Level Up told people to “Let your faith die,” and then contrasted faith with wonder.
I really don’t think that most people experience faith as being in opposition to wonder. It also suggests that faith is incompatible with the sort of progress the rationalist community wants.
This bit about faith points to something that frequently annoys me when interacting with my fellow rationalists.
I’m a person with faith now, but I wasn’t always, and it took me a long time to figure out what faith really means. I spent most of my life deeply misunderstanding what faith is because the Christians I grew up around often conflated faith with unwavering and unquestioning belief in dogma, to the point that even now it’s unclear to me if they meant anything else by the word. I only came around on faith once I realized it was just Latin for trust, and specifically trust in the world to be just as it is.
If a person is a Christian (especially a Nicene Christian), faith will include a metaphysical belief in God because they believe the world is God’s creation and evidence for God exists everywhere within it. I’m not a Christian and so don’t hold such a belief, but I can nevertheless have faith that the world will always be exactly as it is, and find refuge in my trust that I cannot be wrong about my experience of it prior to interpreting and judging it.
But lots of rationalists I know don’t get this. Like they can say the worlds “it all adds up to normality” but then constantly say and do things that suggest to me that they actually think that if they just try a little harder they might understand things well enough to remake the world in some fundamental way. They lack faith, and by extension humility. And while it’s good to see pain in the world and want to heal it, such healing will always be limited in effectiveness so long as the world is not seen clearly, and it’s my strong belief that someone is not seeing clearly if they don’t have faith in the world to be as it is.
Sorry for this ranty tangent, but the song line is plucking at a thread that I think is worth pulling, and I’ve not spent enough time writing about my thoughts here. Hopefully this is somewhat understandable.
I only came around on faith once I realized it was just Latin for trust, and specifically trust in the world to be just as it is.
This really just seems to me like you’re asserting that what a word “really means” is some weird new definition that ~no one else means when they say the word.
(I don’t know Latin. Nevertheless I am extremely confident that the word “faith” in Latin does not specifically refer to the concept of “trust in the world to be just as it is”.)
Who’s this ~no one? I came to see faith differently once I understood more of how the term (or another word in another language with the same base meaning of <trust>) is used in different spiritual traditions. Maybe few Christians and those primarily exposed to Christian memes conceive of faith in this way, but then this begs the question of why privilege their conceptualization of faith rather than looking for some some commonality between what people around the world seem to be pointing to when they say “faith” or a similar word to point to the idea of <trust> as part of a spiritual tradition?
Yeah, I was wrong to suggest/assume that the definition is original to you and not the way it’s defined in other communities that I just am not familiar with.
It still seems like you’re making the core mistake I was trying to point at, which is asserting that a word means something different than what other people mean by it; rather than acknowledging that sometimes words have different meanings in different contexts.
Like, people are talking about what sort of toppings should be on a donut and how large the hole should be, and you’re chiming in to say you came around on donuts when you realized that instead of being ring-shaped with toppings they’re ball-shaped with fillings. You didn’t come around on donuts. You just discovered that even though you don’t like ring donuts, you do like filled donuts, a related but different baked good.
This notion of faith seems like an interesting idea, but I’m not 100% sure I understand it well enough to actually apply it in an example.
Suppose Descartes were to say: “Y’know, even if there were an evil Daemon fooling every one of my senses for every hour of the day, I can still know what specific illusions the Daemon is choosing to show me. And hey, actually, it sure does seem like there are some clear regularities and patterns in those illusions, so I can sometimes predict what the Daemon will show me next. So in that sense it doesn’t matter whether my predictions are about the physical laws of a material world, or just patterns in the thoughts of an evil being. My mental models seem to be useful either way.”
Is that what faith is?
If a rationalist hates the idea of heat death enough that they fool themselves into thinking that there must be some way that the increase in entropy can be reversed, is that an example of not seeing the world as it is? How does this flow from a lack of the first thing?
Quantum physics only adds up to normality until you learn enough about reality to find out that it really, really, really, really doesn’t, and then you get to build quantum computers. I reject the claim that faith implies the world cannot change; I would describe the agnostic-compatible interreligious part of faith as a lobian bet—one could also known as wishcasting—that others will behave in ways that enact good. This does not mean the world cannot change.
