My suggested resolution is as follows:
1) "Don't ask and for God's sake don't tell." This is a group where people come to speak freely about rationality. If you don't talk about your beliefs about God, no one will press you on it or demand that you affirm anything.
2) However, part of our zeitgeist is that it's okay to question beliefs, or even try your hardest to destroy beliefs you think are false, because that which can be destroyed by the truth should be. There are no exceptions for anything, and if you say anything indicating that you think religious beliefs should be exempt, people are not going to nod along, instead they are going to start talking about "The rule that you have to look at a city in order to draw an accurate map of it has no exceptions".
3) Criticism of religion is not taboo - it goes against both the ideals of rationality we believe in, and the atmosphere of freedom that draws us to the group, to have that sort of taboo for that reason. So, to put it bluntly, you will overhear other people comparing belief in God to the Tooth Fairy, and if you contradict them they will contradict you back, and if you say that everyone has a right to th...
I upvoted for a simple reason -- I think these are (more or less) the de-facto rules of the IRC channel #lesswrong. If someone comes in and starts saying how theists are all stupid, we explain calmly that you don't need to signal atheism to belong, and that "arguments are not soldiers." However, when the issue of religion comes up naturally, it is expected that it will be argued honestly, and if at all possible, politely.
I attract more of my share of it, I guess, because I am a (semi-)regular synagogue-goer, and I am perfectly fine with being challenged, and answering any questions. It's one of the many things I do that are not in-line with the rough LW consensus (I'm also significantly more pro-regulation than the rough consensus), and I'm fine with it.
I've been in situations where I'm the only atheist in an explicitly all-theist group, or the only male in an all-female group. I imagine it's not unlike being the only minority in an all-white group. It's slightly uncomfortable, you're constantly aware that you are the exception, and sometimes the conversation turns to things you have no knowledge of or interest in, and you just wait through that period, maybe pick up some things on how the "other half" thinks.
I don't see why a rationalist group has to be any different. A group can be explicitly atheist and still welcome theist members without sacrificing any integrity by kowtowing to their pet irrationality. Atheists need groups where they can be the majority for once as well. Let the theist feel slightly uncomfortable if they have to, we can still welcome them and enjoy their company.
Honestly, the whole "should we make accommodations for the religious" feels like the servile attitude ingrained into a subgroup by an entire lifetime of being taught that they are worth less than the ruling majority. The atheist population needs some sort of Pride movement already. I have a hard time imagining a gay group agonizin...
Gay groups in fact agonize over this all the time, or at least did twenty years ago, and the same divisions between what are sometimes called "nukers" and "appeasers" come up again and again and again.
I suspect the same is true of feminist groups, or at least was at one time.
I suspect it's a universal pattern among activist groups, along with the use of words with high emotional indexes ("nuke," "appease," "servile," "ruling," "bend over backwards," "corrupt," "groveling," etc.) when talking about it.
Frankly, I think you're skirting around the real issue: what precisely is the "rationality outreach" supposed to accomplish?
If the goal is to have a community where all false and biased beliefs will be criticized without any exception at all, including those that are held sacred by the present respectable opinion, then it's inevitable that you'll cause lots of outrage and end up with opinions on some issues that will sound crackpot or extremist to the respectable mainstream, and will also cause dissension in any realistic group of people. On the other hand, if the choice of issues for criticism will be limited by some cost-benefit calculation, then this calculation depends on the exact goals of the group. Specifically, you should attack those false beliefs that interfere with your goals in practice, and only them. For example, a team of physicists cannot tolerate a member who has crazy ideas about physics, but they shouldn't have a problem with a member who has crazy ideas about economics (like Albert Einsten, for example).
So, the question is: what exactly is supposed to be the benefit of making your group explicitly atheist, and does it justify the cost of turning off ...
In that case, I'd propose that if Annie is an adult she’s essentially unreachable. No matter how much effort you expend trying to coach her on basic rational skills she isn’t going to get it, because as a general rule adult humans simply don’t change their basic approach to life that radically. You’d have to replace her entire social milieu with a circle of rationalist associates to have any chance of getting through to her, and even then she’d probably just adopt the surface appearance of rationality as a sort of social-acceptance ritual.
So as a practical matter Barbara, Caroline and Donna are the people who might actually join, contribute to and benifit from a rationalist group, and the question becomes how to balance your appeal to all three instead of restricting yourself to Donnas.
Regarding the "sanity waterline," I don't believe this concept presents a useful and accurate model of people's beliefs, not even as a rough first approximation. In my opinion, any action based on such a model must be fundamentally misguided one way or another.
