Simpler Question to Avoid PrayingMantis's Wrath

[David Sklansky]

You are confused. If believing in something that is farfetched might affect the chances you are a good doctor, then believing in something even more farfetched is more likely to.

[kbfc]

I wasn't confused. I knew exactly what you meant. I just think your example is broken.

You are assuming some sort of continuous, monotonic function between 'farfetchedness' of belief and doctor ability, and a fairly linear one at that. I have doubts that this is the case at all. It could very well be something like a step-funciton, where goofy beliefs don't make much of a difference up to a certain point, after which one falls off the edge, so-to-speak. If this were the case, I would most likely put the crossover point well past OJ-innocence, but well before religion.

As I mentioned before, watch any number of Hitchcock films for outlandish "wrongfully accused" sorts of plots; the details of these plots may be pretty farfetched, but they are nowhere the level where a rational person couldn't see it as a reasonable possibilty.

[RJT]

Great subject title, btw.

At the risk of sounding repetitive, how many doctors do you think really had the time to watch the OJ trial or read much about it? That is, have studied it as much. I really think this is the case of geniuses too. You still have not addressed this issue. You take it as a given that they have a clue to how Religion works.

Are there any writings from geniuses who get past the God/no God issue? Unless you disagree (you don’t seem to) and say that we have to get past this issue first (that we cannot assume for the sake of discussion that one can start with the choice of there is a God) I am really interested in reading some geniuses work on the topic.

RJT

[David Sklansky]

What does your questions have to do with mine? I say for instance that devout Fundamentalist Christian doctors will be on average less good at making diagnosis than agnostic doctors, all other factors such, as geography etc, being equal. Because to believe these things is evidence that you are relativley stupid. I can't make it planer than that. Do you agree or not? And if you don't, do you still disagree if the doctor believed in astrology.

[RJT]

[ QUOTE ]
What does your questions have to do with mine? I say for instance that devout Fundamentalist Christian doctors will be on average less good at making diagnosis than agnostic doctors, all other factors such, as geography etc, being equal. Because to believe these things is evidence that you are relativley stupid. I can't make it planer than that. Do you agree or not? And if you don't, do you still disagree if the doctor believed in astrology.

[/ QUOTE ]

Of course, I agree with you as a general rule. But then we have folk like NotReady who seems to me to be pretty intelligent (seems smarter than I am so, I would need your opinion on his intelligence assuming/given that you are smarter than he). I would tend to trust him operating on my diverticulitous if he were a surgeon. So, here I seem to be saying I disagree to an extent.

[David Sklansky]

I said on average. And I'd choose ALL Bran over Not Ready.

Seriously though, when it came to assigning probabilities to competing diagnosis, Not Ready would be incompetant. He might be a good surgeon though.

[RJT]

[ QUOTE ]
I said on average. And I'd choose ALL Bran over Not Ready.

Seriously though, when it came to assigning probabilities to competing diagnosis, Not Ready would be incompetant. He might be a good surgeon though.

[/ QUOTE ]

LOL.

I understood your post to say exactly this anyway. That's probably why I didn't answer it in a direct manner - I had thought about the two (i.e. I decided upon the example surgeon instead of diagnostic.) I have to defer your to intelligence here and respectfully waive the opportunity to answer.

[ QUOTE ]
I say for instance that devout Fundamentalist Christian doctors will be on average less good at making diagnosis than agnostic doctors, all other factors such, as geography etc, being equal.

[/ QUOTE ]

They don't even have to be fundamentalist to be bad doctors.

*cough*BillFrist*sneeze*TerryShiavo*vomit*

[purnell]

I ignored the whole spectacle.

[PrayingMantis]

First, it might look strange to most of you, but I know very very little about the specifics of OJ trial, so this example doesn't mean much to me (if it matters to anybody), but of course I perfectly understand the context and therefore understand the structure of your question/argument here.

Anyway, here are a few specific thoughts with regard to this question/argument and the previous, "less simple", one (I'll show you in a minute that your new question is in fact more complex than the other one, and not more simple as you have titled it).

In your previous question you were asking a question that can be described as this:
If a person believes in A1, how good will he be as a P1?

For A1 you have used all kinds of religious traditions and "beliefs", and for P you have used a certain job.

Now you are asking:


If a person who is R, AND believes in A2, how good will he do as P2?

Now why the need to introduce that new variable R, which here is "white", into the question/argument? Couldn't you ask it without the R? Does it serve to confuse the readers, by giving them a piece of "irrlevant information", that is, an information that is not relevant to the core point you're trying to make here, or does it have anything to do with the question?

However, the more interesting thing in this structure is your assumption with regard to the nature of "belief", and the "exchangeability" of different variety of cases for A1 and A2, for which you assume your 2 questions are equivalent.

The problem with this, is in using the word "believe" (or more accurately, _thinking_ in terms of "belief") for cases where "belief" might mean very different things, and this without being aware, or not admitting those critical differences.

For instance, in (at least!) 2 cases out of the 10 possible cases you give in the first question, there's often no need in the assumption about "belief". These are (again, at least) "devout jew" and "buddhist". To be more specific (for the case of "devout Jew"): the question of belief is mostly _irrelevant_ for the practice of "being a devout Jew". This is a deep issue which I won't get into here, but the role of "belief" in one's religious life is in many senses an "invention" of Christianity. It is absurd to take this model and to impose it on other religions and practices, without considering the possibility that it might not "work" at all.

Another aspect (which is completely different) of this is in thinking about those structures as if "I think that X is true with very high probability, (OR: "I assign 'high probability' to X") is equivalent to "I believe in X", while in fact this is far from being necessarily true.