When it comes to issues like superstition, abortion, gender, race, pseudoscience, consciousness, etc. so far everyone who disagrees with my views tends to demonstrate horrible illogical arguments or even a complete lack of justification for their views. This doesn’t really apply to LWers, I’m talking about outside of this site.
How about people who agree with your views—how many of them have horrible illogical arguments or even a complete lack of justification?
LessWrong is heavily biased towards the kind of people who can articulate why exactly they believe something in a logical-sounding way, compared to people from a random internet forum or people one might meet in person. So maybe what you’re seeing is just that a lot of people have horribly illogical justifications, it’s just that the only time you have to listen to a justification for a belief is when you disagree with someone.
Conversations rarely go:
- I think homosexual marriage should be legal.
- I fully agree, but *why* do you believe that?
- Well, because <illogical and incoherent justification>
In terms of strength of the effect, I’d guess it’s something like:
1) stupidity is correlated with both wrong opinions and bad justifications
2) you’re more likely to encounter explanations for beliefs you disagree with
3) your judgement of which justifications are good or bad is biased by whether they support your beliefs
This is exactly the case, and it is sometimes quite shocking to hear sincere justifications from people who agree with you that are insanely wrong.
While taking the ideological turing test I had a hell of a time fighting the urge to label people giving bad arguments for atheism as Christians. It turns out that many atheists have very bad reasons for being atheists. Not all skeptics are rationalists.
There’s also the effect of topic selection. I’ve seen an example on an atheist forum in which users were astoundingly adept at refuting creationist arguments, but as soon as anybody posted a silly economic conspiracy theory, the posters seemed to take it at face value. It turns out that, politically, you can predict most people’s opinions one one thing by their opinion on another thing (e.g. opinions about abortion correlate with opinions about gun control). Try prodding around with people who agree with you on one issue and see how quickly they become insane when you bring up an unrelated issue.
How about people who agree with your views—how many of them have horrible illogical arguments or even a complete lack of justification?
LessWrong is heavily biased towards the kind of people who can articulate why exactly they believe something in a logical-sounding way, compared to people from a random internet forum or people one might meet in person. So maybe what you’re seeing is just that a lot of people have horribly illogical justifications, it’s just that the only time you have to listen to a justification for a belief is when you disagree with someone.
Conversations rarely go:
In terms of strength of the effect, I’d guess it’s something like:
1) stupidity is correlated with both wrong opinions and bad justifications
2) you’re more likely to encounter explanations for beliefs you disagree with
3) your judgement of which justifications are good or bad is biased by whether they support your beliefs
This is exactly the case, and it is sometimes quite shocking to hear sincere justifications from people who agree with you that are insanely wrong.
While taking the ideological turing test I had a hell of a time fighting the urge to label people giving bad arguments for atheism as Christians. It turns out that many atheists have very bad reasons for being atheists. Not all skeptics are rationalists.
There’s also the effect of topic selection. I’ve seen an example on an atheist forum in which users were astoundingly adept at refuting creationist arguments, but as soon as anybody posted a silly economic conspiracy theory, the posters seemed to take it at face value. It turns out that, politically, you can predict most people’s opinions one one thing by their opinion on another thing (e.g. opinions about abortion correlate with opinions about gun control). Try prodding around with people who agree with you on one issue and see how quickly they become insane when you bring up an unrelated issue.
You haven’t been to a Mises.org discussion of intellectual property rights, have you?