Last week, after a lot of thought and help from LessWrong, I finally stopped believing in god and dropped my last remnants of Catholicism. It is turned out to be a huge relief, though coping with some of the consequences and realizations that come with atheism has been a little difficult.
Do any of you have any tips you noticed about yourself or others after just leaving religion? I've noticed a few small habits I need to get rid of, but I am worried I'm missing larger, more important ones.
Are there any particular posts I should skip ahead and read? I am currently at the beginning of reductionism. Are their any beliefs you've noticed ex-catholics holding that they don't realize are obviously part of their religion? I do not have any one immediately around me I can ask, so I am very grateful for any input. Thank you!
Well, here at LessWrong, we follow a thirty-something bearded Jewish guy who, along with a small group of disciples, has performed seemingly impossible deeds, preaches in parables, plans to rise from the dead and bring with him as many of us as he can, defeat evil, and create a paradise where we can all live happily forever.
So yeah, getting away from Catholic habits of thought may be tough. With work, you'll get there though...
Speaking from experience: don't kneejerk too hard. It's all too easy to react against everything at all implicitly associated with a religion or philosophy that you now reject the truth-claims of and distort parts of your personality or day to day life or emotions or symbolic thought that have nothing to do with what you have rejected.
Don't forget that reversed stupidity is not intelligence; a belief doesn't become wrong simply because it's widely held by Catholics.
Similarly, there's no need to be scared of responding positively to art or other ideas because they originated from a religious perspective; if atheism required us to do that, it would be almost as bleak a worldview as it's accused of being. Adeste Fideles doesn't stop being a beautiful song when you realize its symbols don't have referents. I think of the Christian mythology as one of my primary fantasy influences—like The Lord of the Rings, Discworld, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant or Doctor Who—so, if I find myself reacting emotionally to a Christian meme, I don't have to worry that I'm having a conversion experience (or that God exists and is sneakily trying to win me over!): it's perfectly normal, and lawful, for works of fiction to have emotional impact.
What others already said: Don't try to reverse stupidity by avoiding everything conected to Catholicism. You are allowed to pick the good pieces and ignore the bad pieces, instead of buying or rejecting the whole package. Catholics also took some good parts from other traditions; which by the way means you don't even have to credit them for inventing the good pieces you decide to take.
If you talk with other religious people, they will probably try the following trick on you: Give you a huge book saying that it actually answers all your questions, and that you should at least read this one book and consider it seriously before you abandon religion completely. Of course if you read the whole book and it doesn't convince you, they will give you another huge book. And another. And another. The whole strategy is to surround you by religion memes (even more strongly than most religious people are), hoping that sooner or later something will "trigger" your religious feelings. And no matter how many books you read, if at some moment you refuse to read yet another book, you will be accused of leaving the religion only because of your ignorance and stubbornness, because this one specific book certainly did contain all answers to your questions and perfectly convincing counterarguments to your arguments, you just refused to even look at it. This game you cannot win: there is no "I have honestly considered all your arguments and found them unconvincing" exit node; the only options given to you are either to give up, or to do something that will allow your opponents to blame you of being willfully ignorant. (So you might as well do the "ignorant" thing now, and save yourself a lot of time.)
Don't try to convince other people, at least not during the first months after deconversion. First, you need to sort out things for yourself (you don't have a convincing success story yet). Second, by the law of reciprocation, if the other people were willing to listen to your explanations, this in turn gives them the moral right to give you a huge book of religious arguments and ask you to read it, which leads to the game described above.
Basicly, realize that you have a right to spend most of your time without thinking about Catholicism, either positively or negatively. That is what most atheists really do. If you were born on another planet, where religion wasn't invented, you wouldn't spend your time arguing against religion. Instead, you would just do what you want to do. So do it now.
I recommend this list:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki_Atheism_FAQ_for_the_Newly_Deconverted
From wikipedia article on rejection therapy:
"At the time of rejection, the player, not the respondent, should be in a position of vulnerability. The player should be sensitive to the feelings of the person being asked."
How does one implement this? One of my barriers to social interactions is the ethical aspect to it; I feel uncomfortable imposing on others or making them uncomfortable. Using other people for one's own therapy seems a bit questionable. Does anyone have anything to share about how to deal with guilt-type feelings and avoid imposing on others with rejection therapy?
