I suspect that most members of the Democratic Party are Democrats for spurious reasons too. But a Republican who lists a bunch of human foibles and writes a scenario that specifically names Democrats as being subject to them is probably attacking Democrats, at least in passing, not just attacking human beings.
I am tempted to reply to this with “May the Force be with you”, but instead I’ll ask “just what are you trying to say?” You just gave me a reply which consists entirely of slogans, with no hint as to how you think they apply.
You just gave me a reply which consists entirely of slogans, with no hint as to how you think they apply.
I think the argument I made was fairly obvious, but let me break it down.
You care about who’s attacking whom. If you are in that mindset arguments are soldiers. You treat the argument that there are atheists who are atheists because it’s cool to be an atheist as a foreign soldier that has to be fought. A foreign soldier that doesn’t play according to the rules.
Those considerations don’t matter if you want to decide whether there are atheists who are motivated by the coolness of being an atheist.
If you care about truth, you want to have true beliefs about how much atheists are motivated by the coolness factor of atheism. It doesn’t matter for this discussion whether that argument is fair. What matters is whether it’s true.
Those considerations don’t matter if you want to decide whether there are atheists who are motivated by the coolness of being an atheist. If you care about truth, you want to have true beliefs about how much atheists are motivated by the coolness factor of atheism.
I also want to have true beliefs about Lewis and about Lewis’s writings. Whether the statement is an attack matters for those beliefs.
Whether the statement is an attack also matters for whether it is a rationalist quote. A proper rationalist quote should only be about its apparent subject and should not try to sneak in such an attack under the radar.
It is possible to produce an endless sequence of statements with truth values (or to go through literature and extract an endless sequence of prewritten statements with truth values). Nobody has the time to evaluate all of them; we must pick and choose between them.
The implicit attack “all materialists are materialists because they are flawed humans who make mistakes” also has a truth value, and this truth value is something that I can care about just as much as the truth value of the statement’s literal words. Pointing out the attack is not ignoring truth in favor of something else, it’s recognizing that there’s something else there whose truth may be in question as well.
4 is wrong. The demon is talking about THIS GUY. The subject (or object as appropriate) is “Your man”, “He”, “him”, throughout. Neither the demon nor Lewis is talking about people who really think things through, nor implying that they don’t exist.
Ehhh. The consistency of the pronoun usage is so strong that I would expect him to have generalized somewhere if he (either one) meant it.
The class he’s a part of is ‘philosophically weak borderline Christians’, not ‘Materialists’. After all, they guy isn’t a materialist. And if you’re a philosophically weak borderline Christian, the easiest route to materialism is indeed how useful it is, not a philosophical argument, because these folks don’t give a whit about philosophy.
I also want to have true beliefs about Lewis and about Lewis’s writings.
Judging authors by a single quote without knowing the context is a bad idea.
Rousseau begins one of his works by saying “”Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
Taken on it’s own you might think that Rousseau is somehow criticizing that man is in chains. He isn’t. He advocates that man is chained by the social contract.
I really had a hard time with ideas like this because I had read the book and my history teacher hadn’t, so discussing Rousseau was really hard.
Why do you care about Lewis?
A proper rationalist quote should only be about its apparent subject and should not try to sneak in such an attack under the radar.
We are a group of smart people. There nothing wrong with a quote having multiple layers of meaning and saying something in addition to it’s apparent subject.
Nobody has the time to evaluate all of them; we must pick and choose between them.
On LW we care about rationality. Having accurate beliefs about what makes people become atheists is useful for that purpose.
On the other hand having accurate beliefs about CS Lewis is less important.
The implicit attack “all materialists are materialists because they are flawed humans who make mistakes” also has a truth value, and this truth value is something that I can care about just as much as the truth value of the statement’s literal words.
The truth value of that statement matters a great deal but that in no way implies that we shouldn’t take about that statement and it has no place on LW.
You didn’t attack it on grounds that it’s wrong and that there evidence that it’s wrong but on the grounds that it’s an unfair attack.
See filtered evidence. It is completely possible to mislead people by giving them only true information… but only those pieces of information which support the conclusion you want them to make.
If you had a perfect superhuman intelligence, perhaps you could give them dozen information about why X is wrong, a zero information about why Y is wrong, and yet the superintelligence might conclude: “Both X and Y are human political sides, so I will just take this generally as an evidence that humans are often wrong, especially when discussing politics. Because humans are so often wrong, it is very likely that the human who is giving this information to me is blind to the flaws of one side (which in this specific case happens to be Y), so all this information is only a very weak evidence for X being worse than Y.”
