I'm not in Seattle, but I read the book recently and would love to hear your "trouble".

I tend to agree that anyone who denies the tendency to rationalize is either in denial or has a different definition for the word "rationalize". In fact I would argue that rationalization is the default for human beings, and that anything else requires either focused effort or serious mental re-programming (which is still probably only partially effective).

One possible way to try to elicit an understanding for any given individual's capacity for rationalization is to ask them about the last time they did something they knew was a bad idea (perhaps a comrpomise they felt uncomfortable making, or an indulgence they knew they were going to regret), and then to ask them what excuses went through their brains to justify it. If someone still denies ever having had such an experience then they are beyond redemption.

A number of commenters have referenced the idea of being a spectator instead of a target, and I think this is important. One-on-one debates often have a competitive aspect to them that can make people defensive (nobody wants to feel like they've "lost" the "argument").

And really, converting people on a case-by-case basis is probably one of the least efficient approaches to cultural change. My guess is that it's more important to create a healthy "atmosphere for conversion", and I think a big part of that is just being outspoken and unashamed about your atheism. The more people do that, the more it'll be normalized - exposure>persuasion. The arguments are all out there anyway. When someone is ready, they'll seek them out, whether that's talking to atheist friends, watching youtube videos, reading books, or whatever.

And for the record, my own transition occurred in my mid-twenties, somewhere between starting an introduction to philosophy book and finishing Michael Shermer's "Why People Believe Weird Things".

I'm not a statistician, but I think that this dilemma might simply sound like other, much trickier probability issues.

One of the misleading aspects of it is this line: 'When asked what the probability is that the coin came down tails, you of course answer “.5”.' The problem is that this is posed in the past tense, but (without any other information whatsoever) the subject must treat it the same way as the question about a future situation: 'What is the probability that a fair-coin would come down tails, all other things being equal?'

But the next time the question is asked, there's a result to tie it to. It is an actual event with observable secondary effects, and you can hazard an educated guess based on the new information at hand.

Perhaps your thought-experiment vaguely references the counter-intuitive notion that if a coin is flipped 99 times and comes up tails every time, the chances of it coming up tails again is still just .5. But it's more like if you had a jar or 100 marbles, containg either 99-white/1-black or 1-white/99-black and you reached in without looking. What is the probability that you managed to pick that 1 out of 100? It's the same principle that is at work in the Monty Hall problem.

Someone who will be there. Looking forward to meeting you. :)

Who are you?

I didn't know you were from Seattle! Definitely give me/us a message if you visit.

I am in general interested in seeing Caplan's work publicized on LW. I may do it myself at some point. If we come up with anything other than "what Caplan says makes sense for the most part" I'll be sure to at least make a discussion post.

I think Professor Pagel's specific attempts to articulate the mechanics of human ideation isn't the most interesting take-away from this video. His tone makes it clear that he is playing around with a perspective that is new to him, a rough understanding of human intelligence that deserves further exploration.

The concept that I think is important, and which is certainly not universally accepted by a wider audience of reasonably intelligent and educated people, is that our creativity is not "special". That new ideas aren't magically willed into being by some ineffable desire to innovate, but are instead arrived at via conscious and subconscious pattern-seeking, and a mental "auditioning" of potential solutions.

And natural selection is a decent conversational analogy here. There are people who accept that there is no external intelligent agency which governs the "creation" of advanced biological organisms, but still hold on to the idea that the human mind is somehow captained by an irreducible agent, that there is a ghost in the machine. Drawing a comparison between these two processes is a strong and accessible argument against such a notion.

This might be a re-phrasing of some of the other comments, but I think you need to calibrate your approach to match your personality make-up. For instance I could easily spend hours reading, thinking, and writing about some socio-political issue, but the idea of joining a march or protest addressing the same issue sounds draining. Other people are the exact opposite of that. Maybe you like traveling, maybe you like telling stories, maybe you like statistics, maybe you like street-art. Any of these could be creatively leveraged to change the world.

If you link your goals to activities that you can't get enough of, then burn-out is less of a problem. If you decide to equate the worth of your contributions with your degree of success in <Activity X>, because it's the culturally accepted standard (or even because it's the most effective tactic, all other things being equal), then you could end up both failing AND blaming yourself for it.