Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Argument

Documenting my mental processes after reading this post (disclaimer: human introspection sucks, and mine is probably no exception):

1. Huh, this is one of the better versions of the Devil's advocate game I've ever encountered... Immediate upvote.

2. Huh, the poster analyzed their mistakes, learned from them and improved the challenge. Too bad I only have one upvote.

3. Clicking on the links... WTF, this is the girl who converted to Christianity (Catholicism? Really? Out of all the options available?) from Atheism a year or so ago... Anything she posts deserves a downvote...

4. Stop! What the hell am I doing? This is, like, falling prey to several biases at once. At least I should notice that I am confused. Unable to reconcile the "obviously dumb" conversion move with this quite clever post.

5. Wait, this is the substance of her post, to begin with!

6. Deciding to definitely keep the upvote and reserve judgment until after looking through the linked posts.

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).

I seem to be simultaneously freakishly good and bad at this game - I have, on multiple occasions and for multiple mappings of "green" and "blue," been accused of being a green pretending to be a blue (I am in fact blue,) and somehow I regularly find myself discussing the finer shades of green with greens who assume I am green. (It is hard for me to think of things that are funner than this.)

On Will Newsome's IRC channel someone mentioned the idea that you could totally automate the ITT into a mass-league game with elo ratings and everything (assuming there was some way to verify true beliefs at the beginning.) Make it happen, somebody.

A concern regarding this kind of test when applied to groups (Christians vs Atheists, for instance) rather than individuals is that one umbrella term may take more views than another, making the guessing game more/less tricky.

Nevertheless, this is a neat idea, particularly for particular people rather than groups as a whole.

Considering the different sizes of the targets, I'm not sure what all this means. Like, while there are hundreds of denominations of christianity (though that seriously overrepresented Catholicism), atheism is barely more specific than 'Other' in terms of moral foundations and systems.

As long as you're comparing groups with different degrees of dispersion, it is going to be trickier for one side than the other. The more degrees of definition, the more opportunities to miss one as an outsider and slip up.

I find it very plausible that Christians are better able to pretend to be atheists than vice versa. But what follows from that?

Caplan claimed in his original piece:

the ability to pass ideological Turing tests—to state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents—is a genuine symptom of objectivity and wisdom.

Caplan gives little in the way of argument in support of this claim, and I'm not at all sure that it's true. "Genuine symptom of objectivity and wisdom", really? My objections follow.

First, there's only one way to be right but there are many ways to be wrong. So if you are right it is likely that you have only a broad survey-level view of the different varieties of wrongness. Take, for example, climate change. The scientific consensus view is narrow and everyone in the debate knows what it is. But as far as I know there are many different skeptical positions (there's no such thing as the greenhouse effect; there may be a greenhouse effect but CO₂ is not a greenhouse gas; CO₂ may be a greenhouse gas but concentrations are not increasing; CO₂ concentrations may be increasing, but they are not anthropogenic; global temperatures are not rising; temperatures may be rising but not because of CO₂; temperatures may be rising but there is no need to do anything because the net result will be beneficial; climate change may be harmful but it's too late to do anything about it; it may not be too late but there are still better things to spend money on). I think I know enough about each of these positions to be confident that it's wrong but in order to impersonate one of these positions well enough to fool people I would have to know it inside out. Exactly which wrong assumptions and wrong authorities does each of these positions depend on?

Second, the criterion of being able to state views "as clearly and persuasively as their proponents" is not as neutral as it seems. If you're right you may have been happy to rely on the facts to do your persuading for you. But if you're wrong then you have probably needed to employ a lot of rhetoric, salesmanship, fallacies and argumentation. These techniques take skill and practice and aren't easy to imitate. For example, there's no way that I would be able to imitate the dense texture of sneering and insinuation in the rhetoric of someone like Moldbug.

Third, in the specific case under discussion here, Christianity has a number of cultural properties that make it hard to imitate. If you are Christian, then you probably know the Bible in detail, you are probably familiar with a range of theological and apologetic texts, and you are probably embedded in a subculture with its own rules, rituals, and mores. These kinds of details take a lot of work to imitate. But the typical atheist has probably never read The God Delusion or attended any kind of atheist event, so there's nothing there that needs to be invented.

Turing Tests

Its called the imitation game. The Turing test is the imitation game when one player is a machine and the other player is a person.

Some of the response posts talk about "attractiveness scores", but I didn't find those in the data summaries. Did those ever happen? I think it'd be more interesting if people wrote their genuinely best arguments for each side, and we measured how much the reader is persuaded, instead of many participants (as far as I can tell) trying to pretend that they're average and are persuaded by average arguments.

