Meh, I think it is possible to look at a list of major biases, contemplate your life and your manners of thinking, and determine which of them apply to you more than others. For instance, someone (I have half a mind it might even have been you?) once mentioned a study on the forum about gender biases in writing academic reference letters (the idea being that one wrote more about nice personal qualities like being friendly or organized for females relative to competency qualities like intelligence for males). That was a bias which I thought may well have applied to me as I write lots of reference letters, and I am no pretty conscious about and so that bias doesn't affect me anymore. We are never going to be doing this anywhere close to perfectly, of course, but I don't think the answer is that we can say absolutely nothing at all on the subject. Mightyboosh may well (although something makes me doubt he actually did this) have observed a consistent pattern of him inadvertently using confirmation bias only to have it pointed out later and thus can rightly claim to struggle with it in a way that other biases have not been.

For the record, I said that it was the bias with I struggle the 'most', that I make the greatest conscious effort to overcome, so I haven't said that I don't struggle with any others, nor have I said directly, or implied, that I'm aware of all the biases that I might be a victim of. Since I haven't memorised or studied in depth, the entire list of currently known biases, there may be others that I actually enjoy more, I'm just not aware of it. Probably confirmation bias plays a role in that too.

It's true that you can know that some apply to you more than they apply to others. For example, the bias you mentioned below will be less frequent in people who don't write evaluations/recommendations, so it gives you an extra context in which that bias may arise and hence increase the probability of it occurring in some time period.

But that type of awareness is different from the declaration that *this* is the worst bias for me.

I'm aware of that bias, so it's possible it was from me.

He's welcome to claim that he struggles with it. That's not the issue. But there's an underlying sense that he thinks he has figured out cognitive biases because he's been able to identify confirmation bias in his own life. Well, that's great that he's been able to identify it at some level (though the evidence is clear that he's not seeing it in certain areas), but that ability does not increase the confidence that this is the bias that he's actually subject to the most.

This identification of biases is a task that our brains are really, really bad at doing. So I would distrust anyone who claims that they have done such an analysis on themselves.

----

Having typed this up, I do need to pull back on one thing. He said that this is the one he "struggles most to overcome" which can be interpreted as this is the one that he "has invested the most effort in overcoming." Under that framework, I can agree to his claim. I was reading the claim as meaning that this is the one he "is most prone to committing" which I think is a doubtful claim for anyone to make (short of getting this information as a result of being a scientific case study).

Edit: I think that MB probably sees several hundred faces a day, and likely just as many pictures of faces. He's likely more subject to pareidolia than confirmation bias, because confirmation bias requires some level of intentional thinking. Images of faces probably drift by his vision all the time, and his brain is unconsciously processing them all as real-faces.

No, you've just misunderstood what I was saying.

What was being called into doubt, was that I'd even had those experiences and I was seeking to show that this wasn't entirely armchair reasoning, as you would see if you reread that paragraph, quoted below in full for you. The point of that paragraph was summed up in the final sentence and if you'd read that with care, you wouldn't be making the objection that you just made.

That claim is not subject to bias to the point that it could be completely false because all I'm saying is that I actually did those things and I'm certain that I didn't imagine them all, but as I went on to say, if you asked me to recall specific conversations, or events, then those would be much more susceptible to biases or selective recollection etc etc. If you asked me what my opinion of football has been formed on and I mentioned that I've been to hundreds of league games, I might have faulty recollection of specific games but what isn't in doubt is that I've been to hundreds of league games.

We're talking past each other.

This conversation is a result of you claiming that neeeel clearly didn't understand cognitive bias for suggesting your experience was subject to it. Your claim was that your experience was evidence that belief in god was a necessary for participation in religious communities.

As your claim is about your experience it absolutely is subject to bias, I am not suggesting that cognitive bias would cause you to imagine all these experience I am suggesting that your recollection of the salient facts of these experiences are subject to them. Generalisations we draw from experience are perfectly suited to being biased.

To expand and clarify a little. This conversation arose because you claimed that your experience supported the claim that belief in god was necessary for participation in religious communities. I challenged you about this which led to the following exchange. The exchange has been edited for brevity and clarity but this is a fair representation of this discussion.

