If the truth is on your side, you will be able to convince others without using dirty tricks, won’t you?
I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t convince a creationist that evolution is correct. And not because creation and evolution each have a 50% chance of being correct.
No, I couldn’t. Because the object level is important. Both evolutionists and creationists can say that the other side is biased, refuses to look at evidence, etc. But when it comes to creation versus evolution, only one side actually is. The symmetry collapses into asymmetry. Creation versus evolution is a prime example of your thesis being wrong. There are two sides, they can’t convince each other, they say the other side is reasoning poorly… and yet someone who understands evolution can fairly and honestly say that their position is about 100% correct.
I agree that any discussion of god-related topics might take several times longer, since you’d have to go into cognitive biases. You’d probably need to explain Bayesianism—or even argue for it—before you could move on. In the worst case, you’d have to drop them Sequences: highlighted. Okay, they won’t read it, because it’s hundreds of pages long, and because Eliezer constantly speaks out against religion, so believers wouldn’t enjoy reading it anyway. Right, that would take an absurd amount of time.
Still, I personally only estimate the probability that creationists are wrong at about 80%, simply because I haven’t really looked into their line of argumentation, and I’ve never even debated a believer seriously. Intuitively, it feels absurd to deny something without really understanding what exactly it is you’re denying.
I agree that any discussion of god-related topics might take several times longer, since you’d have to go into cognitive biases.
Okay then, let’s use homeopathy as an example. I can fairly and honestly say that my position—which is that homeopathy is crap—is basically 100% correct. Or Holocaust deniers. I can fairly and honestly say that my position—which is that the Holocaust was real—is basically 100% correct.
Saying “everyone’s human, every side has smart people on it, so the sides are 50% correct” doesn’t work. Holocaust deniers are certainly human, and they’re not stupid. But they and I are not equally correct.
(I’d also ask, if you’re going to exclude god-related topics because of cognitive biases, how is that not special pleading? In other contexts, you reject the idea of saying “my political opponents have cognitive biases”. After all we’re all human, all sides have smart people, etc.)
I don’t mean that the probability is always 50⁄50. But it’s not 100% either.
In Europe, the smartest people for centuries believed in god, and they saw endless confirmations of that belief. And then—bam! It turned out they were simply all wrong.
Or take any case of ancient medicine. European doctors believed for centuries that bloodletting cured everything, while Chinese doctors believed that eating lead prolonged life. There are also other examples where all the experts were wrong: geocentrism, the ether theory, the idea that mice spontaneously generate in dirty laundry, the miasma theory of disease…
In all these cases it was either about cognitive biases (God, medicine) or about lack of information or broken public discussion (geocentrism).
Today we fight biases much better than a thousand years ago, but we’re still far from perfect.
And we still sometimes operate under very limited information.
I think one should have fundamental rational habits that would protect me from being so sure in god or bloodletting. That’s why, from any conclusion I make, I subtract a few percentage points of confidence. The more complex the conclusion, the more speculative my reasoning or vulnerable to diases, the more I subtract.
If you claim that my way of fighting this overconfidence shouldn’t be used, I’d want you to suggest something else instead. Because you can’t just leave it as it is—otherwise one might assign 99% confidence to some nonsense.
it feels absurd to deny something without really understanding what exactly it is you’re denying.
Hypothesis space is so large that it’s absurd to give anything more than a passing glance if it doesn’t make sense and nobody can convince you in a fairly short period that it’s at least worth exploring.
I guess you can fall on radical agnosticism, but it’s hard to recommend any policy or decision based on not knowing anything.
Unfortunately, we really can’t convince all creationists. We only have time for a few. However, if you pick some and manage to persuade all those who actually have the time for a discussion, at the very least it would give you personally the confidence that you’re right. And if you document it, that would give the same confidence to everyone else. Moreover, if your experiment turned out to be clear-cut enough, it would become a very strong argument to convince believers in god. If I wholeheartedly believed in something, and then found out that someone took 10 people who believed in the exact same thing I do and managed to change their minds, I’d assume he could probably convince me too—so why not save myself the time and just accept right away that I was wrong about this?
if you pick some and manage to persuade all those who actually have the time for a discussion, at the very least it would give you personally the confidence that you’re right.
How does that update work? I already suspect (say, 95% that creationism is wrong, 92% that evolution and luck explains most of current biological existence) I’m right, and they’re quite wrong. If I convince them, that’s more about them being uncertain and wishy-washy than them being able to provide evidence that I am, in fact, right?
It’s surprising that they can be convinced, so I guess I update a bit against creationists being unwilling to discuss, but that tells me nothing about the underlying question.
