The distinction, or better: the phenomenon I am trying to get at is that people (including genuinely smart people) commonly mix up ~intent and ability / actual behaviour.
For example, consider someone who says "I am moral, because I am a Christian", but then sneaks off and cheats on his wife. Or, consider a physics teacher who says "You can learn physics from me, because I am knowledgeable in physics", but then starts lecturing and the content is incorrect.
So too with "atheists" who believe that simply declaring oneself to be a certain way is adequate to achieve the intent.
Note that atheists (also Scientific Materialist fundamentalists like Sean Carroll or NDT, etc) are just a particularly common (and hilarious, because of the irony + self-confidence) manifestation of this abstract phenomenon, it is common in any ideology, derived from fundamental flaws in how our culture teaches (or not) how to think ("Use logic, evidence, critical thinking, etc"...except no methodology accompanies the motto, people think simply declaring it to be so makes it so).
Or maybe another angle to think of it from: rewind 200 years and consider how Western culture was broadly ok with racism and slavery - that's how we currently are with our cultural norms on thinking.
This seems like a separate thing from what you were talking about before. (Unless you're referring again to the "no positive belief in gods" definition of "atheism", but I don't think you can be since in fact if you sincerely declare that you have no positive belief in any gods then that does pretty much mean that you in fact have no such belief.)
If all you're saying is that some people make a lot of fuss about being rational, informed by evidence, etc., and then fail to be sufficiently rational, informed by evidence, etc. -- well, yes, people are fallible and think too highly of themselves, and I expect that state of affairs to continue at least until the Glorious Transhuman Future, should any version of that ever arrive, and probably beyond. I don't see any particular reason to think that atheists overestimate themselves more than theists do.
Also, I think more highly of e.g. Sean Carroll's rationality than it seems you do, and I see absolutely no reason to think that he isn't genuinely attempting, with more success than most, to apply logic and critical thinking to evidence. If you claim he's just mouthing those words and thinks that saying them makes him rational, then I would be interested to know on what grounds you think so.
Also also, although I don't find Richard Dawkins super-impressive when he argues against religion[1], if you think he isn't substantially more rational and more evidence-led than most of the people he argues with[2] then I fear you're severely overstating his shortcomings.
[1] His writing on evolutionary biology is generally very good.
[2] Most, not all. I am not claiming that there is no one reasonable on Team Theism.
> since in fact if you sincerely declare that you have no positive belief in any gods then that does pretty much mean that you in fact have no such belief.
If one declares one's mind to operate in a specific way, it operates that way? How does that work? And what should one think about the plentiful evidence available online of Atheists (Scientists, Rationalists, Experts, etc) demonstrating that their perceived/intended cognition isn't how their actual cognition works? Shall we ignore it?
I am pointing to a genuinely interesting phenomenon here....it is always and everywhere, right in front of (behind?) our noses. Perhaps there's something about it that makes it ~not possible to see it?
> If all you're saying is that some people make a lot of fuss about being rational, informed by evidence, etc., and then fail to be sufficiently rational, informed by evidence, etc.
It isn't, and the evidence of that is right there above.
> well, yes, people are fallible and think too highly of themselves, and I expect that state of affairs to continue at least until the Glorious Transhuman Future, should any version of that ever arrive, and probably beyond.
This is an interesting and common (a literal philosophy professor succumbed to it under testing not more than a week ago) behavior when the idea of improving upon cultural defaults is suggested: framing it as an uninteresting, "everyone knows" fact of life, or an absurd strawman, or both.
Out of curiosity: do you ever observe patterns of cognitive behavior in (all!) Humans? It's really quite interesting, I highly recommend it!
> I don't see any particular reason to think that atheists overestimate themselves more than theists do.
Have you gone looking for it?
Regardless: this is not the point of contention, let's try to avoiding sliding the topic.
> Also, I think more highly of e.g. Sean Carroll's rationality than it seems you do, and I see absolutely no reason to think that he isn't genuinely attempting, with more success than most, to apply logic and critical thinking to evidence.
The point isn't whether he's better than most, the point is that he suffers from the very same problems he mocks others for - it is usually to a lesser degree, perhaps, but on an absolute scale, how bad is he?
It seems to me that Theists, Conspiracy Theorists, Trump supporters, all the usual suspects are always fair game for criticism, but when the same is done to The Right People, for some reason that's inappropriate, if not outright disallowed. And yet: is openness to criticism not often held up as why these superior disciplines are superior?
> If you claim he's just mouthing those words and thinks that saying them makes him rational, then I would be interested to know on what grounds you think so.
More like: "mouthing those words and thinking that he is rational" (in an ~absolute sense, as opposed to more rational).
> Also also, although I don't find Richard Dawkins super-impressive when he argues against religion[1], if you think he isn't substantially more rational and more evidence-led than most of the people he argues with[2] then I fear you're severely overstating his shortcomings.
