But if God made people and our entire existence is up to his design, then
a) He know’s something we don’t
or
b) The world is a cruel, cruel place.
And anyway, if he created humans, he planted our sense of morality too. I think the lesson here is: Don’t go chasing after other gods or you will get killed.
They don’t. However, what you said posed a created contradiction. There is more than that, to be sure. Rixie is saying one piece of this: implying that there will be no contradiction, because your “sense of morality” comes from God. I think that’s a bit naive, but not totally off. That is, I can think all kinds of crazy stuff. That’s not the same as knowledge.
The “other gods” implies a context where there is one, yours. What is that? Is this your identity or is it something deeper? If Rixie is right, “chasing” some other source of meaning could be fatal. What could that mean?
Chaosmosis, you objected elsewhere to my capitalizing Reality, I think. Reality is my substitute-name for God. So if I am chasing another “god” besides Reality, I’m literally going crazy.
Rixie’s point was operating within the hypothetical of “If God is real, and he actually said the thing about killing people”. Rixie defended that point with an appeal to authority. I pointed out that appealing to God’s authority only works if we believe what God said. That somewhat invalidated Rixie’s initial point. If Rixie now wants to argue that God would never order us to do something wrong, or something else like that, then Rixie needs to not only point out that the claim isn’t necessarily founded on an appeal to authority but also needs to add an additional argument which the claim could be legitimately founded on. I initially didn’t catch on that Rixie was abandoning the hypothetical because Rixie never took that second step.
I don’t understand your middle paragraph. What context is this in, where is the “other gods” quote from?
I can’t understand your last paragraph very well until I understand the relevancy of the middle one. I objected to capitalizing words like Reality because that sort of capitalization only occurs when you think of something like a proper noun, and thinking of things like proper nouns when the things aren’t proper nouns often adds a level of mysticism to the concept of those things which is detrimental to rationality.
Okay. First, I don’t really care who said what when, my goal is something like consensus or shared vision, and how we get there, and who stumbled and how, isn’t so important to me.
“other gods” was from Rixie:
And anyway, if he created humans, he planted our sense of morality too. I think the lesson here is: Don’t go chasing after other gods or you will get killed.
This is proposed as a message to you. (You could choose to take it impersonally, as having nothing to do with you, but Rixie did use “you.” That might be accidental, but I like to start with what people actually wrote or said. Kind of the point I’ve been making here, in fact.)
So someone says to you, chaosmosis, “don’t go chasing after other gods, or you will get killed.” The principle of exegesis that I was taught was to assume that statements are correct. In fact, every statement can be true or false, but assuming that statements from others are true is the most powerful place to start. Assuming that the truth is literal and fixed would be irrational; this is just about communication process. When people start with skepticism and rejection, they can only come to understand statements when they are lucky enough to find serious proof. That’s actually rare, the approach is highly inefficient.
So what would “other gods” mean for you? I proposed a meaning. What do you think of it?
“Other god” implies “God.” What would your God be if the words meant something? Rather than anticipate an answer, I’ll stop.
As to capitalization, I use it with proper nouns. You assume that words are proper nouns or not. That depends on context. What you think of as “mysticism” could be a level of meaning that perhaps you don’t recognize, and you assume it is detrimental to rationality. Is that a fact? How would you know? What, indeed, is “mysticism”?
The principle of exegesis that I was taught was to assume that statements are correct. In fact, every statement can be true or false, but assuming that statements from others are true is the most powerful place to start. Assuming that the truth is literal and fixed would be irrational; this is just about communication process. When people start with skepticism and rejection, they can only come to understand statements when they are lucky enough to find serious proof. That’s actually rare, the approach is highly inefficient.
You contend that starting by believing what others say to be true is true is the fastest way to truth. I disagree. I think we should take others opinions as evidence, but that we should evaluate truth on a probabilistic level. There are no defaults, and we shouldn’t unfairly privilege any hypotheses. I think the truths you arrive at through that method aren’t true if they can’t be arrived at through the other method. People say many false and nonfalsifiable things. People assert things that they have no way of knowing or that make no sense at all. There is no reason I should believe people in these cases.
You conflate different instances of claims by people, essentially, viewing them all as equal. I make distinctions, and say that people’s opinions are good approximators of the truth in some cases but bad in other cases. This seems faster because it ensures that I don’t get stuck whenever I hear someone make a nonfalsifiable claim. There is an invisible and untouchable dragon behind you who will eat you and send you to hell if you believe nonfalsifiable claims. If you truly followed the system where you believe everything anyone tells you until you get contrary evidence, you would now have a terrible paradox on your hands.
How do you make the jump from this communications based model of evidence to a model which incorporates evidence? It seems like there’s a huge disconnect there, if the default mode is acceptance of others ideas then there would never be any reason to make the jump towards evidence.
