I don’t believe he’s speaking of two subarguments which together imply the main argument, but two subarguments each of which independently implies the main argument. Thus, they would both have to be false
MBlume
Karma: 5,988
Religion, as practiced today, is most commonly a collection of propositions, entirely incompatible with rationality.
If religion fills certain needs (and in fact I won’t argue that it does) we will find more constructive ways to fill those needs without lying to people.
If you really think that religion isn’t about god, then honestly, I don’t think we disagree that much—I don’t know why you’re starting out with insults flying.
If we could do this, if we could really do this, in a way that is genuine, and unforced, if we could show people that religion has hijacked their deepest needs and that there are better ways to fill those needs, I really think that could be the opening move to winning this thing. I think that could be what finally gets people to pull their fingers out of their ears, stop screaming “can’t hear you, you can’t make me think!” and maybe, just maybe learn something.
It doesn’t have to be a ‘God-shaped hole’—there probably is a hole, and over the past few millennia, the Goddists have learned some excellent strategies to fill it, and to exploit it for the replication of their memes. People like Sagan and Dawkins have spent their lives trying to show that science, properly understood and appreciated, fills the hole better, fits it more truly, than do the ideas of religion.
Bottom line: we’re not selling Sweet’n’Low here. If we slap “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Christ!” on the jar, if we act as though religion is the “real thing,” and we’ve got a convenient stop-gap, people are going to want to go back to the “real thing” every time.
On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists
Perhaps Eliezer’s book should have a note—please read one chapter per day?
I don’t know, I came in and read a little over a year’s worth of Eliezer’s OB posts in a couple months’ exploration, and I think it had a pretty solid impact on me.
I don’t think there’s a rationalist equivalent of eye-gouging, so setting up tournament rules should be relatively easy.
Well, then again, I don’t think there’s a rationalist equivalent of a tournament just yet, either.
I’m not sure if I’m evading the spirit of the post, but it seems to me that the answer to the opening problem is this:
If you were willing to kill this man to save these ten others, then you should long ago have simply had all ten patients agree to a 1⁄10 game of Russian Roulette, with the proviso that the nine winners get the organs of the one loser.
It seems to me that with a complicit surrounding culture, you could get the full “santa experience” without telling any explicit lies.
“Daddy, how does Santa do X?”
“Well, some people think Y—do you think that’s a good explanation?”
and then patiently wait for the day Y is rejected as nonsense.
Also, since this particular community leans altruistic, I’d hope that such a project would emphasize the future happiness of potential partners more than does (correct me if I’m wrong) the current pickup community.
teaching them a lesson in consideration—don’t go telling all the other kids at school that Santa Claus isn’t real. Part of teaching them to be members of a tolerant free society.
Telling someone not to report a fact which they know to be true has no bearing on teaching them to be members of a tolerant free society that I’m aware of...
I mean to say, “tolerance” and “freedom” have nothing to do with not telling your Christian classmate that his religion is a fairly transparent myth.
Whatever your opinion on Santa Claus, I hope we can agree that the woman in the link handled the issue badly. The girl believed in Santa because her mother said he was real, then disbelieved because her mother said he wasn’t. Of course she cried—she was powerless from beginning to end.
Parenting Beyond Belief gives a much better Santa disillusionment tale:
My boy was eight years old when he started in with the classic interrogation: How does Santa get to all those houses in one night? How does he get in when we don’t have a chimney and all the windows are locked and the alarm system is on? Why does he use the same wrapping paper as Mom? All those cookies in one night – his LDL cholesterol must be through the roof!
This is the moment, at the threshold of the question, that the natural inquiry of a child can be primed or choked off. With questions of belief, you have three choices: feed the child a confirmation, feed the child a disconfirmation – or teach the child to fish.
The “Yes, Virginia” crowd will heap implausible nonsense on the poor child, dismissing her doubts with invocations of magic or mystery or the willful suspension of physical law. Only slightly less problematic is the second choice, the debunker who simply informs the child that, yes, Santa is a big fat fraud.
“Gee,” the child can say to either of them. “Thanks. I’ll let you know if I need any more authoritative pronouncements.”
I for one chose door number three.
Honestly, I’m gonna have to back down from this one—I never went to elementary school as an atheist, and I have no idea what it would be like. The more I think about it, the more it sounds pretty difficult.
Then I wish you luck.
I hope you’ll be willing to share with the community how that goes. We want to learn how to build rationalist societies, and societies start with their children.
Every comment/post you make is an opportunity for the community to subtract karma from you if they feel you are wasting their time.
Parenting Beyond Belief and its sister blog The Meming of Life.
Site highlight: I’m So Glad You Asked in which the author lists interesting questions his children have asked him.
I assume Tim means the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis for which I’ve quite a fondness myself.
I was with you right up to the last three paragraphs, and again feel like we might need to taboo “rational” and “rationalist”.
there is a valley of bad rationality between religion and PD-satisficing rationality
I hadn’t seen this insight expressed so clearly before, thank you.
The majority of the population doesn’t think people have a decent chance of living forever in this world.
If we’re reasoning from the values of the majority, the majority are religious, and are hoping that there is a non-zero chance that during those years in jail, you might be saved, and wind up spending eternity in heaven rather than hell. Of course, most prisons are...shall we say less than optimally designed for this purpose.
Eliezer, I suspect you might find the answers to these questions less useful than you expect. The most useful things we’ve learned from you are probably going to be those things that we’ve already forgotten you wrote, because they’ve become a part of us—because they’ve become background in how we live, how we think, and thus are completely invisible to us at any given time.