To me, his debates are like the move Dumb and Dumber. Dawkins is dumb, his opponents are typically dumber. Have you ever seen him go up against someone with some mental horsepower? I haven't, but check out this video with NDT opining on philosophy, in discussion with Kurt Jaimungal (a heavyweight in my books):
"Philosophers Are USELESS!" Neil & Curt Clash on Physics
(I am finding your tone very disagreeable; I am pretty sure you have adopted it deliberately, and suspect you don't care if I find it diasgreeable, but I mention this just in case I'm wrong about any of that.)
I do not think that "if one declares one's mind to operate in a specific way, it operates that way" and did not say that; I said that in the specific case where what you are doing is declaring "I believe / don't believe X", if you do so sincerely, then indeed you have / don't have the belief in question.
This is unlike declarations like "I am being rational" or "I am fully informed about these issues"; the relevant difference is that in general, if you think you believe something then in fact you believe it. A declaration like "I have a headache" would have the same property.
(Of course 1. it is possible that some of these people are lying about what they believe, and 2. I guess there are cases where someone believes something "superficially" but deep down knows they're wrong. #1 seems unlikely to me in these cases. #2 is always possible (though of course just as possible for theists as for atheists) but I would want some concrete evidence before thinking it likely in any particular case.)
I regret that you have not yet succeeded in conveying to me exactly what divergence you see between atheists' statements about their cognition and their actual cognition. Perhaps it would be helpful if you would state it explicitly, rather than gesturing in the general direction and saying "look how stupid these people are".
(Three hypotheses. 1. "They say they don't have a positive belief in gods, but in fact they do." Seems super-implausible to me; show me your evidence. 2. "They say atheism just means not having a positive belief in gods, but in fact they positively believe there is no god." Perfectly plausible but not actually an error. 3. "They say they are being rational but actually they aren't". You have explicitly said that wasn't your meaning. Probably your actual meaning is something other than these three but I don't know what.)
Until we're on the same page about what it is you're claiming, I suspect we're going to be talking past one another a lot, so I could just stop here. But I'll try to address some of the other things you said:
> This is an interesting and common [...] behaviour [...]
Maybe it is, but if what you want to claim is that it's wrong then it would be more productive to say what's wrong with it. (And when the "behaviour" in question is two opposite things, I am not quite sure on what basis you're considering it a single thing.)
> on an absolute scale, how bad is he?
Twenty-three.
To make my point more explicit: I don't know how to answer that question "on an absolute scale" since so far as I know there isn't any sort of generally agreed absolute scale for rationality.
> all the usual suspects are fair game for criticism, but when the same is done to The Right People, for some reason that's inappropriate, if not outright disallowed
I'm deeply confused; I haven't said (and don't think) it's inappropriate to criticize the likes of Richard Dawkins or Sean Carroll or whoever, and I've no idea at all where you get "outright disallowed" from. It's perfectly appropriate to criticize them. I'm just not convinced as yet that your criticism is very accurate -- but since I don't yet know for sure just what your criticism is, it's hard to tell for sure.
I think it is worth distinguishing "I disagree with your criticism of X" from "X should be above criticism". I am not sure you are actually making that distinction.
> Have you ever seen him go up against someone with some mental horsepower?
I'm not much of a debate-watcher and on any not strictly biological topic I would expect others to do better (in terms of intellectual rigour, or fun-to-watch-ness, or both) than Dawkins. So, no. A quick YouTube search suggests he's had a debate with William Lane Craig, who's pretty smart; I wouldn't expect there to be much enlightenment to be had from that one. There's also one on "humanity's ultimate origins" with Rowan Williams (with Anthony Kenny in the chair). I'm pretty sure Williams and Kenny are not creationists, so most likely the arguments there are philosophical rather than biological, so again I wouldn't bet on Dawkins being super-enlightening in this, but you never know.
I'm not sure what the relevance of a debate between Neil deGrasse Tyson and Curt Jaimungal is to the question of whether Richard Dawkins is any good. In any case, I had a listen to that and it's totally unclear to me what about it is "embarrassing". Would you care to be more explicit? I mean, I get that you think NdGT is being unimpressive in some respect, but I don't know what specific thing you think is bad. (For what it's worth, I was more unimpressed by Jaimungal, who seemed to me deeply superficial throughout, but it's hard to be sure of someone's qualities from a 10-minute clip of them talking to someone else.)
Anyway, this is all a bit of a tangent. You seemed to be saying that there's something particularly bad, intellectually, about atheists and scientists, with Dawkins as a typical case, which is why I think it's relevant to ask how he compares to the people he argues with, but it seems to me that nothing of importance really hangs on how smart / rational / deep / ... Richard Dawkins in particular is. It's not like anyone's going to say "OK, you convinced me that Richard Dawkins is really intelligent, so I shall abandon my religion now" or "OK, you convinced me that Richard Dawkins is rather an idiot; see you in church next Sunday".
> I guess there are cases where someone believes something "superficially" but deep down knows they're wrong.
Have you some sort of proof that people can accurately read the behavior of their mind (including the subconscious)?
You are making the claim, where is your (non-narrative based) evidence?
>> on an absolute scale, how bad is he?
> Twenty-three.
