Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

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As a non-religious person, certainly I understand many of my beliefs come from convention or intuition or whatever non-rational source, sure.

But I don't have any meta-belief telling me to hold onto given beliefs-that-seem-implausible-or-unverifiable because I'll be rewarded in the end or because it's a test or whatever. I don't continually change whatever belief I know is arbitrary but that's because consistency has some utility so point remains.

Basically, I have no trouble with non-rational beliefs and behaviors. But religious specifically espouses irrationalist beliefs - irrationalism being the exhortation to keep, cultivate and fixate beliefs beyond the rational. Institutions other than religion, various flavors of Stalinism say, promote faith, fixating one's beliefs and so-forth. I'm against those too. But a wide variety of secular belief systems are against the irrationalist approach - some versions of liberal religion try to escape it too but as people observe, these folks are kind of becoming non-religious.

Edit: Just generally, "everything not-wholly-rational is a religion" is a slippery argument that's being way-abused in this thread.

Religion, spiritual beliefs, ghosts, lottery ticket "investing," superstitions, luck, horoscopes, phobias, ritual sacrifices, Capgras delusions/changelings, and faith healing are examples of what I categorize as magical thinking.

These are the ways of animals who cannot control their emotions long-enough to think clearly and honestly between banging on bones in front of a monolith.

If the average member of society is ever to progress beyond being a bunch of easily-misled rubes herded into tribal cult ideological pens, something needs to change where decent, intelligent people are lionized over minimally-useful celebrities and charlatans.

(The United States was founded by primarily anti-intellectual merchants and landowners who scoffed at the Old World's stodginess and intellectual pursuits.)

phobias

That's an odd thing to put in your list. Phobias aren't something people choose to believe in. They're specifically an irrational, subconscious pattern of behaviour. That isn't a belief.

It's only odd for people with external locus-of-control magical beliefs that things "just happen" to them. Phobias are irrational fears most people choose not to overcome. This is in contrast to people who aren't ruled by fear, and confront and overcome their fears. Therefore, a lack of agency argument would be moot. And, phobias aren't behaviors, they're dysfunctional, intrusive, reflex feelings related to particular triggers.

What is rational? Is not rationality subjective? What you might deem irrational others might deem perfectly rational, and vice-versa, what you might deem rational others might deem quite obviously irrational.

Are we to see experiences as rational explanation of a phenomena? Sure, I see and feel a rock, and I verify its existence rationally. I smell food and verify its existence rationally. What about people experiencing a divine being communicating to them, then?

No, we must disregard this as hallucination or a psychological problem. Only what we (and by we I mean the "educated western world") in our pre-determined frame of rationality deem rational can ever be rational, and all that falls outside must naturally be considered irrational irrespective of its potential rationality in relation to other experiences we might call rational.

Really (I think), something being rational is a state of mind, a common understanding with our peers. In a church most would agree that their belief is rational, not out of ignorance (though here you might disagree), but out of shared acceptance of a different frame of rationality, essentially accepting other experiences as being able to feed to rationality than those you might accept.

I guess the point I'm trying to make (and I might be way off) is that when you say that religiosity espouses irrationalist beliefs, they're irrational to you, within your frame of rationalism. To someone else you're the ignorant one who's fighting tooth and nail.

Edit: To those down voting I would love to engage further in conversation about this!

Rational means you'll make choices that benefit yourself. It's one of the core assumptions of game theory, economics, and policymaking. All the math breaks as soon as that's not the case because irrational is unpredictable. What's nice about rational agency is that it makes cooperation without hierarchy possible so it's been known to rustle the jimmies of the first estate.

There are at least two forms of rationality – epistemic rationality (aka theoretical rationality), and instrumental rationality. Your comment doesn't clearly draw the distinction between them.

In the context of discussions about the rationality of religious belief, we are primarily talking about epistemic/theoretical rationality, although non-epistemic rationality does sometimes come up (for example, Pascal's wager).

Some people think epistemic rationality can be reduced to instrumental rationality, but the philosopher Thomas Kelly wrote what is (to me at least) a pretty convincing refutation of that viewpoint: https://www.princeton.edu/~tkelly/papers/epistemicasinstrume...

I'm familiar with the rationalist movement and all the rationalists I've met have been wonderful people with few exceptions. I hadn't heard of epistemic rationality, but I find it interesting how the LessWrong definition (top search result) makes it sound like self-criticism and atonement.

