Contrast that with someone who denies the existence of anthropogenic global warming (AGW)
I don’t have the knowledge of climatology to make a reasoned claim about AGW myself one way or another. Whether I believe or disbelieve in AGW, it would therefore currently have to be completely done based on trusting the positions of other people. Which are indeed Bayesian evidence, but “mistrusting the current climatological elite” even if someone places a wrong prior on how likely said climatological elite is to manufacture/misinterpret data, is not remotely similar to the same sort of logical hoops that your average theist has to go through to explain and excuse the presence of evil in the world, the silence of the gods, the lack of material evidence, archaelogical and geological discrepancies with their holy texts etc, etc, etc.
So your test isn’t remotely as good. It effectively tests just one thing: one’s prior on how likely climatologists are to lie or misinterpret data.
It effectively tests just one thing: one’s prior on how likely climatologists are to lie or misinterpret data.
People don’t start out with a high/low claimed prior on lying climatologists and then decide to start arguing about global warming on the internet—it’s vice versa, in most cases. The end result tells you about this whole causal history, which includes a fair bit of irrationality along the way.
Of course, where the causal chain terminates is often in stuff like “my parents had political view X,” which we don’t particularly want to learn about, and thus has to be controlled for if we want to learn about the intermediate irrationality.
One might argue that a typical theist’s knowledge of the lack of material evidence for his religion is also pure hearsay. Neither most theists nor most atheists personally investigated the relevant archaeological artefacts. Similarly, few western theists directly experienced things commonly believed to be extremely evil (holocaust, famines, ). They are simply “mistrusting the current archaeological/historical” elite.
edit:
Yes, yes, of course virtually no real theists (or even agnostics) use the “it’s all hearsay, I’m merely sceptical” defence. And indeed, large swaths of theology deal with virtually all problems you could think of. I was merely pointing out that an individual theist could, in principle, use a similar defence to the one ArisKatsaris was using.
Religious people aren’t generally skeptical that terrible things happen to a lot of people on a very large scale. A large part of the problem of theodicy is constructing explanations for this. You may have more of a point in regards to archaeology, but by and large most of these issues are pretty accessible (certainly more accessible to lay people than complicated climate models).
I don’t have the knowledge of climatology to make a reasoned claim about AGW myself one way or another. Whether I believe or disbelieve in AGW, it would therefore currently have to be completely done based on trusting the positions of other people. Which are indeed Bayesian evidence, but “mistrusting the current climatological elite” even if someone places a wrong prior on how likely said climatological elite is to manufacture/misinterpret data, is not remotely similar to the same sort of logical hoops that your average theist has to go through to explain and excuse the presence of evil in the world, the silence of the gods, the lack of material evidence, archaelogical and geological discrepancies with their holy texts etc, etc, etc.
So your test isn’t remotely as good. It effectively tests just one thing: one’s prior on how likely climatologists are to lie or misinterpret data.
People don’t start out with a high/low claimed prior on lying climatologists and then decide to start arguing about global warming on the internet—it’s vice versa, in most cases. The end result tells you about this whole causal history, which includes a fair bit of irrationality along the way.
Of course, where the causal chain terminates is often in stuff like “my parents had political view X,” which we don’t particularly want to learn about, and thus has to be controlled for if we want to learn about the intermediate irrationality.
One might argue that a typical theist’s knowledge of the lack of material evidence for his religion is also pure hearsay. Neither most theists nor most atheists personally investigated the relevant archaeological artefacts. Similarly, few western theists directly experienced things commonly believed to be extremely evil (holocaust, famines, ). They are simply “mistrusting the current archaeological/historical” elite.
edit:
Yes, yes, of course virtually no real theists (or even agnostics) use the “it’s all hearsay, I’m merely sceptical” defence. And indeed, large swaths of theology deal with virtually all problems you could think of. I was merely pointing out that an individual theist could, in principle, use a similar defence to the one ArisKatsaris was using.
Religious people aren’t generally skeptical that terrible things happen to a lot of people on a very large scale. A large part of the problem of theodicy is constructing explanations for this. You may have more of a point in regards to archaeology, but by and large most of these issues are pretty accessible (certainly more accessible to lay people than complicated climate models).