Essay:Quantifying Openmindedness
From Conservapedia
We quantify intelligence (IQ), academic performance (grades), body weight (pounds or kilograms), running speed, and all sorts of other personal characteristics. But perhaps more useful than any of those numbers would be a measure of openmindedness.
By "openmindness" I mean a genuine willingness to consider the evidence before rejecting an idea. I do not mean tolerance, or a rejection of absolute truth, or skepticism. Openmindness means here what the dictionary says: "receptive to arguments or ideas."[1]
One way to measure openmindedness is to test for close-mindedness, and then take the converse. A subject for our measurement can be asked if he views certain proposals as impossible. By impossible I do not mean mathematically impossible, but so unlikely as to be considered absurd. Belief in impossibility is a sign of close-mindedness, because it reflects the unwillingness of the subject to be "receptive" to the possibility.
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Example Questions and Topics
- Do you resist the possibility that Hollywood values result in significant harm for those who believe in them, and to innocent bystanders?
- Do you think it is impossible that increased gun ownership reduces the rate of crime?
- When President Ronald Reagan told Mr. Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, did you think that it was impossible for the Berlin Wall to be torn down?
- Did you think, or still think, that the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") is impossible?
- Do you think that it is impossible that the Shroud of Turin is authentic?
- Do you think that there must be a material explanation for remarkable homing and migration behavior of birds and butterflies?
- Do you think that it is impossible for the speed of light to have been different in the past?
- Do you think that it is impossible to measure openmindedness?
- Do you think that it is possible that evolution did not occur?
- Do you think that is impossible for the power of 2 in Newtonian gravity, whereby the gravitational force is proportional to 1/r2, to be more precise with an exponent that is slightly different from 2, such as a gravitational force proportional to 1/r2.00000001?
A series of ten such questions can be posed, and one's openmindedness can be scored based on how often they declare something to be impossible and thereby demonstrate a level of being "receptive" to ideas.
Follow-Up Questions
The each topic, a short set of follow-up questions is appropriate:
Have you seriously considered the evidence for this idea?
- 1a. If no, then is that because you have never heard of it?
- 1aa. If if you have never heard of it, then will you seriously consider the evidence?
- 1ab. If you have heard of it, but have never seriously considered the evidence, then on this question you lose a point for lack of openmindedness.
- 2b. If yes, then how much time have you spent reviewing the evidence? What evidence did you look at?
- 2ba. If less than 1 hour, then you lose a point for lack of openmindedness.
- 2bb. If more than 1 hour, then ... [Optional question: When, where, what and how did you review the evidence? If the answers are consistent with your claim of spending more than an hour, then ...] ... you gain a point for openmindedness.
- 2bc. If you have not reviewed the evidence due to lack of time or interest, have you formed an opinion about the idea anyway?
Further Refinements
A more sophisticated approach would be to replace the time threshold (an hour in the above example) with an analog version or formula that converted time spent reviewing the evidence of a new idea into a a variable for openmindedness. For example, the openmindedness variable O could be:
- O = t / 60
where t is the time spent in minutes. O could then be summed over a series of topics, and normalized by dividing it by the number of topics.
