I didn’t think that someone who reached your level of education needed LW to break with religion.
People certainly ought not need to. By that I mean that people with the general cognitive capacity of humans have more than enough ability to evaluate religion as nonsense given even basic modern education. But even so it is damn hard to break free. Part of what makes the ‘Belief in Belief’ post particularly useful is that it is written in an attempt to understand what is really going on when people ‘believe’ things that don’t make sense given what they know.
The social factors are also important. Religion is essentially about signalling tribal affiliation. It is dangerous to discard a tribal identity without already having found yourself a new tribe—even a compartmentalised online tribe used primarily for cognitive affiliation.
Nevertheless, I never tried to argue that Less Wrong is useless. It’s one of my favorite places in the metaverse.
This is something I have to remind myself of when reading your comments. You are sincere. Not having known your online self at all some of your arguments and questions would seem far more rhetorical than you intended them. You actually do update on new information which is a big deal!
People certainly ought not need to. By that I mean that people with the general cognitive capacity of humans have more than enough ability to evaluate religion as nonsense given even basic modern education. But even so it is damn hard to break free. Part of what makes the ‘Belief in Belief’ post particularly useful is that it is written in an attempt to understand what is really going on when people ‘believe’ things that don’t make sense given what they know.
The social factors are also important. Religion is essentially about signalling tribal affiliation. It is dangerous to discard a tribal identity without already having found yourself a new tribe—even a compartmentalised online tribe used primarily for cognitive affiliation.
This is something I have to remind myself of when reading your comments. You are sincere. Not having known your online self at all some of your arguments and questions would seem far more rhetorical than you intended them. You actually do update on new information which is a big deal!