I think the original poster would have agreed to this even before they had the realisation. The point here is that, even when you do listen to an explanation, the absurdity bias can still mislead you.
The lady in the story had an entire conversation about evolution and still rejected it as absurd. Some ideas simply take more than 20 minutes to digest, understand and learn about. Therfore after 20 minutes of conversation, you cannot reasonably conclude that you’ve heard everything there is. You cannot reasonably conclude that you wouldn’t be convinced by more evidence.
It’s just like any bias really. Even when you know about it and you think you’ve adjusted sufficiently, you probably haven’t.
I agree with all of that. But there’s a limit to how much effort you can reasonably be expected to put into considering whether something that seems absurd to you is really not-absurd. I suggest that that depends on what other evidence there is for its non-absurdity. E.g., in the case of evolution, it’s highly relevant that it’s endorsed by the great majority of biologists, including biologists belonging to religions whose traditions contain stories that prima facie conflict with evolution.
There are a lot of super-smart Christians too, which I think it’s reasonable to take as evidence that Christianity can’t rightly be dismissed simply because its tradition contains a story about a talking snake. On the other hand, there aren’t so many super-smart talking-snake-believers—even among Christians, most[1] of the cleverest and most educated don’t take the story as indicating that there was ever a talking snake—which suggests that treating a literal reading of the talking-snake story as absurd probably isn’t unreasonable.
Oh absolutely. We don’t have time to thoroughly investigate the case for every idea we come across. There comes a time when you say that you’re not interested in exploring an idea any further.
But there is an intellectual honesty to admitting that you haven’t heard all of the evidence, and acknowledging that you might conceivably have changed your mind (or least significantly changed your probability estimates) if you had done more research.
And there’s a value to it as well. Some ideas have been thoroughly researched and should be labelled in our minds as “debunked”. Others should be labelled as “not yet disproven”. Later, if we happen to encounter more evidence on the topic, we might take this into account when we decide how seriously to take it.
The lady in the story might have sounded much more sensible to us if she had said “Evolution still sounds absurd to me, but I’ll admit that i haven’t yet given the pro-evolution argument a proper opportunity to change my mind”.
And i think we should try to be that sensible ourselves.
I think the unbelievability of evolution has been greatly exaggerated. People believe that diseases are caused by living things that they can’t even see. They believe that you can destroy a city with enough uranium to fit into a car. They believe that burning fuel hundreds of miles away produces this stuff that comes through copper wires to their home and makes their refrigerator run. Evolution is not more unbelievable than those. It’s likely that in most cases where someone “didn’t digest and learn about” evolution, they are rejecting it because it conflicts with something they already believe for other reasons, and “it’s just plain unbelievable” is an excuse, not a reason.
I suspect that if you went up to a Christian Scientist and explained germ theory to him, he’d tell you it’s unbelievable in the same way that literalist Christians or Muslims would tell you that evolution is unbelievable. Yet plenty of people whose religions don’t contradict germ theory, but who haven’t studied the science either, find it perfectly believable.
I think many people find evolution “unbelievable” in the way that many scientists found the idea of continental drift unbelievable even after there was a lot of evidence for it (the physical shape of the continents, the types of fossils found in certain areas, and so on.) That is, the effect (that these continents are thousands of miles apart) just seems too big, and in a similar way, living things just seem too far apart overall.
If you set that aside, people could have come up with the idea of evolution just by thinking carefully what happens when you make a series of imperfect copies, about the fact the reproduction of living things is in fact a case of making an imperfect copy, and about the kinds of patterns that living things fall into. But in fact pretty much no one suggested the theory until there was a lot more evidence than that.
Believing in germs has a pretty big effect, yet most people have no problem believing in germs (or atoms, or electricity, or the Earth moving around the sun). All they need is a couple of scientists to say “there are these invisible things that cause disease” and they’re perfectly happy to believe the scientists.
It may be that scientists themselves had trouble believing in continental drift or germs when they were first introduced, but we’re not talking about scientists here; we’re talking about everyday people who get their knowledge from authorities. Everyday people have no trouble believing in germs or atom bombs when told by an authority, and evolution isn’t any more absurd-sounding than those. They only think evolution “sounds absurd” because it contradicts their religion.
A lot of those average people also have no problem believing that homeopathy or acupuncture works. Part of the problem of evolution is that’s in direct competition with other models of explaining the world. It’s perfectly possible for the average person to believe in Germs causing disease and in bad chi causing it which is to be treated via acupuncture.
This is perfectly true. But it doesn’t much matter, because the point here is that when these people reject the idea of evolution, for these kind of reasons, they use feelings of “absurdity” as a metric—without critically assessing the reasons why they feel that way.
The point here isnt that the lady was using sound and rational reasoning skills. The contention is that her style of reasoning was something a rationalist shouldn’t want to use—and that it was something the author no longer wants to use in their own thinking.
The point was to compare a religious believer saying “evolution sounds absurd” to a rationalist saying “talking snakes sound absurd”. But the situations are not comparable. The religious believer only claims that evolution sounds absurd because he applies different standards for absurdity to things that contradict his religion and things which don’t. The rationalist claims that talking snakes sound absurd using consistent standards (though not the same standards as the religious believer).
