The atheism/secularism that permeates the Sequences and which was an explicit assumption and policy of Less Wrong 7–9 years ago would get you heavily downvoted and censured here, and lambasted and possibly banned on SSC.
I am surprised by this claim, and would be interested in seeing examples. In 2014 (closer to 7 years ago than today), Scott wrote this:
Were we ever this stupid? Certainly I got in fights about “can you still be an atheist rather than an agnostic if you’re not sure that God doesn’t exist,” and although I took the correct side (yes, you can), it didn’t seem like oh my god you are such an idiot for even considering this an open question HOW DO YOU BELIEVE ANYTHING AT ALL WITH THAT MINDSET.
Now, that’s about a different question than “is God real or not?” (in the comments, Scott mentions Leah and the ~7% of rationalists who are theists).
My fifth huge mistake was that I—as I saw it—tried to speak plainly about the stupidity of what appeared to me to be stupid ideas. I did try to avoid the fallacy known as Bulverism, which is where you open your discussion by talking about how stupid people are for believing something; I would always discuss the issue first, and only afterwards say, “And so this is stupid.” But in 2009 it was an open question in my mind whether it might be important to have some people around who expressed contempt for homeopathy. I thought, and still do think, that there is an unfortunate problem wherein treating ideas courteously is processed by many people on some level as “Nothing bad will happen to me if I say I believe this; I won’t lose status if I say I believe in homeopathy,” and that derisive laughter by comedians can help people wake up from the dream.
Today I would write more courteously, I think. The discourtesy did serve a function, and I think there were people who were helped by reading it; but I now take more seriously the risk of building communities where the normal and expected reaction to low-status outsider views is open mockery and contempt.
Despite my mistake, I am happy to say that my readership has so far been amazingly good about not using my rhetoric as an excuse to bully or belittle others. (I want to single out Scott Alexander in particular here, who is a nicer person than I am and an increasingly amazing writer on these topics, and may deserve part of the credit for making the culture of Less Wrong a healthy one.)
In 2017, Scott writes How Did New Atheism Fail So Miserably?, in a way that signals that Scott is not a New Atheist and is mostly annoyed by them, but is confused by why the broader culture is so annoyed by them. But the sense that someone who is all fired up about God not being real would be ‘boring at parties’ is the sense that I get from Scott’s 2017 post, and the sense that I get from reading Scott in 2014, or what I remember from LW in 2012. Which is quite different from “would get you banned” or religion being a protected class.
Like, when I investigate my own views, it seems to me like spending attention criticizing supernaturalist religions is unproductive because 1) materialist reductionism is a more interesting and more helpful positive claim that destroys supernaturalist religion ‘on its own’, and 2) materialist religions seem like quite useful tools that maybe we should be actively building, and allergies to supernaturalist religions seem unhelpful in that regard. This doesn’t feel like abandoning the perspective and adopting the opposite, except for that bit where the atheist has allergies to the things that I want to do and I think those allergies are misplaced, so it at least feels like it feels that way to them.
I am not sure how to best handle the topic of religion in a community blog.
If it is a single-person blog, the optimal solution would probably be mostly not to even mention it (just focus on naturalistic explanations of the world), and once in a long while to explain, politely, why it is false (without offending people who disagree).
With a community blog, the problem is that being polite towards religion may be interpreted by religious people as an invitation to contribute, but their contributions would inevitably include pro-religious statements, at least sometimes.
And if you make it explicit like “religious people are welcome, but any pro-religious statements will be immediately deleted, and the author may be banned”, that sounds like your atheism is a dogma, not an outcome of a logical process (which you merely don’t want to repeat over and over again, because you have more interesting stuff to write about). And even here I would expect a lot of rules-lawyering, strongly hinting, etc.
I am surprised by this claim, and would be interested in seeing examples. In 2014 (closer to 7 years ago than today), Scott wrote this:
Now, that’s about a different question than “is God real or not?” (in the comments, Scott mentions Leah and the ~7% of rationalists who are theists).
In the R:AZ preface, Eliezer writes this:
In 2017, Scott writes How Did New Atheism Fail So Miserably?, in a way that signals that Scott is not a New Atheist and is mostly annoyed by them, but is confused by why the broader culture is so annoyed by them. But the sense that someone who is all fired up about God not being real would be ‘boring at parties’ is the sense that I get from Scott’s 2017 post, and the sense that I get from reading Scott in 2014, or what I remember from LW in 2012. Which is quite different from “would get you banned” or religion being a protected class.
Like, when I investigate my own views, it seems to me like spending attention criticizing supernaturalist religions is unproductive because 1) materialist reductionism is a more interesting and more helpful positive claim that destroys supernaturalist religion ‘on its own’, and 2) materialist religions seem like quite useful tools that maybe we should be actively building, and allergies to supernaturalist religions seem unhelpful in that regard. This doesn’t feel like abandoning the perspective and adopting the opposite, except for that bit where the atheist has allergies to the things that I want to do and I think those allergies are misplaced, so it at least feels like it feels that way to them.
I am not sure how to best handle the topic of religion in a community blog.
If it is a single-person blog, the optimal solution would probably be mostly not to even mention it (just focus on naturalistic explanations of the world), and once in a long while to explain, politely, why it is false (without offending people who disagree).
With a community blog, the problem is that being polite towards religion may be interpreted by religious people as an invitation to contribute, but their contributions would inevitably include pro-religious statements, at least sometimes.
And if you make it explicit like “religious people are welcome, but any pro-religious statements will be immediately deleted, and the author may be banned”, that sounds like your atheism is a dogma, not an outcome of a logical process (which you merely don’t want to repeat over and over again, because you have more interesting stuff to write about). And even here I would expect a lot of rules-lawyering, strongly hinting, etc.