Way too much of my motivation for ‘having true beliefs’ breaks down to ‘maybe then they’ll like me.’
Way too much of everyone's motivation for anything breaks down to "maybe then group X will have/stop having attitude Y towards me". And the vast majority of the time, we're completely unaware of it.
So actually, you've got a leg up over all the people who are doing the same thing, but have a different X and Y than you and are unaware of it. (AFAICT, people who orient on "true beliefs" tend to be more about respect/status rather than affiliation, but apart from motivating slightly different behaviors, it might as well be the same thing. Affiliation-based motivation often results in "nicer" behaviors though, so that's actually a plus for you.)
some people really are trying to form their beliefs in order to act on the world, rather than on other people.
In which case, their desire to act on the world is typically because of a need to influence other people by way of their world-acting-on.
Or are you talking about people whose autism is so severe that they've never formed a bond with any other human being, including their parents?
If that's not who you're talking about, you should probably reconsider.
Barring such extreme cases, people generally learned to do whatever they do -- including any desire to "act on the world" -- as a consequence of their interactions (or lack thereof, in some cases) with other people.
As children, we tend to choose our values based on our attempts to get love and/or attention from our parents, and those early decisions tend to shape later ones. I got rewarded with attention for being the "smart one" in my family, which led me to value learning and knowledge.
For most of my life, I assumed that this valuing was independent of any such early circumstances. Instead, I merely felt like it was the right thing to value knowledge, to seek the truth, etc., and that people who didn't ...
Ultimately, I have an awfully long way to go if I want to be rational, as opposed to being someone who’s just interested in reading about math and science.
What exactly is your benchmark for being "rational"? If you mean becoming more openly critical in situations where your agreeableness prevents you from it, you should be aware that there are topics much more dangerous than religion where an uncompromising quest for truth might lead you to clash with the respectable opinion, both public and private. With this in mind, and considering the rest of what you wrote, it seems to me that for you, becoming hostile towards religion would not mean becoming more rational in any meaningful sense of the term. It would merely be a way to signal to a certain sort of people, without increasing the accuracy of your beliefs in any way, and distracting from topics that are far more difficult and dangerous, and thus a more critical test of rationality.
What exactly is your benchmark for being "rational"? If you mean becoming more openly critical in situations where your agreeableness prevents you from it, you should be aware that there are topics much more dangerous than religion where an uncompromising quest for truth might lead you to clash with the respectable opinion, both public and private.
That is not what I meant. I have no intention in becoming more hostile to religion; I'm having fun with it at the moment. My main issues are a) right now it doesn't feel like it hurts much to change my mind, meaning I'm probably not really changing my mind and I need to learn how to do it better, and b) my current schema for living life is deeply flawed. I care way too much about what others think of me, I've unthinkingly absorbed a ton of social conventions that I wish I hadn't, and my inability to say no means that I'm overbooked and exhausted all the time. Also I behave very irrationally when it comes to romantic relationships, but that's another story. And I'm a workaholic, though I would really be happier and get more done that I care about if I was able to work a little bit less.
Also, you're right about the celestial: In the western world religion has become quite low-hanging fruit by now - so low it practically touches the ground.
In most cases, when I see that someone is a particularly passionate and dedicated atheist (in the sense of the "New Atheists" etc.), lacking other information, I take it as strong evidence against their rationality. For someone living in the contemporary Western world who wants to fight against widespread and dangerous irrational beliefs, focusing on traditional religion indicates extreme bias and total blindness towards various delusions that are nowadays infinitely more pernicious and malignant than anything coming out of any traditional religion. (The same goes for those "skeptics" who relentlessly campaign against low-status folk superstition like UFOs or crystal healing, but would never dare mutter anything against all sorts of horrendous delusions that enjoy high status and academic approval.)
I like to compare such people with someone on board the Titanic who loses sleep over petty folk superstitions of the passengers, while at the same time being blissfully happy with the captain's opinions about navigation. (And, to extend the analogy, often even attacking those who question the captain's competence as dangerous crackpots.)
OOC - some examples would be nice :)
Well, whenever I open this topic, giving concrete examples is problematic, since these are by definition respectable and high-status delusions, so it's difficult or impossible to contradict them without sounding like a crackpot or extremist.
