---
title: Social Turing Tests
categories:
- culture
- personal
content-tags:
- idea
- justice
- mind
---

Attorneys in [New York][1] and [Austin][2] picked up my [notes on jury duty][3] and sent dozens of their readers this way to review them.  Then the defense attorney tracked me down at work just to ask a few questions about the case as routine followup.

So, I'm going to continue my newfound career in jury consulting to share a proposal [Steve][4] and I cooked up for screening.  Rather than employ testers to consider each candidate, we can employ a social Turing test.  Every participant chats for a set time with another one, then with another, until everyone's been paired with everyone else.  At the close of each session, both parties rate the likelihood their partner was a script designed to impersonate a human.

At the conclusion, everyone is simply rated by how many others guessed they were not a rational human.  Adjusting for candidate groups without enough reasonable people to screen the others and whether it's necessary to seed a few actual scripts are left as exercises for the reader.

   [1]: http://blog.bluestonelawfirm.com/
   [2]: http://blog.austindefense.com/
   [3]: /2006/09/25/juror-842.html
   [4]: http://www.codejitsu.com/
