Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points

Science was weaker in these days

Could you elaborate on this? What do you mean by Science? (reasoning? knowledge?)

The thing whose weakness seems relevant to me is a cultural tradition of doubting religion. Also, prerequisites which I have trouble articulating because they are so deeply buried: perhaps a changing notion of benevolence.

That doesn't describe me at all. I was a full-bore Fred Phelps-style ultracalvinist (only an apathetic quietist rather than an activist). I was proud that my faith was so pure I could fully admit that God does this or that thing we find abhorrent because we are so pitiful in comparison to Him and His Plan that the very idea of questioning His Wisdom is laughable. I would say "You cannot question the goodness of His actions because there was no good before God defined it, whatever God does is good by virtue of His doing it and when you say one his actions is "bad" it is only a reflection of your complete inability to know what good is in comparison to Him". I believed in evolution and like you knew the importance of not having a human-centered perception of the world. God was not merely not a 20th century American, he was not human, was not of this planet or even of this universe. He was utterly incomprehensible, and what we did know of Him was only what he had chosen to let us (whose significance in His Plan we cannot know) hear, which left room for a dishonest and misleading approach to us (though we were to think of it as being as benevolent as a parent telling their children, mentally challenged ones at that, about Santa and the Tooth Fairy). I discussed that phase of my belief here, noted one of the contradictions in my God-conception here at Gene Expression and mentioned the resemblance of the deity I was supposed to revere to H.P. Lovecraft's Azathoth here.

I know it's not entirely on topic, but biblical physics seems like a more important test of the Bible's truth than God's morality. If God does not follow the arbitrary laws of human society, what does that prove? Nor does the Bible wrongly saying that God is merciful mean much - what would you do if you were God and had to write a book? But if the Bible accurately states the age of the Universe, that's something. In the end, the only important issue is whether you're going to hell or heaven.

I actually think it's rather irrational for someone to think that God's cruelty is an argument against His existence, and this seems a common opinion among atheists. I mean, I believe in Stalin, who also claimed to be a milkmaid's best friend while executing anyone who looked at him funny.

Tiiba: Because it is very hard to read ambiguity into moral acts. One can say that six days is not meant literally (even if the original language says that - though I'm not saying it does; I don't know). One cannot say that the firstborn of Egypt were all just sleeping.

Furthermore, one cannot explain away deception. Maybe God actually made the Universe in six days but wants us to think it was longer to test our faith. Yes, that's a lousy argument, but one might conceive of it being true. As for other offenses, God makes the laws of physics, so he obeys them at his whim.

By contrast, an action making God appear evil necessarily makes him incomprehensible for many religions. If you say that God is good, and that he slaughtered innocent children, and you believe that such a slaughter is wrong, then any defense of God must change the meaning of "God is good" to something completely unrecognizable. Either good is true of God by definition (What He does is good) or it is the "big plan" strategy, in which case it is actually good but you are too stupid to understand why, meaning he is good in a way that we necessarily cannot understand.

So, to end this rambling, people pick moral attacks because they don't allow the "Well, it's obviously false, therefore, it isn't meant literally!" defense. It also attacks concepts of God on a somewhat different level.

TGGP, different people will rehearse different defenses, depending on what they think is strong - what they genuinely don't anticipate being called on, at least by themselves. You're an atheist now, so there was probably something you didn't think about, in the corner of your mind, which you can think about now. What was it?

Ha, this just happened to me. Luckily it wasn't too painful because I knew the weakness existed, I avoided it, and then reading E. T. Jaynes' "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science" gave me a different and much better belief to patch up my old one. Also, thanks for that recommendation. A lot.

For a while I had been what I called a Bayesian because I thought the frequentist position was incoherent and the Bayesian position elegant. But I couldn't resolve to my satisfaction the problem of scale parameters. I read that there was a prior that was invariant with respect to them but something kept bothering me.

It turns out that my intuition of probability was still "there is a magic number I call probability inherent in objects and what they might do". So when I saw the question "What is the probability that a glass has water:wine in a ratio of 1.5:1 or less, given that it has water:wine in a ratio between 1:1 and 2:1?" I was still thinking something along the lines of "Well, consider all possible glasses of watered wine, and maybe weight them in some way, and I'll get a probability..."

Jaynes has convinced me that the right way to think about probability is plausibility of situations given states of knowledge. There's nothing wrong with insisting that a prior be set up for any given problem; it's incoherent to set up a problem without looking at the priors. They aren't just useful, they're necessary, and anyone who says it's cheating to push the difficulty of an inductive reasoning problem onto the difficulty of determining real-world priors can be dismissed.

If only I'd asked around about this problem before, maybe I would have discovered meta-Jaynes earlier! Speaking of that, why haven't I seen his stuff or things building on it before? I feel like saying that 99% of people miss its importance says more about my importance assignment than their seeming apathy.

