Ideological Turing Test

The Ideological Turing Test is a concept invented by 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 as to evoke the Turing test, a test whereby a machine is required to fool a neutral judge into thinking that it is human.

The idea was first mooted by Caplan in 2011 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.

Three versions of the Ideological Turing Test have been attempted:

Caplan's blog post inspired a number of tries at the Ideological Turing Test by prominent bloggers including those listed below:

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. Interested contestants were given a set of four questions as prompts and asked to write responses to the questions, both as atheists and as Christians. Fifteen people participated in the contest, about half of them Christian and half atheist. In the first round, all the fifteen responses written as atheists were published. In the second round, all the responses written as Christians were published, albeit not with the same numbering. Readers were asked to fill in a survey specifying their own religious identification and giving their view, for each response whether it was by a Christian or an atheist. Later, the identities and affiliations of all the participants, as well as how they did in the survey responses, was revealed in a series of blog posts. The test was repeated in 2012 and a resource page recording all iterations of the test was created on the Patheos website. In 2015, Libresco ran another Christian/Atheist Ideological Turing Test.

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