> To make my point more explicit: I don't know how to answer that question "on an absolute scale" since so far as I know there isn't any sort of generally agreed absolute scale for rationality.
The curiosity you exude is overwhelming.
> I'm not sure what the relevance of a debate between Neil deGrasse Tyson and Curt Jaimungal is to the question of whether Richard Dawkins is any good.
It is a demonstration of how dumb a scientist can be and still be widely respected if not idolized.
> You seemed to be saying that there's something particularly bad, intellectually, about atheists and scientists
Yes, it is the irony. Approximately, science improved upon religion, but they mistake their relative superiority/intelligence as absolute.
Your first question is very strange. I say "I guess X is a thing that happens sometimes" (and went on to say: but I don't see much sign that it's happening in these particular cases, and if you claim it is then I'd like to see some evidence). Your response is: "Can you prove that X doesn't happen?".
If you regard that discussion between NdGT and CJ as showing how dumb a well-respected scientist can be, then it seems to me it would be useful for you to explain what about it shows that.
(So far, my requests for clarification and explanation and explicitness from you have been completely ignored.)
Could you give a few examples to show that atheists and/or scientists (of course those two categories are not at all the same) think their intelligence or rationality is "absolute"? (It would also be nice to know what you mean by that; I don't know what it would mean to call someone "absolutely intelligent" or "absolutely rational", unless what it would mean is that they never make any mistakes, always draw all inferences that would be valid, etc., and if you think anyone believes that about themselves then once again I would like to see some evidence.)
Let's see if we can agree on a fundamental concept.
Imagine a child in grade 5 who gets straight A's, whereas his classmates do not. People will judge this child as smart. But put the child up against some PhD's in each respective field, and the child will no longer be considered smart (you would have to hide his age in the experiment perhaps); the child is only "smart" relative to his peers.
Hopefully you're with me so far. Here's the tricky part: the PhD's are (abstractly, but less so concretely) in the same situation as the child: they are only smart relative to their peers (~all other humans) - on an absolute scale (what is possible, as opposed to (what the person doing the thinking has knowledge of[1]) what exists, aka: "[the] reality"), they too are "dumb" (in a relative sense, in that (for example[1]) they cannot solve all solvable problems presented to them, without making errors).
[1] this, at both individual and societal/cultural levels, is fundamentally important to this class of problem space. There are many things that reliably (necessarily?[1]) trigger System 1 intuition/hallucination in humans, and at least three of them are in play here: the unknown, ideology, and culture (which dictates cognitive, conversational, logical, and many other norms; what "is" is downstream from culture (cultural / psychological conditioning...like training an LLM)).
Yes, obviously I agree that someone can be smart relative to one set of people (or criteria, or problems, or whatever) and stupid relative to another. And yes, I agree that we are all much stupider than a hypothetical superintelligence might be. And I have no idea why you call this "the tricky part"; it isn't tricky at all.
(Except that comparing against "what is possible" is tricky, because there are different sorts of possibility. How smart am I relative to what I might be if I had better habits and less self-deception? What about relative to if I had as good a brain as any mere human could have? Relative to the cleverest things that could exist within our universe, obeying the laws of physics? Relative to a god that isn't bound by such petty concerns? I think those answers might all be very different from one another.)
This all seems absolutely obvious to me, and I suspect it is approximately equally obvious to (say) Richard Dawkins or Sean Carroll. In particular, I see no reason to think that those people or others like them think, still less claim, to be free of cognitive limitations and errors. Evidently you think there is something wrong with them in this general area -- but you seem strangely reluctant to be quite explicit about what your complaint is, and to my (doubtless not-perfectly-comprehending) eyes it seems that you alternate between implying, though not quite saying explicitly, that there is something specially, unusually, wrong about these people, and pointing out universal limitations that everyone, or pretty much everyone, suffers from.
I started writing a few paragraphs engaging with various actual possibilities for what you might be saying about those people and why you might think it bad, but instead of doing that I'll give you another opportunity to tell me. I'm getting bored of having to guess what you have in mind, and then having you ignore my attempts to engage with it.
> And yes, I agree that we are all much stupider than a hypothetical superintelligence might be.
I do not like this framing - it makes it sound as if it is absurd, not realistic, etc. Imagine where we'd be if we used that sort of thinking when it came to the rights of women or POC (actually, that sort of thinking was used on both, which is part of the problem of why we still have major issues in these areas).
> And I have no idea why you call this "the tricky part"; it isn't tricky at all.
a) Rewind the conversation.
b) Is there an implicit "for me" suffix on "it isn't tricky at all"? Because let me tell you, a lot of people struggle with what seem like basic concepts / techniques.
> (Except that comparing against "what is possible" is tricky, because there are different sorts of possibility. How smart am I relative to what I might be if I had better habits and less self-deception? What about relative to if I had as good a brain as any mere human could have? Relative to the cleverest things that could exist within our universe, obeying the laws of physics? Relative to a god that isn't bound by such petty concerns? I think those answers might all be very different from one another.)
