It appears that Scientific American have found out about raising the sanity waterline. Plus one successful prediction by Mr. Yudkowsky, I presume. Since I couldn’t bring myself to quote any particular bit of the article, deeming all of them to be of substance and interest, I urge the reader to actually follow the link and read for themselves.
To summarize: the conclusion many experiments, performed in many different ways, reach, is that, whenever you get people to actually stop and think of what they are saying, rather than go on intuition or what they think the socially “normal” thing is, their declared levels of religious belief seem to always drop dramatically, on average. This isn’t achieved by anything complicated like teaching them about biases, but by tricks as simple and cheap as making the font of the answer sheet hard to read, or showing them a picture of Rodin’s The Thinker.
I shall also link you to the TVTropes discussion on that topic, since they’re a little more mainstream than us, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the world around us and fall to parochialsim. Links to other communities discussing the article (it’s bound to make quite a splash) are very welcome.
Losing Your Religion: Analytic Thinking Can Undermine Belief
It appears that Scientific American have found out about raising the sanity waterline. Plus one successful prediction by Mr. Yudkowsky, I presume. Since I couldn’t bring myself to quote any particular bit of the article, deeming all of them to be of substance and interest, I urge the reader to actually follow the link and read for themselves.
To summarize: the conclusion many experiments, performed in many different ways, reach, is that, whenever you get people to actually stop and think of what they are saying, rather than go on intuition or what they think the socially “normal” thing is, their declared levels of religious belief seem to always drop dramatically, on average. This isn’t achieved by anything complicated like teaching them about biases, but by tricks as simple and cheap as making the font of the answer sheet hard to read, or showing them a picture of Rodin’s The Thinker.
I shall also link you to the TVTropes discussion on that topic, since they’re a little more mainstream than us, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the world around us and fall to parochialsim. Links to other communities discussing the article (it’s bound to make quite a splash) are very welcome.