Tiiba: Also, most religions define God as being supremely good; evidence against the existence of a supremely good god is evidence against those religions even though it's consistent with some other religions almost no one believes in. To get from there to positive "I have good reason to believe there is no god of any sort" atheism requires further work, but if your only reason for believing in God in the first place was tied to a particular religion, and since observationally that's true of the great majority of theists (which suggests, for agreement-theorem-ish reasons, that maybe all the best reasons for believing in God have that characteristic) it provides grounds for not positively believing in God any more.

People don't think about the real weak points of their beliefs for the same reason they don't touch an oven's red-hot burners; it's painful.

Eliezer, unless I missed the analogy, people gloss the weak points to avoid finding themselves in error and avoid the pain of getting 'burned' by woeful ignorance. Perhaps I give humanity too much credit, but I think this is not the primary disincentive for most religious people. Laziness & Apathy are the first stage, where most people drop any thoughts they had of re-evalutating 'their' beliefs.

I observed this tendency in 13 years of private christian school, and at many churches (and I still love my parents...) As soon as people started to think about big problems, like the problem of evil, it became clear that they weren't going to be able to solve it by dinner-time. Since New Testament theology is strewn with paradoxes, most people seemed to merely accept doctrine as a super-strength version of 'Belief as Attire.' For some reason, something didn't click in my brain, b/c though I belonged to the group, I enjoyed exploring heterodox interpretations and other non-sanctioned ideas which unsettled the 'conventional' others.

Anyway, to actually examine the weak points of a religion like christianity or judaism is a huge project for one inside their system. I thought that I would have to master philosophy, logic, ancient languages, theology, and become a lay expert on physics and evolutionary biology in order to square the sacred text with the Life.

Belonging to a religion allows a person to let others do their thinking and believing for them, and that is the real problem. If all christians were Kierkegaards it would be a different situation (and I suppose if all Jews were Spinoza).

I guess I agree w/ Eliezer, I just think most people lie down once they realize the effort it will take to reach the next stage where you 'face-the-pain'.

And the thing that I didn't think about, being indoctrinated from the beginning, was that perhaps the bible wasn't/couldn't be inerrant; the perfect word of god. (Scary to think that there could be such relevant doubts that didn't even register!)

here here, living out what is not true is much more painful - and not just in the long run. it is more painful every day.

i grew up a christian. there is a parable about a man who gives up everything he has in order to find the "pearl of great price" which he knows is buried in a field. so he sells everything to buy the field, and then he is able to legally dig up the treasure. in other words he's done the work and has the right to the reward. i know this will sound crazy to most christians, but giving up christianity was my way of selling everything i had to find the pearl of great price.

Eliezer_Yudkowsky: This seems to contradict your previous trivialization of the "9/11 hijackers are cowardly" claim. If indeed probing our beliefs at their weak points is painful, backing away from this is a sign of cowardice. Blowing yourself up in an attempt to kill off the people who disagree with you, instead of intellectually confronting this, and exposing yourself to that pain of being wrong, is indeed cowardly, even if you are sacrificing something precious in the process.

Americans may feel unjustifiably comfortable in retreating to "9/11 terrorists were cowards". They may endorse this purely because of pro-American bias. However, the claim is fundamentally correct, even if people support it for the wrong reasons.

Silas: Ah, so the US soldiers in Iraq are cowards because they shoot people instead of arguing intellectually with them?

Rationality is not the default state of a human being. It requires an effort just to get a human mind to the point where it perceives a scary duty of argument. I have no evidence that the 9/11 attackers got to this point, so I have no evidence that they were scared enough to be intellectual cowards.

I suppose in some sense I had not been a believer for some time, but my history of being a Christian had put in me a desire to be one whether or not I actually thought it was true. Like many youngsters I had started out with a primitive God-concept of the kindly old man in the sky variety who watches over us and occasionally intervenes sometimes. As I grew older and wiser I made omniscience, predeterminism and so on a more important part, so that God was now the inactive clock-maker (which seemed logical to me). The nature of God came to be shaped by what I knew about the world rather than my view of the nature of the world being affected by my concept of God. God was essentially out of the picture and the only justification I had for including him was the prime-mover argument (which I would now say brings in a conclusion inferior to maximum entropy). It wasn't that long ago I first announced to anyone else I had stopped believing, and still haven't told those I know personally. As I mention in the link, it was reading people like the folks at gnxp that pushed me over the edge. I was able to read them and take what they said seriously because, as I mentioned, I didn't feel my faith was threatened. There were occasional mentions of Bayesianism, but it was mostly the notion of belief as a probabilistic guess based on evidence that got through to me. I wanted to have a more accurate view of the world and tried to adopt that standard of belief. I also knew about how most people's religious beliefs (I did not initially think to include my own in that category) were not grounded in evidence, but group membership/arguments from authority and flawed intuition/heuristics. Eventually those concepts collided and I decided to consciously evaluate whether the evidence really suggested the existence of the judeochristian God. My conclusion was no and I had not really thought the evidence suggested it for some time but had a "preference over belief". Once I admitted I didn't actually believe I couldn't make myself believe anymore whether or not I had that preference. Can anyone honestly say "I believe this even though it isn't actually the case"? I can't really think of any killer argument against God I hadn't considered though.

