Unequally Yoked
There’s more quantitative Turing analysis to come, but, in the meantime, you may want to check out two posts Eve Tushnet has written on her experience reading the entries and writing her own.
Ideological Turing Test Results–Sin makes me stupid!
This is a thing where atheists and Christians attempt to answer questions both from their own POV/beliefs and from the “other side.” The stated objective, per Leah, is to give “a nice way to see how well both sides understand how the other team thinks.” Participating was a fascinating experience… and I really dislike both of my answers, Catholic and atheist, although for different reasons.
Catholic first. I wrote this one first, and the difficulty I had writing it should have been a hint that I understood the whole exercise a lot less than I thought I did. It was really tough to answer questions about subjects so important to me without using the examples and language I would use ordinarily (because I didn’t want to make my real identity obvious)…
Does this count as preferring the tinsel?
So now I’m revisiting all of the answers in Leah’s Ideological Turing Test in order to see which ones I straight-up liked. Keep in mind that I strongly disliked both of my own answers! So far the only one I’ve really liked and whose author I wanted to know better is this fake atheist.
Well, actually, there were many other entries (both real and fake, and both atheist and Christian) which had points I found intriguing but which didn’t develop those points. In a real conversation I would have asked about some of that stuff, and we would have been able to engage more fully, I hope…
Other participants are very welcome to share their strategies. For example, although I didn’t play this year, last time around I wrote my Christian answer as though I were still me, but I believed in God, which turned out to sound pretty plausibly Christian. I’d love to know other people’s approaches.
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