Good discussions take a lot of time, so people ≈can’t discuss. Because of that, even if 90% of people believe very wrong things, the other 10% can never convince them. So you may be one of those 90% on any question, and the others can’t explain you that you are wrong, so you shouldn’t be so confident in your reflexions.
So if you know that a few believers found 20 atheists who were ready to discuss a lot, and as a result 5 of them got bored and left the discussion after 5 hours, but the other 15 were convinced, it should be an extremely powerful prior of god’s existence.
I’m fairly confident in some of my predictions for future experience. Never 100%, of course.
But that’s not my point. My point is that searching for truth is only very lightly correlated with convincing idiots that they’re wrong. Good conversations among epistemically-sane (or even intelligent but brainwashed) people are very good for discovering better models and refining your beliefs. Trying to convert the median or worse is not helpful (for knowledge/understanding; it may be helpful for actual power or outcomes).
Good discussions take a lot of time, so people ≈can’t discuss. Because of that, even if 90% of people believe very wrong things, the other 10% can never convince them. So you may be one of those 90% on any question, and the others can’t explain you that you are wrong, so you shouldn’t be so confident in your reflexions.
So if you know that a few believers found 20 atheists who were ready to discuss a lot, and as a result 5 of them got bored and left the discussion after 5 hours, but the other 15 were convinced, it should be an extremely powerful prior of god’s existence.
I’m fairly confident in some of my predictions for future experience. Never 100%, of course.
But that’s not my point. My point is that searching for truth is only very lightly correlated with convincing idiots that they’re wrong. Good conversations among epistemically-sane (or even intelligent but brainwashed) people are very good for discovering better models and refining your beliefs. Trying to convert the median or worse is not helpful (for knowledge/understanding; it may be helpful for actual power or outcomes).
Interesting model. Probably you are right and I didn’t considered this because all my friends and me are not idiots.