The elephant in the room, AMA

Eliezer and LW have a fairly coherent atheistic worldview.

Why only "fairly"?

Things that caused me to upwardly-adjust the probability that there is a God. Finding independent support for principles I had reached through religious means.

That looks odd to me. Why does finding that someone has reached some of the same conclusions as you, but by a completely different and incompatible path, constitute evidence for your path?

The downward-adjusters are more powerful; Eliezer and LW have a fairly coherent atheistic worldview.

Am I correct in reading that as meaning that on balance, your religious faith has been lessened?

Just to make sure I understand, you mean that Eliezer's writings have more powerful downward-adjusters and a fairly coherent atheistic worldview, right?

Your actual beliefs are best determined by your actions, not what you say your beliefs are. (The ‘invisible dragon’). That many people’s beliefs are actually just attire and tribe-identification.

Why did these two things cause upward-adjustment?

Your actual beliefs are best determined by your actions, not what you say your beliefs are. (The ‘invisible dragon’). That many people’s beliefs are actually just attire and tribe-identification.

I don't understand this. Why would learning this make it seem more likely that there is a god?

This, on its own, does not make sense to me. If you believe the arguments against theism (i.e., the downward-adjusters) are more powerful than your arguments for, why are you still a theist?

My current opinion is that the doctrines of the Mormon church are wildly ridiculous, pernicious, and manifestly false. In other words, these are extraordinary claims. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I don't think calcsam can provide anything like the necessary degree of extraordinary evidence. I think it's much more likely that I'd be struck by lightning while winning the lottery. This isn't sporting of me, but then again, it's not a sport. Calcsam is the one who chose LDS, not me.

Does your experience include LW rationalists deploying such a trick?

It's true that people will dishonestly move goalposts, but at the same time, certain claims really do require proportionally more evidence -- and the correct ones can produce that evidence (e.g. quantum "strangeness", evolutionary theory, etc.).

Such a level of evidence can reasonably be characterized as "ironclad" or "unmistakeable" -- and to borrow from EY's felicitous phrasing, it would take a heck of a lot of evidence to unmistake Mormonism.

If calcsam convinces me that the Mormon god is ~10% probable and also the most probable god (i.e. Hindu gods are not 20% probable), I will publicly declare myself a Mormon. In addition, if there are no dramatic drawbacks to practicing Mormon practices, I will try to officially join the LDS.

This is a real problem in conversations where one or both parties are trying to win. In this conversation, I and presumably Costanza will be actually updating our beliefs as the evidence comes in. When enough evidence has come in to move my beliefs from where they are now to believing in Mormonism, I won't want to move the goalposts, because I'll be a Mormon and agree with Calcsam.

...but if your sureness is based only on the arguments you have seen, how sure can you really be that there isn't an argument that you would accept as refuting all of that?

If Joseph Smith was a prophet, then I desire to believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet.

Right now, I'm very confident that Joseph Smith was a lecherous, manipulative, lying charlatan who patched together his church doctrine out of whatever superstitions he happened to have come across in his life. But I can't prove this to a 100% degree of certainty. So I have some doubt, and so I can be persuaded to change my mind.

Sixthed. Actually I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who wouldn't so promise.

The only caveat is that I'd have to be separately convinced of the factual and ethical sides, i.e., showing evidence to me that the Mormon God exists is not the same as justifying that the Mormon God's policies are good.

Third.

Perhaps a rationalist is someone who is striving, against the current, to make rational decisions.

If you go to a roulette wheel, you can make a lot of choices, as long as they're red or black -- not green. You may lose, you may win. If you play and you place your chips on thirteen and then the ball lands in thirteen, you will be happy for a bit, but I would not call you a rationalist. I would say the rationalists in the game would be those who either choose not to play, or else the house, running the game. I would say the person who bet on thirteen made a successful but not rational decision.

