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Comment by FeepingCreature | Hacker News Reader

Right - "assume at the start that the coin is fair - you are free to update the assumption as you go" is a different thing than they said. Usually "assume that" assumptions are meant to hold throughout the question.

As Randall says, "communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness."

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I think the central point here is that «assume that» is fine when working with a math problem, but can kill you in real life.

If you’ve just lost two billion dollars, or killed 200,000 people in a preventable war, no one cares that the assumptions were reasonable.

Right, but the study has nothing to do with this, because the question was not in real life, but about a fictional scenario.

"Assume you jump off a bridge. Would you be dead?"

"No, because I'd change my mind. What, you think I'd jump off a bridge because someone tells me to?"

"No, but I'd rather expect you'd assume it because I tell you, in the context of a hypothetical."

But this is experts we are talking about. There's supposed to be some degree of translation between models and real life. The point of the fallacy is that this translation can be very debatable and restricted in many fields, and that a good observer with decent intuition can beat those models easily.

If this was about a purely intellectual roleplaying game with internal rules there would be no discussion in the first place.

> If this was about a purely intellectual roleplaying game with internal rules there would be no discussion in the first place.

Which is what makes the discussion bullshit. Because if you're starting your experiment with "assume that", that's what you're signalling you're doing.

The point is that in real life problems it's more important to throw away ridiculous "assume that"s than having very neat models.

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