Religious Tolerance

Nassim talks about religious differences actually being based on other cultural factors.  (Such as which way another tribe cracks its eggs, perhaps?) Very well summarised.  I have said the same about things we call religious wars, both when they occur or in retrospect.  A people decides they are going to go to war and then looks around to make sure they have top-flight excuses justifications, and religion is going to require at least some attention. Buddhists in the west are very superior about their superior nature in accepting difficulties and not wanting war, but in Sri Lanka it hasn't been the same. Not that that makes them worse, just not any better. And seven of the ten deadliest wars have been in Asia, they just don't talk about them that way.

At a trivial (but current!) level, it is similar to the guy who got the late penalty for the Bengals yesterday, which makes it look like he "lost" the game for them. It was a dumb penalty and the call was deserved. But it wasn't the worst mistake or the most important, just the one we see. Lutherans and Catholics were not actually going to war over their few doctrinal issues, like consubstantiation versus transubstantiation. Authority and money got made into doctrinal issues.

WRT the US, I have always wanted to get off whether a war is justified - other nations do lots of provocative stuff that could be legitimate justifications for war - but whether it is wise. That is harder to assess, but is usually more restrictive standard. 

BTW, NNT gets it wrong about IQ tests again, the same way he always does, easily refuted. What we call IQ is tested in many ways, whether ASVAB, Stanford-Binet, WAIS, Raven's Advance Matrices (that one's fun), WAIS, SAT/PSAT/GRE, or the GWAS vocabulary test. They have overlap, but they aren't the same, so talking about IQ as something that only measures "how well you take that test" is just nonsense. They measure g-factor. He isn't given to talking nonsense, and when you dig deeper in his writings about this you find he is giving the same imprecise criticisms that a lot of people do, even very smart ones: he knows foolish people with (probable) high IQs; other abilities get undervalued because they are less sexy and less noticed; and accepting the idea has uncomfortable personal and social consequences.