= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Estarlio comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1750)
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.