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.

It seems like we are thinking of two different views, then. Let's keep the name 'helpless view' for mine and call yours 'straw helpless view'.

The idea behind helpless view is that you're very irrational in many ways. Which ways?

1. You're biased in favor of your ingroups and your culture. This feels like your ingroups are universally correct from the inside, but you can tell that it is a bias from the fact that your outgroups act similarly confident.

2. You're biased in favor of elegant convincing-sounding arguments rather than hard-to-understand data.

3. Your computational power is bounded, so you need to spend a lot of resources to understand things.

4. Mount Stupid

There are obviously more, but biases similar to those are the ones the helpless view is intended to fight.

The way it fights those arguments is by not allowing object-level arguments, arguments that favor your ingroups or your culture over others and things like that.

Instead, in helpless view, you focus on things like:

1. International mainstream consensus. (Things like cross-cultural analysis on opinions, what organizations like the UN say, etc.)

2. Expert opinions. (If the experts, preferably in your outgroup, agree that something is wrong, rule it out. Silence on the issue does not let you rule it out.)

3. Things that you are an expert on. (Looking things up on the web does not count as expert.)

4. What the government says.

(The media are intentionally excluded.)

Oh-oh. I'm failing this test hard.

evil grin

Besides, are you quite sure that you want to make an untestable article of faith with zero practical consequences the criterion for rationality? X-/

Nah, it was mostly meant as a semi-joke. I mean, I like the criterion, but my reasons for liking it are not exactly unbiased.

If I were to actually make a rationality test, I would probably look at the ingroups/outgroups of the people I make the test for, include a bunch of questions about facts where each there is a lot of ingroup/outgroup bias, and look at the answers to that.

That's an argument against the helpless view, right? It sure looks this way.

Except that we live in the current world, not the counterfactual world, and in the current world the helpless view tells you not to believe conspiracy theories.

Well, yes, I'm going to notice and I generally have little trouble figuring out who's stupid and who is smart. But that's me and my personal opinion. You, on the other hand, are setting this up as a generally applicable rule. The problem is who decides. Let's say I talk a bit to Charlie and decide that Charlie is stupid. Charlie, on the basis of the same conversation, decides that I'm stupid. Who's right? I have my opinion, and Charlie has his opinion, and how do we resolve this without pulling out IQ tests and equivalents?

It's essentially a power and control issue: who gets to separate people into elite and masses?

I dunno.

For what purpose are you separating the people into elite and masses? If it's just a question of who to share dangerous knowledge to, there's the obvious possibility of just letting whoever wants to share said dangerous knowledge decide.

In your setup there is the Arbiter -- in your case, yourself -- who decides whether someone is smart (and so is allowed to use the independent approach) or stupid (and so must be limited to the helpless approach). This Arbiter has a certain level of IQ. Can the Arbiter judge the smartness/rationality of someone with noticeably higher IQ than the Arbiter himself?

I don't know, because I have a really high IQ, so I don't usually meet people with noticeably higher IQ. Do you have any examples of ultra-high-IQ people who write about controversial stuff?