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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28462 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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I am not familiar with MacIntyre; I will check him out.

I will venture a guess at the thing you cannot put your finger on. There are two aspects to the meaning of "truth" that adhere at the same time for most English speakers:

  1. The denotation of "truth", most strongly suggested by the use of the word, is material factuality.
  2. "Truth", whatever it is, is irreducibly sacred, if not the fountainhead of sanctity itself (as when Jesus said "I am the truth, the way and the life).

In your reply, you renounced #1 explicitly ("not necessarily bare material factuality") but hung on to #2. In doing this, you have departed from Enlightenment use of the word in one of two ways that you could have. I departed in the other way, retaining #1 but (temporarily, for purpose of the posst) cutting loose of #2. I did this because I reckon that most readers here would have a hard time getting their heads around cutting loose of #1. It takes a long conversation to go in that direction.

In the scheme of things, I am with you: in a longer conversation, I would never grant the use of the word "truth" to denote material factuality -- precisely because I do not think material factuality is irreducibly sacred, and because we cannot simply strip phrases like "the search for truth" and "you are speaking untruthfully" of their spiritual connotations.

By the way, the "truth" Jesus claimed to be was not material factuality, but aletheia -- literally non-concealment and non-forgetting (or, to put it positively, revelation and remembrance). This is the Greek word that is translated as "truth" in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament, etc. In Greek, aletheia is typically not a property of sentences, but a property of the way someone communicates with another person on a given occasion. The modern English equivalent would be something like, "being straight with someone". For example, when Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski", his statement was materially factual, but he was not speaking with aletheia, because he was either concealing something or forgetting something (almost certainly concealing something).

The modern English equivalent would be something like, "being straight with someone".

Or perhaps more to the point, "taking the lowly position of this child". That's a bit archaic, though; the translation into 4chanese is "being autistically honest" (having to couch communications in layers of defense is something neither children nor the autistic have the ability or the desire to do; that's why doing this is a mark of immaturity), and in Mottese it's "communicating using purely mistake theory" (paraphrasing how you described #2 above).

Which is why that part of Enlightenment philosophy is that way, why it works as well as it does (inb4 "surprise, schools of thought closer to God's global maximum make the people who accept that as the room temperature prosper, even though a local maximum of corruption may dominate them for a time"), and as for 'There is no "neutral", or "objective" vision'... uh, the existence of God is asserted in the Bible to be "self-evident" in this way many, many times, and deviating from that is explicitly called out as intentional corruption (like "X good, Y bad, get revenge while the sun shines", which is how [insert a way of thinking you believe, correctly or incorrectly, is corrupt] works).

This is because truthfulness must be fought for, and yet, by itself, yields no reason to fight for anything.

There's a love in it. I think there's a convincing case to be made that deifying Science truth in and of itself is a perversion of that love; the entire point of valuing truthfulness is to serve others, and permit/enable others to do the same, because that is (as far as I can tell) what God intends you to use His creation for.

as for 'There is no "neutral", or "objective" vision'... uh, the existence of God is asserted in the Bible to be "self-evident" in this way many, many times, and deviating from that is explicitly called out as intentional corruption (like "X good, Y bad, get revenge while the sun shines", which is how [insert a way of thinking you believe, correctly or incorrectly, is corrupt] works).

I can't tell what you are trying to say, or how it relates to what you are responding to. Can you elaborate and/or clarify?

I think there's a convincing case to be made that deifying [struck through: Science] truth in and of itself is a perversion of that love;

My position is not that we should deny truth, but that the Enlightenment overreaches on the exclusive sanctity of factual truth and objective methods for determining it. In particular, this leaves no honored way of adjudicating questions of morality or beauty, or of promulgating values and visions (that is, visions in the sense of Sowell's A Conflict of Visions).

By the way, the "truth" Jesus claimed to be was not material factuality, but aletheia -- literally non-concealment and non-forgetting (or, to put it positively, revelation and remembrance). This is the Greek word that is translated as "truth" in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament, etc. In Greek, aletheia is typically not a property of sentences, but a property of the way someone communicates with another person on a given occasion. The modern English equivalent would be something like, "being straight with someone". For example, when Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski", his statement was materially factual, but he was not speaking with aletheia, because he was either concealing something or forgetting something (almost certainly concealing something).