So what would “other gods” mean for you? I proposed a meaning. What do you think of it?
“Other god” implies “God.” What would your God be if the words meant something? Rather than anticipate an answer, I’ll stop.
I don’t think I have any god, so I don’t know what “other gods” might mean for me. I’ll speak metaphorically then. I would say that to the extent that I have a god, it’s a nonomniscient and nonomnipotent god that I find sort of pathetic most of the time, and his name is chaosmosis. Chasing other gods would be impossible for me because everywhere I go there I am. However, I can change as an individual, and I can pursue “other gods” by changing myself.
Thinking like this is relaxing and entertaining but not useful. I don’t mistake this for truth. It might be true, but the process that brought me there was a lazy and invalid one, and in other cases it would fail. It would be right for the wrong reasons.
As to capitalization, I use it with proper nouns. You assume that words are proper nouns or not. That depends on context. What you think of as “mysticism” could be a level of meaning that perhaps you don’t recognize, and you assume it is detrimental to rationality. Is that a fact? How would you know? What, indeed, is “mysticism”?
I think that proper nouns should only be used where they are used traditionally.
Mysticism is an emotion of awe and humility and grandeur. Emotions are not evidence. I’m human, so the temptation is for me to treat emotions as evidence. This is detrimental to rationality. Therefore, I try to avoid my encounters with seductive emotions like mysticism, or to accept those encounters but also to make sure that I’m justifying my decisions on a logical basis and not an emotional one.
Mysticism is meaningful, but in a subjective and emotional sense. In a logical sense, it fights against meaning and truth.
Many issues of weight—at least to me—are raised here, I could spend weeks writing in response, and would lose everyone. What’s on-topic here? The rest can be addressed with new posts.
The original post is “Uncritical supercriticality.” The emphasized text from Deuteronomy prescribes a violent response to unfamiliar, alien thought, proposals of “other gods.” Yudkowsky is suggesting that this entire class of responses is inimical to rationality. He brings the problem down into social phenomena that stifle communication, such as reluctance to criticize evidence for the locally popular view.
I’m extending this a bit. I’m claiming that we cannot have a real dialog on an issue where there is an appearance of disagreement, at the outset, unless we first understand the other side. One of the first distinctions transmitted in the Landmark Forum is “Already Always Listening.” That’s the set of priors that come up based on immediate, often unconscious, associations. I see someone and immediately judge them as interesting, likely to be boring, beautiful, ugly, nice, unpleasant. I hear a few words and have an opinion, instantly, about right, wrong, smart, ignorant. The training is to recognize it, not to make it wrong. AAL is human, and necessary for survival. If I see a flash of tiger-stripes in the foliage, there is no time to run a conscious Bayesian process on it, let’s hope that my habitual responses are sane. However, if we can’t distinguish these learned or instinctual responses from reality, what is actually present, we have become locked into an established world-view.
If we start with an immediate assumption of wrongness, and if we have the normal human habit of inventing arguments to support assumptions—we are really good at that—all we can see is the wrongness of the other person.
It seems to be assumed that I’m proposing “belief” in what others tell us. No. I’m proposing conscious assumption. In order to have a true dialog, I must start with understanding, not with rejection. Once I understand, then, I may be able to apply the tools of rationality to what is now my own thinking, and that is precisely where the scientific method, for example, comes in. We now, having seen, say, the “beauty” of an idea, look for possible alternates, and for ways to test them.
The core, on-topic issue here is the meaning of “other gods.” To my “natural” mind, the prescription of Deuteronomy seems horrific, alien, hostile, irrational, rigid, to be totally rejected. However, my training has become to seek to understand what is right about it. We could think of this as attempting to falsify my Already Always Listening immediate judgment. I’m suggesting that.
I’m suggesting that moving beyond the Deuteronomy position, instead of merely being contrary to it, we best first understand it. A sign of understanding it would be a recognition of “Yes, of course.” I.e., that the prescription makes sense, it was at least functional, in some way, within ordinary survival or tribal survival, and maybe even necessary.
I would never suggest “belief” as a starting place, that is far too fixed. I suggest “acceptance,” as one accepts a hypothesis and then considers the implications and likely consequences.
A Christian minister who was teaching a class on Islam at a local senior center once told me that his goal in teaching it was to convey it in such a way that Muslims would say, “Yes, that is what we believe.” We had a great time. He did not therefore reject his Christianity.
I will now claim that between a theism and atheism is only a narrow space.
I’ll claim that, for some, atheism is closer to truth than dogmatic religion. Much closer. A sane atheism rejects false gods. Does it reject Reality?
