I think this just underscores the original post's point.

The lesson here isn't that Christians are probably right or that Christians are probably wrong. The lesson here is that you can go very wrong by relying on the absurdity heuristic. And that that's true even when the claim seems really absurd.

Let's take a hypothetical atheist who really does think that all Christians believe in the literal word of the Bible. This atheist might reject the whole of Christianity because of the absurdity of talking snakes. Having rejected the entire school of thought that all of Christianity represents, he never has the opportunity to find out that he was wrong (about all Christians taking the Bible literally). Therefore be never realises that he had flawed reasons for rejecting religion.

The woman in the story has a similarly inaccurate understanding of what (many) evolutionists believe. The flawed understanding is part of the issue.

This bias applies to people who reject an idea on the grounds that it seems absurd, but their assessment of 'absurdity' is based on their limited, probably inaccurate, understanding of the topic.

I think you might be deflecting the main point here. Possibly without realising it.

You have a better opportunity to practice your skills as a rationalist if you respond to the [least convenient] (http://tinyurl.com/LWleastconvenient) possible interpretation of this comment.

I would propose that the "experts" being referred to are experts in debating the existence of God. ie of all the arguments that have ever been put forward for the existence of God, these are the people who know the most compelling ones. The most rationally compelling, logically coherent arguments.

Perhaps you mean to say that no such people exist, or no such arguments exist. It is possible that that's true. But it is almost certain that having brief conversations with garden-variety theists, won't expose us to these arguments.

If you happen to have gone looking for these arguments, with an open mind and a willingness to genuinely consider their merits, and you remain unconvinced, then that's fine. I'm pretty sure that if I were to go looking for the most compelling arguments, with a genuinely open mind, i would remain unconvinced too. But i think it's important to acknowledge that I haven't actually done so. I haven't done the research and I haven't given myself the best possible opportunity to change my mind. - There were other things that I was more interested in doing.

For those of us who haven't heard the most compelling arguments: I honestly think that's fine. But i think the original poster (and Psycho) are describing an important bias, that we should be aware of and careful about in our own thinking: the tendency to reason as if we have already seen the most compelling evidence for something, even when there's no reason to believe that you have.

When you realise that you've not yet seen the most convincing version of an argument, there's no reason to raise your probability estimates. But you also shouldn't lower them in the same way that you would if you were sure you'd seen all the evidence that there was.

Exactly!

To demonstrate in this way that the absurdity heuristic is useful, you would have to claim something like:

The ratio of false absurd claims (that you are likely to encounter) to true absurd claims (that you are likely to encounter) is much higher than the ratio of false non-absurd claims (that you are likely to encounter) to true non-absurd claims (that you are likely to encounter).

EDIT wow. I'm the person who wrote that, and i still find it hard to read it. This is one of the reasons why rationality is hard. Even when you have a good intuition for the concepts, it's still hard to express the ideas in a concrete way.

I agree with AlexanderRM.

You stated that some of the autistic people you know are significantly different from most humans. That's in line with the original content, not a counter-argument to it.

And with that said, I'm not sure I'm happy being in a conversation about how "different" a group of people is from normal people. It's hard to know how that will be taken by the people involved, and it may not be a nice feeling to read it.

I think you're right. That squeamishness is very much a product of you having grown up as not-an-octopus.

Most creatures taste with an organ that's at the top of their digestive tract, it's fairly sensible that they have an aversion to tasting anything that they would be unhealthy for them to consume.

A species that had always had a chemical-composition-sense on all of it's limbs? Would almost certainly have a very different relationship with that sense than we have with taste.

I think this might be the bias in action yet again.

Our idea of an alien experience is to taste with a different part of our bodies? That's certainly more different-from-human than most rubber-forehead aliens, but "taste" is still a pretty human-familiar experience. There are species with senses that we don't have at all, like a sensitivity to magnetism or electric fields.

TV tropes calls that the "planet of hats". (visit tv tropes at your own peril, it's a notorious time sink).

I think it represents a different fallacy: to assume that am unfamiliar group of things (or people) are much more homogenous than they really are. And more specifically: to assume that a culture or group of things is entirely defined by the things that make them different from us.

Yes, of course there are many good reasons why writers do this. Reasons why, for a writer, it can be good to do this, in addition to just being difficult to avoid.

But i don't think that's really the point. We're not here to critique science fiction. We're not tv critics. We're trying to learn rationality techniques to help us "win" whatever we're trying to win. And this is a fairly good description of a certain kind of bias.

You're right though. Sci-fi is a good example to demonstrate what the bias is, but not a great example to demonstrate why it's important.

This is fair, because you're using the technique to redirect us back to the original morality issue.

But i also don't think that MBlume was completely evading the question either. The question was about ethical principles, and his response does represent an exploration of ethical principles. MBlume suggests that it's more ethical to sacrifice one of the lives that was already in danger, than to sacrifice an uninvolved stranger. (remember, from a strict utilitarian view, both solutions leave one person dead, so this is definitely a different moral principle.)

This technique is good for stopping people from evading the question. But some evasions are more appropriate than others.

Okay, well let's apply exactly the technique discussed above:

If the hypothetical Omega tells you that they're is indeed a maximum value for happiness, and you will certainly be maximally happy inside the box: do you step into the box then?

Note: I'm asking that in order to give another example of the technique in action. But still feel free to give a real answer if you'd choose to.

Side you didn't answer the question one way or another, I can't apply the second technique here. I can't ask what would have to change in order for you to change your answer.