All of this is not to nitpick needlessly, but to point out that to a somewhat-outside observer, it certainly seems like Bayesianism has been quietly abandoned.
I am curious if the same thing seems true for atheism. In my mind, that faded into the background, and the tone of that discussion in the Sequences ‘was a product of its time’ and didn’t age particularly well. But fading into the background is different from being quietly abandoned, I think, because the former reads more as “obviously true and uninteresting” and the latter reads more as “either false or unproductive.” [Uninteresting in the sense that I don’t see it as having wisdom I haven’t incorporated yet, as mentioned in the other thread under the name ‘growth edge’.]
Yes, the same absolutely seems true for atheism. It didn’t fade into the background; it was actively abandoned. It wasn’t even a quiet abandonment. 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. “Either false or unproductive” is exactly how I’d describe most rationalists’ (and certainly that of most of the ones in visible/influential online spaces) attitude toward atheism/secularism/etc.
It is all well and good to acknowledge that you have incorporated the wisdom offered by some perspective, and having nothing further to learn from it. It is entirely a different matter to reverse course, to abandon that perspective and to adopt its opposite.
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.
“Either false or unproductive” is exactly how I’d describe most rationalists’ (and certainly that of most of the ones in visible/influential online spaces) attitude toward atheism/secularism/etc.
This really surprises me. Do you mean to say that if you asked 20 randomly-selected high-karma LW users whether God as depicted in typical religions exist, at least 10 would say “yes”? If so, I strongly disagree, based on my experience hanging out and living with rationalists in the Bay Area, and would love to bet with you. (You might be right about SSC commenters, I’ll snobbishly declare them “not real rationalists” by default)
In these conversations, it pays to be precise. To wit:
Do you mean to say that if you asked 20 randomly-selected high-karma LW users whether God as depicted in typical religions exist, at least 10 [half of the total —SA.] would say “yes”?
(Emphasis mine.)
I do not mean to say this, no. There is, indeed, a difference between all of these:
“The most high-status[1] members of a community (almost) all believe X.”
“The members of a community (almost) all believe X.”
“The vocal members of a community (almost) all believe X (and say so).”
“The members of a community (almost) all believe X, and the high-status members of that community do not make publicly clear their disbelief in X.”
“The vocal members of a community (almost) all believe X (and say so), and the high-status members of that community do not gainsay them.”
What I said was somewhere in the #s 2–5 region. You asked whether I really believed #1. I never claimed to.
What’s more, my use of the disjunction was deliberate. I did not mean to imply that the breakdown between “believes that atheism/secularism is false” and “considers atheism/secularism unproductive” is even. It would surprise me if it were. But if, in a community, 5% believe X, 5% believe ¬X, and 90% (including all or almost all of the highest-status individuals) probably more or less believe ¬X but consider it unproductive to discuss or even clearly state the (claimed) fact that ¬X, or possibly even unproductive to believe ¬X, then this community will be friendly to discussions of X but unfriendly to objections that, actually, ¬X; and X (and X-derived/adjacent memes) will spread more easily than ¬X (and ¬X-derived/adjacent memes).
Finally, nothing at all that I said referred to, or implied, anything about “as depicted in typical religions”. That, I regret to note, was entirely a strawman on your part.
[1] We can, perhaps—and should, probably—have a discussion about how karma on Less Wrong maps to status in rationalist communities. This is not that discussion, however.
I agree that it pays to be precise, which is why I was asking if you believed that statement, rather than asserting that you did. I guess I’d like to hear what proposition you’re claiming—is “X” meant to stand in for “atheism/secularism” there? Atheism is almost precise (although I start wondering whether simulation hypotheses technically count, which is why I included the “as depicted in typical religions” bit), but I at least could map “secularism” to a variety of claims, some of which I accept and some of which I reject. I also still don’t know what you mean by “unproductive”—if almost everybody I interact with is an atheist, and therefore I don’t feel the need to convince them of atheism, does that mean that I believe atheism is unproductive? (Again, this is a question, not me claiming that your answer to the question will be “yes”)
if almost everybody I interact with is an atheist, and therefore I don’t feel the need to convince them of atheism, does that mean that I believe atheism is unproductive?
I note an important distinction between “don’t feel the need to preach to the choir” and “don’t feel the need to hold people accountable for X”. It’s one thing if I’m operating in a high trust environment where people almost never steal from each other, and so policies that reduce the risk of theft or agitating against theft seem like a waste of time, and it’s another thing if I should shrug off thefts when I witness them because thefts are pretty rare, all things considered.
By analogy, it seems pretty important if theism is in the same category as ‘food preferences’ (where I would hassle Alice if Alice hassled Bob over Bob liking the taste of seaweed) or as ‘theft’ (where I would hassle Alice over not hassling Bob over Bob stealing things). (Tolerate tolerance, coordinate meanness, etc.)
[Edit: to be clear, I don’t think theism is obviously in the same category as stealing, but I think it is clearly an intellectual mistake and have a difficult time trusting the thinking of someone who is theist for reasons that aren’t explicitly social, and when deciding how much to tolerate theism one of the considerations is something like “what level of toleration leads to the lowest number of theists in the long-run, or flips my view on atheism?”.]