There are however a few topics where prominent LW participants have run into such instances of respectable opinion being dogmatic and immune to rational argument. On example is the already mentioned neglect of technology-related existential risks -- as well as other non-existential but still scary threats that might be opened due to the upcoming advances in technology -- and the tendency to dismiss people who ask such questions as crackpots. Another is the academic and medical establishment's official party line against cryonics, which is completely impervious to any argument. (I have no interest in cryonics myself, but the dogmatic character of the official line is clear, as well as its lack of solid foundation.)
This, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, listing other examples typically means opening ideologically charged topics that are probably best left alone. One example that shoul...
Well, there are several reasons why I'm not incessantly shouting all my contrarian views from the rooftops.
For start, yes, obviously I am concerned with the possible reputational consequences. But even ignoring that, the problem is that arguing for contrarian views may well have the effect of making them even more disreputable and strengthening the mainstream consensus, if it's done in a way that signals low status, eccentricity, immorality, etc., or otherwise enables the mainstream advocates to score a rhetorical victory in the ensuing debate (regardless of the substance of the arguments). Thus, even judging purely by how much you're likely to move people's opinions closer or further from the truth, you should avoid arguing for contrarian views unless the situation seems especially favorable, in the sense that you'll be able to present your case competently and in front of a suitable audience.
Moreover, there is always the problem of whether you can trust your own contrarian opinions. After all, even if you take the least favorable view of the respectable opinion and the academic mainstream, it is still the case that most contrarians are deluded in even crazier ways. So how do you...
Is the point of your comment that you think it's possible to make progress by highlighting broad phenomena about the reliability of mainstream views so that people can work out the implications on their own without there being a need for explicit public discussion?
Basically, I believe that exploring the general questions about how mainstream views are generated in practice and what are the implications for their reliability is by far the most fruitful direction for people interested in increasing the accuracy of their beliefs across the board. Of course, if you have a particular interest in some question, you have to grapple with the concrete issues involved, and also a general exploration must be based on concrete case studies. But attacking particular mainstream views head-on may well be counterproductive in every sense, as I noted above.
...A natural method to avoid becoming a crackpot is to reveal one's views for possible critique in a gradual and carefully argued fashion, adjusting them as people point out weaknesses. Of course it might not be a good idea to reveal one's views regardless (self-preservation; opportunity cost of time) but I don't think that danger of being a cr
You can take any topic where it's impossible to make sense of the existing academic literature (and other influential high-status sources), or where the respectable mainstream consensus seems to clash with reality. When discussions about such topics are opened on LW, often the logical next step would be to ask about the more general underlying problems that give rise to these situations, instead of just focusing on the arguments about particular problems in isolation. (And even without a concrete motivation, such questions should directly follow from LW's mission statement.) Yet I see few, if any attempts to ask such general questions on LW, and my occasional attempts to open discussion along these lines, even when highly upvoted, don't elicit much in terms of interesting arguments and insight.
As an illustration, we can take an innocent and mainstream problematic topic like e.g. the health questions of lifestyle such as nutrition, exercise, etc. These topics have been discussed on LW many times, and it seems evident that the mainstream academic literature is a complete mess, with potential gems of useful insight buried under mountains of nonsense work, and authoritative statements...
I am inclined to ask for references.
From what I understand, the professional learned society of cryobiologists has an official policy that bans any engagement with cryonics to its members under the pain of expulsion (which penalty would presumably have disastrous career implications). Therefore, cryobiologists are officially mandated to uphold this party line and condemn cryonics, if they are to speak on the subject at all. From what I've seen, cryonics people have repeatedly challenged this position with reasonable arguments, but they haven't received anything like satisfactory rebuttals that would justify the official position. (See more details in this post, whose author has spent considerable effort searching for such rebuttal.)
Now, for all I know, it may well be that the claims of cryonicists are complete bunk after all. The important point is that here we see a clear and unambiguous instance of the official academic mainstream upholding an official line that is impervious to rational argument, and attempts to challenge this official line elicit sneering and stonewalling rather than any valid response. One of my claims in this discussion is that this is far from being the...
Try a slogan like "democracy is retarded" on the other hand and you'll have butchered the holy cow of practically everyone.
Sure, but that's because slogans aren't about convincing people; they're about signaling group affiliation. Wear a T-shirt with "democracy is retarded" on it and you're effectively saying that you belong to a group that no one has ever heard of and is apparently openly opposed to one of the major shared tenets of practically every active political faction out there. Not a good way to win friends.