In the end, I would have to say that there are degrees of rationalists and degrees of rationality. Only rationalists of some level are capable of making decisions of some degree of rationality.

Are you a rationalist? Did you convert because you were rationally persuaded to convert?

Are you claiming that only rationalists are capable of making rational decisions?

Quite clearly not.

This isn't a question.

Moroni 10:3 tells me I need to have faith in Christ before I ask for a sign. That kind of defeats the purpose.

Because my other reply may seem rude, I want to make my point a different way: by giving a reply to calcsam that looks to Mormons, as his response looks to me (and probably several others here).

Why, this sure is the best response I've ever seen about this issue. I whole-heartedly thank you, and let me just say, I totally support Mormonism where Mormonism is good for America.

Now, all of my anticipations are sort of about "reality", so when I look at reality, I expect certain things to happen based on being a rationalist rather than a Mormon. Let's go over some of those things I expect to be true if I'm correct.

When I think about a problem, I expect to come closer to finding an answer. I will expect to occasionally come to a correct answer. This feeling has been described as an "aha!" moment or a "that's funny..." moment. "America, apple pie, science, greatness, courage, applause lights."

As society follows methods similar to what rationalists do, I expect to see them produce technology that will satisfy our goals. I expect engineers and scientists to come up with land vehicles better than previous generations had. I expect them to find more and better energy that was accessible before.

I expect that these things will not just happen in America, even though she's the greatest nation on earth but in a way that doesn't offend non-Americans, but elsewhere too. I expect that all over the world engineers will be able to produce technologies that make difficult work less difficult.

I expect that when others abandon these rationalist ideas and so don't have curiousity or clear thinking, they won't understand how technology works. I expect they'll be unable to troubleshoot and fix things when they have minor operational breakdowns. I expect that R&D arms that don't follow rationalist ideas won't turn out good technology. So rationalism gives me more accurate expectations than Mormonism.

I could list some more technologies that work, but that should be enough to show beyond a shadow of a doubt Mormonism is completely wrong and incapable of producing technology.

That about covers it...

I expect most of these same things (e.g., that prayer/meditation/reflection, gratitude, forgiveness, clean thoughts, avoiding alcohol & tobacco, etc. will all lead to a better life in the ways you've mentioned) and am not LDS, and have no LDS reason for these beliefs. These beliefs are true regardless of LDS, not because of it. The self-help / positive psychology / happiness literature is sufficient for the above beliefs, and so are not meaningful support for LDS.

Paragraph breakdown:

[politician-style suck-up]

[empty statement]

[uncontroversial expectation that avoids the claims people are really interested in regarding prayer]

[expectation related to social support community and adherence to its rituals, and only superficially to the disputed aspects of Mormonism]

[same]

[same]

[attempt to intimidate reader by implying overwhelming, unbounded list of evidence points when few were presented]

I believe we're mostly interested in anticipations relating to the "supernatural" aspects of mormonisim - ie: what do you expect to see if the mormon god does in fact exist, if joseph smith was in fact a prophet that spoke to an angel, etc.

Hmm. I assign an exceedingly low probability to the proposition that an omnipotent, omniscient being exists and has existed for as long as the universe has existed, but I don't disagree with your anticipations. I don't see how your anticipations are very connected to this proposition.

I can easily imagine you gaining a sense of mental clarity from the act of prayer and procuring certain benefits from the lifestyle choices that you mention. I'm not sure what probability I would assign to these predictions, but I think that they would range from around .15->.6 In my eyes, your anticipations have a considerable of probability of being true regardless of whether or not a being which I described in my first paragraph exists.

I agree with hegemonicon in that (at least in this context), we're more interested in your anticipations that are related to the above proposition rather than those regarding the effects of certain lifestyle choices.

My conclusion: You're here to answer questions, not to debate. But at some point I'd enjoy talking with you about your beliefs with respect to Bayes' Theorem, and about breaking "Mormonism" into multiple hypotheses.

