You are clearly not capable of thinking rationally with respect to a fundamental belief where evidence makes the question overdetermined. Why should I listen to you?
People who hold obviously incorrect beliefs can still be highly intelligent and productive:
Peter Duesberg (a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley) “claimed that AIDS is not caused by HIV, which made him so unpopular that his colleagues and others have — until recently — been ignoring his potentially breakthrough work on the causes of cancer.”
Francisco J. Ayala who “…has been called the “Renaissance Man of Evolutionary Biology” is a geneticist ordained as a Dominican priest. “His “discoveries have opened up new approaches to the prevention and treatment of diseases that affect hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide…”
Francis Collins (geneticist, Human Genome Project) noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the Human Genome Project (HGP) and described by the Endocrine Society as “one of the most accomplished scientists of our time” is a evangelical Christian.
Georges Lemaître (a Belgian Roman Catholic priest) proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe.
Kurt Gödel (logician, mathematician and philosopher) who suffered from paranoia and believed in ghosts. “Gödel, by contrast, had a tendency toward paranoia. He believed in ghosts; he had a morbid dread of being poisoned by refrigerator gases; he refused to go out when certain distinguished mathematicians were in town, apparently out of concern that they might try to kill him.”
There are many more examples. All of them are outliers indeed, and I don’t think that calcsam has been able to prove that his achievements and general capability to think clearly in some fields does outweigh the heavy burden of being religious. Yet there is evidence that such people do exist and he offers you the chance to challenge him.
Generally I agree with you, but I also think that calcsam provides a fascinating example of the internal dichotomy of some human minds and a case study that might provide insights to how the arguments employed by Less Wrong fail in some cases.
Maybe we should make a list on the wiki? eg. I’m tempted to add Aumann, but as pointed out, ‘There are many more examples’ and XiXiDu made his point with the short list.
People who hold obviously incorrect beliefs can still be highly intelligent and productive:
And one of the concerns I detected in wedrifid’s comment (one I share myself) is that if highly intelligent and productive people start doing what obviously incorrect beliefs indicate they should, the world is going to be optimised in a direction I won’t like.
I kind of think that’s already happening. All over the place. All the time. What kind of policy implications did you want to draw from it in this particular instance?
No amount of clear thinking elsewhere can excuse you from being wrong about this one thing. To think so is to treat being right and wrong like a social game, where people with high status gets a free pass on questions with actual answers.
And one of the concerns I detected in wedrifid’s comment (one I share myself) is that if highly intelligent and productive people start doing what obviously incorrect beliefs indicate they should, the world is going to be optimised in a direction I won’t like.
Exactly! If beliefs like this are just used as verbal symbols for navigating the social world they do relatively minor harm. Once someone with the intelligence, productivity and otherwise rational thinking necessary comes to follow the belief to the logical conclusion comes along things start exploding. Or rationalist communities become modified in a direction that makes them either less pleasant or less effective than I would prefer.
Good reminder that reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Adding to the list: Hans Berger invented the EEG while trying to investigate telepathy, which he was convinced was real. Even fools can make important discoveries.
I don’t think that examples of people with fundamental, irrational beliefs being good at other things are relevant—calcsam has invited questions specifically about the belief whose rationality is being examined. If he was starting a discussion about mathematics and his points were dismissed due to his Mormon affiliation, your comment wold make more sense to me.
I think though that holding crazy beliefs is Bayesian evidence for the hypothesis that a person is not a remarkable intellectual contributor to humanity. Wedrifid’s “why should I listen to you?” is thus not addressed head-on by a list of crazy people who happened to achieve other worthy stuff.
If we had no other information about calcsam besides eir religious beliefs, and e were only one of many people potentially worth listening to, and we were processing those many in bulk to try to decide which of them to investigate more expensively closely, then this would be a useful low-cost filter.
However, I don’t think it’s enough evidence to overcome the other things we do know about em: that e’s posting on LW, that e’s responding in a generally clear and intelligent manner, etc.
A policy of ignoring people who disagree with you seems like a good way to never notice that you’re wrong. And you are wrong—not necessarily about this particular question, but of all the things you believe there’s pretty much guaranteed to be at least one false idea. I’d even go so far as to say that there’s probably at least one very important wrong idea in there.
In my opinion, listening to people like calcsam—intelligent people who disagree with me—is one of the most plausible vectors for finding out that I’m wrong about something.
