I think if you drop the view that door-to-door evangelism is about conversation and see it mostly as a retention mechanism instead, it addresses some of the issues in the article.

The statistics on the number of people converted to a religion because someone came to their door and argued with them are pitiful. If you spend two years trying to convert people that way, the median expectation is "no conversions" (one or two is substantial success, and more than that is a crazy outlier). If your goal is actually to change people's minds your approach has to be much more subtle. It requires building a relationship of trust, respect, and care for a long time before a normal person will take your words as worthwhile evidence for updating their life philosophy.

Far more common are vegans who are adamantly non-condemnatory. They may abstain from using any sort of animal products on strictly moral grounds, but, they will defensively assert, they’re not going to criticize anyone else for doing otherwise.

As near as I can tell, this is pretty much the correct strategy for honesty convincing someone to adopt the practices suggested by a belief, whether its a matter of Veganism or Mormonism. My understanding from reading about the sociology of evangelism is that the Mormons give pamphlets to the laity that tell them not to proselyze to friends, co-workers, neighbors etc. Their job is to be friendly, helpful, and admirable while deflecting questions about their beliefs as "helpful for me but not that important" until someone is so impressed by the quality of their lives and how nice they are at a BBQ that they ask two or three times about their beliefs. Then the family invites the interested party (usually an entire family, with bonds of friendship that run husband-to-husband, wife-to-wife, kids-to-kids) to a church social event to help them see how things work. If the family is still interested, the believing family doesn't "close the sale" itself -- they invite the interested family over to talk with a specialized member of the church who can help the interested family formally articulate their by-now-pre-existing interest in joining the church.

In the meantime, from what I can tell, the real adaptive function of going door to door is that it exposes a new adult believer to a lot of debate-style conversation about the idea they are promoting. In the absence of effective epistemic warnings to the contrary they become more committed to their idea via massive commitment and consistency, and various other cognitive biases. This makes them less likely to feel that the belief is just a matter of lip service, which would make a lapse in belief more likely in the absence of the social processes of regular church attendance.

One of my pet hypotheses for "where rationalists come from" is that many of us engage in debate-style conversations (similar to proselytizing) for fun when we are young in the absence of any coherent doctrine to defend that has been handed down to us by an institution. This practice teaches us respect for the usefulness of defending "the right content" as a helpful technique for the intrinsically valuable outcome of winning a debate. Then epistemic rationality is intelligible as a truth-biased (and hence nominally moral) method to find the content and justifications that will be useful for winning future debates... then you have enough to bootstrap into logical fallacies and cost-benefit-analysis and so on. This isn't a very admirable theory, but if it was true then it seems helpful to know if you're trying to teach or find rationalists.

Also, if this hypothesis is on the mark it probably has sociological implications: If someone gets an emotional boost from winning a debate then someone else is going to lose a debate and get negative reinforcement for the same verbal interactions. Unless this process was engineered somehow (with people losing on purpose and not taking it hard?) I suspect that rationalists produced by this method can never be more than a fraction of the population, and they will necessarily be intermixed with people for whom debate has almost entirely negative emotional associations.

From this (admittedly very weird) perspective, evangelists for false doctrines may unwittingly be performing an epistemic public service that, on net, raises the sanity waterline :-)

You raise a good point: if beliefs about a subject (say, theology) are deadly serious, then it makes sense to try to persuade people to agree with you -- after all, you'd be saving lives (or, at least, souls.) The institution of religious toleration, which is relatively recent, is a way of not taking religion quite that seriously. In religiously tolerant societies, we take a meta-value, tolerance, more seriously than the particular religion to which we belong.

I think people who believe in religious tolerance may see religion as a kind of personal identity or choice that should be respected. Not a statement of fact that can be challenged. "You can't expect her to believe in the Virgin Birth, she's Jewish!" is a normal thing to think, but "You can't expect him to believe that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, he's from California!" isn't. Dinosaurs are fair game for argument; religious identity, not so much.

Honestly, on topics where "opinions" are really more about personal identity and taste than evaluations of the facts, the religious toleration model might make more sense than the spirited debate model. Religious toleration tacitly admits that most people are not really capable of staying at a factual level when we talk about religion. I wonder what else might be better relegated to the realm of toleration instead of debate.

So why the taboo on trying to change others’ beliefs?

I think "taboo" is a bit of a strong word - if most people don't go around trying to persuade others to change their minds, it's not because they learned a social norm against that, but rather that they learned through trial and error that 1) having someone try to change your mind is annoying, 2) when they try to change someone's mind, that person is likely to be annoyed and less friendly 3) that person is also likely to counter-argument and may push you to re-examine your beliefs, which is uncomfortable.

From a behaviorist point of view, it's a behavior that gets a lot of punishment and no reward, so it's bound to disappear.

Contrast that with something like saying bad things of somebody behind his back, which doesn't get immediate negative feedback, and is kept down mostly by social norms.

I can think of a special case where this taboo doesn't hold (or has very different dynamics), which is worth studying for comparison: courtship. When courting someone (which in practice means a man to a woman), you're basically trying to persuade someone to make decisions she wouldn't otherwise make, and which will benefit you. Yet this kind of persuasion is in some sense expected.

In NYC, I asked a PUA what makes me, approaching a woman with romantic intent, any different from a panhandler? His answer was (paraphrasing) "because that's the role they expect out of men".

But it’s worth wondering, when we consider a society which upholds a free market of ideas which compete on their relative strength, whether we’ve taken adequate precautions against the sheer annoyingness of a society where the taboo on actually trying to convince others of one’s beliefs has been lifted.

If beliefs have consequences, and persuasion is effective, then, with the benefit of hindsight, most people would be grateful for most episodes of persuasion. For example, suppose I want to visit my cousins on Mars for a few decades, and I believe that the regular space shuttle carries a 10% risk of death and the mass driver carries a 20% risk of death. If you successfully convince me that I've got it backward, and that really it's the mass driver that's safer, then even if I was really annoyed for a few hours, I'll probably thank you afterward for potentially saving my life.

Note that there are three main ways persuasion could fail: an argument has little evidence to back it up, you are bad at arguing, or I am bad at listening. If the argument has little evidence to back it up, then the belief, so far as we can tell, does not have consequences, and you should leave me alone. If you are bad at arguing, then you need to go practice with friends and leave me alone. If I am bad at listening, then I need to practice with friends, and unless the argument is about something both urgent and important, the best thing you can do for me is be my friend and help me practice being convinced on topics that I am less emotionally invested in.

Well, to me, persuasion is usually annoying because it is so blunt. Prolonged exposure to media that proclaim a neutral point of view (such as Wikipedia, where it is enforced by consensus) has seemingly "programmed" me so that biased arguments feel like attempts to rewire my brain.

When I try to convince someone, instead of stating my beliefs outright, I try to poke logical gaps in the opponent's, in the hope that it will get them to think critically.

I have never known another person to criticize evangelists for not trying hard enough to change others’ beliefs.

I would change "another person" to "a non-evangelist," because that sentence as is has some unfortunate implications.

But it’s worth wondering, when we consider a society which upholds a free market of ideas which compete on their relative strength, whether we’ve taken adequate precautions against the sheer annoyingness of a society where the taboo on actually trying to convince others of one’s beliefs has been lifted.

It seems like it's better to circumvent the taboo on persuasion than it is to remove it. You don't want to be evangelized all of the time- and so maybe a polite rationalist society would set aside Sunday as Persuasion Day, where people are encouraged to change other's minds and have their own minds changed.

Or, perhaps we would have a situation like now, where if you want to argue you head to an internet forum, and if you want to have your mind changed you head to a good internet forum.