I would think that the audience is people in the vague New Age spectrum which like pop spirituality and do have some sort of belief in God.
That is probably true.
Being thoughtful just means that you are better at rationalizing your belief. It doesn't make you escape the trap of holding beliefs for signaling social status.
If a person is thoughtful and feels the need to rationalize their belief, then they are usually someone who can be reached through reason and rational arguments. If nothing else, they'll probably have to improve their own rationalization, perhaps take a small step back from their previous position or have a little more doubt about it. Most people actually are willing to be convinced of most things, in the right situation, so long as you don't try to push them too far out of their comfort zone all at once.
The only people who can't be reached at all by reason are people who claim to be completely motivated by faith and belief.
Edit: Also, there are real and valid reasons that "cultural relativism" has become a system that intellectual types claim to have in order to signal social status. If you don't understand that, then you're never going to change the minds of the people who help create those signals in the first place.
Do you feel like I'm treating you as an idiot? If so, that's not intended. Cultural relativists are not the target audience of posts I write on LessWrong.
No, no; I'm not offended. I just feel like you have an extremely low opinion of the people you're talking about trying to convince, which is something you should generally try to avoid; if you act like you have contempt for someone, you will never convince them of anything.
I just feel like you have an extremely low opinion of the people you're talking about trying to convince, which is something you should generally try to avoid; if you act like you have contempt for someone, you will never convince them of anything.
I'm far from contempt when it comes to people who are cultural relativists not being convinced by reason.
There nothing contemptful about recognizing that another person wants to be happy and helping them to be happy.
I don't let my emotions interfere with my reasoning on that level. I don't let myself get blin...
I'm afraid I haven't properly designed the Muggles Studies course I introduced at my local Harry Potter fan club. Last Sunday we finally had our second class (after wasted months of insistence and delays), and I introduced some very basic descriptions of common biases, while of course emphasizing the need to detect them in ourselves before trying to detect them in other people. At some point, which I didn't completely notice, the discussion changed from an explanation of the attribution bias into a series of multicultural examples in favor of moral relativity. I honestly don't know how that happened, but as more and more attendants voiced their comments, I started to fear someone would irreversibly damage the lessons I was trying to teach. They basically stopped short of calling the scientific method a cultural construct, at which point I'm sure I would have snapped. I don't know what to make of this. Some part of me tries to encourage me and make me put more effort into showing these people the need for more reductionism in their worldview, but another part of me just wants to give them up as hopeless postmodernists. What should I do?