Thanks for replying! I'll think on this for a little while.

What has led you to anticipate (for brevity, some of) these things? Including some benefits for you and the predicted detriments for your fraternity brothers.

What is your substantiation?

I'd want to see some or all of the points brought up here addressed. For example:

The detailed history and civilization described in the Book of Mormon does not correspond to anything found by archaeologists anywhere in the Americas. The Book of Mormon describes a civilization lasting for a thousand years, covering both North and South America, which was familiar with horses, elephants, cattle, sheep, wheat, barley, steel, wheeled vehicles, shipbuilding, sails, coins, and other elements of Old World culture. But no trace of any of these supposedly very common things has ever been found in the Americas of that period. Nor does the Book of Mormon mention many of the features of the civilizations which really did exist at that time in the Americas. The LDS church has spent millions of dollars over many years trying to prove through archaeological research that the Book of Mormon is an accurate historical record, but they have failed to produce any convincing pre-columbian archeological evidence supporting the Book of Mormon story. In addition, whereas the Book of Mormon presents the picture of a relatively homogeneous people, with a single language and communication between distant parts of the Americas, the pre-columbian history of the Americas shows the opposite: widely disparate racial types (almost entirely east Asian - definitely not Semitic, as proven by recent DNA studies), and many unrelated native languages, none of which are even remotely related to Hebrew or Egyptian.

The source is overtly an ex-Mormon site. But if Mormon doctrine is what they say it is, and the archeology is what they say it is, then it woudn't look good for Mormonism.

Agreed - I would like to draw calcsam's attention to the grandparent of this comment. I would also note that said question is related to nickernst's question.

I can't figure out which post you've recently made that's relevant to this. Could you link it?

What were you before reading "Losing Faith in Faith" in 9th grade?

What would you do differently if God spoke to you and said: I quit....

...if God did tell me that, I would sign up for cryonics tomorrow....

Thanks. That is a typical answer, and it's what I wanted to hear.

I'll assume that my motives in asking the question were covered adequately in the sibling of the parent post (uncle post?) so I won't reiterate.

And thanks for dealing with the hostile anti-religious crap in some of the other questions. That takes some emotional fortitude.

I was rather disappointed by the story; it struck me as a regular conversion, driven by positive affect, social reinforcement, fuzzy feelings, motivated cognition, and characterized by a profound lack of truth-seeking. I expected something more unique or something strangely appealing.

Thank you for that.

thanks.

In particular, I'm saying Pr(calcsam experiences warm feelings after reading the Book of Mormon | LDS church is true, social interaction with members) > Pr(warm, glowy feelings | LDS church is false, social interaction with members).

I agree that it's really difficult to say exactly what these probabilities are. If you forced me to assign numbers, I would assign something close to 1 for the former and .1-.8 for the latter. To be valid, these should really be the result of probability flows through an entire network of beliefs, but I think the direction of the inequality is apparent. I agree that spiritual experiences for different religions will tend to offset one another. Whether these in total constitute net positive or negative evidence for a god in general depends of your prior about how these experiences are distributed. Based on my interpretation of LDS doctrine, many non-LDS individuals would feel the spirit, even during non-LDS services, just not as strongly.

In any other forum but this one, I wouldn't go around saying this is evidence, but it is, if only weakly.

I first came to view the religious worldview as coherent, in that people's actions seemed to be in accord with their professed beliefs, it seemed to produce generally desirable results.

This seems tangential. I agree that living a non-hypocritical, coherent narrative leads to overall better mental health. But there are many ways to live coherently, most of which don't match the truth.

non-spiritual experiences ... established plausibility, perhaps .05 < p < 0.3. And experiences-which-I-interpret-as-the-Holy-Ghost took me from there to my current state. ... I think there's a basic epistemological difference in that I lend more credence to experience here.

