We already have too much lesswrong-exclusive jargon. "OFT" is unnecessary.

This is probably a very dangerous idea but I think it's worth mentioning if only for the purpose of discussion:

What if you completely sabotage your signalling ability by making yourself appear highly undesirable. Then your actions will not be for the purpose of signalling as it would be futile.

To make this more interesting, interpret it as a true prisoner's dilemma. I.E. the aliens care about something stupid like maximizing paperclips.

A small, but common related occurrence:

When you are checking out at a grocery store, or sometimes at fast food joints, they'll ask you to donate $1 to charity. Of course it is some sub-optimal charity, but the looming discomfort of saying no factors in far more than it should. Plus, it is really hard to tell some random person "sorry, but the utilon-to-dollar ratio is insufficient".

It seems to generalize to a category of 1-of things that arise in social situations. You know it is sub-optimal to along, you know it would be uncomfortable to speak up, but (at least personally) you find it difficult to gauge the actual cost of doing so (in socialons), and wonder if you aren't just overthinking the whole thing - by which point, of course, the decision is already in motion.

The behavior seemed rational to me. Concluding from seeing a bunch of people doing X easily that you are not as good at X is logical; the only takeaway I would take is that occasionally the environment is rigged and the conclusion is unwarranted; famous example from Gladwell is kids born later in the year ending up in the same group (team or class) with slightly older than themselves. That kind of situation can lead to distorted self-perception.

I should disclaim that I would certainly agree to the statement "A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person," but I still find your level of incredulity a little surprising and probably disingenuous. It should be completely clear that the disagreement here is not about questions of fact but about what the question means.

(Edit: Actually, that shouldn't be completely clear at all. However, it should be clear that all reasoned disagreement is of this form. The process for most respondents is quite likely to go "Hear the statement -> Interpret statement as 'redistribution good' -> disagree" without regards for propositional content. If you want to get ridiculous results from interpreting people's statements literally, you could probably find statements much harder to justify than this one.)

What does "means more" denote here? In many contexts it is standard to evaluate strength of preference on a scale of dollars; according to this view everyone values a dollar equally. And there is pragmatic justification for this habit: if I want to determine who should receive a good, dollars are probably the best measure of strength of preference. If I gave the good to someone for whom it "meant more" but who was willing to pay less, I could implement a Pareto improvement by giving the good to the person who was willing to pay more and then performing an appropriate monetary transfer.

If we take this view, a dollar doesn't mean more to a poor person: everything else just means less. Maybe you think this is unreasonable (it is certainly odd), but if you allow any fixed yardstick (I'm guessing that most respondents who disagreed with the statement would have used bundles of particular comforts and discomforts as their yardstick) for measuring strength of preference, then you get similar artifacts--for example, people who care less about stress or physical pain, people who are willing to work harder, etc.

Interpersonal comparisons are inherently problematic and I think it is misleading to describe this question as an "easy" "ontological statement."

The other questions may be different. For example, on the gun control question it seems very likely that respondents are trying to signal their belief that gun control is ineffective by agreeing to a statement whose precise propositional content they haven't considered (just like incorrect respondents on most questions on both the original and the new test).

Silas Barta made the same point above, apparently more persuasively.

More than 30 percent of my libertarian compatriots (and more than 40 percent of conservatives), for instance, disagreed with the statement “A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person”—c’mon, people!—versus just 4 percent among progressives. Seventy-eight percent of libertarians believed gun-control laws fail to reduce people’s access to guns.

I... I notice that I am confused. How could such a large percentage of people get these easy questions wrong? Are they interpreting it as a question of signalling without even reaching the point of evaluating it as an ontological statement?

What is the "Master Document" and why aren't we allowed to see it?

Is the SIAI the best charity to donate to in terms of expected utility?

There's also the bit that says

There is also a "structural integrity'' to your old thoughts that will resist change. You may actively not-think certain things, because it would demand a lot of note keeping work.