This is the first time I’ve ever written an article that got shot down so violently. I’ll admit it is poorly planned and kind of chaotic, but I feel I was misunderstood. While freeing people from religion is a cause I endorse, especially for those that suffer guilt, anguish and pain because of it, rather than those who derive happiness from it, this is not what I am looking for here. What I want to do is to express my points to religious people without coming off as a condescending jerkass Straw Vulcan. And, revently, I have found myself unable to. Despite my best efforts to be respectful and kind, I haven’t managed not to hurt theist senstivities. Which baffles me, because I used to be a theist not so long ago, and felt the same pain reading, say, some of Yudkowsky’s posts, or anything by Dawkins, and if it weren’t for my overwhelming curiosity and the fact that I was almost a born rationalist (something that, as we can see in the Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story thread, is exceedingly and worryingly common for an art that should be accessible to all of humanity) I would have been completely turned off the rationalist project because of its atheistic component, and would have continued to fruitlessly try to be a rational Muslim. And yet I am unable to avoid striking the exact same sour spots I got struck in on my way here.
I don’t even remember how that pain felt, but I know it was great, and I want to avoid inflicting it to potential newbies. Ways of avoiding this, is what I am asking for.
Your spelling is abysmal. It annoys the hell out of me that you would be so inconsiderate of your readers as to not even spell-check.
You say you want to not come off as “a condescending and dismissive jerk”. But practically every paragraph of your posting exhibits disrespect for theists, and a complete dismissal of the possibility that they might have something to teach you, or at least a tricky argument that might require some care to dissolve. So, why would you wish to pretend not to condescend when in fact you seem proud to condescend.
You say you want to convince people “without having to shorten all of the freaking Inferential Distance”. Yet you seem not to realize that to do so would be to practice a Dark Art.
You say you want to convince people “without having to shorten all of the freaking Inferential Distance”. Yet you seem not to realize that to do so would be to practice a Dark Art.
Yes, exactly. Telling someone that the experiences which have convinced them of their religious beliefs aren’t actually strong evidence for those beliefs requires explaining at minimum* Occam’s Razor and Bayesian statistics. I’ve tried shortcuts, such as saying “it’s just like how a patient is usually less qualified to diagnose their symptoms than a doctor,” but that has never succeeded in conveying the message. If someone doesn’t actually understand why entities shouldn’t be multiplied beyond necessity and how to use evidence to evaluate claims, they’re not going to accept what you say about their claims. We can keep trying to explain these concepts, and I do, but they have to decide they want to learn them.
*It’s usually much more than just that, because religious people tend to come from a very anthropocentric worldview, where morality is objective, life has inherent meaning, human beings have souls, etc. We might speak the same language, but we’re using very different systems of thought.
Edit to add: Eliezer has a very good post on this subject which makes the point better than I did: it’s not enough just to cite Occam’s Razor, Bayes’ Theorem, etc.; there has to be understanding. Importantly, developing that understanding requires taking doubt seriously.
Even when it’s explicitly pointed out, some people seemingly cannot follow the leap from the object-level “Use Occam’s Razor! You have to see that your God is an unnecessary belief!” to the meta-level “Try to stop your mind from completing the pattern the usual way!”
...
If “Occam’s Razor!” is your usual reply, your standard reply, the reply that all your friends give—then you’d better block your brain from instantly completing that pattern, if you’re trying to instigate a true crisis of faith.
Better to think of such rules as, “Imagine what a skeptic would say—and then imagine what they would say to your response—and then imagine what else they might say, that would be harder to answer.”
Or, “Try to think the thought that hurts the most.”
And above all, the rule:
“Put forth the same level of desperate effort that it would take for a theist to reject their religion.”
Yes, exactly. Telling someone that the experiences which have convinced them of their religious beliefs aren’t actually strong evidence for those beliefs requires explaining at minimum* Occam’s Razor and Bayesian statistics.
Empirically many people deconvert for reasons that have nothing to do with Bayesianism. Indeed most former theists I know don’t even know what Bayesianism is. If this is what it would take then almost no one would ever deconvert. People can deconvert for many different reasons. Occam’s Razor or Bayesianism can be reasons, but there are a lot of other reasons that people deconvert, such as realizing that their holy texts are full of contradictions, or deciding the only reasonable interpretations of the texts are literalist ones which contradict the physical evidence.
That’s all true. My statement was intended to apply only to those people who have had “religious experiences” and are convinced because of those. In general, people become convinced of religious beliefs for a variety of reasons, and similarly can become unconvinced for a variety of reasons.
Occam’s Razor has never even been a factor in my turning: I was never looking for “the simplest theory”, only “the most consistent theory”. It is religion’s inconsistencies and predictive uselessness that did the trick for me. Perhaps Occam is implicit in that?
