Monday, March 12, 2018

Religious Dunning-Kruger

Yesterday the term occurred to me: "religious Dunning-Kruger." Certainly it applies to Pinker, who simultaneously overestimates what he knows about religion and underestimates what religious people know about his secular humanism. The following is adapted from wiki, but with certain relevant words changed or added:

The Religious Dunning–Kruger effect is a psycho-pneumatic bias wherein excessively rationalistic people suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their spiritual discernment as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority derives from the metaphysical inability of low-ability persons to recognize their own spiritual ineptitude; without the self-awareness of metaphysics, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual knowledge or experience of the spiritual realm.

Conversely, spiritually gifted individuals may erroneously assume that principles easy for them to understand are also easy for other people to understand, or that other people will have a similar understanding of subjects that they themselves are well-versed in.

At the very least, an intellectually honest atheist will want to seek out the finest in religious thought in order to refute it. Instead, they either dismiss it out of hand with a wave of Dunning Kruger, or trot out the worst examples of religious thought in order to prove their phony superiority. But if all religious thinkers were Deepak Chopra I'd be an atheist, just as if all women were Michelle Obama I'd be gay. It proves nothing.

Much of what goes by the name of "thinking" is nothing more than a crude display of intelligence signaling. Ideology in particular is a cognitive system that allows idiots to have opinions.

Conversely, orthodox religious belief is often a helpful way for non-metaphysicians to have correct opinions about the foundations of existence. That is to say, when the average person starts thinking things through for himself from the ground up, disaster is just over the horizon. My entire generation (the boomers) was guilty of this, and look what ensued.

If you don't believe me, believe the Aphorist:

To educate man is to impede the “free expression of his personality.”

Oops.

Educating the individual consists in teaching him to distrust the ideas that occur to him.

What, ideas like man is perfectible and government can solve social problems? The self-satisfied individual who believes his own interior propaganda "ends only destroying values higher than than those he is capable of aiming at and engendering evils greater than those he sets out to overcome" (Schuon). For proof, look at any Democrat-run city.

Where Christianity disappears, greed, envy, and lust invent a thousand ideologies to justify themselves.

Bernie Sanders in '20!

When man refuses the discipline the gods give him, demons discipline him.

Hollywood comes to mind.

An irreligious society cannot endure the truth of the human condition. It prefers a lie, no matter how imbecilic it may be.

Bernie Sanders in '20!

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.

Pinker deserves himself, as Times readers deserve the Times and progressives deserve progressivism.

Nothing remains of Christianity when the Christian tries to seem to the world not to be stupid.

Religious Dunning-Kruger assures this.

Back to Gnosis, which, as I mentioned in the previous post, has some really bad news for Pinker. Except it's not news, of course, but the most venerable things short of God, i.e., the principles that lead from and to him.

At the root of religious Dunning-Kruger must be a rational ego so hypertrophied that it not only obscures the intellect but appropriates some of its its function, which is precisely what allows it to pronounce on realities above its station:

[I]ntellectual genius should not be confused with the mental acuity of logicians: intellectual intuition comprises in its essence a contemplatively that is in no way part of the rational capacity.... it is contemplative power, receptivity toward the uncreated Light, the opening of the Eye of the heart, which distinguishes transcendent intelligence from reason.

For short, it is (o) and (↓).

Moreover, "Reason perceives the general and proceeds by logical operations, whereas Intellect perceives the principial -- the metaphysical -- and proceeds by intuition." Seeing is believing. Which is again where faith comes in, because believing is already a kind of seeing.

Precisely, it is a seeing-beyond-logic, through a window or door situated at the top of the vertical scale. Man is always an open system, both horizontally and vertically -- or at least is supposed to be.

But both history and simple observation of one's contemporaries show that human nature "tends to lock itself into some limitation," which is to say, man stops asking Why? at an arbitrary point, and calls it a metaphysic. Politically this metaphysic ends in a neo-barbaric atheocracy, while intellectually it ends in a prison of relativism, AKA ineradicable stupidity.

10 comments:

julie said...

Pinker deserves himself, as Times readers deserve the Times and progressives deserve progressivism.

Yes. One of the wonderful gifts of faith is that regardless of what we deserve, we are granted the possibility of being saved from ourselves.

julie said...

Re. religious Dunning-Krugerism, not only do they not know what they don't know, they insist it cannot possibly exist.

mushroom said...

So many great quotes.

mushroom said...

So many times you see "thinkers" assuming that no one in the history of the world ever came up with their brilliant insight or solution until now. If you don't believe anything else the Bible says, believe this: There is nothing new under the sun.

Gagdad Bob said...

You want quotes? We've got quotes:

What is truly original is never a wild plant, but one that has a clever graft.

The modern desire to be original makes the mediocre artist believe that simply being different is the secret to being original.

Conformity and nonconformity are symmetrical expressions of a lack of originality.

Unless what we write seems obsolete to modern man, immature to the adult, and trivial to the serious man, we have to start over.

Originality is not something that is sought, but something that is found.

Ideas less than a thousand years old are not fully reliable.

Nothing is more outdated at any moment than yesterday’s novelty.

Whoever believes he is original is merely ignorant.

Originality must adhere to the continuity of a tradition.

Nobody thinks seriously as long as originality is important to him.

julie said...

Heh - suddenly the epithet, "Never had an original thought in his life," is revealed the highest praise!

Of course, as always, the grounds of the unoriginal expression are extremely important. There is no such thing as an original socialist, but their ideas are poison all the same...

Unknown said...

No wonder ,religion emphasizes humility in human relation the frame where the true self excels. It is when the eyes of the head are wide open and the eyes of the heart act not, the Dunning-Krugger effect will run havoc in our world as part of the negating trend of the divine discipline.

Unknown said...

Nothing original but god, the light that makes us see and makes things be seen.

Anonymous said...

Here at our institute we have been studying spiritual acumen as it relates to intuition for quite some time.

The "Greybird Postulate" is what has emerged. The postulate advances the following ideas:

1. Human beings are usually born with strong intuition, which gets progressively blunted or muffled in transition to adulthood, only to reemerge in old age, particularly in the peri-mortem window.

2. The blunting of intuition must have some purpose in the spiritual scheme of things. We think it serves the same purpose as "suspension of disbelief" does for the theatre patron. Certain life situations/experiences cannot be had or are not engaged in by persons with high intuition or spiritual acumen. Therefore, it stands to reason, these faculties must be dialed down to allow intense (often negative) experiences to occur. An example might be an outrageous affair that ruins families, etc.

3. Spiritual acumen and intuition are closely linked. One is a skill, the other a faculty, mutually supporting. We don't think these are acquired; we believe the human being has a default position of already having full intuition/acumen, and these are down-regulated as needed to serve the life purpose. These faculties return to normal starting in hours or minutes before death, or sometimes at the instant of death for violent endings.

Well, that's the latest from Pomona. Chow for now.

julie said...

Awfully quiet in here... I hope you are all well this week!

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