See also RationalWiki’s articles on engineers and woo and the Salem Hypothesis. People can be highly intelligent and rational within a domain where their judgments are strongly tested while believing all sorts of wacky crap in other domains where they can get away with it.
(All the usual caveats about RW do apply. Exactly what counts as “wacky crap” is, of course, highly disputable.)
I’m assuming that there exists a g factor of generalized intelligence; how to measure that and what the cutoff for ‘highly intelligent’ is are undefined, and ‘highly rational’ is too complicated to begin to define.
With two undefined terms, the area between the goalposts is either negative or imaginary, so I won’t suggest that there are no counterexamples or leap into the ‘no true rationalist’ fallacy.
That said, your confusion comes from asserting that ‘intelligent’ and ‘rational’ are behaviors rather than traits. If someone regularly engages in irrational behavior, I adjust my belief in their rational nature downward; if they profess belief in something that I consider stupid, I also adjust my opinion of their intelligence downward.
Membership in the “Conservative Christian” club appears to require a large amount of stupid, irrational behavior, and seems incompatible with being highly intelligent and rational. However, there are people who manage to provide enough signs of intelligence and/or rationality while approaching conservative Christianity for me to give up and cry.
That’s stream of consciousness explanation of what I think my thoughts were, which might help resolve any confusion you have. I doubt that it will convince anybody of anything substantive, but it might help people who disagree with my conclusions find the pivot.
See also RationalWiki’s articles on engineers and woo and the Salem Hypothesis. People can be highly intelligent and rational within a domain where their judgments are strongly tested while believing all sorts of wacky crap in other domains where they can get away with it.
(All the usual caveats about RW do apply. Exactly what counts as “wacky crap” is, of course, highly disputable.)
I’m assuming that there exists a g factor of generalized intelligence; how to measure that and what the cutoff for ‘highly intelligent’ is are undefined, and ‘highly rational’ is too complicated to begin to define.
With two undefined terms, the area between the goalposts is either negative or imaginary, so I won’t suggest that there are no counterexamples or leap into the ‘no true rationalist’ fallacy.
That said, your confusion comes from asserting that ‘intelligent’ and ‘rational’ are behaviors rather than traits. If someone regularly engages in irrational behavior, I adjust my belief in their rational nature downward; if they profess belief in something that I consider stupid, I also adjust my opinion of their intelligence downward.
Membership in the “Conservative Christian” club appears to require a large amount of stupid, irrational behavior, and seems incompatible with being highly intelligent and rational. However, there are people who manage to provide enough signs of intelligence and/or rationality while approaching conservative Christianity for me to give up and cry.
That’s stream of consciousness explanation of what I think my thoughts were, which might help resolve any confusion you have. I doubt that it will convince anybody of anything substantive, but it might help people who disagree with my conclusions find the pivot.