interesting post. The good swimmer admits to swimming.

Disclaimer. I do NOT belong to the lesswrong community, and do not intend to.

Why? 1st: Too many atheists here. One cannot disprove the existence of 'god'. At least nobody ever did. only a) be indifferent, i.e. Agnostic, b) pondering the attributes of 'god', which are indeed rather inconsistent.

2nd: To 'believe' something, means to have an axiomatic base of sorts. Eg 'believing' that the world is perfect, guided along mathematical rules (which ones exactly?) This is, to my knowledge, never questioned in the community.

3rd: The acceptance that there -is/should- be something rather than nothing. (Books >800p have been written about that, but not recognized in the US. Buddhist/continental European.

The lesswrong base-belief seems to be: i) there is no god ii) the world is structured by mathematics and is causally closed iii) it is better that there is something rather than nothing. (change the priorites at Your pleasure)

As it seems: Anglo-American rationalists are very much in a defensive against the >80% lunatics, who believe in a god-entity, or aliens, or ghosts. Where they tend to adopt their specific anti-craziness craziness. (cf Dawkins)

Actually none of these premises (axioms) can be proved or disproved. It -is/shoud be- even in the very conception of the LW belief-system, that it cannot.

But, no, it is denied. It is predominatly considered a 'fact', whereas it is a 'belief'. It CANNOT be a fact, because every Axiom is always a constituent of belief. The most You can do is bet Your life on it.

As an exercise You can identify eg Schopenhauer's 'belief' along (i-iii). It is different.

As to Homeopathy and such, I must say that the rational mind easyly dismisses the empirical fact that H. often is more effective than 'rational medicine'. Why? Because of 'belief'. So the bitter finding is, that 'belief' actually can trump evidence at times.

To be clear: Most beliefs are terribly misguided, but there is a vector of unknown strength, where belief is a component. And 'belief' is a multidimensional issue.

I have just recently denounced the LW community as a deeply disturbed community of american nerds, fighting the windmills of life. Somehow I understand this, because the homeland of insanity nowadays seems to be the US of A.

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