<i>smart enough to see the illogic of religious belief</i><p>A lot of religious people don&#x27;t take their beliefs literally. It&#x27;s more stories that they know are just stories (or just <i>don&#x27;t care</i> if they&#x27;re literally true or not), but that illustrate some important point and provide a shared context for talking about it.<p>Like how it <i>doesn&#x27;t matter</i> if the &quot;640k should be enough for anybody&quot; quote is actually true or not, or Paul Bunyan and John Henry and the rest of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;American_civil_religion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;American_civil_religion</a> , or the Story of Mel the Real Programmer, or the 500 mile email, etc. They illustrate important principles and shared cultural values, and strict historical accuracy isn&#x27;t actually that important to their usefulness.<p>.<p><i>hold more complex thoughts than simple prejudices.</i><p>The annoying thing about prejudices, is they&#x27;re often not so much flat <i>wrong</i> as deliberately under-fitting the data for performance reasons or bootstrapping a model for a new environment with data from an old environment. For example, there&#x27;s a lovely article about how affirmative action quotas encourage racism here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;heterodoxacademy.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;12&#x2F;the-amazing-1969-prophecy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;heterodoxacademy.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;12&#x2F;the-amazing-1969-prop...</a> .