This Darwin, whoever he was, who had designed mankind for no better fate than to wail and weep and war and die, obviously was a villain, and enemy, someone as evil as the Venom Queen of Venus, who poisoned all her lovers. He was the one who stopped the future from coming.
Some of his friends said you had to prick your finger with a pin to make the oath valid; and boys of particular boldness used a rusty pin, as if daring the Jihad plague to strike. Menelaus knew that was all nonsense: it was the willpower that decided oaths, nothing else. No pin would be as sharp as what he felt beating in his angry young heart.
This Darwin pretty sure had clout, if he could do all this stuff. Could be, he was some bigwig from Houston. Mom had also mentioned Malthus. Obviously his henchman.
Or maybe he was a guy long dead, since it sounded like he did his dirt long ago, and meddled with the gene-stuff, like those tragic transhumanist experiments the library had told him about. But it did not matter if Darwin was alive, or dead, or long dead.
Didn’t matter: because he vowed to defeat Darwin, somehow. Some-day.
This Darwin, whoever he was, who had designed mankind for no better fate than to wail and weep and war and die, obviously was a villain, and enemy, someone as evil as the Venom Queen of Venus, who poisoned all her lovers. He was the one who stopped the future from coming...Mom had also mentioned Malthus....Or maybe he was a guy long dead, since it sounded like he did his dirt long ago, and meddled with the gene-stuff, like those tragic transhumanist experiments the library had told him about.
I’d note this novel was published long after Wright had his heart attack, hallucinated the Virgin Mary/Jesus/God/others, and converted to Catholicism.
The point of the quote stands. For that matter, apart from the times that Wright specifically talks about religious doctrine, he seems to have much the same views on other things and be much the same person as before his conversion, at least judging from his blog. (It starts in March 2003; he reports his conversion as a recent event in December 2003.)
If you read his conversion story, it is clear that to say “oh well, something went wrong with his brain” is facile. He had been moving in that direction for many years. He writes of himself before that episode:
To my surprise and alarm, I found that, step by step, logic drove me to conclusions no modern philosophy shared, but only this ancient and (as I saw it then) corrupt and superstitious foolery called the Church. Each time I followed the argument fearlessly where it lead, it kept leading me, one remorseless rational step at a time, to a position the Church had been maintaining for more than a thousand years. That haunted me.
As indeed it drove C.S. Lewis before him. I note that Lewis, Chesterton, and, for that matter, Wright enjoy a certain popularity at LessWrong, all of them having been frequently quoted with approval. People have also talked of the practical usefulness of spiritual exercises, and the concept of sin.
As I said on an earlier occasion, Lewis is laughing in his grave; and perhaps Wright will get the last laugh long before his.
Might i suggest a sweepstake on the date of the first long-time member of LW to announce their religious conversion? Personally I remain an unbeliever, but who can foretell their own future?
My objection here is not to the ‘willpower yay!’ bit, but to the multiple political digs interspersed in it, which substantially reduce the value of the quote for me, and I thought people were not noticing.
If you read his conversion story, it is clear that to say “oh well, something went wrong with his brain” is facile. He had been moving in that direction for many years. He writes of himself before that episode:
I am skeptical of his account. Everything is obvious in retrospect, and when someone is writing their conversion story, superimposing a ‘journey to Catholicism’ is easy. Just cherrypick.
He says he beat friends in arguments and showed their argument were bad? So what? I have beaten other LWers in arguments and show their understanding poor many times over the years, but if tomorrow I suffer brain damage and start worshipping Allah, it would be very easy for me to write ‘despite being a frequent writer at transhumanist websites, I was nevertheless drifting away and routinely showing that my fellow transhumanists were horribly comically wrong about every basic point of philosophy, ethics and logic’; all it requires is a change of perspective.
We can see this hindsight on display right now in discussions of Silk Road. All over the place people are saying that the FBI knew who Ulbricht was from the start since there was a connection from his email address to an early mention of Silk Road, and how easy it would have been to de-anonymize Dread Pirate Roberts. Plausible… until we remember that no one in the world actually managed this despite intense interest by many people and organizations in SR, that if we had noticed the connection we had no good reason to believe that altoid/Ulbricht hadn’t heard about SR through the Hidden Wiki or another discussion forum we simply didn’t have access to or on a page that had linkrotted, that the indictments indicate that the FBI only managed to make the link much later after assigning someone fulltime to sift all Internet traces, and we’re still not clear on whether they were sure DPR==Ulbricht until as late as June 2013.