On the other hand, I'd be willing to bet that writing a series of blog posts, or even a book, on why democracy is retarded (ideally not in those words) wouldn't paint you as anything more than, at worst, mildly crankish. Very little is actually unthinkable in the educated world -- but if you're going to voice opinions outside the Overton window you'd better voice them in terms of actual arguments. By definition, you can't expect your audience to be familiar with the existing arguments for them.
Actually, wearing a t-shirt that says "Democracy is retarded" signals a double affiliation. One is opposition to democracy, and the other is willingness to gratuitously insult retarded people.
Maybe a triple affiliation, because it's possible to put some content about what you don't like about democracy in a short slogan, and you didn't bother. From my point of view, you've just affiliated with boring trolls.
It's been said before that, to first approximation, everyone here is Ravenclaw. But you might say that the second term in my Taylor polynomial is Hufflepuff. I have a habit of seeking out contrarian clusters before taking my contrarian beliefs seriously.
But you might say that the second term in my Taylor polynomial is Hufflepuff.
Your choice of metaphor wildly confirming that you are primarily Ravenclaw, of course.
just as annoying as my sensitivity to religious memes and my inability to say no to anyone.
Sounds like you need to undergo reverse rejection therapy. Ask some people at the next meetup to ask you for things/favors/anything, and your goal is to say 'no' to all of them. May be everyone can be a target and all of you can rotate.
You're the negative mirror image of myself.
I'm very lucky to live in this day and age. If I was born any sooner, (or in some other place) I'd probably be killed by some aggravated superstitious mob or the officials - that is if I was indeed stupid enough to talk as I please. Contrariety and a need to oppose run incredibly deep within me.
I am majorly disgusted by religion and have real trouble to sit through a church service. I'm just counting down the minutes while mentally cringing at virtually every single stupid thing the pathetically deluded pastor drivels from the pulpit, until at last the primitive medieval circus grinds to a halt and I feel like can finally take a deep breath of sanity once I left the building.
I despise human hypocrisy intensely and am somewhat nauseated every time I detect it in others and myself. But ultimately, I believe at the very bottom of my behavior lies a simple mixture of genetic components and what I picked up from my father (who was also somewhat of a rebel in the former Soviet Union, but without any real opportunity to vent). Maybe it runs even deeper than that and I'm just the human archetype of the "male rogue" that can be encountere...
People only want to hear what they like to hear and I almost can't help myself but to provoke and startle, if given the opportunity.
I've known people like that. From what I've seen, for many people it's a game to make social interaction more interesting. I play it very poorly (for example, I almost never get sarcasm unless it's pointed out to me, and even if I do, I'm usually too lazy to come up with something sarcastic to say in return, so I just ignore it, which is awfully boring for the person being sarcastic.) Is this why you do this?
I'm sure you can spin things in such a way, that will enable you to much more easily and effectively convert people into rationalists, than any confrontational hardliner could hope to accomplish in comparison.
I am very good at engaging in dialogue with just about anybody and presenting my points in such a way that it's natural for them to agree. I think the most important component is making it obvious to people that "I don't dislike you because you disagree with me; if anything, I like the fact that we disagree, because maybe I can learn something new from you." Even confrontational people usually respond well to that kind of at...
Trying to think about morality without the concept that morality must exclusively relate to the neurological makeup of conscious brains is damn close to a waste of time.
That's like saying that the job of a sports coach is a waste of time because he is clueless about physics. If it were impossible to gain useful insights and intuitions about the world without reducing everything to first principles, nothing would ever get done. On the contrary, in the overwhelming majority of cases where humans successfully grapple with the real world, from the most basic everyday actions to the most complex technological achievements, it's done using models and intuitions that are, as the saying goes, wrong but useful.
So, if you're looking for concrete answers to the basic questions of how to live, it's a bad idea to discard wisdom from the past just because it's based on models of the world to which we now have fundamentally more accurate ones. A model that captures fundamental reality more closely doesn't automatically translate to superior practical insight. Otherwise people who want to learn to play tennis would be hiring physicists to teach them.
I'm reminded of the discussions in BDSM on how to be submissive in a healthy D/s relationship without being a doormat or being vulnerable to abuse.
Being more comfortable as a follower than as a leader is not necessarily a bug. Just make sure you can pick the right leader to follow.
