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Comment by sidewndr46 | Hacker News Reader

Why would anyone expect this in the first place? It'd be like expecting the pastor to be more or less religious, or more moral than his following. Ultimately they are just going to be a single sampling of the population, which means they have a pretty reasonable probability of being average.

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Ehn, yes. If I see the pope in a strip club, I'll be damn shocked, but not if I see a random catholic. The difference is that the latter is a random member and the former is the literal face of his church, so he has to abide to certain tenets or at least pretend to.

I would in fact expect pastors to be more religious on average than their congregations[1], though not particularly more moral. And I would expect professional ethicists to be more interested in ethics than the population at large, though again not particularly better.

[1] It would depend a bit on what sort of pastor and what sort of congregation.

???

You'd expect Pastors or Ethicists to be more moral/ethical because they spend a lot of time thinking about being moral/ethical compared to members of the general population. Seems pretty intuitive to me.

I'd expect ethicists to have thought more about ethics and morals. I wouldn't necessarily expect them to be more moral or ethical. As C. S. Lewis says in The Abolition of Man, it's not theorems that make the difference when the chips are down.

Pastors... it depends on the pastor. Is it a job, or something they actually believe? Is it just a theory to them, or do they have any actual power helping them live it out?

Ok, so imagine that everyone has the about the same propensity to make the correct ethical decision when faced with a circumstance. You might expect there to be some number of circumstances for which the lay person may be wrong about the appropriate ethical decision and thus fail to make it correctly, whereas the ethicist would be better prepared for such. If this were the case, then you'd expect ethicists to be more ethical despite having the same ethical character as regular people.

In fact, on this interpretation, if we find ethicists are no more ethical, then we must conclude they are actually _less_ ethical than normal people, since they have more occasions where they could make an ethical decision but do not. Or we have to admit that most ethical quandaries are trivial, so that being an ethicists doesn't give you any special advantage.

Well yes, I think the usual intuition is that the people who preach something (religiously or not) should be better at what they are preaching than the ones they are preaching to. Right or wrong, I think that's a pretty common presumption to make.

Might be small sample, but that sample is also biased to have a lot of knowledge about what they are preaching (supposedly), meaning they put higher importance about it compared to other things.

Well idk about you but if I wanted to learn karate I would find an instructor who is better at karate than the average person to learn from.

We are talking about being taught in an academic context, not a practical context. So, a better analogue might be that you wouldn't necessarily expect a martial arts historian to be better at the application of martial arts than the average person.

I think I would?

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