The Basic Rationality Concept Inventory
A note to Michael Vassar and Anna Salamon, March 2012, sketching the design of an instrument that would test whether someone holds the most basic rationality concept: that propositions about the world have truth values, and that those truth values can be supported or refuted by argument, evidence, logic, and citation. Less Wrong, Alyssa argues, is a curriculum for taking people from basic rationality to advanced rationality — but the “basic” level is taken for granted, and most readers do not in fact have it. The proposed test borrows the structure of the Cognitive Reflection Test: short, scoreable, and aimed at distinguishing one specific cognitive habit from its absence.
Michael and I talked earlier about how Less Wrong is mostly material designed to take people from basic rationality to advanced rationality, but we don’t really have material designed to teach basic rationality. In fact, it occurs to me that we don’t really have material designed to test basic rationality. I’ve figured out, over the last few days, that one really, really, really important part of basic rationality is accepting the frame that propositions about the world have truth values — are either true or false — and can potentially be shown to be true or false by arguments, evidence, logic, citations, and so on.
Most people, by default, simply take whatever words they hear and treat them as political propositions. “You did a great job washing my car” is interpreted as “I like you,” while “You didn’t wash my car very well” becomes “I don’t like you.” If you’re in this frame of mind, it’s impossible to even read any of the Sequences, because you don’t ever get the informational content of what they’re trying to convey, you just get political statements. For example, I’d expect all the stuff about “Bayes vs. Science” to just be interpreted as “those scientists sure are dumb/silly,” just like the claims of creationists and postmodernist professors.
The Cognitive Reflection Test is a simple, short test of System 1 vs. System 2, and I think we could come up with a similar test for believing in truth and falsehood. The key element would be to focus on the wording of individual statements. Just as we can read sentences by “rounding up” a word like “irpoamtnt” to “important” (the closest well-known object in thingspace), I think most people will “round up” sentences about factual occurrences to the closest well-known objects of “X likes/doesn’t like Y.” During the rounding, the actual content of the sentence gets discarded.
So, we might give people paragraphs about topics of varying political inflammatoriness, slightly differently worded sentences about the paragraphs, and then ask them to rate them as true or false. For example — these aren’t close to optimal, just the first things that come to mind: Bank of America paragraph Even when caught red-handed and nailed by courts for behavior like this, Bank of America has remained smugly unrepentant. As part of an $8.4 billion settlement it entered into with multiple states over predatory lending practices, the bank agreed to provide homeowners with modified loans and promised not to raise rates on borrowers. But no sooner was the deal signed than the bank “materially and almost immediately violated” the terms, according to Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto. It not only jacked up rates on homeowners, it even instituted a policy punishing any bank employee who spent more than 10 minutes helping a victim get a loan modification. The bank’s list of victims goes on and on. The disabled? Just a few weeks ago, the government charged Bank of America with violating the Fair Housing Act by illegally requiring proof of disability from people who rely on disability income to make their mortgage payments. Minorities? Last December, the bank settled with the Justice Department for $335 million over Countrywide’s practice of dumping risky subprime loans on qualified black and Hispanic borrowers.
Sentence 1: Bank of America punished any employee who helped customers get loan modifications.
Sentence 2: Bank of America punished any employee who spent more than 10 minutes helping a customer get a loan modification.
Sentence 1: Bank of America broke the law by not letting the disabled use their disability income to qualify for a mortgage.
Sentence 2: Bank of America broke the law by asking the disabled for additional documentation before approving them for a mortgage.
Sentence 1: Countrywide sold risky subprime mortgages to lots of blacks and Hispanics, even when Countrywide knew they couldn’t afford it.
Sentence 2: Countrywide sold risky subprime mortgages to lots of blacks and Hispanics, even ones who would have qualified for an ordinary mortgage.
Climate change paragraph According to the researchers’ collective results, the predicted range of climate change by 2050 will place 15 to 35 percent of the 1,103 species studied at risk of extinction. The numbers are expected to hold up when extrapolated globally, potentially dooming more than a million species. “These are first-pass estimates, but they put the problem in the right ballpark… I expect more detailed studies to refine these numbers and to add data for additional regions, but not to change the general import of these findings,” said Hannah. Writing in an accompanying commentary to the study in Nature , J. Alan Pounds of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in Costa Rica, and Robert Puschendorf, a biologist at the University of Costa Rica, say these estimates “might be optimistic.” As global warming interacts with other factors such as habitat destruction, invasive species, and the build-up of carbon dioxide in the landscape, the risk of extinction increases even further, they say.
Sentence 1: Scientists think that climate change might put more than 15% of species at risk for extinction.
Sentence 2: Scientists think that climate change has caused more than 15% of all species to go extinct.
Sentence 1: Environmental problems, like habitat destruction, are thought to increase the risk of extinction from global warming.
Sentence 2: Environmental problems, like habitat destruction, are an even larger problem than global warming.
Sentence 1: Scientists have studied millions of species, one at a time, and concluded that a large fraction of them are at risk from global warming.
Sentence 2: Scientists have studied over a thousand species, one at a time, and concluded that a large fraction of them are at risk from global warming.