The situation here is a bit comparable to the standard test for psychopathy, which includes questions like "did the patient ever harm animals as a child?" The test was designed by a psychologist, and not meant to be used in a criminal justice context. But it has nevertheless become standard. The problem is that it makes rehabilitation extremely difficult -- you can't change answers to historical questions, so rehabilitated criminal psychopaths are sometimes unable to score high enough to have their status changed, which affects parole options.
Not directly relevant, but a comparable to study if someone seriously takes a stab at a "stupidity test."
I'm not sure that's completely true. Rehabilitation is difficult in principle. Parole boards should not put dangerous people on the street even if they have improved slightly.
In a perfect world, parole boards would give the credence for recidivism and have credence calibration based on it. People on such a board can use questions like "did the patient ever harm animals as a child?" to inform themselves to the extend it helps them make better predictions.
It's great to make people more aware of bad mental habits and encourage better ones, as many people have done on LessWrong. The way we deal with weak thinking is, however, like how people dealt with depression before the development of effective anti-depressants:
The only "anti-stupidity drugs" we have are nootropics. But the nootropics we have weren't developed as nootropics. Piracetam was, I think, developed to treat seizures. L-DOPA was developed to treat Parkinson's. No one knows who started using ginkgo biloba or what they used it for; it was used to treat asthma 5000 years ago. Adderall derives from drugs used to keep soldiers awake in World War 2.
And none of them are very good against stupidity. AFAIK, to date, not one drug has been developed by understanding and targeting the causes of different types of stupidity. We have the tools to do this--we could, for instance, sequence a lot of peoples' DNA, give them all IQ tests, and do a genome-wide association study, as a start.
We don't research these things because society doesn't want to research them. People don't conceive of stupidity as a disease that can be cured. We need, somehow, to promote thinking of stupidity as a mental illness. As something drug companies could make billions of dollars off of.