If they believed(1), they would spend every waking moment exactly as their religion instructs.
That's too strong a claim and doesn't factor akrasia in; you might as well say that you don't really believe in the seriousness of existential risks if you don't spend every waking moment working against them.
You can, however, make distinctions between people who will make decisions that they know would be extremely suboptimal if their professed belief was false, and people who only do just enough to signal their belief.
It's going to be a continuum from belief(1) to belief(2), not a binary attribute; but it's still a very important concept and not yet one that the English language groks.
a very important concept and not yet one that the English language groks.
having achieved [at least a semblance of] fluency only in English thus far, I am at this moment very curious as to any assessment of what language(s) do(es) grok such a concept?
This article is a deliberate meta-troll. To be successful I need your trolling cooperation. Now hear me out.
In The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You Eliezer talks about asognostics, who have one of their arm paralyzed, and what's most interesting are in absolute denial of this - in spite of overwhelming evidence that their arm is paralyzed they will just come with new and new rationalizations proving it's not.
Doesn't it sound like someone else we know? Yes, religious people! In spite of heaps of empirical evidence against existence of their particular flavour of the supernatural, internal inconsistency of their beliefs, and perfectly plausible alternative explanations being well known, something between 90% and 98% of humans believe in the supernatural world, and is in a state of absolute denial not too dissimilar to one of asognostics. Perhaps as many as billions of people in history have even been willing to die for their absurd beliefs.
We are mostly atheists here - we happen not to share this particular delusion. But please consider an outside view for a moment - how likely is it that unlike almost everyone else we don't have any other such delusions, for which we're in absolute denial of truth in spite of mounting heaps of evidence?
If the delusion is of the kind that all of us share it, we won't be able to find it without building an AI. We might have some of those - it's not too unlikely as we're a small and self-selected group.
What I want you to do is try to trigger absolute denial macro in your fellow rationalists! Is there anything that you consider proven beyond any possibility of doubt by both empirical evidence and pure logic, and yet saying it triggers automatic stream of rationalizations in other people? Yes, I pretty much ask you to troll, but it's a good kind of trolling, and I cannot think of any other way to find our delusions.