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AnnaSalamon comments on Ask LW: What questions to test in our rationality questionnaire? - Less Wrong
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Comments (45)
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?