David_Gerard comments on Minicamps on Rationality and Awesomeness: May 11-13, June 22-24, and July 21-28 - Less Wrong

24 Post author: AnnaSalamon 29 March 2012 08:48PM

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Comment author: David_Gerard 30 March 2012 10:48:46AM *  3 points [-]

This does sound plausible:

  1. that the people who decompartmentalise crazy and do crazy stuff - fundies, cultists, fundie cultists - have a strong aversion to ambiguity, subtlety, irony;
  2. that groups with weird ideas who are not averse to ambiguity, subtlety or irony are less likely to do crazy stuff.

The first I think is obvious, the second as a positive result would be somewhat surprising and worthy of investigation.

I also suspect that a lot of romantic objection to rationality and science is that they see science as an example of group 1 holding that anything that can't be measured doesn't exist and throwing away important detail.

I wonder how we would meaningfully gather numbers on such things.