1. I rarely fully understand my own positions on minutia 2. Writing is rewriting.
I write forum posts to solidify my understanding of my own interests, beliefs, and reasoning. I often edit them multiple times before moving on and ignoring the responses thereafter. I can reference them and have to other people who ask my opinion. Sometimes I do respond back to replies immediately, and sometimes I revisit days later, after I've had time to put it in my day-to-day context. It's not a hard and fast rule.
Posting stopped being about convincing someone else maybe 20 years ago (around age 30). I do post to look back and understand myself. To others, I'm sure this sounds like existential navel-gazing and self-centered blathering, but I don't mind.
I would guess I post about 40% of the comments I write.
I assume the phenomenon where I write 90% of an email, save it as a draft to finish later, never remember to finish it, get asked about it and have irrefutable certainty I sent it, then finally discover it as an unfinished draft is a facet of the same trickery. Stupid brain... Grrr.
Come to think of it, that’s a major reason why fully agentic coding doesn’t resonate with me and/or feels like I’m not growing or learning. I’m short-circuiting the “journaling” step where I mentally attack my own thoughts and assumptions.
"Sorry this letter is so long as I did not have time to make it shorter."
One of my best professors often asked me:
"what are you trying to achieve here?"
Every time they asked this, it always put me into a deep thinking mode. In some cases it did trigger defensive mindsets, but I think having to actually engage by taking a step back and think deeply is for the best if you want to have any hope of changing your mind on something.
this is a pithy think to say but its really not true, and every person that has lost their religion and been convinced by rational argument is a counter example.
And what of people that were convinced by rational argument that a God must exist? To some (Aristotle, Plotinus, Leibniz, etc) it is irrational to deny such existence:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35592365-five-proofs-of-...
You also seem to imply that rationality is a single monolithic thing:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whose_Justice%3F_Which_Rationa...
Whenever I've met people who claim to have "reasoned" their way out of religion it has always been extremely shallow teenage rebellion, and always driven by feelings.
Even aalewis was "euphoric".
A similar saying that I think I picked up here would be, "I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you."
But that interpretation would make the second half a moot point, wouldn't it?
> You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
If you want to say a person can only reason themselves into any position, it could become "You can't reason someone out of a position."
Do you know any specific examples of this? All examples I know are like people collected some experiences, they needed some mental map for it, and they've built one that doesn't involve religion. In the process of building they really listened to rational arguments, but rational arguments were not the reason for the change, they were the means.
The author of the article complain that people do not listen to their arguments, but if we take a closer look, and look for bigger things, not things like the best way to write bubblesort, people are not ready to change their views while in an argument. They could listen for arguments, but they wouldn't change their position. It would be stupid to change the position in a heat of an argument. It may be stupid to change the position as a result of an argument. People needs time and may be a lot of conversations to look at things from different angles, to think it through. And after that it is very hard to pinpoint what was the reason of the loss of the religion. People talk with other, get new ideas, and they live their lives applying these ideas to the reality. Sometimes it leads to changes in their worldview.
So, you could say he rationally decided to keep his irrational beliefs.
The rational arguments form a structure that beliefs can hang on, but the core process of changing ones mind is not rational. Like many people, I have changed my thinking on many topics over the course of my life, and arguments that I used to find convincing I now consider to be filled with holes, and arguments I used to think were paper-thin now seem stronger than steel. You can find a rational argument for most beliefs, and you can tear down a rational argument for most beliefs.
Reason just isn't how we form our beliefs at all, it's how we convince ourselves that the things we believe are true.
I'm sure some atheists could be convinced. The rule "all atheists will reject evidence of God" seems false. The rule "all atheists will accept evidence of God" also seems false. Life is more complicated than that. It depends on the atheist and on the evidence.
But of course that's not true. I would believe in a God with proof of their existence. I simply have not encountered such proof that hold up to my standards of proof of such an extraordinary claim.
And you never will. This is pretty much my point!
proofs I would accept:
(for Christianity)
Biblically accurate angels descend onto earth, to everyone, and submit themselves to scientific testing, which conclude they are made of something non-physical.
Divinity is proven to be a measurable and testable attribute of reality.
Reality warping magic, demonstrated to not be any sort of trick or technology, and limited to those devout to said religion.
God shows his ass to everyone, the only part of him that - according to the bible - won't make a human insane.
the basis of these proofs can be distilled down to some basic requirements: - It must happen in 'reality' not 'in my head'. - It must be testable, and repeatable. - It must have no 'natural/scientific' explanation. - It must be viewable by everyone.
That's not 'all' of the requirements, but regardless of which religion we are talking about: those are the common primitives.
Nothing I've encountered have met these standards. But if those standards of mine are met...
> "Biblically accurate angels descend onto earth, to everyone, and submit themselves to scientific testing, which conclude they are made of something non-physical."
You would easily agree that something which can be seen, touched, measured, interact with the sky, your eyes, and measuring equipment is "non-physical"? You wouldn't suspect the angels are instead aliens?
> "Divinity is proven to be a measurable and testable attribute of reality."
At this point, if it happened then it's unlikely to be in the macro-scale world that we could all test with an easily available and usable thermometer or film camera or alkalinity measuring strip, because we would probably have noticed that by now. Imagine instead it's a paper from CERN and the Large Hadron Collider where in some extreme situation there's a deviation of 0.0000000<whatever>% from an expected value and experts in Quantum Theology claim that's a testable, repeatable, measure of Divinity. Are you tempted to believe this could happen, or are you already full of reasons to dismiss it?
> "Reality warping magic, demonstrated to not be any sort of trick or technology, and limited to those devout to said religion."
Mass warps spacetime and curves light rays. That's neither trick nor technology. It's arguably "limited to those devout to physics" in the sense that Flat Earthers might not accept it and primitive/uneducated tribes have no grounds for understanding what it means at all and no ability to build machines to test it. Similar with Young's double slit experiment, Lorentz contraction, entanglement, and others (reality warping, or brain warping?).
> "God shows his ass to everyone, the only part of him that - according to the bible - won't make a human insane."
What would it take for you to agree that that's whose ass it was?
You can believe the right thing for the wrong reasons, and I would argue all humans are in that bucket nearly all the time.
That's demonstrably not true, people deconvert from religion and other irrational beliefs all the time.
Disagree here, because:
* Most of us have an irrational attachment to many of our positions. Arguing may or may not be futile, but if you can't "walk away" from most people (except if you sit at home and do nothing, and maybe not even then).
* These people may well be your coworkers on your project or at the organization you work for. So there is no "walk away", you're working with them and will continue working with them.
Being hard wired to non logical believes is just not good in this regard.