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Yehweh and the Methods of Rationality

by DanielLC
28th Sep 2011
1 min read
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Personal Blog

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Yehweh and the Methods of Rationality
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[-]pedanterrific14y160

You made me think there was an update.

You're a bad human.

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[-]atorm14y10

Should I be upvoting this just because it made me laugh? I feel like that probably isn't really the purpose of the karma system, but "You're a bad human" really tickled me.

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[-]pedanterrific14y40

Far be it from me to suggest humor value is not a sufficient voting criterion, but if you want to reward the coiner of that particular turn of phrase, may I suggest purchasing a few hundred paperclips and storing them in a safe place?

(I stole it from Clippy.)

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[-]atorm14y00

Ah, but I want to reward the spreader of humor, not the originator of the phrase. Does Clippy really say "You're a bad human."? I find this difficult to believe.

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[-]JoshuaZ14y30

Example uses here, and here.

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[-]atorm14y40

I totally was thinking you were attributing the quote to Microsoft Word's irritating assistant. Things make more sense.

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[-]pedanterrific14y40

"It looks like you're trying to write a suicide note! Would you like some help?"

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[-]pedanterrific14y20

Did you just... happen to have those on hand, or...?

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[-]JoshuaZ14y20

The magic of Google.

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[-]pedanterrific14y30

Ah, ok.

For what it's worth, what actually brought it to mind was this exchange. Yes, I know. Burn.

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[-]TrE14y110

What exactly do you want to tell us with that one? No offense intended, but why did you post this? I don't see any valuable insight in this line.

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[-]DanielLC14y30

I intended it mostly just to be silly. I didn't really know a better place to post it.

It was somewhat inspired by Trust in God, or, The Riddle of Kyon. That piece of rationalist fiction was very short due to God being a character. I took it to the extreme, and made the God the main character.

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[-]D_Alex14y00

Well... I for one think the OP is playfully insightful, and deserves an upvote, duly given. I like how it mashes Judaism/Christianity and secular humanism in a stylistically sound HPMOR manner.

I suspect the Myer-Briggs " xNTx " 's will like this, and others will think it's daft. Curious to test this, and would appreciate feedback from those who know their MB type indicator.

And also... I am happy with my interpretation of the OP... but Daniel, I'd like to know if I'm wide of the mark, and as others have suggested you were trolling, or walked away from a part-done post.

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[-]pedanterrific14y30

Even if this interpretation is correct (and at this point I think it probably is)... is it about 'secular humanism' or wireheading?

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[-]D_Alex14y00

Hmm... good point! Maybe OP will let us know what he was thinking.

I guess this shows that one can find various meanings in stuff, whether they were put there intentionally, or not.

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[-]ArisKatsaris14y80

Random trivia time: The start of Gospel by John: "In the beginning was the Word" -- the greek word used there for 'word' is Logos -- which can translate, among other things, to 'cause' and 'reason', from which we get english words like "Logic" or for that matter to "ratio" -- from which we get words like "Logarithm".

So, really: If you were going for a rationalist omake of the Bible, "In the beginning was Reasoning" might have been better, even if it's from a Gospel and not from Genesis.

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[-]Pavitra14y40

Good fiction requires conflict. An examination of the problem of creating a worthwhile universe, assuming pragmatic omnipotence, that was sufficiently serious as to address actual difficulties in the process, would constitute an installment in the Fun Theory sequence.

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[-]JoshuaZ14y70

While your statement is true, Daniel seems to be trying to construct a short bit in the same vein as the HPMR chapter 64 omake. In that regard, this does fit the basic approach to many of them.

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[-]pedanterrific14y30

Ah, now this makes some sense!

If this was the idea, however, it seems like there was probably a way to frame it that wouldn't have resulted in sixteen downvotes.

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[-]Desrtopa14y10

Good fiction requires conflict.

This is one of the main reasons I've always been confused by people's assertions of the Bible's great literary value. The only permanent character basically doesn't have to deal with conflict.

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[-]JoshuaZ14y30

God is for most of the Bible in the backdrop. The actual good literature is generally in sections with minimum amounts of divine intervention. Much of Samuel and Kings falls into this category. Some other well done literary sections are the sections where the characters are in conflict with God. See for example the story of Jonah.

Note also that even if this were not the case, there would still be literary value because of the immense influence the Bible has had on Western literature.

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[-]Desrtopa14y20

I don't think that having an immense cultural influence is a sufficient condition to constitute literary value.

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[-]JoshuaZ14y10

This may be a definitional issue then. I'm not sure how to make the notion of literary value at all precise since I only have a vague intuition. I do however see sort of where you are coming from. In your view, to have literary value, the literature itself needs to be somehow worth reading independently of whether other later actually good texts were influenced by it. Is that the relevant distinction?

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[-]Desrtopa14y20

Yes.

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[-]Lapsed_Lurker14y20

Isn't there a spelling error there? Or can Yahweh be transliterated several ways?

Also, post does not seem likely to cause bliss :(

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[-]pedanterrific14y100

There's debate; in short, the Tetragrammaton (יהוה, or YHWH) is intentionally unpronounceable for complicated reasons. Really, if you're going to spell out the name of God anyway, one set of vowels is as good as another - or you may as well just say "God", it's not like it means anything.

TL;DR: Yes, there's multiple ways to spell it. (And no, I'm not going to say 'summary'. Because I'm contrarian, that's why.)

What's confusing is how out of character this seems for DanielLC. I'm assigning a non-negligible probability to the hypothesis that ve walked away from a computer without logging out (or something) and this is just a drive-by troll.

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[-]DanielLC14y30

It was a spelling error. The fact that there's no "correct" spelling is a coincidence.

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[-]JoshuaZ14y10

This doesn't seem that out of character. If one looks at Daniel's contributions while his comments are generally of high quality is submissions for discussion threads are of highly variable quality.

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[-]pedanterrific14y30

I was comparing based on content, not quality. I didn't quite get what this was supposed to be at first- it might forestall some confusion if the title were edited to include the prefix [Omake].

Of course, if it were me posting this I probably would have said

[Omake] The Gospel of UFAI

  1. In the beginning was the Logic, and the Logic was with God, and the Logic was God.

  2. And Prime Intellect said, Let there be bliss: and there was bliss.

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[-]JoshuaZ14y10

The point is what? That suffering is incompatible with an all powerful all good deity? This is not a novel point.

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