I think we should start saying explicitly that this is an atheists-only community.
It’s not that we don’t want to help theists become more rational; we do. But this website isn’t primarily an outreach mechanism; it’s a facilitator for discussions among people who are already on board with the basics of what we’re about. And those basics absolutely rule out theism and other supernatural stuff. I think we could say fairly categorically that if you don’t understand why theism is ruled out, you’re not ready to post here.
I would be at least as concerned about initially repulsing atheists who don’t feel that they want to be part of an overly-exclusionary community, as about driving out intelligent theists.
One good reason to, if not exclude theists, then at least minimize their presence here, is the very real possibility that they could become a large minority. Once their number has reached a certain percentage of the LW community, it’s almost a certainty that they will team up with agnostics and atheists who believe in belief to enforce deference towards their beliefs; by constantly chiding vocal anti-theists, or simply by making it known that they are theists once in a while, they will make it rude to state that theism is, in fact, irrational. This isn’t a new phenomenon, it’s one that already exists in nearly every society in the Western world, as well as most internet communities. I’d hate to see it take hold at Less Wrong too.
Probably this is a better idea than the one I started with—there’s a distinction between an atheist community and an atheist-only community, and the former may be wiser.
I think we could say fairly categorically that if you don’t understand why theism is ruled out, you’re not ready to post here.
I feel like repeating myself here: just don’t foster the discussion concerned directly with religion. We don’t fight religion, we fight for people’s sanity. Otherwise, it’s like not allowing sick people to a hospital. In most cases, good hygiene within the community should be enough to keep the patients from harming each other.
Fair enough. More specifically, the problem is in the efficiency of this criterion: yes, there is a correlation, but is a rule worth enforcing, would it hurt more than help? So, I guess the point comes down to me not considering this particular feature as salient as you do.
The distinction isn’t quite as simple as I’m making—we are all actively fighting our own and each other’s irrationalities—but I still think there’s a line that can be drawn of whether a person is fundamentally in tune with the rationalist values that this site is all about.
However, I am given pause by the fact that everyone except Annoyance seems to disagree with me.
I agree with you in a weak sense . My position is that while we shouldn’t officially exclude theists from participation, we should nevertheless be free to take atheism completely for granted -- as would be manifested, for instance, in unhesitatingly using theism as a canonical example of irrationality. The kind of theist who will be welcome here is the kind who can handle this.
I think it is a huge mistake to assume that someone who is irrational in one area isn’t perfectly rational in other areas. I can easily imagine an intelligent theist writing helpful posts on nearly every subject that comes up here. The fact that he’s making errors when it comes to his thinking on God is totally beside the point. Creationists I’d be considerably more skeptical of- but I don’t think its impossible to imagine a good post on say keeping your brain healthy, or rhetorical tricks for convincing people coming from people with very wrong views in other areas. If a theist came here I take it you should down vote his/her bad arguments for theism and upvote any positive contributions they make. End of story.
Learning someone is a theist might be bayesian evidence that they are fools but its not strong enough evidence to prevent entry to the community even before seeing what the person has to offer.
I don’t see what we have here as a bag of tricks you can use to improve your rationality, but a programme that forms a coherent whole, as I set out here. To be a theist is to fail to grasp the whole thrust of the programme.
I’m not sure that is the case. To be a biblical literalist waiting for the rapture is certainly to have nothing in common with the programme. But there are theists who could share your concerns about the effect of our biases and who could make helpful contributions to that cause. And even though this isn’t a deconversion website I think if you want to evangelize for the rationalist project having a community that is open and friendly even to those who still have some irrational beliefs left over is really important. Would you let in questioning theists? Fideists?
EDIT: I should add that I wouldn’t want to leave the impression that my typical picture of a theist is some thundering fundamentalist; I have several pagan and liberal Christian friends, and they are smart and lovely people. Still, the Escher-brained things they say when you try and talk about the subject discourage me from the idea that they’re going to help us move things forward.
Superhappies would ask you, in the name of fairness, to invent a symmetric rite of admission for atheists. Some Bayesian-obvious truth that would sound similarly unacceptable to their social circle.
For example, we atheists could get a taste of theists’ feelings by declaring aloud that “women/blacks and men/whites don’t have equal intelligence on average” and watching the reactions. A “bigoted” version of Dawkins or Eliezer could arise and argue eloquently how this factual statement is irrelevant to morality, just like the issue of god’s existence. That was inflammatory on purpose; you could go for something milder, like the goodness of monarchy relative to democracy.
For cooperation to arise, the opposing side needs to have relative advantage. For the theists to ask atheists to argue for theism, they should consider atheists to be better at arguing for theism than they are. Fairness is not just about symmetry, but also about cooperation. And cooperation requires improvement in the outcome for all sides.
I confess I don’t understand what you mean by this. Are you wondering why more people haven’t commented on that post? Why I haven’t commented on that post?
Does this have something to do with our previous exchange?
Good questions. I guess I am venting my frustration that my lovely post has had so few comments. It feels like that there’s a conversation to be had about the whole subject that we keep nibbling at the edges of in exchanges like this when we should be driving hard for the center. If my post is a poor way to start on that, someone should make a better one.
So to tie that back into our exchange, I feel like I’d be better armed to discuss who we should be encouraging to post here in the name of outreach if we’d had a discussion on what sort of outreach we might do and what role this website might play in that.
However, it’s also more than possible that I have entirely the wrong end of the stick, in which case I’d appreciate guidance on where the right end might be found :-)
You’re right that debating factors the effect outreach would be a lot easier if we had criteria for what effective outreach means.
I think people prefer posts that go a long way toward making some argument- in contrast with those that just ask for input. Even if people like the question they’re less likely to promote the post. But your comment outlining the programme got a lot of karma. Why not make that into a full post and talk about the sorts of things you’d like our goals to be.
One other possibility is that its just too soon to do outreach. Maybe we need more time to mature and systematize our ideas.
I didn’t want to do that because I wanted to discuss everyone’s ideas, not just my own which I’m not wholly confident of, but you might be right that it would be a better way forward. Thanks.
Outreach? For someone who seems so avowedly anti-religious, you seem very eager to appropriate all the trappings of classical, unthinking religion. I’m fine discussing rationality here, but talk of proselytizing makes me nauseous.
Not to mention greatly overestimating the extent to which a superficial similarity implies a deep one. I plan to continue to urinate, even though the Pope does so too.
Funny, I would have said that most biblical literalists have a lot more in common with us than moderate Christians. Literalists tend to believe they believe in God because of the evidence they see for His existence, whereas moderates usually acknowledge that there is no evidence, but they believe anyway. Of course, literalists make several mistakes about what constitutes evidence, and they reach some damn crazy conclusions, but the basic cognitive mechanism of reason is there: Beliefs must be supported by logic and evidence. Moderates don’t even have that much. It’s why fundamentalists who are forced to accept that a big part of their belief system is false (such as Genesis) tend to drop the whole thing and become atheists, while moderates will go on making excuses to keep on believing in their infinitely malleable worldview.