I agree that there is something real that could be mathematized underlying what “faith” is, and that noticing that “trust” is a near-exact synonym is part of why I agree with this. I think that it would mostly add up to normality to describe it formally, and it would in fact reveal that most religious people are wrong to have faith in many of the things they do. I recognize in myself the urge to make disses about this, and claim that if it reveals religious people are not wrong, I would in fact react to that. I went from atheist to strong agnostic. There are multiple ways I can slice the universe conceptually where I can honestly identify phenomena as alive or as people; similarly, there are multiple ways I can slice the universe where I can honestly identify phenomena as gods. Whether those gods are good is an empirical question, just as it is an empirical question for me whether another will be kind to me.
Exactly. In each moment, the world is exactly as it is and can’t be anyway other than how we find it. Then it’s the next moment and the world is no longer the same as it was the moment before, yet is still however it is in that moment and no other way. The world is constantly changing from moment to moment, but always changing into exactly what it is.
This statement would be false is, for example, we discovered that people could change other’s perceptions of the world by expecting them to be different and taking no other action.
I’m guessing Gordon is referring to a class of things in the category of “attempted telekinesis”, where people have the implicit expectation that it is possible to change something by just willing it—at a sufficiently subtle or implicit level that it persists unnoticed even if the person would never endorse it explicitly. The curse of the counterfactual is another description of this kind of thing. And the kind of “faith” he’s describing is (I’m guessing, from having some familiarity with a similar thing) a kind of mental move that cuts through this type of mistake, by remembering implicitly that which is also believed explicitly.
I’m afraid I don’t understand what the “attempted telekinesis” post is talking about…
The “curse of the counterfactual” post, I also don’t really understand. It’s about a… therapy technique? For people who are fixated on certain events in their past?
It seems like this whole discussion is based on using words like “faith” in weird ways, and making statements that sound profound but are actually trivial or tautological (like “the world is exactly as it is”).
Maybe it would help to ask this directly: is “faith” here being used in anything at all like the ordinary sense of the word? (Or, any of the ordinary senses of the word?) Or is this a case of “we’re talking about a weird new concept, but we’re going to use a commonplace word for it”?
This bit about faith points to something that frequently annoys me when interacting with my fellow rationalists.
I’m a person with faith now, but I wasn’t always, and it took me a long time to figure out what faith really means. I spent most of my life deeply misunderstanding what faith is because the Christians I grew up around often conflated faith with unwavering and unquestioning belief in dogma, to the point that even now it’s unclear to me if they meant anything else by the word. I only came around on faith once I realized it was just Latin for trust, and specifically trust in the world to be just as it is.
If a person is a Christian (especially a Nicene Christian), faith will include a metaphysical belief in God because they believe the world is God’s creation and evidence for God exists everywhere within it. I’m not a Christian and so don’t hold such a belief, but I can nevertheless have faith that the world will always be exactly as it is, and find refuge in my trust that I cannot be wrong about my experience of it prior to interpreting and judging it.
But lots of rationalists I know don’t get this. Like they can say the worlds “it all adds up to normality” but then constantly say and do things that suggest to me that they actually think that if they just try a little harder they might understand things well enough to remake the world in some fundamental way. They lack faith, and by extension humility. And while it’s good to see pain in the world and want to heal it, such healing will always be limited in effectiveness so long as the world is not seen clearly, and it’s my strong belief that someone is not seeing clearly if they don’t have faith in the world to be as it is.
Sorry for this ranty tangent, but the song line is plucking at a thread that I think is worth pulling, and I’ve not spent enough time writing about my thoughts here. Hopefully this is somewhat understandable.
This really just seems to me like you’re asserting that what a word “really means” is some weird new definition that ~no one else means when they say the word.
(I don’t know Latin. Nevertheless I am extremely confident that the word “faith” in Latin does not specifically refer to the concept of “trust in the world to be just as it is”.)
Who’s this ~no one? I came to see faith differently once I understood more of how the term (or another word in another language with the same base meaning of <trust>) is used in different spiritual traditions. Maybe few Christians and those primarily exposed to Christian memes conceive of faith in this way, but then this begs the question of why privilege their conceptualization of faith rather than looking for some some commonality between what people around the world seem to be pointing to when they say “faith” or a similar word to point to the idea of <trust> as part of a spiritual tradition?
