I've known for a long time that some people who are very close to me are somewhat inclined to believe the pseudoscience world, but it always seemed pretty benign. In their everyday lives they're pretty normal people and don't do any crazy things, so this was a topic I mostly avoided and left it at that. After all - they seemed to find psychological value in it. A sense of control over their own lives, a sense of purpose, etc.
Recently I found out however that at least one of them seriously believes Bruce Lipton, who in essence preaches that happy thoughts cure cancer. Now I'm starting to get worried...
Thus I'm wondering - what can I do about it? This is in essence a religious question. They believe this stuff with just anecdotal proof. How do I disprove it without sounding like "Your religion is wrong, convert to my religion, it's right"? Pseudoscientists are pretty good at weaving a web of lies that sound quite logical and true.
The one thing I've come up with is to somehow introduce them to classical logical fallacies. That at least doesn't directly conflict with their beliefs. But beyond that I have no idea.
And perhaps more important is the question - should I do anything about it? The pseudoscientific world is a rosy one. You're in control of your life and your body, you control random events, and most importantly - if you do everything right, it'll all be OK. Even if I succeed in crushing that illusion, I have nothing to put in its place. I'm worried that revealing just how truly bleak the reality is might devastate them. They seem to be drawing a lot of their happiness from these pseudoscientific beliefs, either directly or indirectly.
And anyway, more likely that I won't succeed but just ruin my (healthy) relationship with them. Maybe it's best just not to interfere at all? Even if they end up hurting themselves, well... it was their choice. Of course, that also means that I'll be standing idly by and allowing bullshit to propagate, which is kinda not a very good thing. However right now they are not very pushy about their beliefs, and only talk about them if the topic comes up naturally, so I guess it's not that bad.
Any thoughts?
Of course, but you can ask for the asymmetry between $yourcountry, USA, Germany, Italy, Japan and Israel (or whichever group of places you prefer). These places have wildly different attitudes to religion (or, well, at least they follow different religions, somewhat) with no-one being in a better position in terms of figuring out the right religion, so you can conclude that while some religion must be correct, we don't know which one.
Something something selection bias.
Anyway, I don't know about religious deconversion, but I know I've had a lot of stupid political views that I've removed by using helpless view.
IIRC my brother deconverted via helpless view, but I might misremember. Either way, that would be n=1, so not that useful.
I quite like Eliezer's suggestion of using the question of MWI as a test for rationality, but I'm biased; I independently discovered it as a child. :P
The problem here is that there isn't necessarily a difference between signaling and true beliefs. Imagine your outgroup saying the most ridiculous thing you can. That thing is likely a kind of signaling, but in some ways (not all, though) it acts like a belief.
... I can sometimes for simplicity's sake be modeled as having priors, but we're all monkeys after all. But yeah, I know what you mean.
Sure. But if I lived in a world where most people believed the holocaust is a hoax, or a world where it was controversial whether it was a hoax but the knowledge of the evidence was distributed in the same way as it is today, I'm pretty sure I would be a holocaust denier.
(Of course, in the second case the evidence in favor of the holocaust having happened would rapidly emerge, completely crush the deniers, and send us back to the current world, but we're "preventing" this from happening, counterfactually.)
Anyway, this shows that a large part of my belief in the holocaust comes from the fact that everybody knows holocaust deniers are wrong. Sure, the evidence in favor of the holocaust is there, but I (assume I would have (I haven't actually bothered checking what the deniers are saying)) no way of dealing the denier's counterarguments, because I would have to dig through mountains of evidence every time.
(If holocaust deniers are actually trivial to disprove, replace them with some other conspiracy theory that's trickier.)
Well, most of the time, you're going to notice. Try talking politics with them; the enlightened ones are going to be curious, while the unenlightened ones are going to push specific things. Using the word 'majoritarian' for the helpless view might have made it unclear that in many cases, it's a technique used by relatively few people. Or rather, most people only use it for subjects they aren't interested in.
However, even if you can't tell, most of the time it's not going to matter. I mean, I'm not trying to teach lists of biases or debate techniques to every person you talk to.
Gates is one of the most famous people within tech, though. That's not exactly fringe.
Actually, I just re-read your scenario. I had understood it as if Alice subscribed to the helpless view. I think that in this case, Bob is making the mistake of treating the helpless view as an absolute truth, rather than a convenient approximation.I wouldn't dismiss entire communities based on weak helpless view knowledge; it would have to be either strong (i.e. many conspiracy theories) or independent view.
In the case described in the OP, we have strong independent view knowledge that the pseudoscience stuff is wrong.
I think so. I mean, it even had a Seer who hosted a reasonably popular event at the club, so... yeah. IQ high, rationality at different levels.
Also, 'noticeably higher IQ' is ambiguous. Do you mean 'noticeably higher IQ' than I have? Because it was just an ordinary high-IQ thing, not an extreme IQ thing, so it's not like I was lower than the average of that place. I think its minimum IQ was lower than the LW average, but I might be mixing up some stuff.
Sorry, under the helpless approach you cannot conclude anything, much less on the basis of something as complex as a cross-cultural comparative religion analysis. If you are helpless, you do what people around you do and think what people around you think. The end.
Oh-oh. I'm failing this test hard.
Besides, are you quite sure that you want to make an untestable article of faith w... (read more)