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LizzardWizzard comments on How could one (and should one) convert someone from pseudoscience? - Less Wrong
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This topic is valuable me. Every time when me and my girlfriend getting involved in argument it ends up badly and we continue on holding prior beliefs. She blames me for being too rational (In hollywood sense obv, none of my efforts to convince that the word has different meaning payed off). She is absolutely sure that when you hold a skeptical position, you are getting trapped into it, so entry gate for outside view is closed and you are limiting the spectrum of possibilities. With this I'm okay because I like to think of myself as an open-minded person and I can assume that the universe is not objective. But I'm rapidly getting tired when it comes to secret meanings of events and perfect casuality and total misunderstanding of randomness. In her head there is a strange mash of esoterics, buddhism, astrology somehow combined with evolutionary biology in perfect harmony. I'm not sure whether I should try harder to convert her or give up. Maybe I gave up already, because it seems that open-minded people lack neuroplasticity
There no reason to think that trying harder would produce bigger effects. If your goal is convincing it's very important to pick your battles.
I had a disagreement with my girlfriend about the health effects of the microwave. She thinks that feeding a plant only microwaved water will kill it. That happens to be a quite testable belief and we might run the experiment even if I don't believe that it will produce additional knowledge for me.
You could check whether her beliefs make predictions about the real world and then do credence calibration games with her. You train the important rationalist skill of predicting and she might find out that some of her beliefs don't make true predictions.
Good point. However most of her opinions seem to be unfalsifiable, like how I can tell if Dao technic of Inner Smile doesn't work, maybe I'm smiling to my organs not sincerely enough
The point isn't to try to falsify her opinions but to generally encourage her to make predictions about reality and make predictions about reality as well.
If you look at the Dao technic of Inner Smile, you might start by asking her whether she thinks herself that she can perceive whether or not she's sincerely doing the technique.
Don't get attached to have a debate about truth of individual beliefs but focus on actually making predictions.