(Assuming you believe that he’s recounting the facts basically right. I believe Wright when he writes about his heart attack and hallucination as the reason for the conversion because it’s a shockingly embarrassing way to convert, which invites even believers to write him off as believing due to neurological problems, and this has to be obvious to him; but that doesn’t apply to his claims of having been tending toward Catholicism for years before.)
Oh, and something else to add: religious believers have this tendency to not understand that rationalists don’t use quotes as arguments from authority. They quote people’s words because the words make sense independently of the person. People who are “frequently quoted with approval” are quoted because they have frequently said things that make sense, not because anything they say is automatically right; if they shift to sayng things that don’t make sense, the fact that they have been frequently quoted in the past won’t carry over.
Too lazy to address this comment. Luckily Scott Alexander has done so in delightful detail:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/17/the-what-youd-implicitly-heard-before-telling-thing/
Tldr, the idea that Christianity is is more likely to be true because it is old and some of its ideas match our vocabulary and aesthetics is unconvincing because it is the very fact that it is old (and pervasive) that its vocabulary matches some of our ideas and intuitions. Its hard for a system to survive that long being completely wrong on every count. Pointing to things that the belief system got right is not very interesting. (Scott argues this case much better than I just did)
Also too late on the conversion thing, Leah Libresco converted to Catholicism some time ago.
Just to be clear beyond my closing aside that I remain an unbeliever, I am not defending Wright’s (or Lewis’s, or Chesterton’s) argument here against anything but the knockdown that “oh well, something went wrong with his brain”. Nor do I agree with Gwern’s attribution of Wright’s account of his pre-conversion self to hindsight bias, or “hindsight bias” becomes a universal counterargument against every account of past events.
More generally, one person’s priors are not an argument against another’s posteriors.
Just reading your own link, his “challenge” is something whose irrationality almost anyone here could see a mile off, and if he actually thought that that challenge made any sense, he must have had a second brain malfunction that led him to make the challenge before he had the one that happened after the challenge. (Or more realistically, I’d say he had an emotional breakdown first, then made the challenge, then had a physical brain malfunction.)
He also doesn’t seem to understand the objections people gave to him. At the top of that very link he quotes someone asking why particularly Christianity since it seems so petty. His later reaction (after the brain malfunction) is “if science discovered tomorrow that the universe was half its apparent age, and estimated the stars as half their current number, would the belief in God somehow be twice as credible in your eyes?” Of course, to the extent that his God would seem less petty in a smaller universe, all the alternatives would seem less petty too.
It’s also an incredible coincidence for a rational conversion (but not so incredible for a brain malfunction) that the religion he picked was one that was only a short distance, if at all, from the one predominant in his society and his upbringing. Why don’t people in Christian societies ever ask God for a sign, get one, and turn into devout Muslims?
if science discovered tomorrow that the universe was half its apparent age, and estimated the stars as half their current number, would the belief in God somehow be twice as credible in your eyes?
I am not saying twice credible, but it would be more credible. If science reduced the age of universe once, it may do it again, and who knows… there is a tiny chance it could go down to 6000 years.
More generally, smaller reliability of science would increase the probability that some intelligent agent is acting in the universe.
Problem is, increasing the probability from 0.0001 to 0.0002 is not the same thing as converting.
The argument he was replying to was not about probability, but about pettiness. People could not accept that Christianity contains certain ideas that are petty in contrast to the scope of the universe. He then asked if a smaller universe would make them think Christianity is less petty. To which my reply would be that since Christianity was being compared to rival religions, any rivals would become less petty by a similar factor, so Christianity would still not improve comparatively.
Why don’t people in Christian societies ever ask God for a sign, get one, and turn into devout Muslims?
What hypothesis are you trying to refute with this question?
Edit: If it’s the rational conversion hypothesis, note that people also are more likely to rationally convert to positions they’ve been exposed to, even in domains far away from religion. If it’s the Catholicism is true hypothesis, this would not be surprising.
If it’s the rational conversion hypothesis, then while people are more likely to rationally convert to positions they’ve been exposed to, it doesn’t seem to me that they are enough more likely to explain the way conversions actually work. Furthermore, he supposedly got an experience directly from God. It wasn’t a rational conversion in the sense of having been deduced from things he already knew, it was a new experience, and I wouldn’t expect such things to be correlated with cultural context in the same way that ordinary rational conversions are. God can easily send Catholic experiences to Muslims and Muslim experiences to Catholics after all. Brain malfunctions, on the other hand, would be correlated with cultural context.
If it’s the Catholiicism is true hypothesis, then this example would be unsurprising, but other examples involving other religions would be even more surprising than they are now.
