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[anonymous]20

Karma-score (and voting up/down) could also be a measure of rationality contra affiliation. Movement in itself being more important than the direction of the movement as a clue to your affiliation drive or rationality drive - given a little context and some scrupulous introspection.

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steven046160

I don't know if karma is itself a good measure of rationality, but it might be a good subject to train calibration on. E.g., whenever you make a post or comment there could be an optional field where you put in your expectation and SD for what the post's or the comment's score will be one week later.

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1[anonymous]
Another candidate for a behavioural test could be the number of New Year Resolutions you make and hold.
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by RobinHanson
1 min read
87

43

So you think you want to be rational, to believe what is true even when sirens tempt you?  Great, get to work; there's lots you can do.  Do you want to justifiably believe that you are more rational than others, smugly knowing your beliefs are more accurate?  Hold on; this is hard. 

Humans nearly universally find excuses to believe that they are more correct that others, at least on the important things. They point to others' incredible beliefs, to biases afflicting others, and to estimation tasks where they are especially skilled.  But they forget most everyone can point to such things.  

But shouldn't you get more rationality credit if you spend more time studying common biases, statistical techniques, and the like?  Well this would be good evidence of your rationality if you were in fact pretty rational about your rationality, i.e., if you knew that when you read or discussed such issues your mind would then systematically, broadly, and reasonably incorporate those insights into your reasoning processes. 

But what if your mind is far from rational?  What if your mind is likely to just go through the motions of studying rationality to allow itself to smugly believe it is more accurate, or to bond you more closely to your social allies? 

It seems to me that if you are serious about actually being rational, rather than just believing in your rationality or joining a group that thinks itself rational, you should try hard and often to test your rationality.  But how can you do that? 

To test the rationality of your beliefs, you could sometimes declare beliefs, and later score those beliefs via tests where high scoring beliefs tend to be more rational.  Better tests are those where scores are more tightly and reliably correlated with rationality.  So, what are good rationality tests?

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[-]patrissimo170

Play poker for significant amounts of money. While it only tests limited and specific areas of rationality, and of course requires some significant domain-specific knowledge, poker is an excellent rationality test. The main difficulty of playing the game well, once one understands the basic strategy, is in how amazingly well it evokes and then punishes our irrational natures. Difficulties updating (believing the improbable when new information comes in), loss aversion, takeover by the limbic system (anger / jealousy / revenge / etc), lots of aspects that it tests.

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6[anonymous]
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2Johnicholas
To some extent, all tests have the problem of transfer.
0[anonymous]
Could someone please explain, what is meant by "transfer" here?
5steven0461
A problem here is that it takes something like tens or hundreds of thousands of hands for the signal to emerge from the noise.
5pwno
Agreed, but I think it is easier to see yourself confront your irrational impulses with blackjack. For instance, you're faced with a 16 versus a 10; you know you have to hit, but your emotions (at least mine) tell me not to. Anyone else experience this same accidental rationality test?
8patrissimo
For amateur players, sure. But there is an easily memorizable table by which to play BJ perfectly, either basic strategy or counting cards. So you always clearly know what you should do. If you are playing BJ to win, it stops being a test of rationality. Whereas even when you become skilled at poker, it is still a constant test of rationality both because optimal strategy is complex (uncertainty about correct strategy means lots of opportunity to lie to yourself) and you want to play maximally anyway (uncertainty about whether opponent is making a mistake gives you even more chances to lie to yourself). Kinda like life...
3Annoyance
Whether a person memorizes and uses the table is still a viable test. No rational person playing to win would take an action incompatible with the table, and acting only in ways compatible with the table is unlikely to be accidental for an irrational person. A way of determining whether people act rationally when it is relatively easy to do so can be quite valuable, since most people don't.
1[anonymous]
A problem here is it takes tens or hundreds of thousands of hands for results not to be dominated by noise.
-2Annoyance
Poker isn't just about calculating probabilities, it's also about disguising your reactions and effectively reading others'. Being rational has nothing to do with competence at social interaction and deception. A good test has no confounding variables. Poker, then, is not a good test of rationality.
9Johnicholas
I understand Annoyance's point to be: Prefer online poker to in-person.
4Annoyance
An excellent point and suggestion. Any test in which there are confounding variables should be suspect, and every attempt should be made to eliminate them. Looking at 'winners' isn't useful unless we know the way in which they won indicates rationality. Lottery winners got lucky. Playing the lottery has a negative expected return. Including lottery winners in the group you scrutinize means you're including stupid people who were the beneficiaries of a single turn of good fortune. The questions we should be asking ourselves are: What criteria distinguish rationality from non-rationality? What criteria distinguish between degrees of rationality?
[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky110