Consistency and predictive ability are also important for beliefs, and recognizing that religion lacks them may help turn away someone who is already feeling unsteadiness. The people about whom I’m talking are those who are absolutely convinced of their beliefs by subjective experiences (because, in my experience, these are the most difficult people against whom to argue). We can’t deny the fact of the experience, but we can deny the explanation it is claimed to support.
You are absolutely right. While I felt deeply pressured to put this out of the way, I should have saved a draft and waited until I had clarified and organized the concept before presenting it here. Not so much because I fear hurting the readers’ sensibilities, but because a badly written post hurts the integrity of this site I love so much.
I have discussed with religious people left, down and right, and have been confronted with a very large variety of arguments. There was a part of my way to atheism where I was literally begging theists I trusted to help me find arguments to protect my faith. They kept disappointing me. Only when I felt as certain as I thought I would ever be that no new arguments could come up, I decided to make the great leap over Hell, and officially abandon religion. If I thought there was a non-negligible chance of new arguments swaying me, I wouldn’t have abandoned theism, purely out of fear of Hell.
*Not necessarily: as other posters have pointed out in this discussion, some arguments need more reduction of inferential distance than other, which are much more immediate. Pointing out incosistencies and counterexamples, for example, is far more efficient in making people doubt than explaining the epistemiological merits of Occham’s Razor and reductionism.
The way you ask here sounds a lot better. In the original post sincere curiosity didn’t come across so much as bitterness and contempt. There is a lesson to take from this that actually goes a long way towards giving you the answer you are looking for.
A practical exercise that I (sometimes) do in such cases is to look through my words and consider why I got the response I got. I don’t worry whether it was fair, legitimate or sane. Just how my presentation interacted with the audience. In this case that means identifying what could be perceived as arrogant, condescending or sarcastic.
I don’t even remember how that pain felt, but I know it was great, and I want to avoid inflicting it to potential newbies. Ways of avoiding this, is what I am asking for.
People are very seldom persuaded by argument at the best of times and when they do not feel respected they will not even consider the reasoning much less be swayed by it. (Occasional exception—shame when public opinion is swayed will prompt an identity shift.) One of the best ways to become more persuasive is to release contempt and frustration with people. Then you can go ahead and ‘act as if’ the people you are talking to are smart, reasonable people who react well to new ideas. They may just take that as a cue.
Raw_Power: ” While freeing people from religion is a cause I endorse...”
I don’t care enough to downvote either your post or your comment, but I will point out that the only people who are ever truly free from religion are the ones who care enough and/or are strong enough to free themselves. Anyone else has merely transferred their allegiance to a different authority. Quit worrying about saving the world; it smacks of a poor understanding of basic human psychology—both with respect to your own motivations and those of others.
I don’t get your meaning. Freeing yourself, how do you do that? Why reinvent the wheel? While I was on the straight path to rejecting religion, I could have kept inventing excuses and making stuff up forever, I might even have become a religious expert. I seriously considered becoming a theologian at some point and work to bring out the True Original Islam As Intended By The Prophet (TM) which both the reactionary bigots and the westernized “moderns” were not following. If it hadn’t been for people like Yudkowsky who were able to speak to me in a language I shared and point out the massive failings of my system, I would have continued to invent one patch after another, the same way smart, strong people have been doing for centuries.
And I don’t see what’s wrong with wanting to Save The World, that was the frame that has directed all of my actions ever since I had a concept of what that meant. Of course, Akrasia is a bitch, and Behaving In A Way Such As If All Behaved Like You You Would Like This World Better can be freaking hard, but I’ve never given up. How is that bad self-psychology?
“Freeing yourself” happens when you understand why people have religion, when you ask the questions that bring to light the inconsistencies between belief and behavior, etc. It’s not about finding The Truth.
Similarly, “saving the world” operates from the arrogant presumption that what you have is inherently better than what they have. It implies an active belief that they should change, not you. Of course, since you are on the right side, they should look up to you, take wisdom from you, etc. It puts you in a position of power relative to them. Having power over one’s fellow man and believing that one has a better knowledge about what is right and what is true is the heart of all that is wrong with religion. Freeing oneself from religion is twofold—rejecting the idea that others hold power over you via their relationship to The Truth, and rejecting the idea that you are superior to others by virtue of your relationship to The Truth. Very difficult indeed...
Similarly, “saving the world” operates from the arrogant presumption that what you have is inherently better than what they have. It implies an active belief that they should change, not you. Of course, since you are on the right side, they should look up to you, take wisdom from you, etc. It puts you in a position of power relative to them. Having power over one’s fellow man and believing that one has a better knowledge about what is right and what is true is the heart of all that is wrong with religion.
But reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Some people do have beliefs or methods of thought that are better than others, that give them a more accurate understanding of the world and if used properly, can make them more successful and powerful. The mistake of religion is not deciding that some people’s knowledge or beliefs are better than others, and that other people should learn from them. Entirely rejecting that premise can lead to some very unfortunate results.
Whether having superior beliefs makes one superior oneself… I think that’s a question that needs to be dissolved. What kind of superiority are you talking about, and what does it entail?
I consider the me of today to be superior to the me of the past because of the things I’ve learned and the ways I’ve changed my mind. If I met the me of the past, it would be only appropriate for him to regard me as a teacher, and hopefully the me of the future would be able to perform the same role for the me of today. But of course, I shouldn’t be condescending to my past self simply for having been more wrong than I am.
This is the first time I’ve ever written an article that got shot down so violently. I’ll admit it is poorly planned and kind of chaotic, but I feel I was misunderstood. While freeing people from religion is a cause I endorse, especially for those that suffer guilt, anguish and pain because of it, rather than those who derive happiness from it, this is not what I am looking for here. What I want to do is to express my points to religious people without coming off as a condescending jerkass Straw Vulcan. And, revently, I have found myself unable to. Despite my best efforts to be respectful and kind, I haven’t managed not to hurt theist senstivities. Which baffles me, because I used to be a theist not so long ago, and felt the same pain reading, say, some of Yudkowsky’s posts, or anything by Dawkins, and if it weren’t for my overwhelming curiosity and the fact that I was almost a born rationalist (something that, as we can see in the Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story thread, is exceedingly and worryingly common for an art that should be accessible to all of humanity) I would have been completely turned off the rationalist project because of its atheistic component, and would have continued to fruitlessly try to be a rational Muslim. And yet I am unable to avoid striking the exact same sour spots I got struck in on my way here.
I don’t even remember how that pain felt, but I know it was great, and I want to avoid inflicting it to potential newbies. Ways of avoiding this, is what I am asking for.
Three reasons I downvoted:
Your spelling is abysmal. It annoys the hell out of me that you would be so inconsiderate of your readers as to not even spell-check.
You say you want to not come off as “a condescending and dismissive jerk”. But practically every paragraph of your posting exhibits disrespect for theists, and a complete dismissal of the possibility that they might have something to teach you, or at least a tricky argument that might require some care to dissolve. So, why would you wish to pretend not to condescend when in fact you seem proud to condescend.
You say you want to convince people “without having to shorten all of the freaking Inferential Distance”. Yet you seem not to realize that to do so would be to practice a Dark Art.
Hope that helps.
Yes, exactly. Telling someone that the experiences which have convinced them of their religious beliefs aren’t actually strong evidence for those beliefs requires explaining at minimum* Occam’s Razor and Bayesian statistics. I’ve tried shortcuts, such as saying “it’s just like how a patient is usually less qualified to diagnose their symptoms than a doctor,” but that has never succeeded in conveying the message. If someone doesn’t actually understand why entities shouldn’t be multiplied beyond necessity and how to use evidence to evaluate claims, they’re not going to accept what you say about their claims. We can keep trying to explain these concepts, and I do, but they have to decide they want to learn them.
*It’s usually much more than just that, because religious people tend to come from a very anthropocentric worldview, where morality is objective, life has inherent meaning, human beings have souls, etc. We might speak the same language, but we’re using very different systems of thought.
Edit to add: Eliezer has a very good post on this subject which makes the point better than I did: it’s not enough just to cite Occam’s Razor, Bayes’ Theorem, etc.; there has to be understanding. Importantly, developing that understanding requires taking doubt seriously.
...
Empirically many people deconvert for reasons that have nothing to do with Bayesianism. Indeed most former theists I know don’t even know what Bayesianism is. If this is what it would take then almost no one would ever deconvert. People can deconvert for many different reasons. Occam’s Razor or Bayesianism can be reasons, but there are a lot of other reasons that people deconvert, such as realizing that their holy texts are full of contradictions, or deciding the only reasonable interpretations of the texts are literalist ones which contradict the physical evidence.
That’s all true. My statement was intended to apply only to those people who have had “religious experiences” and are convinced because of those. In general, people become convinced of religious beliefs for a variety of reasons, and similarly can become unconvinced for a variety of reasons.
Occam’s Razor has never even been a factor in my turning: I was never looking for “the simplest theory”, only “the most consistent theory”. It is religion’s inconsistencies and predictive uselessness that did the trick for me. Perhaps Occam is implicit in that?
Consistency and predictive ability are also important for beliefs, and recognizing that religion lacks them may help turn away someone who is already feeling unsteadiness. The people about whom I’m talking are those who are absolutely convinced of their beliefs by subjective experiences (because, in my experience, these are the most difficult people against whom to argue). We can’t deny the fact of the experience, but we can deny the explanation it is claimed to support.
