One of the great things about the internet is that there is a social group for almost every interest. Pick an unusual hobby or ideology, and there is probably an online community centered around it. This is especially wonderful for those of us who never quite fit in to mainstream...
(Warning: this post is a bit technical.) Suppose you are a Bayesian reasoning agent. While going about your daily activities, you observe an event of type . Because you're a good Bayesian, you have some internal parameter which represents your belief that will occur. Now, you're familiar with the Ways...
Occam's razor, as it is popularly known, states that "the simplest answer is most likely to be correct"1. It has been noted in other discussion threads that the phrase "simplest description" is somewhat misleading, and that it actually means something along the lines of "description that is easiest to express...
In this article, Eliezer implies that it's the lack of objective morality which makes life seem meaningless under a materialist reductionist model of the universe. Is this the usual source of existential angst? For me, existential angst always came from "life not having a purpose"; I was always bothered by the thought that no higher power was guiding our lives. I ended up solving this problem by realizing that emergent structures such as society can be understood as a "higher power guiding our lives"; while it's not as agenty as God, it suits my purposes well enough, and I've been free of existential angst ever since.
(I do agree with the main thesis of Eliezer's post; I think I was able to accept my philosophical solution to existential angst because of an increasingly positive outlook on life. I'm just commenting because I'm now very curious about what "existential angst" means to the rest of LessWrong. What does existential angst mean to you?)
I agree with what seems to be the standard viewpoint here: the laws of morality are not written on the fabric of the universe, but human behavior does follow certain trends, and by analyzing these trends we can extract some descriptive rules that could be called morals.
I would find such an analysis interesting, because it'd provide insight into how people work. Personally, though, I'm only interested in what is, and I don't care at all about what "ought to be". In that sense, I suppose I'm a moral nihilist. The LessWrong obsession with developing prescriptive moral rules annoys me, because I'm interested in truth-seeking above all other things, and I've found that focusing on what "ought to be" distracts me from what is.
Aha! I think I was misreading your post, then; I assumed you were presenting truth-seeking as a reason why you wanted your friends to be atheists, as well as a reason why converting them would be moral. Sorry for assuming you didn't know your own motivations!
It really depends on your own personal moral system (assuming ethical relativism). In order to answer your question, I would need to know what you consider moral. I'll attempt to infer your morals from your post, and then I'll try to answer your question accordingly.
It sounds from your post like you're torn between two alternatives, both of which you consider moral, but which are mutually exclusive. On one hand, it seems that you're morally devoted to the causes of atheism and truth-seeking; thus, you desire to convert others to this cause. But on the other hand, you're morally devoted to your friends' happiness, and you realize that if... (read 405 more words →)
That sounds awesome and not manipulative at all. =)
I'm all for community-building activities, and I'd love to learn to dance, so I think this is an awesome idea. That said, something about the way this post and its comments are worded rubs me the wrong way entirely, and makes me want to avoid rationalist dance meetups and the LessWrong community in general. Since it seems that your goal is to recruit more rationalists, and I've been a long-time lurker on the outskirts of the rationalist community, I figured that it might be helpful if I explained my negative reaction. I've had similar negative reactions to many LessWrong posts, and it's part of why, although I consider myself... (read more)
I find this post incredibly inspiring, but I feel like it does not directly address one of the main reasons that people do not find scientific explanations emotionally satisfying. When we personify the cosmos, then the universe seems a lot less hostile, and we feel much more connected to it. A primitive man looks up at the sun and thinks, "There is the sun-god, the sky-father, watching over my people." And he is happy because the universe, while capricious, is not apathetic to his life. But a modern man looks up at the sun and thinks "There is a giant ball of gas that lacks any consciousness."... (read more)
Allow me to provide some insight, as an erstwhile "anti-reductionist" in the sense that Eliezer uses it here. (In many senses I am still an anti-reductionist.) I think that what is at work here is the conflict between intuition and analysis. However, before I remark on the relevance of these concepts to the experience of a rainbow, I would like to clarify what I mean by the terms "intuition" and "analysis".
The way I understand the mind, at the very deepest level of our consciousnesses we have our core processes; these are the things we have carried with us from the dawn of our evolution. And somewhere around there... (read 577 more words →)
This post reminds me of evidential markers in linguistics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality). Evidential markers are morphemes (e.g. prefixes or suffixes) which, when attached to the verb, describe how the speaker came to belief the fact that he is asserting. These can include things like direct knowledge ("I saw it with my own eyes"), hearsay ("Somebody told me so but I didn't see for myself"), and inference ("I concluded it from my other beliefs"). While evidential markers are less specific than what's described in this post ("Somebody told me" rather than "John told me last Thursday at lunch"), I suspect that speakers of languages with evidential markers would be a lot more... (read more)
One of the great things about the internet is that there is a social group for almost every interest. Pick an unusual hobby or ideology, and there is probably an online community centered around it. This is especially wonderful for those of us who never quite fit in to mainstream society.
But there's also a downside to this aspect of the internet, which is that the more we immerse ourselves in these small online communities, the less exposure we get to the rest of the world. And the less exposure we get to the rest of the world, the easier it is for us to hold onto false beliefs that the rest of... (read 995 more words →)
(Warning: this post is a bit technical.)
Suppose you are a Bayesian reasoning agent. While going about your daily activities, you observe an event of type . Because you're a good Bayesian, you have some internal parameter
which represents your belief that
will occur.
Now, you're familiar with the Ways of Bayes, and therefore you know that your beliefs must be updated with every new datapoint you perceive. Your observation of is a datapoint, and thus you'll want to modify
. But how much should this datapoint influence
? Well, that will depend on how sure you are of
in the first place. If you calculated
based on a careful experiment involving hundreds of... (read 1425 more words →)
Occam's razor, as it is popularly known, states that "the simplest answer is most likely to be correct"1. It has been noted in other discussion threads that the phrase "simplest description" is somewhat misleading, and that it actually means something along the lines of "description that is easiest to express concisely using natural language". Occam's razor typically comes into play when we are trying to explain some observed phenomenon, or, in terms of model-building, when we are trying to come up with a model for our observations. The verbal complexity of a new model will depend on the models that already exist in the observer's mind, since, as humans, we express new... (read 757 more words →)
Two sheep plus three sheep equals five sheep. Two apples plus three apples equals five apples. Two Discrete ObjecTs plus three Discrete ObjecTs equals five Discrete ObjecTs.
Arithmetic is a formal system, consisting of a syntax and semantics. The formal syntax specifies which statements are grammatical: "2 + 3 = 5" is fine, while "2 3 5 + =" is meaningless. The formal semantics provides a mapping from grammatical statements to truth values: "2 + 3 = 5" is true, while "2 + 3 = 6" is false. This mapping relies on axioms; that is, when we say "statement X in formal system Y is true", we mean X is consistent with... (read more)