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The Ideological Turing Test, invented by Bryan Caplan, is a test of how well people understand other people’s viewpoints. The regular Turing test is a test for programmers: can you write a computer program which a human being cannot tell apart from another human being? The Intellectual Turing Test is a test for people who believe things: can you explain your opponent’s viewpoints in such a way that your opponent cannot tell it apart from someone who legitimately believes the opinion? If you can, it shows you understand your opponent’s positions on a deep level.

I have a good balance of social-justice and anti-social-justice readers, so I am going to do it about social-justice and anti-social-justice topics. How it’s going to work: I’m going to leave the ITT open for a week. Contrary to the normal policy of this blog, submissions are open to neoreactionaries. If I get a good number of participants from both sides, I will give everyone (social justice and anti-social-justice) two weeks to write answers to the questions from both the social justice side and the anti-social-justice side. I will run first the social justice submissions and then the anti-social-justice submissions, and the audience will vote on whether they think it’s real or a fake. At the end, I’ll reveal who wrote what and give special recognition to the social justice person and the anti-social-justice person who did the best job of impersonating the other side.

The questions are as follows:

  1. What discourse norms do you tend to follow? Why? Do you think everyone else should follow them, and why?
  2. What is the true reason, deep down, that you believe what you believe? What piece of evidence, test, or line of reasoning would convince you that you’re wrong about your ideology?
  3. Explain Gamergate.

If you would like to participate, please email me at ozyfrantz@gmail.com. (I am not guaranteed to see offers to participate made elsewhere.) Please identify whether you’re a social justice person or an anti-social-justice person.