The English word for this is 'honesty'.

I agree that "Honesty" is closer than "truth" as a translation, though I don't think it catches the whole thing. Someone can be honest even when they forget something important, or forget everything (as the dead do, in Virgil's Aeneid, when they drink from the river Lethe). Aletheia connotes being able to give a clear picture of the subject you are talking about, and then actually giving it.

Note that truth is a property of sentences while honesty is a property of a person or his conduct on a given occasion -- whose presence is a virtue and whose absence is a sin. So the Greek concept of aletheia is more like "honesty" in that it is more ethically weighted, and carries that ethical weight into more contexts, than the English conception of truth. But it is stronger than honesty because it also suggests knowing what you are talking about.

Aletheia also just means 'truth'.

People have been doing translation and Biblical criticism for some time now.

I'd be hesitant about the use of etymologies there. That's just the normal Greek word for truth. Sure, that's the etymology, but it's been used like that for centuries; surely most of the sense of the etymological sense has been flattened out by that point.

That said, I don't have a well-defined way to read that middle term in that passage, so ignore me.

What I am citing isn't an etymology (that is, word history); it is the literal meaning of the word in Greek, that long existed, and continues to exist, contemporaneously with the meanings of its constituents (a-lethia: non-forgetting, non-concealment). It is translated as "truth" only because there is not a better English word to translate it into, but a lot of important content and connotation is lost in that translation. A word can become an idiom (that is, cease to have its literal meaning) over time, especially if the constituents become obsolete, but this was not the case with aletheia in Classical Greece, and I doubt it is even the case in Modern Greek. The root lethes, is still a word in Greek to this day, meaning "forgetting" or "oblivion" (not "materially false"). The English word "True" has no root in English, of which it is the opposite, but its opposite is "false".

In its earliest and most influential uses (Homer, for example), aletheia is used differently from the modern English word "true". Here is a brief discussion of how word aletheia is used in Homer. After Homer, the biggest influence on Classical Greek use of the word is probably the poem Aletheia by Parmenides, in which it has a broad and mystical meaning -- even farther from the modern notion of truth as material factuality -- perhaps akin to the Stoical notion of logos.

I also think that even if the word becomes idiomatic over time, it loses its literal meaning only by a matter of degree, and that these things affect us more than most people think.

I would not actually renounce that material factuality is part of truth, nor would I hold that material factuality lacks sanctity. But rather, by describing "bare material factuality," I was describing facts without reference to what we're actually supposed to do with them. You need both, or there is no sanctity.

While material factuality taken too far leads to nihilism (because it separates facts from values), truth-as-non-concealment taken too far leads to relativism (because it separates values from facts). My view would be that material factuality is sacred when tied in with the proper disposition towards factuality and with the larger ontological questions of what reality is. It is sacred to seek the truth, and it is even more sacred to find it. But moreover, the sacredness is applied to the sum total of things and experiences; it's reality that is sacred, sanity that is sacred.

Jesus was indeed describing himself as the full and unconcealed revelation of God, but it is only because that revelation points to something really real, factually real, actually real, that this matters. It would mean precious little for Jesus to be the unconcealed revelation of something that does not correspond to reality. That's not Christianity as the New Testament understands it. It is precisely that his audience believed in the factual existence of God that his claim to be the revelation of God meant anything to them, whether for good or for ill.

Put simply, I think the dichotomy between truth-as-factual-correspondance and truth-as-disposition is a false one, and frankly I see it as a means to smuggle in the epistemological nihilism of Postmodernism. Every discussion I read about the topic sounds like a thousand words saying nothing. There is a reality, and there is a means of humans reaching closer correspondence to it; this is not an enlightenment theory but one that is necessary for human existence in general, anything else also leads to nihilism. It beggars belief to state that when Plato or Aristotle wrote long discourses about the nature of justice or logical deduction, that they did not intend their views to approach material factuality. Whence else cometh the metaphor of the cave?

My disagreements with the Enlightenment have precious little to do with such a dichotomy, and everything to do with their intellectual overconfidence (the "self-evident" phrasing you cited) and limitation of the means of reaching an understanding of material factuality ("according to the rules of evidence used in science and mathematics"). That doesn't mean the tools of science and mathematics are useless in reaching truth, just that they're limited, and cannot at times approach the value of a good story or a compelling narrative in stating and revealing the truth of things within their purview, like human social relations.