You have argued against a misunderstanding of the sanity waterline concept. The idea is sound that people who have and systematically apply a set of skills will not make make mistakes of a certain class. The sanity waterline concept is not simply an ordering of the irrationality of wrong beliefs, but an association of skills with the mistakes they prevent. It does not claim that not making a mistake places someone higher on the waterline so they will not make more irrational mistakes, rather it explicitly calls out the distinction between getting something right because your rationality skills force you to get it right, and other means such as joining the social group that happens to be right.
Forgive me if this point has been hashed out elsewhere before, but I find the interchangeable use of “theism” and “religion” to be jarring every time I see it, and unhelpful in terms of what the community seems to want to accomplish.
Although Protestant religiosity does usually seem to boil down to a question of faith, it seems to be not-at-all uncommon among Jews and Catholics (possibly Muslims and non-Western religions as well; I have less experience with that) for religious practice to be cultural, and not based on any great conviction about God, particularly an anthropomorphic interventionist God. Perhaps there is a rationalist argument to be made that those cultural practices have negative utility, but it is an entirely separate argument from “believing in God is irrational.”
I observe a lot of Jewish religious traditions in spite of being a deist-leaning agnostic. Those practices that I choose to keep, I keep because I see something meaningful and useful in them. Others that I see as harmful or ridiculous I don't observe. I am pretty clearly religious, though not exactly a Barbara, but arguments that undermine theism wouldn't cause me to alter my current practices because “God told me so” isn't the reason underlying them. This distinction seems to be elided pretty frequently on Lesswrong.
I'm not sure what people mean by "respect" here. If anyone asks me my views on religion, I'll happily tell them I see no need of that hypothesis, that it explains nothing and mystifies everything, and so on, and I'll do that whatever I know their own beliefs to be. They ask, they get, and I'm not going to tiptoe around the matter for fear that they can't handle hearing it. OTOH, I'm not going to express myself to anyone by gleeful mocking of the tooth fairy, ritual cannibalism in the Catholic Mass, or camel-herders with underage wives, not even in company for which those would be applause lights. Neither am I going to proselytise atheism to everyone I see wearing a religious symbol.
Neither treating someone like a fragile bloom that will wither at a touch, nor ranting and mockery, constitute what I would describe as "respect". People get respect; beliefs aren't the sort of thing that respect applies to.
David_Gerard:
I find it difficult to deal with the claim that posting a link to a horrible news story - the factuality of which is entirely accepted - constitutes unacceptable bigotry.
Obviously, this is them blaming me for pointing out serious conflicts that are already present in their own thoughts and feelings. It still strikes me as offensively stupid to an extent I have no intention of putting up with if in any way avoidable.
I haven't seen the concrete details of the debate you describe and I'm not claiming that what I'm about to write applies to this case, but generally speaking, conclusions like those of your Facebook correspondents are not always unjustified. (I mean the feeling of hostility they perceived, not the rationalization you ascribe to them.) When someone points out the faults of some particular party and expresses outrage, even if all the stated facts are true, there are still two additional important issues.
First, placing a strong focus on someone's faults is likely to be interpreted as an expression of deeper hostility, and statistically speaking, this interpretation is often correct. To take an extreme example, imagine if someone wrote a book titled The Cri...
Pointing out social worker abuses would be a direct comparison to the situation in the Catholic Church if the relevant federal government department, all the way up to the relevant cabinet-level position, was running a coverup of said abuses, including shuffling offenders to different districts rather than turning them into the authorities, and had been doing so over the course of decades. I am not aware that this is in fact the case, but if it is then references would be most welcomed.
The pro-atheism camp said that, given that religion is so overwhelmingly wrong on the merits, we shouldn't allow it any special pleading -- it's just as wrong as any other wrong belief, and we'd lose our value as a rationalist group if we began to put status above truth.
In an important way, religions do not exist at all. Which two people agree on all aspects of metaphysics? Which people's beliefs of what it is permissible to believe form an exclusive network? (I.e. most believers believe slightly more or less liberal beliefs are valid, but only a bit.)...
Considering religion's status as the primary and most obvious example of irrationality in the world I think pandering to it undermines the entire purpose of a group dedicated to promoting rationality.
I challenge the initial framing of there being a choice to be made between "explicitly atheist" and "respectful to theists." One can, in fact, choose to be both at once.
But, yes, I would agree that not everyone makes that choice.
This isn't unique to atheists, incidentally... many explicitly theist communities choose not to be respectful to other theists, in much the same way.
In any event, I would agree that if there are people around who consider respecting their fellow group members an actively bad thing if those group members aren't thinking correctly enough, then at some point I've got to make a choice about what I value more.
Again, I like your characters but I think you're missing one. The person who thinks that belief in [a] God is the result of rational and reasonable thought.
That's what Barbara says, but only if you press her. Mostly she just doesn't talk about it.
