Will I (Aella) convert to Christianity by the end of 2028?
75
1.3K
1.1K
2029
3%
chance

Justin Murphy predicts I'll reconvert to Christianity: https://twitter.com/jmrphy/status/1741150091874902347
For the purposes of this market (based on Justin's description), it cannot be liberal Christianity, it has to be a version of Christianity that requires some sort of sexual conservatism.

edit: Made this before seeing someone else beat me to it: https://manifold.markets/jacobsaysheyyy/will-aella-revert-to-christianity-w?r=amFjb2JzYXlzaGV5eXk

Get Ṁ200 play money
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boughtṀ20YES

@Dynd Why do you believe this has a >2% chance of happening?

bought Ṁ10 YES

@HankyUSA Bet it down to <2% again and I’ll tell you.

@HankyUSA I'm not Dynd, but am a buyer at this level. Some arguments:

  • People tend to get more socially conservative as they age. There are many ways to describe the mechanism here, but it's hard to do so without being self-serving in one direction or another—maybe old people are jealous of how much fun the youth can have, and want to ban it out of spite, or maybe it's analogous to the fact that people's vocabulary and general knowledge expands over time, i.e. some people learn why certain behaviors are promoted/shunned the easy way, and some the hard way.

  • Worldly pleasures are very nice, and most varieties of Christianity understand this. In fact, older religious traditions tend to have more room for fun than younger ones (Purim and Mardi Gras are not the sort of things a new Protestant denomination would come up with; they are, at least in part, a pressure release valve for being more buttoned-up most of the time). One feature of enjoying a lot of those pleasures all the time is finding that, after a while, they're not satisfying; one might find that at some point, adding another guy to the gangbang has a marginal return that dips negative.

  • Traditional faiths have to have ways to accommodate lots of personality types, because they've had so many adherent-years that they've had to deal with every conceivable personality type. Catholicism is, in my biased opinion, really great at this because there are so many saints for so many topics. If there's some bad behavior you specialized in before you started adhering, there is probably a saint with a similar story out there.

  • They also have ways to accommodate desires in a healthy way! From a Christian perspective, God did not fill the world with delicious plants and animals so we could all feel good about huffily rejecting pleasure; God did not create a world where humor exists just to see how long we could go without laughing; God did not make sex fun as a prank to trick us into repeatedly doing something naughty. But maximally enjoying these things without becoming a util-hunting animal rather than a real human being takes effort, and it entails understanding the telos of those pleasures. My best guess is that the Lord wants us to attend to basic needs, but to do so with a little panache—not just 700 calories 3x/day, but culinary art; not just communication, but shared joy; not just propagating the species and mixing our genes around to outrun parasites and infections, but being able to make the person you love feel the most pleasure they've ever felt while they do the same for you. Statistically, marriage is more sex-positive than singledom, though there are some selection effects there. But if you have a high sex drive, and if it's an important part of what you need to be happy, it's important to ask yourself what you'll do about that as you age. At some point, the easy hookups get less easy, and the casualest sex you'll have is with whoever you're married to. (At a sufficiently high discount rate, satisifed-for-years-and-an-incel-for-decades might be fine, but smart people tend to have lower discount rates than that.)

  • Many thoughtful people reject the belief system in which they're raised at some point. Some systems literally incorporate this into the process (e.g. Rumspringa, the Jewish tradition of carefully debating every aspect of religious texts, Confession as a smaller-scale ritualized redemption following mini-apostasy). But the world does not offer us a null hypothesis! Just competing theories. To the extent that there is a null hypothesis, it's more about what to conform to than what's real—the modern American null hypothesis is a nominally secular belief system heavily influenced by New England Puritan norms/beliefs, but if you grew up in 16th century Spain your acceptance of the null hypothesis would be more like "all of these religious debates are so confusing and contradictory! I'm just going to do the sensible, normal thing and submit to Rome."

  • Aella has experimented with psychedelics before, and this can lead to drastic changes in worldview, in addition to a modest increase in openness to new experience. Jesus, the Buddha, Mohammed, and Moses all have narratives in which they sent a long time in some kind of environment conducive to hallucinations and the like, so there is definitely a precedent for getting loopy and permanently becoming more religious.

  • Christians acknowledge that this belief system requires faith, and tend to believe that this faith is a gift from God. So if you're running your book of bets in a rigorous and thoughtful way, you need to estimate some base rate for the offering and acceptance of divine grace. 0.76%/year sounds counterintuitively low to me, so I buy.

@ByrneHobart Yeah it is most of this. My main point however is that a woman’s biological clock usually starts ticking in her early 30s. As time starts running out to have healthy children and the realization sets in that high value men will soon not be interested anymore for anything that is not just a fling. As looks and overall value fades, women often see the need to lock down before it is too late.

predicts NO

In the past 4 years what percent of atheists converted to "a version of Christianity that requires some sort of sexual conservatism"?

Aella: A friend of mine was surprisingly judgy about my lifestyle.

This guy: I am Catholic. Reconvert to Christianity. That will solve the problem about having judgy friends. Also, stop being loathsome, everyone hates you, repent. Following my advice is logical and being a highly logical fellow myself, I bet you'll do it. Failing to do so is failing to update on evidence, and as a rationalist you should feel bad about it.

@equinoxhq Never seen so many rationalist buzzwords used in a combative tweet before....

Also the fake midwit meme - "Christianity is also the final Bayesian update for real freedom-seeking Western individuals." Literally what?!

bought Ṁ10 of YES

I’m only betting yes because the payout is so good if you do end up converting…

Anyways, let me share with you about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ… 🤪

bought Ṁ110 of NO

God isn't real, and there aren't particularly good reasons to think that Jesus was the Messiah.

bought Ṁ10 of YES

I grew up in a conservative evangelical Christian community, was an evangelical Christian myself until the age of 23, at which point I came out about my atheism. I'm still an atheist, but 14 years later, I'm back in church. It's not a church that would fulfill this market. I'm not sure they even identify as Christian. But if I can go that far back maybe Aella has a chance too.

bought Ṁ0 of NO

well then you still have a lot of updating to do. you should assume that, in the end, every single person will hate what you do with your life and your body, and it will be a miracle if there’s one person who doesn’t

I'd certainly bet no on that

It's graceful* of you to choose not to run a market on "Justin Murphy converts away from Catholicism", given his unusual cruelty.

*Yes, I mean this in the technical, theological sense.

predicts YES

@DaveK I was going to make this market but reading through this guy's Twitter was unpleasant and depressing enough that I don't want to ever think about him again

bought Ṁ10 of YES

Betting yes merely to irritate John Calvin