But humans don’t reason like this. Give them dozen information about why X is wrong, and zero information about why Y is wrong; in the next chapter give them dozen information about why Y is good and zero information about why X is good… and they will consider this a strong evidence that X is worse than Y. -- And Lewis most likely understands this.
I doubt that any LW member would take all of his information about the value of atheism from Lewis. If you let yourself convince that atheism is wrong by reading Lewis than your belief in atheism was very weak in the first place.
I have a hard time imagine pushing anyone in LW into a crisis of faith about atheism in which we wouldn’t come out with better belief system than he started. If someone discovers that he actually follows in atheism because it’s cool and works through his issues, he might end up in following atheism for better reasons.
I agree that this attack would not convince a typical LW-er, but I would claim that an unconvincing attempt to mislead with the truth is still an attempt to mislead with the truth and as such is ineligible to be a good rationality quote.
This quote taken together with the basic LW wisdom can be useful. But taken separately from any LW context, it would probably just push the reader a little towards religion.
In other words, a LW reader has no problem to imagine a complementary and equally valid quote (actually he probably already did something similar before reading Lewis) like:
… Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him in the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that Christianity is true! Make him think it is morally good, or socially beneficial, or altruistic — that it is the traditional wisdom. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.
it would probably just push the reader a little towards religion.
The effects of little pushes are complicated. Vaccination is about little pushes.
Don’t waste time trying to make him think that Christianity is true!
The difference is that many Christians already argue that one should be Christian because it’s the moral thing to do and it’s socially beneficial. Christians don’t engage in the same behavior of trying to make people think it’s true than atheists do.
Christian missionaries actually do a lot of socially beneficial work in order to convince people of Christianity.
As far as “traditional wisdom” goes it gets interesting. I don’t think that Christianity grows in China because the Chinese consider it traditional wisdom.
Mormons argue that the fact that the religion grows as fast at it does is a sign that it’s true. They don’t see it as a religion of the past but as one of the future.
Despite talking about ancient wisdom New Age folks use the word ‘new’ as part of their brand.
I think it’s very useful to understand why certain movements win and move past your first stereotypes and actually seek understanding.
Even Hitler who wanted to bring back traditional values was very clever in painting the status quo as going to end soon and the future as either his nationalism or communism.
He made it the cool philosophy that the young people at the universities wanted to follow before he had success with elections.
I suspect that most members of the Democratic Party are Democrats for spurious reasons too. But a Republican who lists a bunch of human foibles and writes a scenario that specifically names Democrats as being subject to them is probably attacking Democrats, at least in passing, not just attacking human beings.
Don’t let yourself be mindkilled. Arguments aren’t soldiers.
Focus on the true things you can say about the the world.
I am tempted to reply to this with “May the Force be with you”, but instead I’ll ask “just what are you trying to say?” You just gave me a reply which consists entirely of slogans, with no hint as to how you think they apply.
I think the argument I made was fairly obvious, but let me break it down.
You care about who’s attacking whom. If you are in that mindset arguments are soldiers. You treat the argument that there are atheists who are atheists because it’s cool to be an atheist as a foreign soldier that has to be fought. A foreign soldier that doesn’t play according to the rules.
Those considerations don’t matter if you want to decide whether there are atheists who are motivated by the coolness of being an atheist. If you care about truth, you want to have true beliefs about how much atheists are motivated by the coolness factor of atheism. It doesn’t matter for this discussion whether that argument is fair. What matters is whether it’s true.
I also want to have true beliefs about Lewis and about Lewis’s writings. Whether the statement is an attack matters for those beliefs.
Whether the statement is an attack also matters for whether it is a rationalist quote. A proper rationalist quote should only be about its apparent subject and should not try to sneak in such an attack under the radar.
It is possible to produce an endless sequence of statements with truth values (or to go through literature and extract an endless sequence of prewritten statements with truth values). Nobody has the time to evaluate all of them; we must pick and choose between them.
The implicit attack “all materialists are materialists because they are flawed humans who make mistakes” also has a truth value, and this truth value is something that I can care about just as much as the truth value of the statement’s literal words. Pointing out the attack is not ignoring truth in favor of something else, it’s recognizing that there’s something else there whose truth may be in question as well.
4 is wrong. The demon is talking about THIS GUY. The subject (or object as appropriate) is “Your man”, “He”, “him”, throughout. Neither the demon nor Lewis is talking about people who really think things through, nor implying that they don’t exist.
Neither the demon nor Lewis is saying words which literally read like that, but words have implications beyond the literal.
Ehhh. The consistency of the pronoun usage is so strong that I would expect him to have generalized somewhere if he (either one) meant it.
The class he’s a part of is ‘philosophically weak borderline Christians’, not ‘Materialists’. After all, they guy isn’t a materialist. And if you’re a philosophically weak borderline Christian, the easiest route to materialism is indeed how useful it is, not a philosophical argument, because these folks don’t give a whit about philosophy.
Judging authors by a single quote without knowing the context is a bad idea. Rousseau begins one of his works by saying “”Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
Taken on it’s own you might think that Rousseau is somehow criticizing that man is in chains. He isn’t. He advocates that man is chained by the social contract. I really had a hard time with ideas like this because I had read the book and my history teacher hadn’t, so discussing Rousseau was really hard.
Why do you care about Lewis?
We are a group of smart people. There nothing wrong with a quote having multiple layers of meaning and saying something in addition to it’s apparent subject.
On LW we care about rationality. Having accurate beliefs about what makes people become atheists is useful for that purpose.
On the other hand having accurate beliefs about CS Lewis is less important.
The truth value of that statement matters a great deal but that in no way implies that we shouldn’t take about that statement and it has no place on LW.
You didn’t attack it on grounds that it’s wrong and that there evidence that it’s wrong but on the grounds that it’s an unfair attack.
See filtered evidence. It is completely possible to mislead people by giving them only true information… but only those pieces of information which support the conclusion you want them to make.
If you had a perfect superhuman intelligence, perhaps you could give them dozen information about why X is wrong, a zero information about why Y is wrong, and yet the superintelligence might conclude: “Both X and Y are human political sides, so I will just take this generally as an evidence that humans are often wrong, especially when discussing politics. Because humans are so often wrong, it is very likely that the human who is giving this information to me is blind to the flaws of one side (which in this specific case happens to be Y), so all this information is only a very weak evidence for X being worse than Y.”
But humans don’t reason like this. Give them dozen information about why X is wrong, and zero information about why Y is wrong; in the next chapter give them dozen information about why Y is good and zero information about why X is good… and they will consider this a strong evidence that X is worse than Y. -- And Lewis most likely understands this.
I doubt that any LW member would take all of his information about the value of atheism from Lewis. If you let yourself convince that atheism is wrong by reading Lewis than your belief in atheism was very weak in the first place.
I have a hard time imagine pushing anyone in LW into a crisis of faith about atheism in which we wouldn’t come out with better belief system than he started. If someone discovers that he actually follows in atheism because it’s cool and works through his issues, he might end up in following atheism for better reasons.
I agree that this attack would not convince a typical LW-er, but I would claim that an unconvincing attempt to mislead with the truth is still an attempt to mislead with the truth and as such is ineligible to be a good rationality quote.
This quote taken together with the basic LW wisdom can be useful. But taken separately from any LW context, it would probably just push the reader a little towards religion.
In other words, a LW reader has no problem to imagine a complementary and equally valid quote (actually he probably already did something similar before reading Lewis) like:
Why would you want to do that?
The effects of little pushes are complicated. Vaccination is about little pushes.
The difference is that many Christians already argue that one should be Christian because it’s the moral thing to do and it’s socially beneficial. Christians don’t engage in the same behavior of trying to make people think it’s true than atheists do.
Christian missionaries actually do a lot of socially beneficial work in order to convince people of Christianity.
As far as “traditional wisdom” goes it gets interesting. I don’t think that Christianity grows in China because the Chinese consider it traditional wisdom.
Mormons argue that the fact that the religion grows as fast at it does is a sign that it’s true. They don’t see it as a religion of the past but as one of the future.
Despite talking about ancient wisdom New Age folks use the word ‘new’ as part of their brand.
I think it’s very useful to understand why certain movements win and move past your first stereotypes and actually seek understanding. Even Hitler who wanted to bring back traditional values was very clever in painting the status quo as going to end soon and the future as either his nationalism or communism.
He made it the cool philosophy that the young people at the universities wanted to follow before he had success with elections.