Ideological Turing Test

The Ideological Turing Test is a concept invented by American economist Bryan Caplan to test whether a political or ideological partisan correctly understands the arguments of his or her intellectual adversaries: the partisan is invited to answer questions or write an essay posing as his opposite number. If neutral judges cannot tell the difference between the partisan's answers and the answers of the opposite number, the candidate is judged to correctly understand the opposing side. The ideological Turing test is so named because of its similarity with the Turing test, a test whereby a machine is required to fool a neutral judge into thinking that it is human.

History

Original formulation

The idea was first mooted by Caplan in response to Paul Krugman's claim that, in the context of US politics, liberals understand conservatives (and libertarians) better than conservatives (and libertarians) understand liberals. Borrowing the idea of the Turing test used to judge whether machines can pass themselves off as human, Caplan suggested the ideological Turing test as a way to impartially test Krugman's claim: whichever side understands the other better would perform better on an ideological Turing test. He also offered to take the test himself and offered to bet that libertarians could more easily pass themselves off as liberal than liberals could pass themselves off as libertarian.

Caplan's post was praised by Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy blog.

Attempts at the ideological Turing test for political and moral philosophy

Caplan's blog post inspired a number of tries at the ideological Turing test by prominent bloggers including Brad DeLong (pretending to be a follower of Robert Nozick), Caplan himself (posing as a conservative), and Ilya Somin (pretending to be a sophisticated left-liberal).

Religious Turing test

Leah Libresco (who was an atheist at the time, but later converted to Catholicism) set up a contest based on the ideological Turing test idea involving atheists and Christians. In the first round, fifteen people (AbOUT half atheists and half Christians) wrote pieces pretending to be atheists. In the second half, all of them wrote pieces pretending to be Christians. Readers were asked to judge, for each round, who were atheists and who were Christians.

The ideological Turing test was repeated in 2012 and a resource page recording all iterations of the test was created on the Patheos website.

Rise to popularity

Leah Libresco presented the ideological Turing test at Chicago IDeaS Week in October 2012.

In December 2012, a subreddit on the ideological Turing test was created on Reddit.