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:
- Insufferable Bore, anti-poly, author of ITT Pro #1 (57%) and ITT Anti #12 (65%)
- Joel, anti-poly, author of ITT Pro #2 (58%) and ITT Anti #5 (61%)
- Bill, anti-poly, author of ITT Pro #3 (37%) and ITT Anti #13 (41%)
- Tulip, pro-poly, author of ITT Pro #4 (95%) and ITT Anti #4 (73%)
- blacktrance, pro-poly, author of ITT Pro #5 (69%) and ITT Anti #2 (64%)
- Jalen, pro-poly, author of ITT Pro #6 (70%) and ITT Anti #16 (30%)
- Leona, pro-poly, author of ITT Pro #7 (73%) and ITT Anti #9 (78%)
- CB, anti-poly, author of ITT Pro #8 (42%) and ITT Anti #10 (52%)
- Topher, pro-poly, author of ITT Pro #9 (65%) and ITT Anti #8 (38%)
- Dorian, anti-poly, author of ITT Pro #10 (45%) and ITT Anti #11 (56%)
- Trace, anti-poly, author of ITT Pro #11 (86%) and ITT Anti #14 (83%)
- Liam, anti-poly, author of ITT Pro #12 (59%) and ITT Anti #7 (27%)
- Jonathan, anti-poly, author of ITT Pro #13 (63%) and ITT Anti #3 (55%)
- Deluks, pro-poly, author of ITT Pro #14 (42%) and ITT Anti #1 (65%)
- Tcheasdfjkl, pro-poly, author of ITT Pro #15 (95%) and ITT Anti #15 (65%)
- Eric, anti-poly, author of ITT Pro #16 (57%) and ITT Anti #6 (76%)
loving-not-heyting said:
I am such a smart and cunning deceiver yay :3
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offbeatmatt said:
“73% of voters thought that Liam, author of ITT Anti #12, was pro-poly when in fact he is anti-poly.”
Is Liam author of Anti #12, or Anti #7?
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ozymandias said:
Sorry, fixed!
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Tulip said:
I ended up doing a lot better than I’d expected, going in! I’m not quite sure, even in retrospect, how I did relevantly well; but it feels gratifying to have done so.
It also feels gratifying, in a different way, for my pro entry to have been near-universally recognized as genuine. That one had zero persuasive effort put in at all, being basically just a pure thought-dump with some minor editing for clarity and flow, and… somehow, having my unfiltered thoughts be Recognizably Real like that feels very nice?
(I couldn’t do the same thought-dumping maneuver with my anti entry, which is why I’m surprised it worked as well as it did; sure, I did my best to write it as if it were the real unfiltered thoughts of the fictional person who wrote it, but I didn’t expect to actually pull it off particularly well. Even having now gotten clear evidence that the entry successfully convinced people it was real, I don’t know if it convinced people because of that effort or for other reasons.)
As far as voting goes, here’s the full accounting of my votes, plus fuzzy confidence levels assigned to each at the time of voting, plus ultimate result.
Pro #1: Anti (low confidence) [Correct]
Pro #2: Anti (low confidence) [Correct]
Pro #3: Pro (low confidence) [Incorrect]
Pro #5: Pro (high confidence) [Correct]
Pro #6: Pro (low confidence) [Correct]
Pro #7: Pro (medium confidence) [Correct]
Pro #8: Pro (low confidence) [Incorrect]
Pro #9: Anti (medium confidence) [Incorrect]
Pro #10: Pro (low confidence) [Incorrect]
Pro #11: Anti (low confidence) [Correct]
Pro #12: Pro (medium confidence) [Incorrect]
Pro #13: Anti (low confidence) [Correct]
Pro #14: Pro (low confidence) [Correct]
Pro #15: Pro (high confidence) [Correct]
Pro #16: Pro (low confidence) [Incorrect]
Anti #1: Anti (low confidence) [Incorrect]
Anti #2: Pro (low confidence) [Correct]
Anti #3: Pro (low confidence) [Incorrect]
Anti #5: Pro (medium confidence) [Incorrect]
Anti #6: Anti (high confidence) [Correct]
Anti #7: Anti (medium confidence) [Correct]
Anti #8: Pro (low confidence) [Correct]
Anti #9: Pro (medium confidence) [Correct]
Anti #10: Anti (low confidence) [Correct]
Anti #11: Anti (medium confidence) [Correct]
Anti #12: Pro (medium confidence) [Incorrect]
Anti #13: Pro (low confidence) [Incorrect]
Anti #14: Anti (high confidence) [Correct]
Anti #15: Pro (medium confidence) [Correct]
Anti #16: Pro (medium confidence) [Correct]
I was right on 4/4 of my high-confidence votes, which is good. I only got 6/10 of my medium-confidence votes, though—three voted incorrectly as pro, one as anti—and only 9/16 of my low-confidence votes—six voted incorrectly as pro, one as anti—so I definitely seem to have some amount of bias towards reading ambiguous entries as on the pro side, and the difference in success rates between medium-confidence and low-confidence entries isn’t nearly as large as it should be.
(This is still a lot less bad than I was actually expecting my voting results to be, though, considering the clear skew in my numbers of pro versus anti votes.)
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Aapje said:
This is a bit unfair towards Deluks, since on his post, Ozy noted that people were allegedly voting wrong. So people were presumably primed to be much more skeptical of that post than of earlier ones, or later ones.
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blacktrance said:
Thanks for organizing this! It was fun to participate.
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thisheavenlyconjugation said:
I want to congratulate Leona again for Anti #9, as I commented there:
Like #6, this is argued sufficiently more forcefully than any of the pro-poly ones that I’m pretty confident it’s real (and if it’s not then the author has an unusual inability to argue for their own beliefs).
