= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Manfred comments on Open Thread, November 8 - 14, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (141)
The "control" argument predicts more specific things than the "rebellion" argument, and so is a more useful hypothesis. But then again, it's not the whole story at all (desire for community, actual belief, glaring cognitive biases), and once you start inserting caveats the testability goes way down. So I'd say neither argument is worth making.
Actually a rebellion argument also predicts something. It would predict that atheists also rebel against other social norms.
Because the competing hypothesis ("atheists are willing to state a true thing even when most of society disagrees") also predicts some degree of general rebelliousness, I think the prediction is more about pointless and self-destructive behaviors.
And if atheists are just allowed to be tricked by the devil, then I don't know how that pans out into other behaviors.