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Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

It tracks with the approximate 70:30 split we inexplicably observe in other seemingly unrelated population-wide metrics, which I suppose makes sense if 30% of people simply lack the ability to reason. That seems more correct than me than "the question is framed poorly" - I've seen far more poorly framed ballot referendums.

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> 30% of people simply lack the ability to reason

While I’m sure it’s more than 0%, seems more likely that somewhere between 0% and 30% don’t feel obligated to give the inquiry anything more than the most cursory glance.

How do incentives align differently with LLMs?

> which I suppose makes sense if 30% of people simply lack the ability to reason

I think it would be better to say that 30% of people either lack the ability to reason (inarguably true in a few cases, though I'd suggest, and hope, an order of magnitude or two less than 30%, as that would be a life-altering mental impairment) or just can't generally be bothered to, or just didn't (because they couldn't be bothered, or because they felt some social pressure to answer quickly rather than taking more than an instant time to think) at the time of being asked this particular question.

An automated system like an LLM to not have this problem. It has no path to turn off or bypass any function that it has, so if it could reason it would.

This is something I have wondered about before: whether AIs are more likely to give wrong answers when you ask a stupid question instead of a sensible one. Speaking personally, I often cannot resist the temptation to give reductio-ad-absurdum answers to particularly ridiculous questions.

If 30% of humans on the internet can't be bothered to make an effort to answer stupid questions correctly, then one would expect AIs to replicate this behaviour. And if humans on the internet sometimes provide sarcastic answers when presented with ridiculous questions, one would expect AIs to replicate this behavior as well.

So you really cannot say they have no incentive to do so. The incentive they have is that they get rewarded for replicating human behaviour.

I don't think 30% of people can't reason. I think 30% of people will fail fairly simple trick questions on any given attempt. That's not at all the same thing.

Some people love riddles and will really concentrate on them and chew them over. Some people are quickly burning through questions and just won't bother thinking it through. "Gotta go to a place, but it's 50 feet away? Walk. Next question, please." Those same people, if they encountered this problem in real life, or if you told them the correct answer was worth a million bucks, would almost certainly get the answer right.

This. The following question is likely to fool a lot of people, too. "I have a rooster named Pat. (Lots of other details so you're likely to forget Pat is a rooster, not a hen). Pat flies to the top of the roof and lays an egg right on the ridge of the roof. Which way will the egg roll?"

But if you omit the details designed to confuse people, they're far less likely to get it wrong: "I have a rooster named Pat. Pat flies to the top of the roof and lays an egg right on the ridge of the roof. Which way will the egg roll?"

It's not about reasoning ability, it's about whether they were paying close attention to your question, or whether their minds were occupied by other concerns and didn't pay attention.

What does “get it wrong” mean for you with this question? Or what is “getting it right” here? If i hear that Pat is a rooster and i understand and retain that information I will look at you like you are dumb for saying such an impossible story. If i don’t i will look at you like you are dumb because how is anyone supposed to know which way will an egg laid on a ridge roll. How are you supposed to even score this?

My interpretation is that Pat is a rooster and he has laid an egg. That's in the question. A normal rooster can't normally lay an egg, but so what, that's completely irrelevant. Maybe Pat is not a normal rooster. Maybe by "lay" an egg, the question meant "put it down carefully". Maybe it's just that the questioner's English is poor and when they said rooster they meant hen.

Exactly this. The question states it as a fact, so why would you go back and point out the inconsistency?

"Getting it right" for this particular trick question means saying "Hey, roosters can't lay eggs". If someone tries to figure out which way the egg will roll then they've missed the trick. In most cases the person's response will tell you whether they caught the trick or not, though in the case of someone who just looks at you like you're dumb and doesn't say anything I will grant that you wouldn't be able to tell until they said something. But their first verbal response would probably reveal whether they saw through the trick question or not.

For me, I would interpret this as being that actually Pat is a hen and the original premise was mistaken. I.e. Pat is not a rooster.

This question is fundamentally different.

The original question used in this example does not contain a logical impossibility. This one does.

Very problematic to think that something's reproductive attributes have to correspond to what gendered noun we call it by.

Tell me you've never done any farming in your life without telling me you've never done any farming in your life. The difference between male and female animals matters, a lot, to farmers (or ranchers). There's a reason the English language has the words cow and bull, sow and boar, ewe and ram, rooster and hen, nanny and billy, mare and stallion, and many more (and has had those words for centuries). And that reason is precisely because of how mammal (and avian) reproduction works. A cow can't do a bull's job, nor vice-versa, if you want to have calves next year, and grow the size of your herd (or sell the extra animals for income). And so, centuries ago, English-speaking farmers who didn't want to spend the extra syllables on words like "male cattle" and "female cattle" came up with handy, short words (one-syllable words for most species, though not goats and horses) to express those distinctions. Because as I mentioned, they matter a lot when you're raising animals.

