michaelsullivan comments on 2011 Survey Results - Less Wrong

94 Post author: Yvain 05 December 2011 10:49AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (513)

Sort By: Controversial

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: michaelsullivan 05 December 2011 08:29:52PM *  3 points [-]

God (a supernatural creator of the universe) exists: 5.64, (0, 0, 1) Some revealed religion is true: 3.40, (0, 0, .15)

This result is, not exactly surprising to me, but odd by my reading of the questions. It may seem at first glance like a conjunction fallacy to rate the second question's probability much higher than the first (which I did). But in fact, the god question, like the supernatural question referred to a very specific thing "ontologically basic mental entities", while the "some revealed religion is more or less true" question was utterly vague about how to define revealed religion or more or less true.

As I remarked in comments on the survey, depending on my assumptions about what those two things mean, my potential answers ranged from epsilon to 100-epsilon. A bit of clarity would be useful here.

Also, given the large number of hard atheists on LW, it might be interesting to look at finer grained data for the 25+% of survey respondents who did not answer '0' for all three "religion" questions.