“I don’t think I have any god” demonstrates well that the usable concept of “god” has not been understood. No, we have gods, many. All of us do, I’ll claim. To explore this, we need to find usable meanings of the word.
Chaosmosis, above, has begun the inquiry, starting with an obvious possible god, his identity.
“Everywhere I go, there I am.” Great!
Is this true or false? The statement implies something fixed. To be investigated, is whether or not this ubiquity is rational. I’ll claim that it’s not, generally, it’s been inadequately specified.
But if God made people and our entire existence is up to his design, then a) He know’s something we don’t or b) The world is a cruel, cruel place.
And anyway, if he created humans, he planted our sense of morality too. I think the lesson here is: Don’t go chasing after other gods or you will get killed.
I don’t understand how any of those three possibilities refute what I said.
They don’t. However, what you said posed a created contradiction. There is more than that, to be sure. Rixie is saying one piece of this: implying that there will be no contradiction, because your “sense of morality” comes from God. I think that’s a bit naive, but not totally off. That is, I can think all kinds of crazy stuff. That’s not the same as knowledge.
The “other gods” implies a context where there is one, yours. What is that? Is this your identity or is it something deeper? If Rixie is right, “chasing” some other source of meaning could be fatal. What could that mean?
Chaosmosis, you objected elsewhere to my capitalizing Reality, I think. Reality is my substitute-name for God. So if I am chasing another “god” besides Reality, I’m literally going crazy.
Rixie’s point was operating within the hypothetical of “If God is real, and he actually said the thing about killing people”. Rixie defended that point with an appeal to authority. I pointed out that appealing to God’s authority only works if we believe what God said. That somewhat invalidated Rixie’s initial point. If Rixie now wants to argue that God would never order us to do something wrong, or something else like that, then Rixie needs to not only point out that the claim isn’t necessarily founded on an appeal to authority but also needs to add an additional argument which the claim could be legitimately founded on. I initially didn’t catch on that Rixie was abandoning the hypothetical because Rixie never took that second step.
I don’t understand your middle paragraph. What context is this in, where is the “other gods” quote from?
I can’t understand your last paragraph very well until I understand the relevancy of the middle one. I objected to capitalizing words like Reality because that sort of capitalization only occurs when you think of something like a proper noun, and thinking of things like proper nouns when the things aren’t proper nouns often adds a level of mysticism to the concept of those things which is detrimental to rationality.
Okay. First, I don’t really care who said what when, my goal is something like consensus or shared vision, and how we get there, and who stumbled and how, isn’t so important to me.
“other gods” was from Rixie:
This is proposed as a message to you. (You could choose to take it impersonally, as having nothing to do with you, but Rixie did use “you.” That might be accidental, but I like to start with what people actually wrote or said. Kind of the point I’ve been making here, in fact.)
So someone says to you, chaosmosis, “don’t go chasing after other gods, or you will get killed.” The principle of exegesis that I was taught was to assume that statements are correct. In fact, every statement can be true or false, but assuming that statements from others are true is the most powerful place to start. Assuming that the truth is literal and fixed would be irrational; this is just about communication process. When people start with skepticism and rejection, they can only come to understand statements when they are lucky enough to find serious proof. That’s actually rare, the approach is highly inefficient.
So what would “other gods” mean for you? I proposed a meaning. What do you think of it?
“Other god” implies “God.” What would your God be if the words meant something? Rather than anticipate an answer, I’ll stop.
As to capitalization, I use it with proper nouns. You assume that words are proper nouns or not. That depends on context. What you think of as “mysticism” could be a level of meaning that perhaps you don’t recognize, and you assume it is detrimental to rationality. Is that a fact? How would you know? What, indeed, is “mysticism”?
You contend that starting by believing what others say to be true is true is the fastest way to truth. I disagree. I think we should take others opinions as evidence, but that we should evaluate truth on a probabilistic level. There are no defaults, and we shouldn’t unfairly privilege any hypotheses. I think the truths you arrive at through that method aren’t true if they can’t be arrived at through the other method. People say many false and nonfalsifiable things. People assert things that they have no way of knowing or that make no sense at all. There is no reason I should believe people in these cases.
You conflate different instances of claims by people, essentially, viewing them all as equal. I make distinctions, and say that people’s opinions are good approximators of the truth in some cases but bad in other cases. This seems faster because it ensures that I don’t get stuck whenever I hear someone make a nonfalsifiable claim. There is an invisible and untouchable dragon behind you who will eat you and send you to hell if you believe nonfalsifiable claims. If you truly followed the system where you believe everything anyone tells you until you get contrary evidence, you would now have a terrible paradox on your hands.
