing the very same thing. For example, “follow your passion” or “just buy a lottery ticket” may make a few people incredibly rich, and yet, it may be a poor strategy on average. But we will only hear the stories of the winners. “Yeah, I used to be a chicken like you, but then I decided to follow my gut, and played a few rounds of the Russian roulette, and look where I am now! If you are so smart, why aren’t you as rich as me?”
True. Also, a strategy could be good, but not the only ingredient necessary.
Funny religious story:
There’s a big flood, and a priest is stuck on top of a roof as the water is gradually covering up the ground and the buildings. He is praying reverently. Eventually the water is up pretty high on the roofline, and a boat comes by.
They invite the priest to come with them. The priest says “no no no, God will save me!”
This happens a couple more times as the water gets higher and higher, and he eventually drowns.
When he eventually meets God, he asks “Why didn’t you save me? I still had work to do!”
God responds: “I sent you three boats, why didn’t you get on one?!”
One moral of this religious story is that you need to take opportunity when it comes to you, not assume its going to happen through magic.
Another aspect I find important is that it can take many different elements to get the results you want. In the reality of the story described, it requires praying + action. Praying alone was enough to get the opportunity, but only praying didn’t do anything at all for him.
Hence what I was getting at in my previous post about how over-simplification is really not useful and only leads to false confidence.
In the world of science, I can reason by the results. My microwave oven works. What is the chance it would work, if we got physics wrong?
So, I assume the reason you’re asking this is because you assume that belief in physics and mystical beliefs are incompatible. This is a false assumption.
Huh … I don’t see that assumption there at all.
The contrast I see Viliam_Bur making is between ideas that are constantly re-tested and those which are not.
In religion, what we see is that people have vastly different beliefs from each other … but this doesn’t really affect their effectiveness in the world all that much. For the most part, Christians in Christian culture function about as well as atheists in secular culture, or Hindus in Hindu culture … despite the fact that they have vastly different beliefs.
Whereas, if someone had beliefs about physics that were much different from the consensus ones, they’d be predicting things like “microwave ovens won’t work” and “airplanes should fall out of the sky”. They would be proven constantly wrong all the time; and the physics consensus proven constantly right. Technology works because we (socially) have really accurate beliefs about physics, chemistry, etc.; whereas there doesn’t seem to be such a thing as being “really accurate” about religion.
(There does seem to be such a thing as being “really obnoxious” about religion, e.g. religious terrorism or persecution.)
Physics beliefs get constantly tested and re-confirmed by the fact that we use them to make effective predictions about the world. People who get the idea that rocks fall up do not persist in this belief for very long because, well, rocks do not fall up. Religious beliefs don’t get tested in this way: people with belief X and people with contradictory belief Y do not have all that much difference in effectiveness.
Of course there are religious differences that do matter. Anyone whose religion tells them to kill people is going to be at great tension with most societies today. People who have a different religion from the surrounding society are going to be at some tension too, unless secular tolerance memes are quite strong in the area. But these matter because people disagree with each other, not because they disagree with reality.
My understanding was that he gave the example to show why there is a problem with all religion and mystical thinking—that it is less reasonable than how rationalists and scientists think.
If what Viliam said was true regarding all mystical thinking, then he would have been giving what would be more or less a proof of how rationalists are more reasonable in their thinking than religious people.
That’s why his comment was interesting.
The truth is, that the assumption that all religious and mystical people do not believe in the laws of physics is entirely false. My guess is that in truth, the vast majority of people with spiritual beliefs do believe int he laws of physics. I gave one concrete example to make my case.
Thus, he was only disproving an example of one particular type of belief, and not really saying much at all about all religious/mystically inclined people.
Thus, the point he was making is not very useful, in that disproving one person—be they mystic or rationalist, or one type specific type of mysticism is easy.
You missed that point initially and your comment is continuing to make the same mistake that Viliam initially made, in that you are writing based on your personal belief about what “religious people” think.
The truth is, that the assumption that all religious and mystical people do not believe in the laws of physics is entirely false.
