I'm not sure what you mean by this.

Being mistaken about something is different from not knowing everything there is to know about it.

If I'm wrong about a subject, then I don't know everything there is to know about it (assuming I'm reasoning correctly on what I know.)

But if I don't know everything there is to know about a subject, then I'm not necessarily wrong about that subject.

The former entails the latter, but the latter does not entail the former. One doesn't need a degree in biology to correct, or be corrected, about the frog thing - anymore than one needs a degree in sky wizardy to correct or be corrected about god.

Given that you can't know everything about even relatively narrow subject areas these days, (with ~7 billion humans on Earth we turn out a ridiculous amount of stuff,) what we're really dealing with here is an issue of trust: When someone says that you need to know more to make a decision, on what grounds do you decide whether or not they're just messing you around?

There's a major dis-analogy between how the Frog-based anti-evolutionist (AE) and the atheist (AT) 's questions are going to be addressed in that regard.

When the AE challenges evolution there are obvious touching stones, ideally he's told that the frog thing never happened and given a bunch of stuff he can go look up if he's interested. When the AT challenges theology he's told that he doesn't know enough, i.e. he hasn't exhausted the search space, but he's not actually pointed at anything that addresses his concern. It's more a sort of “Keep looking until you find something. Bwahahahaaa, sucker.” response.

That happens because of what evidence does and how we get it. Say, you're trying to decide whether the Earth is flat: To discover that it's vaguely spherical doesn't take a lot of evidence. I could drive to a couple of different locations and prove it to a reasonable degree of accuracy with sticks - it would not be difficult. (Or I could ask one of my friends in another city to take a measurement for me, but regardless the underlying methodology remains more or less the same.) That's an Eratosthenes level of understanding (~200BC). To discover the shape that the Earth actually is closer to an oblate spheroid, however, you need to have at least a Newton level of understanding (~1700 AD.) to predict that it being spun ought to make it bulge around the equator.

Evidence is something like, 'that which alters the conditional probability of something being observed.' But not all evidence alters the probability to the same degree. If you're off by a lot, a little bit of evidence should let you know. The more accurate you want to get the more evidence you need. Consequently, knowledge of search spaces tends to be ordered by weightiness of evidence unless the other person is playing as a hostile agent.

Even to ask the trickier questions that need that evidence requires a deep understanding that you have tuned in from a more general understanding. The odds that you'll ask a relevant question without that understanding, just by randomly mooshing concepts together, are slim.

Now the AT probably doesn't know a lot about religion. Assuming that the atheist is not a moron just randomly mooshing concepts together, her beliefs would off by a lot; she seems likely to disagree with the theist about something fairly fundamental about how evidence is meant to inform beliefs.

So, here the AT is sitting with her really weight super-massive black hole of a reason to disbelieve - and the response from the Christian is that he doesn't know everything about god. That response is missing the references that someone who actually had a reason they could point to would have. More importantly that response claims that you need deep knowledge to answer a question that was asked with shallow knowledge.

The response doesn't even look the same as the response to the frog problem. Everyone who knows even a little bit about evolution can correct the frog fella. Whereas, to my knowledge, no Christian has yet corrected a rational atheist on his or her point of disbelief. (And if they have why aren't they singing it from the rooftops - if they have as one might call it, a knock-down argument why aren't the door to door religion salesmen opening with that?)

Strictly speaking neither of them knows everything about their subjects, or likely even very much of the available knowledge. But one clearly knows more than the other and there are things that such knowledge lets him do that the other can't; point us towards proof, answer low level questions with fairly hefty answers; and is accorded an appropriately higher trust in areas that we've not yet tested ourselves.

Of course I acknowledge the possibility that a Christian, or whoever, might be able to pull off the same stunt. But since I've never seen it, and never heard of anyone who's seen it, and I'd expect to see it all over the place if there actually was an answer lurking out there.... And since I've talked two Christians out of their beliefs in the past who'd told me that I just needed to learn more about religion and know that someone who watched that debate lost their own faith as a consequence of being unable to justify their beliefs. (Admittedly I can't verify this to you so it's just a personal proof.) It seems improbable to me that they've actually got an answer.

Of course if they have such an answer all they have to do is show it to me. In the same manner as the frog-person.

(I can actually think of one reason that someone who could prove god might choose not to: If you don't know about god, under some theologies, you can't go to hell. You can't win a really nice version of heaven either but you get a reasonable existence. They had to pull that move because they didn't want to tell people that god sent their babies went to hell.

However, this latter type of person would seem mutually exclusive with the sort of person who would be interested in telling you to look more deeply into religion to begin with. I'd imagine someone who viewed your taking on more duties to not go to hell probably ought to be in the business of discouraging you joining or investigating religion.)

