Sorry, it’s taken so long to reply. I’m easily distracted by shiny objects and the prospect of work.
Let’s see:
Sorry, I was saying I agreed with them. You don’t have to know every argument for a position to hold it, you just have to be right.
It seems to me at the moment that you don’t know if you’re right. So while you don’t have to know every argument for a position to hold it, if you’re interested in producing truth, it’s desirable to have evidence on your side—either via the beliefs of others who have a wider array of knowledge on the subject than yourself and are good at producing truth or via knowing the arguments yourself.
Mind you, I generally do learn the arguments, but I’m weird like that.
I never have the time to learn all the arguments. Though I tend to know a reasonable number by comparison to most people I meet I suppose—not that that’s saying much.
I’m talking more about the set of everybody who tells you to read the literature. Sure, it’s a perfectly good heuristic as long as you only use it when you’re dealing with that particular subset.
Ah, more generally then that depends on who’s telling you to do it and what literature they’re telling you to read. If someone’s asking you to put in a fairly hefty investment of time then it seems to me that requires a fairly hefty investment of trust, sort of like Let’s see some cards before we start handing over money. You don’t have to see the entirety of their proof up front but if they can’t provide at least a short version and haven’t given you any other reason to respect their ability to find truth....
Like if gwern or someone told me that there was a good proof of god in something—I’ve read gwern’s website and respect their reasoning—that would make me inclined to do it. If I saw priests and the like regularly making coherent arguments and they had that visible evidence in their ability to find truth, then they’d get a similar allowance. But it’s like they don’t want to show their cards at the moment—or aren’t holding any—and whenever I’ve given them the allowance anyway it’s turned out to be a bit of a waste. So that trust’s not there for them anymore.
Well, I was thinking more theologians, but to be fair they’re as bad as philosophers. Still, they’ve spent millennia talking about this stuff.
That’s true. I just wonder—it’s not well ordered or homogenous.
If everyone was writting about trivial truths then you’d expect it to mostly agree with itself—lots of people saying more or less the same stuff. If it was deep knowledge then you’d expect the deep knowledge to be on the top of the heap. Insights relevant to a widely felt need impose an ordering effect on the search space. Which is to say, lots of people know about them because they’re so useful.
It’s entirely possible they’ve just spent millennia talking about not very much at all. I mean you read Malebranche, for instance, and he was considered at the time to be doing very good work. But when you read it, it’s almost infantile in its misunderstandings. If that’s what passed muster it does’t imply good things about what they were doing with the rest of their two thousand years or so.
I’m not sure whether that’s particularly clear, reading it back. When people are talking sense then the people from previous eras don’t appear to pass muster to people from modern eras. They might appear smart, but they’re demonstrably wrong. If Malebranche is transparently wrong to me, and I’m not especially familiar with Christian works, nor am I the smartest man who ever lived—I’ve met one or two people in my life I consider as smart as myself.… That’s not something that looks like an argument that’s the product of thousands of years of meaningful work, or that could survive as something respectable in an environment where thousands of years of work had been put in.
Sorry, but I’m going to have to call No True Scotsman on this. How many theists who were rational in their reasons for believing have been corrected by atheists? How many creationists who were rational in their reasons for disbelieving in evolution have been corrected by evolutionists?
What difference does either of those make to the claim about atheistic rationalists? I’m not making a universal claim that all rationalists are atheistic, I’m making a claim about the group of people who are rationalists and are atheistic.
NTS would be if I said no rational atheist had, to my knowledge, ever been corrected on their point of disbelief by a Christian and you said sometihng like,
“Well, Elizer is a rationalist and he’s become a Christian after hearing my really awesome argument.”
And then I was all, “Well obviously Elizer’s a great big poopy-head rather than a rationalist.”
To my mind, Elizer and a reasonable distribution of other respectable rationalists becoming Christians in response to an argument (so that we know it’s not just a random mental breakdown,) would be very hefty evidence in favour of there being a good argument for being Christian out there.