To do better find someone smart who disagrees with you. He'll do a much better job of questioning your beliefs than you ever will.

Better still, find many such people.

When you're doubting one of your most cherished beliefs, close your eyes, empty your mind, grit your teeth, and deliberately think about whatever hurts the most.

This is good advice.

I started doing this around 9 years ago, because at the end of adolescence I experienced a sudden "mortality awareness". I imagine this is probably common -- that is, many people probably experience a moment in their life when the fact that they, too, are getting older, comes into sharp relief. But in my observation, most people seem to respond to this moment by saying, "Oh well, I'm just not going to think about that". I couldn't not think about it, though. I was already an atheist at this point, but when I was 20 I still hadn't come up with much of an approach for thinking about how to live my life in full awareness of biological vulnerability. So I forced myself to imagine becoming very old and sick, to imagine contracting cancer, to imagine every single worst-case scenario that would lead to pain and death (not just mine, but that of my family, etc., as well).

I didn't mention this to very many people, but those I did seemed to think it was "unhealthy", and that I was exhibiting a kind of OCD-like obsession with doom. But it was a phase I needed to go through, so that I could process the worst-that-could-happen without just reacting emotionally to it. It isn't that I'm "fine" now with the idea of horrible things happening -- of course I would like to avoid them -- but that I don't think that "not thinking about horrible things" is an effective means of avoiding them. I figure that (a) there are some things that could very well happen regardless of what I do or how I think, and (b) I am more likely to come up with an effective strategy for avoiding something bad if I don't hide from thoughts about that bad thing.

Also, after processing the "worst case scenarios" I thought up, I came to realize that even if every bad thing I can imagine happens at some point, life is still infinitely worth living in the meantime -- this is especially pertinent in how I try to approach the subject of life extension, because I think it would lead to damaging bias (e.g., overconfidence with regard to the development of effective biotech solutions for radical longevity in my lifetime) if I were to make my ability to live without despair contingent upon achieving this longevity.

I call myself an atheist. However, I actually think believing in a vague god is based on probabilisticly rational and bayesian kind of thinking, at least for the limited context humans live in.

I say 'vague god' because I believe most people who believe there is a god and have somewhat solid arguments supporting this fact often use fallaciously the wrong level of conceptual abstraction to support their own specific god. The word god is not very well defined and there is quite a large margin around the definition to play with. I find the best arguments, like the prime-mover or entropy argument, are bayesian in a certain context but even where they make sense, they prove nothing but a very vague god. Theists have a very annoying tendency to use these arguments, which in reality, only support the fact that there is 'something' that somewhat fits the definition of "god" (in that it is a creator) that is complex enough to have 'created' the universe (assuming the concept of 'creation' makes sense outside the universe), or at least something which created the thermodynamic order found in the universe. There is never any good evidence for the specific gods, only for some vague god that is probably more similar to a physical phenomenon like the big bang than to the gods of religious literature.

Now why do I think the vague gods are, in some sense, rational ? It came to me while I was thinking about bayesian probabilities, while reading Jaynes book. In most problems, propability is conditioned on some variable I, representing general contextual knowledge. The equations often take the form of P(H|O,I) which represents the probability of an hypothesis H knowing some observations O and other more general facts 'I'. Jaynes never said much about 'I' except that it is whatever else we know about the problem. I like to think of 'I' as a sort of low enthropy bounded context. I sometimes call it the 'contextual urn' because probability texts often idealise this information into an urn. The contextual urn need not have a hard boundary like a real urn, its bounds can be empty space as distance itself or even time can isolate things in the universe. (As an aside, I think studying how we recognise these contexts and their bounds could explain a lot about how we reason and how to make predictions about the universe. It is a hole in probability theory which needs to be understood before we can build Jaynes rational robot) 'I' is some recognisable context that allows us to make predictions. The fact that it is recognisable means it has properties that we have seen before. The contextual urn defines a sitation, a spacio-temporal region, that is low entropy enough to be recognisable and that repeats itself often enough that we can learn things about it.

The next thing I noticed about the relationship between 'I', 'O' and H is that we can kind of view 'I' and O as a cause of H and effects seem never to be more complex than their causes. This is particularly true about creation as far as we can take a creator and his creation to be a cause and effect (Which philosophers like Hume accepted). Taking an information theoretic perspective, if something can create someting else, it contains all the information to create it and probably more. It is at least as complex entropically as the thing it creates. Humans have always lived in a world where this was true almost all the time and hence it is perfectly reasonable for them to deduce using bayesian reasoning that's how things pretty much always work. It is not hard to see then that living organisma, humans or even the universe in general contain a great amount of complexity and there has to be something even more complex which created them. e.g. god.