What are the most effective charities working towards reducing biotech or pandemic x-risk? I see those mentioned here occasionally as the second most important x-risk behind AI risk, but I haven't seen much discussion on the most effective ways to fund their prevention. Have I missed something?
Here's an idea for enterprising web-devs with a lot more free time than me: an online service that manages a person's ongoing education with contemporary project management tools.
Once signed up to this service, I would like to be able to define educational projects with tasks, milestones, deliverables, etc. against which I can record and monitor my progress. If I specify dependencies and priorities, it can carry out wazzy critical path analysis and tell me what I should be working on and in what order. It can send me encouraging/harassing emails if I don't update it regularly.
Some use cases:
I have enrolled in a formal course of study such as an undergrad degree. I can specify my subjects, texts, deadlines, tests and the like. It will tell me what I should be studying in what order, what areas I'm neglecting, and what I really need to get done before the coming weekend.
I have recently started a new job, and have a package of technologies and skills to learn. Some are more important than others, or have much longer time horizons. If I have x hours a week to develop these skills, it will tell me what I should be doing with those x hours.
Conversely, I am an employer or educator (or world-saving organisation) who wishes oversight of another person's study. I can assign them a prefabricated syllabus and observe their progress.
Some things that might fall out of a system like this once the infrastructure is in place:
- A community whose members can offer each other high-context support and advice
- A lot of useful and interesting data on effective learning routes through various subjects, perhaps powering a recommendation service
I imagine there are enough autodidacts and students on LessWrong to establish a preliminary user base. I for one would happily pay for a service like this.
It's argued there's a risk that in the event of a global catastrophe, humanity would be unable to recover to our current level of capacity because all the easily accessible fossil fuels that we used to get here last time are already burned. Is there a standard, easily Googlable name for this risk/issue/debate?
To anyone out there embedded in a corporate environment, any tips and tricks to getting ahead? I'm a developer embedded within the business part of a tech organization. I've only been there a little while though. I'm wondering how I can foster medium-term career growth (and shorter-term, optimize performance reviews).
Of course "Do your job and do it well" tops the list, but I wouldn't be asking here if I wanted the advice I could read in WSJ.
From personal observations
"Do your job and do it well"
most emphatically does not top the list. Certainly you have to do an adequate job, but your success in a corporate environment depends on your interpersonal skills more than on anything else. You depend on other people to get noticed and promoted, so you need to be good at playing the game. If you haven't taken a Dale Carnegie course or similar, do so. Toastmasters are useful, too. In general, learning to project a bit more status and competence than you think you merit likely means that people would go along with it.
Just to give an example, I have seen a few competent but unexceptional engineers become CEOs and CTOs over a few short years in a growing company, while other, better engineers never advanced beyond a team lead, if that.
If you are an above average engineer/programmer etc. but not a natural at playing politics, consider exploring your own projects. If you haven't read Patrick McKenzie's blog about it, do so. On the other hand, if striking out on your own is not your dream, and you already have enough drive, social skills and charisma to get noticed, you are not likely to benefit from whatever people on this site can tell you.
I'd beware conflating "interpersonal skills" with "playing politics." For CEO at least (and probably CTO as well), there are other important factors in job performance than raw engineering talent. The subtext of your comment is that the companies you mention were somehow duped into promoting these bad engineers to executive roles, but they might have just decided that their CEO/CTO needed to be good at managing or recruiting or negotiating, and the star engineer team lead didn't have those skills.
Second, I think that the "playing politics" part is true at some organizations but not at others. Perhaps this is an instance of All Debates are Bravery Debates.
My model is something like: having passable interpersonal/communication skills is pretty much a no-brainer, but beyond that there are firms where it just doesn't make that much of a difference, because they're sufficiently good at figuring out who actually deserves credit for what that they can select harder for engineering ability than for politics. However, there are other organizations where this is definitely not the case.
Perhaps we could be more specific about the social / political skills. I am probably not good at these skills, but here are a few things I have noticed:
Some of your colleagues have a connection between them unrelated to the work, usually preceding it. (Former classmates. Relatives; not necessarily having the same surname. Dating each other. Dating the other person's family member. Members of the same religious group. Etc.) This can be a strong emotional bond which may override their judgement of the other person's competence. So for example, if one of them is your superior, and the other is your incompetent colleague you have to cooperate with, that's a dangerous situation, and you may not even be aware of it. -- I wish I knew the recommended solution. My approach is to pay attention to company gossip, and to be careful around people who are clearly incompetent and yet not fired. And then I try to take roles where I don't need their outputs as inputs for my work (which can be difficult, because incompetent people are very likely to be in positions where they don't deliver the final product, as if either they or the company were aware of the situation on some level).