I’m proposing something stronger than that: it’s not appropriate to post arguments for religious faith here at all. In fact, I’m proposing something stronger than that: if you don’t understand why theism is ruled out, you’re not ready to post here at all.
it’s not appropriate to post arguments for religious faith here at all.
Agreed, with reservations. (Some might be useful examples. Some might be sufficiently persuasive prima facie to be worth a look even though we’d be astonished if they turned out actually to work.)
if you don’t understand why theism is ruled out, you’re not ready to post here at all.
If theism were just one more thing that people can easily be wrong about, perhaps you’d be right. As it is, there’s huge internal and external pressure influencing many people in the direction of theism, and some people are really good at compartmentalizing; and as a result there are lots of people who are basically good thinkers, who are basically committed to deciding things rationally, but who are still theists. I don’t see any reason to believe that no one in that position could have anything to offer LW.
Once again: Would you want to keep out Robert Aumann?
“Still, we can agree that Aumann is not on board with the programme...”
What on earth are you talking about? A legendary rationalist is “not on board with the programme” here at a website ostensibly devoted to the discussion of rationality because he might be a theist? Get a grip. There is no such “programme” that would exclude him.
The site would be helped most not by categorically excluding theists, but by culling out all the blinkered and despicable cult-like elements that seem to worm their way persistently into the manner of speaking around here.
Aumann is a mathematician-of-rationality, not a rationalist. Completely different skillset. It would be great to have him here, but not because he agrees with the site’s basic goals and premises.
This is one of the more asinine things I’ve seen on here. There are many, many brilliant people who happen to be theists, and to categorically exclude their contributions and viewpoints would be doing the community a grave disservice. I’m an atheist myself, but I’ve never thought for a second that “God doesn’t exist” is any kind of fundamental, unassailable axiom of rationality. It’s not.
AlexU, could you re-phrase your comment to have more descriptive discussion of the consequences you want to avoid, or of the evidence that leads you to disagree with ciphergoth? Right now, your comment mostly reads as “I really really want to express how aligned I/we am with niceness/tolerance/etc., and how socially objectionable ciphergoth’s comment is.” If you can think through the reasons for your response, and include more testable descriptions per connotation, the conversation will probably head more useful places.
ETA: I have the same suggestion concerning your othertwo recent comments.
The site is about rationality, not dogma—I think. Posts should be judged on the strength and clarity of their ideas, not the beliefs of the individual posters who espouse them. To categorically exclude an entire class of people—some of whom are very good rationalists and thinkers—simply because they don’t subscribe to some LW party line, is not only short-sighted, but perversely, seems to run entirely counter the spirit of a site devoted to rationality.
The consequences, I imagine, would be less interesting, less broad discussion, with a constricting of perspective and a tendency to attract the same fairly narrow range of people who want to talk about the same fairly narrow range of topics. It will select not for good rationalists per se, but some mix of people who overly fancy themselves good rationalists, as well as the standard transhumanism/Singularity crowd that’s here because of EY.
Observe: Although this post has the same conclusion, because it has different arguments, it is voted up while similar-concluding different-argued comments by the same poster are voted down. (I agree with this judgment; this is how it is supposed to be.) Those wondering exactly what it takes to get voted up or voted down have here a good example before them.
“To categorically exclude an entire class of people—some of whom are very good rationalists and thinkers—”
But that’s the point. No one who belongs to that class is a good rationalist. I’m sure there are people who belong to that class who in limited contexts are good rationalists, but speaking globally, one cannot be a rationalist of any quality and exempt some assertion from the standards of rationality.
This isn’t about the perfect being the enemy of the good. It’s about minimum standards, consistency, and systematic honesty.
If you possess evidence that shows theism to be rationally justifiable, present it.
speaking globally, one cannot be a rationalist of any quality and exempt some assertion from the standards of rationality.
You can’t speak globally when it comes to the human brain.
Sure, if brains had any sort of global consistency or perfect internal software reuse, you could say that being a rationalist rules out believing in irrational things.
But as a practical matter, you can’t insist on consistency when someone might simply not have thought of applying the same logic to all their beliefs… especially since MOST of the beliefs we have are not perceptible as beliefs in the first place. (They just seem like “reality”.)
In addition, our brains are quite capable of believing in contradictory things at the same time, with one set controlling discourse and the other controlling behavior. In work with myself and others who have no conscious religious beliefs, I’ve often discovered, mid-mindhack, that there’s some sort of behavior in the person being driven by an unconscious desire to go to heaven or not be sent to hell. So even someone who thinks they’re an atheist can believe in silly things, without even knowing it.
So, IMO, it makes as much sense to ban people with supernatural beliefs, as it does to ban people who have idiotic beliefs about brains being consistent.
Actually, come to think of it, the belief that people’s brains must be consistent IS a supernatural belief, as there’s no physical mechanism in the brain that allows O(1) updating of belief structures that don’t share common components. To insist that the moment one becomes a rationalist, one must then become an atheist, is to insist on a miracle inconsistent with physics, biology, and information science.
So, if we are going to exclude people with inconsistent or supernatural beliefs, let’s start with the people who insist that the brain must be supernaturally consistent. (This is actually pretty reasonable, since such an error in thinking arises from the same mind-projection machinery that gives rise to theism, after all...)
I would expect the potential commentariat at Less Wrong to be terribly small if anyone holding a firm belief that is not rationally justifiable were banned.
I am highly skeptical that I have fully purged myself of all beliefs where I have been presented with correct damning evidence against them. If anything, reading here has raised my estimate of how many such beliefs I might hold. Even as I purge many false propositions, I become aware of more biases to which I am demonstrably subject. Can anyone here who is aware of the limitations of our mental hardware say otherwise?
I am not as convinced as most posters here that all possible versions of theism are utterly wrong and deserve to be accorded effectively zero probability, but in any case, it’s clear that LW (and OB) communities generally wish to consider the case against theism closed. To the extent that the posters do not attack theism or theists in an obviously biased way, I have respected the decision and post and vote accordingly, including downvoting people who try to reopen the argument in inappropriate places.
I also intend to make a habit of downvoting those who waste time denouncing theism in inappropriate contexts or for specious reasons having more to do with signaling tribal bonds than with bringing up any new substantive argument against theism.
I don’t recall who suggested that we need another canonical example of irrationality, but I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, I’d suggest we need a decent short list to rotate through, so that no one topic gets beaten up so consistently as to encourage an affective death spiral around it.
I would rather emphasize Raising the Sanity Waterline. If we bar theists outright, we miss the opportunity to discuss rationality with them in different contexts. We don’t get to learn what insights they might have when their biases are not in the way. We don’t get to teach them about all the biases using nonreligious examples, so that they might, on their own, figure out to check for those same biases in their theistic beliefs. If we allow theists, we still have the karma system to bury any obnoxious comments they make on discussions of religion, and the same karma system will encourage them to participate in the areas where they will get the most benifet.