This is what I am talking about when I am referring to the religious "gish gallop" style of operation. This whole screed could have been done in 3 sentences.

  • -17

If it's any consolation to you, I had already seen your post on religious "gish gallops" but didn't think much of it. As soon as I had noticed Nelson's long post (and I admit I did recognize his name) and the long reply, and skimming the posts showed certain words, I immediately thought, "hey this is like one of those religious posts that guy was talking about."

(Personally I think I got bored of the CW thread because all that's been said has been said, to a first approximation)

Actually, could you do that (Do the comment in three sentences)? I'd be impressed. It doesn't need to get quite everything, but the gist.

I don't think it's really a gish-gallop, as those make too many points to reasonably address. You're saying it's not dense, so that's just making a few points repeatedly or slowly. That's not a gish-gallop.

Anyway, here's a (brief) case for Christianity, that might even seem rational from a secular, moral-free perspective, at least if you're motivated sufficiently highly by reason and argumentation:

  1. Pascal's wager seems to require that we give up everything to avoid infinite harms and seek infinite goods, if we are to do what is in our own interest. That is, it is instrumentally rational to do so.
  2. It's hard to get infinites accessible to you assuming that atheistic, supernatural-free, no-other-big-surprises model of the world is right.
  3. So you're best off if you bet everything on that being wrong, regardless of how unlikely you think it is.
  4. We need some way to know what's beneficial with regard to infinites, if we are to act.
  5. We don't have any more likely way to know things about infinite rewards accessible to humans than through purported supernatural revelation.
  6. Religions are the most likely sources of revelation of that variety.
  7. Large religions are more likely to be an authentic divine revelation, if God has an interest in giving humans knowledge (which, given that we're assuming divine revelation already, is probably fairly likely). So large religions are the most likely.
  8. Abrahamic religions are the only large religions offering infinite rewards, or escape from infinite torment.
  9. Judaism, in its prescriptions for gentiles, requires fairly little, so you get that one nearly for free, so the main consideration is Christianity vs. Islam. At least, if the rabbis got that right.
  10. And then, Christianity is more likely, as it seems more likely likely to be genuinely new revelation (e.g. attestation of a resurrection from the dead by 500 witnesses seems kind of new) whereas Islam seems to be cribbing off of and trusting Christianity, and grants that Jesus is a prophet, so then, if you were Muslim, you'd have to justify, why Christianity is actually false when the Quran seems to say it's not.
  11. You should be a Christian, if you want what's best for you.

Step 10 is what currently seem sketchiest to me; I'm not too familiar with Islam, unfortunately.

I don't expect you to care about arguments enough to do this (but not doing so is a really low expected value move on your part, if I'm right), but I do think this is fairly defensible, and I think you're irrational insofar as you don't act accordingly.

A list of steps I disagree with (edit: fixed list formatting):

1. There's probably millions of words on Less Wrong about dealing with Pascal's wager, because precisely formulating a consistent decision theory that deals with it is is extremely difficult. At yet every human manages to operate under one - as AhhhTheFrench's examples show, everyone is already rejecting infinitely many such wagers at every point in their lives. The big problem for your argument is that most of these difficulties don't really require infinities, basically every stupid gotcha works about the same with just extremely big rewards for extremely low probabilities. You're also not giving him money if he promises he's invented life extension technology that will allow you and your family billions of years of happy (and fully-christian-compliant for all you afterlife worries) life. One rejects that offer by the same internal mechanism as the infinite version. But your steps 2.-4. rely precisely on the infinite.

5. Technically true in that there's no reason to think any way is likely, but this doesn't lead into the following steps.

6. This isn't even an argument, just a baseless assertion. If I had to pick one I'd say hallucinogens have stronger standing than religion here, but I don't actually have to pick.

7.1. You smuggled in some christian assumptions in the formulation in this statement - many religions involve a multitude of supernatural forces with differing agendas and power levels. Large religions could be such because they are led by evil forces or whatever.

7.2. Even assuming monotheism, that may be how a reasonable god would operate, but so much evidence from our world shows that, were there a god, it would be very far from a reasonable one.