Now imagine this at a system level, where there are only a few different educational methodologies applied to agents in the system, and improving on these methodologies "isn't exactly high priority". Now imagine such a system where improving upon, say, ever advanced weaponry to kill each other is a high priority. Wow, that'd be crazy.
> ...and I suspect it is approximately equally obvious to (say) Richard Dawkins or Sean Carroll.
Of the two of us, who do you think has consumed more of their respective content? And who do you think applies greater attention to error during consumption? And who do you think has tighter standards?
> I see no reason to think that
Note that "seeing" is a function of looking, as well as psychological conditioning / emergence, as well as some other things.
> those people or others like them think, still less claim, to be free of cognitive limitations and errors.
Not explicitly and absolutely (do you see that I see your framing?), but they do assert, either implicitly or explicitly, that "religious people" (imagine the gnashing of teeth if that was replaced with Jewish people! lol) make errors due to their style of thinking, and that they are superior in this regard, because they use scientific thinking....which brings us right back to my question: "If one declares one's mind to operate in a specific way, it operates that way? How does that work?" (which you never answered, by the way).
It is a fact that they claim superiority, and it is a fact that they make the exact same sorts/classes/categories of errors as religious people do in their thinking. TikTok has literally thousands of videos, and my feed is tuned to them...I watch these guys all the time. I find scientific materialists and the way they think to be very interesting, if even just for the entertainment value (like watching Monty Python, except in real life, and everyone is being serious).
Let me know if you'd like to argue about it, it is one of my favorites!
> that there is something specially, unusually, wrong about these people
All Humans make errors when thinking. These specific Humans regularly advertise their superiority in thinking. Also: they are influential, they spread their incorrect beliefs and bad thinking styles into other agents (just pop into the comments section on Reddit or TikTok to see the mass delusion up close and personal) in this system I am stuck in. Much of this world (which is a mess) runs according to the flawed ideology these people preach. So, I pay attention to it. (Note: I fully acknowledge that were it not for science, we would almost certainly be in even worse shape...but reality doesn't have to operate as a false dichotomy, or on fundamentalist ideology. It just currently happens to (due to the ideology).)
> and pointing out universal limitations that everyone, or pretty much everyone, suffers from
I don't like the word "limitations" here, as it implies (or could be interpreted as asserting) something that cannot be fixed. It wasn't all that long ago that the general public couldn't do basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. This was largely solved with education. Have we reached the apex of what can be done? Have we covered all the important bases? Do we have a good understanding of the degree to which education, perhaps certain kinds of education (maybe not currently in the curriculum), could rectify a lot of the intractable problems that still plague humanity?
Does anyone care? Are people even able to care about such details, or might it require a certain kind of education?
> I started writing a few paragraphs engaging with various actual possibilities for what you might be saying about those people and why you might think it bad, but instead of doing that I'll give you another opportunity to tell me.
Are you looking for some sort of a slam dunk over and above "scientific materialists suffer from the very same delusions and faith based thinking the religious people they mock do"? Sorry, I don't have one of those for you (I could make some additional accusations of specific harm they've caused that is overlooked if you would like?). But if that (I am happy to discuss the truth value of it, in detail) alone isn't enough to cause you concern, then you and I have very different styles of thinking regarding risk management, system optimization, etc. I might say "each to his own", except that overlooks that the wellbeing of others is a function of the whole. This was an extremely popular idea during COVID, but it has kinda gone out of style now that the risk to Westerners has subsided. This is but one trait of Westerners that I do not like and think should be addressed, I have a very long list.
(General note: I will respond to arguments and evidence and so forth; I will not respond to mere sneering, beyond noting that it's there.)
I don't understand your complaint about "this framing". Exactly what parallel with civil rights are you drawing?
Yes, there's an implicit "for me" on "it isn't tricky", just as there's an implicit "for you" when you say "here's the tricky part". (Do not try to pretend that you were not intending to talk down to me; of course you were. And still are.)
Yes, I too would like more money and time and effort going into education and less into weapons.
It is not relevant which of us has consumed more Dawkins or Carroll or whatever. If you think I am wrong in thinking that it is obvious to those people that they are finite and fallible and so forth, then show some evidence rather than just saying you know better.
In so far as I understand what complaint you are making about scientific-type atheists, I think it is unreasonable. You say that they point out bad thinking on the part of religious people; yes, they do. (You haven't, so far at least, suggested that they're wrong about that.) You say: booooo, they're hypocrites because they're making similar errors themselves. I say: they aren't claiming perfection, that's just something you made up; they are implicitly claiming to be doing better than the people they're criticizing, and I think they're generally right about that: they seem to me to be doing quite a lot better. I have the impression that you disagree, but I'm not sure how we could realistically resolve that disagreement.
I can't help noticing that your argument seems to depend very strongly on what errors, and how bad, and how many of them, the likes of Dawkins and Carroll make when arguing about religion -- but that the nearest you've come to giving a concrete example of their alleged errors is an objection to the "atheism just means not positively believing in gods" thing. (And that when I asked for some clarification on this, you ignored me.)