Are you so confident in your perfect, unerring rationality that you’ll consider that particular proposition completely settled and beyond questioning? I’m about as certain that there is no God as one can get, but that certainty is still less than 100%, as it is for virtually all things I believe or know. Part of maintaining a rational outlook toward life, I’d think, would be keeping an attitude of lingering doubt about even your most cherished and long-held beliefs.
Yes, that will always be technically true—no belief can be assigned a probability of 100%. Nevertheless, my utility calculations recognize that the expected benefit of questioning my stance on that issue is so small (because of its infinitesimal probability) that almost anything else has a higher expected value.
Why then should I question that, when there is so much else to ask?
Why isn’t this comment voted higher? (I presume it is because it is relatively new.) This is exactly the kind of comment that makes it easier on new/shy people. This sort of feedback is phenomenal. It may be harsh but it (a) gives specific criticisms without being vindictive (b) offers a reinterpretation of the original post and (c) offers suggestions on how to proceed in the future.
I feel that AlexU’s response was a vast improvement and is evidence to the value of AnnaSalamon’s comment.
A well-made point, AlexU. Unfortunately, while the point is correct, the argument which it is a part of is not.
Atheism isn’t axiomatic. It follows necessarily from the axioms of reason applied to the available evidence. If someone is a theist, that means either that they reject reason, or they have shocking evidence which is not available to others… and which they need to make available if they want others to recognize that their position is a sane one.
At present, there is absolutely no reason to think that anyone is in possession of such hidden evidence. Given the non-existence of such data, it follows that theists reject reason—which other, independent evidence confirms.
In this world, one cannot be informed, sane, and believe that the Earth is flat. The available evidence simply does not support that position. Nor does it support belief in a deity or deities.
In this world, one cannot be informed, sane, and believe that the Earth is flat.
No, but one can be fairly informed, sane, and a theist.
There are instrumental reasons for accepting theism that are hardly matched by rejecting it. For the most part, people don’t think the question of God’s existence is very important—if it is the case that a good Christian would live the same in the absence of God’s existence (a common enough contention) then nothing really turns on the question of God’s existence. Since nothing turns on the question, there’s no good reason to be singled out as an atheist in a possibly hostile environment.
If anything, there’s something terribly (instrumentally) irrational about calling oneself an atheist if it confers no specific benefit. And for many people, the default position is theism; the only way to become an atheist is to reject a commonly-held belief (that, again, nothing in life really turns on).
So I’d agree that a scholar of religion might be (epistemically) irrational to be a theist. But for the everyday person, it’s about as dangerous as believing the Earth to be a sphere, when it really isn’t.
Yeah. Another way of putting this is that no one is completely sane. People act irrationally all the time and it doesn’t make sense to target a group of people who have irrational beliefs about an issue that hardly affects their life while not targeting others (including ourselves) for acting irrationally in a bunch of different ways that really affect the world.
There are different standards for what to consider sane. At least among ourselves, we should raise the sanity waterline. But as the word is normally used, informed and rational theists are considered possible.
I would like you to elaborate more. I gave an argument in favor of being a theist. I have seen few good ones in favor of being an atheist.
I’m not at all convinced that atheism is the best epistemic position (most epistemically rational). I’m an atheist for purely methodological reasons, since I’m a philosopher, and dead dogma is dangerous. I could see someone being a theist for purely instrumental reasons, or by default since it’s not a very important question.
“I have seen few good ones in favor of being an atheist.”
That misses the point. Atheism is the null hypothesis; it’s the default. In the complete absence of evidence, non-commitment to any assertion is required.
They key point is that when you do the p value test you are determining p(data | null_hyp). This is certainly useful to calculate, but doesn’t tell you the whole story about whether your data support any particular non-null hypotheses.
Chapter 17 of E.T. Jaynes’ book provides a lively discussion of the limitations of traditional hypothesis testing, and is accessible enough that you can dive into it without having worked through the rest of the book.
The Cohen article cited below is nice but it’s important to note it doesn’t completely reject the use of null hypotheses or p-values:
.. null hypothesis testing complete with power analysis can be useful if we abandon the rejection of point nil hypotheses and use instead “good-enough” range null hypotheses
I think it’s funny that the observation that it’s “non-Bayesian” is being treated here as a refutation, and got voted up. Not terribly surprising though.
Could you be more explicit here? I would also have considered that if the charge of non-Bayesianness were to stick, that would be tantamount to a refutation, so if I’m making a mistake then help me out?
The charge was not that the idea is not useful, nor that it is not true, either of which might be a mark against it. But “non-Bayesian”? I can’t unpack that accusation in a way that makes it seem like a good thing to be concerned about. Even putting aside that I don’t much care for Bayesian decision-making (for humans), it sounds like it’s in the same family as a charge of “non-Christian”.
One analogy: non-mathematical, not formalized, not written in English, and attempts to translate generally fail.
See [*] for a critique of null hypothesis and related techniques from a Bayesian perspective. To cite:
My work in power analysis led be to realize that the nil hypothesis is always false. [...] If it is false, even to a tiny degree, it must be the case that a large enough sample will produce a significant result and lead to its rejection. So if the null hypothesis is always false, what’s the big deal about rejecting it?
[*] J. Cohen (1994). `The Earth Is Round (p < .05)’. American Psychologist 49(12):997-1003. [pdf].
But atheism isn’t actually the default. A person must begin study at some point in his life—you start from where you actually are. Most people I’m aware of begin their adult lives as theists. Without a compelling reason to change this belief, I wouldn’t expect them to.
Well… yes, it is. I do not know of any theistic infants. Actually, I’m not aware that infants have any beliefs as such.
Young children seem predisposed to attribute things to powerful but non-present entities, but I’m fairly certain there are logical fallacies involved.
The fact that many people accept certain concepts as given without questioning them thoroughly—or at all—does not constitute a justification for believing those things. I have often heard the claim that philosophy does not attempt to examine premises but only to project and study the consequences of the premises people bring to it; I consider that to be one of the reasons why ‘philosophy’ is without merit.
It seems that Annoyance and thomblake are using different definitions of “default”.
Annoyance uses it the same as null hypothesis, the theory with the smallest complexity and therefore the best prior probability, that any other theory needs evidence to compete with. In this sense, atheism is the default position, supposing that the universe follows mindless laws of nature without the need for initial setup or continuous intervention by any sort of intelligent power is simpler than supposing the universe acts the same way because some unexplained deity wills it. This definition is useful to figure out what our beliefs ought to be.
Thomblake seems to mean by “default”, the belief one had when achieving their current level of rationality, that they will keep until they find a reason to change it. For most people, who are introduced to a religion at young age before they get a chance to learn much about anything approaching rationality, some sort of theism would be this default. This definition is useful to figure out why people believe what they believe, and how to convince them to change their beliefs.