8. Straightforwardly false. Especially when you nicely worded it to include nirvana.

9. If you're going for appeasing multiple religions at once, there's an infinity to choose from, so why stop at judaism and christianity?

10. As others have already mentioned, this one is very weak if you haven't already bought into a christian worldview.

1. The problem of handling many wagers virtually goes away once you accept one: the infinites involved in pursuing that one more or less perfectly are free to outweigh the others. It's actually pretty simple to make a decision theory that accepts it. Including hyperreals, and then doing the usual shut-up-and-multiply, works. LessWrong has written at length because they have no good way to reject the wager—I don't know that there's any real consistent way to do so—and so they just try to reject it while changing nothing else, which is just inconsistent. At least, so far as I have seen; I haven't looked in a while. (Especially funny in light of the EA shift somewhat in favor of longtermism: you know what else cares a lot about things with low chances of effective changes but extremely high rewards? This, but more.)

5. Doesn't it lead into them?

6. Fair enough. I mean, I do think you should pick, but if you think hallucinogens are more likely, then that would be the right move.

7.1. Then judge accordingly. In any case, if they're large because they're more powerful, wouldn't the more powerful be more likely to win in whatever cosmic battles we're talking about? Maybe you should worried that they might be evil forces, but if they're going to win, that doesn't sound good for anyone, not just their devotees.

7.2. Maybe that's how a reasonable god would act, and we shouldn't necessarily expect that, but we should make the best guess we can, and I don't exactly have a better one to offer.

8. Fair enough. Nirvana is cessation from suffering through infinite lives, right? Well, if those lives are finite in suffering each, and there are an ℵ0 number of lives to live through, well, there are larger infinities that could be promised by the other religions. (Yes, I didn't want to mention this messiness before, but there's no reason it wouldn't be present. It's unclear how they relate to each other, but most religions do not put an upper bound on how good their benefit/how harmful their cost, unlike what I just characterized nirvana as.)

9. Because large religions are more likely, assuming 7 is right. Combine that with prohibitions in said large religions on worshipping other gods, and so you shouldn't seek out more. (I gave Judaism a pass on that, because there are at least arguments to be made that Abrahamic religions worship the same God.)

10. Sure, this point is currently weak.

Edit: This doesn't matter, but I'm not currently convinced that by billions you've reached the point that the increase in benefit outweighs the decrease in probability enough to make it worth it. But at some point that does start happening, so, as I said, this point doesn't matter.

can you escape the list autoformatting?

3\. X

→

3. X

Step 1 seems very shaky to me, as it assumes the reward-structure of real, Earth theologies. These gods are likely to involve something like "Infinite reward for belief; Infinite punishment for disbelief."

If we assume God operates on the opposite payout, then Pascal's Wager clearly implies we need to be Atheist!

Then your problem isn't with assuming that the things that everything should be done are infinites, in what you just said, you seem to concede that. It's with step 5, maybe, as you think we can't know anything.

Alright, so now, what are you going to do?

It seems fairly unlikely to me that those people claiming divine revelation and eternal rewards would do precisely nothing to affect the probabilities involved, and, if you have no competition in mind that gives you a more likely source of infinite gain/loss, then you should go wholeheartedly after that small chance.

That is, God could have the opposite payout, but revelation, in my opinion, makes it slightly more likely that he has the policies conveyed than that he has the opposite, and any slight likeliness will dominate over the rest of your options. But it would be weird if they cancelled out exactly to zero, so if you really think the other way is more compelling, then you should act fanatically that way. If you're really not sure, well, this is literally the most important thing, so you should think extremely hard, like, lifetime of effort hard, in order to discern any minute difference in probability, so that you can figure out what to orient yourself around. Under no circumstances should you be ignoring all this.

I originally engaged because your step 1 name drops Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager assumes the reward structure (God wants to be believed).

It seems the phrasing of your step 1 should be more like "We should avoid infinite punishments and seek out infinite rewards." Then, you introduce the reward structure all the way down in step 5 or 6, where it is awarded the position of Null Hypothesis on account of the scriptures.

