= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Jack comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (857)
I guess I should try harder to remember this, in the context of my rather discouraging recent foray into the Richard Dawkins Forums -- which, I admit, had me thinking twice about whether affiliation with "rational" causes was at all a useful indicator of actual receptivity to argument, and wondering whether there was much more point in visiting a place like that than a generic Internet forum. (My actual interlocutors were in fact probably hopeless, but maybe I could have done a favor to a few lurkers by not giving up so quickly.)
But, you know, it really is frustrating how little of the quality of a person (like Richard Dawkins, or, say, Paul Graham) or a cause (like increasing rationality, or improving science education) actually manages to rub off or trickle down onto the legions of Internet followers of said person or cause.
Interesting. Hom many places have you brought this issue up? Is there any forum which has responded rationally? What seem to be the controlling biases?
LW is thus far the only forum on which I have personally initiated discussion of this topic; but obviously I've followed discussions about it in numerous other places.
You're on it.
I mean, there are plenty of instances elsewhere of people getting the correct answer. But basically what you get is either selection bias (the forum itself takes a position, and people are there because they already agree) or the type of noisy mess we see at RDF. To date, LW is the only place I know of where an a priori neutral community has considered the question and then decisively inclined in the right direction.
In the case of RDF, I suspect compartmentalization is at work: this topic isn't mentally filed under "rationality", and there's no obvious cached answer or team to cheer for. So people there revert to the same ordinary, not-especially-careful default modes of thinking used by the rest of humanity, which is why the discussion there looks just like the discussions everywhere else.
It's noteworthy that my references and analogies to concepts and arguments discussed by Dawkins himself had no effect; apparently, we were just in a sort of separate magisterium. Particularly telling was this quote:
Now on the face of it this seems utterly dishonest: I hardly think this fellow would actually be tempted to convert to theism upon hearing the news that eight Perugians had been convinced of God's existence. But I suspect he's actually just trying to express the separation that apparently exists in his mind between the kind of reasoning that applies to questions about God and the kind of reasoning that applies to questions about a criminal case.
Technical nitpick on the use of 'a priori' in the context. Subject to possible contradiction if I have missed a nuance in the meaning in the statistics context).
I would have just gone with 'previously'.