As you can see the claim that I am disputing is entirely relevant to the original discussion about your beliefs vis a vis your experiences and the claim that belief in god necessary for participation in religious communities.

You can't simply yell 'cognitive bias! you might be wrong' to absolutely everything. That's what Neel was doing and it's what revealed his lack of understanding at the time. Or he was being sarcastic which I'm more inclined to believe, plus I had been expecting that from somebody so it was predictable.

Generally I've found Jack Dee to be funny, as I recall he makes me laugh, is that subject to bias? It's a general recollection and so subject to bias according to you. If I say to you, I find Jack Dee funny, are you going to question whether or not I'm right about how I feel about Jack Dee and that maybe I don't find him funny and definitely shouldn't tell people that he's funny?

So if I say that in my experience of being a member of many different communities over 40 years I've found that generally speaking you can't be truly accepted into a community as 'one of us' if you don't share the primary reason for the existence of that community, regardless of what else they do or what you might share, should I mistrust that and doubt myself on it? Also, by definition, you are not 'one of them' if 'one of them' is people who believe in and worship a god and you're an atheist.

You could put it like this;

1) You can't be truly accepted into a community as 'one of us' if you don't share the primary reason for the existence of that community, regardless of what else they do or what you might share.

2) In a religious community that core reason is generally the existence and worship of a god. (there may be exceptions)

3) Therefore, if you don't believe in god, or at least profess to, you won't ever be 'one of us' in a community founded around the belief in, and worship of god.

:blank stare:

No, thats what YOU were doing, yelling "cognitive bias, you might be wrong" at every opportunity


I was trying to point out that

1) shouting cognitive bias at every opportunity is stupid
2) that your experiences are equally as susceptible to cognitive biases as everyone else, so if you can use it against others experience, I can say use it against yours
3) your conclusions based on your experiences ARE likely influenced by cognitive biases. It shows in the way you think and talk about religion.

I don't doubt neeeel was being sarcastic and I wasn't disagreeing it was predictable, I found it amusingly appropriate but I get your frustration with it. My disagreement with you here is that you found it wrong to the point of it being stupid, this is a topic you have very strong opinions on and it is natural that these are subject to bias. Not in their existence but in their evaluation and selection. I'll also note that you haven't answered why your experience supports these specific claims but I'll park it.

On to the claims I can see legitimate challenges to your two premises. To the first I think communities evolve and our reasons for participation evolve with them. Consider your earlier example of freemasons, these trace their origins to the guilds of stonemasons yet actual freemasonry has very little if anything to do with the core reasons of protecting the skills of masons. So why a particular group continue to exist may have very little to do with the reason it exists.

If you believe, and if I recall correctly you have claimed it before, that religions may be a result of evolutionary forces then these are at the core for religions existing. The "evolutionary advantage" assuming there is one, may not be the belief in a deity but in the advantages of having a common belief to unite the particular group. The advantage would seem to manifest in the increased participation in the community not in the false belief. It seems appropriate to give less credence to one specific belief if there's still a benefit to the group to accepting members that do not share that specific belief.

And this is not to say that there aren't religious communities that routinely ostracise and worse those that express a loss or lack of belief but this isn't universal and so is not necessary.

Bolded was my read. I don't think he was trying to comment on anything like pareidolia, or even use the "most frequent to occur" as the metric. Whatever.

I think I've answered this multiple times now. Short of me listing all the communities and teams that I've been part of, the dates on which I've attended churches or spoken to religious people etc etc, I don't know what would satisfy you.

Sure, this doesn't change anything about my conclusion though. If the primary reason for a community existing evolves but you don't share it, you'll still not be considered 'one of us' even if you were originally. You don't even have to rewrite the first premise for it to include that.

Let's assume that your recollections aren't subject to a bias that's causing them to be unreliable.

I think the advantage is how it strengthens the group precisely because they're united, it's not necessarily an individual benefit, and it's certainly boosted by it being a deity that's on your side, but I don't see how this is disagreeing with my argument. Whatever the 'common belief' is, that's what unites the group primarily, it's what makes the members 'one of us' and not 'one of them'. It doesn't have to be a deity but that's the context we're addressing in RGT.

