You are correct that it is reasonable to assign high confidence to atheism even if it doesn’t have 80% support, but we must be very careful here. Atheism is presumably the strongest example of such a claim here on Less Wrong (i.e. one which you can tell a great story why so many intelligent people would disagree etc and hold a high confidence in the face of disagreement). However, this does not mean that we can say that any other given view is just like atheism in this respect and thus hold beliefs in the face of expert disagreement, that would be far too convenient.
Strong agreement about not overgeneralizing. It does appear, however, that libertarianism about free well, non-physicalism about the mind, and a number of sorts of moral realism form a cluster, sharing the feature of reifying certain concepts in our cognitive algorithms even when they can be ‘explained away.’ Maybe we can discuss this tomorrow night.
However, this does not mean that we can say that any other given view is just like atheism in this respect and thus hold beliefs in the face of expert disagreement, that would be far too convenient.
Of course not; the substance of one’s reasons for disagreeing matters greatly. In this case, I suspect there’s probably a significant amount of correlation/non-independence between the reasons for believing atheism and believing something like moral non-realism.
One thing we should take away from cases like atheism is that surveys probably shouldn’t be interpreted naively, but rather as somewhat noisy information. I think my own heuristic (on binary questions where I already have a strong opinion) is basically to look on which side of 50% my position falls; if the majority agrees with me (or, say, the average confidence in my position is over 50%), I tend to regard that as (more) evidence in my favor, with the strength increasing as the percentage increases.
(This, I think, would be part of how I would answer Yvain.)
You are correct that it is reasonable to assign high confidence to atheism even if it doesn’t have 80% support, but we must be very careful here. Atheism is presumably the strongest example of such a claim here on Less Wrong (i.e. one which you can tell a great story why so many intelligent people would disagree etc and hold a high confidence in the face of disagreement). However, this does not mean that we can say that any other given view is just like atheism in this respect and thus hold beliefs in the face of expert disagreement, that would be far too convenient.
Strong agreement about not overgeneralizing. It does appear, however, that libertarianism about free well, non-physicalism about the mind, and a number of sorts of moral realism form a cluster, sharing the feature of reifying certain concepts in our cognitive algorithms even when they can be ‘explained away.’ Maybe we can discuss this tomorrow night.
Of course not; the substance of one’s reasons for disagreeing matters greatly. In this case, I suspect there’s probably a significant amount of correlation/non-independence between the reasons for believing atheism and believing something like moral non-realism.
One thing we should take away from cases like atheism is that surveys probably shouldn’t be interpreted naively, but rather as somewhat noisy information. I think my own heuristic (on binary questions where I already have a strong opinion) is basically to look on which side of 50% my position falls; if the majority agrees with me (or, say, the average confidence in my position is over 50%), I tend to regard that as (more) evidence in my favor, with the strength increasing as the percentage increases.
(This, I think, would be part of how I would answer Yvain.)