Besides, people who are rational don’t have a monopoly on good ideas and some ideas may be more easily obtainable if you are already heavily biased. (You don’t get loads of interesting attempted philosophical proofs of the existence of god in a nation full of atheists.)
Given that one of the people working in CFAR produced a genuine new proof for it making sense to believe in God that made her convert to Catholicism while being employed in CFAR, I don’t see where you get that idea.
In my experience this community is very open to thinking all sorts of contrarian ideas.
That’s very interesting and I would be interested in seeing her proof. Was it a new idea that religious people had not thought of and spread before?
I should change my claim. People would be likely to think of “loads” of attempted proofs.
The theory I was trying to state is that certain perspectives or states of mind may be more effective at finding certain ideas than others. Calling “being a contrarian” might not be a good name for a perspective but I’ll treat it as such for the moment. Do you think if people at CFAR and LW (our local contrarians) were left to their own devices, they would occupy perspectives to reach every single one of the literally hundreds of proofs for the existence of god compared to people who are highly motivated by belief, social-utility, and dedication to an imagined highly dangerous omnipotent deity? Are there some that would be much harder to obtain or much easier?
I think what I may have been trying to get at was that while LW contrarianism is awesome and a pretty great method for thinking about things, it may not be the best for finding all the possible good ideas out there in idea space.
Given that one of the people working in CFAR produced a genuine new proof for it making sense to believe in God that made her convert to Catholicism while being employed in CFAR, I don’t see where you get that idea.
In my experience this community is very open to thinking all sorts of contrarian ideas.
That’s very interesting and I would be interested in seeing her proof. Was it a new idea that religious people had not thought of and spread before?
I should change my claim. People would be likely to think of “loads” of attempted proofs.
The theory I was trying to state is that certain perspectives or states of mind may be more effective at finding certain ideas than others. Calling “being a contrarian” might not be a good name for a perspective but I’ll treat it as such for the moment. Do you think if people at CFAR and LW (our local contrarians) were left to their own devices, they would occupy perspectives to reach every single one of the literally hundreds of proofs for the existence of god compared to people who are highly motivated by belief, social-utility, and dedication to an imagined highly dangerous omnipotent deity? Are there some that would be much harder to obtain or much easier?
I think what I may have been trying to get at was that while LW contrarianism is awesome and a pretty great method for thinking about things, it may not be the best for finding all the possible good ideas out there in idea space.