I mean, I don’t have a horse in this race, but this can just as easily be “If you haven’t read a lot of cognitive science and statistics and gone through a long process of unlearning your irrational and corrupted-hardware nature, and identifying the importance of rationality, I think I can provide evidence of your behaving in a way that perpetuates irrationality in this world. To do this I’d have to watch you in person for a while, but if you want to answer this question without that happening, you can just read lots of the literature on heuristics and biases (even frequentism will work for this....”
This sort of superficial pattern-matching proves nothing. It really is true that most people who don’t put effort into improving beyond the cultural baseline are most likely perpetuating the irrational biases of their culture, even if they think they’re thinking perfectly clearly; the fact that it pattern-matches your bit about the Bible doesn’t change that.
No, the bit that pattern-matches is that “patriarchy”, “oppression”, “privilege” and the like have no consistent definition, just like “sinfulness”. Also, rationalists don’t try to guilt-trip you into overcoming your biases and becoming more rational (unless you count some of the efficient-charity advocacy as akin to guilt-tripping). It really is a pseudo-religious argument.
(nods) If your comment had been clearer about your objection being to the ill-defined nature of key terms and to the use of guilt as a means of manipulating behavior, I would not have reacted as I did. But that was far from clear.
Oh, come on.
I mean, I don’t have a horse in this race, but this can just as easily be “If you haven’t read a lot of cognitive science and statistics and gone through a long process of unlearning your irrational and corrupted-hardware nature, and identifying the importance of rationality, I think I can provide evidence of your behaving in a way that perpetuates irrationality in this world. To do this I’d have to watch you in person for a while, but if you want to answer this question without that happening, you can just read lots of the literature on heuristics and biases (even frequentism will work for this....”
This sort of superficial pattern-matching proves nothing. It really is true that most people who don’t put effort into improving beyond the cultural baseline are most likely perpetuating the irrational biases of their culture, even if they think they’re thinking perfectly clearly; the fact that it pattern-matches your bit about the Bible doesn’t change that.
No, the bit that pattern-matches is that “patriarchy”, “oppression”, “privilege” and the like have no consistent definition, just like “sinfulness”. Also, rationalists don’t try to guilt-trip you into overcoming your biases and becoming more rational (unless you count some of the efficient-charity advocacy as akin to guilt-tripping). It really is a pseudo-religious argument.
(nods) If your comment had been clearer about your objection being to the ill-defined nature of key terms and to the use of guilt as a means of manipulating behavior, I would not have reacted as I did. But that was far from clear.