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Username comments on Cognitive Biases due to a Narcissistic Parent, Illustrated by HPMOR Quotations - Less Wrong Discussion
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This post is the clearest example of generalizing from fictional evidence that I've seen in quite a while. Harry and his parents don't have the personality traits they do because they mesh together coherently, but because they make for a more entertaining story and give the characters the tools to carry out the plot. To use the characters as evidence of the author's mindstate (or the mindstate of the readers) does not follow.
A book's content can be predictive of the reader's and author's mindstate: reading the Bible predicts religiosity, reading old fiction predicts high education, and reading Japanese predicts living in Japan. I have high confidence that people who enjoy HPMOR have a higher-than-average likelihood of narcissistic parents, because we chose to spend hours reading about a very narcissistic protagonist. In other words, HPMOR is a filter for people who share Harry's arrogance and desire to save/conquer the Universe using science.
Thanks for the link - it was useful. Generalizing from fictional evidence would be to assume that real-world relationships are like HPMOR relationships, without considering that HPMOR is fiction. It looks as if I'm making this error even though I'm not, because I'm using enjoying reading about a certain kind of personality as evidence that readers are more likely to have that same kind of personality. If I used, for example, enjoying reading about desserts to predict, for example, that readers are less (or more) likely to be diabetic, it would be clearer that I'm not making this error.
You are wrong about that. The average atheist know more about the Bible than the average Christians for measures such as being able to name as many of the ten commandments as possible.
Interesting, do you have a source for this? I found http://www.pewforum.org/2010/09/28/u-s-religious-knowledge-survey-who-knows-what-about-religion/ which is ambiguous. (Roughly, it looks like Mormons and white Evangelicals do better than atheists, but atheists do better than white mainline Protestants and Catholics - and the latter two groups are slightly larger.)
It isn't ambiguous. It says 4.2 correct for Christian at the Knowledge of the Bible and 4.4 for atheists/agnostics. For knowledge for Christianity it's 6.2 for Christians and 6.7 for atheists/agnostics.
As far as the source with made me form that belief I don't have noted it down.
You are however right that individual groups like Mormons still outperform the atheists.
Things are further complicated that a lot of Christians get knowledge of the Bible by attending Church where they don't read themselves. An atheist on the other hand might have doubted Christianity and then went to read the Bible to make up his mind that Christianity is bullshit.