The thought occurs to me that the converse question of "How do you know you're rational?" is "Why do you care whether you have the property 'rationality'?" It's not unbound - we hope - so for every occasion when you might be tempted to wonder how rational you are, there should be some kind of performable task that relates to your 'rational'-ness. What kind of test could reflect this 'rationality' should be suggested from consideration of the related task. Or conversely, we ask directly what associates to the task.

Prediction markets would be suggested by the task of trying to predict future variables; and then conversely we can ask, "If someone makes money on a prediction market, what else are they likely to be good at?"

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4Jack
I think there is likely a distinction between being rational at games and rational at life. In my experience those who are rational in one way are very often not rational in the other. I think it highly unlikely that there is a strong correlation between "good at prediction markets" or "good at poker" and "good at life". Do we think the best poker players are good models for rational existence? I don't think I do and I don't even think THEY do. A suggestion: List your goals. Then give the goals deadlines along with probabilities of success and estimated utility (with some kind of metric, not necessarily numerical). At each deadline, tally whether or not the goal is completed and give an estimation or the utility. From this information you can take at least three things. 1. Whether or not you can accurately predict your ability. 2. Whether or not you are picking the right goals (lower than expected utility would be bad, I think) 3. With enough date points your could determine your ration of success to utility. Too much success and not enough utility means you need to aim higher. Too little success for goals with high predicted utility mean either aim lower or figure out what you're doing wrong in pursuing the goals. If both are high you're living rationally, if both are low YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. The process could probably be improved if it was done transparently and cooperatively. Others looking on would help prevent you from cheating yourself. Not terribly rigorous, but thats the idea.
0harremans
I'm not sure if this works, since a lazy person could score very low on utility yet still be quite rational.
[-]Mike Bishop70

Are there cognitive scientists creating tests like this? If not, why not?

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[-]Tom_Talbot70

This almost seems too obvious to mention in one of Robin's threads, but I'll go ahead anyway: success on prediction markets would seem to be an indicator of rationality and/or luck. Your degree of success in a game like HubDub may give some indication as to the accuracy of your beliefs, and so (one would hope) the effectiveness of your belief-formation process.

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5jimrandomh
I would expect success in a prediction market to be more correlated with amount of time spent researching than with rationality. At best, rationality would be a multiplier to the benefit gained per hour of research; alternatively, it could be an upper bound to the total amount of benefit gained from researching.
0timtyler
Prediction markets tend to be zero-sum games. Most rational agents would prefer to play in a real stock market - where you can at least expect to make money in line with inflation.
5RobinHanson
The relevant category is constant-sum games, and stock markets are that as well if liquidity traders are included in the relevant trader set. One can subsidize prediction markets so that all traders can gain by revealing info.
3gwern
Tim: but don't prediction markets have a lot of benefits compared to stock markets? They terminate on usually set dates, they're very narrowly focused (compare 'will the Democrats win in 2008' to 'will GE's stock go up on October 11, 2008' - there are so many fewer confounding factors for the former), and they're easier to use.
2Johnicholas
Prediction markets as implemented in the real world mostly use fake money, which is a drawback.
2gwern
Well, you don't have to use the fake-money ones. Intrade and Betfair have always seemed perfectly serviceable to me, and they're real money prediction markets. On a related point, fake money could actually be good. There's less motivation to bet what you really truly think, but not wagering real money means you can make trades on just about everything in that market - you aren't so practically or mentally constrained. You're more likely to actually play, or play more. (Suppose I don't have $500 to spare or would prefer not to risk $500 I do have? Should I not test myself at all?)
[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky60

This is the fundamental question that determines whether we can do a lot of things - if we can't come up with evidence-based metrics that are good measures of the effect of rationality-improving interventions, then everything becomes much harder. If the metric is easily gamed once people know about it, everything becomes much harder. If it can be defeated by memorization like school, everything becomes much harder. I will post about this myself at some point.