Anyway, yeah. I think you can subscribe to E's heuristic quite happily even in areas where you acknowledge that you're likely to be off by a long way.

I dispute its applicability, because I've known very smart Mormons. Humans are not logic engines. It's rare to find even a brilliant person who doesn't have some blind spot.

Even if it were clinically applicable, you presented it as an in-group vs. out-group joke, which is an invitation for people from one tribe to mock people from another tribe. Its message was not primarily informational.

Crocker's Rules are not an invitation to be rude.

Crocker's Rules are not an excuse for you to be rude to others. They are an invitation for others to ignore politeness when talking to you. They are not an invitation for others to be rude to you for the sake of rudeness, either; only where it enables some other aim, such as efficient transfer of information.

What you did, when viewed from the outside, is a clear example of rudeness for the sake of rudeness alone. I don't see how Crocker's rules are relevant.

Ironically, this turned out not to be the case

A common problem when one person tries to explain the words of another to a third party, yes.

Funny thing - I had a brief interaction over private messaging with Kawoomba on the subject of religion some time back, and he seemed reasonable at the time. Mildly curious, firmly atheistic, and not at all hostile.

I'm not sure if he changed, or if he's hostile to only a specific subcategory of theists?

Well, this explains the mystery of why that got downvoted by someone.

for example, if I substitute every reference to the superiority of atheism to theism (or the inadequacy of theism more generally) with a similar reference to the superiority of, say, heterosexuality to homosexuality (or the inadequacy of homosexuality more generally), my emotional response is basically "yeah, fuck that shit."

Firstly, you're replying to an old version of my comment - the section you're replying to is part of a quote which had a formatting error, which is why it forms a complete non-sequitur taken as a reply. I did not write that, I merely replied to it.

These examples are not at all analogous. Claims about the existence of divine agents - or the accuracy of old textbooks - are epistemological claims about the world and not up to personal preferences.

You know, I agree with you, homosexuality isn't a great example there. However, it's trivially easy to ironman as "homosexuality is moral" or some other example involving the rationality skills of the of the general populace.

Claims about preferences can by definition not be objectively right or wrong, but only be accurate or inaccurate relative to their frame of reference, to the agent they are ascribed to. Even if that agent were some divine entity. Jesus would like you to do X, but Bob wouldn't.

The fact that something is true only relative to a frame of reference does not mean it "can by definition not be objectively right or wrong". For example, if I believe it is correct (by my standards) to fly a plane into a building full of people, I am objectively wrong - this genuinely, verifiably doesn't satisfy my preferences. I may have been persuaded a Friendly superintelligence has concluded that it is, or that it will cause me to experience subjective bliss (OK, this one is harder to prove outright, we could be in a simulation run by some very strange people. It is, however, irrational to believe it based on the available evidence.)

"There is a ball in the box" - Given the same evidence, Clippy and an FAI will come to the same conclusion. Personal theist claims mostly fall in this category ("This book was influenced by being X", "the universe was created such-and-such", "I was absolved from my sins by a god dying for me").

"I prefer a ball in the box over no ball in the box" - Given the same evidence, rational actors do not have to agree, their preferences can be different.

Ayup.

Sexual preferences, for example.

As I said earlier, it's trivially easy to ironman that reference to mean one of the political positions regarding the sexual preference. If he had said "abortion", would you tell him that a medical procedure is a completely different thing to an empirical claim?

The reason that theists are generally regarded as irrational in their theism is because there is no reason to privilege the hypothesis that any particular age old cultural text somehow accurately describes important aspects of the universe, even if you'd ascribe to some kind of first mover.

Forgive me if I disagree with that particular empirial claim about how our community thinks.

Like watching William Craig debates, who goes from some vague "First Cause" argument all the way to "the Bible is right because of the ?evidence? of a supernatural resurrection".

"The Bible is right because of the evidence of a supernatural resurrection" is an argument in itself, not something one derives from the First Cause. However, the prior of supernatural resurrections might be raised by a particular solution to the First Cause problem, I suppose, requiring that argument to be made first.

Arguing for a first mover (no restriction other than "something that started the rest") is to arguing for the Abrahamic god what predicting the decade of your time of death would be to predicting the exact femtosecond of your death.

I guess I can follow that analogy - you require more evidence to postulate a specific First Mover than the existence of a generalized First Cause - but I have no idea how it bears on your misreading of my comment.

Such motivated cognition compromises many other aspects of one's reasoning unless it's sufficiently cordoned off, just like an AI that steadfastly insisted that human beings are all made of photons, and needed to somehow warp all its other theories to accommodate that belief.

Source? I find most rationalists encounter more irrational beliefs being protected off from rational ones than the inverse.