You are absolutely right. While I felt deeply pressured to put this out of the way, I should have saved a draft and waited until I had clarified and organized the concept before presenting it here. Not so much because I fear hurting the readers’ sensibilities, but because a badly written post hurts the integrity of this site I love so much. I have discussed with religious people left, down and right, and have been confronted with a very large variety of arguments. There was a part of my way to atheism where I was literally begging theists I trusted to help me find arguments to protect my faith. They kept disappointing me. Only when I felt as certain as I thought I would ever be that no new arguments could come up, I decided to make the great leap over Hell, and officially abandon religion. If I thought there was a non-negligible chance of new arguments swaying me, I wouldn’t have abandoned theism, purely out of fear of Hell. *Not necessarily: as other posters have pointed out in this discussion, some arguments need more reduction of inferential distance than other, which are much more immediate. Pointing out incosistencies and counterexamples, for example, is far more efficient in making people doubt than explaining the epistemiological merits of Occham’s Razor and reductionism.
The way you ask here sounds a lot better. In the original post sincere curiosity didn’t come across so much as bitterness and contempt. There is a lesson to take from this that actually goes a long way towards giving you the answer you are looking for.
A practical exercise that I (sometimes) do in such cases is to look through my words and consider why I got the response I got. I don’t worry whether it was fair, legitimate or sane. Just how my presentation interacted with the audience. In this case that means identifying what could be perceived as arrogant, condescending or sarcastic.
Move to Discussion? Might work better there. The comments so far have been productive.
People are very seldom persuaded by argument at the best of times and when they do not feel respected they will not even consider the reasoning much less be swayed by it. (Occasional exception—shame when public opinion is swayed will prompt an identity shift.) One of the best ways to become more persuasive is to release contempt and frustration with people. Then you can go ahead and ‘act as if’ the people you are talking to are smart, reasonable people who react well to new ideas. They may just take that as a cue.
Raw_Power: ” While freeing people from religion is a cause I endorse...”
I don’t care enough to downvote either your post or your comment, but I will point out that the only people who are ever truly free from religion are the ones who care enough and/or are strong enough to free themselves. Anyone else has merely transferred their allegiance to a different authority. Quit worrying about saving the world; it smacks of a poor understanding of basic human psychology—both with respect to your own motivations and those of others.
I don’t get your meaning. Freeing yourself, how do you do that? Why reinvent the wheel? While I was on the straight path to rejecting religion, I could have kept inventing excuses and making stuff up forever, I might even have become a religious expert. I seriously considered becoming a theologian at some point and work to bring out the True Original Islam As Intended By The Prophet (TM) which both the reactionary bigots and the westernized “moderns” were not following. If it hadn’t been for people like Yudkowsky who were able to speak to me in a language I shared and point out the massive failings of my system, I would have continued to invent one patch after another, the same way smart, strong people have been doing for centuries.
And I don’t see what’s wrong with wanting to Save The World, that was the frame that has directed all of my actions ever since I had a concept of what that meant. Of course, Akrasia is a bitch, and Behaving In A Way Such As If All Behaved Like You You Would Like This World Better can be freaking hard, but I’ve never given up. How is that bad self-psychology?
“Freeing yourself” happens when you understand why people have religion, when you ask the questions that bring to light the inconsistencies between belief and behavior, etc. It’s not about finding The Truth.
Similarly, “saving the world” operates from the arrogant presumption that what you have is inherently better than what they have. It implies an active belief that they should change, not you. Of course, since you are on the right side, they should look up to you, take wisdom from you, etc. It puts you in a position of power relative to them. Having power over one’s fellow man and believing that one has a better knowledge about what is right and what is true is the heart of all that is wrong with religion. Freeing oneself from religion is twofold—rejecting the idea that others hold power over you via their relationship to The Truth, and rejecting the idea that you are superior to others by virtue of your relationship to The Truth. Very difficult indeed...
But reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Some people do have beliefs or methods of thought that are better than others, that give them a more accurate understanding of the world and if used properly, can make them more successful and powerful. The mistake of religion is not deciding that some people’s knowledge or beliefs are better than others, and that other people should learn from them. Entirely rejecting that premise can lead to some very unfortunate results.
Whether having superior beliefs makes one superior oneself… I think that’s a question that needs to be dissolved. What kind of superiority are you talking about, and what does it entail?
I consider the me of today to be superior to the me of the past because of the things I’ve learned and the ways I’ve changed my mind. If I met the me of the past, it would be only appropriate for him to regard me as a teacher, and hopefully the me of the future would be able to perform the same role for the me of today. But of course, I shouldn’t be condescending to my past self simply for having been more wrong than I am.
Indeed you do make it sound quite hard...