I’m not sure we can really hope to make meta-rationality scrutable.
How about making an “ideological Turing test”? If rationalists could successfully pretend to be meta-rationalists, would that count as a refutation of the claim that meta-rationalists understand things that are beyond understanding of mere rationalists?
Or is even this just a rationalist-level reasoning that from a meta-rationalist point of view makes about as much sense as a hypothetical pre-rationalist asking rationalists to produce a superior horoscope?
The point about meta-rationality as Chapman describes is that it isn’t a single point of view.
If you wanted to run an ideological Turing test on Chapman you would need to account for his Tantra Buddhist background. Most rationalists would likely fail an ideological Turing test for Tantra Buddhism but that wouldn’t mean much for the core thesis.
At first I was going to say “yes” to your idea, but with the caveat that the only folks I’d trust to judge this are other folks we’d agree are meta-rationalists. But then this sort of defeats the point, doesn’t it, because I already believe rationalists couldn’t do this and if they did it would in fact be evidence that even if they don’t call themselves meta-rationalists I would say they have thought processes similar to those who do call themselves meta-rationalists.
“Rationalist” and “meta-rationalist” are mostly categories for describing stochastic categories around the complexity of thinking people do. No one properly is or is not a rationalist or meta-rationalist, but instead can at best be sufficiently well described as one.
I don’t mean this to be wily: I think what you are asking for (and the entire idea of an “ideological Turning test” itself) confounds causality in ways that make it only seem to work from rationalist-level reasoning. From my perspective the taking on of another’s perspective in this test is already incorporated into meta-rationalist-level reasoning and so is not really a test of meta-rationality in the same way a “logical argument test” would be meaningless to a rationalist but a powerful tool for more complex thought for the pre-rationalist.
How about making an “ideological Turing test”? If rationalists could successfully pretend to be meta-rationalists, would that count as a refutation of the claim that meta-rationalists understand things that are beyond understanding of mere rationalists?
Or is even this just a rationalist-level reasoning that from a meta-rationalist point of view makes about as much sense as a hypothetical pre-rationalist asking rationalists to produce a superior horoscope?
The point about meta-rationality as Chapman describes is that it isn’t a single point of view.
If you wanted to run an ideological Turing test on Chapman you would need to account for his Tantra Buddhist background. Most rationalists would likely fail an ideological Turing test for Tantra Buddhism but that wouldn’t mean much for the core thesis.
At first I was going to say “yes” to your idea, but with the caveat that the only folks I’d trust to judge this are other folks we’d agree are meta-rationalists. But then this sort of defeats the point, doesn’t it, because I already believe rationalists couldn’t do this and if they did it would in fact be evidence that even if they don’t call themselves meta-rationalists I would say they have thought processes similar to those who do call themselves meta-rationalists.
“Rationalist” and “meta-rationalist” are mostly categories for describing stochastic categories around the complexity of thinking people do. No one properly is or is not a rationalist or meta-rationalist, but instead can at best be sufficiently well described as one.
I don’t mean this to be wily: I think what you are asking for (and the entire idea of an “ideological Turning test” itself) confounds causality in ways that make it only seem to work from rationalist-level reasoning. From my perspective the taking on of another’s perspective in this test is already incorporated into meta-rationalist-level reasoning and so is not really a test of meta-rationality in the same way a “logical argument test” would be meaningless to a rationalist but a powerful tool for more complex thought for the pre-rationalist.