Oh, I completely agree!
In fact, that was my point, which I took to be an elaboration or variation of Viliam’s.
It wasn’t about scientific people versus religious people. It was about the wide diversity of religious belief versus the relative unity of physical belief.
Christians, Hindus, and atheists may completely disagree on matters of theology or metaphysics, but may completely agree on matters of everyday physical reality. (I say “may” because of course there are exceptions, such as young-earth creationists.) The same is pretty much true for, say, elementary mathematics.
We are all more-or-less equally capable of getting on with the physical world, even if we believe things about gods or spirituality that completely contradict one another.
I suggest that this is precisely because we all interact with the same everyday physical reality, and our physical beliefs are constantly tested by that interaction. If we come up with a wrong belief about everyday physical reality, we will encounter contrary evidence. If we come up with a belief that implies that airplanes shouldn’t be able to fly, we can look up and notice that in fact they do.
The sorts of beliefs that we call exclusively religious (as opposed to, say, beliefs about psychology that we happen to have learned in religious terms) are pretty much those which are not tested by our interactions with everyday reality. That is why they are able to drift so far from one another, from person to person, or culture to culture.
If the likes and dislikes of the gods were as testable as the composition of rocks, then theology would have the degree of consensus that geology does.
I’m not really sure where you are going with this. For one thing, it sounds like we need Viliam to clarify what it is that he was trying to prove in his statement:
“In the world of science, I can reason by the results. My microwave oven works. What is the chance it would work, if we got physics wrong?”
Regarding the rest, you’re making a lot of generalizations about religion and religious people, which I don’t personally find to be on the same topic that I was speaking about. That said, apparently I was nowhere near as clear as I thought I was in my writing, so I perhaps do not have room to judge about this.
I was talking about the concepts of what you choose personally regarding beliefs/faith/perspectives/point of view. I was not advocating any organizations religious or not, or even speaking much about them. Only personal choices.
Religion is the connection people make when you use the word faith, but I was actually trying to draw different connections, and advocating a deep level of personal understanding rather than accepting anything on faith—be it a religious notion or an atheist one.
Personally I find the more modern things going on in the spiritual communities a lot more interesting than what has been going on in the past few hundred years.
I find that individuals seeking truth get much farther than organizations. Organizations are collections of people, and I find that the multiplication of bias with the interactions of multiple people tends to outweigh the multiplication of the positive attributes of brain capacity. I don’t think this will always be true in the future, but I think has been true in most cases to this point.
Anyone who believes in miracles doesn’t believe the laws of physics are entirely reliable. This is most but not all religious people.
On the other hand, it’s probably more important to find out how often, in what way, and under what circumstances someone believes the laws of physics break down rather than whether they believe the laws of physics are absolutely true all the time.
Anyone who believes in miracles doesn’t believe the laws of physics are entirely reliable.
Yeah, but they may have the concept (not necessarily explicit) of separate magisteria… so they may believe that the laws of physics are entirely reliable when constructing a microwave oven and similar stuff, but unreliable when God purposefully decides to break them.
In other words, if you believe we live in the Matrix, but you also believe that the Lords of Matrix don’t micromanage most of the stuff, you can still scientifically research the (default) rules of the Matrix.
Even with a ToE, a remnant of doubt always must remain, as required by the ToE being in principle open to being falsified / contradicted by future evidence.
However, that inherent lingering unreliability cannot be twisted into believing some “favorite miracle” to be more likely, e.g. unicorns.
Keep in mind that we live in a country with “One nation under God” written on the money supply—we’re in a religious country, even though there is for the most part separation of church and state. Physics is taught in high schools in the same country, so odds are that the majority believe both in God and Physics.
The other two commenters who beat me to it named the most common logic I hear from people who believe in miracles. I have never heard anyone attribute it to the laws of physics being incorrect.
In the world of science, I can reason by the results. My microwave oven works. What is the chance it would work, if we got physics wrong?