Some roosters lay eggs.

You might believe there is intrinsic sexual dimorphism among mammals and birds. You might even have overwhelming experimental and scientific evidence that proves it. But ask yourself: is it worth losing your job over?

Some roosters lay eggs.

When you are doing workshops, particularly teaching something that people are "sitting through" rather than engaging with, you see very similar ratios on end of segment assessment multiple choice questions. I mentioned elsewhere that this is the same kind of ratio you see on cookie dialogs (in either direction).

Think basic security (password management, email phishing), H&S etc. I've ran a few of these and as soon as people hear they don't have to get it right a good portion of people just click through (to get to what matters). Nearly 10 years ago I had to make one of my security for engineers tests fail-able with penalty because the front-end team were treating it like it didn't matter - immediately their results effectively matched the backend team, who viewed it as more important.

I talked to an actor a few days ago, who told me he files his self-assessment on the principle "If I don't immediately know the answer, just say no and move on". I talked to a small company director about a year ago whose risk assessments were "copy+paste a previous job and change the last one".

Anyone who has analysed a help desk will know that its common for a good 30+% of tickets to be benign 'didn't reason' tickets.

I think the take-away is that many people bother to reason about their own lives, not some third parties' bullshit questions.

Is this your experience? Do you think 30% of your friends or family members can't answer this question? If not, do you think your friends or family are all better than the general population?

I'd look for explanations elsewhere. This was an online survey done by a company that doesn't specialize in surveys. The results likely include plenty of people who were just messing around, cases of simple miscommunication (e.g., asking a person who doesn't speak English well), misclicks, or not even reaching a human in the first place (no shortage of bots out there).

If you're interested in the user experience, it's this: https://www.reddit.com/r/MySingingMonsters/comments/1dxug04/... - apparently, some annoying ad-like interstitial that many people probably just click through at random.

People often trip up on similar questions, anything to do with simple math. You know when they go out in the street and ask random people if 5 machines can produce 5 parts in 5 minutes, how long will it take for 100 machines.

Unlike the car question, where you can assume the car is at home and so the most probable answer is to drive, with the machines it gets complicated. Since the question doesn't specify if each machine makes one part or if they depend on each other (which is pretty common for parts production). If they are in series and the time to first part is different than time to produce 5 parts, the answer for 100 machines would be the time to produce the first part. Where if each machine is independent and takes 5 minutes to produce single part, the time would be 5 minutes.

You passed the intelligence check and failed the wisdom one.

The key technique in the mathematical method to answer the machine question is "theory of mind".

Theory of mind won’t help you answering this question. It is obviously an underspecified question (at least in any contexts where you are not actively designing/thinking about some specific industrial process). As such theory of mind indicates that the person asking you is either not aware that they are asking an underspecified question, or are out to get you with a trick. In the first case it is better to ask clarifying question. In the second case your choosen answer depend on your temperament. You can play along with them, or answer an intentionally ridiculous answer, or just kick them in the shin to stop them messing with you.

There is nothing “mathematical” about any of this though.

>As such theory of mind indicates that the person asking you is either not aware that they are asking an underspecified question, or are out to get you with a trick.

Context would be key here. If this were a question on a grade school word problem test then just say 100, as it is as specified as it needs to be. If it's a Facebook post that says "We asked 1000 people this and only 1 got it right!" then it's probably some trick question.

If you think it's not specified enough for a grade school question, then I would challenge you to come up with a version that's specified rigorously enough for any sufficiently picky interviewee. (Hint: This is not possible)

>There is nothing “mathematical” about any of this though.

Finding the correct approach to solve a problem specified in English is a mathematical skill.

> If this were a question on a grade school word problem test then just say 100

Let me repeat the question again: "If 5 machines can produce 5 parts in 5 minutes, how long will it take for 100 machines?" Do you think that by adding 95 more machines they will suddenly produce the same 5 parts 95 minutes slower?

What kind of machine have you encountered where buying more of them the ones you already had started working worse?

> then I would challenge you to come up with a version that's specified rigorously enough for any sufficiently picky interviewee.

This is nonsense. The question is under specified. You don't demonstrate that something is underspecified by formulating a different well specified question. You demonstrate it by showing that there are multiple different potentially correct answers, and one can't know which one is the right one without obtaining some information not present in the question.