I don't think I agree with (what I take to be) your estimation of how bad their errors are. I might be able to be more concrete if you were more concrete, but you seem determined not to be. You've suggested a few times that I should take your word for it because you've watched a lot of videos with atheists in, but I'm afraid your argumentation here hasn't so far given me much reason to trust your assessment of the quality of their thinking.
Your suggestion that there might be better modes of education that effectively stop people making (as I take it you mean) broad classes of cognitive errors is interesting. Do you have specific suggestions for what sort of education might bring that about? Do you have specific reasons for thinking it would work? My impression is that the more obvious ways of trying to help people not make cognitive errors tend to be pretty ineffective.
(I think people who pay attention to cognitive errors and try to make fewer of them do, in fact, tend to make fewer of them -- though I don't have objective quantitative evidence for this, only casual observation over the years -- but I don't think it's mostly because learning about cognitive errors and trying to make fewer of them is very effective, it's more because the sort of person who does that is the sort of person who is already likely to be making fewer cognitive errors.)
Thank you for clarifying that you are not making a claim beyond "scientific materialists suffer from the very same delusions and faith based thinking the religious people they mock do". I'm not sure how much we disagree about this -- it depends on just what "the very same" means. (Obviously they're not literally the exact same; if you think they're just as bad then we disagree but it doesn't seem like the sort of thing it's easy to give clear-cut evidence of; if you are claiming only "cognitive errors with similar patterns, though different in detail and possibly less often and less severely" then we probably agree, though I think we disagree about how much sneering at the scientific materialists this justifies.)
I completely agree with you that the general crapness of human thinking is a serious problem. I'm not sure whether we agree about what fraction of that problem is specifically about scientific materialists. You clearly feel (or, I guess, find it convenient to give the impression that you feel, but I'm happy to take this at face value) that I don't care about it enough, whereas you do; for my part, I am not convinced, and I don't think one can tell how much someone cares about human irrationality by how enthusiastically they sneer at other people on the internet.
(Aside: this is a very fun argument, thanks for your grit and persistence! As Ludmilla Drago ~said: "I hope, we can be friends. After all, we are sportsmen, not soldiers").
> I don't understand your complaint about "this framing". Exactly what parallel with civil rights are you drawing?
Framing is a technique used to misinform people, which can cause harmful behavior to persist longer than necessary.
> Yes, there's an implicit "for me" on "it isn't tricky", just as there's an implicit "for you" when you say "here's the tricky part".
If something is tricky for at least one person, "it is tricky" is true[1] (in the "not false" sense - here lies very important, unexplored, and largely unknown/misunderstood territory).
If something is not tricky for at least one person, "it is not tricky" is not necessarily true (it is but one data point among billions).
[1] Look how potentially ~misleading my more correct version is; now consider the risk of having an entire planet of semi-aware but very powerful humans who think primarily in binary, but without the rigour or curiosity.
> (Do not try to pretend that you were not intending to talk down to me; of course you were. And still are.)
Oh, do I have to say it out loud? Yes, I am. But it's not "you" so much as it is your kind: Human - semi-aware, highly programmable, minimal capability of self-reflection. I to am one of these, but not all of these are the same, and all that is possible is not necessarily (and sometimes even rarely) attempted.
> Yes, I too would like more money and time and effort going into education and less into weapons.
Once again: (misinformative) framing. It's kind of hard to avoid, eh....almost like it is intuitive.
Man, could you imagine if human beliefs were affected by the words of other humans....imagine the calamity that could ensue!
> It is not relevant which of us has consumed more Dawkins or Carroll or whatever.
Incorrect: experiences train the mind, which affects the "reality" it generates, and believes (mistakenly, due to its training) is "the" reality.
> If you think I am wrong in thinking that it is obvious to those people that they are finite and fallible and so forth
A simple boolean is adequate to represent "are finite and fallible", and yes they gladly admit that they are more than zero (but not nearly as much as non-members of their ideology), but is it adequate to represent the full dimensionality of the situation?
> ...then show some evidence rather than just saying you know better.
Lack of evidence is a form of evidence: them having not written in depth on the shortcomings of science, at the object level. But then I shouldn't be too hard on them, all people of your kind tend not to do this..."putting one's best foot forward" (aka: intentional deceit) is core to the human psyche.
> In so far as I understand what complaint you are making about scientific-type atheists, I think it is unreasonable.
Of course, that's how "reality" works. And vice versa with me. An important difference though: insult members of the team I'm defending, and see if my reaction is the same as yours.
> You say that they point out bad thinking on the part of religious people; yes, they do. (You haven't, so far at least, suggested that they're wrong about that.)
I think I said it outright. If not, I do now: religious people are dumb, and not only because they are humans (all humans are dumb, they pride themselves on it).
> You say: booooo, they're hypocrites because they're making similar errors themselves. I say: they aren't claiming perfection, that's just something you made up; they are implicitly claiming to be doing better than the people they're criticizing, and I think they're generally right about that: they seem to me to be doing quite a lot better. I have the impression that you disagree, but I'm not sure how we could realistically resolve that disagreement.
Oh this pisses me off. How many times do we have to go through this. But then, here I am being naive!
