Hi, welcome to LW! Fellow deconverted christian here. I’ve both gone through some crisis mode deconverting from christianity, and some crisis mode when exploring and undoing some of the faux-rational patches I had made during the first crisis. Can’t wait for round three :)
I’m happy to give some more thoughts, though it might be useful for you to enumerate a few example beliefs / behaviors that you are adopting and now rethinking. “rationalist” is a pretty big space and there’s many different strokes for many different folks.
As a very general thought, I’m currently exploring the idea that most of my problems aren’t related to big picture philosophy / world-view stuff, and more matters of increasing personal agency (i.e “Do I feel stressed from not enough money?” “Am I worried about the security of my job?” “Can I reliably have fun conversations?” “Can I spend time with people who love me?” “Does my body feel good?” etc). Though admittedly, I had to arrive at this stance via big picture world-view style thinking. Might be useful to dwell on.
This is super helpful. It sounds like you’ve lived the thing that I’m only hypothesizing about here. Hopefully “Can’t wait for round three” isn’t sarcastic. This first round for me was extremely painful, but it sounds like round 2 was possibly more pleasant for you.
I like the framework you’re using now, and I’m gonna try to condense it into my own words to make sure I understand what you mean. Basically, you’re trying to optimize around keeping the various and conflicting hopes, needs, fears, etc. within you at least relatively cool with your choices. It also seems like there might be an emphasis on choosing to pursue the things that you find most meaningful. Is that correct? I would actually love to hear more on this. Are there good posts / sequences on it?
Regarding examples: I’ll need to spend some time brainstorming and collating, but I’ll post some here when I get to it. I tend to do the lazy thing of using examples to derive a general principle and then discarding the examples. This is probably not good practice wrt: Rationality.
More or less. Here are some related pieces of content:
There’s a twitter thread by Qiaochu that ostensibly is about addiction, but has the idea “It’s more useful to examine what you’re running from, than what you’re running to.” In the context of our conversation, the Christianity and Rationalism would be “what you’ve been running to” and “what you’re running from” (for me) has been social needs not being met, not having a lot of personal agency, etc.
Meaningness is an epic tome by David Chapman on different attitudes towards meaning that one can take and their repercussions.
Regarding regarding examples and generalizing, I’ve been finding it that it’s really hard to feel like I’ve changed my mind in any substantive way, unless I can find the examples and memories of events that lead me to believe a general claim in the first place, and address those examples. Matt Goldenberg has a sequence on a specific version of this idea.
Hi, welcome to LW! Fellow deconverted christian here. I’ve both gone through some crisis mode deconverting from christianity, and some crisis mode when exploring and undoing some of the faux-rational patches I had made during the first crisis. Can’t wait for round three :)
I’m happy to give some more thoughts, though it might be useful for you to enumerate a few example beliefs / behaviors that you are adopting and now rethinking. “rationalist” is a pretty big space and there’s many different strokes for many different folks.
As a very general thought, I’m currently exploring the idea that most of my problems aren’t related to big picture philosophy / world-view stuff, and more matters of increasing personal agency (i.e “Do I feel stressed from not enough money?” “Am I worried about the security of my job?” “Can I reliably have fun conversations?” “Can I spend time with people who love me?” “Does my body feel good?” etc). Though admittedly, I had to arrive at this stance via big picture world-view style thinking. Might be useful to dwell on.
Thanks for the welcome!
This is super helpful. It sounds like you’ve lived the thing that I’m only hypothesizing about here. Hopefully “Can’t wait for round three” isn’t sarcastic. This first round for me was extremely painful, but it sounds like round 2 was possibly more pleasant for you.
I like the framework you’re using now, and I’m gonna try to condense it into my own words to make sure I understand what you mean. Basically, you’re trying to optimize around keeping the various and conflicting hopes, needs, fears, etc. within you at least relatively cool with your choices. It also seems like there might be an emphasis on choosing to pursue the things that you find most meaningful. Is that correct? I would actually love to hear more on this. Are there good posts / sequences on it?
Regarding examples: I’ll need to spend some time brainstorming and collating, but I’ll post some here when I get to it. I tend to do the lazy thing of using examples to derive a general principle and then discarding the examples. This is probably not good practice wrt: Rationality.
More or less. Here are some related pieces of content:
There’s a twitter thread by Qiaochu that ostensibly is about addiction, but has the idea “It’s more useful to examine what you’re running from, than what you’re running to.” In the context of our conversation, the Christianity and Rationalism would be “what you’ve been running to” and “what you’re running from” (for me) has been social needs not being met, not having a lot of personal agency, etc.
Meaningness is an epic tome by David Chapman on different attitudes towards meaning that one can take and their repercussions.
Regarding regarding examples and generalizing, I’ve been finding it that it’s really hard to feel like I’ve changed my mind in any substantive way, unless I can find the examples and memories of events that lead me to believe a general claim in the first place, and address those examples. Matt Goldenberg has a sequence on a specific version of this idea.