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Bingo cards and salvation

Mr. DarcyMr. Darcy
edited 2013-12-23 15:10:43 in Talk

Generally, I think of Lesswrong as a secular cult like Objectivism or General Semantics, but their member Yvain is highly insightful.

"the scariest thing would be if one of those bingo cards had, in the free space in the middle: 'You are just pattern-matching my responses. I swear that I have something legitimate to tell you which is not just a rehash of the straw-man arguments you’ve heard before, so please just keep an open mind and hear me out.'

If someone did that, even Origen would have to admit they were beyond any hope of salvation."

He also says "extreme rationality has no practical benefits".

'Learning calculus won't make you a billiard champion', 'and convincing Newton he would been even more successful by applying extreme rationality to his religious beliefs would probably be as misguided'.

"Your success in the world depends on things ranging from your hairstyle to your height to your social skills to your IQ score to cognitive constructs psychologists don't even have names for yet."

Man, where were you more a century ago when high-IQ freethinkers first got obsessed with general intelligence and eugenics?

Comments

  • OdradekOdradek
    My dreams exceed my real life
    He invented Poisoning the Well too.
  • AlirozAliroz
    ...And even when your hope is gone
    move along, move along, just to make it through
    (2015 self)
    I'm not seeing it, I'm just seeing an uppity person.
  • Yarrun XIXYarrun XIX
    Whores! we want "poems that kill."
    Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
    guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
    and take their weapons leaving them dead
    A bit too esoteric for me, but I get the jist. He's an atheistbro who recognizes the flaws of extreme atheist broism.
  • Mr. DarcyMr. Darcy
    "It is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected.... Whosoever alters them to suit his own opinions, whatever they are, is guilty, to our thinking, of an act of presumption, and appropriates to himself what does not belong to him." -- Charles Dickens
    Yarrun XIX said:

    A bit too esoteric for me, but I get the jist. He's an atheistbro who recognizes the flaws of extreme atheist broism.

    "Bro" is just about the last term I'd use for geeks who read science fiction novels about AI. Though I have seen such a thing as a "Bayesian Bodybuilder".
  • Mr. DarcyMr. Darcy
    "It is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected.... Whosoever alters them to suit his own opinions, whatever they are, is guilty, to our thinking, of an act of presumption, and appropriates to himself what does not belong to him." -- Charles Dickens

    And as far as atheism, yesbut:

    "The Christians' problem isn't that there aren't enough Christians. And it's not that Christians aren't devout and zealous enough. And it's not even that Christians don't understand what their faith expects of them. Their problem is that the impulse to love thy neighbor gets lost somewhere between theory and action. My urge as an outsider is to blame it on a combination of akrasia, lack of sufficient self-consciousness, and people who accept Christianity 100% on the conscious level but don't 'feel it in their bones'.

    If I were a theologian, I would be recommending to my fellow Christians one of two things:

    First, that they spend a whole lot less time in Bible study than they do right now, because they already know a whole lot more Bible than they actually use, and teaching them more Bible isn't going to solve that problem. Instead they need to be spending that time thinking of ways to solve their problem with applying the Bible to real life."

  • Yarrun XIXYarrun XIX
    Whores! we want "poems that kill."
    Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
    guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
    and take their weapons leaving them dead
    Mr. Darcy said:

    And as far as atheism, yesbut:

    "The Christians' problem isn't that there aren't enough Christians. And it's not that Christians aren't devout and zealous enough. And it's not even that Christians don't understand what their faith expects of them. Their problem is that the impulse to love thy neighbor gets lost somewhere between theory and action. My urge as an outsider is to blame it on a combination of akrasia, lack of sufficient self-consciousness, and people who accept Christianity 100% on the conscious level but don't 'feel it in their bones'.

    If I were a theologian, I would be recommending to my fellow Christians one of two things:

    First, that they spend a whole lot less time in Bible study than they do right now, because they already know a whole lot more Bible than they actually use, and teaching them more Bible isn't going to solve that problem. Instead they need to be spending that time thinking of ways to solve their problem with applying the Bible to real life."

    ...accurate
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