Social proof only goes so far, and for most topics between large groups of humans it’s not terribly precise.
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).
I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t convince a creationist that evolution is correct. And not because creation and evolution each have a 50% chance of being correct.
what if you have enough time and they know how to discuss correctly?
No, I couldn’t. Because the object level is important. Both evolutionists and creationists can say that the other side is biased, refuses to look at evidence, etc. But when it comes to creation versus evolution, only one side actually is. The symmetry collapses into asymmetry. Creation versus evolution is a prime example of your thesis being wrong. There are two sides, they can’t convince each other, they say the other side is reasoning poorly… and yet someone who understands evolution can fairly and honestly say that their position is about 100% correct.
I agree that any discussion of god-related topics might take several times longer, since you’d have to go into cognitive biases. You’d probably need to explain Bayesianism—or even argue for it—before you could move on. In the worst case, you’d have to drop them Sequences: highlighted. Okay, they won’t read it, because it’s hundreds of pages long, and because Eliezer constantly speaks out against religion, so believers wouldn’t enjoy reading it anyway.
Right, that would take an absurd amount of time.
Still, I personally only estimate the probability that creationists are wrong at about 80%, simply because I haven’t really looked into their line of argumentation, and I’ve never even debated a believer seriously. Intuitively, it feels absurd to deny something without really understanding what exactly it is you’re denying.
Okay then, let’s use homeopathy as an example. I can fairly and honestly say that my position—which is that homeopathy is crap—is basically 100% correct. Or Holocaust deniers. I can fairly and honestly say that my position—which is that the Holocaust was real—is basically 100% correct.
Saying “everyone’s human, every side has smart people on it, so the sides are 50% correct” doesn’t work. Holocaust deniers are certainly human, and they’re not stupid. But they and I are not equally correct.
(I’d also ask, if you’re going to exclude god-related topics because of cognitive biases, how is that not special pleading? In other contexts, you reject the idea of saying “my political opponents have cognitive biases”. After all we’re all human, all sides have smart people, etc.)
I don’t mean that the probability is always 50⁄50. But it’s not 100% either.
In Europe, the smartest people for centuries believed in god, and they saw endless confirmations of that belief. And then—bam! It turned out they were simply all wrong.
Or take any case of ancient medicine. European doctors believed for centuries that bloodletting cured everything, while Chinese doctors believed that eating lead prolonged life.
There are also other examples where all the experts were wrong: geocentrism, the ether theory, the idea that mice spontaneously generate in dirty laundry, the miasma theory of disease…
In all these cases it was either about cognitive biases (God, medicine) or about lack of information or broken public discussion (geocentrism).
Today we fight biases much better than a thousand years ago, but we’re still far from perfect.
And we still sometimes operate under very limited information.
I think one should have fundamental rational habits that would protect me from being so sure in god or bloodletting. That’s why, from any conclusion I make, I subtract a few percentage points of confidence. The more complex the conclusion, the more speculative my reasoning or vulnerable to diases, the more I subtract.
If you claim that my way of fighting this overconfidence shouldn’t be used, I’d want you to suggest something else instead. Because you can’t just leave it as it is—otherwise one might assign 99% confidence to some nonsense.
Hypothesis space is so large that it’s absurd to give anything more than a passing glance if it doesn’t make sense and nobody can convince you in a fairly short period that it’s at least worth exploring.
I guess you can fall on radical agnosticism, but it’s hard to recommend any policy or decision based on not knowing anything.
We don’t know, because both of those conditions are false in almost every case.
Unfortunately, we really can’t convince all creationists. We only have time for a few. However, if you pick some and manage to persuade all those who actually have the time for a discussion, at the very least it would give you personally the confidence that you’re right. And if you document it, that would give the same confidence to everyone else. Moreover, if your experiment turned out to be clear-cut enough, it would become a very strong argument to convince believers in god. If I wholeheartedly believed in something, and then found out that someone took 10 people who believed in the exact same thing I do and managed to change their minds, I’d assume he could probably convince me too—so why not save myself the time and just accept right away that I was wrong about this?
How does that update work? I already suspect (say, 95% that creationism is wrong, 92% that evolution and luck explains most of current biological existence) I’m right, and they’re quite wrong. If I convince them, that’s more about them being uncertain and wishy-washy than them being able to provide evidence that I am, in fact, right?
It’s surprising that they can be convinced, so I guess I update a bit against creationists being unwilling to discuss, but that tells me nothing about the underlying question.
Social proof only goes so far, and for most topics between large groups of humans it’s not terribly precise.
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.