Verifying rationality is possibly the single largest problem for those desiring to create methods of systematically training for increased epistemic and instrumental rationality—how to verify that the training actually worked. Very Awful Things happen to people who set out to build training methods and schools without strong means of verification—two hideous historical examples being modern-day practice of martial arts (once the teachers are no longer fighting duels to the death) and the proliferating “schools” of psychotherapy (in the entire absence of any experimental evidence that one school worked better than another, and indeed, in the presence of experimental evidence that the schools did no have any discernible difference in effectiveness).
External links
Rational Poker by Louie
(book) The Rationality Quotient: Toward a Test of Rational Thinking (review by Stuart Ritchie, review by pcm)
The Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking (CART) by Keith E. Stanovich (sci-hub)
I suggest converting this to a tag, and perhaps shortening the name to “Rationality Verification”.
(For some reason using the UI to convert this to a tag candidate didn’t work for me)
Huh, I was able to apply the tag flag. Let’s see if this shows up in recent discussion.
I’m unable to apply this tag to posts (this tag doesn’t show up when I search to add a tag).
I have now converted this page to be also tag, and not just a wiki. It should work now.
Note that I think this tag:
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/skill-expertise-assessment
Was originally called rationality verification, and then felt too narrow and I changed it something broader, and maybe we should have an explicit rationality-verification tag but I expect at least the current version to be a bit redundant.
I think there’s place for both of them. Someone can be rational and not have expertise in field X, and someone can have expertise in field X without having general rationality.
Also skill/expertise assessment feels more other-focused, while rationality verification is in large part about self assessment.
btw, i don’t see any revision history on that tag. maybe it was changed before the history feature was implemented? (Was there a time without the history feature?)
I think revision history probably doesn’t capture name changes. (But I also might be misremembering the history)
Thanks Ruby!
Nope, didn’t show up in Recent Discussion.