Yvain comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

97 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 March 2010 11:23PM

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Comment author: Yvain 16 March 2010 09:28:00PM 43 points [-]

Two more non-trustworthy indicators:

  • Ask the person in question which of the several ridiculous ideas they reject they find least ridiculous - for example "Which do you think is more likely to be true - astrology, or UFOs?" I've found people trying to signal affiliation have a hard time with this sort of question and will even be flustered by it, saying something along the lines of "They're both stupid" or "Is this some sort of trick to make me sound like I believe a crazy idea?". A rationalist will say something more like "Well, I don't believe either, but UFOs at least make sense with our idea of the universe, whereas astrology is just plain crazytalk" (or ze may refuse to answer on the grounds that you're wasting zir time; it's not a perfect test).

  • Observe the circumstances in which the person involved brings up the belief. If they just go to atheist forums and say "Man, those religious people sure are stupid," higher probability of signaller. If they actively talk to religious people, try to use atheism as a starting point for building new ideas, and don't bring it up much when it's not relevant, higher probability they believe it for the right reasons.

Comment author: Strange7 27 June 2011 06:15:12AM 4 points [-]

I'd be willing to seriously consider astrology in the sense that what time of year someone was born, and thus the weather and food their mother was exposed to in utero or that they had to deal with during some early developmental window, could have consistent effects on personality.

I've heard enough conflicting explanations for "UFOs" that I think there probably is some real phenomenon to explain, even if it's just neurological.

Comment author: DanielLC 19 March 2012 12:11:13AM 5 points [-]

I've heard enough conflicting explanations for "UFOs" that I think there probably is some real phenomenon to explain, even if it's just neurological.

What makes you think there's only one?

Comment author: MichaelVassar 17 March 2010 08:36:47PM 10 points [-]

A sufficiently good rationalist should probably decompose astrology and UFOs into different possible definitions and discuss both priors and the nature of the processes that probably produce the two beliefs.

Comment author: goodside 17 March 2010 12:44:37PM *  11 points [-]

I wouldn't answer the astrology/UFO question. Extraterrestrials visiting in flying human-vehicle-sized ships from human-visible distances is so horribly anthropomorphic as to make it immeasurably improbable. Both propositions are far less likely than me winning the lottery, and that's the best I can get from my wetware. Anything further is like asking, "Which are you more certain is a European country, France or Spain?"

Also, I'm inclined to avoid questions of this form on principle. It's like Yudkowsky's "blue tentacle" in Technical Explanation: Being able to find outs for a theory that doesn't fit evidence is anti-knowledge, and the more practice you get at it the crazier you become.

Comment author: RobbBB 24 April 2013 10:26:14AM 3 points [-]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'anthropomorphic' here. One way to think about framing the comparison is to note that if intelligent extraterrestrials have visited us, we have to update strongly in favor of their intelligence playing an important role in our intelligence. In any universe that isn't completely teeming with intelligent life, this will hold for anthropic reasons; two intelligences are immeasurably more likely to encounter each other if one had a causal role in the other's coming to existence (via panspermia and/or guided evolution). So some of the bizarre anthropomorphism here can be dispensed with.

But note that if we want to pull a similar trick regarding astrology -- and I think there's several orders of magnitude more reason to be inclined to do this in the astrology case than in the UFO case -- then we'll need to posit an intelligent designer for our entire universe, not just for our species. In the one case our understanding of the origin of life on Earth is wrong; that's not surprising as these things go, since most scientists have already noted their current and ongoing confusion about the timeline for life on Earth's origination. In the other case, however, our understanding of the fabric of the universe is completely wrong. We are not in the least bit confused, at this point, about how it is that our psychological dispositions sometimes correlate with astronomical phenomena. To discover that there is a causal connection would mean that Approximately Everything You Know Is A Lie. That's a bigger deal, I think.

Comment author: jhuffman 26 September 2011 09:03:43PM 10 points [-]

UFOs are possible given what we know of the universe. Unlikely, yes, but its possible to have them without us learning much new about the universe. Astrology, not so much. Astrology means we have totally whiffed on science and have to integrate all the contradictory information we have in ways that are unimaginable.

Comment author: RobinZ 17 March 2010 12:50:07PM *  16 points [-]

Spain is more Middle-Eastern than France and France was on the European front of both World Wars, so France. I can see your point, though.