I think in the political context the test if of limited usefulness, because relatively few political disputes are about political philosophy. As the most thoughtful blogger on the internet, Julian Sanchez, recently wrote, “people overemphasize the importance of differing political philosophies in driving practical political conclusions, relative to straightforward empirical disagreements.”
Would a smart conservative still believe that defaulting on the debt is not a big deal, as Palin believes? Even if I put on my conservative principles hat, I don’t arrive at an obvious answer. And I think that’s true for many of today’s political battles.
A related problem is whether, to employ the test, you are to take the most charitable version of the other side, or simply the most representative. I recall that when Ilya Somin on VC did this, many commenters complained that he acted smarter and less aggressive than any liberal really acts. I imagine you might get the same reaction here if one of the board liberals adopted a “smart conservative” persona for a week.
If you just go to the front pages and read some of the sample responses, I think you’ll agree that they are intelligent and deep. I can’t imagine anyone being dissatisfied with the intellectual content of them.
I would say no. That is, if there is no Christian God (to use an example), then a person who passes a Christian Turing test is “just as good” as a “real” Christian. Because their ultimate outcomes will be the same (death).
To put it differently: the audience for the Turing test is the observers - they are the ones you have to “fool”. But if there is an omniscient God you can’t fool him, so passing a Turing test directed at other humans is not helpful.
There is a perhaps interesting thought experiment about whether it is possible to pass a religious Turing test with God himself as the observer. That pretty quickly gets into “true faith” issues and other religious and philosophical questions.
I guess one possible interesting outcome of the OP’s proposed test is if nobody could pass it. That is, if there is no way to reliably fool Christians into thinking your a real Christian. This would imply there is some fundamental change in a “true believer” that cannot be mimicked.
As someone who “passed” for a very long time in a Christian community I have no doubt this test can be passed.
I think it sounds interesting. Many a debate has been derailed by the complaint (from either side) that the opponents don’t really understand them or their argument, or are misrepresenting or mischaracterising it, engaging in Straw Man fallacies, etc.
This test won’t stop that happening, but might generate some interesting results nonetheless.
I was going to agree with you - but then something occurred to me. Some Christians claim they have the Holy Spirit in them and that it illuminates things or somehow makes their reality different. Now, I grant that I probably don’t have a precise handle on what the Holy Spirit is supposed to do or contribute to one’s life, but if there is supposed to be a difference, then wouldn’t this ‘test’ function in a similiar way to the original Turing Test (in a reverse sort of way)?
That is, it would show that those endowed with the HS were somehow different then those merely familiar with scripture (and good at acting)?
I don’t know, this just occurred to me, I could be completely off base…
OTOH, I think we all can agree that the subjective experience of being a sincere Christian is rather different from that of one who “passes” as Christian. And that difference holds, doesn’t it, regardless of whether God exists, or does not exist, or exists but his proper name is Allah.
Hm… yeah, that is true. And I would suppose that any emotional benefits that accrue to sincere religious belief (if such exist) would not accrue to a “Turing-equivalent” Christian - although that might be interesting to test as well. If prayer helps reduce stress, for example, does it matter if I’m praying sincerely?
Are there not religions where the actions themselves are paramount? Where whether you “truly believe” is completely irrelevant as long as you put in the work (some Buddhist traditions, perhaps?).
I guess an atheist would probably have more luck passing as a sedate Minnesota Lutheran than an evangelical Texas Baptist. If the test subjects are expected to be visibly moved by the Holy Spirit in their responses, then the atheist trying to pass as that kind of Christian has a lot of acting (and outright lying) ahead of him. But he might still be up for it, especially if he’s a lapsed Christian with real experiences to draw from.
So you’d have to nail down what behaviors are particular to true believers that can’t be reproduced by a good actor. It’s not obvious to me there are any.
I was wondering about the point of the exercise: I have heard that a smart person could pretend to be dumb, but a dumb person cannot (convincingly) pass as smart.
The cynic inside me said that this experiment might be trying to prove that you have to be dumb to believe in magical beings, but I haven’t quite figured out the steps needed (using this format) to get to the desired conclusion.
This almost sounds like a restatement of Poe’s Law? For example, there’s a frequent poster in the Elections forum who may, in fact, be representing himself accurately or may also be trolling the board using a what almost seems to be Eliza-like parroting of ideological talking points. It’s really quite hard to tell.
The point I’m trying to make here is that you don’t really have to have a very deep understanding of the topic to convincingly sound like an ideologue – all you have to do is memorize three or four talking points and ring the changes on them.
Right, that’s what I’d be interested in testing. Does Turing-equivalent prayer (that is, a prayer that a Christian would identify as genuine) have the same emotional benefits (if there are any) as “true” prayer.
If it does, then that would perhaps reduce the impact of the “God is real because prayer works” argument. If I can “fake pray” and get the same benefits then it’s obviously not God doing the helping.
Are we allowed to use technology in our Turing tests? I wonder if there is a difference in brain activity between “true believer” prayer and mimicry. I ask because I know there have been studies about brain activities during meditation that show identifiable patterns.
See, I don’t think so. It would be pretty hard to distinguish between a not very intelligent person repeating what they’ve seen on ideologically oriented news shows and blogs and someone who is simply mimicking that behavior. In either case, the thought processes don’t go that deep. Trying to put yourself in the position of an * intelligent * person arguing a deeply felt belief would be a different story, but that doesn’t seem to be a fundamental component of this test. Could the panel distinguish between a troll and dim-witted (or at least, non-introspective) true-believer? I bet they couldn’t.
I’m not sure this is true. I essentially “Turing Tested” myself into being convinced I was a true believer rather than someone who was passing by refusing to engage with my doubts when they arose. While my subjective experience was a bit tricky and anxious, it wasn’t the experience of someone who was lying to others. Or at least not exactly that way.
I think belief has a lot of habit in it, and you could eventually habitutally feel X instead of Y so long as you didn’t go poking around in your own psyche all the time.
How do you distinguish between someone who is faking their position poorly, and someone who is sincere but really really really fucking stupid?
We have these controversies all the time on the Dope, after all. Is such-and-such a poster a troll, or just a huge moron? I suppose the Turing response to that, is if you can’t tell the difference between trolling and brain damage, then maybe there is no difference. As Vonnegut said, We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. If you spend your time posting like a retarded jackass, then aren’t you really a retarded jackass?
One problem I see with this is that, like almost all such debates here on the SDMB, it pits Christianity against Atheism. That includes two different debates:
athesim vs theism
the validity of Christianity
It makes for a sloppy exercise. But it’s the way atheists like it, because they think that by shooting holes in Christianity they’ve successfully discounted theism more generally. Even though, as anyone who has had a course in logic understands, they haven’t.
I fear that that same conflation would screw up the exercise described.
