I feel like the core example here has a long history of being argued for with increasingly strong anti-epistemologies, and so it feels like an especially strong example of a thing to not spend time trying to steelman. We should expect such arguments for it to reliably be really good at making us confused without there being a useful insight behind our confusion.
If the argument is just being used as an example to make an interesting point about, as you say, epiphenomena and selection processes, then I think there is probably a large swathe of examples that aren’t this particular example.
The point is really analytically simple, it doesn’t require steelmanning to understand, you can just read the post. You don’t need to use the outside view for arguments like this, you can just spend a small amount of effort trying to understand it (argument screens off authority). It isn’t even arguing positively for the existence of the afterlife, it’s at most arguing against one particularly weak argument against it.
Contrast this with, say, the ontological argument, which is not analytically simple, has obvious problems/counterexamples, and might be worth understanding more deeply, but likely isn’t worth the effort since (from an atheistic perspective) it’s likely on priors to be made in bad faith based on a motivated confusion.
In general if “politics is the mindkiller” is preventing you from considering all analytical arguments that you interpret as being on a particular side of a political issue, then “politics is the mindkiller” is likely mindkilling you more than politics itself. (My impression was that religion wasn’t even a significant political issue around here, since opinion is so near-unanimously against its literal truth...)
I don’t see a different example that makes the point as strongly and clearly, do you see one?
You may be right. It certainly seems likely to me that the author was just picking a narratively good example.
I did recently experience some arguments surprisingly similar to the one in the OP (things similar to this) definitely designed to be deeply confusing, and I was also incredibly surprised to find the environment I was in (not LW, but some thoughtful people) taking them seriously and being confused by them, which made me decrease my threshold for pointing out this type of cognitive route as bad and not-worth-exploring. I haven’t the time to think up as clear an example as the OP’s—as I say, it seems plausible that this one just is the most narratively simple. There are often religion-metaphors in abstract problems (e.g. decision theory) that are clearly natural to use.
You say you found the OP to be a useful thought experiment, and that already causes me to think I might be mistaken, I’m pretty sure the part of me that thought the example was bad also would predict you wouldn’t find it very useful.
I think the OP is more about evolution giving us irrational drives that override our intellect. For example, if someone believes that bungee jumping is safe but is still afraid to jump, their belief is right but their fear is wrong, so the fear shouldn’t be taken as a strong argument against the belief.
I feel like the core example here has a long history of being argued for with increasingly strong anti-epistemologies, and so it feels like an especially strong example of a thing to not spend time trying to steelman. We should expect such arguments for it to reliably be really good at making us confused without there being a useful insight behind our confusion.
If the argument is just being used as an example to make an interesting point about, as you say, epiphenomena and selection processes, then I think there is probably a large swathe of examples that aren’t this particular example.
The point is really analytically simple, it doesn’t require steelmanning to understand, you can just read the post. You don’t need to use the outside view for arguments like this, you can just spend a small amount of effort trying to understand it (argument screens off authority). It isn’t even arguing positively for the existence of the afterlife, it’s at most arguing against one particularly weak argument against it.
Contrast this with, say, the ontological argument, which is not analytically simple, has obvious problems/counterexamples, and might be worth understanding more deeply, but likely isn’t worth the effort since (from an atheistic perspective) it’s likely on priors to be made in bad faith based on a motivated confusion.
In general if “politics is the mindkiller” is preventing you from considering all analytical arguments that you interpret as being on a particular side of a political issue, then “politics is the mindkiller” is likely mindkilling you more than politics itself. (My impression was that religion wasn’t even a significant political issue around here, since opinion is so near-unanimously against its literal truth...)
I don’t see a different example that makes the point as strongly and clearly, do you see one?
You may be right. It certainly seems likely to me that the author was just picking a narratively good example.
I did recently experience some arguments surprisingly similar to the one in the OP (things similar to this) definitely designed to be deeply confusing, and I was also incredibly surprised to find the environment I was in (not LW, but some thoughtful people) taking them seriously and being confused by them, which made me decrease my threshold for pointing out this type of cognitive route as bad and not-worth-exploring. I haven’t the time to think up as clear an example as the OP’s—as I say, it seems plausible that this one just is the most narratively simple. There are often religion-metaphors in abstract problems (e.g. decision theory) that are clearly natural to use.
You say you found the OP to be a useful thought experiment, and that already causes me to think I might be mistaken, I’m pretty sure the part of me that thought the example was bad also would predict you wouldn’t find it very useful.
I think the OP is more about evolution giving us irrational drives that override our intellect. For example, if someone believes that bungee jumping is safe but is still afraid to jump, their belief is right but their fear is wrong, so the fear shouldn’t be taken as a strong argument against the belief.