LW is thus far the only forum on which I have personally initiated discussion of this topic; but obviously I’ve followed discussions about it in numerous other places.
Is there any forum which has responded rationally?
You’re on it.
I mean, there are plenty of instances elsewhere of people getting the correct answer. But basically what you get is either selection bias (the forum itself takes a position, and people are there because they already agree) or the type of noisy mess we see at RDF. To date, LW is the only place I know of where an a priori neutral community has considered the question and then decisively inclined in the right direction.
What seem to be the controlling biases?
In the case of RDF, I suspect compartmentalization is at work: this topic isn’t mentally filed under “rationality”, and there’s no obvious cached answer or team to cheer for. So people there revert to the same ordinary, not-especially-careful default modes of thinking used by the rest of humanity, which is why the discussion there looks just like the discussions everywhere else.
It’s noteworthy that my references and analogies to concepts and arguments discussed by Dawkins himself had no effect; apparently, we were just in a sort of separate magisterium. Particularly telling was this quote:
You are claiming that the issue of gods existence has been the subject of a major international trial, where a jury found that god existed? When did that happen?
Now on the face of it this seems utterly dishonest: I hardly think this fellow would actually be tempted to convert to theism upon hearing the news that eight Perugians had been convinced of God’s existence. But I suspect he’s actually just trying to express the separation that apparently exists in his mind between the kind of reasoning that applies to questions about God and the kind of reasoning that applies to questions about a criminal case.
Technical nitpick on the use of ‘a priori’ in the context. Subject to possible contradiction if I have missed a nuance in the meaning in the statistics context).
LW is thus far the only forum on which I have personally initiated discussion of this topic; but obviously I’ve followed discussions about it in numerous other places.
You’re on it.
I mean, there are plenty of instances elsewhere of people getting the correct answer. But basically what you get is either selection bias (the forum itself takes a position, and people are there because they already agree) or the type of noisy mess we see at RDF. To date, LW is the only place I know of where an a priori neutral community has considered the question and then decisively inclined in the right direction.
In the case of RDF, I suspect compartmentalization is at work: this topic isn’t mentally filed under “rationality”, and there’s no obvious cached answer or team to cheer for. So people there revert to the same ordinary, not-especially-careful default modes of thinking used by the rest of humanity, which is why the discussion there looks just like the discussions everywhere else.
It’s noteworthy that my references and analogies to concepts and arguments discussed by Dawkins himself had no effect; apparently, we were just in a sort of separate magisterium. Particularly telling was this quote:
Now on the face of it this seems utterly dishonest: I hardly think this fellow would actually be tempted to convert to theism upon hearing the news that eight Perugians had been convinced of God’s existence. But I suspect he’s actually just trying to express the separation that apparently exists in his mind between the kind of reasoning that applies to questions about God and the kind of reasoning that applies to questions about a criminal case.
Technical nitpick on the use of ‘a priori’ in the context. Subject to possible contradiction if I have missed a nuance in the meaning in the statistics context).
I would have just gone with ‘previously’.