I’m not convinced the whole thing is a decent rationality quote, as part of it seems to be Menelaus surrendering to the idea that “because Darwin discovered Natural Selection, he endorsed it”.
On the other hand, “Some of his friends said you had to prick your finger with a pin to make the oath valid; and boys of particular boldness used a rusty pin, as if daring the Jihad plague to strike. Menelaus knew that was all nonsense: it was the willpower that decided oaths, nothing else. No pin would be as sharp as what he felt beating in his angry young heart.” is brilliant: both understanding the inclination to irrationality, and also emphasising that rationality can be strengthened by emotion.
I’m not convinced the whole thing is a decent rationality quote, as part of it seems to be Menelaus surrendering to the idea that “because Darwin discovered Natural Selection, he endorsed it”.
It appears to me that within the story, his knowledge of exactly who Darwin was has been greatly garbled by the processes of history. That’s just a detail of the setting. My reading of Menelaus’ attitude to evolution is that he is expressing much the same idea as Eliezer’s characterisation of it as a blind idiot god that we should overcome and replace.
---Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright
I’d note this novel was published long after Wright had his heart attack, hallucinated the Virgin Mary/Jesus/God/others, and converted to Catholicism.
The point of the quote stands. For that matter, apart from the times that Wright specifically talks about religious doctrine, he seems to have much the same views on other things and be much the same person as before his conversion, at least judging from his blog. (It starts in March 2003; he reports his conversion as a recent event in December 2003.)
If you read his conversion story, it is clear that to say “oh well, something went wrong with his brain” is facile. He had been moving in that direction for many years. He writes of himself before that episode:
As indeed it drove C.S. Lewis before him. I note that Lewis, Chesterton, and, for that matter, Wright enjoy a certain popularity at LessWrong, all of them having been frequently quoted with approval. People have also talked of the practical usefulness of spiritual exercises, and the concept of sin.
As I said on an earlier occasion, Lewis is laughing in his grave; and perhaps Wright will get the last laugh long before his.
Might i suggest a sweepstake on the date of the first long-time member of LW to announce their religious conversion? Personally I remain an unbeliever, but who can foretell their own future?
My objection here is not to the ‘willpower yay!’ bit, but to the multiple political digs interspersed in it, which substantially reduce the value of the quote for me, and I thought people were not noticing.
I am skeptical of his account. Everything is obvious in retrospect, and when someone is writing their conversion story, superimposing a ‘journey to Catholicism’ is easy. Just cherrypick.
He says he beat friends in arguments and showed their argument were bad? So what? I have beaten other LWers in arguments and show their understanding poor many times over the years, but if tomorrow I suffer brain damage and start worshipping Allah, it would be very easy for me to write ‘despite being a frequent writer at transhumanist websites, I was nevertheless drifting away and routinely showing that my fellow transhumanists were horribly comically wrong about every basic point of philosophy, ethics and logic’; all it requires is a change of perspective.
We can see this hindsight on display right now in discussions of Silk Road. All over the place people are saying that the FBI knew who Ulbricht was from the start since there was a connection from his email address to an early mention of Silk Road, and how easy it would have been to de-anonymize Dread Pirate Roberts. Plausible… until we remember that no one in the world actually managed this despite intense interest by many people and organizations in SR, that if we had noticed the connection we had no good reason to believe that altoid/Ulbricht hadn’t heard about SR through the Hidden Wiki or another discussion forum we simply didn’t have access to or on a page that had linkrotted, that the indictments indicate that the FBI only managed to make the link much later after assigning someone fulltime to sift all Internet traces, and we’re still not clear on whether they were sure DPR==Ulbricht until as late as June 2013.
(Assuming you believe that he’s recounting the facts basically right. I believe Wright when he writes about his heart attack and hallucination as the reason for the conversion because it’s a shockingly embarrassing way to convert, which invites even believers to write him off as believing due to neurological problems, and this has to be obvious to him; but that doesn’t apply to his claims of having been tending toward Catholicism for years before.)
Oh, and something else to add: religious believers have this tendency to not understand that rationalists don’t use quotes as arguments from authority. They quote people’s words because the words make sense independently of the person. People who are “frequently quoted with approval” are quoted because they have frequently said things that make sense, not because anything they say is automatically right; if they shift to sayng things that don’t make sense, the fact that they have been frequently quoted in the past won’t carry over.
So they (instinctively) understand the halo effect?