I believe the base rate of “a random machine doing seemingly miraculous things” is pretty low, otherwise we would be surrounded by magical machines built on theories often incompatible with the official physics. And I mean, magical machines that would work as obviously and reliably as my microwave oven does, or as my mobile phone does… not just something supposedly providing some invisble and hard-to-measure effects.
Now my personal life, and my everyday beliefs, that seems like a different kind of game. I see people with different beliefs, having not significantly worse or better results than myself. (A colleague of mine told me recently that he heard that the theory of evolution was disproved. Doesn’t have any impact on his programming skills, which is what he gets paid for. But a better example would be some idea outside of science.) I don’t have this kind of feedback for the correctness of my ideas. Thus it would be incorrect to put the same degree of faith in them.
Unfortunately, I have no mind-reading abilities, so I don’t know what the obviously successful people believe in. I can listen to what they tell me, but there are problems with this.
First, people compartmentalize (and that’s the charitable approach; sometimes they also just plainly lie), so what they tell me they believe may not be the same thing they actually believe or alieve. (For example, reading the books by Kiyosaki will not give me the recipe for how to be as rich as Kiyosaki. The true secret of Kiyosaki is more likely something like: Just pretend to know the secret of being rich, and let other people pay you for whatever soundbites you have for them. It’s not like someone would ever do a double-blind study to verify your teachings.)
Second, there could be a selection bias; even if most of the successful people believe the same thing, there may be even more unsuccessful people believing the very same thing. For example, “follow your passion” or “just buy a lottery ticket” may make a few people incredibly rich, and yet, it may be a poor strategy on average. But we will only hear the stories of the winners. “Yeah, I used to be a chicken like you, but then I decided to follow my gut, and played a few rounds of the Russian roulette, and look where I am now! If you are so smart, why aren’t you as rich as me?”
Thank you for giving me something challenging to work with that I cannot instantly respond to :) I will process and respond over the next day or two.
I can tell you a couple of elements the response will include. One is that men of science tend to over-extrapolate. Ie: that your microwave works means certain things, which are more probable to relate to other certain things. However, you can take these chains of logic out very far to where they become very flimsy, but justify the flimsy parts with the word SCIENCE.
Another element is something I will refer to casually for now as “solving the problem from the middle.” You can have a very logical and concrete beautiful thing that looks like a solution in the middle of a puzzle, that does not really relate to the beginning or end.
This is the classic logic fallacy that I see Less Wrongers engage in, such as the straw man argument in this comment.
He makes a beautiful point that everyone agrees with including me, that doesn’t have anything to do with the larger topic at hand. Because he does so in a way that is tangentially related to what I was actually saying, it appears to be a part of the larger topic at hand, it appears on the surface that he knows the answer.
In other words: Physics is highly reliable. You believe in the standard scientific explanation of physics. This creates a feeling of great confidence in “what you believe”… and then you are prone to apply this confidence mistakenly to everything that seems to belong to the literary genre of science. -- Even if the scientific field is not as reliable as physics. Or if you are not an expert in the given field, so regardless of the reliability of the field itself, your understanding of what the field says is unreliable.
I know a few people like this… who have a degree in computer science, are good at maths, have read a few popular science books on physics… which makes them believe they are “experts on science” in general… and then they produce laughable simplifications of psychology, and crackpot theories of evolution. Everything they say follows “logically” from their long and convoluted thought chains. Everything you say, even if it is standard science 101, they dismiss as not sufficiently Popper-approved.
I don’t even know the question. The OP’s comparison with religious faith serves no clear purpose; the whole post seems more like an advertisement than an immediately useful suggestion. Compare and contrast this post.
The summary has been added, thank you for the suggestion.
I do appreciate the request for more clarity of purpose and useful suggestion.
I think that there is quite a lot that is implicit if you are reading this from an open rather than defensive perspective. However, I am in agreement that I could be much more explicit and that this would be of benefit. Rather than giving an off the cuff response, I will think this through and craft something more useful. Thanks!
