As I commented elsewhere I think this is great, but there’s one curious choice here, which is to compare exposure to The Singularity as a de-conversion experience and loss of faith rather than a conversion experience where one gets faith. The parallel is from someone going from believer to atheist, rather than atheist to believer.
Which in some ways totally makes sense, because rationality goes hand in hand with de-conversion, as the Sequences are quite explicit about over and over again, and often people joining the community are in fact de-converting from a religion (and when and if they convert to one, they almost always leave the community). And of course, because the Singularity is a real physical thing that might really happen and really do all this, and so on.
But I have the system-1 gut instinct that this is actually getting the sign wrong in ways that are going to make it hard to understand people’s problem here and how to best solve it.
(As opposed to it actually being a religion, which it isn’t.)
From the perspective of a person processing this kind of new information, the fact that the information is true or false, or supernatural versus physical, doesn’t seem that relevant. What might be much more relevant is that you now believe that this new thing is super important and that you can potentially have really high leverage over that thing. Which then makes everything feel unimportant and worth sacrificing—you now need to be obsessed with new hugely important thing and anyone who isn’t and could help needs to be woken up, etc etc.
If you suddenly don’t believe in God and therefore don’t know if you can be justified in buying hot cocoa, that’s pretty weird. But if you suddenly do believe in God and therefore feel you can’t drink hot cocoa, that’s not that weird.
People who suddenly believe in God don’t generally have the ‘get up in the morning’ question on their mind, because the religions mostly have good answers for that one. But the other stuff all seems to fit much better?
Or, think about the concept Anna discusses about people’s models being ‘tangled up’ with stuff they’ve discarded because they lost faith. If God doesn’t exist why not [do horrible things] and all that because nothing matters so do what you want. But this seems like mostly the opposite, it’s that the previous justifications have been overwritten by bigger concerns.
I think that losing your faith in civilization adequacy does feel more like a deconversion experience. All your safety nets are falling, and I cannot promise you that we’ll replace them all. The power that ‘made things okay’ is gone from the world.
As I commented elsewhere I think this is great, but there’s one curious choice here, which is to compare exposure to The Singularity as a de-conversion experience and loss of faith rather than a conversion experience where one gets faith. The parallel is from someone going from believer to atheist, rather than atheist to believer.
Which in some ways totally makes sense, because rationality goes hand in hand with de-conversion, as the Sequences are quite explicit about over and over again, and often people joining the community are in fact de-converting from a religion (and when and if they convert to one, they almost always leave the community). And of course, because the Singularity is a real physical thing that might really happen and really do all this, and so on.
But I have the system-1 gut instinct that this is actually getting the sign wrong in ways that are going to make it hard to understand people’s problem here and how to best solve it.
(As opposed to it actually being a religion, which it isn’t.)
From the perspective of a person processing this kind of new information, the fact that the information is true or false, or supernatural versus physical, doesn’t seem that relevant. What might be much more relevant is that you now believe that this new thing is super important and that you can potentially have really high leverage over that thing. Which then makes everything feel unimportant and worth sacrificing—you now need to be obsessed with new hugely important thing and anyone who isn’t and could help needs to be woken up, etc etc.
If you suddenly don’t believe in God and therefore don’t know if you can be justified in buying hot cocoa, that’s pretty weird. But if you suddenly do believe in God and therefore feel you can’t drink hot cocoa, that’s not that weird.
People who suddenly believe in God don’t generally have the ‘get up in the morning’ question on their mind, because the religions mostly have good answers for that one. But the other stuff all seems to fit much better?
Or, think about the concept Anna discusses about people’s models being ‘tangled up’ with stuff they’ve discarded because they lost faith. If God doesn’t exist why not [do horrible things] and all that because nothing matters so do what you want. But this seems like mostly the opposite, it’s that the previous justifications have been overwritten by bigger concerns.
I think that losing your faith in civilization adequacy does feel more like a deconversion experience. All your safety nets are falling, and I cannot promise you that we’ll replace them all. The power that ‘made things okay’ is gone from the world.