In fact I have attempted such meta-discussion. Unfortunately it's very difficult to get a straight answer to questions like that; people will almost always CLAIM to care about the truth, but that's also what they would claim if they merely thought they cared and didn't reflect enough on it to know otherwise.
The possibility that I am incorrect about what would make them lose their belief is a very real one; I used to think that merely repeating the things that broke MY faith in God would work on everyone, and that was clearly wrong. Still, I'd give p>.33 for success, and thus expect it to work on at least one of the three people I'm writing about.
The following point is of interest primarily to the OP and is orthogonal to the OP's question.
I'd give p>.33 for success, and thus expect it to work on at least one of the three people I'm writing about.
You should maybe spend some time looking at the foundation of your rationality, as this statement rings some alarm bells.
Probability estimates should be numbers, not ranges, unless you're doing something nonstandard. I can understand saying something like "I don't want to commit to saying anything about the probability of event A beyond 0.25 <...
I'm not sure if this is precisely the correct forum for this, but if there is a better place, I don't know what it would be. At any rate...
I'm a student a Catholic university, and there are (as one might surmise) quite a lot of Catholics here, along with assorted other theists (yes, even some in the biology faculty). For this reason, I find myself acquiring more and more devoutly Catholic friends, and some of them I have grown quite close to. But the God issue keeps coming up for one reason or another, which is a source of tension. And yet as I grow closer to these people, it becomes clearer and clearer that each theist has a certain personal sequence of Dark Arts-ish levers in eir head, the flipping (or un-flipping) of which would snap em out of faith.
So the question is this: in what situations (if any) is it ethical to push such buttons? We often say, here, that that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, but these are people who have built their lives around faith, people for whom the Church is their social support group. If it were possible to disillusion the whole world all at once, that'd be one thing - but in this case my options are limited to changing the minds of only the specific individuals I have spent time getting to know, and the direct result would be their alienation from the entire community in which they've been raised.
And yet it is the truth.
I'm conflicted. LessWrong, what is your opinion?