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From the New York Times:
The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence
Gray Matter
By DAVID Z. HAMBRICK and ALEXANDER P. BURGOYNE SEPT. 16, 2016ARE you intelligent — or rational? The question may sound redundant, but in recent years researchers have demonstrated just how distinct those two cognitive attributes actually are.
It all started in the early 1970s, when the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky conducted an influential series of experiments showing that all of us, even highly intelligent people, are prone to irrationality.
Across a wide range of scenarios, the experiments revealed, people tend to make decisions based on intuition rather than reason.
In one study, Professors Kahneman and Tversky had people read the following personality sketch for a woman named Linda: “Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.”
Then they asked the subjects which was more probable: (A) Linda is a bank teller or (B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. Eighty-five percent of the subjects chose B, even though logically speaking, A is more probable. (All feminist bank tellers are bank tellers, though some bank tellers may not be feminists.)
In the Linda problem, we fall prey to the conjunction fallacy — the belief that the co-occurrence of two events is more likely than the occurrence of one of the events.
An alternative explanation is that readers assume that the authors wouldn’t be wasting their time with what would be irrelevant details if Linda isn’t a feminist. If you started to read a novel full of pointless trivia that wasn’t tied into anything else, you’d soon put it aside.
I reviewed in Taki’s Magazine Kahneman’s bestseller. I wrote in 2012,
As con men, conjurors, and comedians demonstrated long before Kahneman, most people trust in the speaker’s good faith. They play along and try to guess what is being implied. So it’s easy to pull the rug out from under us.
Back to the NYT:
But starting in the late 1990s, researchers began to add a significant wrinkle to that view. As the psychologist Keith Stanovich and others observed, even the Kahneman and Tversky data show that some people are highly rational. In other words, there are individual differences in rationality, even if we all face cognitive challenges in being rational. So who are these more rational people? Presumably, the more intelligent people, right?
Wrong. In a series of studies, Professor Stanovich and colleagues had large samples of subjects (usually several hundred) complete judgment tests like the Linda problem, as well as an I.Q. test. The major finding was that irrationality — or what Professor Stanovich called “dysrationalia” — correlates relatively weakly with I.Q. A person with a high I.Q. is about as likely to suffer from dysrationalia as a person with a low I.Q. In a 2008 study, Professor Stanovich and colleagues gave subjects the Linda problem and found that those with a high I.Q. were, if anything, more prone to the conjunction fallacy.
People with high IQs tend to be better at reading novels and making sense out of the patterns imposed by the author’s choice of details than people with low IQs.
Here’s my prediction: all else being equal, more women than men would fall for the famous Linda trick question because women are less Aspergery on average.
Based on this evidence, Professor Stanovich and colleagues have introduced the concept of the rationality quotient, or R.Q. If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.
This sounds like a test of nerdishness.
Also, higher IQ people probably tend to be more trusting — high IQ environments tend to be more honest and cooperative (e.g., I noticed when I got to Rice U. that I could accidentally leave valuables, like calculators and cameras, out and not have them stolen) — and many of Kahneman’s trick questions work to trip up the trusting.
I bet the correlation between IQ and doing well on Kahneman’s puzzles goes up when the subjects are told that these are trick questions.
There is also now evidence that rationality, unlike intelligence, can be improved through training.
Sure, because what they are calling “rationality” is more like becoming harder to fool with common tricks.
For example, if you read 20 detective novels in a row, you’d probably be less likely to fall for red herring distractions in the 21st detective novel.
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Everyone if possible should learn to be so nerdish. Then they can do anything they want, and the nerdish program running in the background will help.
Or does learning to be nerdish kill some sort of creativity that isn’t just noise?
This sounds like something ripe for manipulation and a speaking tour. Smells like that fraud Duckworth and “grit.”
It also sounds ripe for the inclusion of the researcher’s biases. So we’re back to square one. In this case, the test discriminates against smart people, just as the rest of PC society does.
I don’t think it ought to be mocked as “nerdish.” Rationality is what separates us from the frothing, raving, group-thinking high-IQ sociopaths in the corridors of power.
Hlade’s Law:
If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person — they will find an easier way to do it.