Of course, I'll dispute getting to that base level, but focusing on the personal experiences, I hope we don't have different views on how to weigh experience. This should be weighed as evidence exactly the same way everything else is: by the odds ratio of it occurring when the hypothesis is true over when it isn't. Taking your numbers at face value, your odds on the church were between 1:20 and 1:2. Adding feelings of peace, rightness, reassurance, etc, these odds moved to say 10:1 (p~0.9). For this to work out, feelings of this sort had to be between 20 and 200 times more likely if the church is true than if it isn't. Given human psychology, I think this is implausibly high. Like I said, I do think what you experienced is evidence, but I wouldn't put the odds much higher than 5:1.

But truth claims depend on the Book of Mormon. Seer stones, divining rods and polygamy are all true but irrelevant to this question.

I agree completely. Well, I think it depends on more than the BoM, but polygamy, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the church's opposition to Prop 8, and other things that can get people riled up are irrelevant to this. I admit I haven't read much Dialogue (although I have one issue with a friend's fiction sitting on my shelf), so maybe the matters presented are simply embarrassments and not evidence against the church. I was thinking more along the lines of Adam/God or the Book of Abraham papyri, which I assume you've been exposed to. And of course Native American genetics and BoM related matters.

I wasn't convinced by the View of the Hebrews/ Solomon Spaulding/ anachronisms arguments.

I actually think these are (very weak) evidence for the Book of Mormon. They might provide an explanation for how the BoM came about if it wasn't inspired, but it seems more likely that others would think Indians were descended from Hebrews if they really were.

Badger, possibly you're right in that everyone else's hopes were too high

Well, this was useful for me to practice thinking about what does or does not constitute evidence. I hope it's been useful for you one way or another.

So why do you think that

• Mormonism is a good explanation for your non-spiritual experiences?
• the Book of Mormon is accurate with respect to metaphysical claims?
• Mormonism is a good explanation for your experiences-which-you-interpret-as-the-Holy-Ghost? (Keeping in mind that the majority of people who have religious beliefs based on personal spiritual / faith experiences are incorrect.)

I went through a time like yours in college, but i found LW about the time you met Joesph and my roommate was much more cynical ;)

That's because it is. Yes, the way I described power rankings working, it is isomorphic to this:

Bayesian agent has two beliefs X and Y. If it discovered that X and Y are evidence against each other ( Pr(X | Y) < Pr(X) & Pr(Y | X) < Pr(Y) ) which belief will be updated more?

which is isomorphic to

How much evidence for X and how much for Y?

but those questions don't cause most human brains to give good answers.

I make a few presumptions here; correct me if I'm wrong.

I presume you do not simply have total faith in everything Latter Day Saints; you don't experience a sense of rightness on every single line of every single religious text (I've never met a religious person who does; this is something that only happens in strawman atheism arguments). But presumably you also have experienced a sense of rightness regarding some large part of LDS theology (again, based off my experiences with religious people), as that would be why you converted.

Now here's the tricky part. If you read something that struck you as right - you got that sense of rightness about it - but when you shared it you found it was directly contradicting some doctrine of LDS, what would happen? Would you stop thinking the thing was right, or would you adjust your view of the LDS Church slight downwards?

(The reason I am not sure this is fair is because if you asked me the same question in terms of rationality and truth-feeling, I would have a hard time not picking it apart, although in the least convenient possible world I would closely examine both my rationality and my feeling of truthness, and then rationality would win.)

This is explicitly a sub-perfect world, and has been since the fall of Adam.

Actually perfect worlds do not devolve into sub-perfect worlds.

And it's no less amazing that several afflicted people managed to survive and function reasonably well.

He didn't assume that; the post says

events that break the laws of physics as we know them

I find only one alternative remotely plausible, namely that there is no God and what I interpret as spiritual experiences are actually delusions.

People have already accomplished "spiritual experiences" with secular meditation, drugs (mushrooms, LSD), and magnetic stimulation (the "god helmet"). And sometimes similar results from disease, schizophrenia, infections, etc.

