Presumably most of those whose opinions fall outside of whatever the acceptable range is have those opinions either because they believe they have some relevant piece of expertise, or because they believe they have some relevant information about the biases of specific experts, or because they don’t believe that their ability to estimate systematic bias is in fact “very poor”, or even because they disagree with you about what the experts think. This seems like the sort of information people might falsely convince themselves that they have, but at least if we’re no longer just looking at relatively narrow and technical questions like attribution and sensitivity but also at broader questions like policy, where expert consensus becomes harder to characterize and many different fields become relevant (including futurism and rational aggregation of evidence and weighing of considerations, which many LessWrongers are probably better at than most domain experts) the possibility that they’re right surely is not so preposterous that we can hold it up as a stronger rationality test than theism.
You’re right of course—having policy niggles or disagreement is not a good sign of irrationality. But the harder the science gets, the more disagreement becomes irrational. And I’ve seen people cycle through “global warming isn’t happening” to “it’s happening but it’s natural” to “it’s man-made but it’ll be too expensive to do anything about it” in the course of a single conversation, without seeming to realise the contradications (I’ve seen theists do the same, but this was worse).
So yes, mild anti-AGW (or anti-certain AGW policy ideas) is not a strong sign of irrationality, but I’d argue that neither is mild theism.
Presumably most of those whose opinions fall outside of whatever the acceptable range is have those opinions either because they believe they have some relevant piece of expertise, or because they believe they have some relevant information about the biases of specific experts, or because they don’t believe that their ability to estimate systematic bias is in fact “very poor”, or even because they disagree with you about what the experts think. This seems like the sort of information people might falsely convince themselves that they have, but at least if we’re no longer just looking at relatively narrow and technical questions like attribution and sensitivity but also at broader questions like policy, where expert consensus becomes harder to characterize and many different fields become relevant (including futurism and rational aggregation of evidence and weighing of considerations, which many LessWrongers are probably better at than most domain experts) the possibility that they’re right surely is not so preposterous that we can hold it up as a stronger rationality test than theism.
You’re right of course—having policy niggles or disagreement is not a good sign of irrationality. But the harder the science gets, the more disagreement becomes irrational. And I’ve seen people cycle through “global warming isn’t happening” to “it’s happening but it’s natural” to “it’s man-made but it’ll be too expensive to do anything about it” in the course of a single conversation, without seeming to realise the contradications (I’ve seen theists do the same, but this was worse).
So yes, mild anti-AGW (or anti-certain AGW policy ideas) is not a strong sign of irrationality, but I’d argue that neither is mild theism.