Are you religious by chance? I have been trying to understand why some individuals are more susceptible to it.
> In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
—David Foster Wallace
It is not possible to be more of an atheist than myself but there are all these things I notice I worship with religious conviction instead.
You have your own rituals too. You are just calling them something else.
There has to be biological hard wiring for people to believe so much religious nonsense across space and time.
It is delusional to believe you don't believe in all kinds of similar nonsense if someone from 500 years in the future was looking at your beliefs.
I ritually shower every day and I have beliefs like, when water comes out of the faucet it will fall to the floor because of gravity. That is wildly different than worshipping the water or the shower.
I suspect you have a very strange definition of the word worship.
There appears to be a neurological wired-in need to 'believe' whether in God or UFOs (think Mulder in X-Files) which I think is a evolutionary survival mechanism to have an advantage to cope with the uncertainty of primitive survival. Any psychological edge such as believing we are special (chosen people arose during nation-building phases of cultural development) or that some supreme being will protect us against threats or enemies unifies and motivates feats involving danger.
I'm assuming here, but would you say that better critical thinking skills would have helped me avoid spending that Saturday with ChatGPT? It is often said that critical thinking is the antidote to religion, but I have a suspicion that there's a huge prerequisite which is general broad knowledge about the world.
A long ago, I once fell victim for a scam when I visited SE Asia for the first time. A pleasant man on the street introduced himself as a school teacher, showed me around, then put me in a tuktuk which showed me around some more before dropping me off in front of a tailor shop. Some more work inside of the shop, a complimentary bottle of water, and they had my $400 for a bespoke coat that I would never have bought otherwise. Definitely a teaching experience. This art is also how you'd prime an LLM to produce the output you want.
Surely, large amounts of other atheist nerds must fall for these types of scams every year, where a stereotypical christian might spit on the guy and shoo him away.
I'm not saying that being religious would not increase one's chances of being susceptible, I just think that any idea will ring "true" in your head if you have zero counterfactual priors against it or if you're primed to not retrieve them from memory. That last part is the essence of what critical thinking actually is, in my opinion, and it doesn't work if you lack the knowledge. Knowing that you don't know something is also a decent alternative to having the counter-facts when you're familiar with an adjacent domain.