> Your suggestion that there might be better modes of education that effectively stop people making (as I take it you mean) broad classes of cognitive errors is interesting. Do you have specific suggestions for what sort of education might bring that about?

Yes, but I will not share.

> Do you have specific reasons for thinking it would work?

Yes: universal aversion - theists & atheists, scientists/scientismists/mystics/conspiracy theorists, the list goes on: all humans hate very particular things in this general domain. And the reason I think it would work is because of the richness and ineffability of the view from the other said.

> My impression is that the more obvious ways of trying to help people not make cognitive errors tend to be pretty ineffective.

Like anything: amateur Normies teaching amateur Normies tends to not yield world class results. Once again, consider pre-scientific times.

> (I think people who pay attention to cognitive errors and try to make fewer of them do, in fact, tend to make fewer of them...

To some degree...but then, they also typically fall into a set of brand new ones! There are many layers to this onion, as even science has well revealed to us.

> but I don't think it's mostly because learning about cognitive errors and trying to make fewer of them is very effective

110% agree here! The introduction of "logical fallacies", etc into the Memeplex may have made things even worse (education and knowledge are often powerful catalysts for even more hubris and delusion)!

> it's more because the sort of person who does that is the sort of person who is already likely to be making fewer cognitive errors.)

Agreed....but why is this?

> Thank you for clarifying that you are not making a claim beyond "scientific materialists suffer from the very same delusions and faith based thinking the religious people they mock do". I'm not sure how much we disagree about this -- it depends on just what "the very same" means. (Obviously they're not literally the exact same

At the abstract level, they are the same. The variables differ, but the processes are largely identical. After all, do they not all run essentially the same hardware, and "largely" the same firmware ("reality", among others)?

> if you think they're just as bad then we disagree

What "is" depends on how you look at it: like if you are (or are not) weighting by magnitude of harm. For example, consider the risks we face from climate change. And if we look into the chain of causation behind that, who do we find playing critical roles?

Luckily, humans experience reality through stories, and scientists have some of the best. So I wouldn't worry about being found out any time soon. Or, it would seem safe to not worry about it at least.

> then we probably agree, though I think we disagree about how much sneering at the scientific materialists this justifies.)

Again, see climate change, and see "the reality" of who is to blame: "not" scientists!.

> I completely agree with you that the general crapness of human thinking is a serious problem. I'm not sure whether we agree about what fraction of that problem is specifically about scientific materialists.

Science is the current thought leader, and largely decides what does and does not get studied, funded, and respected or believed/disbelieved. How much of the "woo woo" world is actually very useful? Do you think such questions are even on the radar of most scientists? Could you provide any evidence in your favor of that?

> You clearly feel...

Don't overlook: think.

> (or, I guess, find it convenient to give the impression that you feel, but I'm happy to take this at face value) that I don't care about it enough

By what means could you know? How much time and effort do you put into it, and in what ways?

> whereas you do; for my part, I am not convinced

Do you not find this conversation substantially anomalous?

Try this: what processes underlie "convinced"?

> and I don't think one can tell how much someone cares about human irrationality by how enthusiastically they sneer at other people on the internet.

Closing with framing is wonderful. Sometimes I really love the internet, and the humans who fill it with wonderful new absurd content every single day!