I think it is a huge mistake to assume that someone who is irrational in one area isn’t perfectly rational in other areas. I can easily imagine an intelligent theist writing helpful posts on nearly every subject that comes up here. The fact that he’s making errors when it comes to his thinking on God is totally beside the point. Creationists I’d be considerably more skeptical of- but I don’t think its impossible to imagine a good post on say keeping your brain healthy, or rhetorical tricks for convincing people coming from people with very wrong views in other areas. If a theist came here I take it you should down vote his/her bad arguments for theism and upvote any positive contributions they make. End of story.
Learning someone is a theist might be bayesian evidence that they are fools but its not strong enough evidence to prevent entry to the community even before seeing what the person has to offer.
I don’t see what we have here as a bag of tricks you can use to improve your rationality, but a programme that forms a coherent whole, as I set out here. To be a theist is to fail to grasp the whole thrust of the programme.
I’m not sure that is the case. To be a biblical literalist waiting for the rapture is certainly to have nothing in common with the programme. But there are theists who could share your concerns about the effect of our biases and who could make helpful contributions to that cause. And even though this isn’t a deconversion website I think if you want to evangelize for the rationalist project having a community that is open and friendly even to those who still have some irrational beliefs left over is really important. Would you let in questioning theists? Fideists?
EDIT: I should add that I wouldn’t want to leave the impression that my typical picture of a theist is some thundering fundamentalist; I have several pagan and liberal Christian friends, and they are smart and lovely people. Still, the Escher-brained things they say when you try and talk about the subject discourage me from the idea that they’re going to help us move things forward.
Superhappies would ask you, in the name of fairness, to invent a symmetric rite of admission for atheists. Some Bayesian-obvious truth that would sound similarly unacceptable to their social circle.
For example, we atheists could get a taste of theists’ feelings by declaring aloud that “women/blacks and men/whites don’t have equal intelligence on average” and watching the reactions. A “bigoted” version of Dawkins or Eliezer could arise and argue eloquently how this factual statement is irrelevant to morality, just like the issue of god’s existence. That was inflammatory on purpose; you could go for something milder, like the goodness of monarchy relative to democracy.
For cooperation to arise, the opposing side needs to have relative advantage. For the theists to ask atheists to argue for theism, they should consider atheists to be better at arguing for theism than they are. Fairness is not just about symmetry, but also about cooperation. And cooperation requires improvement in the outcome for all sides.
I confess I don’t understand what you mean by this. Are you wondering why more people haven’t commented on that post? Why I haven’t commented on that post?
Does this have something to do with our previous exchange?
Good questions. I guess I am venting my frustration that my lovely post has had so few comments. It feels like that there’s a conversation to be had about the whole subject that we keep nibbling at the edges of in exchanges like this when we should be driving hard for the center. If my post is a poor way to start on that, someone should make a better one.
So to tie that back into our exchange, I feel like I’d be better armed to discuss who we should be encouraging to post here in the name of outreach if we’d had a discussion on what sort of outreach we might do and what role this website might play in that.
However, it’s also more than possible that I have entirely the wrong end of the stick, in which case I’d appreciate guidance on where the right end might be found :-)
You’re right that debating factors the effect outreach would be a lot easier if we had criteria for what effective outreach means.
I think people prefer posts that go a long way toward making some argument- in contrast with those that just ask for input. Even if people like the question they’re less likely to promote the post. But your comment outlining the programme got a lot of karma. Why not make that into a full post and talk about the sorts of things you’d like our goals to be.
One other possibility is that its just too soon to do outreach. Maybe we need more time to mature and systematize our ideas.
I didn’t want to do that because I wanted to discuss everyone’s ideas, not just my own which I’m not wholly confident of, but you might be right that it would be a better way forward. Thanks.
Outreach? For someone who seems so avowedly anti-religious, you seem very eager to appropriate all the trappings of classical, unthinking religion. I’m fine discussing rationality here, but talk of proselytizing makes me nauseous.
Not to mention greatly overestimating the extent to which a superficial similarity implies a deep one. I plan to continue to urinate, even though the Pope does so too.
Funny, I would have said that most biblical literalists have a lot more in common with us than moderate Christians. Literalists tend to believe they believe in God because of the evidence they see for His existence, whereas moderates usually acknowledge that there is no evidence, but they believe anyway. Of course, literalists make several mistakes about what constitutes evidence, and they reach some damn crazy conclusions, but the basic cognitive mechanism of reason is there: Beliefs must be supported by logic and evidence. Moderates don’t even have that much. It’s why fundamentalists who are forced to accept that a big part of their belief system is false (such as Genesis) tend to drop the whole thing and become atheists, while moderates will go on making excuses to keep on believing in their infinitely malleable worldview.
