I recently gave a talk at Chicago Ideas Week on adapting Turing Tests to have better, less mindkill-y arguments, and this is the precis for folks who would prefer not to sit through the video (which is available here).

Conventional Turing Tests check whether a programmer can build a convincing facsimile of a human conversationalist.   The test has turned out to reveal less about machine intelligence than human intelligence.  (Anger is really easy to fake, since fights can end up a little more Markov chain-y, where you only need to reply to the most recent rejoinder and can ignore what came before).  Since normal Turing Tests made us think more about our model of human conversation, economist Bryan Caplan came up with a way to use them to make us think more usefully about our models of our enemies.

After Paul Krugman disparaged Caplan's brand of libertarian economics, Caplan challenged him to an ideological Turing Test, where both players would be human, but would be trying to accurately imitate each other.  Caplan and Krugman would each answer questions about their true beliefs honestly, and then would fill out the questionaire again in persona inimici - trying to guess the answers given by the other side.  Caplan was willing to bet that he understood Krugman's position well enough to mimic it, but Krugman would be easily spotted as a fake!Caplan.

Krugman didn't take him up on the offer, but I've run a couple iterations of the test for my religion/philosophy blog.  The first year, some of the most interesting results were the proxy variables people were using, that weren't as strong as indicators as the judges thought.  (One Catholic coasted through to victory as a faux atheist, since many of the atheist judges thought there was no way a Christian would appreciate the webcomic SMBC).

The trouble was, the Christians did a lot better, since it turned out I had written boring, easy to guess questions for the true and faux atheists.  The second year, I wrote weirder questions, and the answers were a lot more diverse and surprising (and a number of the atheist participants called out each other as fakes or just plain wrong, since we'd gotten past the shallow questions from year one, and there's a lot of philosophical diversity within atheism).

The exercise made people get curious about what it was their opponents actually thought and why.  It helped people spot incorrect stereotypes of an opposing side and faultlines they'd been ignoring within their own.  Personally, (and according to other participants) it helped me have an argument less antagonistically.  Instead of just trying to find enough of a weak point to discomfit my opponent, I was trying to build up a model of how they thought, and I needed their help to do it.  

Taking a calm, inquisitive look at an opponent's position might teach me that my position is wrong, or has a gap I need to investigate.  But even if my opponent is just as wrong as zer seemed, there's still a benefit to me.  Having a really detailed, accurate model of zer position may help me show them why it's wrong, since now I can see exactly where it rasps against reality.  And even if my conversation isn't helpful to them, it's interesting for me to see what they were missing.  I may be correct in this particular argument, but the odds are good that I share the rationalist weak-point that is keeping them from noticing the error.  I'd like to be able to see it more clearly so I can try and spot it in my own thought.  (Think of this as the shift from "How the hell can you be so dumb?!" to "How the hell can you be so dumb?").

When I get angry, I'm satisfied when I beat my interlocutor.  When I get curious, I'm only satisfied when I learn something new.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, when STEM enthusiasts highlight the work of modern and historical women scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.  If you run a blog, you may want to participate by posting about a woman in a STEM field whom you admire.  But I'd love to have people share women scientists/mathematicians/authors in the comments that they think we could all stand to read more about. 

• Women in STEM fields (living or dead, fiction or nonfictional) that you'd like us to know more about (preferably with a little precis and a link
• Books about women in STEM fields that are awesome
• Books written by women about STEM subjects that are awesome
• Studies about sexism (or ways to combat it) in STEM fields (and anywhere else)
• Practical things you or organizations you're with have done to cut down on careless or intentional sexism. (how did you implement it, how did you measure the effects, etc)

Richard Carrier is a naturalist philosopher, a blogger for FreeThought Blogs (an atheist portal), and the creator of a Bayesian calculator website.  He's looking for more places to read people noodling about Bayes (and he already knows about LW).

This is a request to all fans of Bayes’ Theorem out there: I’m looking for the best blogs and websites substantially devoted to discussing all things Bayesian.  

[He lists a few Bayes links that don't match his criteria]

But none of these are blogs or websites that regularly produce discussion and articles about Bayesian reasoning. And I’m looking for the best of the latter. I’m looking for more stuff like Less Wrong or Maximum Entropy. If there is any. It can be basic intro level stuff, or advanced, but it should be good reading either way, the kind of place a general Bayesian might want to visit monthly to see what’s going down.

Pop on over if you have recommendations, and feel free to crosspost here.  Looking for a tighter filter than just Blogs by LWers.

I was recently in an argument with a friend about the efficacy of WhiteHouse.gov petitions.  He was disappointed that atheists hadn't pushed the Free Alexander Aan petition up to 25,000 signatures and thought this was a bad sign for future projects.  I thought it wasn't a very good 'ask' so it was reasonable for otherwise committed activist to ignore it.  He ended up pulling Pascal's Mugging by arguing "nothing tangible may ever happen as a result, but we don’t know that, and it does send a palpable signal either way."

I was annoyed, but I also noticed I couldn't think of any GiveWell equivalent for advocacy efforts.  I was pretty confident that this WhiteHouse.gov petition was a waste of time, but I wasn't sure whether I'd prefer for a cause I supported to focus on petitions, voter education, wacky stunts to up coverage, etc etc. I've seen plenty of studies on how to get people to sign petitions, but none on whether they work.

The Human Rights Campaign used to run into a lot of criticism for just wining and dining legislators instead of getting pushier or focusing on electing new allies, but, when DADT was killed, the pundits seemed to think the strategy had paid off.  It looks like no one is very good at predicting which lobbying techniques will work, just popping in at various timepoints, seeing whether the policy changed, and passing or failing the outreach effort on that basis.

I'm actually a researcher for a consumer protection group that does a fair amount of lobbying, and it can feel a little like a cargo cult over here.  It feels a bit like we just try to keep an issue in view (through visits, press coverage, etc) so that when Congress or a regulatory body lumbers into action, they might think of our pet issue.  

Government gridlock is out of our hands, so the metrics we track (number of signatures on a petition, press citations of our work, social shares of data infographics) are meant to be proxies for our influence, but I'm not aware of any heuristic we use to check which align best with the regulatory results we're actually seeking.

Has anyone seen interesting data on this or have heuristics they use when deciding which advocacy efforts to support and promote?