khafra comments on Five-minute rationality techniques - Less Wrong

55 Post author: sketerpot 10 August 2010 02:24AM

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Comment author: Unknowns 24 August 2010 02:12:26PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: khafra 24 August 2010 03:25:04PM 5 points [-]

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.