Now, I am not sure what we mean by “sanity”, but I think someone who maintains a default position (in thomblake’s sense) that they would not have adopted if first presented in their current level of rationality, while they may benifet from achieving an even higher level of rationality (or simply haven’t reviewed all their default positions), they are not necessarily incapable of achieving the higher level.
You keep doing this. Simply stating the opposite of another statement is not helping. Even if you clarify a little later it seems to be indirectly and without a solid response to the original point.
Well… yes, it is. I do not know of any theistic infants. Actually, I’m not aware that infants have any beliefs as such.
Infants without beliefs do not last long. They get beliefs eventually. Trying to argue this point just pushes the relevant stuff up the tree and makes the argument about semantics that are not particularly useful for the topic at hand.
And… are you saying that the null hypothesis is whatever an infant believes? How is that useful? I think it degrades definitions of things like “atheism” by saying that if you make no choice it is the same as making the correct choice. Coming to the correct conclusion for the wrong reason is the wrong solution.
Young children seem predisposed to attribute things to powerful but non-present entities, but I’m fairly certain there are logical fallacies involved.
The null hypothesis could be wrong. Logical fallacies are irrelevant.
The fact that many people accept certain concepts as given without questioning them thoroughly—or at all—does not constitute a justification for believing those things. I have often heard the claim that philosophy does not attempt to examine premises but only to project and study the consequences of the premises people bring to it; I consider that to be one of the reasons why ‘philosophy’ is without merit.
This is irrelevant to the topic. So, at the end, I spent my time telling you your comment was mostly irrelevant. I should just downvote and bury it like I did the other one.
I just noticed that “-1 points” is plural. Is that correct for negative numbers?
Yes, that’s one of the odd things about plurality, and why I argue that it’s a silly thing to encode in so much of our language. Singular means exactly one, plural means any other number. Sometimes we use the singular and “of a” for fractions, like “one quarter of a pie”, but “0.25 pies” is also correct.
“That wasn’t a loaded question. That was asking for clarification.”
No, clarification is when you have an imprecise idea and ask someone to provide more content to make it clearer. What you did was ask about something that was neither said nor implied.
I have no interest in denying the infinite number of meanings I don’t express in any given post, only in discussing the meanings I do express. Feel free to ask questions about those.
I am frankly amazed that so simple and evident an assertion should receive so many negative votes. (Not surprised, merely amazed. It would have to violate my expectations to be a surprise.)
Can I assert that Santa Claus does not exist and cannot be rationally considered to exist without receiving similar votes, or do I need to review the demonstration of why such is the case to avoid the wrath of the voters?
A more pertinent question: why should any of us care about negative votes when they’re given out so poorly?
I didn’t vote the post in question up or down, but I would speculate that it was received negatively simply because the tone came across as rude.
There’s sometimes a tendency in rationalists to observe (accurately) that our society overemphasizes politeness over frankness, and then to take it upon ourselves to correct this. Unfortunately, being human, we tend to do this selectively: by being ruder to others, sometimes to an overcompensating extent, while still reacting poorly to the rudeness of others. At least, that’s an issue I’ve had in the past. Your mileage may vary.
My personal take on it is that keeping to the standard level of etiquette is less trouble than the alternative, especially when trying to function in a conversational setting with a wide range of people. The metaphor of apparently unnecessary politeness as a “social lubricant” of sorts has been helpful to me in this regard.
But as I said, I’m only guessing here. I think you’d be within your rights to simply stop caring about the votes you get, be they positive or negative. Just be aware that you may be giving up on useful feedback information that way.
There’s sometimes a tendency in rationalists to observe (accurately) that our society overemphasizes politeness over frankness, and then to take it upon ourselves to correct this.
Great comment, agreed on all points. One of my mottos is “As polite as possible; as rude as necessary”.
I can’t see anything in Annoyance’s writings that could not be conveyed with less rudeness except their urge to ensure we all understand the contempt they hold us all in.
I like that motto a lot. Another one that bears on this is Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.”
In the case of wanting to deemphasize politeness, this would suggest being more lenient in the amount of rudeness you allow from others, but not increasing it in your output. Sort of the principle behind Crocker’s Rules.
My downvote (along with most others I presume) is not about agreement, but about whether you are adding anything useful to the discussion. Argument by repeated assertion is not supposed to be a staple of rationalist discourse. Either it’s worth your time to provide some links to an actual argument or it isn’t.
Do you really expect points for needing to get in the last word?
Your statement was simply wrong, by most commonly used definitions of sanity. Try pleading insanity in court based purely on a belief in god. Your comment also added nothing of value to the discussion.
The rational thing to do when you get downvoted would be to at least consider the possibility that your own judgement is at fault rather than assuming it is proof that negative votes are given out without good reason.
The assumption of both above comments is that there can be multiple commonly-used definitions of a word. Annoyance is using one of the commonly-used definitions that doesn’t fit into the ‘most’ above. He asserts that the other definitions are not only incorrect but insane, and I think this answers your question—a definition can be incorrect in the case that it is insane. Though I think calling a definition ‘insane’ is an odd use of the word.
I think you have to remember that saying something obvious is not the same as saying something useful. If someone came by and said “It is rational to believe in Santa Claus” it does not help to say “No it isn’t. Sorry, can’t elaborate.”
I would have to write an entire post—and a quite lengthy one at that—to do justice to the demonstration, and it’s already common knowledge.
If repeating something short and simple that’s already been said is so undesirable, why in the world would I wish to post something large, complex, and cumbrous that’s already widely known? Why would any of you wish me to do so?
Sorry, I deleted my comment because two other people basically said the same thing. I was hoping to get it out before you responded. My bad.
I am not necessarily saying I would rather you post a huge wall of text. Personally, I would just link to a good summary of the material and say, “This has been covered before.”
Another way to respond would be to play coy and ask for more details. This, at the very least, encourages more dialogue.
Another solution is to just not respond at all.
None of these are particularly fun, but I like to think you can at least avoid the negative response from the community.
I think we should start saying explicitly that this is an atheists-only community.
It’s not that we don’t want to help theists become more rational; we do. But this website isn’t primarily an outreach mechanism; it’s a facilitator for discussions among people who are already on board with the basics of what we’re about. And those basics absolutely rule out theism and other supernatural stuff. I think we could say fairly categorically that if you don’t understand why theism is ruled out, you’re not ready to post here.
I would be at least as concerned about initially repulsing atheists who don’t feel that they want to be part of an overly-exclusionary community, as about driving out intelligent theists.
