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.
More like “People can be conservative Christians in spite of being highly intelligent and rational”.
That way does seem slightly better. At least it is certainly more clear what the claim means, even if I would personally put a qualifier of some kind before ‘rational’ or perhaps append ‘compared to their peers’.
“People can be conservative Christians compared to their peers in spite of being highly intelligent and rational”?
Or “There exist conservative Christians who are highly intelligent and rational compared to their peers”?
I’m going to step away from the definition discussion on whether ‘Conservative Christian’ is mutually exclusive with ‘intelligent and rational’. I have a specific person in mind who is Christian, very intelligent, and mostly rational (all beyond any reasonable argument), but there exists a reasonable argument that this person is not conservative, or that ‘conservative Christian’ means something other than “possess the quality ‘conservative’ and the quality ‘Christian’”
Or “There exist conservative Christians who are highly intelligent and rational compared to their peers”?
This.
I have a specific person in mind who is Christian, very intelligent, and mostly rational (all beyond any reasonable argument)
I have several people in mind (immediate family members) who meet this criteria too. “Mostly” is the kind of qualifier I had in mind. (So any disagreement we may have about categorisations here must not be fundamental.)
I wish I could make the fundamental categorization, but the world provides a counterexample from which the only escape is a weak cry of ‘not conservative enough to count?’.
The weaker form of ‘Conservative Christianity is a negative predictor of intelligence and rationality’ is roughly equivalent to the same thing that we’ve been agreeing about.
I wish I could make the fundamental categorization, but the world provides a counterexample from which the only escape is a weak cry of ‘not conservative enough to count?’.
That doesn’t seem to be a counterexample to anything here. It seems to be a somewhat sad failure of thinking by an individual. If it is a failure that occurs frequently then it would be worth exploring just which human biases are involved in the decline.
Are you confusing an observation with a conclusion? I think the only reason I or you disagree with the conclusion is that we don’t share the same observation; everything from there on is either logically sound or high-probability.
More like “People can be conservative Christians in spite of being highly intelligent and rational”.
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.
That way does seem slightly better. At least it is certainly more clear what the claim means, even if I would personally put a qualifier of some kind before ‘rational’ or perhaps append ‘compared to their peers’.
“People can be conservative Christians compared to their peers in spite of being highly intelligent and rational”?
Or “There exist conservative Christians who are highly intelligent and rational compared to their peers”?
I’m going to step away from the definition discussion on whether ‘Conservative Christian’ is mutually exclusive with ‘intelligent and rational’. I have a specific person in mind who is Christian, very intelligent, and mostly rational (all beyond any reasonable argument), but there exists a reasonable argument that this person is not conservative, or that ‘conservative Christian’ means something other than “possess the quality ‘conservative’ and the quality ‘Christian’”
This.
I have several people in mind (immediate family members) who meet this criteria too. “Mostly” is the kind of qualifier I had in mind. (So any disagreement we may have about categorisations here must not be fundamental.)
I wish I could make the fundamental categorization, but the world provides a counterexample from which the only escape is a weak cry of ‘not conservative enough to count?’.
The weaker form of ‘Conservative Christianity is a negative predictor of intelligence and rationality’ is roughly equivalent to the same thing that we’ve been agreeing about.
That doesn’t seem to be a counterexample to anything here. It seems to be a somewhat sad failure of thinking by an individual. If it is a failure that occurs frequently then it would be worth exploring just which human biases are involved in the decline.
Are you confusing an observation with a conclusion? I think the only reason I or you disagree with the conclusion is that we don’t share the same observation; everything from there on is either logically sound or high-probability.
No, not from what I can see.
What is the failure of thinking that you see, then? “Morality loves me” implies “theism is correct”.