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schmidtleonard 4 days ago

So a sufficiently confident idiot is equivalent to https://xkcd.com/54/ ?

o11c 4 days ago | parent [-]

Well, I would have suggested an experiment, but if we're still at the "idiot" phase that might be a bit premature.

Instead, I'll offer some general questions that can be answered without experiments, only research.

For each faith X:

  0. Note that each line depends on previous lines.
  1. Who and what defines X-ism?
  2. How exactly do you determine if someone is an X-ist?
  3. What immediate claims does X-ism make about you, me, X-ists, non-X-ists, people at large, the world in general, etc.
  4. What are the greater (long-term, conceptual, metaphysical, etc.) implications of 3?
  5. If X is true, what prior assumptions and values will I have to discard? Am I willing to do so?
  6. What kind of signal-to-noise ratio can I expect due to uncertainties when calculating the above in practice?