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gwern comments on Connection Theory Has Less Than No Evidence - Less Wrong
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The crazier things are only exposed to a small fraction, which undermines the point. Do the Scientologists not believe in Xenu because they've seen all the Scientology teachings and reject them, or because they've been diligent and have never heard of them? If they've never heard of Xenu, their lack of belief says little about whether the laity differs from the priesthood... In contrast, everyone's heard of and rejected the Basilisk, and it's not clear that there's any fraction of 'people who run LW' which believes in the Basilisk comparable to the fraction of 'people who run that religion' who believe in Xenu. (At this point, isn't it literally exactly one person, Eliezer?)
Visiting a Scientology website is not like taking the LW annual poll as I've suggested, and if there were somehow a lot of random visitors to LW taking the poll, they can be easily cut out by using the questions about time on site / duration of community involvement / karma. So the poll would still be very useful for demonstrating that the Basilisk is a highly non-central and peripheral topic.
I'm pretty sure that a poll taken of most Catholics would show that they think abortion and birth control are moral. I'm also pretty sure that a poll taken of most Catholics would show that (to the extent they've heard of the issue at all) they think the medieval Church was completely wrong in how it treated Galileo, not just factually wrong about heliocentricism.
The church itself would disagree. Is it illegitimate to crticize either the church or Catholicism on that basis?
Well, mostly everyone heard of Xenu, for some value of "heard of", so I'm not sure what's your point.
Yeah. So far, though, it is so highly non central and so peripheral that you can't even add a poll question about it.
edit:
Roko, someone claimed to have had nightmares about it... who knows if they still believe, and whoever else believes? Scientology is far older (and far bigger), there been a lot of insider leaks which is where we know the juicy stuff from.
As for how many people believe in "Basilisk", given various "hint hint there's a much more valid version out there but I won't tell it to you" type statements and repeat objections along the lines of "that's not a fair description of the Basilisk, it makes a lot more sense than you make it out to be", it's a bit slippery with regards to what we mean by Basilisk.