If she spontaneously announces this to the group and challenges them to a debate, believing that the truth ought to be obvious enough that anyone should be able to see it, I shall endeavor to turn her into Caroline in 15 minutes and Donna a day later.
I shall endeavor to turn her into Caroline in 15 minutes and Donna a day later.
With what probability will you anticipate success?
The most likely outcome is that she will conclude, "I guess I was wrong to think that anyone would be able to see the truth of theism." She will justify this with either "I didn't imagine that atheists would hold on to their delusions so tenaciously" or "Although the rationality of theism is still plain to me, I didn't realize how great the inferential distances could be. It takes more work than I anticipated to spell out all the details to a skeptical audience."
Most folk tell themselves they are being rational, Miss Granger. They do not thereby rise above the ordinary.
(Not literally true, but true within certain subcommunities.)
Currently trendy is the Bayesian argument, which frequently starts with asserting that the only acceptable proper and right-thinking prior probability of God is 0.5 AAAAAARGH
(The problem here being the assumption that we start knowing nothing at all rather than that we know really quite a lot - that being the bit in the argument where a negligible probability is turned into a non-negligible one.)
(Sorry, I just had lunch with some relatively sensible theists and I'm still going AAAAAARGH)
I think more precision is needed on what sort of behaviour we're talking about. The question posed is
"should a group dedicated to rationality be explicitly atheist? Or should it make an effort to be respectful to theists in order to make them feel welcome and spread rationality farther?"
First off, I think a group can be explicitly atheist but still respectful to theists. Why not? A meeting of a political party should be able to be respectful to those of opposing parties, even though that's all they're about. And rationality is bigger than atheis...
There have been nearly identical discussions among the skeptics movement, and are a primary source of a some of the drama within that movement. The typology breakdown here seems pretty similar to those situations. At least among people testing the waters with the skeptical organization one doesn't get much in the way of Annies. The only primary reason I would think that this would be otherwise here is because of HPMR and similar texts which as you observe might appeal to the Annies.
There is a subtype of Donna the 'smug Atheist skeptic' who thinks he knows enough already and spends his day battling superstition.
Other-optimizing is something that prevents healthy rationalist organizations from forming, since it's a mode by which managers sabotage the managed.
"Other-optimizing" occurs in atheist/theist debates when the atheist (Donna) deploys her one-size-fits-all arguments against religion without even bothering to listen long enough to learn what the theist actually believes and why. It is important to keep in mind (with apologies to LT) that, while all rational atheists are alike, each theist is irrational in her own way.
Another quote that may be r...
Yeah, I think Michael Shermer's wrong about what went wrong exactly. Chemists have access to the indisputable Truth about the atomic theory of chemistry and it hasn't turned them into a cult. http://lesswrong.com/lw/m1/guardians_of_ayn_rand/.
Perhaps because they didn't try to excommunicate the disbelievers. They simply waited for them to die off.
People really like this idea of old scientists just dying off as a new paradigm comes in. But frequently old people don't have trouble adopting the new paradigms. When Einstein proposed special relativity, it didn't take a generation to get accepted. Similarly, it didn't take very long for the double helix or the triplet code to get accepted by biologists. To be sure, there are exceptions to this trend. One prominent example is Joseph Priestly who despite being responsible for the experiments that discovered oxygen and paved the way for modern chemistry until his dying days continued to defend phlogiston theory. But he's the exception rather than the rule. Others of the same age as Priestly embraced the chemical revolution.
(Incidentally, this is connected to why I don't like the common LW tendency to use phlogiston as an example of a bad hypothesis. In its original forms it worked. Others rejected it precisely because it had been falsified. The vague, convoluted form of phlogiston that is discussed here was the consequence of seeing the theory handed down after already being intertwined with Priestly's convoluted defenses from the last few years of his life.)
The upshot is that scientists very rarely need to wait for the old ones to die off.
I appear to have formatting issues -- I'll fix them as soon as the site will let me.
This post grew out of a very long discussion with the New York Less Wrong meetup group. The question was, should a group dedicated to rationality be explicitly atheist? Or should it make an effort to be respectful to theists in order to make them feel welcome and spread rationality farther? We argued for a long time. The pro-atheism camp said that, given that religion is so overwhelmingly wrong on the merits, we shouldn't allow it any special pleading -- it's just as wrong as any other wrong belief, and we'd lose our value as a rationalist group if we began to put status above truth. The anti-atheism group said that, while that may be true, it's going to doom us to be a group exclusively for eccentric nerds, and we need to develop broad appeal, even if that's hard and requires us to leave our comfort zone.
Things got abstract very fast; my take was that we need to get back to practicalities. Different attitudes to religion have different effects on different types of people; we need to optimize for desired effects and accept what tradeoffs we must. We can't appeal equally to everyone. So I came up with a sort of typology.
Annie