People who hold obviously incorrect beliefs can still be highly intelligent and productive:
Peter Duesberg (a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley) “claimed that AIDS is not caused by HIV, which made him so unpopular that his colleagues and others have — until recently — been ignoring his potentially breakthrough work on the causes of cancer.”
Francisco J. Ayala who “…has been called the “Renaissance Man of Evolutionary Biology” is a geneticist ordained as a Dominican priest. “His “discoveries have opened up new approaches to the prevention and treatment of diseases that affect hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide…”
Francis Collins (geneticist, Human Genome Project) noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the Human Genome Project (HGP) and described by the Endocrine Society as “one of the most accomplished scientists of our time” is a evangelical Christian.
Georges Lemaître (a Belgian Roman Catholic priest) proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe.
Kurt Gödel (logician, mathematician and philosopher) who suffered from paranoia and believed in ghosts. “Gödel, by contrast, had a tendency toward paranoia. He believed in ghosts; he had a morbid dread of being poisoned by refrigerator gases; he refused to go out when certain distinguished mathematicians were in town, apparently out of concern that they might try to kill him.”
There are many more examples. All of them are outliers indeed, and I don’t think that calcsam has been able to prove that his achievements and general capability to think clearly in some fields does outweigh the heavy burden of being religious. Yet there is evidence that such people do exist and he offers you the chance to challenge him.
Generally I agree with you, but I also think that calcsam provides a fascinating example of the internal dichotomy of some human minds and a case study that might provide insights to how the arguments employed by Less Wrong fail in some cases.
I think these kinds of list should always include Donald E. Knuth.
Maybe we should make a list on the wiki? eg. I’m tempted to add Aumann, but as pointed out, ‘There are many more examples’ and XiXiDu made his point with the short list.
I made the list at http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Irrationalists
More suggestions welcome. I think I’m going to make a Discussion article on this to get a little more visibility.
And one of the concerns I detected in wedrifid’s comment (one I share myself) is that if highly intelligent and productive people start doing what obviously incorrect beliefs indicate they should, the world is going to be optimised in a direction I won’t like.
I kind of think that’s already happening. All over the place. All the time. What kind of policy implications did you want to draw from it in this particular instance?
My inclination would be to discourage posts with undertones of religious propaganda on this site.
Hmm, what policy...
No amount of clear thinking elsewhere can excuse you from being wrong about this one thing. To think so is to treat being right and wrong like a social game, where people with high status gets a free pass on questions with actual answers.
Could you please be more specific? What sort of action is being taken here as a result of your worry?
Not voting for religious candidates for Australian Parliament elections.
Exactly! If beliefs like this are just used as verbal symbols for navigating the social world they do relatively minor harm. Once someone with the intelligence, productivity and otherwise rational thinking necessary comes to follow the belief to the logical conclusion comes along things start exploding. Or rationalist communities become modified in a direction that makes them either less pleasant or less effective than I would prefer.
Good reminder that reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Adding to the list: Hans Berger invented the EEG while trying to investigate telepathy, which he was convinced was real. Even fools can make important discoveries.
But increasing one’s foolishness does not increase the expected rate of discovery.
I don’t think that examples of people with fundamental, irrational beliefs being good at other things are relevant—calcsam has invited questions specifically about the belief whose rationality is being examined. If he was starting a discussion about mathematics and his points were dismissed due to his Mormon affiliation, your comment wold make more sense to me.
I think though that holding crazy beliefs is Bayesian evidence for the hypothesis that a person is not a remarkable intellectual contributor to humanity. Wedrifid’s “why should I listen to you?” is thus not addressed head-on by a list of crazy people who happened to achieve other worthy stuff.
If we had no other information about calcsam besides eir religious beliefs, and e were only one of many people potentially worth listening to, and we were processing those many in bulk to try to decide which of them to investigate more expensively closely, then this would be a useful low-cost filter.
However, I don’t think it’s enough evidence to overcome the other things we do know about em: that e’s posting on LW, that e’s responding in a generally clear and intelligent manner, etc.
A policy of ignoring people who disagree with you seems like a good way to never notice that you’re wrong. And you are wrong—not necessarily about this particular question, but of all the things you believe there’s pretty much guaranteed to be at least one false idea. I’d even go so far as to say that there’s probably at least one very important wrong idea in there.
In my opinion, listening to people like calcsam—intelligent people who disagree with me—is one of the most plausible vectors for finding out that I’m wrong about something.
So XiXiDu’s negative quotes file is not limited to just Eliezer.