One thing that I have noticed—as a general rule—is that, in any debate, no two debaters will ever agree on what is implicit in any argument. Anything that needs to be said, that forms an important part of the desired point, pretty much has to be stated explicitly, or most of the readers will fail to notice it.
Or, to put it another way; I, too, agree that your post would be much improved if you were a lot more explicit about precisely what you meant.
Voted up for “One thing that I have noticed—as a general rule—is that, in any debate, no two debaters will ever agree on what is implicit in any argument.”.
Funny, I opened that post expecting something very logical and to the point, and was immediately surprised that it read like a long advertisement for CFAR :)
...containing an immediately useful (or at least, immediately practicable) suggestion, as, er, advertised.
Yes. I will come back to this and fill in the missing piece, as I said to hairyfigment when they brought it to my attention.
To me the conclusion is obvious, but I can see how it is not to people who are not me, now that this has been pointed out to me. I want to take my time to figure out how to word it properly, and have been very busy with work. I will be getting to it either later tonight or tomorrow.
That said, I personally find it laughable that hairyfigment linked a piece that is clearly advertising propaganda IMHO after claiming that my post sounded like advertisement. Perhaps if I call myself an executive director this would not bother people? :) I had better be careful or I’m going to get this post entirely deleted… ;)
It’s not clear to me—I’m not even sure what you think it’s advertising!
( ETA: I wrote a bunch of irrelevant stuff, but then I scrolled up and saw (again, but it somehow slipped my mind even though I friggin’ quoted it in the grandparent, I’m going senile at the tender age of 36) that you specifically think it’s advertising for CFAR, so I’ve deleted the irrelevant stuff. )
Advertising for CFAR seems like a stretch, because—although very nice things are said about Anna Salamon—the actual product CFAR sells isn’t mentioned at all.
Is the intended point simply that people have more confidence in their beliefs than would be optimal? People should change their assumptions more often and see what happens?
One of several. I wrote a couple of others here. In retrospect, it is a very good point that I was writing my thoughts more than writing to a specific conclusion, and that I made a writing error in not specifying an action oriented conclusion.
I want to add one in, but since there are actually several different points I’m making in the article, I need to think it through and decide which to include or not in the official conclusion.
I somewhat wish I could help many people on this site learn to be a lot nicer about pointing these things out, as you have been here. However, as they would say to me, it is my choice to post on this site, and thus to the degree I’m here, I it behooves me to play by, or at least tolerate, the cultural rules.
Well then, I would like to point out a more general fact.
Everyone that you will ever deal with, in any way, is someone who is not you.
Umm… why does this need to be pointed out?
To me, I was being nice and empathizing with the point made. This feels like I expressed vulnerability and you decided to sink your teeth in and/or rub my nose in shit to tell me what I’ve done wrong, except I don’t actually understand what you’re even trying to show me.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to be so abrasive. It’s just that communication is, practically by definition, communication with people who are not oneself. It seemed to me that you were surprised to come up against this.
As for the original post itself, it seems to me, as it has to some others who have commented, that it talks around something that sounds like it might be interesting, but never says the thing itself.
Hi Richard,
I just saw this, sorry about the delay in response.
Yes, I was surprised by the response, because my assumptions about other people’s assumptions were wrong in this case.
I do of course understand that no one else has the same mental model I do—my mistake was in that I did not model correctly quite how different my mental models are from the majority of Less Wrong readers on this topic.
Given the hostility of the responses I received in response to my attempt to share something I find valuable, I’m really not inclined to keep going.
Yes, I did make a mistake, but I do not feel an obligation to keep paying and paying for it to ungrateful people… why would I want to teach them anything?
It is work to better articulate—to figure out what the difference is between our models and be able to name it in a way that the group can understand.
I do not feel that I have adequate reason at this point in time to make that investment of my time and energy, when the only payment is contempt and ridicule.
Taking what you said one piece at a time:
So, I assume the reason you’re asking this is because you assume that belief in physics and mystical beliefs are incompatible. This is a false assumption.