> I can't help noticing that your argument seems to depend very strongly on what errors, and how bad, and how many of them, the likes of Dawkins and Carroll make when arguing about religion
That, but more so the delta between what they imply about themselves (measure their fan base's opinion!) vs what is true, on an absolute scale. If you refuse to or are unable to acknowledge that this notion of an absolute scale exists, then we (you, I, and overall humanity) are going to have trouble making (certain kinds of) progress.
> but that the nearest you've come to giving a concrete example of their alleged errors is an objection to the "atheism just means not positively believing in gods" thing. (And that when I asked for some clarification on this, you ignored me.)
Ok fair. I'm not going to go look for examples, but if one listens to them talk, very often they make logical/ontological slip-ups that reveal that only(!) lack of belief is not actually true.
If I was to give you some examples, I fully expect you wouldn't be able to resist dismissing it as {"you know what they mean", "you're being pedantic", "that isn't what they meant"...}. Most of the world runs on this phenomenon by the way. Speaking of which: hey, have you noticed how easily AI can mimic human speech? That's weird eh, I wonder why it is possible in the first place (as opposed to how it is implemented) .
> I don't think I agree with (what I take to be) your estimation of how bad their errors are.
This concept of an absolute scale is absolutely crucial here. If you do not conceptualize it properly, then I am likely going to sound like a delusional, raving madman. Let's try this angle: consider the general perception of "reality" (aka: the reality) of the average human prior to the rise of science. Is it not fair to say that they were:
1. confused?
2. unaware that they were confused (at least the magnitude and variety of ways)?
Then consider us: if we were confused, would we necessarily be able to tell? Or perhaps even worse: would we necessarily even have the ability to wonder (also: note that "have the ability to" is not a boolean)?
> I might be able to be more concrete if you were more concrete, but you seem determined not to be.
Shrewd (and correct) observation - this is a whole discussion in itself. That humans think so much in concrete form is a big part of the problem (and one of the most powerful rhetorical techniques in the atheist/scientists bag of tricks/heuristics).
> You've suggested a few times that I should take your word for it because you've watched a lot of videos with atheists in
"that I should take your word for it" is false, I was only raising the question of who has the bigger sample size, and stricter methods of inquiry/observation. (You will lose badly if you continue down this path.)
> but I'm afraid your argumentation here hasn't so far given me much reason to trust your assessment of the quality of their thinking.
Consider whether your confusion may play some role here.
"The medium is the message" is a famous saying. A fun question: on an absolute(!) scale of 1 to 10, how optimal do you believe aggregate of the mediums (plural) we are using here are for achieving high quality communication? I ask this question absolutely sincerely, it is core to the problem.
(I somehow hadn't noticed this when I replied to its successor. I kinda gave up on the discussion after reading the latter, but I'll take a look at this one anyway.)
I understand what you mean by "framing" (though I would dispute the, er, framing that "framing is a technique used to misinform people"; framing can be used for many reasons, which do not have to involve misinformation). What I don't understand is exactly what your complaint about my framing is; you're drawing some analogy with "the rights of women or PoC" but I don't understand what the analogy is supposed to be.
(There is a general pattern here in this discussion. You make very broad, general, vague accusations, and provide neither evidence nor explanation even when asked for it. E.g., a few lines below: "Once again: (misinformative) framing. It's kind of hard to avoid, eh...almost like it is intuitive." You don't say what it is that you think is misinformative. You don't say why you consider it, or anyone else should consider it, misinformative. This is annoying and rude and unproductive. It is not possible to have a meaningful discussion with someone who just repeatedly says "you're wrong", which is essentially what you are doing.)
(This general pattern overlaps substantially with another one, which I also think is annoying and rude and unproductive: you are constantly gesturing vaguely towards things you clearly wish to be considered bad, without ever being specific enough that e.g. anyone could possibly refute what you say even if you were completely wrong. Lots of "isn't that weird? I wonder why it might be" in the place of "this is evidence of X, because Y".)
> people of your kind
I don't think I have ever once seen any productive discussion with someone who used that phrase or any of its equivalents.
> slip-ups that reveal that only(!) lack of belief is not actually true.
OK, this I already addressed, albeit very briefly. Let me go into more detail now you've clarified that this is your complaint.
If someone says "I am an atheist", and "atheism simply means not positively believing in any gods", and also "I positively believe that there are no gods", there is nothing inconsistent about that. (Nor, of course, if e.g. they don't explicitly say the last of those.)
The situation is exactly parallel to this: If someone says "I am British", and "British means coming from somewhere in the British Isles", and also "I am Welsh", then nothing about this is inconsistent. If you are Welsh then you are also British; it is not inconsistent, or dishonest, to give a less-than-maximally detailed description of yourself.
Now, if one of these people says (not just "atheism means ..." but) "I do not positively disbelieve in gods, I merely don't positively believe in them" and then it turns out that they do positively disbelieve in gods, then sure, they're being inconsistent, and maybe that shows that they're dishonest or stupid or whatever. I don't spend as much time as you apparently do watching atheists debating theists, so maybe I've missed some examples of that, but I don't think I've seen any.
