I think probability is a red herring, as is high pop variation of any kind. It's more appropriate to consider serial experimentation. If I change the concept I'm testing for to, say, gullibility, I can practice evaluating people without a high N trial. I can simply try to trick one individual after another and, over time, even if my tests are somewhat dynamic, I can evolve a collection of tricks that distinguish the gullible from the ... risk averse. Being gullible myself, I'm familiar with the process ... I am serially foolish. Sure, reduction to the smallest possible set of traits that lead to gullibility would require high N trials. But that's not necessary for approaching the gist.
I can't help but think there is an equivalent method for [a]theism. There must be gurus and evangelicals, especially those busted for something but that then recover and start another congregation, who have honed the craft. Or, perhaps better examples would be people like Jack Abramoff, Edward Snowden, or even ex-addict drug counselors. These are people who, I think, are in their situations because of _systemic_ pressures rather than some hypothetical internal mechanisms that motivated them. Or, perhaps it's analogous to the false dichotomy between pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics.
It may well be a mistake to hunt for [a]theism in individual humans (behavior- or molecule-based). Perhaps it's actually a property of the system in which the humans live, or, more likely, a result of the coupling of the individual to the society.
On December 26, 2014 3:56:58 PM PST, "Marcus G. Daniels" <mar...@snoutfarm.com> wrote:
The refusal or inability to write these functions and routines is an indicator that the speaker is full of it and would rather talk about witches.
Or the refusal or inability to write the functions is a result of the witch-hypothesizer's embeddedness in his culture? This is something many high N trials will not discover unless explicitly designed to discover them. And that can be very difficult. How do we design a trial across cultures that involve witch-hypotheses? Is the bruja a good analog for the voodoo priestess? Is vishnu a good analog for yaweh? Can we really believe the alcoholics anonymous advocates that you can adopt _whatever_ "something larger than yourself" is a synonym for "God"?
When cornered on a question, can the believer justify or change their belief?
Justification is always possible. (Perhaps we could correlate justificationism with the rise and fall of conspiracy theories, which are simply tortuous justifications.) And we can't quite rely on tracking changes in belief, at least not directly. We could rely (somewhat) on changes to the self-reports of belief. But, again, when and in what context is the self-report trustworthy?
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