I think I basically agree with Rob about the importance of the thing he’s pointing to when he talks about the importance of “Trying to pass each other’s Ideological Turing Test”, but I don’t like using the concept of the ITT to point to this.
It’s a niche framing for a concept that is general & basic. “Understand[ing] the substance of someone’s view well enough to be able to correctly describe their beliefs and reasoning” is a concept that it should be possible to explain to a child, and if I was trying to explain it to a child I would not do that via the Turing Test and Bryan Caplan’s variant.
The Ideological Turing Test points to the wrong part of the process. Caplan says that the ability to pass ITTs is the ability “to state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents.” This means that the ITT is a way of testing whether a person has that ability to state opposing views well. But what we care about in practice is whether a person has that ability & is using it, not how they do on this particular way of testing whether they have that ability. This kind of imitation test usually doesn’t come into play.
There have been several ITT contests, where authors write short essays about either their own views or the views of an ideological opponent, and guessers try to tell which essays represented the authors own views. The vibe of these contests doesn’t match the thing that matters in conversation, and ‘pretend to be a proponent of X’ can be pretty different than understanding a particular person’s views. The contests involve pretending to be something you’re not, they involve capturing the style and not just the substance, and they involve portraying a member of the group rather than getting a single person’s views.
We need better terminology for disagreements, arguments, and similar conversations.
I think I basically agree with Rob about the importance of the thing he’s pointing to when he talks about the importance of “Trying to pass each other’s Ideological Turing Test”, but I don’t like using the concept of the ITT to point to this.
It’s a niche framing for a concept that is general & basic. “Understand[ing] the substance of someone’s view well enough to be able to correctly describe their beliefs and reasoning” is a concept that it should be possible to explain to a child, and if I was trying to explain it to a child I would not do that via the Turing Test and Bryan Caplan’s variant.
The Ideological Turing Test points to the wrong part of the process. Caplan says that the ability to pass ITTs is the ability “to state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents.” This means that the ITT is a way of testing whether a person has that ability to state opposing views well. But what we care about in practice is whether a person has that ability & is using it, not how they do on this particular way of testing whether they have that ability. This kind of imitation test usually doesn’t come into play.
There have been several ITT contests, where authors write short essays about either their own views or the views of an ideological opponent, and guessers try to tell which essays represented the authors own views. The vibe of these contests doesn’t match the thing that matters in conversation, and ‘pretend to be a proponent of X’ can be pretty different than understanding a particular person’s views. The contests involve pretending to be something you’re not, they involve capturing the style and not just the substance, and they involve portraying a member of the group rather than getting a single person’s views.
We need better terminology for disagreements, arguments, and similar conversations.