Too lazy to address this comment. Luckily Scott Alexander has done so in delightful detail: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/17/the-what-youd-implicitly-heard-before-telling-thing/ Tldr, the idea that Christianity is is more likely to be true because it is old and some of its ideas match our vocabulary and aesthetics is unconvincing because it is the very fact that it is old (and pervasive) that its vocabulary matches some of our ideas and intuitions. Its hard for a system to survive that long being completely wrong on every count. Pointing to things that the belief system got right is not very interesting. (Scott argues this case much better than I just did)
Also too late on the conversion thing, Leah Libresco converted to Catholicism some time ago.
Just to be clear beyond my closing aside that I remain an unbeliever, I am not defending Wright’s (or Lewis’s, or Chesterton’s) argument here against anything but the knockdown that “oh well, something went wrong with his brain”. Nor do I agree with Gwern’s attribution of Wright’s account of his pre-conversion self to hindsight bias, or “hindsight bias” becomes a universal counterargument against every account of past events.
More generally, one person’s priors are not an argument against another’s posteriors.
I’m pretty sure that’s already happened.
See the last entry here.
Just reading your own link, his “challenge” is something whose irrationality almost anyone here could see a mile off, and if he actually thought that that challenge made any sense, he must have had a second brain malfunction that led him to make the challenge before he had the one that happened after the challenge. (Or more realistically, I’d say he had an emotional breakdown first, then made the challenge, then had a physical brain malfunction.)
He also doesn’t seem to understand the objections people gave to him. At the top of that very link he quotes someone asking why particularly Christianity since it seems so petty. His later reaction (after the brain malfunction) is “if science discovered tomorrow that the universe was half its apparent age, and estimated the stars as half their current number, would the belief in God somehow be twice as credible in your eyes?” Of course, to the extent that his God would seem less petty in a smaller universe, all the alternatives would seem less petty too.
It’s also an incredible coincidence for a rational conversion (but not so incredible for a brain malfunction) that the religion he picked was one that was only a short distance, if at all, from the one predominant in his society and his upbringing. Why don’t people in Christian societies ever ask God for a sign, get one, and turn into devout Muslims?
I am not saying twice credible, but it would be more credible. If science reduced the age of universe once, it may do it again, and who knows… there is a tiny chance it could go down to 6000 years.
More generally, smaller reliability of science would increase the probability that some intelligent agent is acting in the universe.
Problem is, increasing the probability from 0.0001 to 0.0002 is not the same thing as converting.
The argument he was replying to was not about probability, but about pettiness. People could not accept that Christianity contains certain ideas that are petty in contrast to the scope of the universe. He then asked if a smaller universe would make them think Christianity is less petty. To which my reply would be that since Christianity was being compared to rival religions, any rivals would become less petty by a similar factor, so Christianity would still not improve comparatively.
What hypothesis are you trying to refute with this question?
Edit: If it’s the rational conversion hypothesis, note that people also are more likely to rationally convert to positions they’ve been exposed to, even in domains far away from religion. If it’s the Catholicism is true hypothesis, this would not be surprising.
If it’s the rational conversion hypothesis, then while people are more likely to rationally convert to positions they’ve been exposed to, it doesn’t seem to me that they are enough more likely to explain the way conversions actually work. Furthermore, he supposedly got an experience directly from God. It wasn’t a rational conversion in the sense of having been deduced from things he already knew, it was a new experience, and I wouldn’t expect such things to be correlated with cultural context in the same way that ordinary rational conversions are. God can easily send Catholic experiences to Muslims and Muslim experiences to Catholics after all. Brain malfunctions, on the other hand, would be correlated with cultural context.
If it’s the Catholiicism is true hypothesis, then this example would be unsurprising, but other examples involving other religions would be even more surprising than they are now.
Leah Libresco?
I’m not convinced the whole thing is a decent rationality quote, as part of it seems to be Menelaus surrendering to the idea that “because Darwin discovered Natural Selection, he endorsed it”.
On the other hand, “Some of his friends said you had to prick your finger with a pin to make the oath valid; and boys of particular boldness used a rusty pin, as if daring the Jihad plague to strike. Menelaus knew that was all nonsense: it was the willpower that decided oaths, nothing else. No pin would be as sharp as what he felt beating in his angry young heart.” is brilliant: both understanding the inclination to irrationality, and also emphasising that rationality can be strengthened by emotion.
It appears to me that within the story, his knowledge of exactly who Darwin was has been greatly garbled by the processes of history. That’s just a detail of the setting. My reading of Menelaus’ attitude to evolution is that he is expressing much the same idea as Eliezer’s characterisation of it as a blind idiot god that we should overcome and replace.