As one of my favorite examples of this being false, I happen to be friends with someone who is a Tibetan grand master of Reiki, who is also a quantum physicist, with a Ph.D from Oxford. She is obviously extremely spiritual, identifies as a believer in the laws of physics, and knows what the laws of physics are in far more detail and with greater understanding than almost anyone who may read this blog.
Okay, so this is more elaboration based on the first assumption made, which I already addressed.
Okay, so this is said to contrast the initial statement, again, doesn’t need a response now.
Perhaps time to start asking? :)
Agreed that the true secret may be different than that given. Agreed that people also sometimes compartmentalize. True of everyone whether a rationalist or not. Gathering data and finding ways to test for truth and compartmentalization seems like a good idea.
True. Also, a strategy could be good, but not the only ingredient necessary.
Funny religious story:
There’s a big flood, and a priest is stuck on top of a roof as the water is gradually covering up the ground and the buildings. He is praying reverently. Eventually the water is up pretty high on the roofline, and a boat comes by.
They invite the priest to come with them. The priest says “no no no, God will save me!”
This happens a couple more times as the water gets higher and higher, and he eventually drowns.
When he eventually meets God, he asks “Why didn’t you save me? I still had work to do!”
God responds: “I sent you three boats, why didn’t you get on one?!”
One moral of this religious story is that you need to take opportunity when it comes to you, not assume its going to happen through magic.
Another aspect I find important is that it can take many different elements to get the results you want. In the reality of the story described, it requires praying + action. Praying alone was enough to get the opportunity, but only praying didn’t do anything at all for him.
Hence what I was getting at in my previous post about how over-simplification is really not useful and only leads to false confidence.
Huh … I don’t see that assumption there at all.
The contrast I see Viliam_Bur making is between ideas that are constantly re-tested and those which are not.
In religion, what we see is that people have vastly different beliefs from each other … but this doesn’t really affect their effectiveness in the world all that much. For the most part, Christians in Christian culture function about as well as atheists in secular culture, or Hindus in Hindu culture … despite the fact that they have vastly different beliefs.
Whereas, if someone had beliefs about physics that were much different from the consensus ones, they’d be predicting things like “microwave ovens won’t work” and “airplanes should fall out of the sky”. They would be proven constantly wrong all the time; and the physics consensus proven constantly right. Technology works because we (socially) have really accurate beliefs about physics, chemistry, etc.; whereas there doesn’t seem to be such a thing as being “really accurate” about religion.
(There does seem to be such a thing as being “really obnoxious” about religion, e.g. religious terrorism or persecution.)
Physics beliefs get constantly tested and re-confirmed by the fact that we use them to make effective predictions about the world. People who get the idea that rocks fall up do not persist in this belief for very long because, well, rocks do not fall up. Religious beliefs don’t get tested in this way: people with belief X and people with contradictory belief Y do not have all that much difference in effectiveness.
Of course there are religious differences that do matter. Anyone whose religion tells them to kill people is going to be at great tension with most societies today. People who have a different religion from the surrounding society are going to be at some tension too, unless secular tolerance memes are quite strong in the area. But these matter because people disagree with each other, not because they disagree with reality.
What he said about microwaves is noteworthy.
My understanding was that he gave the example to show why there is a problem with all religion and mystical thinking—that it is less reasonable than how rationalists and scientists think.
If what Viliam said was true regarding all mystical thinking, then he would have been giving what would be more or less a proof of how rationalists are more reasonable in their thinking than religious people.
That’s why his comment was interesting.
The truth is, that the assumption that all religious and mystical people do not believe in the laws of physics is entirely false. My guess is that in truth, the vast majority of people with spiritual beliefs do believe int he laws of physics. I gave one concrete example to make my case.
Thus, he was only disproving an example of one particular type of belief, and not really saying much at all about all religious/mystically inclined people.
Thus, the point he was making is not very useful, in that disproving one person—be they mystic or rationalist, or one type specific type of mysticism is easy.
You missed that point initially and your comment is continuing to make the same mistake that Viliam initially made, in that you are writing based on your personal belief about what “religious people” think.
