If I take the outside view and account for the fact that thirty-something percent of people, including a lot of really smart people, believe in Christianity,
Yes, but there are highly probable alternate explanations (other than the truth of Christianity) for their belief in Christianity, so the fact of their belief is very weak evidence for Christianity. If an alarm goes off whenever there’s an earthquake, but also whenever a car drives by outside, then the alarm going off is very weak (practically negligible) evidence for an earthquake. More technically, when you are trying to evaluate the extent to which E is good evidence for H (and consequently, how much you should update your belief in H based on E), you want to look not at the likelihood Pr(E|H), but at the likelihood ratio Pr(E|H)/Pr(E|~H). And the likelihood ratio in this case, I submit, is not much more than 1, which means that updating on the evidence shouldn’t move your prior odds all that much.
and that at least personally I have radically changed my worldview a whole bunch of times,
This seems irrelevant to the truth of Christianity.
then it seems like I should assign at least a 5% or so probability to Christianity being true.
Yes, but there are highly probable alternate explanations (other than the truth of Christianity) for their belief in Christianity, so the fact of their belief is very weak evidence for Christianity.
Of course, there are also perspective-relative “highly probable” alternate explanations than sound reasoning for non-Christians’ belief in non-Christianity. (I chose that framing precisely to make a point about what hypothesis privilege feels like.) E.g., to make the contrast in perspectives stark, demonic manipulation of intellectual and political currents. E.g., consider that “there are no transhumanly intelligent entities in our environment” would likely be a notion that usefully-modelable-as-malevolent transhumanly intelligent entities would promote. Also “human minds are prone to see agency when there is in fact none, therefore no perception of agency can provide evidence of (non-human) agency” would be a useful idea for (Christian-)hypothetical demons to promote.
Of course, from our side that perspective looks quite discountable because it reminds us of countless cases of humans seeing conspiracies where it’s in fact quite demonstrable that no such conspiracy could have existed; but then, it’s hard to say what the relevance of that is if there is in fact strong but incommunicable evidence of supernaturalism—an abundance of demonstrably wrong conspiracy theorists is another thing that the aforementioned hypothetical supernatural processes would like to provoke and to cultivate. “The concept of ‘evidence’ had something of a different meaning, when you were dealing with someone who had declared themselves to play the game at ‘one level higher than you’.” — HPMOR. At roughly this point I think the arena becomes a social-epistemic quagmire, beyond the capabilities of even the best of Lesswrong to avoid getting something-like-mind-killed about.
consider that “there are no transhumanly intelligent entities in our environment” would likely be a notion that usefully-modelable-as-malevolent transhumanly intelligent entities would promote
Yes, but there are highly probable alternate explanations (other than the truth of Christianity) for their belief in Christianity, so the fact of their belief is very weak evidence for Christianity. If an alarm goes off whenever there’s an earthquake, but also whenever a car drives by outside, then the alarm going off is very weak (practically negligible) evidence for an earthquake. More technically, when you are trying to evaluate the extent to which E is good evidence for H (and consequently, how much you should update your belief in H based on E), you want to look not at the likelihood Pr(E|H), but at the likelihood ratio Pr(E|H)/Pr(E|~H). And the likelihood ratio in this case, I submit, is not much more than 1, which means that updating on the evidence shouldn’t move your prior odds all that much.
This seems irrelevant to the truth of Christianity.
That probability is way too high.
Of course, there are also perspective-relative “highly probable” alternate explanations than sound reasoning for non-Christians’ belief in non-Christianity. (I chose that framing precisely to make a point about what hypothesis privilege feels like.) E.g., to make the contrast in perspectives stark, demonic manipulation of intellectual and political currents. E.g., consider that “there are no transhumanly intelligent entities in our environment” would likely be a notion that usefully-modelable-as-malevolent transhumanly intelligent entities would promote. Also “human minds are prone to see agency when there is in fact none, therefore no perception of agency can provide evidence of (non-human) agency” would be a useful idea for (Christian-)hypothetical demons to promote.
Of course, from our side that perspective looks quite discountable because it reminds us of countless cases of humans seeing conspiracies where it’s in fact quite demonstrable that no such conspiracy could have existed; but then, it’s hard to say what the relevance of that is if there is in fact strong but incommunicable evidence of supernaturalism—an abundance of demonstrably wrong conspiracy theorists is another thing that the aforementioned hypothetical supernatural processes would like to provoke and to cultivate. “The concept of ‘evidence’ had something of a different meaning, when you were dealing with someone who had declared themselves to play the game at ‘one level higher than you’.” — HPMOR. At roughly this point I think the arena becomes a social-epistemic quagmire, beyond the capabilities of even the best of Lesswrong to avoid getting something-like-mind-killed about.
Why?
I agree that this doesn’t even make sense. If you’re super intelligent/powerful, you don’t need to hide. You can if you want, but …
Not an explanation, but: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled...”