This year, we have an unprecedented number of winners of the Intellectual Turing Test.

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 asked some people who are pro-polyamory and some people who are anti-polyamory to write essays: one from the point of view of a pro-poly person and one from the point of view of an anti-poly person. Then, my readers voted about whether each essay was written by someone who genuinely held those beliefs, or someone who was pretending. If more than half of voters believed that someone was espousing their true beliefs, when really they were pretending, they would win.

On the anti side, we have:

  • Trace, #11, 86% (!) of the vote
  • Jonathan, #13, 63% of the vote
  • Liam, author of #12, 59% of the vote
  • Joel, author of #2, 58% of the vote
  • Insufferable_Bore, #1, 57% of the vote

On the pro side, we have:

  • Leona, #9, 78% of the vote
  • Tulip, #4, 73% of the vote
  • Deluks, #1, 65% of the vote
  • Tcheasdfjkl, #15, 65% of the vote
  • blacktrance, #2, 64% of the vote

Trace is the overall winner of the Intellectual Turing Test. Congratulations Trace! Accept your adulations in the comment section down below.

I would also like to congratulate the following participants on winning the Strawman Award for Poorly Representing Your Own Side:

  • 58% of voters thought that Deluks, author of ITT Pro #14, was anti-poly when in fact they are pro-poly.
  • 73% of voters thought that Liam, author of ITT Anti #7, was pro-poly when in fact he is anti-poly.
  • 59% of voters thought that Bill, author of ITT Anti #13, was pro-poly when in fact he was anti-poly

I would also like to announce an additional loser: the voters, who misidentified thirteen out of thirty-two entries, only slightly better than chance and a noticeably worse performance than previous years. My suspicion is that, because we rarely see arguments about polyamory, the voters had an incorrect idea of what pro-poly and anti-poly people believe and so underperformed compared to previous years.

Full Results: