But at the end of the day it’s not inherently irrational to hold these top-level beliefs. Francis Crick for instance...
But, I don’t think Crick was talking about a “vast superintelligence”. In his paper, he talks about extraterrestrials sending out unmanned long-range spacecraft, not anything requiring what I think he or you would call superintelligence. In fact, he predicted that we would have that technology within “a few decades”, though rocket science isn’t among his many fields of expertise so I take that with a grain of salt.
A worldview comes into play when one jumps to #3 with Miller-Urey because it fits with one’s top-level priors.
I don’t think that’s quite what happened to me, though; the issue was that it didn’t fit my top-level priors. The solution wasn’t to adjust my worldview belief but to apply it more rationally; I ran into an akrasia problem and concluded #3 because I hadn’t examined my evidence well enough according to even my own standards.
But, I don’t think Crick was talking about a “vast superintelligence”. In his paper, he talks about extraterrestrials sending out unmanned long-range spacecraft, not anything requiring what I think he or you would call superintelligence. In fact, he predicted that we would have that technology within “a few decades”, though rocket science isn’t among his many fields of expertise so I take that with a grain of salt.
I don’t think that’s quite what happened to me, though; the issue was that it didn’t fit my top-level priors. The solution wasn’t to adjust my worldview belief but to apply it more rationally; I ran into an akrasia problem and concluded #3 because I hadn’t examined my evidence well enough according to even my own standards.