Corollaries:
1. They’ll use WD-40.
2. A bigger can works faster.
4. Duct tape!
I don’t get it. Why isn’t she more likely to be a feminist bank teller?
The stuff about her background is extraneous information that biases the test subject to think she is a feminist, but whatever the probability that she is one, the probability that she a feminist and is ALSO a bank teller is lower than the probability that she is simply a bank teller. For that matter she is more also likely to be just a feminist than she is both a feminist AND a bank teller.Replies: @ben tillman, @Jus' Sayin'..., @namae nanka
Both questions ask whether she's likely to be a bank teller. Any question that adds other conditions to her status is less likely to be true. Condition A is always more likely than A + B, A + C, etc.Replies: @Harry Baldwin
The problem is that in real world situations we calculate risks not merely on statistical probability, but how it may directly affect us in our real world lives. What Tversky and Kahneman succeeded in doing was to show how much our personal interests can affect our calculation of probabilities, as in terms of risk/reward. The RQ stuff is too abstract, in my opinion, to have any real world validity.Replies: @CAL
"which is more likely, that she is JUST a bank teller, or is she a feminist bank teller?"
Instead, the people who designed the test, who are either autistic or deceptive, mean:
"which is more likely, that she is a bank teller whether she is a feminist or not, or that she is a bank teller and a feminist?"
Since the first option includes the second this is a pointless question, like "what was the color of Napoleon's white horse?"
In reality the first interpretation, the non-autistic one, is perfectly correct since it is what normal human beings would mean if they asked such a question.Replies: @Corvinus, @melendwyr
B) Linda is a teller and done told the bank, then
C) Oh snap, gurrrrl! You a feminist!
Q.E.D.
Setting all that aside, responses to the the second block quote above are hardly exemplars of irrationality. Better examples of irrationality are the people in this thread trying to "explain" the reason why a) is the correct answer, which it may not be.
This reminds me of nothing so much as an episode of The Office where Michael Scott is trying to fight stereotypes:
"Close your eyes. Picture a convict. What's he wearing? Nothing special. Baseball cap on backwards. Baggy pants. He says something ordinary, like 'Yo, that's shizzle.' Okay, now slowly open your eyes again. Who were you picturing? A black man? Wrong. That was a white woman. Surprised? Well, shame on you."Replies: @BB753
If the B answer was more like “Linda is a bank teller and is CEO of multiple feminist nonprofits” then maybe this would make more sense.
Nutters being involved in various side projects outside of work is something I’ve seen in real life, so the original B answer seems likely to me.
Since RQ correlates with both high and low IQ, it seems more like a way to say that low IQ people are “rational”, therefore it really is evil whites keeping blacks down.
Here is a good question for their test:
Which is more probable? Black dysfunction is caused by A) a massive global conspiracy by white people to keep black people poor, because they just hate the color of their skin B) low IQ
The point is not that B is unlikely. It's that it's less likely than A. If you can't understand that then, well, don't look down too much on blacks.
This looks like an attack on Noticing. People’s characteristics tend to conjoin for a reason; it’s not irrational to assume that a man with an IQ of 145 probably likes to play chess, even if by the laws of probability that’s less likely than just having an IQ of 145.
You deny that systematic cognitive biases exist?
http://members.calbar.ca.gov/fal/Member/Detail/183617
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.politics.socialism.trotsky/74Cs3Q1guh0Replies: @Stephen R. Diamond
The researchers are stupid. Aside of the psychometric value of the feminist test, basically what they are doing is putting first one pattern recognition test and then other. Then they claim that one pattern recognition test measures intelligence and the other propensity to use intelligence.
The opposite could be claimed too. A person performing bad at IQ test could claim that the IQ test is the rationality test and that the other is the intelligence one, saying that he did wrong at progressive matrix because he was being too irrational, but he is still intelligent because he realized the other pattern.
Succinctly: both tests are about pattern recognition, both measure the same and if the fault to realize one pattern is blamed on not using all intelligence in that moment or in general, there is no reason any fault on whatever pattern recognition test can’t be blamed on the same.
MSM Conclusion: blacks are low IQ because they are “diffuse”
As an uncannily “rational” person myself, I can tell you it’s a lonely existence.
