But then once you have an omnipotent God your ability to make predictions goes away. God could have willed something else, so when I raise the ball in the air and drop it I have to be surprised every time when it falls to the ground.
But then once you have an omnipotent God your ability to make predictions goes away. God could have willed something else, so when I raise the ball in the air and drop it I have to be surprised every time when it falls to the ground.
Here's an additional hypothesis to consider:
One solution would be to offer a story about how rationalist atheists can cooperate. I have most of such a story. Maybe I should get on with my writing.
Another solution would be to throw in the towel and start a rationalist sect of Christianity or some other religion. I don't recommend this - the Biblical God is obviously evil, unless one accepts an unnatural redefinition of "evil", so it is harmful to encourage people to regard that God or the Bible positively.
There is nothing that makes Christianity special in this context other than my lack of education about the other popular alternatives.
I was trying to find the bounds of my ignorance of physics yesterday and I realized nobody has a self consistent story of how a lightbulb works. Emission of photons requires quantum electrodynamics and there is no self consistent mathematical model of QED. Apparently the required integrals diverge at very small scales, and if you can get a paper describing how to fix that math through peer review, there are people who want to give you a million dollars.
The correct link for "fiction differs from reality in systematic ways" might now be this. Robin starts that page with a link to the scribd document he is summarizing. That document has been deleted. If someone has enthusiasm and ability to find a replacement link, please reply.
In response to:
Traditional Rationality doesn’t have the ideal that thinking is an exact art in which there is only one correct probability estimate given the evidence.
The ideal process applies Bayes' rule to the evidence and the prior probabilities to get the (posterior) probability estimate. Since there is no law saying what prior probabilities to assume, thinking is not an exact art in the sense used here. You might have meant that there is value in Traditional Rationality having this ideal even if we know it to be false, but in that case I don't understand your point.
The prior isn't trivial because one can model theism as doing Bayesian inference on a contrived prior. Take some reasonable prior, reassign the probabilities of all universes in which Christianity is false or meaningless to zero, scale to get the total probability back to 1, and use the result as the prior probability input to Bayes' rule. This gives rationalist Christianity.
This contrived prior was selected with knowledge that Christianity exists, and newborns don't know that, so it isn't a prior that describes the inborn suppositions of any real person. But this crazy thing exists mathematically so we can't say accuse Christianity or other theists of being irrational in the sense of failing to apply Bayes' rule to some prior just because they are Christian.
Today, one of the chief pieces of advice I give to aspiring young rationalists is “Do not attempt long chains of reasoning or complicated plans.”
I agree with this, but it was amusing to find this sentence in your 2000+ page (according to Kindle) "Rationality" book.
Shinzen Young's Five Ways to Know Yourself https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/FiveWaystoKnowYourself_ver1.6.pdf uses the words "spacey" and "racy" instead of "hazy" and "crazy", but they might be talking about the same thing. He has specific antidotes for each. There are YouTube videos in addition to the document I just cited. He has a newer book out that is probably about the same topics, but I haven't read it.
Would you be willing to share the koan?
I generally don't believe that dreams or omens come from a place with some special connection to the truth, but if following a clue from a mysterious source is cheap, I generally follow it. If one doesn't accept prompts to go on an adventure, one cannot reasonably claim disappointment if life has too few adventures.
I have known these people personally with broken bones from bicycling: two people each with a broken collarbone from mountain biking, one broken arm, one minor skull fracture that would only have been considered a bump if it were not observed with modern imaging equipment, and one broken pelvis. It also killed Steven Covey but I never met him.
The minor skull fracture was interesting because I knew the person to be successful at a job that required mostly conscientiousness. He fell during his work commute and was riding a bike that had no clear purpose other than being safe. He went back to the place he fell and tried to find some mistake he made so he could prevent a reoccurrence, and he couldn't find anything he could have done differently given that he was commuting to work on a bike.
For context, I do not ride a bike, there is nothing about my life that would tend to make me meet bicyclists, and not I am not especially friendly, so there is no unusually large number of bicyclists passing through my life who chat about their injuries.
So I'm not sure I agree that bicycling is great for your physical health. I could easily believe is is good for the health of people who don't fall.
I care about human culture and human genetic diversity and human long term survival. In the first example, if the 500 people share a culture or are related to each other, there might be worthwhile unique ideas or genes that are either preserved with certainty if I pick the more certain option, or lost altogether if I pick the option where all die with probability 10%, so I prefer the more certain option.
Similarly, if we have been fighting this thing for a while and there are only 500 humans left, I certainly prefer having 400 left with certainty over having zero left with 10% probability. We obviously can't recover if everyone is dead.
In the real world where everyone is plugged into the Internet and we have 8b people and perhaps more population than we can support, and we assume the people are randomly chosen people, I very much don't care what happens to 500 random people. We lose more than that every day due to people making bad life decisions.
People here are insinuating that scope insensitivity is somehow wrong, but I haven't yet seen any argument as to why. I agree that intransitive preferences is wrong, but I don't see any reason to add up the happiness and decide more people is better than fewer people when we have plenty of people and survival of humanity isn't threatened either way.
The orthogonality thesis holds, right? If intelligence is compatible with having arbitrary preferences, there are lots of possibilities in that space for which total preference isn't linear in the total number of happy people, so why treat that very small subset as somehow better?