Let me show you that demonstration. If the machines are for example FDM printers each printing on their own a benchy each, then the correct answer is 5 minutes. The additional printers will just sit idle because you can't divide-and-conquer the process of 3d printing an object.

If the machines are spray paint applying robots, and the parts to be painted are giant girders then it is very well possible that the additional 95 paint guns make the task of painting the 5 girders quasi-instantaneous. Because they would surround the part and be done with 1 squirt of paint from each paint gun. This classic video demonstrates the concept: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vGWoV-8lteA

This is why the question is under specified. Because both 1ms and 5 minutes are possibly correct answers depending on what kind of machine is the "machine". And when that is the case the correct answer is neither 1ms nor 5 minutes, but "please, tell me more. There isn't enough information in the question to answer it."

Note: I'm struggling to imagine a possible machine where the correct answer is 100 minutes. But I'm sure you can tell what kind of machine you were thinking of.

Not sure what you mean by this.

I encourage you to ask a questions so I can figure out what do you not understand.

Let me also simplify my comment: “100 minutes” is not the correct answer to that question.

I'm not getting what you're trying to convey.

It's not theory of mind, it's an understanding of how trick questions are structured and how to answer one. Pretty useless knowledge after high school - no wonder AI companies didn't bother training their models for that

It's not a trick question. It has a simple answer. It's literally impossible to specify a question about real world objects without some degree of prior knowledge about both the contents of the question and the expectation of the questioner coming into play.

The obvious answer here is 100 minutes because it's impossible to perfectly encapsulate every real life factor. What happens if a gamma ray burst destroys the machines? What happens if the machine operators go on strike? Etc, etc. The answer is 100.

There are different kind of statements. Do you mean in a defined time interval or on average? Men are stronger than women. Does that mean there is no woman who is stronger then a man? You can't drive over 50 here. Does that mean it's physically impossible?

Well, these type of questions are looking for intelligent assumptions. Similar to IQ tests, you are supposed to understand patterns and make educated guesses.

Thanks for that info. I was certain it was some janky ultra low or negative reward system that people just click a random answer to get through.

Had to be since their site lists no way to be a tester. In other words their service is a bunch of 7-13 year olds playing some loot box game.

Wonder where that is in the disclaimers.

> Do you think 30% of your friends or family members can't answer this question? If not, do you think your friends or family are all better than the general population?

That actually would be quite feasible. Intelligence seems to be heritable and people will usually find friends that communicate on their level. So it wouldn't be odd for someone who is smarter than the general population to have friends and family who are too.

My friend's and family all tell me they are above average at work, yet most of them will tell me they have coworkers who won't pay enough attention to a question to answer it correctly.

>If not, do you think your friends or family are all better than the general population?

Since most people live in social bubbles that would be a very plausible case, especially on HN.

If you're a college educated developer, with a college educated wife, and smart, well educated children, perhaps yourselves the children of college educated parents, and your social circle/friends are of similar backgrounds, you'd of course be "better than the general population".

What if 30% lack the ability to fill out forms and surveys?

If you suggest bad reasoning, do you think they would actually walk to the car wash and then be surprised the car wasn't there?

Or by reasoning, do you mean something else?

I don't think it's the lack of the ability to reason. The question is by definition a trick question. It's meant to trip you up, like ' "Could God make a burrito so hot that even he couldn't touch it?" Or "what do cows drink?" or "a plane crashes and 89 people died. Where were the survivors buried?"

I've seen plenty of smart people trip up or get these wrong simply because it's a random question, there's no stakes, and so there's no need to think too deeply about it. If you pause and say "are you sure?" I'm sure most of that 70% would be like "ohhh" and facepalm.

> which I suppose makes sense if 30% of people simply lack the ability to reason

You can't really infer that from survey data, and particularly from this question. A few criticisms that I came up with off the top of my head:

- What if the number were actually 60% but half guessed right and half guessed wrong?

- Assuming the 30% is a failure of reasoning, it's possible that those 30% were lacking reason at that moment and it's not a general trend. How many times have you just blanked on a question that's really easy to answer?

- A larger percentage than you expected maybe never went to a car wash or don't know what one is?

- Language barrier that leaked through vetting? (Would be a small %, granted)

- Other obvious things like a fraction will have lied just because it's funny, were suspicious, weren't paying attention and just clicked a button without reading the question.

I do agree that the question isn't framed particularly badly, however. I'm just focusing on cognitive impairment, which I don't think is necessarily true all of the time.

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