shokwave comments on The elephant in the room, AMA - Less Wrong

22 Post author: calcsam 12 May 2011 02:59PM

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Comment author: XiXiDu 12 May 2011 04:13:46PM *  24 points [-]

You are clearly not capable of thinking rationally with respect to a fundamental belief where evidence makes the question overdetermined. Why should I listen to you?

People who hold obviously incorrect beliefs can still be highly intelligent and productive:

  • Peter Duesberg (a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley) "claimed that AIDS is not caused by HIV, which made him so unpopular that his colleagues and others have — until recently — been ignoring his potentially breakthrough work on the causes of cancer."
  • Francisco J. Ayala who “…has been called the “Renaissance Man of Evolutionary Biology” is a geneticist ordained as a Dominican priest. “His “discoveries have opened up new approaches to the prevention and treatment of diseases that affect hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide…”
  • Francis Collins (geneticist, Human Genome Project) noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the Human Genome Project (HGP) and described by the Endocrine Society as “one of the most accomplished scientists of our time” is a evangelical Christian.
  • Georges Lemaître (a Belgian Roman Catholic priest) proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe.
  • Kurt Gödel (logician, mathematician and philosopher) who suffered from paranoia and believed in ghosts. “Gödel, by contrast, had a tendency toward paranoia. He believed in ghosts; he had a morbid dread of being poisoned by refrigerator gases; he refused to go out when certain distinguished mathematicians were in town, apparently out of concern that they might try to kill him.”

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.

Comment author: shokwave 12 May 2011 04:53:59PM 15 points [-]

People who hold obviously incorrect beliefs can still be highly intelligent and productive:

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.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 May 2011 05:04:07AM 7 points [-]

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?

Comment author: shokwave 14 May 2011 05:14:27AM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 May 2011 05:25:17AM 2 points [-]

Could you please be more specific? What sort of action is being taken here as a result of your worry?

Comment author: shokwave 14 May 2011 02:31:39PM *  2 points [-]

Not voting for religious candidates for Australian Parliament elections.

Comment author: D_Alex 16 May 2011 03:39:11AM 1 point [-]

My inclination would be to discourage posts with undertones of religious propaganda on this site.

Comment author: wedrifid 13 May 2011 05:21:46AM *  0 points [-]

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.

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.