This argument seems to me like a rhetorical device, and not reasoning. Nobody decides to think about infinite rewards and punishments, and then stumbles upon sacred texts. People read the sacred texts and then start thinking about the expected utility of infinite rewards and punishments. Someone doing reasoning would notice if the texts are just an incentive structure, and if so, discard the whole infinite reward business.

I guess this makes me not on board with 1, as this is clearly a rigged game with a pre-written Bottom Line.

You're right, I only actually bring up God later. The whole argument here is a more fleshed out version of Pascal's wager that doesn't assume Christianity is the only possible such wager. I didn't mean to include the whole thing in step one.

I guess I don't quite follow why you're rejecting this. You're saying that this isn't usually the way that people approach things. Sure. Does that mean it's wrong?

I don't understand what you're saying in this sentence: "Someone doing reasoning would notice if the texts are just an incentive structure, and if so, discard the whole infinite reward business." Could you elaborate?

I guess this makes me not on board with 1, as this is clearly a rigged game with a pre-written Bottom Line.

I don't think that's a good reason to reject step 1. You seem to be saying that these are specious arguments trying to trick you into being religious, and therefore can be dismissed. But that's not actually any reason to think that 1 (we'll follow your phrasing of it) is wrong.

I find 1 extremely compelling, and it should be true just as a matter of general principles, before we consider any implications: it's worth pursuing better things and avoiding bad things in general, this is just more of that.

I'm glad I didn't misread your points, indeed I felt pretty good about my comprehension once I saw another of your replies (An earlier draft of my post included language like: "It seems I am stuck believing in infinite rewards and punishment" in regards to seeing that step 5 invokes scripture, and step 1 merely invokes infinite reward and punishment. It seems the trap I fell into was intended!)

The impression I get from Pascal's Wager: an a-priori argument for God for those who think it distasteful to apply that "empiricism" business to the beautiful question of theism. When deployed in that manner, it is open to the non-empirical attack of "the Atheist's God." The Thiest's retort "that seems unlikely!" amounts to cherry-picking evidence.

Your more fleshed out version of Pascal's Wager appears to be in the business of evaluating evidence. Of course, one would need evidence in order to even consider the hypothesis about infinite rewards and punishments, given that empirically, there doesn't seem to be infinite of anything around us! The police do not open a phonebook and randomly determine a suspect to investigate when they hear of a new crime. The laws of probability and what we might call "reasonable thought" obligate them to possess evidence before considering any suspect in the first place. It would be even more disturbing to learn the accused is a rival of the sheriff!

Your focus on infinite rewards and punishments is not separate from sacred texts. The reason anyone discusses Pascal's Water and infinite rewards and punishments is because of the sacred texts. So this business of "deciding what are the infinite rewards and punishments" is of course a strategic choice of starting point. It seems to me we should start with the evidence in front of us: the sacred texts. Maybe I chose that strategically? I don't have perfect access to my mind's internals. The sacred texts seem to me quite easily explainable as a lie to steer people's behavior by giving them incentives (That's what I meant by "incentive structure")

More comments

Regarding 10, if you go back far enough Islam is seen as a schism from Christianity by some writers. Notably Dante has Muhammad being tormented in hell as a schismatic, not as a pagan/non-Christian/whatever.

My impression was that it was more common to characterize it as heresy than schism, but yes, it was usual to see it as a departure from Christianity rather than another pagan religion.

Couldn't you argue that large religions that revise existing religions are less to be false, because God would not tolerate such mass heresy, and so Islam is more likely to be true than Christianity?

To be a Christian, you have to think that (a) Muhammad was a false prophet, (b) Muhammad was massively successful, and (c) God let Muhammad live a long and successful life (vastly more successful in his lifetime, as a prophet, than Jesus) knowing that it would lead to a mass heresy, and then tolerated Islam becoming a massively successful religion. Whereas, in Islam, Christianity is one of the revelations of true Islam that was corrupted due to human imperfection: Jesus was essentially a Muslim prophet, but - like all those prior to Muhammad - unsuccessful in delivering the true revelation, with his followers adding false elements e.g. that Jesus was not just the Son of Man, but the Son of God; not the blood descendent of David through Joseph, but the Son of God (and also God).

You might say, "Ah, but God doesn't intervene in such cases, at least not post-X AD, when he cut back on the smiting and miracle business, whereas before he might turn you into a pillar of salt if you looked back towards a sinful city" but then it seems you should also give up Premise 7.