This problem is one we should approach with the attitude of solving as much as possible, not fee... (read more)

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[-]badger50

Prediction markets seem like the obvious answer, but the range of issues currently available as contracts is too narrow to be of much use. Most probability calibration exercises are focus on trivial issues. I think they are still useful, but the real test is how you deal with emotional issues, not just neutral ones.

This might not be amenable to a market, but I would like to see a database collected of the questions being addressed by research in-progress. Perhaps when a research grant is issued, if a definite conclusion is anticipated, the question can be ... (read more)

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3jimmy
"If you find yourself disagreeing with Republicans more frequently than with Democrats over factual issues, that appears to be a sign of confirmation bias." Only to the extent that you think Republicans and Democrats are equally wrong. I don't see any rule demanding this. Since all accurate maps are consistent with eachother, everyone with accurate political beliefs are going to be consistent, and you might as well use a new label for this regularity. It's fine to be a Y if the causality runs from X is true -> you believe X is true -> you're labeled "member of group Y". Tests for "Group Y believes this-> I believe this" that can rule out the first causal path would be harder to come up with, especially since irrational group beliefs are chosen to be hard to prove (to the satisfaction of the group members). The situation gets worse when you realize that "Group Y believes this-> I believe this" can be valid to the extent that you have evidence that Group Y gets other things right.
2[anonymous]
Even if rationality isn't a major cause of party affiliation, party affiliation could conceivably still be a major cause of rationality.
[-]Johnicholas50

ISO quality certification doesn't look primarily at the results, but primarily at the process. If the process has a good argument or justification that it consistently produces high quality, then it is deemed to be compliant. For example "we measure performance in [this] way, the records are kept in [this] way, quality problems are addressed like [this], compliance is addressed like [such-and-so]".

I can imagine a simple checklist for rationality, analogous to the software carpentry checklist.

  1. Do you have a procedure for making decisions?
  2. Is the
... (read more)
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4Eliezer Yudkowsky
How do you know whether the checklist actually works or if it's just pointless drudgery?
2Johnicholas
Sorry, I said "Test the process, not the results", which is a strictly wrong misstatement. It is over-strong in the manner of a slogan. A more accurate statement would be "Focus primarily on testing process, and secondarily on testing results."
1Eliezer Yudkowsky
Okay but how do you test the results?
0Johnicholas
Consult someone else who commented on this article. I didn't have an idea for how to solve Dr. Hanson's original question. I was trying to pull the question sideways.
[-]Emile40

Set up a website where people can submit artistic works - poetry, drawings, short stories, maybe even pictures of themselves - and it's expected rating on a 1-10 scale.

The works would be publicly displayed, but anonymously, and visitors could rate them ("nonymously" is to make sure the ratings are "global" and not "compared to other work by the same guy" - so maybe the author could be displayed once you rated it).

You could then compare the expected rating of a work to the actual ratings it received, and see how much the author... (read more)

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[-]johnbr30

Another test.

  1. Find out the general ideological biases of the test subject

  2. Find two studies, one (Study A) that supports the ideological biases of the test subject, but is methodologically flawed. The other (Study B) refutes the ideological biases of the subject, but is methodologically sound.

