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{"id":7056,"date":"2013-03-13T19:14:50","date_gmt":"2013-03-13T23:14:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=7056"},"modified":"2013-03-13T19:14:50","modified_gmt":"2013-03-13T23:14:50","slug":"staring-doubts-in-the-face","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2013\/03\/staring-doubts-in-the-face.html","title":{"rendered":"Staring Doubts in the Face"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"\"$ <\/a><\/p>\n

Before I left DC to start my new job, I arranged a\u00a0The Great Divorce<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>bookclub with an atheist friend. \u00a0Somehow, just in the lead up to the argument we managed to pull in Blake\u2019s\u00a0The Marriage of Heaven and Hell<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and the Grand Inquisitor scene from\u00a0 The Brothers Karamazov<\/em><\/a>. \u00a0(And now I\u2019ve got him reading Ted Chiang\u2019s \u201cHell is the Absence of God<\/a>\u201c).<\/p>\n

But aside from the pleasure of a good fight, making my friend grant that this soteriology made more internal sense than he expected, and apparently inspiring him to write a parody song based on the book (which he\u2019ll probably let me post), there were some unexpected benefits.<\/p>\n

I know some of the blog readers are cross readers of Less Wrong, but for everyone else, you can use this link to familiarize yourself with the idea of an ugh field<\/a>. \u00a0It\u2019s a term made up by LW that basically refers to the things you flinch away from thinking. \u00a0My ugh fields tend to turn up when I think I might notice an answer I don\u2019t like if I keep gathering data. \u00a0For example, when I was trying to start my dryad costume, I kept putting off making the big diagram of everything I needed to do<\/a>. \u00a0I suspected, correctly, that once I wrote everything down, it would be clear I didn\u2019t have time to finish before Halloween.<\/p>\n

Ugh fields don\u2019t always mean I\u2019m about to be proven wrong somewhere I\u2019d like to be right. \u00a0(That would be a useful signal to have). \u00a0It just tends to mean that I\u2019m not confident about which way the answer will go, and I badly want it to turn out a particular way. \u00a0 I try to be a good rationalist, and use that flinching feeling as a cue to look deeper, but I don\u2019t always manage it.<\/p>\n

But debates, especially with a smart person arguing in good faith, are a great way to get someone else to shove you into your ugh field and not let you out til you find the answer you didn\u2019t want. \u00a0During my book club\/fight, my friend kept pressing me, not on the truth of Christianity, but on whether I was\u00a0personally<\/em> incapable of being a good Christian, whether or not it was true. \u00a0(The specific details of why aren\u2019t so relevant to this post).<\/p>\n

This concern had\u00a0occurred\u00a0to me before, and it was the kind of thought I shied away from. \u00a0I didn\u2019t want to examine the evidence for or against this claim carefully, in case it were true. \u00a0I\u2019d never even bothered to try and flesh out the argument. \u00a0But, in the middle of a book club fight, I didn\u2019t have an easy way to flinch once my friend started needling me.<\/p>\n

But, it turns out, once I actually\u00a0heard<\/em> the full argument, instead of just thinking \u201cthat would be awful,\u201d I didn\u2019t actually find it\u00a0persuasive<\/em>. \u00a0I wasn\u2019t just trying to beat my friend. \u00a0When he broached the topic, I flinched, worried he was right, and then was surprised to find I did have pretty good answers to his objections.<\/p>\n

[I think \u201cWow, this argument is way<\/em> weaker that I was afraid it was! \u00a0Thank you!\u201d was not the reaction he was going for].<\/p>\n

The whole thing reminded me a bit of rubber duck debugging<\/a>, where explaining your problem in detail to anybody<\/em> \u2014 another specialist, a friend, or a rubber duck \u2014 makes you think carefully about your assumptions instead of skipping over the bits that feel obvious or scary. \u00a0So I\u2019m awfully grateful to have had my feet held to the fire on this one.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"