It can predict, as long as you don’t expect the predictions to be true
This theist got them all right, although I had to think about the second one for a few minutes.
Illogically, self-contrarily, and incorrectly - but certainly succinctly! One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn’t belong, can you guess which thing is…"
It’s totally cool though (like heat, sandwiches, and Bette Midler).
No, not at all. Nothing could be more natural! God and Nature are just English names for two different viewpoints on the same object, like the facets of a single gem.
Hmm, not sure if I’d go that far– for instance, the mormons seem to do alright on those fronts. I also wouldn’t say being religious leads to those outcomes; it might be correlated with them however. It could lead to them though, say if you send your kids to liberty university for example…
I think I’d want to know a lot more about the toxicity, interactions and side effects of your drugs before I took any of them. A 5 minute dose of 10,000 ppm CO will likely guarantee you never get liver cancer, but it’s pretty drastic as preventative medicine goes.
Say what? All the engineering I and my colleagues have dealt with would never fit that definition. We deal in grey grey grey. A better definition would be engineers balance conflicting requirements and constraints to try and solve a problem. Sometimes it’s can’t be done. Often it’s a compromise. Where people get the idea engineers deal in black in white is how they frame their solutions. Utter confidence. They will fight to the death that their grey compromise is best.
I’m as guilty as anyone. Why? If I didn’t think it was the right answer, I wouldn’t have given it to you. Now piss off and do what I said. And if it blows up, yeah, I was wrong. That’s engineering. Stop being a scared of failure and get moving. (please note, I intentionally test stuff to failure because either I find my mistakes, or the customer does).
I’m sorry, but I think you will find the actual data on this thesis very disappointing.
Religious people have greater access to social, economic and educational opportunities through membership in religious communities (such as churches, synagogues and mosques).
Be careful not to conflate atheism with irreligiosity, though. My religion happily accepts atheists, and many attend my church.
Yup, the church is UU, although technically my own religion is pantheism. I’m an essential monist. “All are welcome, that come in peace with an open heart.”
I read the article and don’t understand how it relates to anything I’ve written, unless possibly it is meant to support my observation that religious communities offer things to their members that are not available to non-members.
Eaxctly. And implying ahead of time that they’re non-intuitive “trick” questions encourages more people to question their intuition. Drop these in an ordinary algebra test and you’d get a lot more wrong answers because the respondents wouldn’t think “it’s a trap” so much as “it’s a gimme”.
ETA: I almost fixed my transposition typo, but it’s too funny.
Gervais and Norenzayan draw on Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s view that human cognition can best be conveyed as the interaction of two “systems.” System 1 is the fast, almost instinctive process that makes instant, gut, unreflective judgments, while System 2 is the slow, effortful process that draws on our powers of analytical reasoning. They continue:
AVAILABLE EVIDENCE AND THEORY SUGGEST THAT A CONVERGING SUITE OF INTUITIVE COGNITIVE PROCESSES FACILITATE AND SUPPORT BELIEF IN SUPERNATURAL AGENTS, WHICH IS A CENTRAL ASPECT OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS WORLDWIDE… RELIGIOUS BELIEF THEREFORE BEARS MANY HALLMARKS OF SYSTEM 1 PROCESSING.
The authors reason that since “religious belief emerges through a converging set of intuitive processes, and analytic processing can inhibit or override intuitive processing…analytic thinking may undermine intuitive support for religious belief.” Seeing people through the Kahnemanian lens thus “predicts that analytic thinking may be one source of religious disbelief.”
This is not true either, as one can have both correlation and causation. So a better operator might be =?=. But that says there is no information about the relationship and there is a relationship between the two concepts. A better representation is causation => correlation, i.e. if there is causation then there is correlation. The inverse is unknown, if there is correlation then there may be causation but one needs more information. Likewise, if there is no correlation then there is no causation. Correlation is required evidence for establishing causation, however it is insufficient of itself. I think there is a fallacy in using boolean logic to describe what is actually a continuum of evidence. Further, correlation has been historically used as a proxy for causation many times in decision making to great effect. In the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak John Snow recommended a pump be shut off based solely on a correlative plot. If it was causative then lives would be saved, if it wasn’t then people had to needlessly walk further to get their water by taking action. When including risk into the decision making process correlation was sufficient to assume possible causation and take action. John Snow also evaluated the evidence afterward, and felt the evidence still wasn’t strong enough for causation and his critics used his own words to support rejecting the theory and blaming it all miasma because everyone knew that’s what caused disease.
Based on my interactions with students, i’d say that the intuitive answers are:
$1 (“because you just have to subtract”)
100 minutes (“follow the pattern”)
24 days (“it’s a division problem”)
And i think that @anon50609448 and @Glaurung are closest to the way i’m thinking about this. Essentially: this isn’t about math or religiosity, but degree of self-questioning. I thought the most significant word in the writeup here was:
I think it significant (beyond the WEIRD problem) that the people that were being tested here were college students. I.e., people who, for the most part, have been tested for many years in a way that encourages quick thinking and discourages self-questioning. In addition, although i don’t have evidence, i would guess that there is a correlation between some kinds of religiosity and a lack of self-questioning/second thoughts.
However, i suspect that even a non-self-questioner with strict religious tendencies against self-doubt (think of the most hide-bound fundamentalist you can think of, once they’ve made a decision, that’s it, no more discussion) would get #1 and possibly #3 correct.
There’s math problems quite like #2 that cause many a student difficulties and which are difficult to explain.
One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn’t belong, can you guess which thing is…" 