One good reason to, if not exclude theists, then at least minimize their presence here, is the very real possibility that they could become a large minority. Once their number has reached a certain percentage of the LW community, it’s almost a certainty that they will team up with agnostics and atheists who believe in belief to enforce deference towards their beliefs; by constantly chiding vocal anti-theists, or simply by making it known that they are theists once in a while, they will make it rude to state that theism is, in fact, irrational. This isn’t a new phenomenon, it’s one that already exists in nearly every society in the Western world, as well as most internet communities. I’d hate to see it take hold at Less Wrong too.
Probably this is a better idea than the one I started with—there’s a distinction between an atheist community and an atheist-only community, and the former may be wiser.
I feel like repeating myself here: just don’t foster the discussion concerned directly with religion. We don’t fight religion, we fight for people’s sanity. Otherwise, it’s like not allowing sick people to a hospital. In most cases, good hygiene within the community should be enough to keep the patients from harming each other.
So part of the question is whether this is a hospital or a medical conference.
Data point: I followed a link to OB from reddit, got (largely) cured, and am now doing my best to assist the doctors.
Fair enough. More specifically, the problem is in the efficiency of this criterion: yes, there is a correlation, but is a rule worth enforcing, would it hurt more than help? So, I guess the point comes down to me not considering this particular feature as salient as you do.
So in essence, you’re asking whether this is:
a place for experts on rationality to come and discuss / build on important developments, or
a place for people who need rationality to come and get better
ne?
The distinction isn’t quite as simple as I’m making—we are all actively fighting our own and each other’s irrationalities—but I still think there’s a line that can be drawn of whether a person is fundamentally in tune with the rationalist values that this site is all about.
However, I am given pause by the fact that everyone except Annoyance seems to disagree with me.
I agree with you in a weak sense . My position is that while we shouldn’t officially exclude theists from participation, we should nevertheless be free to take atheism completely for granted -- as would be manifested, for instance, in unhesitatingly using theism as a canonical example of irrationality. The kind of theist who will be welcome here is the kind who can handle this.
I think it is a huge mistake to assume that someone who is irrational in one area isn’t perfectly rational in other areas. I can easily imagine an intelligent theist writing helpful posts on nearly every subject that comes up here. The fact that he’s making errors when it comes to his thinking on God is totally beside the point. Creationists I’d be considerably more skeptical of- but I don’t think its impossible to imagine a good post on say keeping your brain healthy, or rhetorical tricks for convincing people coming from people with very wrong views in other areas. If a theist came here I take it you should down vote his/her bad arguments for theism and upvote any positive contributions they make. End of story.
Learning someone is a theist might be bayesian evidence that they are fools but its not strong enough evidence to prevent entry to the community even before seeing what the person has to offer.
I don’t see what we have here as a bag of tricks you can use to improve your rationality, but a programme that forms a coherent whole, as I set out here. To be a theist is to fail to grasp the whole thrust of the programme.
I’m not sure that is the case. To be a biblical literalist waiting for the rapture is certainly to have nothing in common with the programme. But there are theists who could share your concerns about the effect of our biases and who could make helpful contributions to that cause. And even though this isn’t a deconversion website I think if you want to evangelize for the rationalist project having a community that is open and friendly even to those who still have some irrational beliefs left over is really important. Would you let in questioning theists? Fideists?
If we’re so keen on outreach, why aren’t we talking about it?
EDIT: I should add that I wouldn’t want to leave the impression that my typical picture of a theist is some thundering fundamentalist; I have several pagan and liberal Christian friends, and they are smart and lovely people. Still, the Escher-brained things they say when you try and talk about the subject discourage me from the idea that they’re going to help us move things forward.
Superhappies would ask you, in the name of fairness, to invent a symmetric rite of admission for atheists. Some Bayesian-obvious truth that would sound similarly unacceptable to their social circle.
For example, we atheists could get a taste of theists’ feelings by declaring aloud that “women/blacks and men/whites don’t have equal intelligence on average” and watching the reactions. A “bigoted” version of Dawkins or Eliezer could arise and argue eloquently how this factual statement is irrelevant to morality, just like the issue of god’s existence. That was inflammatory on purpose; you could go for something milder, like the goodness of monarchy relative to democracy.
For cooperation to arise, the opposing side needs to have relative advantage. For the theists to ask atheists to argue for theism, they should consider atheists to be better at arguing for theism than they are. Fairness is not just about symmetry, but also about cooperation. And cooperation requires improvement in the outcome for all sides.
I wasn’t asking atheists to argue for theism. And I don’t understand your reply at all. Could you explain?
I confess I don’t understand what you mean by this. Are you wondering why more people haven’t commented on that post? Why I haven’t commented on that post?
Does this have something to do with our previous exchange?
Good questions. I guess I am venting my frustration that my lovely post has had so few comments. It feels like that there’s a conversation to be had about the whole subject that we keep nibbling at the edges of in exchanges like this when we should be driving hard for the center. If my post is a poor way to start on that, someone should make a better one.
So to tie that back into our exchange, I feel like I’d be better armed to discuss who we should be encouraging to post here in the name of outreach if we’d had a discussion on what sort of outreach we might do and what role this website might play in that.
However, it’s also more than possible that I have entirely the wrong end of the stick, in which case I’d appreciate guidance on where the right end might be found :-)
You’re right that debating factors the effect outreach would be a lot easier if we had criteria for what effective outreach means.
I think people prefer posts that go a long way toward making some argument- in contrast with those that just ask for input. Even if people like the question they’re less likely to promote the post. But your comment outlining the programme got a lot of karma. Why not make that into a full post and talk about the sorts of things you’d like our goals to be.
One other possibility is that its just too soon to do outreach. Maybe we need more time to mature and systematize our ideas.
I didn’t want to do that because I wanted to discuss everyone’s ideas, not just my own which I’m not wholly confident of, but you might be right that it would be a better way forward. Thanks.
Outreach? For someone who seems so avowedly anti-religious, you seem very eager to appropriate all the trappings of classical, unthinking religion. I’m fine discussing rationality here, but talk of proselytizing makes me nauseous.
I think you may be underestimating the degree of irony with which we’re using religious language.
Not to mention greatly overestimating the extent to which a superficial similarity implies a deep one. I plan to continue to urinate, even though the Pope does so too.
Funny, I would have said that most biblical literalists have a lot more in common with us than moderate Christians. Literalists tend to believe they believe in God because of the evidence they see for His existence, whereas moderates usually acknowledge that there is no evidence, but they believe anyway. Of course, literalists make several mistakes about what constitutes evidence, and they reach some damn crazy conclusions, but the basic cognitive mechanism of reason is there: Beliefs must be supported by logic and evidence. Moderates don’t even have that much. It’s why fundamentalists who are forced to accept that a big part of their belief system is false (such as Genesis) tend to drop the whole thing and become atheists, while moderates will go on making excuses to keep on believing in their infinitely malleable worldview.
I doubt anyone needs to be warned that their argument for religious faith would have to be exceptional indeed to earn a positive response here.
