I disagreed with the bit at 27:40 about the supposed unique badness of religion since any free floating that's basically a tribal marker is similarly insulated, especially anything that's extensively used by a professional class who basically make a living of reinterpreting it and do so from a position of authority. [...] She does partially address this later at 29:40, but I don't think she's ever been faced with the best possible version of that argument.
I think you're being much too charitable here. The critical assumption in her argument is that ideological delusions can normally be successfully confronted by pointing to empirical evidence of their practical failures. However, this is completely wrong. In practice, it is very rare that we have clear enough natural experiments that enable us to present such evidence in a clear and convincing form. Even when such natural experiments exist in a striking form, as it was in the case of communism, ideological partisans usually have little difficulty rationalizing them away in practice.
When they don't exist, as is typically the case, it is normally impossible to move the public opinion towards greater accuracy with empirical evidence of failure, since any such evidence can be discounted by disputing the counterfactual. For example, disasters brought by irresponsible government guided by crackpot economic theories are easily excused by arguing that things would have been even worse without the enlightened guidance of these theories, and the cause of the problems is the insufficient purity of our sticking to them (perhaps along with some regrettable mistakes in execution).
The speaker herself confirms this with her concrete examples. To me it seems pretty clear that she responds to some evident failures of ideology in recent times by (pretty much) doubling down on the ideology, and she's nowhere close to examining its problematic fundamental tenets -- such examination being simply unthinkable for her.
(I understand that this last statement is controversial, and normally I would not open such topics here, but I think it's justified given that this talk has already been made the subject of discussion.)
(I understand that this last statement is controversial, and normally I would not open such topics here, but I think it's justified given that this talk has already been made the subject of discussion.)
Which statement? That she doesn't examine the most fundamental downsides of ideological thinking?
The talks from Skepticon IV are being posted to YouTube.
So far we have:
ADDED:
More to come soon, hopefully...