From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Jun 05 2003 - 08:29:29 MDT
Karen Rand Smigrodzki wrote:
>
> I am surprised that I haven't seen anyone mention that Einstein
> believed in the existence of a god. He was purported to be a genius. "God
> does not play dice with the universe." Isn't it right to conclude that
> intelligent minds can differ on the issue of a deity?
If you call Einstein intelligent. He *was* human.
Einstein's beliefs about God are not certain; let us take Newton as an
unambiguous case. Was Newton intelligent? Yes, I would consider him so.
Was he rational? No. Newton was born too early and knew too little; he
died without hearing the word "meme" or the phrase "evolutionary
psychology" or even the name "Darwin". Newton was a good scientist, but a
poor rationalist, and it is not surprising to me that he should make
mistakes; Newton is not someone with whom I cannot agree to disagree.
Today I usually assign my "cannot agree to disagree"-ness measure, the
degree to which I find a mistake *surprising*, the degree to which a
person's disagreement with me makes me question my own beliefs, according
to that person's knowledge of the bugs in human psychology and the amount
of time they have spent explicitly studying rationality. Show me a
Cosmides or a Kahneman that believes in God (I have no prior idea whether
they do), and I will be surprised. Show me a Bostrom or a Hanson that
believes in God, and I will care enough to ask them why.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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