And Muslims don't deny all of Christianity (e.g. that there is one God) just things like the Trinity, which are hardly the most attractive parts: even if you're willing to tolerate the mystery of the Trinity, it's hardly the first thing you'd bring up if you were trying to convince someone of Christianity. You'd want them to at least believe that God the Father exists, that Jesus was his son, that Jesus rose from the dead having sacrificed himself for our sins, and THEN, once the person is on board and emotionally invested and convinced they must be a Christian to be saved, say "And Jesus is also God, in a sense that I cannot explain to you and is a wonderful, beautiful mystery."

On the assumption of an activist God, who sometimes (but not always) intervenes to promote religions, Islam seems more plausible than Christianity.

I don't understand Pascal's wager arguments.

I can just as easily claim that there is an invisible being in my garage that will torment you upon your death for all time if you don't believe in it, and grant you an eternal afterlife of bliss if you do. That wouldn't cause you to believe in it on the off chance I am telling the truth, would it? What about if I claim to have that power and if you don't pay me 1,000 dollars each month as an indulgence I'll damn you to hell, and if you do I'll make sure you get to the good place? Isn't 1,000 dollars cheap insurance against an eternity of suffering or missing out on bliss for all time?

I'm making that claim! I'll be waiting for my venmo transfer when you're ready.

Alternatively, suppose there is a god who only accepts atheists into heaven, and all of the religions in the world are tests created by it to sort out the overly credulous. There are infinite religions you can create, including ones where atheists are the only ones who go to heaven.

Okay, sure, those are all possible.

But are they more likely? Once we've gotten to the step of "ok, we should care about infinites" there's not really any going back. The game is no longer about feeling a little happier today, or satisfied in a few decades, or getting the next promotion. It's no longer a matter of mere life and death. Now the concern, the only concern, is about pursuit of those infinite goods, and flight from the infinite bads.

You ask, how should we know? How may we judge some more likely than others?

Well, you may find it hard. Fair enough. But that doesn't change that that is fundamentally what things are about, what matters.

So: is it possible that there's a god that rewards atheists with heaven, and punishes the religious? Sure. But is there reason to think that that's more likely than the reverse? I don't see any reason to. But if that is the most likely source of infinites, then sure, maximize around that, and flee religion like your life depends on it (or, well, do the most to forget about the whole thing). But do you actually have any reason to think that that is the case? Religions being divine revelation seems more straightforward.

So, do you think that that's more likely, or only that it's possible?

"Religions being divine revelation seems more straightforward."

How so? Isn't the most likely thing that all religions are made up? You just stumbled into the one true one by blind luck (or divine plan)?

There is no way to rationally discuss something so fundamentally irrational, in the end it boils down to "I believe, or I have faith". I try not to get bogged down in the weeds with people who study the bible for fun. It is like engaging with any fandom in their domain. The difference is, most fans of Stargate don't consider it to be a factual representation of events taking place under Cheyenne Mountain in the late 1990's and early 2000's

To be clear, I'm not trying to say here that religions being divine revelation is more probable than not.

What I was trying to say was that a major religion being divine revelation seems to me to be more likely than that there is a god that rewards atheists infinitely or punishes theists infinitely. Specifically, for the argument, the question is about looking around to find the best way to get infinite expected value. I'm guessing you don't think there's any especially likely way to do so, so now we're looking for the least unlikely way to do so (even if it's still very unlikely). I think a religion could well be that.

Why a major one? I don't know, seems intuitively likely that a big one's more likely to be true than a small one. Like, if the god's interested in contact with humans, it would be unsurprising if that god is interested in contact with a lot of humans. Yes, that's a judgment call, but it seems like the right call to me—at least more reasonable and workable than the alternative. Is there any reason you might think otherwise?

If you recall, this was to you posing alternate wagers; I'm talking here about how to gauge between them. But I don't think posing alternate possible wagers entitles you to reject wagers altogether.

Anyway, I'm trying to make a rational argument here, so feel free to engage in reason.

