Clearly real life achievement correlates well with rationality, by definition. So an impractical but “gold standard guaranteed” test of rationality would be to wait until the person in question got to the age of, say, 50, and check to see whether they had made lots of money, or achieved other obvious life goals (fame, for example).
A more specific good test of rationality is the world of startups. Other than the OB/LW community, the entrepreneurial world is the closest to perfect rationality I have found. You could test someone in a month or so by asking them to enter a startup competition, like this:
The kind of challenges you find on Alan Sugar’s “The Apprentice” are fairly rationality oriented, and administrable in a few days.
Potential rationalists could be tested by putting them in the position of a venture capitalist/angel investor, and have a combination of real business and fakes come to pitch at them. This test could be made harder by supplying some of the fakes with convincing cover stories and the real businesses with poor presentation skills, forcing the rationalist to concentrate on the merit of the underlying idea rather than superficial clues. It could be made a better test by allowing participants to do their own research beforehand, and giving them the opportunity to hire and consult “experts” some of whom would again be fakes.
In general, rationality tests have to take a long time IMO, because genuinely creative thinking takes a long time at a serial speed of ~10Hz. Any “test” that takes a few hours (like an exam) is just going to be regurgitation of previously memorized material, or activation of previously trained-up hardwired circuits, a la “cached thoughts”. It seems to me that a day long test is the absolute minimum.
Of course you could also administer a classic academic style exam on the OB material, cognitive biases, etc. But someone could do very well on that without really understanding it. Still, it would provide some indication of real life rationality performance.
Clearly real life achievement correlates well with rationality, by definition. So an impractical but “gold standard guaranteed” test of rationality would be to wait until the person in question got to the age of, say, 50, and check to see whether they had made lots of money, or achieved other obvious life goals (fame, for example).
Clearly real life achievement correlates well with rationality, by definition. So an impractical but “gold standard guaranteed” test of rationality would be to wait until the person in question got to the age of, say, 50, and check to see whether they had made lots of money, or achieved other obvious life goals (fame, for example).
A more specific good test of rationality is the world of startups. Other than the OB/LW community, the entrepreneurial world is the closest to perfect rationality I have found. You could test someone in a month or so by asking them to enter a startup competition, like this:
http://www.cue.org.uk/5k-Challenge
Again, probably not so practical.
The kind of challenges you find on Alan Sugar’s “The Apprentice” are fairly rationality oriented, and administrable in a few days.
Potential rationalists could be tested by putting them in the position of a venture capitalist/angel investor, and have a combination of real business and fakes come to pitch at them. This test could be made harder by supplying some of the fakes with convincing cover stories and the real businesses with poor presentation skills, forcing the rationalist to concentrate on the merit of the underlying idea rather than superficial clues. It could be made a better test by allowing participants to do their own research beforehand, and giving them the opportunity to hire and consult “experts” some of whom would again be fakes.
In general, rationality tests have to take a long time IMO, because genuinely creative thinking takes a long time at a serial speed of ~10Hz. Any “test” that takes a few hours (like an exam) is just going to be regurgitation of previously memorized material, or activation of previously trained-up hardwired circuits, a la “cached thoughts”. It seems to me that a day long test is the absolute minimum.
Of course you could also administer a classic academic style exam on the OB material, cognitive biases, etc. But someone could do very well on that without really understanding it. Still, it would provide some indication of real life rationality performance.
Not by definition.