I’m proposing something stronger than that: it’s not appropriate to post arguments for religious faith here at all. In fact, I’m proposing something stronger than that: if you don’t understand why theism is ruled out, you’re not ready to post here at all.
Agreed, with reservations. (Some might be useful examples. Some might be sufficiently persuasive prima facie to be worth a look even though we’d be astonished if they turned out actually to work.)
If theism were just one more thing that people can easily be wrong about, perhaps you’d be right. As it is, there’s huge internal and external pressure influencing many people in the direction of theism, and some people are really good at compartmentalizing; and as a result there are lots of people who are basically good thinkers, who are basically committed to deciding things rationally, but who are still theists. I don’t see any reason to believe that no one in that position could have anything to offer LW.
Once again: Would you want to keep out Robert Aumann?
Um. No. Busted.
Still, we can agree that Aumann is not on board with the programme...
“Still, we can agree that Aumann is not on board with the programme...”
What on earth are you talking about? A legendary rationalist is “not on board with the programme” here at a website ostensibly devoted to the discussion of rationality because he might be a theist? Get a grip. There is no such “programme” that would exclude him.
The site would be helped most not by categorically excluding theists, but by culling out all the blinkered and despicable cult-like elements that seem to worm their way persistently into the manner of speaking around here.
Aumann is a mathematician-of-rationality, not a rationalist. Completely different skillset. It would be great to have him here, but not because he agrees with the site’s basic goals and premises.
Or to put it another way: expert on rationality versus expert at rationality?
This is one of the more asinine things I’ve seen on here. There are many, many brilliant people who happen to be theists, and to categorically exclude their contributions and viewpoints would be doing the community a grave disservice. I’m an atheist myself, but I’ve never thought for a second that “God doesn’t exist” is any kind of fundamental, unassailable axiom of rationality. It’s not.
AlexU, could you re-phrase your comment to have more descriptive discussion of the consequences you want to avoid, or of the evidence that leads you to disagree with ciphergoth? Right now, your comment mostly reads as “I really really want to express how aligned I/we am with niceness/tolerance/etc., and how socially objectionable ciphergoth’s comment is.” If you can think through the reasons for your response, and include more testable descriptions per connotation, the conversation will probably head more useful places.
ETA: I have the same suggestion concerning your other two recent comments.
The site is about rationality, not dogma—I think. Posts should be judged on the strength and clarity of their ideas, not the beliefs of the individual posters who espouse them. To categorically exclude an entire class of people—some of whom are very good rationalists and thinkers—simply because they don’t subscribe to some LW party line, is not only short-sighted, but perversely, seems to run entirely counter the spirit of a site devoted to rationality.
The consequences, I imagine, would be less interesting, less broad discussion, with a constricting of perspective and a tendency to attract the same fairly narrow range of people who want to talk about the same fairly narrow range of topics. It will select not for good rationalists per se, but some mix of people who overly fancy themselves good rationalists, as well as the standard transhumanism/Singularity crowd that’s here because of EY.
Observe: Although this post has the same conclusion, because it has different arguments, it is voted up while similar-concluding different-argued comments by the same poster are voted down. (I agree with this judgment; this is how it is supposed to be.) Those wondering exactly what it takes to get voted up or voted down have here a good example before them.
“To categorically exclude an entire class of people—some of whom are very good rationalists and thinkers—”
But that’s the point. No one who belongs to that class is a good rationalist. I’m sure there are people who belong to that class who in limited contexts are good rationalists, but speaking globally, one cannot be a rationalist of any quality and exempt some assertion from the standards of rationality.
This isn’t about the perfect being the enemy of the good. It’s about minimum standards, consistency, and systematic honesty.
If you possess evidence that shows theism to be rationally justifiable, present it.
You can’t speak globally when it comes to the human brain.
Sure, if brains had any sort of global consistency or perfect internal software reuse, you could say that being a rationalist rules out believing in irrational things.
But as a practical matter, you can’t insist on consistency when someone might simply not have thought of applying the same logic to all their beliefs… especially since MOST of the beliefs we have are not perceptible as beliefs in the first place. (They just seem like “reality”.)
In addition, our brains are quite capable of believing in contradictory things at the same time, with one set controlling discourse and the other controlling behavior. In work with myself and others who have no conscious religious beliefs, I’ve often discovered, mid-mindhack, that there’s some sort of behavior in the person being driven by an unconscious desire to go to heaven or not be sent to hell. So even someone who thinks they’re an atheist can believe in silly things, without even knowing it.
So, IMO, it makes as much sense to ban people with supernatural beliefs, as it does to ban people who have idiotic beliefs about brains being consistent.
Actually, come to think of it, the belief that people’s brains must be consistent IS a supernatural belief, as there’s no physical mechanism in the brain that allows O(1) updating of belief structures that don’t share common components. To insist that the moment one becomes a rationalist, one must then become an atheist, is to insist on a miracle inconsistent with physics, biology, and information science.
So, if we are going to exclude people with inconsistent or supernatural beliefs, let’s start with the people who insist that the brain must be supernaturally consistent. (This is actually pretty reasonable, since such an error in thinking arises from the same mind-projection machinery that gives rise to theism, after all...)
I would expect the potential commentariat at Less Wrong to be terribly small if anyone holding a firm belief that is not rationally justifiable were banned.
I am highly skeptical that I have fully purged myself of all beliefs where I have been presented with correct damning evidence against them. If anything, reading here has raised my estimate of how many such beliefs I might hold. Even as I purge many false propositions, I become aware of more biases to which I am demonstrably subject. Can anyone here who is aware of the limitations of our mental hardware say otherwise?
I am not as convinced as most posters here that all possible versions of theism are utterly wrong and deserve to be accorded effectively zero probability, but in any case, it’s clear that LW (and OB) communities generally wish to consider the case against theism closed. To the extent that the posters do not attack theism or theists in an obviously biased way, I have respected the decision and post and vote accordingly, including downvoting people who try to reopen the argument in inappropriate places.
I also intend to make a habit of downvoting those who waste time denouncing theism in inappropriate contexts or for specious reasons having more to do with signaling tribal bonds than with bringing up any new substantive argument against theism.
I don’t recall who suggested that we need another canonical example of irrationality, but I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, I’d suggest we need a decent short list to rotate through, so that no one topic gets beaten up so consistently as to encourage an affective death spiral around it.
I would rather emphasize Raising the Sanity Waterline. If we bar theists outright, we miss the opportunity to discuss rationality with them in different contexts. We don’t get to learn what insights they might have when their biases are not in the way. We don’t get to teach them about all the biases using nonreligious examples, so that they might, on their own, figure out to check for those same biases in their theistic beliefs. If we allow theists, we still have the karma system to bury any obnoxious comments they make on discussions of religion, and the same karma system will encourage them to participate in the areas where they will get the most benifet.
