Take the Rationality Test to determine your rational thinking style

Warning: the test requires that you enter your e-mail address to receive results, and does not warn you of this ahead of time.

The test took me about 20 minutes.

Maybe you want to tell us about your result:

I'm a [pollid:1173]

My rationality score (the value where the median currently is 55) is [pollid:1174]

It seems that the test is based on the CART (The Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking) rationality inventory.

Abstract:

The Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded in 2002 for work on judgment and decisionmaking tasks that are the operational measures of rational thought in cognitive science. Because assessments of intelligence (and similar tests of cognitive ability) are taken to be the quintessence of good thinking, it might be thought that such measures would serve as proxies for the assessment of rational thought. It is important to understand why such an assumption would be misplaced. It is often not recognized that rationality and intelligence (as traditionally defined) are two different things conceptually and empirically. Distinguishing between rationality and intelligence helps explain how people can be, at the same time, intelligent and irrational. Thus, individual differences in the cognitive skills that underlie rational thinking must be studied in their own right because intelligence tests do not explicitly assess rational thinking. In this article, I describe how my research group has worked to develop the first prototype of a comprehensive test of rational thought (the Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking).

Interesting test but i think the questions "How many other causes of death aside from this one did you consider before you arrived at this conclusion?" and "How many weeks would you budget to write this paper?" can be answered in different rational ways.

1) I already know that smoke inhalation is the primary cause of fire deaths. For someone who doesn't know that, it can be rational to consider several options. But in my case it is enough to recall the aforementioned statitical fact and thus consider only one option to tell which cause of Bill's death will most likely turn out to be. (So i consider just one cause but according to the test i should consider many causes).

2) The average time of writing each of 3 previous papers is 3 weeks and minimum time is 2 weeks. The fourth paper is about the book i like, it is implied that now i have more thorough knowledge about the book than in previous cases which consequently means that i can devote less time to reading/research/thinking than i usually do. And since the minimum time previously was 2 weeks and in that case the paper was about less familiar book, i assume that writing the fourth paper (about more familiar book) will most likely take no more than 2 weeks. (So i would budget 2 weeks but according to the test i should budget 3 weeks).

What do you think, am i missing something?

Took the test -

Your ability to evaluate outside information and theories for accuracy. For example, the question you answered earlier about the fictional BacoNation fast food sandwich checked your Evidence Evaluation. The question reported that the BacoNutcase ad campaign produced a $16 million increase in BacoNation sales, but the sales of the sandwich had fluctuated by nearly as much in the recent past without an ad campaign. Since the connection between the ad campaign and the sales increase was dubious, the question awarded full points if you answered that the ads were only somewaht likely to have driven the sales up.

That just seems wrong. This was the data:

March: $55.0 million

April: $43.8 million

May: $59.4 million

June: $49.6 million

July: $46.1 million

August: $54.9 million

September: $44.5 million

October: $60.5 million

The a priori chance of ads increasing sales is high. Bayesian updating increases the chance quite significantly since the result is higher than any one in the past 7 months (albeit quasi-tied with May). How is it not very likely that the increase is due to the ads? Simply saying 'it fluctuated by this much before' seems to be misunderstanding Bayesian probability.

What is this, Less Wrong: Cosmos Edition?