The reason I brought it up is that there is no default "do what the mainstream does" position there. The mainstream is religious and the helpless view would tell you to be religious, too.

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.

I don't have much experience with deconversions, but even looking at personal stories posted on LW, they seem to rotate around doubting particular elements on the objective level, not on the "this belief is too weird" level.

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.

Well, yes, but "rationality" is not terribly well defined and is a whole another can of worms. In particular, I know how to measure IQ and I know how it's distributed in populations and sub-groups. I do NOT know how to measure the degree of rationality and what's happening with it in populations. That makes discussions of rationality as an empirical variable to be handwavy and... not stand on solid data ground.

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

First, signaling loyalty could be a perfectly rational thing to do. Second, there is the issue of the difference between signaling and true beliefs -- signaling something other than what you believe is not uncommon.

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.

You have priors, don't you?

... 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.

Presumably, quite strong priors about certain things?

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.)

How do you know who is who? And who gets to decide? If I am talking to someone, do I have to first have to classify her into enlightened or unenlightened?

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.

That's not a winning line of argument -- it's argument for popularity can be easily shut down by pointing out that a lot more smart people are not worried, and the helpless approach tells you not to pick fringe views.

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.

The basic question is, how do you know? In particular, can you consistently judge the rationality of someone of noticeably higher IQ?

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.