From The American Scene, via Andrew Sullivan:

For the last few months I have been subscribing to the RSS feed of Overcoming Bias, the blog of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. I find very appealing the idea of a group blog dedicated to isolating and (if possible) rooting out the habits of mind that cause us to misunderstand the world. But after much careful scrutiny I have discovered that the bias that needs to be overcome is always — always — bias exhibited by other people. Especially religious people and conservatives, and sometimes those who like poetry. I’d love to find a site where bloggers dedicated themselves to overcoming their own biases, but in the meantime: Delete.

Having a rule against criticizing others means you can’t criticize them for breaking said rule. Similarly, if you make a commitment to examining your own flaws, you don’t get to ignore people who point them out since hey, they ought to be doing what you claim to be doing.

Having a policy of strong self-scrutiny is good, because of the human tendency to overrate ourselves and underrate our competition. That fact alone, however, cannot tell us whether any particular criticism is valid. It provides no grounds for dismissing what someone else says because “you should have more self-scrutiny.”

I emphasize that the above quote is the entire post. It might have been okay as an incidental part of a response to the Overcoming Bias folks, but that’s now what it was. Oh yeah, also…

*The Unnamed Great Thinker:*

In the comments, we get this:

I’d be quite interested in what you’d have to say about secular biases, but the issue of more general relevance, to me, is: How do we, /whatever/ we believe, find ways to identify our biases and recognize them when they’re getting in the way of real knowledge? I’m inclined to say that Step One should be to acquaint ourselves with the smartest people who disagree with us.

This is something — to get back to the issue of secular bias — that New Atheists (and Old ones too, for that matter) almost never do: you can always count on Hitchens and Harris and Dawkins (and Yudowsky, for that matter) to grab the lowest-hanging fruit they can find.

Eliezer himself has made this general point, but the application to this particular case falls flat because we aren’t told who these smartest religious people are. Dawkins, for example, takes on Anslem, Thomas Aquinas, leading philosopher of religion Richard Swinburne, Ph.D.’d Intelligent Design proponents who insisted the’re so much more sophisticated than creationists, and people who portrayed themselves as the champions of sophisticated religion, correcting Dawkins on his alleged misunderstandings. I don’t know if these are the smartest religious people around, but they’re among the best regarded, and a reasonable choice of targets for a discussion on the validity of religion. Anyone who claims Dawkins missed something should say what.

For further reading: Robin Hanson actually has a post discussing this issue.