Are you so confident in your perfect, unerring rationality that you’ll consider that particular proposition completely settled and beyond questioning? I’m about as certain that there is no God as one can get, but that certainty is still less than 100%, as it is for virtually all things I believe or know. Part of maintaining a rational outlook toward life, I’d think, would be keeping an attitude of lingering doubt about even your most cherished and long-held beliefs.
Yes, that will always be technically true—no belief can be assigned a probability of 100%. Nevertheless, my utility calculations recognize that the expected benefit of questioning my stance on that issue is so small (because of its infinitesimal probability) that almost anything else has a higher expected value.
Why then should I question that, when there is so much else to ask?
Where are you getting the idea that Annoyance said this?
Why isn’t this comment voted higher? (I presume it is because it is relatively new.) This is exactly the kind of comment that makes it easier on new/shy people. This sort of feedback is phenomenal. It may be harsh but it (a) gives specific criticisms without being vindictive (b) offers a reinterpretation of the original post and (c) offers suggestions on how to proceed in the future.
I feel that AlexU’s response was a vast improvement and is evidence to the value of AnnaSalamon’s comment.
Since you and I have voted it up, I guess two people have voted it down. That seems strange to me too.
Really must set up my LessWrong dev environment so I can add a patch to show both upvotes and downvotes!
Indeed. If that is the only change to this site’s system or ethic that comes out of this discussion, it will have been worth it.
A well-made point, AlexU. Unfortunately, while the point is correct, the argument which it is a part of is not.
Atheism isn’t axiomatic. It follows necessarily from the axioms of reason applied to the available evidence. If someone is a theist, that means either that they reject reason, or they have shocking evidence which is not available to others… and which they need to make available if they want others to recognize that their position is a sane one.
At present, there is absolutely no reason to think that anyone is in possession of such hidden evidence. Given the non-existence of such data, it follows that theists reject reason—which other, independent evidence confirms.
In this world, one cannot be informed, sane, and believe that the Earth is flat. The available evidence simply does not support that position. Nor does it support belief in a deity or deities.
No, but one can be fairly informed, sane, and a theist.
There are instrumental reasons for accepting theism that are hardly matched by rejecting it. For the most part, people don’t think the question of God’s existence is very important—if it is the case that a good Christian would live the same in the absence of God’s existence (a common enough contention) then nothing really turns on the question of God’s existence. Since nothing turns on the question, there’s no good reason to be singled out as an atheist in a possibly hostile environment.
If anything, there’s something terribly (instrumentally) irrational about calling oneself an atheist if it confers no specific benefit. And for many people, the default position is theism; the only way to become an atheist is to reject a commonly-held belief (that, again, nothing in life really turns on).
So I’d agree that a scholar of religion might be (epistemically) irrational to be a theist. But for the everyday person, it’s about as dangerous as believing the Earth to be a sphere, when it really isn’t.
Yeah. Another way of putting this is that no one is completely sane. People act irrationally all the time and it doesn’t make sense to target a group of people who have irrational beliefs about an issue that hardly affects their life while not targeting others (including ourselves) for acting irrationally in a bunch of different ways that really affect the world.
“No, but one can be fairly informed, sane, and a theist.”
No.
I wish I could elaborate more, but your statement is simply wrong. In our world, with our evidence, sanity and being informed rule out theism.
There are different standards for what to consider sane. At least among ourselves, we should raise the sanity waterline. But as the word is normally used, informed and rational theists are considered possible.
Not sure I disagree with your position, but I voted down because simply stating that your opponent is wrong doesn’t seem adequate.
I would like you to elaborate more. I gave an argument in favor of being a theist. I have seen few good ones in favor of being an atheist.
I’m not at all convinced that atheism is the best epistemic position (most epistemically rational). I’m an atheist for purely methodological reasons, since I’m a philosopher, and dead dogma is dangerous. I could see someone being a theist for purely instrumental reasons, or by default since it’s not a very important question.
“I have seen few good ones in favor of being an atheist.”
That misses the point. Atheism is the null hypothesis; it’s the default. In the complete absence of evidence, non-commitment to any assertion is required.
The idea of a null hypothesis is non-Bayesian.
A null hypothesis in Bayesian terms is a theory with a high prior probability due to minimal complexity.
I’m not sure it’s so clear cut.
They key point is that when you do the p value test you are determining p(data | null_hyp). This is certainly useful to calculate, but doesn’t tell you the whole story about whether your data support any particular non-null hypotheses.
Chapter 17 of E.T. Jaynes’ book provides a lively discussion of the limitations of traditional hypothesis testing, and is accessible enough that you can dive into it without having worked through the rest of the book.
The Cohen article cited below is nice but it’s important to note it doesn’t completely reject the use of null hypotheses or p-values:
I think it’s funny that the observation that it’s “non-Bayesian” is being treated here as a refutation, and got voted up. Not terribly surprising though.
Could you be more explicit here? I would also have considered that if the charge of non-Bayesianness were to stick, that would be tantamount to a refutation, so if I’m making a mistake then help me out?
The charge was not that the idea is not useful, nor that it is not true, either of which might be a mark against it. But “non-Bayesian”? I can’t unpack that accusation in a way that makes it seem like a good thing to be concerned about. Even putting aside that I don’t much care for Bayesian decision-making (for humans), it sounds like it’s in the same family as a charge of “non-Christian”.
One analogy: non-mathematical, not formalized, not written in English, and attempts to translate generally fail.
See [*] for a critique of null hypothesis and related techniques from a Bayesian perspective. To cite:
[*] J. Cohen (1994). `The Earth Is Round (p < .05)’. American Psychologist 49(12):997-1003. [pdf].
Being non-Bayesian is one particular type of being untrue.
Now, what does this mean? Sounds horribly untrue.
But atheism isn’t actually the default. A person must begin study at some point in his life—you start from where you actually are. Most people I’m aware of begin their adult lives as theists. Without a compelling reason to change this belief, I wouldn’t expect them to.
“But atheism isn’t actually the default.”
Well… yes, it is. I do not know of any theistic infants. Actually, I’m not aware that infants have any beliefs as such.
Young children seem predisposed to attribute things to powerful but non-present entities, but I’m fairly certain there are logical fallacies involved.
The fact that many people accept certain concepts as given without questioning them thoroughly—or at all—does not constitute a justification for believing those things. I have often heard the claim that philosophy does not attempt to examine premises but only to project and study the consequences of the premises people bring to it; I consider that to be one of the reasons why ‘philosophy’ is without merit.
It seems that Annoyance and thomblake are using different definitions of “default”.
Annoyance uses it the same as null hypothesis, the theory with the smallest complexity and therefore the best prior probability, that any other theory needs evidence to compete with. In this sense, atheism is the default position, supposing that the universe follows mindless laws of nature without the need for initial setup or continuous intervention by any sort of intelligent power is simpler than supposing the universe acts the same way because some unexplained deity wills it. This definition is useful to figure out what our beliefs ought to be.
