a GIRL FROM GERMANY…A FRIEND OF MANY JEWS I AM. AND YOU HAVE NO IDEA…

“We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.”

Stanovich argues that to a strategy for evaluating memes should include the criteria that the memes are falsifiable. be suspicious of any meme that protests evaluation. One nebulous meme that satisfies this criteria is freedom of speech: it’s difficult to construct an appealing argument that questions it.

“Holocaust Denial: Iranian Style”
http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/2007/04/holocaust-denial-iranian-style/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lBw99RbEyA

Unfortunately, the primary sources are the key. We in the west have a free press, meaning a market oriented press, backed up by some libel laws, and certain values in the press and in the public. To convince someone from another culture that such a set-up is pretty fair overall would be much harder than bringing in the primary sources (“what newspaper gets rich by printing things people don’t want to read?” would be their response. “Why should I trust the New York Times more than the National Enquirer? They’re both free press.”)

And he’ll add the pro-israel bias which is a feature in the US media. Trying to convince him that it doesn’t matter in this case is very hard.

Best approach, if desperate: Note that german and other european newspapers also endorse the holocaust, and they aren’t seen to have pro-israel bias. Even Russian sources confirm the holocaust – and Russian isn’t a pro-jewish country by any strech of the imagination.

Yes, but I suspect that these people use the anchoring heuristic that Elizer described. Specifically, they know they are being lied to, so they take the corrputed newspaper as a base and “adjust it” till it sounds plausible.

But this doesn’t result in anything particularly reliable (more reliable than the newspaper, certainly, but still not very good). You can’t use reason to overcome a known bias if you have nothing more truthfull to compare it with. And people normally have great faith in their new position – after all, they’ve constructed it themselves, on the lookout for any evidence they could glean.

A holocaust denier in a totalitarian state would feel his opinions are more accurate than those in the US, because he has “worked out the truth” while we have just “accepted the newspaper’s version without question”.

Is every religion except yours a conspiracy theory? The different branches of religions often seem to see their heretical cohorts as conspiracies to distort the true meaning and intent of an otherwise shared faith. Are Muslims resurrection deniers?

Connecting back to the original post, if you are from a Muslim country that criminalizes apostasy, does that show “that believers in [Islam] want to foreclose debate on the subject and thus indicates that they fear they might lose an honest debate”? “If I met a [Muslim] living in, say, Syria I would argue that [the majority] in the U.S., a nation with [free religion], believes that the [resurrection of Jesus] did occur.” Or do those substitutions change something essential to the argument?

(I should note that I am using Islam as the example because Syria was the previous example. You probably know stories about other religions that have had Inquisitions and executed heretics and pagans.)