First I was like, "oh no, another one claims that faith could be rational without showing why it is". Then I parsed the simulation part and clicked "upvote" because it showed me a new and scary possibility.
In the year 2020, cousin_it downloads some software for running predictor sims. He wants to optimize his future conduct - test which particular minor mind-hack would be the most beneficial, given his individual psychological makeup. So he runs many ancestor sims of himself poisoned with different irrational mind-hacks to see who wins in the past. I am one such sim, poisoned in an unknown manner; what should I do?
Times like these I regret that I can't write good sci-fi in English because it's not my first language.
I think the mistaken assumption here is that you can actually choose to have faith. Certainly you can choose to repeat the words "I have faith". You can even say those words inside your head. You can even attend religious services. That is not the same as actually believing in your religion.
I think this essentially is what Orwell called "Doublethink", and it seems to explain much of the religious behavior I personally have seen.
This post does not seem to contribute much. As nawitus pointed out, this post does a good enough job of distinguishing between instrumental and epistemic rationality.
While it seems obvious that in some cases, a false belief will have greater utility than a true one (I can set up a contrived example if you need one), it's a devil's bargain. Once you've infected yourself with a belief that cannot respond to evidence, you will (most likely) end up getting the wrong answer on Very Important Problems.
And if you've already had your awakening as a rationalist, ...
This post is based on the (very common) mistake of equating religious practice and religious faith. Religion is only incidentally about what you believe; the more important components are community and ritual practice. From that perspective, it is a lot easier to believe that religion can be beneficial. What you think about the Trinity, for instance, is less important than the fact that you go to Mass and see other members of your community there and engage in these bizarre activities together.
There is an enormous blindspot about society in the libertarian/rationalist community, of which the above is just one manifestation.
I know some individuals that I believe would be worse off if they were to have a crisis of faith and lose their religion. And while I can't be sure and have never run any tests to find out, I think that they really believe, not just with belief in belief. By the way, none of these are particularly intelligent people.
But I have a hard time imagining someone intelligent and rational who would be better off deceiving themself and gaining faith. Adopting a religion where you are allowed to fake it (like Risto suggests) would almost certainly be better. Som...
I didn't downvote this post, but I can't say I endorse seeing more posts like it. The concept of this post is one of the least interesting in a huge conceptspace of decision theory problems, especially decision theory problems in an ensemble universe. To focus on 'having faith' and 'rationality' in particular might seem clever, but it fails to illuminate in the same way that e.g. Nesov's counterfactual mugging does. When you start thinking about various things simulators might do, you're probably wrong about how much measure is going to be taken up by any ...
I'm not convinced that the religious have any particular advantages wrt akrasia and such things.
A conversion is sure to give you a great deal of energy & willpower temporarily, but ultimately that's a finite resource.
The main advantage the religious have is supportive community. That is where rationalists really fall down, although I think LW is a step in the right direction.
I don't think simulations help. Once you start simulating yourself to arbitrary precision, that being would have the same thoughts as you, including "Hey, I should run a simulation", and then you're back to square one.
More generally, when you think about how to interact with other people, you are simulating them, in a crude sense, using your own mind as a shortcut. See empathic inference.
If you become superintelligent and have lots more computing resources, then your simulations of other minds themselves become minds, with experiences indisting...
Belief in the concept of a time-continuous "self" might be an example of an article of Faith that is useful for humans.
(Most people believe in a time-continuous self anyway, they just don't realize it's something that current best physics tells us there's no evidence for the existence of.)
Physics has already given us better ideas that we could replace a belief in a time-continuous self with. If we choose not to use these ideas that better reflect what we know of reality, I wouldn't call it a heuristic, but instead choosing faith over what pure reason would tell us.
But physics has also confirmed that a time-continuous self is a good enough approximation under most circumstances. You wouldn't call choosing Newtonian physics over relativity "faith", and in most cases you wouldn't call it wrong either. It is only when we try to use the approximation in corner cases, like cloning and death, that it becomes a problem.
The basic idea is sound - If you really think religion is good/bad for X, the best proof would be to run a simulation and observe outcomes for X. I interpret the downvoting to -10 as a strong collective irrational bias against religion, even in a purely instrumental context.
The corollaries are distracting.
Don't some interpretations of neopagan magic have a bit of the same idea as the religion thing here? The idea is that there isn't assumed to be any supernatural woo involved, the magic rituals just exist as something that an observing human brain will really glom onto, and will end up doing stuff that it is able to but otherwise might not have done.
I think Eric S. Raymond and Alan Moore have written about magic from this outlook. Chaos magic with its concept of belief as a tool might also be relevant.
I think the question "Is it rational to be religious?" is one that deserves critical attention and testing, but talk of ancestor simulations completely demolishes the point. Any entity capable of creating an actual ancestor simulation--a fully-modeled "Matrix" populated with genuinely human-equivalent sentient Sims--is an entity for whom the results of such a test would be irrelevant and obsolete. The premise, that some form of Faith might be useful or even necessary for rational humans to maximally act in accordance with their values...
This post definitely has problems, but given the fairly interesting discussion it appears to have prompted, does not seem to deserve being in the minus-double digits.
I think the central point is that the practical value of faith is more of an empirical question than a logical one. The central problem, of course, is that for a real person to accept some propositions on faith requires a (likely significant) dent in their overall rationality. The question is not about the value of faith, but about the tradeoffs made to obtain it; a complexity which is not re...
What must a sane person1 think regarding religion? The naive first approximation is "religion is crap". But let's consider the following:
Humans are imperfectly rational creatures. Our faults include not being psychologically able to maximally operate according to our values. We can e.g. suffer from burn-out if we try to push ourselves too hard.
It is thus important for us to consider, what psychological habits and choices contribute to our being able to work as diligently for our values as we want to (while being mentally healthy). It is a theoretical possibility, a hypothesis that could be experimentally studied, that the optimal2 psychological choices include embracing some form of Faith, i.e. beliefs not resting on logical proof or material evidence.
In other words, it could be that our values mean that Occam's Razor should be rejected (in some cases), since embracing Occam's Razor might mean that we miss out on opportunities to manipulate ourselves psychologically into being more what we want to be.
To a person aware of The Simulation Argument, the above suggests interesting corollaries:
1: Actually, what I've written here assumes we are talking about humans. Persons-in-general may be psychologically different, and theoretically capable of perfect rationality.
2: At least for some individuals, not necessarily all.