I hope we don’t have different views on how to weigh experience. This should be weighed as evidence exactly the same way everything else is: by the odds ratio of it occurring when the hypothesis is true over when it isn’t.
This is very important.
jasonmcdowell
Karma: 335
The organizational problems you have written about here are concrete and easily supported. When I read your organizational writing and I come to a place where I need to evaluate if what you’re saying is true, the problem is transformed into a question of whether I believe that churches and missionary groups are successful at these things. So far you’ve been distilling and translating institutional knowledge.
I haven’t seen you write about harder issues here. Issues that require weighing competing mental processes, avoiding self-deception, tracing several levels of implication, being careful about what constitutes evidence, etc.
Of your writing elsewhere, it feels like you are snorkeling with fins and a mask. You’re staying on the surface in warm water and are checking out the beautiful tropical fish. You can see some of the terrain below you because your mask isn’t that foggy, but you don’t touch it because that just isn’t the activity you’re doing. You’re not surface diving, or deep water diving, and you’re having fun with your current activity.
Me too. I’ve even done it before:
I have a facebook friend who writes thoughtfully, seems reasonably clever and cares about deep questions. He is a speaking-in-tongues, deeply religious, Prosperity, Charismatic, Word of Faith, Christian. A few of his interests and landmark-experiences match my own.
I was excited to talk to him because I thought he would be able to teach me something about religious people that ‘normal people’ couldn’t.
I also thought the skeleton of his personality was similar enough to mine that he might have made an ‘interesting mistake’. Due to the similarities between us, I wondered if I could also be susceptible to whatever ‘wrong turn’ his thinking took. I wanted to identify and analyze that ‘interesting mistake’, so I wouldn’t make it, and because I expected it to be weird and interesting.
It turned out his mistake wasn’t interesting and I was disappointed.
And psychology courses would include stuff on perception and how it can be tricked, such as optical illusions.
That’s true, and if he answered ‘yes’, or ‘no’ we wouldn’t know much. But he seems pretty thorough—I’m hoping he’ll describe his definition of what ‘supernatural’ means.
I could have just asked, ‘how would you define supernatural’, but I felt like seeing how he would respond to the first version. The information I wanted is how he frames the question. :-)
I like to learn more about missionary success rates. That sounds really low.
What happened in South Korea?
Yes on this question. Here is his conversion story which someone else posted in a different reply.
In the story Initiation Ceremony, a character is asked if he ‘wants to know’.
In that context, do you want to know? Does knowing motivate you? Are you interested in the ‘truth’ about the nature of the universe and how it works?
Do you care about reality as opposed to socially constructed ‘realities’
I’ve just started reading your blog which someone linked to.
Have you attended a meet up in Berkeley (and are you that guy that said he wrote programs to analyze his own genetic SNPs?)
thanks.
I’m going to start having kids in a few years. I have my eye of some of the sequenences—such as Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions. I need to find a way to distill this stuff down, so I can teach it to my children.
You said what I’m thinking, only in complete paragraphs. Seriously. I was thinking:
his content is good, but I have questions and suspicions.
missionaries evolved a bunch of good techniques
can these techniques be used without negative side effects?
If Calcsam is willing to spend the time, I’d rather he respond in a detailed “answers” discussion post rather than responding ad-hoc in this thread.
There is lots of meta in this thread. I wish for an answers post with the questions he’s responding to numbered and quoted. Then we could respond to the response with less clutter.
I tried to use the broken link when I read the article today. Thanks.
We can use his definition.
The beginnings of older religions are lost in myth and so are somewhat protected from scrutiny.
Newer religions like LDS and perhaps Scientology have much more detailed historical information available. For these newer organizations, there are verifiable primary sources for many historical details. The public record (internet accessible) tells a different story than church doctrine on some of these details.
The question: Have you done a due diligence study of the roots and founding of your faith?
Do you believe in supernatural things?
Yes. But the reason why we should listen to him is self-evident. He has written things that are valuable. If he maintains his interest in the community here, and the quality is good, he could be a value-multiplier. A catalyst. His writing here is the intersecting part of a Venn diagram, his interests overlapping with Less Wrong.
His allusions to his missionary work are provoking an immune response from many here, including me (not that I write much). I think this is why (from a quote thread):
What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation. —Anatole France
For positive reinforcement: I’ve found your writing on less wrong good enough to be here so far. Reinforced bits: organization, use of emphasis, footnotes, engaging style, neutral tone, not taking incompatibility personally, a focus on sharing compatible, mutually useful knowledge.