How do you make the jump from this communications based model of evidence to a model which incorporates evidence? It seems like there’s a huge disconnect there, if the default mode is acceptance of others ideas then there would never be any reason to make the jump towards evidence.
I don’t think I have any god, so I don’t know what “other gods” might mean for me. I’ll speak metaphorically then. I would say that to the extent that I have a god, it’s a nonomniscient and nonomnipotent god that I find sort of pathetic most of the time, and his name is chaosmosis. Chasing other gods would be impossible for me because everywhere I go there I am. However, I can change as an individual, and I can pursue “other gods” by changing myself.
Thinking like this is relaxing and entertaining but not useful. I don’t mistake this for truth. It might be true, but the process that brought me there was a lazy and invalid one, and in other cases it would fail. It would be right for the wrong reasons.
I think that proper nouns should only be used where they are used traditionally.
Mysticism is an emotion of awe and humility and grandeur. Emotions are not evidence. I’m human, so the temptation is for me to treat emotions as evidence. This is detrimental to rationality. Therefore, I try to avoid my encounters with seductive emotions like mysticism, or to accept those encounters but also to make sure that I’m justifying my decisions on a logical basis and not an emotional one.
Mysticism is meaningful, but in a subjective and emotional sense. In a logical sense, it fights against meaning and truth.
Many issues of weight—at least to me—are raised here, I could spend weeks writing in response, and would lose everyone. What’s on-topic here? The rest can be addressed with new posts.
The original post is “Uncritical supercriticality.” The emphasized text from Deuteronomy prescribes a violent response to unfamiliar, alien thought, proposals of “other gods.” Yudkowsky is suggesting that this entire class of responses is inimical to rationality. He brings the problem down into social phenomena that stifle communication, such as reluctance to criticize evidence for the locally popular view.
I’m extending this a bit. I’m claiming that we cannot have a real dialog on an issue where there is an appearance of disagreement, at the outset, unless we first understand the other side. One of the first distinctions transmitted in the Landmark Forum is “Already Always Listening.” That’s the set of priors that come up based on immediate, often unconscious, associations. I see someone and immediately judge them as interesting, likely to be boring, beautiful, ugly, nice, unpleasant. I hear a few words and have an opinion, instantly, about right, wrong, smart, ignorant. The training is to recognize it, not to make it wrong. AAL is human, and necessary for survival. If I see a flash of tiger-stripes in the foliage, there is no time to run a conscious Bayesian process on it, let’s hope that my habitual responses are sane. However, if we can’t distinguish these learned or instinctual responses from reality, what is actually present, we have become locked into an established world-view.
If we start with an immediate assumption of wrongness, and if we have the normal human habit of inventing arguments to support assumptions—we are really good at that—all we can see is the wrongness of the other person.
It seems to be assumed that I’m proposing “belief” in what others tell us. No. I’m proposing conscious assumption. In order to have a true dialog, I must start with understanding, not with rejection. Once I understand, then, I may be able to apply the tools of rationality to what is now my own thinking, and that is precisely where the scientific method, for example, comes in. We now, having seen, say, the “beauty” of an idea, look for possible alternates, and for ways to test them.
The core, on-topic issue here is the meaning of “other gods.” To my “natural” mind, the prescription of Deuteronomy seems horrific, alien, hostile, irrational, rigid, to be totally rejected. However, my training has become to seek to understand what is right about it. We could think of this as attempting to falsify my Already Always Listening immediate judgment. I’m suggesting that.
I’m suggesting that moving beyond the Deuteronomy position, instead of merely being contrary to it, we best first understand it. A sign of understanding it would be a recognition of “Yes, of course.” I.e., that the prescription makes sense, it was at least functional, in some way, within ordinary survival or tribal survival, and maybe even necessary.
I would never suggest “belief” as a starting place, that is far too fixed. I suggest “acceptance,” as one accepts a hypothesis and then considers the implications and likely consequences.
A Christian minister who was teaching a class on Islam at a local senior center once told me that his goal in teaching it was to convey it in such a way that Muslims would say, “Yes, that is what we believe.” We had a great time. He did not therefore reject his Christianity.
I will now claim that between a theism and atheism is only a narrow space.
I’ll claim that, for some, atheism is closer to truth than dogmatic religion. Much closer. A sane atheism rejects false gods. Does it reject Reality?
“I don’t think I have any god” demonstrates well that the usable concept of “god” has not been understood. No, we have gods, many. All of us do, I’ll claim. To explore this, we need to find usable meanings of the word.
Chaosmosis, above, has begun the inquiry, starting with an obvious possible god, his identity.
“Everywhere I go, there I am.” Great!
Is this true or false? The statement implies something fixed. To be investigated, is whether or not this ubiquity is rational. I’ll claim that it’s not, generally, it’s been inadequately specified.