In the sense of LessWrong “productive” means that you can write posts based on a certain framework that produces valuable ideas.
Bring Back the Sabbath would be a post that productively uses Judaism. Multiple people in our local dojo found a lot of value in that post even when they don’t have any personal connection to Judaism.
Elsewhere you find us making up gods like Omega and Morloch and using them productively.
There aren’t any similar straight secular posts that come to mind in the last years that made productive use of atheism or secularism.
Yes, the same absolutely seems true for atheism. It didn’t fade into the background; it was actively abandoned. It wasn’t even a quiet abandonment. 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. “Either false or unproductive” is exactly how I’d describe most rationalists’ (and certainly that of most of the ones in visible/influential online spaces) attitude toward atheism/secularism/etc.
It is all well and good to acknowledge that you have incorporated the wisdom offered by some perspective, and having nothing further to learn from it. It is entirely a different matter to reverse course, to abandon that perspective and to adopt its opposite.
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.
This really surprises me. Do you mean to say that if you asked 20 randomly-selected high-karma LW users whether God as depicted in typical religions exist, at least 10 would say “yes”? If so, I strongly disagree, based on my experience hanging out and living with rationalists in the Bay Area, and would love to bet with you. (You might be right about SSC commenters, I’ll snobbishly declare them “not real rationalists” by default)
In these conversations, it pays to be precise. To wit:
(Emphasis mine.)
I do not mean to say this, no. There is, indeed, a difference between all of these:
“The most high-status[1] members of a community (almost) all believe X.”
“The members of a community (almost) all believe X.”
“The vocal members of a community (almost) all believe X (and say so).”
“The members of a community (almost) all believe X, and the high-status members of that community do not make publicly clear their disbelief in X.”
“The vocal members of a community (almost) all believe X (and say so), and the high-status members of that community do not gainsay them.”
What I said was somewhere in the #s 2–5 region. You asked whether I really believed #1. I never claimed to.
What’s more, my use of the disjunction was deliberate. I did not mean to imply that the breakdown between “believes that atheism/secularism is false” and “considers atheism/secularism unproductive” is even. It would surprise me if it were. But if, in a community, 5% believe X, 5% believe ¬X, and 90% (including all or almost all of the highest-status individuals) probably more or less believe ¬X but consider it unproductive to discuss or even clearly state the (claimed) fact that ¬X, or possibly even unproductive to believe ¬X, then this community will be friendly to discussions of X but unfriendly to objections that, actually, ¬X; and X (and X-derived/adjacent memes) will spread more easily than ¬X (and ¬X-derived/adjacent memes).
Finally, nothing at all that I said referred to, or implied, anything about “as depicted in typical religions”. That, I regret to note, was entirely a strawman on your part.
[1] We can, perhaps—and should, probably—have a discussion about how karma on Less Wrong maps to status in rationalist communities. This is not that discussion, however.
I agree that it pays to be precise, which is why I was asking if you believed that statement, rather than asserting that you did. I guess I’d like to hear what proposition you’re claiming—is “X” meant to stand in for “atheism/secularism” there? Atheism is almost precise (although I start wondering whether simulation hypotheses technically count, which is why I included the “as depicted in typical religions” bit), but I at least could map “secularism” to a variety of claims, some of which I accept and some of which I reject. I also still don’t know what you mean by “unproductive”—if almost everybody I interact with is an atheist, and therefore I don’t feel the need to convince them of atheism, does that mean that I believe atheism is unproductive? (Again, this is a question, not me claiming that your answer to the question will be “yes”)
I note an important distinction between “don’t feel the need to preach to the choir” and “don’t feel the need to hold people accountable for X”. It’s one thing if I’m operating in a high trust environment where people almost never steal from each other, and so policies that reduce the risk of theft or agitating against theft seem like a waste of time, and it’s another thing if I should shrug off thefts when I witness them because thefts are pretty rare, all things considered.
By analogy, it seems pretty important if theism is in the same category as ‘food preferences’ (where I would hassle Alice if Alice hassled Bob over Bob liking the taste of seaweed) or as ‘theft’ (where I would hassle Alice over not hassling Bob over Bob stealing things). (Tolerate tolerance, coordinate meanness, etc.)
[Edit: to be clear, I don’t think theism is obviously in the same category as stealing, but I think it is clearly an intellectual mistake and have a difficult time trusting the thinking of someone who is theist for reasons that aren’t explicitly social, and when deciding how much to tolerate theism one of the considerations is something like “what level of toleration leads to the lowest number of theists in the long-run, or flips my view on atheism?”.]
Beware punishing nonpunishers!
In the sense of LessWrong “productive” means that you can write posts based on a certain framework that produces valuable ideas.
Bring Back the Sabbath would be a post that productively uses Judaism. Multiple people in our local dojo found a lot of value in that post even when they don’t have any personal connection to Judaism.
Elsewhere you find us making up gods like Omega and Morloch and using them productively.
There aren’t any similar straight secular posts that come to mind in the last years that made productive use of atheism or secularism.
You mean we shouldn’t bash religion, right?
Yes. That comment was correctly self-described as “controversial” for a good reason.