Bugmaster comments on The Wonder of Evolution - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 November 2007 08:49PM

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Comment author: Bugmaster 02 May 2012 09:25:42PM 2 points [-]

That's a good point; humans are not perfect "anti-induction machines". That said, each person who'd presented this argument to me had spent a lot of mental effort during his or her life to embrace and perfect this worldview. In the same way as a rationalist would train himself to use Bayesian reasoning and distrust his biases, the anti-rationalist trains himself to trust his faith/emotions/ESP/etc., and ignore scientific evidence. Thus, even when the anti-rationalist feels the intuitive sway of evidence, he or she will strive to ignore it.

BTW, I'm using slash-separated lists in my posts because I'd heard this argument multiple times, from multiple people, each of whom had a different set of ancillary beliefs. Thus, it seems like this worldview is not tied to any particular religion or philosophy.