Nornagest comments on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism - Less Wrong

51 Post author: ChrisHallquist 01 March 2014 08:52AM

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Comment author: Nornagest 06 March 2014 11:57:05PM *  2 points [-]

Perhaps self-deception is more congnitively demanding than self-honesty and therefore a clever test might measure it.

If anything, I might expect the opposite to be true in this context. Neurotypical people have fast and frugal conformity heuristics to fall back on, while self-honestly on a lot of questions would probably take some reflection; at least, that's true for questions that require aggregating information or assessing personality characteristics rather than coming up with a single example of something.

It'd definitely be interesting to hook someone up to a polygraph or EEG and have them take the Crowne-Marlowe Scale, though.

Comment author: brazil84 07 March 2014 06:30:22AM 0 points [-]

If anything, I might expect the opposite to be true in this context.

Well consider the hypothetical I proposed:

suppose you are having a Socratic dialogue with someone who holds irrational belief X. Instead of simply laying out your argument, you ask the person whether he agrees with Proposition Y, where Proposition Y seems pretty obvious and indisputable. Our rational person might quickly and easily agree or disagree with Y. Whereas our irrational person needs to think more carefully about Y; decide whether it might undermine his position; and if it does, construct a rationalization for rejecting Y. This difference in thinking might be measured in terms of reaction times.

See what I mean?

I do agree that in other contexts, self-deception might require less thought. e.g. spouting off the socially preferable answer to a question without really thinking about what the correct answer is.

It'd definitely be interesting to hook someone up to a polygraph or EEG and have them take the Crowne-Marlowe Scale, though.

Yes.

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