I don’t mean that the probability is always 50/50. But it’s not 100% either.
In Europe, the smartest people for centuries believed in god, and they saw endless confirmations of that belief. And then—bam! It turned out they were simply all wrong.
Or take any case of ancient medicine. European doctors believed for centuries that bloodletting cured everything, while Chinese doctors believed that eating lead prolonged life.
There are also other examples where all the experts were wrong: geocentrism, the ether theory, the idea that mice spontaneously generate in dirty laundry, the miasma theory of disease…
In all these cases it was either about cognitive biases (God, medicine) or about lack of information or broken public discussion (geocentrism).
Today we fight biases much better than a thousand years ago, but we’re still far from perfect.
And we still sometimes operate under very limited information.
I think one should have fundamental rational habits that would protect me from being so sure in god or bloodletting. That’s why, from any conclusion I make, I subtract a few percentage points of confidence. The more complex the conclusion, the more speculative my reasoning or vulnerable to diases, the more I subtract.
If you claim that my way of fighting this overconfidence shouldn’t be used, I’d want you to suggest something else instead. Because you can’t just leave it as it is—otherwise one might assign 99% confidence to some nonsense.
Interesting model. Probably you are right and I didn't considered this because all my friends and me are not idiots.
Thank you for your comment, I changed this part so it is cleaner now
Unfortunately, we really can’t convince all creationists. We only have time for a few. However, if you pick some and manage to persuade all those who actually have the time for a discussion, at the very least it would give you personally the confidence that you’re right. And if you document it, that would give the same confidence to everyone else. Moreover, if your experiment turned out to be clear-cut enough, it would become a very strong argument to convince believers in god. If I wholeheartedly believed in something, and then found out that someone took 10 people who believed in the exact same thing I do and managed to change their minds, I’d assume he could probably convince me too—so why not save myself the time and just accept right away that I was wrong about this?
what if you have enough time and they know how to discuss correctly?
The situation in the real world isn’t as neat as in my thought experiment, but we still see the same dynamic, where people with the same goals end up fighting each other. It’s a hyperbolized example meant to highlight that particular dynamic as clearly as possible, but I don’t claim it’s the only one.
Excellent point!