I don't know how many times I've used the word 'generally' or qualified my original assertion in some other way, so this criticism is unnecessary and redundant but you won't let it go.

Why would I struggle to overcome pareidolia? How would that even be possible.

In the context of discussing my opinions with people on this forum and generally in life, confirmation bias is a significant problem and one I make deliberate efforts to overcome, for example, by watching videos released by Islamists explaining their point of view, speeches by politicians who'd politics I don't agree with, or debates where theists have 'won'. I even occasionally try to read the Daily Mail with an objective eye, but only on good days.

In other contexts, it may be other biases that are problematic.

What if the core reason for the existence of religious community is not the existence and worship of god, but to create a cohesive community where people feel at ease, know the rules, and know how to be a good member of that community, and the belief in the existence and worship of god is the means to that end.

One way would be to have someone help you to train your brain to be less responsive to vague stimuli. If your brain is over-identifying faces in nothingness, it can be a source of stress or anxiety (leading to paranoia).

Incidentally, my edit was tongue-in-cheek.

Those things don't particularly help. Even the quotes around 'won' are an indication that you're probably not really understanding confirmation bias. You've already determined that they haven't won, so what do you think you're gaining by watching?

It would be interesting to see you elaborate on what you think you accomplish by doing these things. How does watching that video help you overcome confirmation bias?

I don't think you have answered it because you haven't shown me an how your claim is deduced from any specific element of your experience but we can park it.

I was taking your claim regarding the community existing in terms of it originating not in terms of it's current reason to exist. I'll think about it.


The benefit of community participation doesn't require the belief in a deity, if the group benefits from members participation and realises this it is entirely reasonable to relax the grounds of acceptance. What you consider the central reason for the community existing in its current state is but one of many reasons.

This was the statement from Original Position and your response that this discussion started from.

If your disagreement is with Original Position's claim that the above is true for many groups rather than some groups then we don't have a disagreement about the facts because I don't know but your use of always and never suggests otherwise.

If you are contesting on those grounds however your personal experience is less useful because you have experience of fewer groups.

So the members just think that's the core reason but it actually isn't. Same difference, because they think it is. It's whatever creates that feeling of being 'one of us' that I'm talking about.

Take Christian Aid as another example, their primary purpose is to provide aid, people who join are doing that and sharing the value of that. But, what's the thing that actually unites those people? What creates the 'one of us' feeling? Being Christian.

That's why they joined Christian aid and not Medicines sans frontiers, or Oxfam, or some other non-overtly religious Aid organisation. (There may be individual exceptions of course)

Or you can keep accusing me over and over of not having answered it and then try to park it but I'm just going to keep saying over and over that I have answered it. I can't help that you're not satisfied with the answer but I'm not going to let the charge of not having answered it go, er.. unanswered.

Over to you.

It applies to either.

No it doesn't but the individual benefits of membership are not what is being discussed. Also, I've already said that by 'necessary' I don't mean that they check your 'belief passport' before you're allowed in, heck they don't even mind if you don't believe at all because they hope, of course, to change that. But.... you will never be 'one of us' until you share that belief, or at least pretend to.


Hopefully you can now see that we're coming at this from different angles. OrP was saying that it's not necessary for you to join, I'm saying it is necessary (or an appearance of it is necessary) if you want to consider yourself truly a 'part' of that community, or more importantly, for the other members of that community to regard you as truly part of it.

And you would know this how? Bear in mind that I'm not solely talking about religious groups and that you still appear to be conflating the two premises into one.

Where have you posted what it is about your personal experience that supports your conclusion? You have stated you have experience of various groups and that where a core belief is present it is central to being a part of that group but you haven't explained any pertinent facts about them.

The problem is it can't once you accept that the core reasons for participation in a group evolve, the core reason for it existing back when may not be the core reason for it existing now.

I don't think this is how communities work. People can be members of multiple communities simultaneously, often these communities will overlap, this reduces significantly the viability of having a particular core belief as a requirement for membership. I also think you ignore the bond building that can operate within a setting irrespective of whether some specific belief is shared.

It seems that OrP is able to consider himself a member of those communities.