Curious why you asked; there is a follow-up question that seems like the reason you asked the initial question. I'll see if you do.

In the past the LDS church seems to have had "revelations" that caused it to change its teachings to follow US mainstream attitudes in other respects -- banning polygamy, no longer discriminating against black people, etc...

I tried to sort-of quantify your expectation for this trend to continue. You may comment on the issue in the general, I didn't have a specific follow-up question in mind.

What's the difference between the red and yellow pills?

I think I remember some posters being in favor of wireheading.

Is there anyone on this site who'd be willing to say "blue pill?"

Sure, given the right circumstances.

I think these kinds of list should always include Donald E. Knuth.

People who hold obviously incorrect beliefs can still be highly intelligent and productive:

And one of the concerns I detected in wedrifid's comment (one I share myself) is that if highly intelligent and productive people start doing what obviously incorrect beliefs indicate they should, the world is going to be optimised in a direction I won't like.

Good reminder that reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

Adding to the list: Hans Berger invented the EEG while trying to investigate telepathy, which he was convinced was real. Even fools can make important discoveries.

I don't think that examples of people with fundamental, irrational beliefs being good at other things are relevant - calcsam has invited questions specifically about the belief whose rationality is being examined. If he was starting a discussion about mathematics and his points were dismissed due to his Mormon affiliation, your comment wold make more sense to me.

I think though that holding crazy beliefs is Bayesian evidence for the hypothesis that a person is not a remarkable intellectual contributor to humanity. Wedrifid's "why should I listen to you?" is thus not addressed head-on by a list of crazy people who happened to achieve other worthy stuff.

So XiXiDu's negative quotes file is not limited to just Eliezer.

Too adversarial.

No, and I take a mild degree of offence at the accusation. Ask Me Anything taken literally. It is exactly what the 'elephant in the room' is. I am being frank, not adversarial and given calcsam's experiences and the emotional resilience that he would have needed to develop while evangelizing I know I don't have to tiptoe through a minefield to protect his feelings.

If I am obliged to maintain a social facade even in a thread specifically created to asking this question then the only real recourse I would have is to do whatever is appropriate to eliminate the necessity for me to speak bullshit (or act in a misleading way that is analogous to bullshit).

His allusions to his missionary work are provoking an immune response from many here, including me (not that I write much). I think this is why (from a quote thread):

I have not been particularly bothered by the missionary allusions but obviously don't consider the posts nearly as valuable as you do. There is an undesirable emphasis on norms and a constant pressure to move things in the direction of 'making the group do set projects' and 'consensus'. This isn't an organisation, it's a blog.

I completely failed to parse this sentence (and so didn't really understand the next one either.) Could you try phrasing it another way and/or correcting typos, if they're in there?

I edited the paragraph. The meaning is approximately the same but far clearer.

For the sake the question, you could answer it as though it is something like:

"I am Xist. Given that wedrifid believes not-X, how should he behave?"

In part because LessWrong has no kill-file or kill-filter technology.

The greasmonkey script to implement that functionality is steadily moving towards the top of the todo list. :p

As someone who has always rooted for the villains, I can appreciate this level of megalomania. (Me, I'm happy just being a cultist. Alas, no gods to serve.)

Religion and rationality are not compatible, because the specific claims of religion are false and rationality seeks to destroy false beliefs. There is no missing link; subjective experience is not compelling evidence of anything, let alone something so massively in need of high-quality evidence as a god.

Given enough study time, this might be enough to convince an unbiased person (given that there are no unbiased people, this is of course difficult to prove)...

You are rationalizing a position you didn't reason yourself into. Stop it.

(Just to clarify - I did not actually have to convert, I'm half jewish on the right side, so conversion = observance in this context)

Partially it was the environment. I ended up in an orthodox Jewish school when I came to the US largely b/c I was used to having so many Jewish friends in my math-sci school in USSR. I already had cousins in this school.