Oh, I completely agree!
In fact, that was my point, which I took to be an elaboration or variation of Viliam’s.
It wasn’t about scientific people versus religious people. It was about the wide diversity of religious belief versus the relative unity of physical belief.
Christians, Hindus, and atheists may completely disagree on matters of theology or metaphysics, but may completely agree on matters of everyday physical reality. (I say “may” because of course there are exceptions, such as young-earth creationists.) The same is pretty much true for, say, elementary mathematics.
We are all more-or-less equally capable of getting on with the physical world, even if we believe things about gods or spirituality that completely contradict one another.
I suggest that this is precisely because we all interact with the same everyday physical reality, and our physical beliefs are constantly tested by that interaction. If we come up with a wrong belief about everyday physical reality, we will encounter contrary evidence. If we come up with a belief that implies that airplanes shouldn’t be able to fly, we can look up and notice that in fact they do.
The sorts of beliefs that we call exclusively religious (as opposed to, say, beliefs about psychology that we happen to have learned in religious terms) are pretty much those which are not tested by our interactions with everyday reality. That is why they are able to drift so far from one another, from person to person, or culture to culture.
If the likes and dislikes of the gods were as testable as the composition of rocks, then theology would have the degree of consensus that geology does.
I’m not really sure where you are going with this. For one thing, it sounds like we need Viliam to clarify what it is that he was trying to prove in his statement:
“In the world of science, I can reason by the results. My microwave oven works. What is the chance it would work, if we got physics wrong?”
Regarding the rest, you’re making a lot of generalizations about religion and religious people, which I don’t personally find to be on the same topic that I was speaking about. That said, apparently I was nowhere near as clear as I thought I was in my writing, so I perhaps do not have room to judge about this.
I was talking about the concepts of what you choose personally regarding beliefs/faith/perspectives/point of view. I was not advocating any organizations religious or not, or even speaking much about them. Only personal choices.
Religion is the connection people make when you use the word faith, but I was actually trying to draw different connections, and advocating a deep level of personal understanding rather than accepting anything on faith—be it a religious notion or an atheist one.
Personally I find the more modern things going on in the spiritual communities a lot more interesting than what has been going on in the past few hundred years.
I find that individuals seeking truth get much farther than organizations. Organizations are collections of people, and I find that the multiplication of bias with the interactions of multiple people tends to outweigh the multiplication of the positive attributes of brain capacity. I don’t think this will always be true in the future, but I think has been true in most cases to this point.
Anyone who believes in miracles doesn’t believe the laws of physics are entirely reliable. This is most but not all religious people.
On the other hand, it’s probably more important to find out how often, in what way, and under what circumstances someone believes the laws of physics break down rather than whether they believe the laws of physics are absolutely true all the time.
Anyone who believes the laws of physics as currently understood are entirely reliable believes in miracles.
Yeah, but they may have the concept (not necessarily explicit) of separate magisteria… so they may believe that the laws of physics are entirely reliable when constructing a microwave oven and similar stuff, but unreliable when God purposefully decides to break them.
In other words, if you believe we live in the Matrix, but you also believe that the Lords of Matrix don’t micromanage most of the stuff, you can still scientifically research the (default) rules of the Matrix.
I also think the vast majority of religious people think large miracles are something that used to happen, but can’t reasonably be expected any more.
Unless and until a ToE is found, nobody should believe the “laws of physics are entirely reliable”.
Even with a ToE, a remnant of doubt always must remain, as required by the ToE being in principle open to being falsified / contradicted by future evidence.
However, that inherent lingering unreliability cannot be twisted into believing some “favorite miracle” to be more likely, e.g. unicorns.
Keep in mind that we live in a country with “One nation under God” written on the money supply—we’re in a religious country, even though there is for the most part separation of church and state. Physics is taught in high schools in the same country, so odds are that the majority believe both in God and Physics.
The other two commenters who beat me to it named the most common logic I hear from people who believe in miracles. I have never heard anyone attribute it to the laws of physics being incorrect.