I am immune to nearly all forms of persuasion. No sort of advertising or mob frenzy or group-think has any influence over me. I have the inveterate bad habit of seeing only facts (including the psychological comportment of others, which is itself a “fact” that must be weighed along with the rest). Most other people seem like perpetual daydreamers and liars to me, which is all the more frustrating because they are in a sense invincibly ignorant in their lying—they do not realize that they are acting from such involved and egotistic motives. I have no ego of my own, so I find the timeless pageantry to be quite tiresome. I am forever fated to be outside the herd. I could not rejoin it even if I wanted to.
Therein we obtain a clue as to why most people are so irrational. That irrationality of which the author speaks is precisely the “virtue” that ordinary people possess which allows them to maintain their egos (and therefore their courage) against the fact-world which is constantly threatening to destroy it, and also to form those inordinate bonds with one another that are the necessary foundations of friendships, families, and tribes. They are gregarious animals with the brains and sensoria geared to that end; they will be what they will be. “Rationality” is of very little use to them and would oftentimes entail doing violence against everything they hold most dear.
Gregariousness is a product of the material brain, rationality of the immaterial mind. The more rational a man is, the more angelic and unearthly he becomes. No longer a herd animal, he becomes a solitary predator—a lonely eagle on the heights, a leopard stalking through the reeds. The rational man has joys, disappointments, and dangers that the gregarious man knows not of, but it is only a a very few who are called to such a path. The great bulk of mankind will always be irrational—and therefore human.
I had a friend who had a nervous breakdown, and he was complaining about this and that, and I said, "from the get-go, you have a tough life, because you have a high IQ. Think about it. Everything you see as self-evident, you have to convince others to be so. When you advise them against doing something stupid, and they do it anyway, and it blows up in their face as you predicted, how fun is it for them to tell you all about it? How fun is it to listen to? And they'll do it again and again. All the fucking time. Contradicting your friends takes it's toll. They become afraid of you, and/or you get tired of them, so you have to find new friends after a while.
Or, you can remain silent while they share their plans you know will fail, creating anxiety if you give a shit about them, and probably is unhealthy if you try to act like you don't. You have a high IQ, but what's really great about it in a social setting? It sucks ass, doesn't it? You have to lie, or you'll eventually have to find new friends. And that's why you had your nervous breakdown. You're fighting against what's shitty about being smart. You want relationships like people who aren't very smart have.
You can't. Get used to it."
The fundamental contradiction of human nature described in The Republic is that the philosopher-king no longer wants to re-enter the cave, and the cave-dwellers would disbelieve and even kill him if he did -- yet the just society cannot exist unless this happens.Replies: @Randal, @Desiderius
For people who claim IQ is nonsense, they sure seem to want to come up with derivatives of it. EQ, now RQ…
This was titled The Mezzanine, and it was a minor literary sensation.
oh these folks(credentialed phd) do narrative not “science”
(C) Linda is an SJW who will never marry nor have children and will become a bitter spinster as a result.
I think the test discriminates against high trust, honest people, just as the rest of PC society does.
You deny that idiopathic ethical biases exist?
http://members.calbar.ca.gov/fal/Member/Detail/183617
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.politics.socialism.trotsky/74Cs3Q1guh0
I am immune to nearly all forms of persuasion. No sort of advertising or mob frenzy or group-think has any influence over me. I have the inveterate bad habit of seeing only facts (including the psychological comportment of others, which is itself a "fact" that must be weighed along with the rest). Most other people seem like perpetual daydreamers and liars to me, which is all the more frustrating because they are in a sense invincibly ignorant in their lying---they do not realize that they are acting from such involved and egotistic motives. I have no ego of my own, so I find the timeless pageantry to be quite tiresome. I am forever fated to be outside the herd. I could not rejoin it even if I wanted to.
Therein we obtain a clue as to why most people are so irrational. That irrationality of which the author speaks is precisely the "virtue" that ordinary people possess which allows them to maintain their egos (and therefore their courage) against the fact-world which is constantly threatening to destroy it, and also to form those inordinate bonds with one another that are the necessary foundations of friendships, families, and tribes. They are gregarious animals with the brains and sensoria geared to that end; they will be what they will be. "Rationality" is of very little use to them and would oftentimes entail doing violence against everything they hold most dear.