One concern I have is how closely many people associate "rationality" with the "rationalist movement" (LessWrong, etc). Rationality has been discussed by philosophers for well over 2000 years. Aristotle famously declared that rationality was the feature that distinguished human beings from lesser animals. Most of those philosophers had radically different views from those of the contemporary "rationalist movement". Even today, many thinkers who radically disagree with the "rationalist movement" still believe in the importance of rationality, they just disagree with the "rationalist movement" on what actually counts as "rational".

Well now they get to be a footnote in Plato's Republic. I'm not concerned about what people believe. If they want to get excited about Bayes theorem then that's great. I'm not concerned if people disagree on what it's called or how it's defined. Do you think the people who get paid to be rational understand rationality? I've seen things like software that earned billions in additional revenue get rolled back because we couldn't explain how it made decisions. The answer is that I don't have the answers and no one else does too. What's remarkable is how philosophers like Charles Babbage helped us make thousands of years of philosophy executable and we've unleashed it unto the world. How do we begin to understand that let alone explain it to the world?

Do we want people to make choices that benefit themselves? That seems to be the root of so many problems in the world. Shouldn't we encourage people to make choices that benefit others, benefit the wider community, etc.?

Of course and one way to do that is by ensuring everyone gains. Startups for example create wealth by building products that provide a service to their communities. Paul Graham talks about this sort of thing on his blog. I think that's great even though it's not the case for folks in rent-seeking economies with zero-sum games where people can only win by making the other guy lose. Would you encourage someone in that situation to act against their self-interest?

No, we should encourage choices that maximize the benefit over all individuals including the person who is making the choice. The person making the choice is in no way morally less important than others.

We should also avoid thinking in terms of a false dichotomy. Most voluntary exchanges and relationships in the world are win-win-win, in that both counterparties are gaining and the externality is positive. In such a context, self-maximizing through profit seeking is the choice that maximizes the benefit to others.

What we want to discourage is a much more narrow cone of behavior. Corruption. Negative externalities. Things that aren't win-win-win.

> What's nice about rational agency is that it makes cooperation without hierarchy possible

And economic liberalism is the belief system that it works for the greater good.

> And economic liberalism is the belief system that it works for the greater good.

Perhaps also anarchism, due to its focus on having the minimum amount of hierarchy possible.

We actually don't know that:

"What about people experiencing a divine being communicating to them, then?"

But we have studied this and the answers tell us what the most realistic thing actually is and thats why we see 'divine being communicating to them' as a mental illness.

You can expierence this challanging thought yourself by taking LSD. Realizing that you are actually know everything for a few hours and than getting back to your 'normal reality' is exhausting.

But i still don't believe we are all caught on the earth and we need LSD to shackle those bounds. I know how many people are on the planet, how many people i have seen die and leave our planet in the normal rational way. I have never ever seen anything which makes me believe otherwise and LSD showed me even more how fragile my own reality is.

You might want to look in a medical book on different topics you refered to to see what you believe. Nonetheless its just more realistic that human a had a similiar brain issue than all other similiar independend cases before than that this person is now talking directly to god and we areound us are all dumb shits not being able to recognise it.

My default sentence for this is simple: I'm a good person, and i don't like the idea very much that there is a god who allows cancer in kids and rape from religious people and murder etc. and either this god is a massive asshole, clearly not relevant enought to woreshop or doesn't exist anyway.

I don’t know much of the field of rationality, yet I can’t help but think that you confirm my idea that rationality is subjective. You determine rationality based on probability, so essentially when you’re saying something is irrational, you mean it is improbable (or in your words realistic).

Taken further, is it not then irrational to think that the earth arose out of absolute nothingness, to become the perfectly aligned world we know? Is this realistic? Is this probable? (Not saying the alternative is necessarily more probable, just asking)

As to your default sentence you might want to look into the discipline of Harmatiology (the doctrine of sin), for you do not understand the commonly held view of Christians on this point.

I do connect rationality with math and chances.

Of course there is always an unkown right? We don't know it all.

But as i said somewhere else: math for example is universal, you can come up with the same rules independently were you are.

This doesn't happen with religion/believe.

There is no experiment in the world, which shows any universal truth to believing in one specific god or more specific gods or religion.

Nothing spiritual was proven ever in my lifetime. None.

So i dream. I like to come up with things, ideas, stories, places etc. but that doesn't motivate me to believe in it so hard that it affects my normal life.

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