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Yvain comments on Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Argument - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm having trouble determining the best strategy in these kinds of games, but I'm worried it's not quite actually sounding like a member of the group you're pretending to be.
For example, a liberal Christian complained that her (honest!) Christian answer did very poorly, because people associated liberalism with atheism. This suggests that the best strategy isn't necessarily to honestly list what you believe, but to list what you think a typical member of the group involved believes.
And If (for example) atheists know that the average Christian is writing about what they think the average Christian believes, than atheists in their fake entries will also write about what they think the average Christian believes.
Yes, if overdone, this is a sign of dishonesty; for example, anyone who was too stereotypical ("Yeah, I get up each day, read a selection from the Bible, check the Pope's Twitter account, then go to church, then go bomb an abortion clinic..." would be obviously fake.) So the best strategy seems to write something kind of stereotypical, but to depart from stereotype in a few places so as to signal you're talking about a real person rather than a straw man.
But this strategy is identical for real Christians and sham Christians, which sort of defeats the purpose of the Ideological Turing Test. We're not testing whether atheists can talk like a real Christian any more as much as whether atheists can talk like a real Christian pretending to be a stereotypical Christian, which seems like a lower bar.
I'd be interested in seeing differences between this test and one in which, say, Christians were just asked to discuss their opinions on some topics without it being part of a Turing Test, and then atheists were asked to fake Christian opinions on those same topics (also interested in how those same just-discuss entries would do against Christians-writing-for-a-Turing-test entries).
Interestingly, the entry that I was most convinced was Christian - and I was right - was one that included the phrase "and when I was in seminary...". I didn't expect any atheist to have the chutzpah to fake a priest, whereas I did expect some actual priests to read Leah's blog. This suggests that a winning strategy is to be stereotypical in unexpected ways fakers wouldn't think of, and possibly to be unstereotypical in unexpected ways fakers wouldn't think of (although obviously I can't think of any examples of this).
The atheists and Christians were told to be honest when writing their own responses. So they shouldn't have been trying to game it in this way.
For year three, I've been thinking of doing just this:
On the topic of marriage, since people conceive of the institution of having really different purposes but usually get bogged down of the question of what laws should exist. I thought the question of "How should a couple decide whether to get married?" would provoke interesting responses.
"Honest" leaves a lot of wiggle room. If I were trying to write my honest atheist entry, what do I emphasize? That I hate scholastic philosophy and think religion set ethics back five hundred years? Or how I love C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton and find many religious works to be among the most sublime creations of humankind? Both would be "honest".
Even if someone genuinely sets out not to present themselves at all, I still would expect presentation to be their main concern. There's a certain class of things which are impossible to do naturally. For example, if you try to count your natural respiratory rate, you will fail miserably; the fact that you're thinking about your breath immediately shifts it to consciously deciding what it is going to be. In my case, it makes it slower than normal. I can try to then consciously adjust by speeding it up, but since I don't know how much to speed it up, attempting to breathe naturally is basically just me trying to fake my natural breathing rate, probably badly.
I think self-presentation attempts of this sort raise some of the same problems.
It depends how you define poorly. Her answer demostrated something useful about inaccurate stereotypes of Christianity. If the goal of the whole exercise is to convince others that Christianity is right, then her answer might be good because it teaches people about their misconceptions about Christianity.
Yes. If you're faking it, the measure is how many people you fool. If you're guessing, the measure is how many you get right. But if you're writing honestly, there's no winning or losing; just write honestly, and if people guess you wrong more fool them.
I don't think you understand the point of the game. The goal of the game isn't to guess the teachers password. palladias converted to Catholism after running that game. That's a win for the catholics in the game who honestly explained catholicsm to her.
Of of the catholics wrote that he likes SMBC. That's one of the examples that struck out to palladias. Even when it reduced the judging scores of the answer, I think that answer likely increase the chances of "turning" palladias.
Ah, so you're saying that the goal of the honest participant is for the guessers to distinguish correctly, showing that their counterparts have a poor understanding of their beliefs?
Your argument is too general: it applies to any game. If I play chess against a Catholic, who deliberately throws the game in order to make a clever argument that succeeds in converting me to Catholicism, that counts as a win of some sort... but not a win in chess.
I think that this game is inherently about showing that your ideology is better than the one of the people on the other side. Chess is generally not played with that intent.
Wait, did that actually happen? Is there a place where I can read about how and why?
I think "poorly" in this case meant that it wasn't rated very believable by the judges.
Yes, I think that's a bad definition of poorly. The goal of the game isn't only to get high ratings from the judges but to ultimately show people that your beliefs are better than the beliefs of the other side.
One think you're analysis neglected is how the judges will adjust their strategy in response to these developments.
I had read this, when it was originally posted.
And then, I was referred to this, which was also written by you: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/
Which was sufficiently good at espousing Reactionary philosophy that I was STARTLED when I got to the end, because I had forgotten that you were only pretending to be Reactionary for the sake of an Ideological turing test. You were well on your way to convincing me to take a hard look at my own progressive ideals and find out why I hadn't seen all of these obvious flaws and then you said:
Despite the fact, that you had literally said, at the beginning:
I seem to have forgotten that while reading the middle... So erm, yes, I understand that you don't hold those ideas, and I'm not angry at you. But I do apparently fail at reading comprehension. And at having justifications for my ideals.
But reading this IN LIGHT of you saying a short time ago
That's just weird. I'm having a hard time visualizing room for there to even be a better strategy than what you just did.
It's rather embarrassing to admit that I failed at reading comprehension, but the contrast seems to great to not mention.
Yvain might be a brilliant doctor, now or some day, but what he writes is already genius. If only he realized that he could help more people and make more money if he seriously considered this as a career. The case of an altruistic lawyer volunteering in a soup kitchen comes to mind.
It isn't at all obvious to me that he could help more people and make more money by making his career in writing. (I mean, obviously it's possible that he would, but you can't mean that because it's pretty much always true for any pair of careers.)
Just what sort of writing career do you envisage for him that's more lucrative and more world-enhancing than medicine?
(For the avoidance of doubt: I agree that his writing is excellent.)
Actually, I take it back. It's not a dichotomy. He can be both and he will probably be a better writer if he is also a practicing psychiatrist. He might decide to write professionally at some point, though.
One of my only two errors on the christian side of year 2 was to suspect that a stereotypical Christian was a faker who was aiming for dead center. The other was an atheist who nailed the periphery.
So, the strategy of lying or selectively choosing topics to seem more typical within your group would not have worked on me.
I do think the whole 'I went to seminary' thing might best in the future be ruled out. It's one thing to create a fictional persona. It's another to give them a position of authority.
I don't even think it's about authority. Another person talked about how Christianity helped them through their drug addiction. Because there really are Christians who have been helped through drug addictions, but most contestants would have respected the spirit of the test too much to try the somewhat different exercise of making up a completely fake personality with a fake life history, this provided strong evidence of real Christianity.
Isn't the spirit of the test to be as convincing as possible? Imagining and imitating a fake persona in detail is exactly what the test asks for.
In other words, the test should have blinded the participants.
As Angleton once told me, there's a W.C.Fields made every minute.