This is of a piece with the Doublethink article. I think you just don’t get it, as too many atheists don’t.
This seems a case of someone concluding consciously and subconsciously that believing in God had greater instrumental rationality—more winning—than not believing in God. The supposed mystery of her stress on her belief in God, rather than his existence, is easily explained by this. Her belief pays the freight, not God.
To be clear, I’m an atheist. But it’s clear that belief in God does have instrumental benefits for lots of people. If your goal is winning, and not just accurate prediction, it could be perfectly instrumentally rational to believe in God.
I remember having a similar discussion with a friend in college. She “decided she would have a better life” if she believed in God. Being an atheist and epistemic rationalist at the time, I was appalled. How peculiar and unfathomable it was. What gibberish. She’s wasn’t saying it was true, just that believing it would give her a better life.
Well, turns out she had a greater appreciation for instrumental rationality than I had, though I doubt it was particularly conscious on her part. My appreciation for that kind of instrumental rationality is now conscious. I haven’t quite made the leap yet, and don’t know that I will, but dismissing it as irrational is just incorrect.
I’ve thought about this as well. Its basically the same question as “If I had the option of living in a virtual reality fantasy world without ever knowing that the real world existed, and I would be happier in the VR world, would I rather live there?” Is increased happiness worth the cost of self-deception?
I’ve tried to do what you describe. It didn’t work, and it made me feel cheap, like I wasn’t respecting myself. That’s just my own subjective experience of course.
Sounds like you are blessed and cursed with a mind that values epistemic rationality over instrumental rationality. That’s how your neural net is wired.
It’s one thing to see the argument. It’s another to feel it in your values.
We’re probably just a mutation that helps group survival at our own expense.
That’s my subjective experience as well. But clearly other people don’t operate the same way, to the same extent.
I compare it to the recent empirical work on morality, where they have found a number of different moral modalities by which people determine something good or bad, and further found that people weight those modalities differently. Fairness might have the greatest weight to you, while autonomy might have the greatest to me.
I think a similar thing happens with ideas. They get accepted according to a multimodal valuation. Only one of those modes is predictive power, but that’s the mode predominant in rationalist circles, and rationalists get together and wonder how other people can believe tripe. Well, because the tripe fulfills some other valuation that we don’t feel as strongly. Maybe that value is believing what powerful people tell you. Maybe that value is believing what your neighbors believe. Maybe that value is believing what your elders believe. Maybe it’s not believing what your elders believe.
This is of a piece with the Doublethink article. I think you just don’t get it, as too many atheists don’t.
This seems a case of someone concluding consciously and subconsciously that believing in God had greater instrumental rationality—more winning—than not believing in God. The supposed mystery of her stress on her belief in God, rather than his existence, is easily explained by this. Her belief pays the freight, not God.
To be clear, I’m an atheist. But it’s clear that belief in God does have instrumental benefits for lots of people. If your goal is winning, and not just accurate prediction, it could be perfectly instrumentally rational to believe in God.
I remember having a similar discussion with a friend in college. She “decided she would have a better life” if she believed in God. Being an atheist and epistemic rationalist at the time, I was appalled. How peculiar and unfathomable it was. What gibberish. She’s wasn’t saying it was true, just that believing it would give her a better life.
Well, turns out she had a greater appreciation for instrumental rationality than I had, though I doubt it was particularly conscious on her part. My appreciation for that kind of instrumental rationality is now conscious. I haven’t quite made the leap yet, and don’t know that I will, but dismissing it as irrational is just incorrect.
I’ve thought about this as well. Its basically the same question as “If I had the option of living in a virtual reality fantasy world without ever knowing that the real world existed, and I would be happier in the VR world, would I rather live there?” Is increased happiness worth the cost of self-deception?
I’ve tried to do what you describe. It didn’t work, and it made me feel cheap, like I wasn’t respecting myself. That’s just my own subjective experience of course.
Sounds like you are blessed and cursed with a mind that values epistemic rationality over instrumental rationality. That’s how your neural net is wired.
It’s one thing to see the argument. It’s another to feel it in your values.
We’re probably just a mutation that helps group survival at our own expense.
That’s my subjective experience as well. But clearly other people don’t operate the same way, to the same extent.
I compare it to the recent empirical work on morality, where they have found a number of different moral modalities by which people determine something good or bad, and further found that people weight those modalities differently. Fairness might have the greatest weight to you, while autonomy might have the greatest to me.
I think a similar thing happens with ideas. They get accepted according to a multimodal valuation. Only one of those modes is predictive power, but that’s the mode predominant in rationalist circles, and rationalists get together and wonder how other people can believe tripe. Well, because the tripe fulfills some other valuation that we don’t feel as strongly. Maybe that value is believing what powerful people tell you. Maybe that value is believing what your neighbors believe. Maybe that value is believing what your elders believe. Maybe it’s not believing what your elders believe.