Yeah, I was wrong to suggest/assume that the definition is original to you and not the way it’s defined in other communities that I just am not familiar with.
It still seems like you’re making the core mistake I was trying to point at, which is asserting that a word means something different than what other people mean by it; rather than acknowledging that sometimes words have different meanings in different contexts.
Like, people are talking about what sort of toppings should be on a donut and how large the hole should be, and you’re chiming in to say you came around on donuts when you realized that instead of being ring-shaped with toppings they’re ball-shaped with fillings. You didn’t come around on donuts. You just discovered that even though you don’t like ring donuts, you do like filled donuts, a related but different baked good.
This notion of faith seems like an interesting idea, but I’m not 100% sure I understand it well enough to actually apply it in an example.
Suppose Descartes were to say: “Y’know, even if there were an evil Daemon fooling every one of my senses for every hour of the day, I can still know what specific illusions the Daemon is choosing to show me. And hey, actually, it sure does seem like there are some clear regularities and patterns in those illusions, so I can sometimes predict what the Daemon will show me next. So in that sense it doesn’t matter whether my predictions are about the physical laws of a material world, or just patterns in the thoughts of an evil being. My mental models seem to be useful either way.”
Is that what faith is?
If a rationalist hates the idea of heat death enough that they fool themselves into thinking that there must be some way that the increase in entropy can be reversed, is that an example of not seeing the world as it is? How does this flow from a lack of the first thing?
Quantum physics only adds up to normality until you learn enough about reality to find out that it really, really, really, really doesn’t, and then you get to build quantum computers. I reject the claim that faith implies the world cannot change; I would describe the agnostic-compatible interreligious part of faith as a lobian bet—one could also known as wishcasting—that others will behave in ways that enact good. This does not mean the world cannot change.
I agree that there is something real that could be mathematized underlying what “faith” is, and that noticing that “trust” is a near-exact synonym is part of why I agree with this. I think that it would mostly add up to normality to describe it formally, and it would in fact reveal that most religious people are wrong to have faith in many of the things they do. I recognize in myself the urge to make disses about this, and claim that if it reveals religious people are not wrong, I would in fact react to that. I went from atheist to strong agnostic. There are multiple ways I can slice the universe conceptually where I can honestly identify phenomena as alive or as people; similarly, there are multiple ways I can slice the universe where I can honestly identify phenomena as gods. Whether those gods are good is an empirical question, just as it is an empirical question for me whether another will be kind to me.
Me too, which is why I didn’t write this.
You wrote “the world will always be exactly as it is.” I don’t see the difference.
Compare, the world will be exactly as it has been in the past, with the world will always be exactly as it is in this moment
Exactly. In each moment, the world is exactly as it is and can’t be anyway other than how we find it. Then it’s the next moment and the world is no longer the same as it was the moment before, yet is still however it is in that moment and no other way. The world is constantly changing from moment to moment, but always changing into exactly what it is.
What would it mean for this to be false?
This statement would be false is, for example, we discovered that people could change other’s perceptions of the world by expecting them to be different and taking no other action.
So… are you just saying that reality exists, and is not merely shaped by our perceptions?
This is one of the bedrock ideas of LW-style rationality, isn’t it? And what does it have to do with “faith”…?
I’m guessing Gordon is referring to a class of things in the category of “attempted telekinesis”, where people have the implicit expectation that it is possible to change something by just willing it—at a sufficiently subtle or implicit level that it persists unnoticed even if the person would never endorse it explicitly. The curse of the counterfactual is another description of this kind of thing. And the kind of “faith” he’s describing is (I’m guessing, from having some familiarity with a similar thing) a kind of mental move that cuts through this type of mistake, by remembering implicitly that which is also believed explicitly.
I’m afraid I don’t understand what the “attempted telekinesis” post is talking about…
The “curse of the counterfactual” post, I also don’t really understand. It’s about a… therapy technique? For people who are fixated on certain events in their past?
It seems like this whole discussion is based on using words like “faith” in weird ways, and making statements that sound profound but are actually trivial or tautological (like “the world is exactly as it is”).
Maybe it would help to ask this directly: is “faith” here being used in anything at all like the ordinary sense of the word? (Or, any of the ordinary senses of the word?) Or is this a case of “we’re talking about a weird new concept, but we’re going to use a commonplace word for it”?