I'll answer this with a brief statement of my problem with your position in this thread. If we consider knowledge about facts of a particular matter known to us empirically then we accept whatever general principles we seek to establish are subject to revision in light of evidence. Despite you saying your evidence counts here you haven't really said why it counts or how it counts. You're relying on general evidence of community membership to deny a specific claim that is grounded empirically. Despite claiming evidence you are generalising from principle in order to refute a claim supported empirically and that's not how it works.

Central to your claim is that there is a core belief in a deity holding to which is central to participation in religious groups, this has been empirically challenged and you haven't actually responded with any evidence that it is other than to state you have experience of it.

See the para below:

Ok, and what experience do you have that you think justifies this view, or are you claiming no actual experience here? Perhaps while answering this you might shed some light on why my answers to the question about my experiences have been unsatisfactory for you.

To try to illustrate the trouble I'm having with it. If I said that the hundreds of football league games that I've attended have informed my opinion about what it's like to be part of a crowd at a football match, and you asked what it was specifically about my experiences that made me think that I know what it is to be part of a crowd at a football match, what could I say other than 'well, I've attended hundreds of league games, been part of the crowd on all those occasions (which were varied) and I know what it's like to be part of a crowd at a football match'.....

Sure it can, the premise applies to whatever the core reason is right now, not what is was historically or will be in the future, we're speaking about being part of a community now. Members who no longer share the core reason for the group's existence, or who at some point will no longer share it, are or will no longer truly be 'one of us'.

Take an extreme example. I join the KKK, I love the gatherings, the activities (I like sowing, carpentry and bonfires), but I'm not actually racist. I don't share the core reason why that group exists, so will I ever truly be accepted as 'one of us' by them?

Sure, but does the rest of the community truly accept him as 'one of us'. I think given the emotive and controversial context, that of religion and atheism, this is even less likely than might normally be the case.


I don't believe that the claim is grounded empirically and I deny it on empirical grounds. That is evidence gathered first hand and also witnessed on innumerable occasions. I'm also denying it on principle because I don't believe that the principle is correct either.

Yes I have responded, multiple times, and this is yet another time, by qualifying my claim to say that it doesn't always apply that the specific god belief is always the reason in a religious croup, there may be other reasons sometimes but the main principle still applies. If you don't share that reason, you'll never be 'one of us'.

Take this basic article as an example of what I'm talking about, are you familiar with 'in-group' and 'out-group' as part of Social Identity theory? And no, I'm not an expert on this nor am I claiming any high level of knowledge. However, it's easy for me to find articles that support what I'm saying about the similarities being the most important part of group membership, and what makes people similar in a church group for example? They may come from all walks of life, have many different views, but they share (or pretend to share) a belief in god.

Social Identity Theory In a typical Christian group, what is the main 'category' that the members share?

Or this one - Why do we join groups?

Or this one - It Is Motivating to Belong to a Group- where the 'core' reason is something as simple as a shared birthday, no mention made of what else they may have in common,
For this last one, imagine you join the group and have lots in common with them, but you don't share the same birthday and that's the reason for the group. Will you ever really be 'one of us'? By definition, you can't be.

Here we go again... Your attempts here to characterize in-group and out-group are about as accurate as your initial attempts to characterize pareidolia.

Nothing you've said here is in contradiction with Original Position's understanding of religion. This is just *YOU* trying define other groups for them, rather than letting those other groups define themselves.

Sorry if I caused the derail. In penance, I'll answer your OP question more exactly.

I do a few things in a more-or-less secular manner that are inspired by religion. One is confession. I'm friendly with a priest that I occasionally go to for confession. I also will sometimes go to the local Catholic Church's confessional. I guess most people don't know this, but you don't need to be a Catholic to go to confession.

I mostly do this for its positive psychological benefits. Confession encourages me to be more objective about my own actions. I have to put my reasons and justifications into words, which has made me realize how weak my excuses sometimes are. It is also useful for me because politics as an industry is dominated by secrecy and misdirection, so it can be good for me as an anchor to have a place where I have to be completely open and honest.

Did you not bother reading the first sentence to realize that these particular features are about "stereotyping" and not really about social identity?

If you want to read about social identity, go to the second sentence of the article:

As you can see, the "main category" that members share have little to do with social identity. It has more to do with how individuals see themselves within the context of that group.

