EDIT, 4/18:  I'm closing the survey.  I'll post analysis and a better anonymized version of the raw data in a day or so.  236 people responded; thanks very much to all who did.

For survey participants curious about the calibration questions, the answers are:

Number of republics the USSR broke up into, following the output of the cold war: 15.

The year in which the global population reached 1 billion: 1804.

The average percentage of a watermelon's weight that comes from water: 92.

Response to: The uniquely awful example of theism

Why is theism such an ever-present example of irrationality in this community? I think ciphergoth overstates the case. Even theism is not completely immune to evidence, as the acceptance of, say, evolution by so many denominations over time will testify. Theism is a useful whipping boy because it needs no introduction.

But I think the case is overstated for another reason. There are terrible epistemologies out there that are just as bad as theism's. Allow me to tell you a tale, of how I gave up my religion and my association with a school of economics at the same time.

I grew up in a southern Presbyterian church in the U.S. While I was taught standard pseudo-evidential defenses for belief, such as "creation science" and standard critiques of evolution, my church was stringently anti-evidentialist. Their preferred apologetic was something called presuppositionalism. It's certainly a minority apologetic among major defenders of Christianity today, especially compared to the cosmological or morality arguments. But it's a particularly rigorous attempt to defend beliefs against evidence nonetheless.

Presuppositionalism (in some forms) hangs on the problem of induction. We cannot ultimately justify any of our beliefs without first making some assumptions, otherwise we end in solipsism. Christianity, then, justifies itself not on evidence, but on internal consistency. It is ok for an argument to be ultimately circular, because all arguments are ultimately circular. Christianity alone maintains perfect worldview consistency when examined through this lens, and is therefore correct.

Since I've spent a lot of time thinking about this--it can take a considerable effort to change one's mind, after all--I can imagine innumerable things wrong with it, but they're not the focus of this entry. First, I just want to note how close it is to a kind of intro-level Bayesian understanding. Bayesians admit that we must have priors, that it's indeed nonsense to think we can even have an argument with one who doesn't. We must ultimately admit that certain justifications are going to be either recursive or based on priors. We believe that we should update our priors based on evidence, but there's nothing in the math that tells us we can't start with a prior for some position of 0% or 100%. (There is something in the math that tells us such probability assignments are very bad ideas, and we have more than enough cognitive bias literature that tells us we shouldn't be so damn overconfident. But then, what if you have a prior that keeps you from accepting such evidence?) It doesn't have any of the mathematical rigor, but it comes very close on a few major points.

Followup to: Are You a Solar Deity?

James McAuley and Harold Stewart were mid-20th century Australian poets, and they were not happy. After having society ignore their poetry in favor of "experimental" styles they considered fashionable nonsense, they wanted to show everyone what they already knew: the Australian literary world was full of empty poseurs.

They began by selecting random phrases from random books. Then they linked them together into something sort of like poetry. Then they invented the most fashionable possible story: Ern Malley, a loner working a thankless job as an insurance salesman, writing sad poetry in his spare time and hiding it away until his death at an early age. Posing as Malley's sister, who had recently discovered the hidden collection, they sent the works to Angry Penguins, one of Australia's top experimental poetry magazines.

You wouldn't be reading this if the magazine hadn't rushed a special issue to print in honor of "a poet in the same class as W.H. Auden or Dylan Thomas".

The hoax was later revealed¹, everyone involved ended up with egg on their faces, and modernism in Australia received a serious blow. But as I am reminded every time I look through a modern poetry anthology, one Ern Malley every fifty years just isn't enough. I daydream about an alternate dimension where people are genuinely interested in keeping literary criticism honest. In this universe, any would-be literary critic would have to distinguish between ten poems generally recognized as brilliant that he'd never seen before, and ten pieces of nonsense invented on the spot by drunk college students, in order to keep his critic's license.

Can we refine this test? And could it help Max Muller with his solar deity problem?

Max Muller was one of the greatest religious scholars of the 19th century. Born in Germany, he became fascinated with Eastern religion, and moved to England to be closer to the center of Indian scholarship in Europe. There he mastered English and Sanskrit alike to come out with the first English translation of the Rig Veda, the holiest book of Hinduism.

One of Muller's most controversial projects was his attempt to interpret all pagan mythologies as linked to one another, deriving from a common ur-mythology and ultimately from the celestial cycle. His tools were exhaustive knowledge of the myths of all European cultures combined with a belief in the interpretive power of linguistics.

What the significance of Orpheus' descent into the underworld to reclaim his wife's soul? The sun sets beneath the Earth each evening, and returns with renewed brightness. Why does Apollo love Daphne? Daphne is cognate with Sanskrit Dahana, the maiden of the dawn. The death of Hercules? It occurs after he's completed twelve labors (cf. twelve signs of zodiac) when he's travelling west (like the sun), he is killed by Deianeira (compare Sanskrit dasya-nari, a demon of darkness) and his body is cremated (fire = the sun).  His followers extended the method to Jesus - who was clearly based on a lunar deity, since he spent three days dead and then returned to life, just as the new moon goes dark for three days and then reappears.

Muller's work was massively influential during his time, and many 19th century mythographers tried to critique his paradigm and poke holes in it. Some accused him of trying to destroy the mystery of religion, and others accused him of shoddy scholarship.

R.F. Littledale, an Anglican apologist, took a completely different route. He claimed that there was, in fact, no such person as Professor Max Muller, holder of the Taylorian Chair in Modern European Languages. All these stories about "Max Muller" were nothing but a thinly disguised solar myth.