The core idea sounds very interesting: Increasing rationality likely has effects which can be generalized, therefore having a measure could help evaluate wider social outreach causes.
Defining intelligence could be an AI-complete problem, but I think the problem is complicated enough as a simple factor analysis (i. e. even without knowing what we’re talking about :). I think estimating impact once we know the increase in any measure of rationality is the easier part of the problem—for ex. knowing how much promoting long-termist thinking increases support for AI regulation, we’re only a few steps from getting the QALY. The harder part for people starting out in social outreach might be to estimate how many people they can get on board of thinking more long-termistically with their specific intervention. So I think it might be very useful to put together a list of all attempts to calculate the impact of various social outreach strategies for anyone who’s considering a new one to be able to find some reference points because the hardest estimates here also seem to be the most important (e. g. the probability Robert Wright would decrease oversuspicion between powers). My intuition tells me differences in attitudes are something intuition could predict quite well, so the wisdom of the crowd could work well here. The best source I found when I tried to search whether someone tried to put changing society into numbers recently is this article by The Sentience Institute.
Also, this post adds some evidence based intervention suggestions to your list.
The core idea sounds very interesting: Increasing rationality likely has effects which can be generalized, therefore having a measure could help evaluate wider social outreach causes.
Defining intelligence could be an AI-complete problem, but I think the problem is complicated enough as a simple factor analysis (i. e. even without knowing what we’re talking about :). I think estimating impact once we know the increase in any measure of rationality is the easier part of the problem—for ex. knowing how much promoting long-termist thinking increases support for AI regulation, we’re only a few steps from getting the QALY. The harder part for people starting out in social outreach might be to estimate how many people they can get on board of thinking more long-termistically with their specific intervention.
So I think it might be very useful to put together a list of all attempts to calculate the impact of various social outreach strategies for anyone who’s considering a new one to be able to find some reference points because the hardest estimates here also seem to be the most important (e. g. the probability Robert Wright would decrease oversuspicion between powers). My intuition tells me differences in attitudes are something intuition could predict quite well, so the wisdom of the crowd could work well here.
The best source I found when I tried to search whether someone tried to put changing society into numbers recently is this article by The Sentience Institute.
Also, this post adds some evidence based intervention suggestions to your list.