From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Sep 16 1999 - 02:26:25 MDT
On Wed, 15 Sep 1999, Spike Jones wrote:
> Modern technologists and even many modern scientists carry
> superstitious religious memes.
>
> What I find the most disturbing of all is that superstition does not
> seem to be dissipating nearly as quickly as I would have expected
> with the advance of science and technology. Superstition seems
> to be a stubbornly persistent aspect of human nature, one that will
> be carried into the next century.
>
Ah, Spike, you have voiced **the** fundamental problem we face
as extropians. Since one of the major axioms of extropianism
is to "value rational thought", the problem lies in discovering
exactly *who* is capable of this.
For *most* people, what they consider "rational" is what they
"experience" to be true. Gravity makes things go down --
I experience that so it must be true. Electricity or
gas makes stoves hot and hot things burn my fingers --
I experience that so it must be true. If I forget to
put the brakes on in my car and it runs into another object
and makes a big mess, there must be something involved
with inertial energy that must be true.
But someplace not to far beyond the above descriptions one
runs into the limits of "personal" experience for the
average person in the population. After that one enters
the realm of newpapers claiming hermaphrodites can fertilize
themselves, men can walk on the moon and FBI agents are part
of a government conspiracy to murder U.S. citizens
(spanning the credibility range from unlikely to likely
to possibly).
How do you deal with individuals attempting to invoke
rational thought when so much of rational thought depends
on the belief of what others have told you? And if you believe
what others have told you, you may just as well believe the
garbage as the stuff that is really serious.
Rational thought is counter-intuitive. How can you say
something that is heavier than air should actually fly?
Eric had it absolutely right in one of his discussions where
he argued that you have to rate the raters. If you can get
a number of trusted opinions that an opinion is trustable
than that can give you high confidence in it. Then you
have the problem of getting the average person to trust
opinions of people they don't know over people they know.
How do you get the average person on the street to believe
something in Science is any more valid than something
in the National Enquirer???
Robert
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