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HughRistik comments on Raising the Sanity Waterline - Less Wrong
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From the standpoint of rationalists, this kind of thinking looks insane. Yet is just species-typical thinking with a hardwired basis, as others in this thread have observed. The kind of cognitive biases that lead to religion, especially social ones such as group conformity and social proof, were/are adaptive. This is how sane human minds work. It is the rationalists who are the crazy people.
"This is how sane human minds work. It is the rationalists who are the crazy people."
I must disagree. That is how normal human minds work. Sanity is not at all normal.
'Being normal' is highly overrated, but of course the people who do so are both normal and crazy, so I expect them to continue praising it.
There is no such thing as "normal and crazy." Insanity implies some malfunction of the brain (hence the study of psychopathology is often called "abnormal psychology"). The brains of normal people, including those who believe in religion, are not malfunctioning at all. In fact, they are "working as intended" (strictly speaking, evolution doesn't "intend" anything; the point is that the hardware developed by evolution is showing no defects).
Rationalists are also perfectly sane (I only called them crazy jokingly, which is how they look to normal people), and their brains are also "working as intended." They just have a less typical phenotype.