In April, I’ll share all the entries on my blog, so you can play along at home and see whether you can distinguish the impostors from the true (non-)believers.
How do you account for ideological Turing tests failing because of shibboleths? It’s one thing to be unable to express or recognize the same ideas as a Christian, it’s another to be unable to express or recognize in-group terminology.
I try to structure questions so that they’ll be less vulnerable to shibboleth exploits (plus, some shammers do do a bit of research to be able to drop in jargon!).
One thing I noted when doing this. Most of my true answers were more specific than my made up answers, which might give them away. I look forward to reading the results!
I just took the “root of all sins” test and I tried to distinguish the answers of the Christians and non-Christians entirely based on shibboleths. Disordered love? Christ is a blinding searing light? Humans are finite beings who naturally desire the infinite? Maybe. But the decision was not “would a Christian have those ideas” but “would a Christian phrase the ideas that way”.
Of course I can’t just go count the shibboleths; it’s possible that non-Christians might overcompensate and actual Christians don’t talk about Jesus’ blinding light much at all, at least not actual Christians of the type who answer such surveys.
But either way, I didn’t feel that the most likely way to figure out which answer came from Christians was to look at the content of the answer. So I think that the test has already failed.
On top of this is the question of what type of Christian the non-Christians are trying to imitate. Are they trying to imitate average Christians, average survey-answering Christians, average blogging Christians, average Christians who are knowledgeable about Christianity? Trying to imitate the wrong kind of Christian can mean that knowing too much about Christianity can make your imitation fail.
I’m running an Ideological Turing Test about religion, and I need some people to try answering the questions. I’ve giving a talk at UPenn this week on how to have better fights about religion, and the audience is going to try to sort out honest/faked Christian and atheist answers and see where both sides have trouble understanding the other.
In April, I’ll share all the entries on my blog, so you can play along at home and see whether you can distinguish the impostors from the true (non-)believers.
How do you account for ideological Turing tests failing because of shibboleths? It’s one thing to be unable to express or recognize the same ideas as a Christian, it’s another to be unable to express or recognize in-group terminology.
I try to structure questions so that they’ll be less vulnerable to shibboleth exploits (plus, some shammers do do a bit of research to be able to drop in jargon!).
One thing I noted when doing this. Most of my true answers were more specific than my made up answers, which might give them away. I look forward to reading the results!
It’s curious; I felt the opposite.
These questions are quite difficult and will require effort. I’ll try to submit an entry.
Edit: Completed. :)
I just took the “root of all sins” test and I tried to distinguish the answers of the Christians and non-Christians entirely based on shibboleths. Disordered love? Christ is a blinding searing light? Humans are finite beings who naturally desire the infinite? Maybe. But the decision was not “would a Christian have those ideas” but “would a Christian phrase the ideas that way”.
Of course I can’t just go count the shibboleths; it’s possible that non-Christians might overcompensate and actual Christians don’t talk about Jesus’ blinding light much at all, at least not actual Christians of the type who answer such surveys.
But either way, I didn’t feel that the most likely way to figure out which answer came from Christians was to look at the content of the answer. So I think that the test has already failed.
On top of this is the question of what type of Christian the non-Christians are trying to imitate. Are they trying to imitate average Christians, average survey-answering Christians, average blogging Christians, average Christians who are knowledgeable about Christianity? Trying to imitate the wrong kind of Christian can mean that knowing too much about Christianity can make your imitation fail.