Striking paragraph by a recent ACX commenter (link):
I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It’s like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn’t been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you’ve developed decent priors this time?
A quite different thing but: I met an openly atheist person in real life a couple of years after I became an atheist myself (preceded by a brief experience with religious fundamentalism). I think those years were interesting practice for something that people who were always surrounded by folks with approximately reasonable, approximately correct beliefs missed out on
Striking paragraph by a recent ACX commenter (link):
A quite different thing but: I met an openly atheist person in real life a couple of years after I became an atheist myself (preceded by a brief experience with religious fundamentalism). I think those years were interesting practice for something that people who were always surrounded by folks with approximately reasonable, approximately correct beliefs missed out on