Of course, it's already pretty interesting as-is, and it's nice that somone actually tried out the excercise!

ETA: the other thing is that I suspect the participants in your blog are wildly unrepresentative (except perhaps of participants in your blog). It might be interesting to have some people who can't argue both sides that well both to provide more diversity for the reader/scorer and provide some representation of other communities (for example, I'm not optimistic about my ability to effectively pass off as a Christian, since I can't think of any moment in my life when I actually believed or paid much attention to church teachings).

What's a good term for "being able to pass an ideological Turing test"? (Being able to pass an ITT is related to being able to argue both sides of a debate, being able to accurately explain your opponent's position, being able to summarize the strongest counterargument to your position, etc.)

Following the original analogy, is there a term for "a machine that's able to pass a Turing test"? My googling didn't turn up anything. But if there was ("a machine is called Turing-(blank) if it can pass a Turing test"), then it seems we could adapt it fairly easily to the ITT: someone is ideologically Turing-(blank) if they can pass an ITT.

Any suggestions to fill in the blank?

I think the ITT may test more for personal experience than ability to model. For instance how well would this group of Christians and Atheists do trying to imitate Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Shintoists, Zoroastrianism, and other even less well-known religions in the Western world? Most English speakers have some familiarity with a branch of Christianity. How many have explored Shaamanism (I haven't)? Many atheists have gone through the motions of Christianity or some other religion in the past and have a comparably easier time writing about how that religious behavior and belief feels from the inside.

How do we separate the ability to understand and model other beliefs from the measurement of prior experiences? How do we eliminate the effect of writing/storytelling ability? MOAR SCIENCE NEEDED (imho). I love the idea of this project and hope you continue it. I may volunteer next time.

I want to highlight the use of the above approach to argument for resolving mundane conflicts as a Bayesian.

• Step 1: Run your Turing Test on the conflict. (This does need to run on both sides, It is your own missing info we will focus on)
• Step 2: Compare your results to their actual model. Highlight the individual differences.
• Step 3: Item by item quiz them for info on the differences. Why chose this? What alternatives did you consider? Why not take those alternatives? The goal is is to identify their goals, values and beliefs that created their model.
• Step 4: Repeat until your Turing Test matches their model.
• Step 5: Update your model with the newly acquired info.
• Step 6: Admire the mutually beneficial solution to the conflict. (Convincing them this is the mutually beneficial solution is outside the scope of this seven step program.)
• Step 7: Profit.

A step by step checklist on how to decide which widget to use in the new product line, or where to go for supper.

I want to highlight the use of the above approach to argument for resolving mundane conflicts as a Bayesian.

Step 1: Run your Turing Test on the conflict. (This does need to run on both sides, It is your own missing info we will focus on) Step 2: Compare your results to their actual model. Highlight the individual differences. Step 3: Item by item quiz them for info on the differences. Why chose this? What alternatives did you consider? Why not take those alternatives? *The goal is is to identify their goals, values and beliefs that created their model. Step 4: Repeat until your Turing Test matches their model. Step 5: Update your model with the newly acquired info. Step 6: Admire the mutually beneficial solution to the conflict. (Convincing them this is the mutually beneficial solution is outside the scope of this seven step program.) Step 7: Profit.

A step by step checklist on how to decide which widget to use in the new product line, or where to go for supper.

BTW, I accidentally passed the gender Turing Test (which ISTR pre-dated and inspired the actual Turing Test). :-)

I think we've had discussions before on argumentative techniques, and usually the first step is being able to state the other person's argument as convincingly as they can - pass a Turing Test on imitating them.

I've read this three times now and am still not sure how to interpret:

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 have concluded that it's vague, for the following reasons:

A. I don't know if "this particular argument" refers to your argument for atheism, for Christianity, or your arguments to convince the opponents that you are an atheist or a Christian.

B. Your phrase "the rationalist weak-point" is unspecified. At first, I thought you were referring to the fact that the atheists did less well at detecting the fakes, but you admitted yourself in the paragraph about that that the problem was the questions you wrote.

C. Your phrase "the error" is unspecified.

Also, it's unclear whether the following statement:

(Think of this as the shift from "How the hell can you be so dumb?!" to "How the hell can you be so dumb?").

...should be interpreted to mean "how can my opponents be so dumb?" or "how can myself and my side be so dumb?" I originally interpreted the latter but now am wondering if the correct interpretation should be the former.

I like this a lot. It's often said by conservative commentators that conservatives completely understand liberals, but liberals do not understand conservatives at all. I think there's truth to that, I would love to see some experiments like this, hehehe...