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.
Although yours is a reasonable position for getting along in society, and therefore rational to some degree, I think I would have to call it "weakly" rational rather than "strongly" rational: you are willing to accept the meme which has gained the most mindshare rather than attempting to assess the relative merits of each meme.
There is certainly a high degree of reliability in this technique, but it has two drawbacks:
I submit the following principle: An expert should always be willing to at least try to explain her/his position on any subject on which there is disagreement.
It seems to me an integral part of the rational worldview that analysis of expert opinions can be subject to lay evaluation. You take the explanations offered by the various experts, with all their experience and understanding of the field, and keep track of each point raised by each side, and whether it has been satisfactorily answered (and whether the answer has been rebutted, etc.).
If, for example, Expert B consistently offers rational refutations of points raised by Expert A, while Expert A consistently offers points which have already been refuted by Expert B, you might begin to suspect that Expert A is being less than honest and does not really have a case.
As far as I can see, this has been the situation with Intelligent Design, global warming denial -- and the official story of 9/11.
If experts disagree, then there simply isn't a strong consensus.
Personally, I am not a professional demolitionist, but I have yet to see any argument that WTC7 was brought down in a controlled demolition which reflected a technical understanding of the subject greater than, or even equal to, my own. If I did find such an argument, it would change my opinion on the subject considerably... although that would only be the first of many hurdles to over... (read more)