Thomblake seems to mean by “default”, the belief one had when achieving their current level of rationality, that they will keep until they find a reason to change it. For most people, who are introduced to a religion at young age before they get a chance to learn much about anything approaching rationality, some sort of theism would be this default. This definition is useful to figure out why people believe what they believe, and how to convince them to change their beliefs.
Now, I am not sure what we mean by “sanity”, but I think someone who maintains a default position (in thomblake’s sense) that they would not have adopted if first presented in their current level of rationality, while they may benifet from achieving an even higher level of rationality (or simply haven’t reviewed all their default positions), they are not necessarily incapable of achieving the higher level.
I’m not even entirely sure that we’re all using the word ‘atheism’ to refer to the same things.
This highlights the problems that arise when people use the same terminology for different concepts.
You keep doing this. Simply stating the opposite of another statement is not helping. Even if you clarify a little later it seems to be indirectly and without a solid response to the original point.
That’s why you need to read the sentences following the one you quoted.
Infants without beliefs do not last long. They get beliefs eventually. Trying to argue this point just pushes the relevant stuff up the tree and makes the argument about semantics that are not particularly useful for the topic at hand.
And… are you saying that the null hypothesis is whatever an infant believes? How is that useful? I think it degrades definitions of things like “atheism” by saying that if you make no choice it is the same as making the correct choice. Coming to the correct conclusion for the wrong reason is the wrong solution.
The null hypothesis could be wrong. Logical fallacies are irrelevant.
This is irrelevant to the topic. So, at the end, I spent my time telling you your comment was mostly irrelevant. I should just downvote and bury it like I did the other one.
“And… are you saying that the null hypothesis is whatever an infant believes? ”
Yes, I have stopped beating my wife, thank you for asking.
I think you need to review what the concept of the null hypothesis actually is.
That wasn’t a loaded question. That was asking for clarification.
(PS) I just noticed that “-1 points” is plural. Is that correct for negative numbers?
Oddly enough, yes. “0 points” is also the standard. The singular only applies for 1.
Yes, that’s one of the odd things about plurality, and why I argue that it’s a silly thing to encode in so much of our language. Singular means exactly one, plural means any other number. Sometimes we use the singular and “of a” for fractions, like “one quarter of a pie”, but “0.25 pies” is also correct.
ETA citation
“That wasn’t a loaded question. That was asking for clarification.”
No, clarification is when you have an imprecise idea and ask someone to provide more content to make it clearer. What you did was ask about something that was neither said nor implied.
I have no interest in denying the infinite number of meanings I don’t express in any given post, only in discussing the meanings I do express. Feel free to ask questions about those.
I am frankly amazed that so simple and evident an assertion should receive so many negative votes. (Not surprised, merely amazed. It would have to violate my expectations to be a surprise.)
Can I assert that Santa Claus does not exist and cannot be rationally considered to exist without receiving similar votes, or do I need to review the demonstration of why such is the case to avoid the wrath of the voters?
A more pertinent question: why should any of us care about negative votes when they’re given out so poorly?
Downvoted because it adds nothing to what you said before. Repetition of bald assertions, even true ones, is one habit we want to avoid.
I didn’t vote the post in question up or down, but I would speculate that it was received negatively simply because the tone came across as rude.
There’s sometimes a tendency in rationalists to observe (accurately) that our society overemphasizes politeness over frankness, and then to take it upon ourselves to correct this. Unfortunately, being human, we tend to do this selectively: by being ruder to others, sometimes to an overcompensating extent, while still reacting poorly to the rudeness of others. At least, that’s an issue I’ve had in the past. Your mileage may vary.
My personal take on it is that keeping to the standard level of etiquette is less trouble than the alternative, especially when trying to function in a conversational setting with a wide range of people. The metaphor of apparently unnecessary politeness as a “social lubricant” of sorts has been helpful to me in this regard.
But as I said, I’m only guessing here. I think you’d be within your rights to simply stop caring about the votes you get, be they positive or negative. Just be aware that you may be giving up on useful feedback information that way.
Great comment, agreed on all points. One of my mottos is “As polite as possible; as rude as necessary”.
I can’t see anything in Annoyance’s writings that could not be conveyed with less rudeness except their urge to ensure we all understand the contempt they hold us all in.
I like that motto a lot. Another one that bears on this is Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.”
In the case of wanting to deemphasize politeness, this would suggest being more lenient in the amount of rudeness you allow from others, but not increasing it in your output. Sort of the principle behind Crocker’s Rules.
That comment could equally well have gone in “The ideas you’re not ready to post,” come to think of it.
And, then again, some people just enjoy being obnoxious.
My downvote (along with most others I presume) is not about agreement, but about whether you are adding anything useful to the discussion. Argument by repeated assertion is not supposed to be a staple of rationalist discourse. Either it’s worth your time to provide some links to an actual argument or it isn’t.
Do you really expect points for needing to get in the last word?
Your statement was simply wrong, by most commonly used definitions of sanity. Try pleading insanity in court based purely on a belief in god. Your comment also added nothing of value to the discussion.
The rational thing to do when you get downvoted would be to at least consider the possibility that your own judgement is at fault rather than assuming it is proof that negative votes are given out without good reason.
“Your statement was simply wrong, by most commonly used definitions of sanity.”
True, but not useful. The most commonly-used definitions of sanity are not only incorrect but insane.
“Your comment also added nothing of value to the discussion.”
That’s very useful feedback, indeed. Now I appreciate your thoughts and votes much more accurately.
How can a definition be incorrect?
If you find the common usage incoherent or otherwise not useful, don’t use it. To do otherwise is to lie.
The assumption of both above comments is that there can be multiple commonly-used definitions of a word. Annoyance is using one of the commonly-used definitions that doesn’t fit into the ‘most’ above. He asserts that the other definitions are not only incorrect but insane, and I think this answers your question—a definition can be incorrect in the case that it is insane. Though I think calling a definition ‘insane’ is an odd use of the word.
I think you have to remember that saying something obvious is not the same as saying something useful. If someone came by and said “It is rational to believe in Santa Claus” it does not help to say “No it isn’t. Sorry, can’t elaborate.”
I would have to write an entire post—and a quite lengthy one at that—to do justice to the demonstration, and it’s already common knowledge.
If repeating something short and simple that’s already been said is so undesirable, why in the world would I wish to post something large, complex, and cumbrous that’s already widely known? Why would any of you wish me to do so?
Sorry, I deleted my comment because two other people basically said the same thing. I was hoping to get it out before you responded. My bad.
I am not necessarily saying I would rather you post a huge wall of text. Personally, I would just link to a good summary of the material and say, “This has been covered before.”
Another way to respond would be to play coy and ask for more details. This, at the very least, encourages more dialogue.
Another solution is to just not respond at all.
None of these are particularly fun, but I like to think you can at least avoid the negative response from the community.