  3. Have the subject read/research information about the studies, and then ask them which study is more correct.

If you randomize this a bit (sometimes the study is both correct and "inline with one's bias") and run this multiple times on a person, yo... (read more)

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2j03
1. How do you know your determination of "ideological bias" isn't biased itself? 2. All experiments are flawed in one way or another to some degree. Are you saying one study is more methodologically flawed than another? How do you measure the degree of the flaws? How do you know your determination of flaws isn't biased? 3. Again, you've already decided the which study is "correct" based on your own biased interpretations. How do you prove the other person is wrong and it's not you that is biased? I agree with the randomize and repeat bit though. However, I would like to propose that this test methodology for rationality is deeply flawed.
[-]johnbr30

Keep track of when you change your mind about important facts based on new evidence.

a) If you rarely change your mind, you're probably not rational.

b) If you always change your mind, you're probably not very smart.

c) If you sometimes change your mind, and sometimes not, I think that's a pretty good indication that you're rational.

Of course, I feel that I fall into category (c), which is my own bias. I could test this, if there was a database of how often other people had changed their mind, cross-referenced with IQ.

Here's some examples from my own past... (read more)

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0adamisom
I'm not sure about this. The words are vague enough that I think we'll usually see ourselves as only sometimes changing our mind. That becomes the new happy medium that we all think we've achieved, simply because we're too ignorant on what it actually means to change your beliefs the right amount that we think. I'm having a hard time knowing how I could decide if I'm changing my beliefs the right amount; since that would be a (very rough) estimation of an indirect indicator, I feel like I have to disagree with the potential of this idea.
-6j03
[-][anonymous]30

How about testing the rationality of your life (and not just your beliefs)?

Are you satisfied with your job/marriage/health-exercising? Are you deeply in debt? Spent too much money on status-symbols? Cheating on your life-partner? Spending too much time on the net? Drinking too much?

I am sure there are many other life-tests.

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7RobinHanson
Surely we want to distinguish "rational" from "winner." Are winners on average more rational than others? This is not clear to me.
8Eliezer Yudkowsky
If we can't demand perfect metrics then surely we should at least demand metrics that aren't easily gamed. If people with the quality named "rationality" don't on average win more often on life-problems like those named, what quality do they even have, and why is it worthwhile?
6RobinHanson
I understand "rational" people "win" at the goal of believing the truth, but that goal may be in conflict with more familiar "success" goals. So the people around us we see as succeeding may not have paid the costs required to believe the truth.
3PhilGoetz
Suppose we did the experiments and found other policies more winning than rationality. Would you adopt the most winning policy? If not, then admit that you value rationality, and stop demanding that it win.
2[anonymous]
If rationality is defined as making the decisions that maximise expected utility in a given situation then it is by definition more winninng. The question would be nonsensical. If another definition of rationality is implied then I don't think Eleizer demanded that it win.
2arundelo
That would be a rational thing to do!
2Eliezer Yudkowsky
I do have components of my utility function for certain rituals of cognition (as described in the segment on Fun Theory) but net wins beyond that point would compel me.
7PhilGoetz
I predict that winners are on average less rational than rationalists. Risk level has an optimal point determined by expected payoff. But the maximal payoff keeps increasing as you increase risk. The winners we see are selected for high payoff. Thus they're likely to be people who took more risks than were rational. We just don't see all the losers who made the same decisions as the winners.
3[anonymous]
Those who take rational actions win more often than those who do not. If we take a sample of those who have achieved the greatest utility then we can expect that sample to to be biased towards those who have taken the most risks. Even in idealised situations where success is determined soley by decisions made based off information and in which rationality measured based on how well those decision maximise expected utility we can expect the biggest winners to not be the most rational. When it comes to actual humans the above remains in place, yet may well be dwarfed by other factors. Some lyrics from Ben Folds spring to mind: Fate doesn't hang on a wrong or right choice, fortune depends on the tone of your voice
[-]MichaelHoward30

I am 95% confident that calibration tests are good tests for a very important aspect of rationality, and would encourage everyone to try a few.