If we look further than our immediate existence, we find out that it is not always true that a cause is more complex than its effect. Because of random variations, an effect is not very probable to be more complex than its cause but it CAN happen sometimes. And as a result of natural selection, it is possible for the complexity of populations of effects to increase given a bias which makes the more complex survive more than the less.

Evolution is not something that happens in the time-scale of a human life therefore it is not very useful to us. We thus have evolved and rationally learned during our lifetime that effects are probably always less complex than their causes. And in the context of a relatively short life span this is right!

We have to look at a wider timespan to see that there is actually another way for complexity to arise and that it explains the complexity we observe much better than the gods of religions. This is of course the theory of evolution.

I think this explains why theists feel so threatened by evolution. It's because it is the only good alternative for the creation of complexity. And although most people don't understand the principles of entropy and thermodynamics, most people's innate Bayesian reasoning leads them to the right conclusions: When they see the alternative explaining the creation of complexity and when they see how well the theory of evolution fits historical evidence, their last argument for the belief in god vaporises.

Benoit: The universe may actually contain almost no information despite looking complex, just like (say) pi or e.

Anne: I love your comment. In Buddhism (as I understand), it is recommended to meditate every day on your death and the deaths of your loved ones, so you can consider the possibility without going crazy. I always thought that sounded like a good idea.

Nick: I'm not a Buddhist (definitely can't grok the reincarnation stuff), but in a lot of ways I can see where the Buddhists are coming from, especially with regard to "letting go of attachments".

I dunno Nick, your link implies the 'multiple universes' interpretation of quantum theory, and like Jaynes and Einstein, I tend to disagree with this interpretation. But yeah, I'm sure there exists some kind of physical explanation that when written down is more similar to a scientific article than a religious text. We just don't know it yet.

Many-worlds was invented by Everett in 1957. Einstein died in 1955. Einstein and Jaynes both disapproved of the Copenhagen interpretation - I have no evidence that either ever considered many-worlds or even heard of it. Both of them objected to inherent randomness, and MWI gets rid of this.

I see, that's is not how I had understood it. I guess I should just leave this stuff to physicists.

But Eliezer, Wikipedia says about the Copenhagen interpretation:

Aage Petersen paraphrasing Niels Bohr: "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature."here is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature."

Doesn't this imply that Bohr didn't believe in inherent randomness but in randomness in the "description"? This seems like the same position as Jaynes and Einstein to me. Is Wikipedia wrong here? What am I missing???

I wonder if atheists ever get a chance to think about the weakest points of their beliefs? http://jewishphilosopher.blogspot.com/2007/08/why-atheism-is-not-religion.html

Biblical literalism is a relatively new phenomenon, and mostly a Christian one. Jewish (and many Christian) theologians have for many, many centuries regarded such things as the seven-days, two-parents creation story as myths. The questions isn't whether the mythology is true in the sense that science is true; of course it isn't. The question is whether what the mythology is intended to communicate is true.

The moral offense that moderns tend to find in the story of the killing of Egypt's firstborn is rooted in our individualist morality. The ancient view was that every member of the tribe was to some extend morally responsible for the tribe as a whole. When the pharoah offended, all of Egypt suffered, just as later all of Israel would suffer for the offenses of idolators and such.

I suspect that collective morality on that scale is quite alien to most of us, but it's fundamental for understanding the biblical worldview. But still we might ask, for instance, Are all Americans to some extent to blame for Iraq, or is blame restricted to the formal government and chain of command, or to those who voted for Bush, or to those who voted for Bush and those who didn't vote at all, or ...?

The reason one does not believe, is that he believes differently.

This brings up a point that has become clear to me - religion is to be attacked not on truth grounds, but on specific moral grounds, as concretely and personally as possible.

And yes, denial and evasion is the root of almost all crazy.

This rings so true. For years I've celebrated passover, without really considering what happened, or even if it was true. I'm glad my family is liberal enough, and I didn't ONLY rehearse the strong points, but it was interesting for me at the time how the creation myth uncannily fit in with the Big Bang theory.

That said, I was permitted to not only doubt, but not even have to defend. I just didn't follow my thoughts through. "Considering all this, is there any reason to actually worship a God, if that exists, which is unlikely? Moreso- oooh, youtube video giving a simple enough explanation to quantum physics that even I can understand it! I'll think things through later." and never actually arriving at the conclusion.

Judaism has, to me, still seemed most open and accepting of questioning. The philosophies are certainly interesting, and continue to affect me now - the core of "question everything" that I strive to follow originated from Judaism. Well, for me anyway. The lesswrong community has helped me even further, though. I still consider, if you are to believe in something before you become atheist - as in, a logical threshold you need to cross to become logical, Judaism has the lowest.

I'm not quite sure what there is to add to this, though. There is nothing more to add, in my opinion. Insightful.

