Epiphany comments on 2012 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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My first thought about this is that people's rationality 'in real life' totally is determined by how likely they are to notice a Bayes question in an informal setting, where they may be tired and feeling mentally lazy. In Keith Stanovich's terms, rationality is mostly about the reflective mind: it's someone's capacity and habits to re-compute a problem's answer, using the algorithmic mind, rather than accept the intuitive default answer that their autonomous mind spits out.
IQ tests tend to be formal; it's very obvious that you're being tested. They don't measure rationality in the sense that most LWers mean it; the ability to apply thinking techniques to real life in order to do better.
It might still be valuable to know how LWers do on a more formal test of probability-related knowledge; after all, most people in the general public don't know Bayes' theorem, so it'd be neat to see how good LW is at increasing "rationality literacy". But that's not the ultimate goal. There are reasons why you might want to measure a group's ability to pick out unexpected rationality-related problems and activate the correct mindware. If your Bayesian superpowers only activate when you're being formally tested, they're not all that useful as superpowers.
I can see why you'd criticize someone for saying "the problem is that the setting wasn't formal enough" but that's not exactly what I was getting at. What I was getting at is that there's a limit to how much thinking that one can do in a day, everyone's limit is different, and a lot of people do things to ration their brainpower so they avoid running out of it. This comment on mental stamina explains more.
My point was, more clearly worded: It would be a very rare person who possesses enough mental stamina to be rational in literally every single situation. That's a wonderful ideal, but the reality is that most people are going to ration brainpower. If your expectation is that rationalists should never ration brainpower and should be rational constantly, this is an unrealistic expectation. A more realistic expectation is that people should identify the things they need to think extra hard about, and correctly use rational thinking skills at those times. Therefore, testing for the skills when they're trying is probably the only way to detect a difference. There are inevitably going to be times when they're not trying very hard, and if you catch them at one of those times, well, you're not going to see rational thinking skills. It may be that some of these things can be ingrained in ways that don't use up a person's mental stamina, but to expect that rationality can be learned in such a way that it is applied constantly strikes me as an unreasoned assumption.
Now I wonder if the entire difference between the control groups results and LessWrong's results was that Yvain asked the control group only one question, whereas LessWrong had answered 14 pages of questions prior to that.
Agreed that rationality is mentally tiring...I went back and read your comment, too. However:
To me, rationality is mostly the ability to notice that "whew, this is a problem that wasn't in the problem-set of the ancestral environment, therefore my intuitions probably won't be useful and I need to think". The only way a rationalist would have to be analytical all the time is if they were very BAD at doing this, and had to assume that every situation and problem required intense thought. Most situations don't. In order to be an efficient rationalist, you have to be able to notice which situations do.
Any question on a written test isn't a great measure of real-life rationality performance, but there are plenty of situations in everyday life when people have to make decisions based on some unknown quantities, and would benefit from being able to calibrate exactly how much they do know. Some people might answer better on the written test than if faced with a similar problem in real life, but I think it's unlikely that anyone would do worse on the test than in real life.