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loving-not-heyting said:
😀
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TracingWoodgrains said:
Thanks for organizing this! Leona did a great job with Anti #9, and I’ll echo my own comment at the time and give a lot of credit for their presentation of the argument. I had a fun time making my own case and sorting through the rest.
Amused to find out I ended up being more convincingly read as pro-poly than anti. Glancing through, it looks mostly like a product of people here being slightly less likely to read anti-poly comments as genuine. Gratifying to be able to pass the test regardless.
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loving-not-heyting said:
Thank chuuuuuuu~ ^ . ^
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Liam said:
So in conclusion, people’s differing opinions on polyamory generally follow not from any lack of understanding, but perhaps from differing values and priorities.
This is also how I wrote my pro and anti pieces: different interpretations of roughly the same underlying facts. Did others do the same?
(I am not a regular reader of this blog, but stumbled upon the ITT and was persuaded to participate by Ozy’s plea for more anti-poly perspectives.)
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blacktrance said:
Some remarks about my submissions:
– My <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2020/08/04/itt-poly-pro-5/"pro-poly submission was intended to make a principled case for poly even when no one has an immediate desire to have multiple partners. I’ve seen a lot of poly advice for situations like “I have a partner but I’m also interested in someone else” or “my partner really wants to date others but doesn’t want to break up with me, what do I do?”, but not much for single people or people in stably monogamous relationships. (In an earlier draft, I had a point about how you don’t ban your partner from playing golf even if neither if you is interested in it.)
– I should’ve articulated this better, but I wanted to say something about how reasons not to be stereotypically poly are not necessarily reasons to be mono. If there’s something you want within your relationship, and 100% no-expectations relationship anarchy doesn’t provide it, then you shouldn’t practice relationship anarchy, but you should also only be as restrictive as necessary to get whatever you’re looking for – which might not be as restrictive as monogamy.
– My anti-poly submission is a steelman of some of my aversions to polyamory back when I was mono. To respond to it – I thought of poly as continuous with party/hookup culture, but it can just as well be continuous with idyllic monogamy. I agree with the argument that concentrated investment in a relationship makes it significantly better, but I think taking every available opportunity to invest in one relationship still leaves something to invest in another, so it’s more of a case for hierarchical poly.
Based on how on my results in the SJ ITT, I thought I’d do worse on this one since my entry felt less cohesive, but I did about the same.
—
As for my predictions, not counting my own entries, I did pretty well on the pro side, but got about half wrong for anti. Slightly better than the voters or a coin flip, but not by much. One of my main mistakes on the anti side was misclassifying anti people when they sounded like stereotypes of themselves – I thought genuine ones would seem more original/nuanced.
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blacktrance said:
Fixed first link
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Aapje said:
The problem with this theory is that it requires people to know what they are looking for, to be aware of the pitfalls and to be very good at communicating. It also means that we cannot punish people who engage in behavior that is nearly always abusive.
In many other situations, we recognize the advantages of:
– sensible defaults that are more often correct than not, especially for those who are unaware of what is good for them or even what the options are
– restrictions that ban some mutually beneficially agreements, but more often protect people from abuse who are incapable of recognizing the harm that happens or will happen to them, are unable to walk away from a harmful situation, etc
– the impact of defaults and restrictions on power dynamics, providing a baseline that guides people towards more equitable outcomes, rather than very lopsided ones.
– the impact of the lack or existence of defaults and rules on the options that realistically exist, rather than theoretically. For example, lots of women nowadays consider it necessary to escalate to sex fairly quickly during dating, even if they prefer otherwise. So it seems that removing the ban on sex before dating simply created a different social expectation and didn’t necessarily give women more options.
Ultimately, we now live in a very socially individualist society where many gifted and/or privileged people are very unwilling to be restricted in maximizing the social benefits that their gifts or privileges may bring, even if those restrictions may provide great benefits to the socially less gifted and privileged. In fact, outside of conservative bubbles, it seems to be regarded unacceptable to even make this argument to support or criticize a law, policy or culture. Yet it is far, far more accepted among the gifted and/or privileged to be restricted in their ability to maximize their economic benefits that their gifts or privileges may bring, to the advantage of the economically less gifted and privileged.
Yet I see no inherent difference in gifts or privileges that can be used to get social benefits and those that can be used to get economic benefits (and there is a substantial overlap), and no reason to assume that trying to provide a safety net of social benefits to all is less of a moral imperative than to provide a safety net of economic benefits. Studies into lacking social benefits find enormous impacts on both mental well-being, but also physical health.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
I unfortunately didn’t systematically keep track of my opinions, but of the ones where I did write down my opinion:
pro 1 (fake): correct
pro 8 (fake): correct
pro 11 (fake but a VERY successful fake): wrong. I DID pick up on a “subtle sense of off-ness” but thought the substance was quite good; possibly I should pay more attention to such hunches!
pro 13 (fake): I think I was correct (I didn’t say “this is fake” in my comment but I critiqued bits of it for being unrealistic)
pro 14 (real): wrong and apparently I want to fight Deluks!
pro 16 (fake): correct
anti 5 (real): correct
anti 16 (fake): wrong (though I picked up on a lot of weirdness and only voted this real because I thought it was probably written by the same person as pro 16, which turned out to be false)
in total 5/8 correct – just barely better than chance, welp.
(I think I probably had some opinions I didn’t write down in comments because I didn’t want to conspicuously guess on all of them except my own. Sadly I was not motivated enough to track this privately.)
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