Incidentally, *YOU* see yourself as an outsider to the religious groups. That's fine, but that's *YOUR* identity and it says how *YOU* feel about *YOURSELF.* You have said nothing about what they've done to treat you as an outsider, nor have you made any affirmative arguments that all religious groups treat non-believers in that manner.

What's particularly amusing to me is that you didn't even understand the article enough to see that the first sentence is not actually tied to the rest. The structure of the article is that there are three theories being discussed in a particular paper. The first sentence is the second half of theory #2 and the rest is talking about theory #3.

This particular paragraph is talking about the motivations of group membership:

I don't really see what you're trying to accomplish by linking this article because it doesn't even seem to speak to your point that religious groups are bound by their belief in God and nothing else.

I'm not even going to bother looking up that article (it would be simple to Google it), but simply point out that framing this hypothetical as "the reason for the group" is just saying that in the religious case you're simply defining yourself to be part of the out-group.

There's a real sense in which you're exhibiting something like a victim mentality. It's almost like you want to feel persecuted. You want to feel like an outsider so that you can take pride in it. Maybe the framework of counter-culturalism is better. I don't know. But since you haven't been able to produce a meaningful position to convince everyone else that you can't be a part of a religious community unless you believe in God, maybe you should be circumspect in your belief.

Good, this is useful. So I don't disagree with you that having similarities with other people in your group is important. This can be some activity you have in common (e.g. a hiking club), or it can be some feature of your identity (e.g. LGTB clubs), and so on.

However, I think that premise is incorrect because it is simplistic in an important way.

I think for most groups, especially complex ones like religion, the similarities are best understood not as a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for membership, but rather as a family resemblance concept.

Family resemblance concepts is an idea that comes from Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophers had thought since ancient Greece that a concept applied to some object by named some essential feature of that object. For instance, Aristotle had claimed that humans were rational animals, and that the rationality was an essential, or necessary condition of being human. Thus, if you weren't rational you weren't fully human, and if you were human you were rational.

Wittgenstein criticized this idea by saying, imagine you were walking down a hallway of family portraits. You see some people have the family nose, others have the characteristic eye color or shape, and so on. None of these features are common to all members of the family, but taken as a whole, they are enough to pick out people who resemble family members.

This seems to me a useful way of understanding religion. Sure, obviously belief in God is a very common feature of most Christians. But there are many other features as well, and focusing on any single one as the primary one is a mistake as many Christians lack it, while having other features that are characteristic of Christians (e.g. church attendance, prayer, worship, and so on). So I think you go wrong here in focusing on a single primary feature as necessary for membership.

Two points. First, there are large and glaring exceptions. Entire religions, such as Buddhism, are neutral about the existence of god and in some versions, such as Zen Buddhism, really don't focus on the existence and worship of a god at all. Other religions that are more focused on a god, such as Christianity and Judaism, have such a wide variety of conceptions of the nature of this god that in some versions it is barely distinguishable from atheism. This is enough on its own to defeat your point.

I'm really a bit surprised you aren't taking this more seriously. One of the points you push the most in discussions with religious people is to question how they can be so certain their own religion or their own conception of God is the right one where there are so many different religions and ways of understanding god. I would think that an appreciation for the variety of religions would include knowledge of the non-theistic religions.

Second, and really, this is my most central disagreement with you, we look at religion very differently. I think you look at the surface of religion, what people say about what they're doing. That is, if you ask Christians why they are Christians, a lot of them will say that it is because they believe in God and to worship him. This is an unsatisfying answer to me. Especially since I don't think there actually is a God to worship, I want to know why they believe in God and feel like they should worship him.

It is more in answer to this latter question that scholarly research has focused. What role does religion play in society such that it is so common? So, for instance, Marx said that religion was a way for the upper classes to appease the lower classes to prevent too much social strife. Others have said that it is a way to signal group membership and so helps with social cooperation. Anyway, there are many proposals, and I'm not sure which are correct. But, they mostly treat the belief in god as a means to achieving those ends.

So when I think about the primary reasons for religion, I'm focusing more on the actual functions it serves in society, not the reasons people think they have for being a member.