As a contrarian rationalist, I can assure you that my attitudes are the results of my personality & upbringing, not some bold brave conscious decision. I was always different, enough that conforming wouldn't have worked, so finding true & interesting & positive-attention-capturing ways to be different was my best path. The result is that I'm biased towards contrarian theses, which I think is useful for improving group rationality in most cases, but still isn't rational.
First, I feel like I can partly explain why you're finding many contrarian rationalists here. If rationality is a technology, it's a technology that enables you to be right in situations where people are normally wrong. Since rationalists should win, it should also enable us to be right where others are right. But there's nothing to discuss about that on here! In those cases, we can just learn from our surrounding cultures and don't need a specialized blog.
I've always thought of this place as essentially "a place to learn how to go against the grain i...
I think that as rationalists, we are the ultimate conformists. It only happens, in this day and age, that the majority of people is somehow wrong about reality. But the fact that we agree to the existence of an ultimate truth and that we cannot rationally agree to disagree, should makes us the most uniform group in history. Biases and tendencies to conform/contrast indexical social groups are just going in the way of reaching consensus.
By the way, there's nothing wrong in being moved or being mystically exalted by some piece of literature/music/etc. I was ...
Nice self-introduction. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "mystical experience of music," but if you mean spine-tingling transportation, I think that's pretty common, even among us'ns. For example, here's a good performance of a piece my own group (not this one) sang a year ago - turn it up :)
No one here has yet made fun of me for my interest in religion, even though I expect most people disagree with it.
What does it mean to disagree with an interest? That sounds like it means that most LWers either disapprove of your involvement with religion, do not share your interest, or expect that you could increase your utility by decreasing your involvement with religion. I'm not sure which of these, if any, you meant, but as to the first, I don't think most of us do disapprove of it. As to the second, that's not disagreement. And as to the third, I'm not sure what most LWers think, but I think that you are in a much better position to judge that than I am.
I’m a conformist, even if I would prefer not to be
I like situations that allow me to be helpful and generous
Emotionally, I don’t like disagreeing with others
Sounds like you'd score very high on tests for the personality trait "agreeableness".
If you're looking to practice disagreeing with people, then you could do worse than joining Hacker News, a community which very strongly rewards (well-cited, technical) disagreement.
See this post, where the top scored comment, (written by me) with 40 points, disagrees with the linked article, and has another dozen comments disagreeing with it.
Do beware being too negative too early, however. If your first comment is downvoted into the negatives, then your account will be hellbanned.
Part of me wants to write: "You're a brave and forthright person, and I admire you for it."
Another part of me, which I think is motivated by your honesty, reads that and says I should write: "I just wrote that because I want you to like me, and it reads like it might get an upvote (after LW acceptance subprocess runs consciously), proving someone else likes me, too."
When I'm alone, alert and unoccupied, those two parts (there may be more, I don't know) are always bickering. Thing 1 decides some feeling or idea is good, or correct, or si...
Though I do tend to be contrarian, I've always thought that acting independently from others is the correct stance. Does everyone agree that being contrarian or conformist are both forms of bias to be avoided? I think that at best they can be seen as very weak/indirect reasons to believe something or do something, and only relative to your context. (You need to pick your battles as a contrarian and you need to break from conforming with the wrong people as a conformist)
One of the reasons this post is of interest is that it likely represents the feelings of some/many would-be rationalists and the struggles they have. The reasons this person has for continuing their current mode of living cuts across many different lines. How many people choose to not come out of the closet, don't admit to being childfree, or refuse to be the sexual libertines they wish they could be because of fear of potentially being ostracized (and losing their social and economic support networks)? Thought experiment:
In a theoretical future society wh...
One of the things I've been exploring is where my sense of self is and what it's doing. I've found that I spend a lot of time imagining myself as someone looking at me and disapproving.
Obviously, sometimes I do need to check my behavior, but what I'm seeing seems more like an emotional habit.
I don't know whether you've got the same habit (even if you're got something similar, it's probably shaded differently), but I do recommend gentle exploration of what's going on in your stream of consciousness.
Perhaps it is sometimes rational to prefer agreeing with your friends over being rational :-) ?
