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And comments on Epistemic Viciousness - Less Wrong
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The way I test the rationality of the people around me is by lying to them, generally about irrelevant things, and seeing if they can unravel the lies.
In virtually all cases, what happens is that they simply learn not to believe anything I say, at which point I start telling the truth in a way that makes it seem like a lie. People dial their credulity up and down, and eventually just give up.
From the general attitude of the people here, I doubt most of them have gotten beyond the "calibration" mindset either, thinking of rationality like tuning a TV, just trying to correct for the biases. It isn't that simple.
If you want to test your rationality, you have to try and determine the truth about something difficult, and you have to be able to verify the results. This can be done by:
having someone around who knows the answer to begin with, and is putting the problem to you as a test
working on a problem where the correct answer can be verified because it allows you to make predictions of some kind
working on a problem so tricky that even coming up with an answer which is internally consistent is very difficult, i.e. the miracle of the sun
And when they call you on your bull, you say "I was only trying to make you think"? I think I met you at a party once.
I don't believe you.
I have friends like this, who don't know how to open their mouths or set hands to keyboard without trolling. (I mean, I can't open my mouth without trolling, but I try to be slightly aware of and useful with it.) They tend to exercise it a lot on my LiveJournal. I blocked one from a non-LJ blog of mine for doing the same sort of thing there, where it was just the wrong place. But on LJ - or my own, at least - it's somewhat tolerable because it's the right sort of social space, sort of. YMMV.
Me neither. Are the people around you really paying so much attention to you that they would go such effort? Ones who aren't related to you?
"The way I test the rationality of the people around me is by lying to them, generally about irrelevant things, and seeing if they can unravel the lies."
Unless you are carefully documenting your procedures (which I doubt), this is exactly the kind of informal "testing" that gets superstitious or mystically inclined individuals into epistemic hot water. Playing pranks on your friends is one thing, striving for increased human rationality something else.
The test seems about as useful as a thermometer that starts at 100 degrees. It doesn't tell you a lot about your environment except in extreme situations. Not very useful, at least as a first test.