It seems like this is more or less isomorphic to utilitarianism, and my critique of it would be the same as my critique of utilitarianism: You seem to be trying to do math here, but I don't think it's actually math. That is to say, I don't think these calculations actually deliver repeatable answers independent of specific observers, and I don't think there's a way to fix that any more than there's a rigorous way to multiply potatoes by carrots.

I do, actually, think you can apply math here. You can use hyperreals or surreals: probabilities are able rigorously to be formulated in such contexts, I believe. And, mathematically, out comes Pascal's wager: a fanaticism for the infinite over the finite (and bigger infinites over smaller infinites, but I didn't want to complicate the matter), provided that we're always dealing with finite and not infinitesimal probabilities (which I'm relatively confident we are, but I didn't want to complicate the matter).

Now, assigning probabilities to things is tricky, but I think it's something that must be done. We can certainly think that things are more or less likely in general. It might be hard to do rigorously, to come up with exact numbers, but all you really need for this context is the balance of the matter, to figure out what's more likely from your own point of view, in the sense that the LessWrongers like talking about Bayes.

EDIT: just realized I wasn't quite addressing your objection. The Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem is pretty good evidence that your preferences, if you want them to have certain desirable properties (for example, one of the four is transitivity: if I would prefer to eat a hamburger now than to eat pasta, and I would prefer to eat pasta now than to eat brussels sprouts, then I must prefer to eat a hamburger now than to eat brussels sprouts), must be able to be modeled by a utility function. That of course isn't saying that you need to just calculate whether this makes more people happy or something, and there, ethics is done. You're free to have among the things you care about how subjectively likely it is that that course of action might be violating some divine law, for example. Nor is it saying that you ought to be pulling out a function and writing down numbers or you're Irrational. But it is saying that, if you want your preferences to follow some pretty reasonable seeming properties, they need to have that certain mathematical structure. But you don't necessarily need to think about in your day-to-day life, you can just live it, caring about the things you care about.

I just realized in that last paragraph I was switching back and forth between ethics and preferences. I don't think those are the same, but I do think that ideally, our preferences should follow ethics. In any case, both involve "how do I decide what to do," so the same argument is relevant for each.

What exactly have you contributed to the discussion here?

We have Nazis and Holocaust Deniers and white nationalists and pedophiles and Repeal the 19th (and the 13th and 14th...) party members here, and people who really really fucking do not like them manage to refrain from posting "You suck and your arguments are bad" every time they post.

So far, this is not the "mind-blowing" politeness you promised, and this is about your last warning because I'm sick of seeing these low-effort potshots in the queue just because you can't control yourself.

Come on, it's bad form to use me for every single example.

You see every post of mine in the queue as do all the other mods, due to low vote count, I think this leads to a focus that otherwise wouldn't fall on me. I thought that was an accurate assessment of that post, especially since the author couldn't see my post. But again, I will dial it down much further.

First of all, that's not actually true. I don't know exactly how the algorithm works, but not all your posts are automatically filtered, just a lot of them.

Second, we mostly see your posts a lot because you get reported a lot. You know what most people who get reported a lot have in common? They post a lot of really shitty comments. We try hard not to let the mob silence someone for having an unpopular point of view, but this isn't happening to you. You are not posting a fringe or minority view. Most people here are in fact somewhere on the atheist-agnostic spectrum, and you're annoying them too.

The best way to "dial it down" would be to stop seeing red every time someone says something about God or the Enlightenment.

I'm getting there, it is a process. I still do think every single one of my comments must be manually approved though.

I'll accept a ban for this if need be, but this type of comment from this specific user is getting really old. It's near-constant, disdainful, antagonistic, and never changes, and never gets punished. We get that you don't like religious people, but nothing in your above characterization is remotely reasonable, fair, or calculated to lead to any useful discussion of the topic.

Bro, he just got warned for it. Wait a minute before firing off comments like that. Yes it's annoying to see /r/atheism comments from 2010 getting posted like it's insightful or groundbreaking or solving a major problem with our community(the motte is supermajority atheist or at least agnostic, tradcaths are overrepresented but still single digits). But there are people whose actual job is to tell him to knock off the smug one liners and complaining about the <20% who are religious believers of any sort. We should let them do it before posting even more complaining.

The author can't even see my comment. They blocked me months ago. What would eating a ban with a user name "TheThrowaway" even stand for?

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