I would like to ask if you have turned this idea against your own most cherished beliefs?

I would be really interested to hear what you see when you "close your eyes, empty your mind, grit your teeth, and deliberately think about whatever hurts" rationality and singularity the most.

If you would like to know what someone who partially disagrees with you would say:

In my opinion, the objective of being a rationalist contains the same lopsided view of technology's capacity to transform reality that you attribute to God in the Jewish tradition.

According to Jewish theology, God continually sustains the universe and chooses every event in it; but ordinarily, drawing logical implications from this belief is reserved for happier occasions. By saying "God did it!" only when you've been blessed with a baby girl, and just-not-thinking "God did it!" for miscarriages and stillbirths and crib deaths, you can build up quite a lopsided picture of your God's benevolent personality.

Technology cures diseases, provides a more materially comfortable life style for many people, and feeds over 7 billion. By saying "rapid innovation did it" when blessed with a baby girl who would have died in birth without modern medical equipment, and just-not-thinking "rapid implementation of innovation did it" for ecocide, the proliferation of nuclear waste, the destruction of the ocean, increase in cancer, and the ability to wipe out an entire city thousands of miles away, you can build up quite a lopsided picture of technological development's beneficial personality.

The unquestioned rightness of rapid, continual technological innovation that disregards any negative results as potential signs for the need of moderation is what I see as the weakest point of your beliefs. Or at least my understanding of them.

How has Rationality, as a universal theory (or near-universal) on decision making, confronted its most painful weaknesses? What are rationality's weak points? The more broad a theory is claimed to be, the more important it seems to really test the theory's weaknesses -- that is why I assume you bring up religion, but the same standard should apply to rationality. This is not a cute question from a religious person, more of an intellectual inquiry from a person hoping to learn. In honor of the grand-daddy of cognitive biases, confirmation bias, doesn't rational choice theory need to be vetted?

HungryTurtle makes an attempt to get to this question, but he gets too far into the weeds -- this allowed LW to simply compare the "cons" of religion with the "cons" of rationality -- this is a silly inquiry -- I don't care how the weaknesses of rationality compares to the weaknesses of Judaism because rational theory, if universally applicable with no weaknesses, should be tested on the basis of that claim alone, and not its weaknesses relative to some other theory.

Please note that negative points to this post, or failure to respond will only provide further evidence that LW is guilty of confirmation bias. Its sweet when you get to use cognitive biases against those that try to weed them out. (Yes, I'm trying to goad someone into answering, but only because I really want to know your answer, not because I'm trying to troll).

This is a response to theOtherDave -- I can't respond anymore to threads! you guys win! crush dissent based on superficial factors that "automatically result in downvotes" and thus ignore criticism! fool proof!

Is that [understanding reality] the goal? I'm not sure it is As above, I neither agree that understanding reality is a singularly important terminal goal, nor that finding the "best theory" for achieving my goals is a particularly high-priority instrumental goal.

ok, sorry to put words in your mouth -- what is your goal then? Is it not fair to say the goal is "understand reality" and "achieve your goals"? I'm ignoring the second because its personal -- the first goes to a normative understanding of reality, which presumably equally apply to each of us.

perhaps your definition is different, but my understanding is that epistemic rationality is focused on understanding reality, and it uses rational choice theory as a means to understand that reality.

How has Rationality, as a universal theory (or near-universal) on decision making, confronted its most painful weaknesses? What are rationality's weak points? The more broad a theory is claimed to be, the more important it seems to really test the theory's weaknesses -- that is why I assume you bring up religion, but the same standard should apply to rationality. This is not a cute question from a religious person, more of an intellectual inquiry from a person hoping to learn. In honor of the grand-daddy of cognitive biases, confirmation bias, doesn't rational choice theory need to be vetted?

HungryTurtle makes an attempt to get to this question, but he gets too far into the weeds -- this allowed LW to simply compare the "cons" of religion with the "cons" of rationality -- this is a silly inquiry -- I don't care how the weaknesses of rationality compares to the weaknesses of Judaism because rational theory, if universally applicable with no weaknesses, should be tested on the basis of that claim alone, and not its weaknesses relative to some other theory.

NOTE: re-posting without offending language in the hopes i dont need to create a new name. looks like i lost on my instrumental rationality point, got downvoted enough to get be restricted. on the bright side I am learning to admit i'm wrong (i was wrong to misread whether i'd offend LW, which prevented me from engaging with others on substantive points i'm trying to learn more about).

Absolutely.

In fact, when used properly it's an entirely overt attempt to manipulate speakers, in order to influence the speaking that goes on in ways that the site prefers, and it is specifically endorsed by the site for that purpose. (It is also frequently used to express annoyance or to manipulate speakers for other purposes, which the site may or may not endorse.)

I think "the way the site prefers" just equates to the way the site prefers. When you're hanging out on the site, the way the site prefers is more relevant to you than this other "Good" thing.

