[Nursie]

I think the post you reply to is saying that the fact that someone believes fervently in creation over evolution actually makes them an idiot, regardless of IQ.

This would be because it is a firm rejection of scientific evidence in favour of belief. Not all forms of faith and belief require you to reject evidence, mind, but this one most certainly does.

[dagw]

I knew a very smart and successful scientist doing biochemistry research at a pharma company who fell squarely in the Intelligent Design camp. Rather than seeing it as a wholesale abandonment of science they simply felt that the evidence of the prevailing scientific view was not that strong, and that ID offered firmer theory for the beginning/evolution of life than any other theory.

[Nursie]

In which case they were wrong, and most likely trying to reconcile their religious leanings with their self-image.

[dagw]

Well sure, but that doesn't make him an idiot.

[Nursie]

Depends on your definition. People called me an idiot (well, my partner did) when I hit myself in the hand with a hammer, really hard, while fossil hunting. So hard I had to go to hospital...

But in other respects I'm at least a reasonably intelligent software engineer!

[coldtea]

>I think the post you reply to is saying that the fact that someone believes fervently in creation over evolution actually makes them an idiot, regardless of IQ.

That stretches the definition of an idiot considerably.

>This would be because it is a firm rejection of scientific evidence in favour of belief.

That could be beneficial for one's emotional health (belief in higher power and all that) and thus the smart thing to do in some cases.

Who said "identifying reality correctly" is the smarter thing to do? Sometimes, not being too logical can have great benefits.

Here's an old argument for this:

>Origin of the Logical. — Where has logic originated in men's heads? Undoubtedly out of the illogical, the domain of which must originally lave been immense. But numberless beings who reasoned otherwise than we do at present, perished; albeit that they may have come nearer to truth than we! Whoever, for example, could not discern the "like" often enough with regard to food, and with regard to animals dangerous to him, whoever, therefore, deduced too slowly, or was too circumspect in his deductions, had smaller probability of survival than he who in all similar cases immediately divined the equality. The preponderating inclination, however, to deal with the similar as the equal — an illogical inclination, for there is nothing [100%] equal to another — created the whole basis of logic. It was just so (in order that the conception of [a shared] substance should originate, this being indispensable to logic, although in the strictest sense nothing actual corresponds to it) that for a long period the changing process in things had to be overlooked, and remain unperceived. The beings not seeing correctly [and saw similar things as "same" and static] had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux". In itself every high degree of circumspection in conclusions, every sceptical inclination, is a great danger to life. No living being might have been preserved unless the contrary inclination — to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to mistake and fabricate rather than wait, to assent rather than deny, to decide rather than be in the right — had been cultivated with extraordinary assiduity. The course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to a process and struggle of impulses, which singly and in themselves are all very illogical and unjust ; we experience usually only the result of the struggle, so rapidly and secretly does this primitive mechanism now operate in us.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Gaya Scienza -- with small edits in [] to make the excerpt clearer)

And here's a newer one:

>Hoffman: Right. The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illus...

[Nursie]

The specific problem with creationism and "ID" is that they claim to have objective facts but are actually faith. They do not embrace the irrational as you seem to be encouraging. Quite the opposite - they dress up in the clothes of scientific argument whilst actually rejecting the method, yet claim to have objective truth.

And personally, yeah, I think anyone that can't cope with reality as it is, that needs comforting fictions of higher powers, is de-facto weaker and worse off.

The scientific method has advanced our society immeasurably. Evolutionarily speaking our rationality and logical thought has given us such amazing success it's hard to see how that is supportable at all. It's also not clear what they mean by "tuned to fitness" there. He seems to consider that abstractions and shortcuts are the same as unreality, which appears orthogonal to this debate.

[crististm]

You might want to remember that while scientific method is pretty useful, it does has a weakness. It has all the bases covered except for the hypothesis.

Where do hypothesis come from?

[Nursie]

From hunches, partial observations, suggestions from prior research, various other sources of questions about what may or may not be correct that warrants further investigation.

I'm not sure how that's a weakness?

[crististm]

My point is to make you think about bootstrapping the hypothesis issue.

Yes, an intelligent agent will do exactly what you suggested. And by the way, what you said was exactly a hypothesis. What exactly did you do to generate it? Where did that text/ideas come from?

When you come to the bottom of it you'll probably find something that you can't explain. You'll have to think about something and that will lead to something else and so on.

The scientific method is just a means of communicating ideas to other people. But, can you use scientific method on itself? That is, can you communicate a scientific method to generate scientific methods (basically only the hypothesis) for a particular subject? What about "hunches"? Can I have them?

If you can, you hit jackpot. But if you don't, then you might want to think more about discarding the unexplainable.

Go beyond that and try to imagine an 4d or 5d space. Then extrapolate and do a bijection from that to understanding what God is. Why do you think that you can do that? What does this prove about all this thing?

[Nursie]

I'm sorry I don't know what you're talking about any more.

You seem to be trying to say that the use of hunches and soft knowledge to form the basis of inquiry and test somehow contradicts or weakens the idea that the world around us can be best understood by the scientific method.

"Hypothesis" is not knowledge, nor are such generated by magic, and they only become knowledge when tested (or contradicted).

As for the last bit, sorry you've degenerated into talking nonsense.

[Nursie]

The other thing that strikes me as a conundrum here is that, if one is aware of deliberately choosing unreality over reality, are you really choosing unreality?

I.E. how is it possible to choose fiction as fact in the knowledge it is fiction?

I don't really understand the mindset...

[coldtea]

>I.E. how is it possible to choose fiction as fact in the knowledge it is fiction?

That's just the moment of choice though. Given enough conditioning and getting used to it yourself, it can become as convincing (to your own self) as any reality.

Besides, don't people chose convenient truths over reality all the time, creationists or not?

Even the belief in science, which usually is a belief in fiction (an ideal of how it should be conducted) as opposed to how it's practiced and what interests and motivations are in play (from corporate tampering to "I'll review this peer reviewed paper favourably, because that guy is a friend of a friend, or they might help with my grants, etc." -- which can even function at a subconscious level, e.g. instinctively being more positively predisposed to papers by people you know or can help your career).

[Nursie]

But you would still know that you had a moment of choosing unreality.

Don't people choose convenient fictions? Not people worth knowing, IMHO, no. People that choose inquiry over ignorance are the ones thay actually make stridea out of the darkness and got us where we are today.

"Belief" in science is the wrong way to think about it. Understanding that the scientific method has flaws but is still far superior as a tool to discover what is, rather than proclaim it without evidence or shy away into comforting fictions, seems the best way to approach knowledge.

[coldtea]

>Don't people choose convenient fictions? Not people worth knowing, IMHO, no.

That's a convenient fiction to believe, but I haven't found it to be true in anybody.

[Nursie]

That would be an opinion of mine, not a belief, that people worth knowing try not to hold on to fictions.

Whether they end up doing so is less important, they choose not to whenever the choice is apparent.