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7RobinHanson
Yes calibration tests are rationality tests, but they are better tests on subjects where you are less likely to be rational. So what are the best subjects on which to test your calibration?
5AnnaSalamon
I suspect I should also be writing down calibrated probability estimates for my project completion dates. This calibration test is easy to do oneself, without infrastructure, but I'd still be interested in a website tabulating my and others' early predictions and then our actual performance -- perhaps a page within LW?. Might be especially good to know about people within a group of coworkers, who could perhaps then know how much to actually estimate timelines when planning or dividing complex projects.
3pwno
Wouldn't making a probability estimate for your project completion dates influence your date of completion? Predicting your completion times successfully won't prove your rationality.
3AnnaSalamon
This is a good point. Still, it would provide evidence of rationality, especially in the likely majority of cases where people didn't try to game the system by e.g. deliberately picking dates far in advance of their actual completions, and then doing the last steps right at that date. My calibration scores on trivia have been fine for awhile now, but my calibration at predicting my own project completions is terrible.
2badger
I wonder to what degree this is a problem of poor calibration vs. poor motivation. Maybe commitment mechanisms like Stikk.com would have a greater marginal benefit than better calibration. I don't know about you, but that seems to be the case with regards to similar issues on my end.
4AnnaSalamon
Perhaps we could make a procedure for asking your friends, coworkers, and other acquaintance (all mixed together) to rate you on various traits, and anonymizing who submitted which rating to encourage honesty? You could then submit calibrated probability estimates as to what ratings were given. I'd find this a harder context in which to be rational than I'd find trivia.
1AnnaSalamon
Actually, there's probably some website out there already that lets one solicit anonymous feedback. (Which would be a rationality boost for some of us in itself, even apart from calibration -- though I'd like to try calibration on it, too.) Does anybody know of such a site? I spent an hour looking on Google -- perhaps not with the right keywords -- and found only What Others Think, Kumquat, and a couple Facebook/Myspace apps. Both look potentially worth using, but neither is ideal. Are there other competitors?
1[anonymous]
I don't associate rationality with Trivial Pursuit, which does rather seem to dominate the test questions.
3MichaelHoward
Marshall, you don't need to be good at the question subjects, just as long as you don't think you're good when you're not. Calibration tests aren't about how many of the questions you can get right, they test if you're over (or under) confident about your answers. They tend to use obscure questions which few people are likely to know for sure what the answers are.
2[anonymous]
Thanks Michael - I just don't think calibrating on useless information is evidence of my rationality. I am 95% sure, that I don't know all the time. Calibrating on whether I book my next dental appointment on time seems a better clue.
3MichaelHoward
Interesting point. Does anyone know of any evidence about how well calibration test results match overconfidence in important real-life decisions? I'd expect it would give a good indication, but has anyone actually tested it?
5Eliezer Yudkowsky
There are a lot of tests that look plausibly useful but would be much more trustworthy if we could find a sufficiently good gold standard to validate against.
4AnnaSalamon
If we have enough tests that look plausibly useful, each somewhat independent-looking, we could see how well they correlate. Test items on which good performance predicts high scores on other test items would seem more credible as indicators of actual rationality. We could include behavioral measures of success, such as those suggested by Marshall, in our list of test items. (Income, self-reported happiness, having stable, positive relationships, managing to exercise regularly or to keep resolutions, probabilistic predictions for the situation you'll be in next year (future accomplishments, self-reported happiness at future times, etc.; coupled with actual reports next year on your situation) in our list of test items. If we can find pen-and-paper test items that correlate both with behavioral measures of success and with other plausibly rationality-related pen-and-paper test items, after controlling for IQ, I'll say we've won.
[-]Annoyance20

An ideal rationality test would be perfectly specific: there would be no way to pass it other than being rational. We can't conveniently create such a test, but we can at least make it difficult to pass our tests by utilizing simple procedures that don't require rationality to implement.

Any 'game' in which the best strategies can be known and preset would then be ruled out. It's relatively easy to write a computer program to play poker (minus the social interaction). Same goes for blackjack. It takes rationality to create such a program, but the program doesn't need rationality to function.

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[-]HalFinney20

"Do you want to justifiably believe that you are more rational than others, smugly knowing your beliefs are more accurate?"

Is this what people want? To me it would make more sense to cultivate the belief that one is NOT more rational than others, and that one's beliefs are no more likely than theirs to be accurate, a priori. Try to overcome the instinct that a belief is probably correct merely because it is yours.

