This is the fundamental question that determines whether we can do a lot of things—if we can’t come up with evidence-based metrics that are good measures of the effect of rationality-improving interventions, then everything becomes much harder. If the metric is easily gamed once people know about it, everything becomes much harder. If it can be defeated by memorization like school, everything becomes much harder. I will post about this myself at some point.
This problem is one we should approach with the attitude of solving as much as possible, not feeling delightfully cynical about how it can’t be solved, but at least you know it. It’s too important for that. It sets up the incentives in the whole system. If the field of hedonics can try to measure happiness, we can at least try to measure rationality.
...but not to derail the discussion, Robin’s individual how-do-you-know? stance is a valid perspective, and I’ll post about the scientific measurement / institutional measurement problems later.
This is the fundamental question that determines whether we can do a lot of things—if we can’t come up with evidence-based metrics that are good measures of the effect of rationality-improving interventions, then everything becomes much harder. If the metric is easily gamed once people know about it, everything becomes much harder. If it can be defeated by memorization like school, everything becomes much harder. I will post about this myself at some point.
This problem is one we should approach with the attitude of solving as much as possible, not feeling delightfully cynical about how it can’t be solved, but at least you know it. It’s too important for that. It sets up the incentives in the whole system. If the field of hedonics can try to measure happiness, we can at least try to measure rationality.
...but not to derail the discussion, Robin’s individual how-do-you-know? stance is a valid perspective, and I’ll post about the scientific measurement / institutional measurement problems later.