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Forgetting where your car keys are is not really an example of irrationality.
But it is an example of a wrong belief. Which, if we assume that theism is a wrong belief, we must equate the two as both being false statements. If you don't like the car key example, simply substitute it for any other belief that you hold that has a high likely hood of being false; or do you claim you have none.
Further, You still ignore the fundamental argument, and stick on the example. If it not possible to have a blind spot in reason, but be reasonable in all (is anyone really reasonable in all instances? -- let's say many instead) other instances.
"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"
You believe that it is impossible to hold a "wrong belief" and still be "smart"? Have you ever believed your car keys to be one place, when they were in another? Are there any issues that you have a known bias about, or are you claiming all your beliefs are 100% rational all time? Even when you change your mind?
If you accept the claim that theism is irrational or less rational then atheism, is it not still possible for Wednesday to be rational on most other subjects?
In response to
Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted
Is it really essential that, as a community, we exclude or dismiss or reflexively criticize theists....
I don't think we should exclude them. But that doesn't mean we can't confidently inform them when we know they're wrong.
My favorite rationalist quote ever is "I don't have to agree with you to like or respect you" (Anthony Bourdain). Just because we know theists are wrong doesn't mean we have to be jerks about it. If Newton could make that mistake, anyone can, and we all know how hard it is to climb out of those sorts epistemic holes once you've found yourself in one.
But we shouldn't confuse "not being jerks" with "pretending not to know things that we do in fact know, so that people don't think we're jerks"
"[N]ot to know things that we do in fact know," and "Confidently inform them when we know they're wrong." Except, as a rationalist, you can't say that you know there is no god. You may be able to say that you believe it to be unlikely that there is a god, or that you have seen no evidence that would make you believe that there is a god. The fact is that it is (near) impossible to prove a negative. Likewise, you cannot say that you know there is are no purple polar bear, fairies, unicorns or black swans. The burden of proof does always fall to the affirmative, but you can't rationally and conclusively prove the negative.
In fairness, the teacher may have understood that the student was right about kilometers, but was distracted and put-off by how he made his point, which was pretty brutal.
You know, pretty much how people regard me all the time :-P
Yes, the child was pretty brutal. That said, so was Galileo when he stood on the table and dropped fruit, while having a polite diner with a clergyman who "knew" that heavier objects fell faster than light objects -- if the story is true.
Stupidity is the lack of mental horsepower. A stupid person has a weak or inefficient "cognitive CPU".
Craziness is when the output of the "program" doesn't correlate reliably with reality due to bugs in the "source code". A crazy person has a flawed "cognitive algorithm".
It seems that in humans, source code can be revised to a certain degree, but processing power is difficult (though not impossible) to upgrade.
So calling someone crazy (for the time being) is certainly different from calling someone stupid.
To use your analogy. Any person who doesn't provide the expected output is often deemed crazy... It doesn't mean that there is a bug in the person, perhaps sometimes it's a bug in reality.
I've talked to a number of people who most would call crazy (none of them went to the mad house -- at least that I know of). When you begin to look at things from their perspective you sometimes find that they see patterns others are missing; but lack the social graces and unique way or inability to relate those patterns to others is lost.
On the other hand, I think that we are all "crazy" and "stupid" in our own ways. I think there are really extreme cases of both.
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In the context of my analogy, it's nonsense to say that reality can have bugs.
I suppose you meant that sometimes the majority of people can share the same bug, which causes them to "deem" that someone who lacks the bug (and outputs accordingly) is crazy.
But there's still an actual territory that each program either does or does not map properly, regardless of society's current most popular map. So it's meaningful to define "craziness" in terms of the actual territory, even if it's occassionaly difficult to determine whether 1 person is crazy or "everyone else" is.
I suppose what I was referring to is a spec bug; the bug is in expecting the wrong (accepted by society) output. Not an actual "the universe hiccuped and needs to be rebooted." The reason for the spec bug might not be a shared bug, but programs operating on different inputs. For instance, Tesla... Anyone who knew Tesla described him as an odd man, and a little crazy. At the same time, he purposefully filled his input buffer with the latest research on electricity and purposefully processed that data differently than his peers in the field. He didn't spend much time accumulating input on proper social behavior, or on how others would judge him on the streets. It is seen as a crazy thing to do, to pick up wounded pidgins on the street, take them home and nurse them back to health. Because the spec of the time (norms of society) say it was odd to do.
An old friend of mine who I haven't seen in years is an artist. He's a creative minded person who thinks that rationality would tie his hands too much. That said, when I was younger it surprised me the types of puzzles he was able to solve because he'd try the thing that seemed irrational.