Now I can understand that for people at the cutting edge of society, pushing into new frontiers like Robin and Eliezer, this would not ... (read more)

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[-]RobinHanson20

Jim Randomh makes some suggestions here.

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[-][anonymous]20

Karma-score (and voting up/down) could also be a measure of rationality contra affiliation. Movement in itself being more important than the direction of the movement as a clue to your affiliation drive or rationality drive - given a little context and some scrupulous introspection.

Reply
6steven0461
I don't know if karma is itself a good measure of rationality, but it might be a good subject to train calibration on. E.g., whenever you make a post or comment there could be an optional field where you put in your expectation and SD for what the post's or the comment's score will be one week later.
3Jack
Its too bad karma scores are reads-neutral. Late comments to posts tend to get ignored at the bottom of the thread. I wonder if one couldn't add a "Read this comment" button... though I imagine a lot of people wouldn't bother.
2Johnicholas
Late comments getting ignored would not be an issue if people primarily read comments via "Recent Comments".
2Jack
"Recent comments" may work when traffic is low and there is only 1-2 posts a day. But imagine when this thing gets going and you're posting in an old article during high traffic hours.
1khafra
Maybe there should be a "recent comments less than half the age of the article" feed.
4RobinZ
Maybe there should be "recent comments on this article" feeds.
2NancyLebovitz
There certainly should be. And possibly a "recent comments on all articles except [list of articles]" feed. That way, people could see possibly interesting comments on old articles, while avoiding comments to recent high traffic articles they aren't interested in.
1[anonymous]
Another candidate for a behavioural test could be the number of New Year Resolutions you make and hold.
2pwno
Funny how the holiday became devoted towards making rational self-improvement goals. Which leads me to my next point: I think people who decide to self-improve on their own, and actually follow through, are already more rational than the average joe. Most people rationalize their mediocrity, find reasons not to self-improve, and stay preoccupied with tasks that don't impinge on their mental comfort level.
4badger
I agree that people that try to self-improve have more potential to be rational, but I don't think significantly more are in practice. If your goals are misplaced, achieving them could be worse than if you did nothing. On the subject of New Year Resolutions, my parents are apt to make goals like "attend religious services more frequently" and "read scripture more frequently", and they often succeed.
2Jack
You'd want people to estimate the utility of their goals and compare that to a post-goal completion estimate of utility. See here http://lesswrong.com/lw/h/test_your_rationality/dg#comments
0[anonymous]
That sounds healthy for them. Did they benefit from it?
[-]Jonnan10

Just a personal problem that seems to me to be a precursor to the rationality question.

Various studies have shown that a persons 'memory' of events is very much influenced by later discussion of the event, when put into situations such as the 'Stanford Prison Experiment' or the 'Milgram Experiment' people will do unethical acts under pressure of authority and situation.

Yet people have a two-fold response to these experiments. A) They deny the experiments are accurate, either in whole, or in degree B) They deny that they fall into the realm of those that... (read more)

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[-]Cosmin10

There is quite a gap between wanting to be rational and wanting to know how unbiased you are. Since the test is self-administered, pursuing the first desire could easily lead to a favourable, biased, seemingly rational test result. This result would be influenced by personal expectations, and it's reliability is null according to Löb's Theorem. The latter desire implies one being open to his biased state and states his purpose of assessing some sort of bias/rational balance. This endeavour is more profitable than the previous because, hopefully, it offers... (read more)

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[-]nazgulnarsil10

it seems that the the relevance of the calibration tests are that the better calibrated you are the better you will perform on predicting how happy various outcomes will make you. being good at this puts you at a huge advantage relative to the average person.

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[-]SeanMCoincon00

My concern is less with the degree to which I wear the rationality mantle relative to others (which is low to the point of insignificance, though often depressing) and more with ensuring that the process I use to approach rationality is the best one available. To that end, I'm finding that lurking on LessWrong is a pretty effective process test, particularly since I tend to come back to articles I've previously read to see what further understanding I can extract in the light of previous articles. SCORING such a test is a more squiffy concept, though cor... (read more)

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[+]j03-70
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