In Search of Normal

At Overcoming Bias, Eliezer writes about current norms and how to encourage better ones:

If you were told many stories, as a kid, about specific people who accepted specific hard truths - like a story of a scientist accepting that their theory was wrong, say - then your brain would generalize over its experiences, and compress them, and form a concept of that-which-is-the-norm: the wordless act of accepting reality.

Eliezer doesn't believe in God and he likes to spend a lot of time on the subject, despite it being pretty obvious he doesn't have any evidence to the contrary. I do, however, really like his suggestion above. We could teach children a story about accepting reality, and as part of that story we find out theories can be wrong, even when they are scientific. Ah, the beautiful truth.

There are many kinds of evidence, such as the various witnesses of God's interaction with man over the centuries, which Eliezer discounts, but we should not discount what Eliezer says about the word truth. People do indeed use this as he suggests- a sort of unverifiable, abstract, symbol to which we all must bow. And yet, it's very unclear what people mean when they say it. It is perhaps, more clear what they feel.


Interestingly, if Eliezer did believe in God, the process he would be looking for is repentance. For repentance is about sin, but it is also about beliefs, agendas, and all the unreality that interferes with truth. God and reality get along fine; it's all those little gods that get a person in trouble. Something as simple as an inordinate attachment to an idea can wreak havoc for years, and yet, have none of the more obvious symptoms of sin attached to it.