I think it is a huge mistake to assume that someone who is irrational in one area isn’t perfectly rational in other areas. I can easily imagine an intelligent theist writing helpful posts on nearly every subject that comes up here. The fact that he’s making errors when it comes to his thinking on God is totally beside the point. Creationists I’d be considerably more skeptical of- but I don’t think its impossible to imagine a good post on say keeping your brain healthy, or rhetorical tricks for convincing people coming from people with very wrong views in other areas. If a theist came here I take it you should down vote his/her bad arguments for theism and upvote any positive contributions they make. End of story.
Learning someone is a theist might be bayesian evidence that they are fools but its not strong enough evidence to prevent entry to the community even before seeing what the person has to offer.
I don’t see what we have here as a bag of tricks you can use to improve your rationality, but a programme that forms a coherent whole, as I set out here. To be a theist is to fail to grasp the whole thrust of the programme.
I’m not sure that is the case. To be a biblical literalist waiting for the rapture is certainly to have nothing in common with the programme. But there are theists who could share your concerns about the effect of our biases and who could make helpful contributions to that cause. And even though this isn’t a deconversion website I think if you want to evangelize for the rationalist project having a community that is open and friendly even to those who still have some irrational beliefs left over is really important. Would you let in questioning theists? Fideists?
If we’re so keen on outreach, why aren’t we talking about it?
EDIT: I should add that I wouldn’t want to leave the impression that my typical picture of a theist is some thundering fundamentalist; I have several pagan and liberal Christian friends, and they are smart and lovely people. Still, the Escher-brained things they say when you try and talk about the subject discourage me from the idea that they’re going to help us move things forward.
Superhappies would ask you, in the name of fairness, to invent a symmetric rite of admission for atheists. Some Bayesian-obvious truth that would sound similarly unacceptable to their social circle.
For example, we atheists could get a taste of theists’ feelings by declaring aloud that “women/blacks and men/whites don’t have equal intelligence on average” and watching the reactions. A “bigoted” version of Dawkins or Eliezer could arise and argue eloquently how this factual statement is irrelevant to morality, just like the issue of god’s existence. That was inflammatory on purpose; you could go for something milder, like the goodness of monarchy relative to democracy.
For cooperation to arise, the opposing side needs to have relative advantage. For the theists to ask atheists to argue for theism, they should consider atheists to be better at arguing for theism than they are. Fairness is not just about symmetry, but also about cooperation. And cooperation requires improvement in the outcome for all sides.
I wasn’t asking atheists to argue for theism. And I don’t understand your reply at all. Could you explain?
I confess I don’t understand what you mean by this. Are you wondering why more people haven’t commented on that post? Why I haven’t commented on that post?
Does this have something to do with our previous exchange?
Good questions. I guess I am venting my frustration that my lovely post has had so few comments. It feels like that there’s a conversation to be had about the whole subject that we keep nibbling at the edges of in exchanges like this when we should be driving hard for the center. If my post is a poor way to start on that, someone should make a better one.
So to tie that back into our exchange, I feel like I’d be better armed to discuss who we should be encouraging to post here in the name of outreach if we’d had a discussion on what sort of outreach we might do and what role this website might play in that.
However, it’s also more than possible that I have entirely the wrong end of the stick, in which case I’d appreciate guidance on where the right end might be found :-)
You’re right that debating factors the effect outreach would be a lot easier if we had criteria for what effective outreach means.
I think people prefer posts that go a long way toward making some argument- in contrast with those that just ask for input. Even if people like the question they’re less likely to promote the post. But your comment outlining the programme got a lot of karma. Why not make that into a full post and talk about the sorts of things you’d like our goals to be.
One other possibility is that its just too soon to do outreach. Maybe we need more time to mature and systematize our ideas.
I didn’t want to do that because I wanted to discuss everyone’s ideas, not just my own which I’m not wholly confident of, but you might be right that it would be a better way forward. Thanks.
Outreach? For someone who seems so avowedly anti-religious, you seem very eager to appropriate all the trappings of classical, unthinking religion. I’m fine discussing rationality here, but talk of proselytizing makes me nauseous.
I think you may be underestimating the degree of irony with which we’re using religious language.
Not to mention greatly overestimating the extent to which a superficial similarity implies a deep one. I plan to continue to urinate, even though the Pope does so too.
Funny, I would have said that most biblical literalists have a lot more in common with us than moderate Christians. Literalists tend to believe they believe in God because of the evidence they see for His existence, whereas moderates usually acknowledge that there is no evidence, but they believe anyway. Of course, literalists make several mistakes about what constitutes evidence, and they reach some damn crazy conclusions, but the basic cognitive mechanism of reason is there: Beliefs must be supported by logic and evidence. Moderates don’t even have that much. It’s why fundamentalists who are forced to accept that a big part of their belief system is false (such as Genesis) tend to drop the whole thing and become atheists, while moderates will go on making excuses to keep on believing in their infinitely malleable worldview.