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nyan_sandwich comments on POSITION: Design and Write Rationality Curriculum - Less Wrong
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Those examples are good evidence for us not being able to test coherently yet, but I don't think they are good evidence that the question is ill-posed.
If the question is "how can we test rationality?", and the only answers we've come up with are limited in scope and subject to all kinds of misinterpretation, I don't think that means we can't come up with broad tests that measure progress. I am reminded of a quote: "what you are saying amounts to 'if it is possible, it ought to be easy'"
I think the place to find good tests will be instead of looking at how well people do against particular biases, look at what it is we think rationality is good for, and measure something related to that.
Ill posed does not necessarily mean impossible. Most of the problems we deal with in real life are ill posed, but we still usually manage to come up with solutions that are good enough for the particular contexts at hand. What it does mean is that we shouldn't expect the problem in question to be definitely solved once and for all. I'm not arguing against attempting to test rationality. I'm arguing against the position some posters have taken that there's no point even trying to make progress on rationality until the problem of testing it has been definitely solved.
Ok, that's reasonable. I was taking ill-posed to mean like a confused question. Or something like that.