However, to answer your questions:
I don’t know on the creationist front, but on the Christian front I personally know of … actually now I think of it longer I know of four, one of my friends in the US changed his mind too.
I do know of one person who’s gone the other way too. But not someone that I’d considered particularly rational before they did so.
Sorry, it’s taken so long to reply. I’m easily distracted by shiny objects and the prospect of work.
Let’s see:
It seems to me at the moment that you don’t know if you’re right. So while you don’t have to know every argument for a position to hold it, if you’re interested in producing truth, it’s desirable to have evidence on your side—either via the beliefs of others who have a wider array of knowledge on the subject than yourself and are good at producing truth or via knowing the arguments yourself.
I never have the time to learn all the arguments. Though I tend to know a reasonable number by comparison to most people I meet I suppose—not that that’s saying much.
Ah, more generally then that depends on who’s telling you to do it and what literature they’re telling you to read. If someone’s asking you to put in a fairly hefty investment of time then it seems to me that requires a fairly hefty investment of trust, sort of like Let’s see some cards before we start handing over money. You don’t have to see the entirety of their proof up front but if they can’t provide at least a short version and haven’t given you any other reason to respect their ability to find truth....
Like if gwern or someone told me that there was a good proof of god in something—I’ve read gwern’s website and respect their reasoning—that would make me inclined to do it. If I saw priests and the like regularly making coherent arguments and they had that visible evidence in their ability to find truth, then they’d get a similar allowance. But it’s like they don’t want to show their cards at the moment—or aren’t holding any—and whenever I’ve given them the allowance anyway it’s turned out to be a bit of a waste. So that trust’s not there for them anymore.
That’s true. I just wonder—it’s not well ordered or homogenous.
If everyone was writting about trivial truths then you’d expect it to mostly agree with itself—lots of people saying more or less the same stuff. If it was deep knowledge then you’d expect the deep knowledge to be on the top of the heap. Insights relevant to a widely felt need impose an ordering effect on the search space. Which is to say, lots of people know about them because they’re so useful.
It’s entirely possible they’ve just spent millennia talking about not very much at all. I mean you read Malebranche, for instance, and he was considered at the time to be doing very good work. But when you read it, it’s almost infantile in its misunderstandings. If that’s what passed muster it does’t imply good things about what they were doing with the rest of their two thousand years or so.
I’m not sure whether that’s particularly clear, reading it back. When people are talking sense then the people from previous eras don’t appear to pass muster to people from modern eras. They might appear smart, but they’re demonstrably wrong. If Malebranche is transparently wrong to me, and I’m not especially familiar with Christian works, nor am I the smartest man who ever lived—I’ve met one or two people in my life I consider as smart as myself.… That’s not something that looks like an argument that’s the product of thousands of years of meaningful work, or that could survive as something respectable in an environment where thousands of years of work had been put in.
What difference does either of those make to the claim about atheistic rationalists? I’m not making a universal claim that all rationalists are atheistic, I’m making a claim about the group of people who are rationalists and are atheistic.
NTS would be if I said no rational atheist had, to my knowledge, ever been corrected on their point of disbelief by a Christian and you said sometihng like,
“Well, Elizer is a rationalist and he’s become a Christian after hearing my really awesome argument.”
And then I was all, “Well obviously Elizer’s a great big poopy-head rather than a rationalist.”
To my mind, Elizer and a reasonable distribution of other respectable rationalists becoming Christians in response to an argument (so that we know it’s not just a random mental breakdown,) would be very hefty evidence in favour of there being a good argument for being Christian out there.
However, to answer your questions: I don’t know on the creationist front, but on the Christian front I personally know of … actually now I think of it longer I know of four, one of my friends in the US changed his mind too.
I do know of one person who’s gone the other way too. But not someone that I’d considered particularly rational before they did so.