The next largest factor is that the specific approach of this school was to claim that Judaism is "rational" and "proved" along these lines. Unfortunately I did not have Methods of Rationality under my belt, but I did like the label. In addition, the best counterarguments to this "proof" actually require some knowledge if Judaism from the inside, which I did not have at the time.

Lastly I'd mention the fact that having survived so long Judaism is a very powerful memetic system. As one example, the Talmud is largely logical and whenever it's not new methods are developed to "reconcile" the inconsistencies; these methods are praised and constitute the main activity of Rabbinical students for millennia. When first exposed to this it's hard to not be impressed, and in my case convinced.

My deconversion should probably be credited to 3 things that occurred at around same time.

Earthquake in Haiti, and seeing bodies of kids piled up by medical workers. I have kids myself and was not even as a religious person arrogant enough to draw distinctions - I realized that with all the explanations and mysteries God does not care about what I have to protect.

I became more open to consider and seek out arguments against the Torah along these lines http://www.talkreason.org/articles/letter1.cfm .

Lastly reading LessWrong (I had interests in biases and AI), things like "Belief in Belief", "Privileging the hypothesis" added a certain amount of reflectivity to my thinking, and also gave me another community with social acceptance to my new set of beliefs.

ok, let's say that lets christianity off the hook. What about zeus, odin, shiva, allah, judaism, or coyote? It also doesn't serve to explain why he would consider his, out of all the flavors of christianity, to be more uniquely convincing.

Thanks for this.

We can use his definition.

Pardon me for answering a question directed to someone else.

Sad love, certainly, but love. I've experienced this second-hand; I know a number of people who left the church, who are still in good contact with their friends and families. Sure, the friends and families wish they would come back, but they respect that everyone must choose his own path. That there is the key tenant of "agency", or freedom of choice; that's the freedom we fought for in the pre-existence.

TBH I'd rather you just dived in and started replying to people. Doing what you propose throws away the valuable structure which is exactly why we have threading in the first place. Worse, it creates a barrier to you replying. It's a bit of a shame to announce an AMA and then 132 comments later announce that you can't answer anything until you've constructed your Answer Post. Just dive in and start replying; if there's repetition you can always link to your replies elsewhere, or just answer one of them and let people figure it out.

It still doesn't really hold. Adherents of other religions describe similar experiences. If they were a sign of any particular religion being true, you would expect only adherents of the true religion to experience them, so all the claims from different religions function as counterevidence for each other.

Rather than making the proposition more plausible, but not enough more plausible, the evidence you provided is only as good or weaker than the sort of evidence I would have predicted in advance, so it doesn't increase my probability estimate of Mormonism being true at all. In order to increase our probability estimates, you would have to offer stronger evidence than we would expect a Mormon in your position to be able to offer given the assumption that Mormonism is not true.

On a side note, I think you may have anchored on an estimate of the likelihood that we assign to Mormonism being correct that was completely out of the ballpark. Given what I said about the probability I'd assign Mormonism given the premise of some religion being true, adding a couple zeroes would only account for my having a 1 in 100 probability estimation of any religion being true, which is still off by several orders of magnitude.

Here is the technical reason:

If you use a Solomonoff prior nearly any utility function will not have a well defined expected value, i.e., trying to calculate it will give ∞ − ∞.

Or basically trying to take all possible versions of Pascal's mugging into account makes expected utility calculations mathematically incoherent.

What's the rational reason not to be vulnerable to Pascal's Mugging?

This article has the basics.

It basically consists of calling BS on the promised high utility - under most circumstances.

What's the rational reason not to be vulnerable to Pascal's Mugging?

Roughly the same reason to one box on Newcomb's Problem -- rationalists win.

I ask because I hypothesize that a rational theist/religious person almost definitely has to be vulnerable to Pascal's Mugging.