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Lumifer comments on A Voting Puzzle, Some Political Science, and a Nerd Failure Mode - Less Wrong
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I would submit that it rather depends on your goals.
That might be true, but you wouldn't be in much of a position to know whether it was true until you could conduct an unbiased analysis of your own motivations given a state where it was false versus a state where it was true.
But the same is true for everyone, isn't it? What's special about conservative Christians here?
Also, consider the goal "I want to be resurrected by Jesus and live forever".
Well, if it were really your goal to be resurrected by Jesus and live forever, and not just to be comforted by the belief that you were going to be resurrected by Jesus and live forever, then if Jesus didn't exist, it would be of prime importance for you to know that, since for there to be any chance of it happening at all, someone would have to make him.
I am sure the fellow considered that possibility and rejected it :-) Or maybe he likes the Pascal's Wager.
In any case, getting back to the original issue, it was, to put it crudely, that Christians are necessarily stupid. That seems to be false on its face as there are a lot of people who believe in Jesus and are highly intelligent by all the usual measures of intelligence.
Which is exactly the matter which, as Wedrifid pointed out, bears on the individual's intelligence and/or rationality.
Nobody in this conversation made such a claim that I'm aware of. The point of contention originally raised in Wedrifid's comment was that religious conservatives may be intelligent and rational in spite of, rather than regardless of, their religious conservatism. That is, religious conservatism would be counterevidence to the overlap of intelligence and rationality.
I read wedrifid's post as stating that, in a bit more polite terms.
So what does this actually mean? You see a girl, she looks intelligent and rational, you learn that she's a conservative Christian and you go "Oh, she isn't intelligent at all, my mistake"..?
How do you tell that she "looks intelligent and rational?"
If you have some other information that already screens off the evidence from knowing that she's a religious conservative, it doesn't adjust your probability, but if you don't, then you adjust your probability estimate that she falls into the overlap of "intelligent" and "rational" downwards.
If you know a particular human is three feet tall, but do not have access to other personal information about them, then it's possible they're an adult, but your best guess should be that they're probably not.
By talking to her.
Would the downgrade from 99.999999% to 99.999998% be satisfactory? :-)
Depends how much information you already have.
I would say it would be awfully hard to get enough information to raise the probability of someone having both high intelligence and high general rationality to 99.999999% in the first place without finding out whether the person was a religious conservative or not, so I would say "possibly, but not in realistic formulations."
I affirm Desrtopa's interpretation, as well as Eliezer's reminder about how conjunction works.
To reiterate: When you encounter "!(A AND B)" it does not mean "Let X equal whichever of !A and !B is most objectionable and claim that !(A AND B) is equivalent to X".
Not a very charitable interpretation. How about this instead: If someone is a conservative Christian then that fact makes it less likely that person is rational.
Similarly: If someone is deaf then it is less likely that they are a great pianist.
I can affirm that statement and still believe that Beethoven existed, without implying any insult to Beethoven.
This is true in as much as the No Free Lunch theorem is true. As for the relevance to the beliefs and preferences of actual Christians, the testimony of the relevant religious texts, expressed beliefs of Christians and emphasis of Christian apologetics arguments do much to affirm that "long life of positive experience" is a goal that is in general shared by Christians. The "carrot" presented to reward belief is "eternal life". John 3:16 is the most famous quote from the Bible and the one used to express the core of Christian doctrine concisely:
People, including Christians, tend to prefer long life---either in their physical body or after that body has been destroyed. If the beliefs of the Christian are false then the actions they choose when attempting to achieve this goal will fail.