Alex Turner introduced an exercise to test subjects’ ability to notice falsehoods: change factual statements in Wikipedia articles, hand the edited articles to subjects and see whether they notice the modifications.

I’ve spent a few hours making such modifications and testing the articles on my friend group. You can find the articles here. I describe my observations and thoughts below. The bottom line: it is hard to come up with good modifications / articles to modify, and this is the biggest crux for me.

The concept

Alex Turner explains the idea well here. The post is short, so I'm just copying it here:

Rationality exercise: Take a set of Wikipedia articles on topics which trainees are somewhat familiar with, and then randomly select a small number of claims to negate (negating the immediate context as well, so that you can't just syntactically discover which claims were negated).

For [...]

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Outline:

(00:38) The concept

(02:14) Features of good modifications

(04:44) Examples

(05:40) Takeaways and thoughts

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.