I think the original poster would have agreed to this even before they had the realisation. The point here is that, even when you do listen to an explanation, the absurdity bias can still mislead you.
The lady in the story had an entire conversation about evolution and still rejected it as absurd. Some ideas simply take more than 20 minutes to digest, understand and learn about. Therfore after 20 minutes of conversation, you cannot reasonably conclude that you’ve heard everything there is. You cannot reasonably conclude that you wouldn’t be convinced by more evidence.
It’s just like any bias really. Even when you know about it and you think you’ve adjusted sufficiently, you probably haven’t.
I agree with all of that. But there’s a limit to how much effort you can reasonably be expected to put into considering whether something that seems absurd to you is really not-absurd. I suggest that that depends on what other evidence there is for its non-absurdity. E.g., in the case of evolution, it’s highly relevant that it’s endorsed by the great majority of biologists, including biologists belonging to religions whose traditions contain stories that prima facie conflict with evolution.
There are a lot of super-smart Christians too, which I think it’s reasonable to take as evidence that Christianity can’t rightly be dismissed simply because its tradition contains a story about a talking snake. On the other hand, there aren’t so many super-smart talking-snake-believers—even among Christians, most[1] of the cleverest and most educated don’t take the story as indicating that there was ever a talking snake—which suggests that treating a literal reading of the talking-snake story as absurd probably isn’t unreasonable.
[1] Though certainly not all.
Oh absolutely. We don’t have time to thoroughly investigate the case for every idea we come across. There comes a time when you say that you’re not interested in exploring an idea any further.
But there is an intellectual honesty to admitting that you haven’t heard all of the evidence, and acknowledging that you might conceivably have changed your mind (or least significantly changed your probability estimates) if you had done more research.
And there’s a value to it as well. Some ideas have been thoroughly researched and should be labelled in our minds as “debunked”. Others should be labelled as “not yet disproven”. Later, if we happen to encounter more evidence on the topic, we might take this into account when we decide how seriously to take it.
The lady in the story might have sounded much more sensible to us if she had said “Evolution still sounds absurd to me, but I’ll admit that i haven’t yet given the pro-evolution argument a proper opportunity to change my mind”.
And i think we should try to be that sensible ourselves.
Again, I agree with all of that.
Thank you. :)
I think the unbelievability of evolution has been greatly exaggerated. People believe that diseases are caused by living things that they can’t even see. They believe that you can destroy a city with enough uranium to fit into a car. They believe that burning fuel hundreds of miles away produces this stuff that comes through copper wires to their home and makes their refrigerator run. Evolution is not more unbelievable than those. It’s likely that in most cases where someone “didn’t digest and learn about” evolution, they are rejecting it because it conflicts with something they already believe for other reasons, and “it’s just plain unbelievable” is an excuse, not a reason.
I suspect that if you went up to a Christian Scientist and explained germ theory to him, he’d tell you it’s unbelievable in the same way that literalist Christians or Muslims would tell you that evolution is unbelievable. Yet plenty of people whose religions don’t contradict germ theory, but who haven’t studied the science either, find it perfectly believable.
I think many people find evolution “unbelievable” in the way that many scientists found the idea of continental drift unbelievable even after there was a lot of evidence for it (the physical shape of the continents, the types of fossils found in certain areas, and so on.) That is, the effect (that these continents are thousands of miles apart) just seems too big, and in a similar way, living things just seem too far apart overall.
If you set that aside, people could have come up with the idea of evolution just by thinking carefully what happens when you make a series of imperfect copies, about the fact the reproduction of living things is in fact a case of making an imperfect copy, and about the kinds of patterns that living things fall into. But in fact pretty much no one suggested the theory until there was a lot more evidence than that.
Believing in germs has a pretty big effect, yet most people have no problem believing in germs (or atoms, or electricity, or the Earth moving around the sun). All they need is a couple of scientists to say “there are these invisible things that cause disease” and they’re perfectly happy to believe the scientists.
It may be that scientists themselves had trouble believing in continental drift or germs when they were first introduced, but we’re not talking about scientists here; we’re talking about everyday people who get their knowledge from authorities. Everyday people have no trouble believing in germs or atom bombs when told by an authority, and evolution isn’t any more absurd-sounding than those. They only think evolution “sounds absurd” because it contradicts their religion.
A lot of those average people also have no problem believing that homeopathy or acupuncture works. Part of the problem of evolution is that’s in direct competition with other models of explaining the world. It’s perfectly possible for the average person to believe in Germs causing disease and in bad chi causing it which is to be treated via acupuncture.
This is perfectly true. But it doesn’t much matter, because the point here is that when these people reject the idea of evolution, for these kind of reasons, they use feelings of “absurdity” as a metric—without critically assessing the reasons why they feel that way.
The point here isnt that the lady was using sound and rational reasoning skills. The contention is that her style of reasoning was something a rationalist shouldn’t want to use—and that it was something the author no longer wants to use in their own thinking.
The point was to compare a religious believer saying “evolution sounds absurd” to a rationalist saying “talking snakes sound absurd”. But the situations are not comparable. The religious believer only claims that evolution sounds absurd because he applies different standards for absurdity to things that contradict his religion and things which don’t. The rationalist claims that talking snakes sound absurd using consistent standards (though not the same standards as the religious believer).