Rationality means listening to objections.

Please provide evidence. I challenge this claim.

"Listening to objections" is not what provides the highest expected utility based on my information and model of the world. By my previous definition, rationality meant winning and being less wrong. Using those tools, I determine that listening to objections is not the best way to be less wrong or win.

Edit: Also, I really think this whole thread should go here, judging by the current trend of discourse.

Rationality means listening to objections.

Yes, definitely. But when there is a large number of objections, rationality also means prioritizing which objections to address with which allocation of resources. And the site prefers to address those objections that aren't wrapped in threats and insults. =]

Because Bayes says you should update when presented with contrary evidence. Because Bayes doens't say you can sweep evidence under the carpet. Because Confirmation Bias is bad

The fact of an otherwise unexceptional objection is only evidence against an idea when you get more objections than you'd expect an arbitrary true idea in its reference class to get. Ideas touching on political or identity issues, for example, can be expected to garner a certain proportion of objections merely from tribal effects, with no particular implications for truth value.

The content of objections is a different matter and pretty much has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Parsing content carries costs, however, and so there are situations when it's not going to be worth your time -- as for example when it comes from a source with a known history of trolling or poor-quality reasoning, or with known-bad axioms.

Please don't confuse rationality (a collection of methods) with philosophical rationalism.

While the Munchausen Trilemma isn't mentioned by name in the article, the ideas behind it are pretty thoroughly examined in The Useful Idea Of Truth

My point is that, when it comes to spontaneous self-questioning, one is much more likely to spontaneously self-attack strong points with comforting replies to rehearse, then to spontaneously self-attack the weakest, most vulnerable points.

Typo: "then" should be "than."

Um... were you ever really Modern Orthodox? What about "Baruch Dayan Emes" after someone dies, or the continual affirmation of God after tragedy with kaddish? You, sirrah, have many blind points on this subject. I believe that God gave the Torah. God is not wrong. God created humanity, and He does not have to treat them as thinking beings beyond the dispensation He gave. He destroyed the Egyptian army, as was His right, and yet He STILL mourned and would not let the angels sing, yet He allowed the humans because He understood they could not be expected not to celebrate. You shouldn't talk about things you don't understand, since you clearly haven't learned very much of the Midrash or, for that matter, much about Judaism period.

I'm sorry your experience with religion scarred you. That doesn't give you the right to make broad generalizations.

EDIT: To those who down-voted me, my point is that his fundamental premise is that any "real" question will lead to his answers, i.e. rejection of faith. That's narrow-minded and not at all rational

For the record, the simplest answer may be the best way to go based off of information, but germs weren't the simplest answer when it came to figuring out where disease came from. History shows, again and again, that what seems to be the simplest answer is often wrong. So I don't like your logic.

And that's a lovely quote at the end. Truly. But I don't think it entails the rejection of God or Judaism to question what I believe.

Besides, how can we ever know what's true? I like Kant's system for this. We can't know what the real world looks like, only what our brain understands. For all I know, you're not real. I'm not real. The point is, knowing is impossible, and truth is impossible without some sort of leap of faith. You choose to trust your brain. I trust in God, which makes a lot more sense to me.

Can anyone point out the weakest points in christianity? You need to know enough about it and you need to give it considerable thought.

(I am christian. As long as I can remember I have adopted a mindset of skeptical thinking and self doubt, but since I in real life don´t know many people who are smarter than me and knows enough to say anything about christianity, I ask you. My mom is agnostic and pretty clever, but she can come up with better arguments for a God than I can. A fair warning, I doubt that many here knows enough about christianity to actually come up with something, but I would be positively surprised if someone did. I have some weak points of my own, but it would be very useful to see if I have missed something instead of just sticking with that.)

More than anything, the grip of religion is sustained by people just-not-thinking-about the real weak points of their religion. I don't think this is a matter of training, but a matter of instinct. People don't think about the real weak points of their beliefs for the same reason they don't touch an oven's red-hot burners; it's painful.

I think that Eliezer oversimplifies religious beliefs. People who have witnessed terrible things have kept their faith. People who have witnessed their loved ones being killed and tortured still have clung on to their religion. These people have had all the reason in the world to doubt the existence of a benevolent god. They surely have thought of the weak points, when you find yourself being tortured, you don´t keep your faith just because you want an explanation for everything. And afterward I find it hard to believe they just reasoned away it all. My point is that sheer idiocy probably didn´t convince all of those who have suffered, something else must have fooled them, or a lot of things combined.

...wait, so if I don't want to believe in a God whose morality is ineffable, who has power over time and matter, and has, they say, surgically altered the course of history on a number of occasions (think the Flood), does it mean I'm making this exact mistake, avoiding my [atheistic] belief's real weak point? I mean, I can't remember any 'manifestation of God's power' that happened in peopled regions which didn't hurt anyone. If he exists, and is supposedly powerful, what are the woes of Egyptian firstborn to me if he can just wipe out the universe?..

