Heck, just having some kind of metric to see whether people were following rationality advice would be a big step forward. We can get a visceral impression that someone is more or less formidable, and we can spot patterns of repeated mistakes, but we don’t really have a good way of seeing the extent to which someone is applying rationality advice in their daily lives. (Of course this is just a restatement of the good old “Rationality Dojo” problem, one of the very first posts in the Sequences.) Paper tests don’t really capture the ability to apply the lessons to real-world problems that people actually care about.
Heck, just having some kind of metric to see whether people were following rationality advice would be a big step forward. We can get a visceral impression that someone is more or less formidable, and we can spot patterns of repeated mistakes, but we don’t really have a good way of seeing the extent to which someone is applying rationality advice in their daily lives. (Of course this is just a restatement of the good old “Rationality Dojo” problem, one of the very first posts in the Sequences.) Paper tests don’t really capture the ability to apply the lessons to real-world problems that people actually care about.