Jiro comments on Vegetarianism Ideological Turing Test! - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Raelifin 09 August 2015 02:39PM

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Comment author: Jiro 10 August 2015 02:32:39PM *  4 points [-]

It is my impression that most vegetarians are vegetarian for reasons having some connection to animal suffering and morality. As such, asking about health questions is strange. In order to pretend to be a vegetarian answering these (I'm not a vegetarian), I would have to decide how likely a morality-vegetarian is to engage in motivated reasoning on health-related subjects. I would then have to answer the health questions not as a good rationalist, but as an intentionally biased rationalist, applying a bias towards believing meat is bad for health.

More generally, I don't think ideological Turing tests work that well, because in order to be indistinguishable from the other side, you need to imitate a lot of things that aren't really "understanding the other side". I'd like to see a pseudo-ideological-Turing-test where everyone here tried to imitate a creationist. It would not work as a real test because the proportion of creationists here isn't 50%, but it would help make obvious what such a test is actually measuring.