Comment by rainsford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rainsford | Hacker News Reader

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Your reaction is exactly the reason the question was constructed that way. A lot of the available information would lead you to conclude that the provided details were important and that they support a specific option being more likely.

But if you rationally consider the options, it's apparent that option B can't possibly be more likely than option A, regardless of the information presented, because option B is by definition a subset of option A. It is not possible for Linda to fit option B but not option A, so option B can't possibly be more probable.

The fact that it's a leading question designed to promote assumptions is not a flaw; it's the whole point of the experiment. Even intelligent people are supposed to be led to the wrong conclusion because they try to analyze all the available information. But rational people are supposed to recognize that the presented information is irrelevant and that they can pick the right answer even if they don't know anything about Linda.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll mention that I had exactly the same reaction regarding the quality of the question. It was only after some consideration that I realized this may have been intentional on the part of the people conducting the experiment.

Some amount of people probably assume that asking "What's more likely, A, or A and B" intends to ask for a comparison between A^~B and A^B, not simply A and A^B, in which case it would be an error in communication rather than an error in rationality.

The premise of the experiment is akin to considering whether or not people are prone to being swindled by a three card monte con-game.

The premise of the example only demonstrates a susceptibility to a situation where the individual is not expecting to be judged based on technicalities.

Technically, in a three card monte game, on the street, you have no assurance that the dealer is operating the deck with integrity. Technically, on the street, you have no assurance that other players are not collaborating with the dealer.

Does this prove that humans are often innately irrational? Maybe insofar as any other parlour trick does.

The claim that a bystander should know that their own capacity for estimation of the likelihood that Linda's occupation may be bank teller shall be poor, is masked, in terms of relevance to the rest of the context of the presented scenario. A bystander's estimation of feminist alignment is anticipated and intended.

When the bystander chooses option (B), an assertion that they have no insight into whether Linda was a banker or not, suddenly becomes the defining aspect of the test.

So now we've proven that given an unexpected context, a bystander is surprised by a sudden ambush within that context.

While such nuances may be interesting on a much grander scale, in most cases, the experiment is not framed that way, as a design to misdirect the individual, and certainly, the authors of this op-ed article make the same mistake in pointing at the idea that a bystander should be expected to know that they have no way of knowing whether or not Linda might be a bank teller.

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