Fallacy of gray. Even if there are no actual magical superrationalists, clearly some people are better skilled than others, and a group of people would behave differently depending on this level.
The question is whether it is possible in practice for individuals or groups to exist who really apply some set of skills with enough consistency that "sanity waterline" becomes a good enough approximation of reality for them. If individuals and groups differ greatly, as they obviously do, it may still be that nobody is good enough that their basic skills would be highly (even if imperfectly) reliable when it comes to the most seductive biases. Even if this assumption is not true, it does not represent the fallacy of grey, no more than, say, claiming that nobody can run 100m in less than 9.5s means equating athletes with couch potatoes. (The latter claim may be falsified if someone actually manages to run that fast, but even if false, it's not a fallacy of grey, since it merely asserts an upper bound for achievement, not that there aren't people far closer to it than others.)
Now, I do believe that there are plenty of topics where even the most rational individuals are in serious danger of having their most basic epistemological skills distorted by biases, and therefore, it's never a good idea to draw any "sanity waterlines." You may disagree with this view, but not on the grounds that it constitutes fallacy of grey.
Now, I do believe that there are plenty of topics where even the most rational individuals are in serious danger of having their most basic epistemological skills distorted by biases, and therefore, it's never a good idea to draw any "sanity waterlines."
You clearly don't understand the concept in the way it was intended, and instead criticize a different idea.
This post grew out of a very long discussion with the New York Less Wrong meetup group. The question was, should a group dedicated to rationality be explicitly atheist? Or should it make an effort to be respectful to theists in order to make them feel welcome and spread rationality farther? We argued for a long time. The pro-atheism camp said that, given that religion is so overwhelmingly wrong on the merits, we shouldn't allow it any special pleading -- it's just as wrong as any other wrong belief, and we'd lose our value as a rationalist group if we began to put status above truth. The anti-atheism group said that, while that may be true, it's going to doom us to be a group exclusively for eccentric nerds, and we need to develop broad appeal, even if that's hard and requires us to leave our comfort zone.
Things got abstract very fast; my take was that we need to get back to practicalities. Different attitudes to religion have different effects on different types of people; we need to optimize for desired effects and accept what tradeoffs we must. We can't appeal equally to everyone. So I came up with a sort of typology.
The Four New Members
Annie