Eliezer, you wrote:
But when you’re really done, you’ll know you’re done. Dissolving the question is an unmistakable feeling...
I’m not so sure. There have been a number of mysteries throughout history that were resolved by science, but people didn’t immediately feel as if the scientific explanation really resolved the question, even though it does to us now—like the explanation of light as being electromagnetic waves.
I frequently find it tricky to determine whether a feeling of dissatisfaction indicates that I haven’t gotten to the root of a problem, or whether it indicates that I just need time to become comfortable with the explanation. For instance, it feels to me like my moral intuitions are objectively correct rules about how people should and shouldn’t behave. Yet my reason tells me that they are simply emotional reactions built into my brain by some combination of biology and conditioning. I’ve gotten somewhat more used to that fact over time, but it certainly didn’t feel at first like it successfully explained why I feel that X is “wrong” or Y is “right.”
I like the cuteness of turning an old parlor game into a theory-test. But I suspect a more direct and effective test would be to take one true fact, invert it, and then ask your test subject which statement fits their theory better. (I always try to do that to myself when I’m fitting my own pet theory to a new fact I’ve just heard, but it’s hard once I already know which one is true.)
Other advantages of this test over the original one proposed in the post: (1) You don’t have to go to the trouble of thinking up fake data (a problematic endeavor, because there is some art to coming up with a realistic-sounding false fact—and also because you actually have to do some research to make sure that you didn’t generate a true fact by accident). (2) Your test subject only has a 1 in 2 shot at guessing right by chance, as opposed to a 2 in 3 shot.