The fact that a believer in a loving and all powerful god can't really be taken seriously on the singularity is not a claim about their character, and thus doesn't qualify as ad-hominem. It is a claim about the arguments they are going to put forward: in the presence of the background assumption that there's a loving god watching over us, you can't make sensible decisions about the singularity.

You do realize that on any list of historically significant "geniuses," the majority are going to be theists, right?

Irrelevant, they didn't have the evidence that we do today.

If they want to come here and talk about prisoners dilemmas or the Singularity or something, then of course we should welcome their opinions.

also disagreeing here. I don't value a religious person's arguments relating to the singularity at all, and whilst I think we should tolerate them in the interest of free speech, this should be done grudgingly and with disclaimers like "this person cannot have a sensible view on the singularity, treat their output on the subject as noise".

This is because, if you are religious (in the theistic sense, which is really what we're likely to encounter and what I'm talking about), you believe that there is a divine agent watching over us. This has obvious false implications concerning the singularity.

Suppose you tell a theist that there's a serious risk that smarter than human AI could wipe out the whole human race. They'll be thinking "this couldn't happen, God would prevent it" or "oh, it's ok, I'll go to heaven if this happens". Wherever the argument goes next, you are talking to someone who has such radically different background assumptions to you that you won't get anything useful out of them.

Why is this differs from most other subjects is that the religious conception of divine intervention is tailored so that it is consistent with our everyday observations. Thus any religious person who is vaguely sane will have some argument as to why God doesn't prevent earthquakes from killing random people. So God allows small injustices and crimes, but the main point is that everything will be OK in the end, i.e. the ultimate fate of our world is not in question. The debate concerning the Singularity is directly about this question.

There are other failure modes which theists will have disproportionately over atheists, of course. To me it seems that an unerring and (essentially) non-evidence based belief that everything will turn out OK is indictment enough.

Amongst the other failure modes: belief in existence of souls and of the divine place of human intelligence is likely to produce skewed beliefs about the possibility of synthetic intelligence. Various results of dark-side epistemology such as disbelief of evolution, belief in "free will", belief in original sin and belief in moral realism ("god given morality") preventing something like CEV. I've heard the following fallacious argument against the transhumanist project from a lot of theists: humans are imperfect, so the only way to improve ourselves is to take advice from a perfect being. Imperfection cannot lead to less-imperfection.

"Can Wednesday be religious and still be a smart person who's good at using rationality?", the answer is empirically yes (eg Robert Aumann).

Disagree here. If Aumann really is religious, and isn't just pretending to be, then he doesn't qualify as "smart" in my book. I would classify him more as "mad scientist with mental health issues"

Isn't there an equally well-known bias toward thinking we'll react differently to future events (or behave differently) than most people? That is, we observe that most people don't become happier when they become rich, but we convince ourselves that we're "different" enough that we nonetheless will? I think Dan Gilbert wrote pretty extensively on this in of those recent "happiness studies" books. Anyway, it seems like there's an obvious tension between the two tendencies.

The historical causes of the different kinds of worldviews held by different people may be similar, but it doesn't make the different worldviews themselves similar. The evolution was implemented on the same kind of physics that fires up the stars, yet a snail is nothing like a giant ball of plasma. The answer to "2+2=" doesn't depend on where you place your faith. Even if you zealously believe that the answer is 78, even if that's what you were taught in school, just like the other kids who were taught different answers, the answer is still 4.

And there is a rational reason to believe the global scientific community, once you grow strong enough to pose the question: they are often right, and they self-check their correctness.

Yes, this is the crux of the difference between the two scenarios. We accept many things from authority figures at face value, but they fall into two categories, testable and untestable, and we can easily figure out which is which.

if you can believe in God, you can believe in anything.

The trouble with that is that I believe in some pretty weird things. I believe in a universe with a hundred billion galaxies, each of a hundred billion stars, of the Earth being a globe rushing round the sun when it appears to be still, with the sun going round it. I believe these things not because I have worked them out for myself, but because I understand that Academe believes them, more or less, and people with whom I associate believe them.

If Wednesday sees the argument for cryonics and dismisses it out of hand because her religion guarantees her an infinite life, and if a positive singularity occurs >100 years from now, Wednesday will lose nearly everything in that one moment of dismissal, because of her religion.

i did not say it established she was better off as a theist than as an atheist. i was merely pointing out that being a theist does not make anyone more or less likely (as far as i know) to believe things which are false about their local environment (beyond those things which necessarily follow from their beliefs, e.g., this priest sure is wise in the ways of the Lord! he must be wise about other things, too!).

do we have any data suggesting atheists hold more accurate beliefs than theists about phenomena that they experience firsthand?