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simplicio comments on A Rationalist's Tale - Less Wrong
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Great article, and by the way, I have been listening to episode after episode of your very interesting podcast for a few days now.
A worry about theism/atheism... thinking and writing about that question is indeed worthwhile, for the sake of helping confused people relinquish their confusion. However, it seems to me that there is a point at which it becomes flat-out epistemically dangerous, in the sense that a person writing and thinking about X all the time, even as a critic of X, is going to have their thinking inadvertently shaped by X. One sees this with certain atheists who don't have any opinions about anything except insofar as it relates to the atheism/theism debate. For example, I recall one fellow who could find nothing more germane to a discussion on the ethics of eating meat than a passing comment by some atheist debater on YouTube he had recently heard.
I am certainly not accusing you of this problem, but it is something to watch out for. Religion is psychological candy, after all. (I swear my right hemisphere is a theist.)
Highly agree. My current approach when talking to theists is not to mention atheism at all. I just talk about science and rationality and sociology and so on. If you know enough science and can overcome a few cognitive biases when you're told about them in vivid ways, then theism starts to look ridiculous even when I don't explicitly mention theism. That's a theory, anyway - I haven't tested it carefully.
Interesting anecdote along these lines: just this morning I used the 1960 Watson experiment as an attempt to explain the Confirmation Bias to a coworker. (That's the 'list triplets of numbers. I'll tell you if they fit or don't fit the rule I'm thinking of. Your first free example is 2 4 6, which fits.') Even after having the Confirmation bias explained to him as the fact that people don't tend to try to look for ways their beliefs might be wrong (amongst other things), he still only made 'positive' guesses, and came up with "Each number is even and a multiple of the first."
I was fascinated by this.
What was his reaction when he learned that he was wrong?
Hypothesis: Your coworker is an idiot. Observation: This hypothesis has little to do with whether or not he is religious.
More seriously, I've given the selection task to people before and no one I've ever encountered does that badly if they've been primed about confirmation bias and similar issues. Even just telling people that it is a puzzle seems to go a long way to them getting the right solution.
I've never been greatly impressed by his intellect, but I would definitely say that he is of at least average intelligence. The field I work in doesn't suffer individuals of significantly poor intelligence (IT/sysadmin), though I freely admit that isn't really saying much. There are some folks to whom the practice of thinking rationally is just... alien. Once you reach somewhere around forty, thinking patterns get pretty firmly set, too.
Additionally, the guy is an english-as-second-language speaker, so it might not have been a 'fair trial' to him. I'm trying to be generous (to him) considering I pretty much agree with you.
He's openly atheistic, in fact.