Two good "fundamentalism is stupid" posts over the weekend. First up is Scott Aaronson on rules of inference:
In the study of rationality, there's a well-known party game: the one where everyone throws a number from 0 to 100 into a hat, and that player wins whose number was closest to two-thirds of the average of everyone's numbers. It's easy to see that the only Nash equilibrium of this game -- that is, the only possible outcome if everyone is rational, knows that everyone is rational, knows everyone knows everyone is rational, etc. -- is for everyone to throw in 0. Why? For simplicity, consider the case of two people: one can show that I should throw in 1/2 of what I think your number will be, which is 1/2 of what you think my number will be, and so on ad infinitum until we reason ourselves down to 0.
On the other hand, how should you play if you actually want to win this game? The answer, apparently, is that you should throw in about 20. Most people, when faced with a long chain of logical inferences, will follow the chain for one or two steps and then stop. And, here as elsewhere in life, "being rational" is just a question of adjusting yourself to everyone else's irrationalities. "Two-thirds of 50 is 33, and two-thirds of that is 22, and ... OK, good enough for me!"
What does this have to do with religion? Click over there and read the whole post.
In a similar vein, from a different angle, Slacktivist on illiteralist reasoning in religion:
I've written before about one variety of mirror-opposites of these illiteralist believers -- see "Bloody Mary Candyman" and "Freethinkers wanted" -- those who I call "sectarian atheists." These are usually folks who start out like Marshall Hall, fully indoctrinated in the all-or-nothing illiteralism of American fundamentalism. They start out believing, like Hall, that the Earth must be fixed or else the Bible is false and there is no God and life is meaningless despair. And then they catch a glimpse of the moons of Jupiter or of an eclipse or of a middle-school science textbook and they realize that the Earth moves. At this point they declare themselves "atheists," yet for all their supposed rejection of their previous beliefs, they continue to share Hall's way of looking at the world. Theirs is an extremely sectarian, parochial atheism -- the God in which they no longer believe is a very particular kind of God. (I don't believe in that God either, but I am not an atheist.)
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Fred Clark is the best writer on religion and politics working in the blogosphere today.
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http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/average.htm
The "2/3 of average" winning value in the interval 0->1 is 4/27. Would it be proportionately larger 0->100, e.g., 15?
OTOH, folks expect the random average would be 1/2 the interval so they choose (2/3)*(1/2). A clever git jumps everybody else one level deeper. The winner went one level deeper still:
(2/3)(2/3)(2/3)(1/2) = 4/27
"I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Fred Clark is the best writer on religion and politics working in the blogosphere today."
Yes he is! I think it is a very hard topic to tackel.. and I tip my hat to anyone with the wisdom to take on such a feat.
I absolutely enjoy Slacktivist (in fact, it's one of the first blogs I've ever read), but I do think he misunderstands most of those he calls sectarian atheists. While there are certainly some atheists like that, he usually uses someone as an example who is trying to show who inherently silly literalism is. This isn't because they believe that it's the only type of religion out there (although I am not denying that there are some who really seem to believe that), but because it is the most flagrant example, and most easily dismissed type, of fundamentalism that exists right now.
A good example would be the post about the Blasphemy Challenge. Instead of arguing against their tactics, of which there are many possible criticisms, he just presented it as if it was something it wasn't. I know Fred isn't someone who would purposefully use a strawman, so it's most likely just a misunderstanding, but he keeps coming back to it without re-examining his views at all, which I find annoying and unlike him.