[extropy-chat] Belief in logic (was: survey on fringe ideas: evolution)

Adrian Tymes wingcat at pacbell.net
Tue Oct 25 17:58:19 UTC 2005


--- spike <spike66 at comcast.net> wrote:
> Ron Numbers makes the case that those polls which
> show a person believing mutually exclusive notions
> should be eliminated from the final score.  He suggests
> that this could result in most of the survey-returns being
> eliminated, but then the conclusions are much more evolution-
> friendly.

Possibility: there is a correlation between those who believe in logic,
specifically the very possibility that evidence can disprove notions
and that said disproven notions should then receive less or no further
belief (depending on the strength of the argument against them), and
those who believe in evolution.

We might take this as obvious or nonsensical.  Logic exists, whether we
believe it or not.  1+1=2 no matter how much one may preach against it.
But this is not the mindset of everyone.  Some believe that preaching
that 1+1=3 is enough to make it so - and either it has not occurred to
them to try it, or they have rationalizations of why it has failed to
work every time it has been attempted (possibly backed up with accounts
of it working for other people - entirely fictitious, but they may or
may not be aware of this, and for whatever reason they do not make much
use of science's error-correcting mechanisms for cases like this).

I wonder what a survey focussed on belief in a logical, rational world
would turn up, especially if it looked for correlations with belief in
science vs. religion (which could possibly be distilled to belief in
evolution vs. creationism).



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