This feeling, anger and not being allowed to doubt, was what I felt after reading Andersen's The little match girl.

I am new to Bayesian Rationality, and it seems to me to be an ideal worth pursuing. I have so far read only Yudkowsky, and am compling a "further reading list" to continue my journey to reducing my irrationality. Please bear with me as I give you some personal context to my comments. I am a religious, practicing Jew. I don't label myself "Orthodox" or "Modern Orthodox", although I attended an Orthodox Yeshiva and live in a Modern Orthodox community, because a lot of what colors the cultural manifestation of the Jewish religion is based on social influences. I refer to myself as a "Torah observant" Jew. I also attended university, majoring in biochemistry and minoring in psychology, and most of the sections on cognitive biases were not new to me, but framed in a new way that I just didn't see before. I have, in the past, questioned my faith, but since my first read-through of AI-Zombies, learned that I did not ask the right questions. Reciting the Litany of Tarski regarding God once scared me, but now I recite it regularly, because I recognize that I really only want to believe that God exists if and only if God exists. It does me no good to believe God exists if God doesn't exist.

In regards to the first story in this post, I was always taught in Yeshiva that God is responsible for everything, good AND bad, and that we are supposed to acknowledge that in bad cases as well as good. That is why, at a Jewish funeral, the mourners recite the blessing "Baruch ata... Dayan HaEmet", Blessed are You, God, the True Judge" (or "Judge of Truth", direct translation is not perfect), the understanding being that God has decided that it is the right time for that person to die, and we accept that.

I recognize the underlying conflict between the ideas of a benevolent God and certain aspects of Biblical narrative, like God killing all first born children when we can easily imagine any number of alternate ways God could have ended slavery without killing babies (and adults; it doesn't say that the first borns had to be child-aged, and the tragedy is not lessened just because they were grown up). I honestly don't have an answer.

I have tried to sit down and imagine a world without a God, what it would look like. I can't claim that I'm not fooling myself, but in the world that I constructed without a God, Judaism does not exist. I'm not an expert historian, but I've counted dozens (at least) of cultures/nations from the past 3 millenia, going back to what I can find as the first independent corroboration of records of a Jewish (or proto-Jewish, depending on the source) nation, and aside from China, they are all gone. Completely wiped out, remembered only by archeological discoveries, and in the cases of the great world powers, historical records and cultural echoes. Where Judea/Israel differs from China is that the Jews spent the past 2,000 years primarily homeless (a fraction remained in the region that Rome renamed "Syria-Palestina", but many were sold into Roman slavery), and we know from more recent records that at least the past thousand years were marked with countless occurences of genocide, where entire communities were ravaged just for being Jewish. I don't know how to calculate the probability of a nation that is not a superpower (or even a superpower) to remain a recognizable, cohesive unit for 3,000 years, but I imagine it's pretty small, since only one of each has done so. I also don't know how to calculate the probability of a nation remaining recognizable and cohesive despite hundreds of years of dominating countries attempting to eradicate them. To me, that makes less sense than a God who does things I don't understand. Is there no alternative answer that explains how Judaism has survived, or have I stopped looking too soon? I have ordered a number of books written by secular historians who talk about the origins of Judaism to see what kind of evidence they offer one way or another. At what point do I say "I still don't understand this"and put it on the shelf because I don't have the time to dedicate to researching it, and there are more important things to do with my life? Even if I stop believing in God, which is probably unlikely, but not impossible, I will likely continue to be a practicing Jew simply because I like to identify with this tribe, despite the downsides like anti-Semitism.

Being a Marxist at one time, I also suffered from this problem.

Thank you for this and particularly the last paragraph.

I think there have been pieces of this essay floating around in my brain for a while but for some reason I have never been able to put them together so clearly and beautifully, as you have done here.

you can find God killing the first-born male children of Egypt to convince an unelected Pharaoh to release slaves who logically could have been teleported out of the country. An Orthodox Jew is most certainly familiar with this episode

I've seen Yudkowsky make this point in a couple places (why bother inflicting mass infanticide etc. etc. when you're presumably omnipotent and could teleport everyone to safety) and it makes me blink, something about the argument feels off. Are there cases in the scriptures where God teleports large numbers of people large distances? I get, and vehemently agree with, the point being made here (you can't deny that in this and many other stories, God had more humane alternatives available, and knowingly opted for a crueler one) but unless there's a clear precedent for mass teleportation, this specific argument seems to strawman the religious belief a little.

Having studied quite a few of the world's religions, I'd have to say that, in a lot of cases, it's a map-territory error writ large.

If you take the major religions that have survived for thousands of years and extrapolate out their teachings to their logical conclusions, and ruthlessly chop out the contradictions, it seems an awful lot like "God" could be defined as "Whatever it is that defines the fundamental nature of life, the universe, and everything."

