You’re such a lion against religion, I admire that. So, I’m surprised you would say that living with doubt is not a virtue. You know about incommensurability right? You know about perspectivism? There is no “view from nowhere” that can make perfect objectivity possible.
Therefore: doubt. To live with doubt makes room for learning. Lose doubt and you also lose inquiry. Some doubts are annihilated by inquiry, but as Richard Feynman said, “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”. He said we need a well developed theory of ignorance to protect the future from our misconceptions of the present.
Doubt is difficult to live with. I’d love to say with certainty that Christianity is false. I’m constrained to saying that I have no better reason to accept Christianity than to accept the Spaghetti monster theory. The guy who came up with the Spaghetti monster did so as a parody—but maybe the Monster Himself placed the ideas in his head to spread the good word of Spaghetti.
Bayesian rationality doesn’t solve doubt, because nothing tells you how to identify the system and its factors that must be modeled. So, you’re still stuck with having to define your premises, and doubt comes in with the premises.
Doubt is like an anti-oxidant that protects against cultishness. Of course, a cult can use fake doubt to throw people off its scent.
You’re using different definitions for doubt here, and that is the issue. EY uses “doubt” in the sense of a suspicion that not enough knowledge is currently had to evaluate a specific claim, while you are using it as the opposite of “certainty” (though not consistently, somehow). In saying that doubt should not be lived with he was referencing his previously posted explanation of how these specific suspicions by nature are meant to annihilate themselves. Either you find the evidence you thought was missing or you conclude after some searching that finding it would be a waste of energy and make your judgment based on the evidence you already have, and either way, that doubt is gone.
If you still harbor doubts, in his sense, that Christianity may be true, you should search for that missing evidence immediately or conclude that the effort to find it isn’t worth it and assign the likelihood the ridiculously small probability it deserves. Notice that I did not say that you should claim with certainty that christianilty is false; predicting anything with true 100% certainty is, for a bayesian, truly stupid, because on the absurdly small chance that you’re wrong, you lose the game, having just conceded that you assigned your life a likelyhood of 0%.
You’re such a lion against religion, I admire that. So, I’m surprised you would say that living with doubt is not a virtue. You know about incommensurability right? You know about perspectivism? There is no “view from nowhere” that can make perfect objectivity possible.
Therefore: doubt. To live with doubt makes room for learning. Lose doubt and you also lose inquiry. Some doubts are annihilated by inquiry, but as Richard Feynman said, “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”. He said we need a well developed theory of ignorance to protect the future from our misconceptions of the present.
Doubt is difficult to live with. I’d love to say with certainty that Christianity is false. I’m constrained to saying that I have no better reason to accept Christianity than to accept the Spaghetti monster theory. The guy who came up with the Spaghetti monster did so as a parody—but maybe the Monster Himself placed the ideas in his head to spread the good word of Spaghetti.
Bayesian rationality doesn’t solve doubt, because nothing tells you how to identify the system and its factors that must be modeled. So, you’re still stuck with having to define your premises, and doubt comes in with the premises.
Doubt is like an anti-oxidant that protects against cultishness. Of course, a cult can use fake doubt to throw people off its scent.
You’re using different definitions for doubt here, and that is the issue. EY uses “doubt” in the sense of a suspicion that not enough knowledge is currently had to evaluate a specific claim, while you are using it as the opposite of “certainty” (though not consistently, somehow). In saying that doubt should not be lived with he was referencing his previously posted explanation of how these specific suspicions by nature are meant to annihilate themselves. Either you find the evidence you thought was missing or you conclude after some searching that finding it would be a waste of energy and make your judgment based on the evidence you already have, and either way, that doubt is gone.
If you still harbor doubts, in his sense, that Christianity may be true, you should search for that missing evidence immediately or conclude that the effort to find it isn’t worth it and assign the likelihood the ridiculously small probability it deserves. Notice that I did not say that you should claim with certainty that christianilty is false; predicting anything with true 100% certainty is, for a bayesian, truly stupid, because on the absurdly small chance that you’re wrong, you lose the game, having just conceded that you assigned your life a likelyhood of 0%.