scrape_r_rational/data/cache/2v7xpy.md

How do you measure rationality?

Post:

I haven't seen whether this question has been answered yet or not, but I am under the impression that a lot of people either don't know how to measure rationality or don't think it can be measured.

I was thinking that the calibration game could be used to measure epistemic rationality, which I'm guessing it probably already is. As for instrumental rationality, I was thinking maybe something like this: get a sample of participants who want to lose a certain amount of weight by a certain time and a highly competent bariatric physician. Weigh all the participants. Have each of them talk to the physician so they can tell them any and all information that would be relevant to reaching their goal. The physician must not advise them on what to do. Give each participant a certain number of strategies to choose from, one of which is the strategy that the bariatric physician recommends as the strategy that will bring that participant closest to their goal. At the end of the study, weigh all the participants again. Then, 1/(Goal Weight - Final Weight) ~ instrumental rationality.

Additionally it doesn't just have to be for weight. You could try chess for instance: Get a sample of chess players who want to beat nth level of chess-bot by a certain time. Give them a particular number of strategies to choose from, at least one of which was used by a skilled professional chess player to improve their chess ability. Then at the end of the set time, measure how many levels of chess bots each participant managed to progress through, and then 1/(goal level - levels surpassed)~instrumental rationality.

Comments:

• u/OffColorCommentary:

  Human rationality isn't a thing, it's a description of a whole bunch of unrelated traits and skills grouped by having roughly the same uses.  However, true rationality is exactly one thing - an optimal optimization process.
  
  Those two thoughts are reconcilable if you instead view rationality as normal, and try to measure irrationality.
  
  Irrationality is also not one thing - there are infinite reasons you could be wrong.  Certain ones of those are particularly common among humans though - you can and people do study cognitive biases.  Those, individually, can be measured.
  
  With a suite of individually measured biases, we could go through and measure them by their impact on some common heuristic to create a total irrationality metric (average wealth delta compared to parents or something).  Since at this point we'd be measuring well-defined traits instead of people, the terrible noise in irrationality vs life outcomes would be easier to cope with (but any better metric to calibrate with would certainly be welcome).  Once there's a total, we can call the inverse "rationality" if that's desirable.
  
  If that sounds like a lot of work, it's because it is.  "Measure rationality" isn't a primitive action.  I think it would be a great thing if someone did it though; more power to you if you take up that cause.
  

• u/LiteralHeadCannon:

  With a rationalometer, of course.  /s
  

• u/Charlie___:

  Check out [Keith Stanovich's work.](http://www.keithstanovich.com/Site/Research_on_Reasoning.html)
  

• u/k5josh:

  Microyudkowskis.
  

• u/Escapement:

  >*As for instrumental rationality, I was thinking maybe something like this*
  
  Wouldn't that be biased in any number of ways? I mean, I read [Scott Alexander's piece on weight loss](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/12/the-physics-diet/) not so long ago and it seems very plausible that weight loss could be differently difficult for different people; and furthermore, a number of people will have obvious low-hanging fruit to change in their behaviours, while others have already hit those low-hanging fruit. Further, your suggestion about having the difference in weight targets be the instrumental rationality score seems highly dubious, as I feel that people who get a lot accomplished that is meaningful to them in the rest of their lives and maintain within 5 lbs their desired weight are probably *much better instrumental rationalists* than someone who spends any sort of time and effort to obsessively track every gram of food and second of work exercised to the detriment of other actually important life goals to come within an ounce of their target weight in order to win at the 'instrumental rationality scoring game' for status-signaling reasons among the tiny population of people who think about this sort of thing.  Seriously, the people I would expect to be the best at the thing you're trying to measure might very well score middle of the pack on this indicator.
  
  I have considered and discarded a couple of my own other ideas to ranking/scoring instrumental rationality:
  
  1. Make or choose a game of some sort about primarily decisionmaking and resource management and thoughts rather than blind luck or reflexes or other physical attributes, then have people play it.
  
  2. Choose a real-world joint goal that everyone agrees with, and monitor who has the most positive impact towards achieving that goal.
  
  Objections to 1: 
  
  - Experience with similar games will lead to people having different skillsets at the outset which influence results
  
  - Doesn't match up to real-world situations at all (adversarial, zero-sum effectively, arbitrary rules constructs, etc)  
  
  - Results are extremely uncertain and translation to anything meaningful is hard (single elimination gets best player iff better players *always* defeat worse players, and double elimination gets top two in same constraint, but this gets unweildy fast and still runs into problems of luck/momentum/timing/arbitrary externalities).
  
  - Skillset in game playing almost always will involve things other than pure decisionmaking and evaluation and planning and etc.
  
  Objections to 2:
  
  - Scoring is extremely difficult and prone to manipulation and poor results (see Campbell's Law) and for many problems making any sort of reasonable contribution to them is difficult to even measure quantitatively
  
  - major problems suitable for this (match up to all participants' actual goals while being measurable and fully quantifiable) are tough to choose
  
  - people will have inherent advantages/disadvantages in their capabilities, circumstances, etc, from every externality in their life.
  
  ...
  
  This seems like a really hard problem. I am also unsure of my own rationale for caring. On the meta level, it would be sort of **super awesome / hilarious** if this was actually a meta-level trap to score instrumental rationality by seeing how much time and effort people are willing to waste that they could be spending productively working towards meaningful goals, on discussing theoretical measures of instrumental rationality that will never be implemented. I suppose that if that were the case the perfect score on this fora as a measure of instrumental rationality would be 'never click on this post and therefore read the contained information therein', while my own 'write ~4k characters in response suggesting the whole thing is futile' is probably almost off the scale in failing the instrumental rationality test...
  

  • u/Sailor_Vulcan:

    "Wouldn't that be biased in any number of ways? I mean, I read Scott Alexander's piece on weight loss not so long ago and it seems very plausible that weight loss could be differently difficult for different people; and furthermore, a number of people will have obvious low-hanging fruit to change in their behaviours, while others have already hit those low-hanging fruit. Further, your suggestion about having the difference in weight targets be the instrumental rationality score seems highly dubious, as I feel that people who get a lot accomplished that is meaningful to them in the rest of their lives and maintain within 5 lbs their desired weight are probably much better instrumental rationalists than someone who spends any sort of time and effort to obsessively track every gram of food and second of work exercised to the detriment of other actually important life goals to come within an ounce of their target weight in order to win at the 'instrumental rationality scoring game' for status-signaling reasons among the tiny population of people who think about this sort of thing."
    
    So in other words instrumental rationality cannot be approximated by how well someone does in reaching any individual goal, but how well they do on all of their main goals overall? Maybe multiply that by the total difficulty of reaching all their main goals. And since difficulty is also very difficult to measure... Wow I see your point.
    

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