I’m much more interested in techniques by which I can measure my own rationality and discover whether it is improving, than the means by which I can measure other people’s. After all, if my own rationality is good then my estimates of other people’s rationality should directly improve.
And I have very strong misgivings about the idea of trying to measure it by asking intensely personal questions that may or may not correlate with rationality. It’s not at all clear to me that a rational person would choose to answer, or would apply to join an organisation that asked in the first place.
If the idea is to set a MENSA-like membership gate based on rationality, I would opt for directly testing only for what we can uncontroversially test for, such as basic familiarity with the heuristics and biases program, and asking in addition that they state their agreement with the broad outlines of what brings us together, such as the belief that the territory is not just another map.
ciphergoth, see my “ADDED” at the end of the post.
The idea here isn’t to tell individuals how rational they are, and it certainly isn’t to set a gate on other people. It’s… to feel around through the vague space of notions of “rational” that seem to be in use, and see if there might be a notion in there that has some construct validity.
I think the only real use of such a survey will be to more precisely pin down how members of this community are using the term “rationality.” And by the construction of the survey, it seems pretty clear that what they (or you) mean by “rational” is just “whatever we are.”
OK, it’s not meant as a test yourself or a membership test, but a sort of psychological experiment. I have to say that I don’t have a feel for the query you’re trying to hug—for example, do you have an application of this information in mind?
Later we can do a test that will determine how “rational” you are more or less, the problem is we don’t really have a good experimental definition of rationality. This survey will help see correlations and underlying characteristics of rational people (or at least people striving for rationality).
We don’t really know what to look for right now, so a broad set of questions will help us find out what is worth looking at in more depth. Which also means we can’t really know what we will get out of this, but hopefully we can find some strong indicator type questions for rational action.
Science is not about rushing off to collect data before you have any idea why you want it or what you’re going to do with it! If you have no idea what you might even hope to get out of an exercise in collecting data, what reason do you have to hope that good will come of it? What use would you make of “strong indicator type questions for rational action”? What is the underlying query?
What is this test for, exactly?
I’m much more interested in techniques by which I can measure my own rationality and discover whether it is improving, than the means by which I can measure other people’s. After all, if my own rationality is good then my estimates of other people’s rationality should directly improve.
And I have very strong misgivings about the idea of trying to measure it by asking intensely personal questions that may or may not correlate with rationality. It’s not at all clear to me that a rational person would choose to answer, or would apply to join an organisation that asked in the first place.
If the idea is to set a MENSA-like membership gate based on rationality, I would opt for directly testing only for what we can uncontroversially test for, such as basic familiarity with the heuristics and biases program, and asking in addition that they state their agreement with the broad outlines of what brings us together, such as the belief that the territory is not just another map.
ciphergoth, see my “ADDED” at the end of the post.
The idea here isn’t to tell individuals how rational they are, and it certainly isn’t to set a gate on other people. It’s… to feel around through the vague space of notions of “rational” that seem to be in use, and see if there might be a notion in there that has some construct validity.
I think the only real use of such a survey will be to more precisely pin down how members of this community are using the term “rationality.” And by the construction of the survey, it seems pretty clear that what they (or you) mean by “rational” is just “whatever we are.”
OK, it’s not meant as a test yourself or a membership test, but a sort of psychological experiment. I have to say that I don’t have a feel for the query you’re trying to hug—for example, do you have an application of this information in mind?
Later we can do a test that will determine how “rational” you are more or less, the problem is we don’t really have a good experimental definition of rationality. This survey will help see correlations and underlying characteristics of rational people (or at least people striving for rationality).
We don’t really know what to look for right now, so a broad set of questions will help us find out what is worth looking at in more depth. Which also means we can’t really know what we will get out of this, but hopefully we can find some strong indicator type questions for rational action.
Science is not about rushing off to collect data before you have any idea why you want it or what you’re going to do with it! If you have no idea what you might even hope to get out of an exercise in collecting data, what reason do you have to hope that good will come of it? What use would you make of “strong indicator type questions for rational action”? What is the underlying query?