Bryan Caplan: commitment

Transcript context

…What is the Ideological Turing Test? And how do you use it to improve your own knowledge and understanding of things? The Ideological Turing Test — this is an idea that I came up with something like five years ago. There’s the original Turing Test, which is a test. It’s used in artificial intelligence, and basically, it says that if you can no longer tell the output from a computer from the output from a human being, that AI has passed the regular Turing Test. I was saying you could actually do a similar thing for a human being. You could say, “Is it possible for you to successfully mimic the holder of a view that you disagree with?” Sort of jumping off of [John Stuart] Mill’s famous line of, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows but little of that.” The key thing about the idea is that it’s a real test. It’s one you can actually administer. The idea is you do it blind, and then you actually show it to people that hold a view that you don’t and see whether they can tell the difference between that and the real view. I say, “Once you can pass that test, then you have at least indicated that you understand the view that you disagree with.” Now of course, in practice, it is hard to do this because of the cost. When I am actually trying to explain a view, I do try, in my mind at least, to pass this. I will say, when I am going and checking on my references with the original authors, the one thing where I basically never contradict the author is if they say, “You misunderstood me. ” That’s where I say, “If the guy says I misunderstood him, then I almost certainly misunderstood him, and I need to do better.” Last question. What are your plans for the future?…

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