If someone complains about everything, that is a red flag; this person probably causes the problems, or at least contributes to them. On the other hand, if someone says everything is great and seems like they mean it, that's possibly also a red flag; it could be a person whose mistakes have to be fixed by someone else (e.g. because of the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph), and that someone else could become you.
Extra red flag is a person who makes a lot of decisions and yet refuses to provide any of them in a written form. (Here, "written form" includes a company e-mail, or generally anything that you could later show to a third party. For example in the case when the person insists on something really stupid, things get horribly wrong, and then suddenly the person says it was actually your idea.) -- One nice trick is to send them an e-mail containing the decisions they gave you, and say something like "here is the summary of our meeting; please confirm if it's correct, or please correct me if I'm not".
Sometimes a person becomes an informational bottleneck between two parts of the company. That could happen naturally, or could be a strategy on their part. In such case, try to find some informal parallel channels to the other part of the graph. Do it especially if you are discouraged by the given person from doing so. For example, if they say the other part is stupid and blames them for all troubles of your part. (Guess what: He is probably telling them the same thing about your part. So now he is the only person the whole company trusts to fight for their best interests against the other stupid part.)
Okay, this was all the dark side. From the light side, being nice to people and having small talk with them is generally useful. Remember facts about them, make notes if necessary (not in front of them). Make sure you connect with everyone at least once in a while, instead of staying within your small circle of comfort.
http://cognitiveengineer.blogspot.com/
by jimmy, our resident evil hypnotist
"Monsters & Magical Sticks: There's No Such Thing As Hypnosis?" is a fine book for explaining what hypnosis is.
The recurring punchline is that there's no Hypnosis but there are hypnotic phenomena. Being a good hypnotist is basically about using a bunch of hypnotic phenomena to go where you want to go.
Framing an interaction is something very important. A hypnosis therapist I know says that the hypnosis sessions for quitting smoking begins with the call.
The patient calls to make an appointment. He answers and asks whether the person has made a decision to quit smoking. If the patient says "no" he tells the patient to call again once he made the decision. Hypnotherapist do a lot of stuff like this.
I am currently teaching myself basic Spanish. At the moment, I'm using my library's (highly limited) resources to refresh my memory of Spanish learned in high school and college. However, I know I won't go far without practice. To this end, I'd like to find a conversation partner.
Does anyone have any recommendation of resources for language learners? Particularly resources that enable conversation (written or spoke) so learners can improve and actually use what they are learning? The resource wouldn't have to be dedicated solely to Spanish learning. Eventually, I want to learn other languages as well (such as German and French).
ROI in learning a foreign language is low, unless it is English. But if you must, I would say the next best thing to immersive instruction would be to watch spanish hulu as an aid to learning. You'd get real conversions at conversational speeds.
If you are willing/able, the best way is to go to a Spanish school in Mexico or Central America and live with a host family for a month or two. I learned more in two months doing that than my first four university classes combined. This probably doesn't fall under "teaching yourself," but if you are serious the other things can't even touch the ROI of an immersive experience, in terms of time and money to Spanish acquired
Fluenz is a great computer-based program, but it's expensive. I used Rosetta Stone a bit, this is way better.
Pimsular audio tapes for car rides or MP3 player
Duolingo is free, but isn't for active conversation.
Look on Meetup.com for a spanish conversation meetup.
italki is a good option for a conversation focus.
http://markmanson.net/foreign-language
http://www.andrewskotzko.com/how-to-unlock-foreign-languages/
The last two links are about principles/suggestions. I agree with most of them. This is my advice: say anything that you can, whenever you can. Embarrassment is often the biggest obstacle. When you are beginning with conversations, say anything you can, even if it is a single word, grammatically incorrect, or irrelevant.
With regard to what niceguyanon said about low ROI on languages aside from English, I think there are social capital benefits, self-confidence benefits, cognitive functioning benefits that are valuable. Not to mention travel benefits--Spanish makes travel in many countries easy.