I think it is fairly obvious that the LessWrong community is not innately privileged as arbiters of rationality, or of fact. As such, it is reasonable to be cautious about obscuring large portions of your map with new ink; I don’t think anyone should criticize you for moving slowly.
However, regarding your hesitance to examine some beliefs, the obvious thing to do (since your hesitance does not tell you whether or not the beliefs are correct, only examining them does) is to make the consequences of your discovery feel less severe.
Agreed. And this is very good advice. My map has beliefs about my map and I figured those are very high priority. Any ooga-booga’s about touching an area is probably in the meta-map. As of right now, most of those are open for analysis. The big, annoying is a self-referential lockout that is likely to get tricky. Of all the discussions that would thoroughly surprise the community here, this one takes the cake. My younger self was pretty clever and saw the future too clearly for my own good.
The ulterior motive of this post is to give me a way to discuss these things without people going, “Wait, backup. You believe in God?”
The ulterior motive of this post is to give me a way to discuss these things without people going, “Wait, backup. You believe in God?”
Bear in mind that not everyone reads every post—assuming you continue to discuss matters related to theism without a major reversal of opinion (either on your part or ours—I, naturally, expect the latter to be unlikely), this will still happen occasionally, with increasing frequency as time progresses.
Making a general response to the post, now:
I think it is fairly obvious that the LessWrong community is not innately privileged as arbiters of rationality, or of fact. As such, it is reasonable to be cautious about obscuring large portions of your map with new ink; I don’t think anyone should criticize you for moving slowly.
However, regarding your hesitance to examine some beliefs, the obvious thing to do (since your hesitance does not tell you whether or not the beliefs are correct, only examining them does) is to make the consequences of your discovery feel less severe. (It is precisely these feelings which are the only true consequences, but that does not make them nonexistent. Keats felt as if Science had murdered the gnomes, though there were no gnomes to be killed.) The author behind Ebon Musings and Daylight Atheist offers Stardust, Fragile Trappings, Extinguishing the Fear of Hell, To Those Who Doubt Their Religion, Green Fields; Greta Christina has Dancing Molecules, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing To Do With God, The Meaning of Death: Part One, Two, Three of Many, The Not So Logical Conclusion: On the Morality of Atheists and Believers, Atheism, Bad Luck, and the Comfort of Reason; some people have found comfort in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality by André Comte-Sponville, but I found it annoying; … the long and the short of it is that there are a lot of places you can look to find reasons not to fear a particular answer to an empirical question. (I could do the same exercise with the negative answer to “do human beings have free will?”, for example.)
I think Eliezer Yudkowsky talked about this idea, but his phrasing didn’t stick with me.
Leave a Line of Retreat
That was the one I was thinking of. Thanks for the link.
Agreed. And this is very good advice. My map has beliefs about my map and I figured those are very high priority. Any ooga-booga’s about touching an area is probably in the meta-map. As of right now, most of those are open for analysis. The big, annoying is a self-referential lockout that is likely to get tricky. Of all the discussions that would thoroughly surprise the community here, this one takes the cake. My younger self was pretty clever and saw the future too clearly for my own good.
The ulterior motive of this post is to give me a way to discuss these things without people going, “Wait, backup. You believe in God?”
Bear in mind that not everyone reads every post—assuming you continue to discuss matters related to theism without a major reversal of opinion (either on your part or ours—I, naturally, expect the latter to be unlikely), this will still happen occasionally, with increasing frequency as time progresses.
Agreed. Having this post in the archives is useful for my far-future self. I expect it to save me a lot of time.