shokwave comments on The elephant in the room, AMA - Less Wrong
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People who hold obviously incorrect beliefs can still be highly intelligent and productive:
There are many more examples. All of them are outliers indeed, and I don't think that calcsam has been able to prove that his achievements and general capability to think clearly in some fields does outweigh the heavy burden of being religious. Yet there is evidence that such people do exist and he offers you the chance to challenge him.
Generally I agree with you, but I also think that calcsam provides a fascinating example of the internal dichotomy of some human minds and a case study that might provide insights to how the arguments employed by Less Wrong fail in some cases.
And one of the concerns I detected in wedrifid's comment (one I share myself) is that if highly intelligent and productive people start doing what obviously incorrect beliefs indicate they should, the world is going to be optimised in a direction I won't like.
I kind of think that's already happening. All over the place. All the time. What kind of policy implications did you want to draw from it in this particular instance?
Hmm, what policy...
No amount of clear thinking elsewhere can excuse you from being wrong about this one thing. To think so is to treat being right and wrong like a social game, where people with high status gets a free pass on questions with actual answers.
Could you please be more specific? What sort of action is being taken here as a result of your worry?
Not voting for religious candidates for Australian Parliament elections.
My inclination would be to discourage posts with undertones of religious propaganda on this site.
Exactly! If beliefs like this are just used as verbal symbols for navigating the social world they do relatively minor harm. Once someone with the intelligence, productivity and otherwise rational thinking necessary comes to follow the belief to the logical conclusion comes along things start exploding. Or rationalist communities become modified in a direction that makes them either less pleasant or less effective than I would prefer.