> This concept of an absolute scale is absolutely crucial here.
If it's so crucial, it seems odd to me that while you are very insistent that we accept the existence of such a scale you seem curiously reluctant to say anything about what it actually is.
We have already established (though you didn't like the way I framed the issue, on grounds I have not been able to understand) that we agree that human reasoning falls considerably short of what might be possible for some hypothetical superintelligence -- gods, super-advanced aliens, future AIs, or whatever. This is clearly not enough; you think I should be saying something further. Perhaps something along the lines of "my reasoning abilities are less than 1% of the way from zero to hypothetical god-level superintelligence". But for any statement with that sort of concreteness to make sense, we would need some actual way of quantifying this stuff. That seems very difficult to me and I don't know of any credible way of doing it; when I pointed that out before your response was to sneer at my alleged lack of intellectual curiosity.
But if you want us to look at human intelligence and rationality on an absolute scale, we first need to have an absolute scale. You write as if you know of one, and have done the relevant calculations, and found (most of?) the human race wanting. But you won't tell us what your scale is, or how you assess anyone's place on it.
> I was only raising the question
Yes, and you have adopted this strategy over and over in this discussion. It may be a rhetorically effective strategy -- it lets you lord it over whomever you're talking to, "only raising the question" of this, that, and the other, vaguely implying that they're wrong about everything, never making any statement of your own concrete enough to be refuted or even really addressed. But it makes actual communication almost impossible; it means that if you're right about something and I'm wrong, I can't learn from you because you never actually say what you mean, and if you're wrong about something and I'm right, you can't learn from me because we never get to see your actual opinions and arguments.
(I don't think it really is rhetorically effective; my guess is that if anyone else is still reading this, they are mostly not impressed. I could, of course, be wrong.)
> Your suggestion that there might be better modes of education that effectively stop people making (as I take it you mean) broad classes of cognitive errors is interesting. Do you have specific suggestions for what sort of education might bring that about?
Yes, but I will not share.
> Do you have specific reasons for thinking it would work?
Yes: universal aversion - theists & atheists, scientists/scientismists/mystics/conspiracy theorists, the list goes on: all humans hate very particular things in this general domain. And the reason I think it would work is because of the richness and ineffability of the view from the other said.
> My impression is that the more obvious ways of trying to help people not make cognitive errors tend to be pretty ineffective.
Like anything: amateur Normies teaching amateur Normies tends to not yield world class results. Once again, consider pre-scientific times.
> (I think people who pay attention to cognitive errors and try to make fewer of them do, in fact, tend to make fewer of them...
To some degree...but then, they also typically fall into a set of brand new ones! There are many layers to this onion, as even science has well revealed to us.
> but I don't think it's mostly because learning about cognitive errors and trying to make fewer of them is very effective
110% agree here! The introduction of "logical fallacies", etc into the Memeplex may have made things even worse (education and knowledge are often powerful catalysts for even more hubris and delusion)!
> it's more because the sort of person who does that is the sort of person who is already likely to be making fewer cognitive errors.)
Agreed....but why is this?
> Thank you for clarifying that you are not making a claim beyond "scientific materialists suffer from the very same delusions and faith based thinking the religious people they mock do". I'm not sure how much we disagree about this -- it depends on just what "the very same" means. (Obviously they're not literally the exact same
At the abstract level, they are the same. The variables differ, but the processes are largely identical. After all, do they not all run essentially the same hardware, and "largely" the same firmware ("reality", among others)?
> if you think they're just as bad then we disagree
What "is" depends on how you look at it: like if you are (or are not) weighting by magnitude of harm. For example, consider the risks we face from climate change. And if we look into the chain of causation behind that, who do we find playing critical roles?
Luckily, humans experience reality through stories, and scientists have some of the best. So I wouldn't worry about being found out any time soon. Or, it would seem safe to not worry about it at least.
> then we probably agree, though I think we disagree about how much sneering at the scientific materialists this justifies.)
Again, see climate change, and see "the reality" of who is to blame: "not" scientists!.
> I completely agree with you that the general crapness of human thinking is a serious problem. I'm not sure whether we agree about what fraction of that problem is specifically about scientific materialists.
Science is the current thought leader, and largely decides what does and does not get studied, funded, and respected or believed/disbelieved. How much of the "woo woo" world is actually very useful? Do you think such questions are even on the radar of most scientists? Could you provide any evidence in your favor of that?
> You clearly feel...
Don't overlook: think.
> (or, I guess, find it convenient to give the impression that you feel, but I'm happy to take this at face value) that I don't care about it enough
By what means could you know? How much time and effort do you put into it, and in what ways?
> whereas you do; for my part, I am not convinced
Do you not find this conversation substantially anomalous?
Try this: what processes underlie "convinced"?
> and I don't think one can tell how much someone cares about human irrationality by how enthusiastically they sneer at other people on the internet.
Closing with framing is wonderful. Sometimes I really love the internet, and the humans who fill it with wonderful new absurd content every single day!