I was eighteen when I first encountered the ‘Jesus myth’ in its full, meme-honed-to-maximum-virulence form, and the story arc captivated me for a full six months. I still cry during every Good Friday service. But I must have missed some critical threshold, because I can’t actually believe in that story. I’m not even sure what it would mean to believe in a story. What does that feel like?
I understand. I -absolutely- love the Gnostic narrative, having stumbled upon it through the books of Philip K. Dick. That's a really cool story, and I'd love it to be t...
I suspect we others are more like you than we know, and you've done well to notice your own compulsion to conform. That said, you do make it sound like you're an extreme case, but conforming with LessWrong norms is probably not a bad thing.
just as annoying as my sensitivity to religious memes and my inability to say no to anyone.
Sounds like you need to undergo reverse rejection therapy. Ask some people at the next meetup to ask you for things/favors/anything, and your goal is to say 'no' to all of them. May be everyone can be a target and all of you can rotate.
When I found Less Wrong and started reading, when I made my first post, when I went to my first meetup….
It was a little like coming home.
And mostly it wasn’t. Mostly I felt a lot more out of place than I have in, say, church youth groups. It was hard to pinpoint the difference, but as far as I can tell, it comes down to this: a significant proportion of the LW posters are contrarians in some sense. And I’m a conformist, even if I would prefer not to be, even if that’s a part of my personality that I’m working hard to change. I’m much more comfortable as a follower than as a leader. I like pre-existing tradition, the reassuring structure of it. I like situations that allow me to be helpful and generous and hardworking, so that I can feel like a good person. Emotionally, I don’t like disagreeing with others, and the last thing I have to work hard to do is tolerate others' tolerance.
And, as evidenced by the fact that I attend church youth groups, I don’t have the strong allergy that many of the community seem to have against religion. This is possibly because I have easily triggered mystical experiences when, for example, I sing in a group, especially when we are singing traditional ‘sacred’ music. In a previous century, I would probably have been an extremely happy nun.
Someone once expressed surprise that I was able to become a rationalist in spite of this neurological quirk. I’ve asked myself this a few times. My answer is that I don’t think I deserve the credit. If anything, I ended up on the circuitous path towards reading LessWrong because I love science, and I love science because, as a child, reading about something as beautiful as general relativity gave me the same kind of euphoric experience as singing about Jesus does now. My inability to actual believe in any religion comes from a time before I was making my own decisions about that kind of thing.
I was raised by atheist parents, not anti-theist so much as indifferent. We attended a Unitarian Universalist church for a while, which meant I was learning about Jesus and Buddha and Native American spirituality all mixed together, all the memes watered down to the point that they lost their power. I was fourteen when I really encountered Christianity, still in the mild form of the Anglican Church of Canada. I was eighteen when I first encountered the ‘Jesus myth’ in its full, meme-honed-to-maximum-virulence form, and the story arc captivated me for a full six months. I still cry during every Good Friday service. But I must have missed some critical threshold, because I can’t actually believe in that story. I’m not even sure what it would mean to believe in a story. What does that feel like?
I was raised by scientists. My father did his PhD in physical chemistry, my mother in plant biology. I grew up reading SF and pop science, and occasionally my mother or my father’s old textbooks. I remember my mother’s awe at the beautiful electron-microscope images in my high school textbooks, and how she sat patiently while I fumblingly talked about quantum mechanics, having read the entire tiny physics section of our high school library. My parents responded to my interest in science with pride and enthusiasm, and to my interest in religion with indulgent condescension. That was my structure, my tradition. And yes, that has everything to do with why I call myself an atheist. I wouldn’t have had the willpower to disagree with my parents in the long run.
Ultimately, I have an awfully long way to go if I want to be rational, as opposed to being someone who’s just interested in reading about math and science. Way too much of my motivation for ‘having true beliefs’ breaks down to ‘maybe then they’ll like me.’ This is one of the annoying things about my personality, just as annoying as my sensitivity to religious memes and my inability to say no to anyone. Luckily, my personality also comes with the ability to get along with just about anyone, and in a forum of mature adults, no one is going to make fun of me because I’m wearing tie-dye overalls. No one here has yet made fun of me for my interest in religion, even though I expect most people disagree with it.
And there’s one last conclusion I can draw, albeit from a sample size of one. Not everyone can be a contrarian rationalist. Not everyone can rebel against their parents’ religion. Not everyone can disagree with their friends and family and not feel guilty. But everyone can be rational if they are raised that way.