A test in which there are a number of Claims, like “We should put more effort into education”. For each Claim, a number of subclaims and pieces of “evidence” are given by the test; the sources are cited, but as with most things they might be misleading or wrong. You answer by responding to the core of the claim (not necessarily the explicit proposition) in a way that integrates the relevant evidence, calls out or at least skips the pieces which are irrelevant or misleading, grapples with the uncertainties, doesn’t dodge the parts that might make you look bad, shows a fitting attitude toward the uncertainties and pieces of evidence (not reveling in your uncertainty, integrating intuition and anecdotes naturalistically with escape-cruxes, not getting too detailed or too hand-wavy).
(Tools trained: avoiding Misleads, turning a proposition into a nuanced tree of attitudes, [all the other rationality techniques]. I think this is a core part of rationality, because the most common ways for rationalists to go wrong isn’t to make a big dumb math mistake, it’s the entropy that steadily claws its way into your reasoning as you slide past the difficult core unspoken points and into the most attackable propositions stated per se. It’s like the soft version of when you read a news article, and it’s Not Even Wrong, it just states a bunch of irrelevant statistics and backs them up with not-actually-evidence—that’s why it’s so hard to see when you’re wrong, because the ways in which you’re wrong are always Not Even Wrong.)
An oral exam where someone talks to you about something that’s sort of triggering or difficult for you (like education if you had a bad education), and it’s not specifically about whether you’re Wrong there, it’s just about how the thing works. And they challenge some of your views, and you have to build a better understanding and attitude toward it on the fly.
(Skills trained: hypothetical apostasy-lite. Healthy lines of retreat are arguably the core skill of rationality, a prequisite for escaping or iterating on bad/stuck beliefs. The original versions of apostasies were mainly talked about in big flashy ways, where you only have your worldview challenged so hard a few dozen times in your life, but there are about a billion small areas where people can easily find that they have twisted beliefs and it’s more on the order of a half hour to start untwisting them, rather than requiring deep courage and total isolation. Admittedly this is hard to test and a little bit easy to game because the scoring would be so subjective and it’s hard to tell how much actually changes in someone’s mind, but there are some patches.)
One problem with testing/training rationality is that it’s very hard to tell apart from object-level knowledge or IQ, and in fact a good deal of it is just the heuristics that you learn from object-level knowledge. The second test helps to separate these by isolating a place where you know you can do better without just grinding; the first test gives you a good measure both of the actual knowledge and of the rationality given some fixed amount of knowledge.
Two tests I’d like to see:
A test in which there are a number of Claims, like “We should put more effort into education”. For each Claim, a number of subclaims and pieces of “evidence” are given by the test; the sources are cited, but as with most things they might be misleading or wrong. You answer by responding to the core of the claim (not necessarily the explicit proposition) in a way that integrates the relevant evidence, calls out or at least skips the pieces which are irrelevant or misleading, grapples with the uncertainties, doesn’t dodge the parts that might make you look bad, shows a fitting attitude toward the uncertainties and pieces of evidence (not reveling in your uncertainty, integrating intuition and anecdotes naturalistically with escape-cruxes, not getting too detailed or too hand-wavy).
(Tools trained: avoiding Misleads, turning a proposition into a nuanced tree of attitudes, [all the other rationality techniques]. I think this is a core part of rationality, because the most common ways for rationalists to go wrong isn’t to make a big dumb math mistake, it’s the entropy that steadily claws its way into your reasoning as you slide past the difficult core unspoken points and into the most attackable propositions stated per se. It’s like the soft version of when you read a news article, and it’s Not Even Wrong, it just states a bunch of irrelevant statistics and backs them up with not-actually-evidence—that’s why it’s so hard to see when you’re wrong, because the ways in which you’re wrong are always Not Even Wrong.)
An oral exam where someone talks to you about something that’s sort of triggering or difficult for you (like education if you had a bad education), and it’s not specifically about whether you’re Wrong there, it’s just about how the thing works. And they challenge some of your views, and you have to build a better understanding and attitude toward it on the fly.
(Skills trained: hypothetical apostasy-lite. Healthy lines of retreat are arguably the core skill of rationality, a prequisite for escaping or iterating on bad/stuck beliefs. The original versions of apostasies were mainly talked about in big flashy ways, where you only have your worldview challenged so hard a few dozen times in your life, but there are about a billion small areas where people can easily find that they have twisted beliefs and it’s more on the order of a half hour to start untwisting them, rather than requiring deep courage and total isolation. Admittedly this is hard to test and a little bit easy to game because the scoring would be so subjective and it’s hard to tell how much actually changes in someone’s mind, but there are some patches.)
One problem with testing/training rationality is that it’s very hard to tell apart from object-level knowledge or IQ, and in fact a good deal of it is just the heuristics that you learn from object-level knowledge. The second test helps to separate these by isolating a place where you know you can do better without just grinding; the first test gives you a good measure both of the actual knowledge and of the rationality given some fixed amount of knowledge.