Embedded software developer in Dallas. Actively seeking friendships.
Arandur
Karma: 258
Hello, Less Wrong.
I suppose I should have come here first, before posting anything else, but I didn’t come here through the front door. :3 Rather, I was brought here by way of HP:MOR, as I’m sure many newbies were.
My name is Anthony. I’m 21 years old, married, studying Linguistics, and I’m an unapologetic member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Should be fun.
Wow. I’ve been guilty of this for a while, and not realized it. That “is this action morally wrong” question really struck me.
Myself, I believe that there is an objective morality outside humanity, one that is, as Eliezer would deride the idea, “written on a stone tablet somewhere”. This may be an unpopular hypothesis, but accepting it is not a prerequisite for my point. When asked about why certain actions were immoral, I, too, have reached for the “because it harms someone” explanation… an explanation which I just now see as the sin of Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points.
What I really believe, upon much reflection, is that there are two overlapping, yet distinct, classes of “wrong” actions: one we might term “sins”, and the other we might term “social transgressions”. Social Transgressions is that class of acts which are punishable by society, usually those that are harmful. Sins is that class of acts which goes against this Immutable Moral Law. Examples are given below, being (in the spirit of full disclosure) the first examples I thought of, and neither the more pure examples, nor the most defensible, non-controversial examples.
Spitting on the floor of an office building is a social transgression, but not a sin.
Homosexuality is a sin, but not a social transgression (insofar as it is accepted by society, which is more and more very day).
Murder is both a sin and a social transgression.
I do not know if this is a defensible position, but I now recognize it as a clearer form of what I believe than what I had previously claimed to believe.
That’s quite all right; I’m sure the naivete blossoming forth from the OP makes that an easy mistake to make. :P
I’m well aware of the Discussion Section… which only compounds my error. Yes, this should have been posted there. Losing some eighty Karma (by the way, apparently negative Karma does not exist per se, but perhaps it does de facto… is as good a wakeup call as any for the sin of overconfidence.
I would have traded my karma simply for the advice you’ve given here. Thank you. And thank you for the compliment on my writing style; nice to see not everything about this experience was negative. I assure you that I will not be leaving any time soon. When I first saw that this post was getting a negative response, I made a split-second decision: should I flee, or should I learn? I choose to learn.
That would be why I’m here. :3
Your point is well taken, and I will meditate upon it. Thank you.
I think our disagreement stems from a fuzzy definition of the word “best”. I believe that it is better to believe something for good (read: valid) reasons than to believe it for bad reasons, regardless of the truth value of the thing being believed. So yes, your suggestion may lead more Christians to toss their Christianity, but mine makes them more rational thinkers, which (under the assumption that their Christian beliefs are wrong, which assumption I decline to assign a truth value in this post) leads them to atheism as a side benefit.
Essentially, this is the question posed: Which is the greater sin, if Christianity is wrong? Christianity, or irrationality?
Oh, how curious. I’ve been reading on here a while, and I think I had previously misunderstood the adopted meaning of the word “bias”… using the term as it’s socially used, that is to say, a prior reason for holding a certain belief over another due to convenience. A judge might be biased because one side is paying him; a jury member might be biased because their sister is the one on trial. Are these “mistakes”? Or do they fall under a certain type of cognitive bias that is similar among all humans? *ponder*
For that matter, try being born into the Church, not going on a mission at the prescribed age, but then still belonging to the Mormon church. Two degrees of dissent there.
Or try being a non-Republican Mormon, cohabitating with crazy right-wingers who think it’s a Good Idea to shut down Planned Parenthood.
For that matter, try being a bisexual in the Mormon church. (Or a furry!) You can’t talk about your sense of identity without your Mormon friends judging you, but you can’t talk about your religion with your non-Mormon friends because they’ll consider you a hypocrite.
But you know what’s interesting? In each of the above situations, all of which apply (or have applied in the past) to me, I can think of someone else I know who’s in the same situation.
With seven billion people on this planet, is it really possible to dissent in a “unique” way?
This is not meant to detract from Yudkowsky’s post; he himself said “there are [others] in the world, somewhere, but they aren’t there next to you. You have to explain it, alone, to people who just think it’s weird”. But it’s an interesting thought. Reminds me of the saying: “In China, if you’re one-in-a-million, there are a thousand of you”.
That’s where randomized controlled trials come in. Rigor! Scholarship! Risks to one’s health! That’s the scientific method!
… Just to check: we’re talking about Microsoft Office’s Clippy, right?
Reckon it’s atop some mystical unassailable mountain on a windswept planet. That, or it doesn’t exist. :P I’m well aware of the arguments against stone tablet morality. I had thought I’d made it clear above that this was an epiphany about my flawed mind-state, not about Actual Morality. Judging by the downvotes, I did not make this sufficiently clear.
Your chastisement is well taken. Thank you.
I’m being pulled off to bed, but from my skimming this looks like a very, very helpful critique. Thank you for posting it; I’ll peruse it as soon as I’m able. One note: I did note after posting this, but too late to make a meaningful change, that “we should support cryonics less” is rather a ridiculous notion, considering the people I’m talking to are probably not the same people who are working hardest on cryonics. So: oops.
Huh. An interesting point, and one that I should have considered. So what would you suggest as a safety hatch?
Far less likely to suppose that 1 out of 6.5 billion humans is a stable psychopath.
Even if the money alone isn’t enough to warrant the scientist to publish in a no-name journal, the journal would soon stop being a no-name journal because scientists would expect that their colleges want to publish in the journal to get the money. That expectation makes the journal more prestigious. The expectations that other people expect the journal to get more prestigious in-turn will increase it’s prestige.
I’m inclined to dispute this point. Setting quite aside the difficulty of setting up such a project, supposing that the money came ex nihilo and we magically caught the ear of prestigious scientists… it is my intuition that our journal would nevertheless fail to gain prestige. I believe that scientists who published with us would be seen as having been “bought”, and I expect that this scorn would overpower any demonstrable merit the research or our journal as a whole possessed. “I want to publish in this journal to get the prize money” is a different motivation than “I want to publish in this journal because it has prestige,” and I don’t think that gap is as easily crossed as you seem to think.
Hmm. Read one chapter at a time, and therefore spread out the torment? There are resources available on the internet—pandering to Mormons—that map out a plan for reading the whole Book in one year. This has the added benefit of allowing each chapter to separately marinate in your mind, that you can decide for each individual one how it contributes to your worldview and/or your confidence level in the Book.
Find a friend to read and discuss it with? A Mormon friend would be easier to find, but would likely view the situation in a light that you’d be uncomfortable (annoyed?) with. A non-Mormon friend would be harder to find, but would be able to discuss the text with you in an areligious context. Ideally you’d want a Bayesian.
Which leads me to an idea which terrifies me: Why not make this an online thing? Day-by-day, or perhaps week-by-week, post (somewhere, not necessarily on Less Wrong, so as to not clutter the site; though perhaps Less Wrong would actually be the ideal locale, due to familiarity, extant population, etc?) a chapter of the Book of Mormon and allow discussion of it, separately from the rest of the Book, using terms common to Rationalists.
What do you think?
EDIT: My terror at this idea, I just realized, is evidence that it’s a good one, from a selfish perspective. This would be the strongest possible test of my belief system. xP
Seconded. I actually found this very relevant, and quite a good point.
Now to be fair, the choir boys were already a subgroup. :P Also, Generalization from Fictional Evidence. But I have a feeling you were being facetious.
I once told a friend, “I think I’m a Daria, but I know the correct answer is Ferris”. Then I realized the absurdity of that statement, and had much pondering to do.