The ancients tended to think of it as a sapient, thinking, possibly living being.  Because that's the machinery that our brains have for comprehending and predicting insanely complex phenomena.  Thor, god of thunder, may not be "real" in the same way that modern physics' equations are, but if thinking about it that way keeps you from standing in an open field waving your sword at the clouds in defiance during major storms then it's still a useful model.

The problem comes in when people start thinking that because it's modeled as a human, it must be just like a human and then twist themselves into knots trying to deal with the moral implications of that along with trying to bargain or placate with sacrifices that a human would appreciate rather than with what is actually necessary to make the change they want.

And further compounds when people turn "we've noticed a pattern of behaviour and consequences over generations and have concluded that the master of the universe is rewarding/punishing us" into "God has spoken and this may never be questioned again."

Most of the old religious rules make pretty decent sense when you pick them apart and figure out, based on what life was like at the time and place, what they were intended to protect against.  They're not irrelevant in the modern world, it's just that our understanding has grown and our technology has changed and, in many places we now have better solutions to the problems.

And yet...  If you plant multiple crops in the same garden plot you'll still often end up with strange and undesirable results, leaving bodily wastes lying around on the surface is still a bad idea, and farmers still have a strong need for harvest insurance.

The amount the ancients managed to figure out while barely having a written language, minimal mathematics, and no statistics is darned impressive.  And honest study of them can be useful because there are patterns to human society and behaviour in there which persist to this day.

It's the people who take ancient morality plays, wash them through several translations, strip them of their cultural context, and then cherry-pick phrases out of them to justify whatever conclusion they've already written in at the bottom of the page that are the real problem.  But then, they're the problem whether their source is an ancient tome or fresh, new data.

I don't know how much it'd be a new thing, but Kardec's spiritism is very familiar to the Orthodox Judaism. 

I grew up on Brazil spiritism and it's a sophisticated way to address science through a third revealing. And many answers of the Spirit of Truth on the The Spirit's Book are scientifically accurate, but just with the epoch science (it's harder to argue that XIX Century French people couldn't understand that spirits live on the vacuum or another dimension, but the Spirit of Truth goes ahead and tells Kardec that in fact "There is an ethereal fluid that fills space and penetrates bodies. This fluid is the ether or primitive cosmic matter, the generator of the universe and beings."). Nonetheless, there are holes but they are harder to spot. So if you're smart to ask the dumb question to the average religion but you don't put much effort thinking in the harder questions, this may well suit you (I don't think it'll suit anyone on this forum)

I'm new to this blog, still making my way through the Sequence Highlights, so I'm still going through the process of applying rationalist critiques to myself for the first time. In this spirit, I asked myself if I avoid my beliefs' real weaknesses when I attempt to challenge my political ideology (I am not religious, so that seemed like the next best thing). The answer is: no, of course I don't. But I think it for reasons not described in this post. Frankly, the reason I instinctively challenge the strongest points of my political ideology is because these are the reasons I subscribe to the ideology in the first place. Most people are happy to admit that their political ideology is imperfect; after all, a coherent ideology is like a web of ideas, where no single idea can really be separated. When you accept a political ideology, you generally accept the good with the bad. Where losing faith in some aspects of a religion is enough to shake your faith entirely, the same is not true with political ideology...

...unless it should be. Perhaps we should only strive to believe in individual policy ideas and solutions, wholly separated from political ideologies. Perhaps we should only seek to construct the most accurate model of the world and then seek to make individual improvements, instead of conceiving of entirely different models. But I fear that this approach forces us into the status quo. It may be true that, for instance, abolishing capitalism in favour of some version of socialism would generally improve the world, but forcing ourselves to only think in terms of modifications to capitalism would never allow us to even consider it. It precludes us from making the necessary systemic critiques to get us there. Our sincere attempt at unideological rationality turns out to be deeply ideological in practice.

Again, I am new here, so if this topic actually covered somewhere else on LessWrong (or my criticisms are addressed indirectly by something else posted here), then I would love to read it.

Eliezer: In your opinion, do you think it is possible for individuals to overcome this inclination to avoid their belief's weakest points, and if so, what steps or practices might help them confront these vulnerabilities with an open mind and a genuine desire for understanding?

I like this post because it offers a thought-provoking perspective on the human tendency to avoid confronting the most challenging aspects of our beliefs, particularly when it comes to religion. It is interesting to consider how this behavior might be driven by an innate desire for comfort and reassurance, rather than a genuine pursuit of truth. And one might wonder how this phenomenon manifests itself in other belief systems and ideologies as well.

Cheers,

Avi Kerendian

I’m sorry to hear you lost your faith, Eliezer. I’m also sorry to read you write off millions of people who for centuries delved into the depths of our people’s tradition. I have been blessed to learn from teachers with unparalleled intellectual honesty who address the most difficult questions and underpinnings of faith and remain steadfast in their belief. Happy Passover.