I wasn't declaring victory. I think that whole way of thinking about discussions is toxic and stupid. When it turns out that one party hasn't been arguing in good faith and that there isn't much likelihood of anything useful coming from further discussion, no one wins. But that's where we seem to be.
It's that discussion-as-competitive-game framing again! Again, I think that's a bad way to look at it. Anyway: (1) it is always possible that what I said was wrong, (2) I am not currently aware that it was, (3) which may or may not indicate that I am not "smart enough", and (4) as already indicated, I do not wish to continue this discussion any further.
More universal truth than admission. It's always possible that something, anything, I've said is wrong. If you spend most of your time in discussions with people who don't recognize that then either (1) you're choosing the wrong people to talk to, or (2) there's something about the way you're talking to them that discourages them from acknowledging that pretty straightforward fact.
(Framing your discussion as a competitive game in which it makes sense to "declare victory" etc., as you have done here, might do it. People are generally less willing to do things that feel like getting beaten.)
Dunno what intuition you're referring to, so I can't comment on whether it's correct.
I get the sense that you are implying that your approach here is necessarily more optimal than mine in an absolute sense (as opposed to superior in a normative, "Overton Window" sense...I can easily acknowledge you are the victor there) - regardless: do you believe that it is? Because optimality in an absolute sense is my core concern.
I have a serious issue with this norm of strongly implied "facts", and then (usually after a multi-comment challenge) a casual "I could be wrong" or "It's just my opinion" as a sort of rhetorical get out of jail free card. I consider this behavior dangerous and irresponsible, especially as an aspect of the default metaphysical framework (aka: story) of a culture: science/scientism, that claims superiority to all others (but refuses to defend that claim, contrary to its scriptures).
Though, I do not think you do it with (substantial) conscious intent or maliciousness, fwiw - tautologically, everyone is doing their current best. But being a non-determinist, (some) free will believer, I think people can improve - and, I believe people can be made to improve, even against their will. Breaking the will of one Human is hard, breaking the will of millions/billions of huma s at massive scale, that's a whole other story. I believe it can be done though!
Yes, I believe it is usually better not to treat conversations as competitive games. (Not always. For instance, formal debates have some value, even if only for entertainment.) I'm not sure what "in an absolute sense" really means, though, so I'm not sure whether I've answered your question; I think it's better in the sense that it's more likely for the conversations in question to improve the world overall. (E.g., by making one or both participants' beliefs or thinking more accurate.)
When I say "I could be wrong" it isn't a rhetorical get-out-of-jail-free card, it's a simple statement of fact. You claimed I was "speaking untruthfully" and (by implication) asked whether I was aware of it; I said: so far as I know, what I said was true, but it could be wrong. I'm not sure what nefarious rhetorical goal you imagine I was achieving by saying that, but my intention was simply to summarize my actual epistemic state since you were evidently curious (or, I guess, pretending to be curious) about it.
Anyway. When I said I didn't want to continue this conversation, I meant it. I don't think you're arguing in good faith; you continue to be (apparently deliberately) super-vague about your actual position; you make repeated assertions of bad faith on my part; you've made it clear that you see this as a zero-sum interaction where your goal is to "win"; in view of all that, I think there is negligible chance of anything actually useful coming of the discussion. I shall not be responding further.
This is powerful, and popular. I wonder what it means. I wonder how many people on this planet wonder this, or similar things.
I wonder why things on this planet are so screwed up, in fact (as opposed to how it seems, which is the maximum of what can be discussed if operating under good faith guidelines[1]). I wonder if there is anyone else on this planet wonders this.
I wonder if the above "is" "in good faith".
[1] Could pleasure on behalf of the accuser be a principal component of good faith?
I propose this is a bit of a checkmate - thoughts/memes/rhetoric?
[1] I very much enjoy pointing out the flaws (logical inconsistency) in "scientific thinking" as it is...which is another instance of the very same abstract phenomenon Neil is talking about here, "as it is-ness", as opposed to how it is intended and asserted as a fact to be (which is literally what you are doing in this argument)... I wonder if he ever considered that he too (and all of his "intellectually superior" to my kind) scientific colleagues) suffers from this very same problem, and also the degree to which he has considered it.
For example, consider someone who says "I am moral, because I am a Christian", but then sneaks off and cheats on his wife. Or, consider a physics teacher who says "You can learn physics from me, because I am knowledgeable in physics", but then starts lecturing and the content is incorrect.
So too with "atheists" who believe that simply declaring oneself to be a certain way is adequate to achieve the intent.
Note that atheists (also Scientific Materialist fundamentalists like Sean Carroll or NDT, etc) are just a particularly common (and hilarious, because of the irony + self-confidence) manifestation of this abstract phenomenon, it is common in any ideology, derived from fundamental flaws in how our culture teaches (or not) how to think ("Use logic, evidence, critical thinking, etc"...except no methodology accompanies the motto, people think simply declaring it to be so makes it so).
Or maybe another angle to think of it from: rewind 200 years and consider how Western culture was broadly ok with racism and slavery - that's how we currently are with our cultural norms on thinking.