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CynicalOptimist comments on Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale - Less Wrong
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I think the original poster would have agreed to this even before they had the realisation. The point here is that, even when you do listen to an explanation, the absurdity bias can still mislead you.
The lady in the story had an entire conversation about evolution and still rejected it as absurd. Some ideas simply take more than 20 minutes to digest, understand and learn about. Therfore after 20 minutes of conversation, you cannot reasonably conclude that you've heard everything there is. You cannot reasonably conclude that you wouldn't be convinced by more evidence.
It's just like any bias really. Even when you know about it and you think you've adjusted sufficiently, you probably haven't.
I agree with all of that. But there's a limit to how much effort you can reasonably be expected to put into considering whether something that seems absurd to you is really not-absurd. I suggest that that depends on what other evidence there is for its non-absurdity. E.g., in the case of evolution, it's highly relevant that it's endorsed by the great majority of biologists, including biologists belonging to religions whose traditions contain stories that prima facie conflict with evolution.
There are a lot of super-smart Christians too, which I think it's reasonable to take as evidence that Christianity can't rightly be dismissed simply because its tradition contains a story about a talking snake. On the other hand, there aren't so many super-smart talking-snake-believers -- even among Christians, most[1] of the cleverest and most educated don't take the story as indicating that there was ever a talking snake -- which suggests that treating a literal reading of the talking-snake story as absurd probably isn't unreasonable.
[1] Though certainly not all.
Oh absolutely. We don't have time to thoroughly investigate the case for every idea we come across. There comes a time when you say that you're not interested in exploring an idea any further.
But there is an intellectual honesty to admitting that you haven't heard all of the evidence, and acknowledging that you might conceivably have changed your mind (or least significantly changed your probability estimates) if you had done more research.
And there's a value to it as well. Some ideas have been thoroughly researched and should be labelled in our minds as "debunked". Others should be labelled as "not yet disproven". Later, if we happen to encounter more evidence on the topic, we might take this into account when we decide how seriously to take it.
The lady in the story might have sounded much more sensible to us if she had said "Evolution still sounds absurd to me, but I'll admit that i haven't yet given the pro-evolution argument a proper opportunity to change my mind".
And i think we should try to be that sensible ourselves.
Again, I agree with all of that.
Thank you. :)