Do anti-evolutionists tend also to be anti-abortion, anti-same-sex-marriage, (in the US) Republican rather than Democratic, etc.? Why, yes, they very much do, which by Stefan’s heuristic suggests that their anti-evolutionism is likely to be the product of their religion. Do evolutionists tend to have positions opposite to those? Probably yes, but not to nearly the same extent.
1) What is the extent? “Probably the same extent” doesn’t really help you here if you don’t know what it is.
2) This would suggest that the arguments for same-sex marriage were motivated reasoning 20 years ago, and the arguments for atheism were motivated reasoning 100 years ago. What the heuristic is really detecting is popularity, because unpopular beliefs tend to have much higher correlations with other beliefs.
One can often compare things better than one can quantify them individually. I expect there are more Baptist preachers in the United States than in Bolivia, but I couldn’t tell you how many there are of either.
In the present case, it seems to me that almost all anti-evolutionists just happen to be adherents of conservative forms of religions like Christianity and Islam that involve a relatively recent divine creation, which happen also to have something of a tradition of opposing abortion and homosexuality. (The link with right-wing politics in the US is a bit arbitrary, and actually on further reflection that link may be weaker than I thought, because it’s specifically white conservative Christianity in the US that goes with voting Republican.)
What the heuristic is really detecting is popularity, because unpopular beliefs tend to have much higher correlations with other beliefs.
That might be true. (It’s not obvious to me that it is.) But if it is, the obvious next question is: why are unpopular beliefs more highly correlated with other beliefs? The obvious candidate answers seem to me to amount to saying that unpopular beliefs are more likely to be caused by something other than the truth. E.g., an unpopular belief may correlate with other beliefs because it’s held almost exclusively by a few small groups who were convinced of it by some single person, and he convinced them of a bunch of other things too. That’s not the same thing as motivated reasoning, I agree, but it’s got the exact same problem: it means that those beliefs are quite likely not very rationally held.
(Only “quite likely”. Sometimes the single persuasive person really has spotted something important that others have missed. But the odds aren’t good, especially once the belief in question has been around for a while and others have had a chance to be persuaded of it without the founder’s charisma.)
why are unpopular beliefs more highly correlated with other beliefs?
The point is that even beliefs we consider correct were, when they were still unpopular, limited to a small group of people and highly correlated with other beliefs. That’s how ideas spread. At one point, atheism was correlated with lots of radical ideas because all of society was religious, and atheism was so far from the status quo that nobody was going to be one without a type of conviction that would lead them to extremism in general (by their time’s standards).
Do you think that support for gay marriage 20 years ago was rare but randomly distributed through the population?
1) What is the extent? “Probably the same extent” doesn’t really help you here if you don’t know what it is.
2) This would suggest that the arguments for same-sex marriage were motivated reasoning 20 years ago, and the arguments for atheism were motivated reasoning 100 years ago. What the heuristic is really detecting is popularity, because unpopular beliefs tend to have much higher correlations with other beliefs.
One can often compare things better than one can quantify them individually. I expect there are more Baptist preachers in the United States than in Bolivia, but I couldn’t tell you how many there are of either.
In the present case, it seems to me that almost all anti-evolutionists just happen to be adherents of conservative forms of religions like Christianity and Islam that involve a relatively recent divine creation, which happen also to have something of a tradition of opposing abortion and homosexuality. (The link with right-wing politics in the US is a bit arbitrary, and actually on further reflection that link may be weaker than I thought, because it’s specifically white conservative Christianity in the US that goes with voting Republican.)
That might be true. (It’s not obvious to me that it is.) But if it is, the obvious next question is: why are unpopular beliefs more highly correlated with other beliefs? The obvious candidate answers seem to me to amount to saying that unpopular beliefs are more likely to be caused by something other than the truth. E.g., an unpopular belief may correlate with other beliefs because it’s held almost exclusively by a few small groups who were convinced of it by some single person, and he convinced them of a bunch of other things too. That’s not the same thing as motivated reasoning, I agree, but it’s got the exact same problem: it means that those beliefs are quite likely not very rationally held.
(Only “quite likely”. Sometimes the single persuasive person really has spotted something important that others have missed. But the odds aren’t good, especially once the belief in question has been around for a while and others have had a chance to be persuaded of it without the founder’s charisma.)
The point is that even beliefs we consider correct were, when they were still unpopular, limited to a small group of people and highly correlated with other beliefs. That’s how ideas spread. At one point, atheism was correlated with lots of radical ideas because all of society was religious, and atheism was so far from the status quo that nobody was going to be one without a type of conviction that would lead them to extremism in general (by their time’s standards).
Do you think that support for gay marriage 20 years ago was rare but randomly distributed through the population?