DSimon comments on Five-minute rationality techniques - Less Wrong
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I remember reading in the news that one of those crazy guys who went into a school with a gun and started shooting people asked a few of them, "Does God exist," threatening to shoot them if they said yes. Some of them said yes anyway (and he shot them), so it looks like this method isn't going to stop people from believing in God.
The idea of a physical threat is the same; but the social context is radically different--the school shooters were asking their victims to give up their tribal allegience under circumstances similar to historical threats. Ideally, this question would be posed under conditions which divorced epistemic state from tribal identity as much as possible.
That could be an urban legend - it's the sort of story that martyr-happy adherents would be likely to fabricate and spread, and the story I find searching online (Columbine) only has one person asked that question, and after being shot.
No, I read it at the time of the event, in the regular news, although I don't remember the details well enough now to find it again.
That could be Columbine. In an earlier Salon article talking about the investigators preparing their report:
...and the article I linked previously followed up with this:
and this: