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Comment by ckuehne | Hacker News Reader

Not only do they seem to lack basic probability skills. They also cannot cite the original material correctly. Kahneman and Tversky tested something else completely. Namely, that people tend to ignore base rates when making probability estimates. From Kahneman's book:

"In one experimental condition, subjects were told that the group from which the descriptions had been drawn consisted of 70 engineers and 30 lawyers. In another condition subjects were told that the group consisted of 30 engineers and 70 lawyerss. [..] In sharp violation of Bayes' rule, the subjects in the two conditions produced essentially the same probability judgements."

There is also a blatant error in the OP article: Answer No. 2 (Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.) is by no means "logically impossible".

EDIT: wording

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'There is also a blatant error in the OP article: Answer No. 2 (Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.) is by no means "logically impossible".'

They meant that it's logically impossible for the probability of A AND B to be higher than the probability of A, since A AND B is a subset of A. She could be feminist, but the probability of being feminist is lower than the 100% probability that she's either a feminist or not.

I am well aware of the point they were trying to make. Or, more precisely, the point Kahneman et al. were trying to make. What I am concerned about is that they, that is, the editors / writers of Vanity Fair, do not understand their mistake. This is somewhat likely given the error they made described by the grandparent comment.

Overall, I find it rather ironic to find such gross errors in an article that sets out to educate the reader about "human error".

I'm going to copy/paste the relevant section:

Then they went around asking people the same question:

Which alternative is more probable?

(1) Linda is a bank teller.

(2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

The vast majority—roughly 85 percent—of the people they asked opted for No. 2, even though No. 2 is logically impossible. (If No. 2 is true, so is No. 1.)

They say: "If No. 2 is true, so is No. 1.", but they omit that the opposite does not hold. Perhaps they thought it was obvious enough.

I think they get it and just left that second part out. They may have worded it poorly (better would be "it is logically impossible that #2 could be the correct answer"), but it was very clear to me when reading the article that the editors meant exactly what you describe.

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