Gregariousness is a product of the material brain, rationality of the immaterial mind. The more rational a man is, the more angelic and unearthly he becomes. No longer a herd animal, he becomes a solitary predator---a lonely eagle on the heights, a leopard stalking through the reeds. The rational man has joys, disappointments, and dangers that the gregarious man knows not of, but it is only a a very few who are called to such a path. The great bulk of mankind will always be irrational---and therefore human.Replies: @Neil Templeton, @Anonymous, @Dr. X, @Sean, @Ivan K.
It’s curious that rational man exists. Given your description, it doesn’t appear to be a net useful trait.
Now the author of The Mezzanine, Updikean novelist Nicholson Baker, has an essay out about his year as a substitute teacher in high school. His big complaint about schooling is that it tries to teach kids concepts, like mammal vs. reptile, rather than encourage kids to get lost in the infinite details of the world.
It's reminiscent of an old argument in the literary columns between Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh. Huxley argued that education made people less sensitive to the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of nature, while Waugh argued that without concepts to discriminate among details, you'd find the world confusing and boring.
It’s reminiscent of an old argument in the literary columns between Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh. Huxley argued that education made people less sensitive to the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of nature, while Waugh argued that without concepts to discriminate among details, you’d find the world confusing and boring.
The relevant question is: does she support bank policies that make her more attractive? If not, she’s trans.
Then they asked the subjects which was more probable: (A) Linda is a bank teller or (B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. Eighty-five percent of the subjects chose B, even though logically speaking, A is more probable. (All feminist bank tellers are bank tellers, though some bank tellers may not be feminists.)
Who were these subjects? Did this researcher pull his pool from the humanities building at a college? I suspect sampling problems here, to say the least.
Like Glenn Beck, I’m going to refer to a book I just started reading, in this case Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford. Crawford makes the point that people who do the kind of work that requires that they understand and accept reality, such as mechanics, carpenters and electricians, are more likely to be rational than those who work in the purely intellectual realm, such as academics, politicians, and bureaucrats. The latter may be more intelligent (as measured by IQ) but can get away with being less rational.
Students headed off to college fill their applications with box-checking activities as if mindless drones, then the repeat the same in college, accumulate credentials that appear to be no more than an attendance record, and rest on these laurels as if signifying knowledge, experience, and achievement--and navigate life as if 'doing stuff' means accomplishment. Activity for the sake of activity...
OT: Steve – any thoughts about Hughie and Tony Rodham? Seems like their foibles are fair game in this election….
If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person -- they will find an easier way to do it.
Corollaries:
1. They'll use WD-40.
2. A bigger can works faster.Replies: @Ivy, @Anonym, @anon
3. Get a bigger hammer.
4. Duct tape!
Well, yeah, that was kind of my whole point. Rationality is not very useful when it comes to living the life of the flesh, which is the only kind of life most people understand or aspire to. To paraphrase George Bailey, it is the normal people who do most of the working and paying and living and dying on this planet. How do they manage it, since they are not geniuses, or philosophers, or noblemen? Well, the short answer is, because the instincts and impulses of the flesh, combined with the collating, attachment-forming power of the gregarious brain, is more than sufficient to allow life to go on.
But rationality is not only necessary but essential if one wants to understand metaphysical truths, to ascend to Heaven to live the divine life eternally with God. Normal human flesh in this instance is something that must be overcome. The spirit wars against the flesh and the flesh against the spirit. I would venture a guess that even the vast majority of those who make it to Heaven only get their first real taste of rationality in Purgatory, when they are divested of the mortal coil and no longer have their bodies to temp and distract them.
That's not rational.Replies: @Charles Erwin Wilson
You'd better have pretty substantial empirical evidence for your claim to be rational. You sound like just another emotional ape.
you’re confused, But not so horribly- I know you are creating a situation to think. You and I are lucky that we have a spouse that loves us, and kids that love us. But, what about the rest of the world? Good night, I am toast.
Fear is a big factor. Liberals get more irrational the more they fear the implications of an idea. Fear of course of losing your job or social standing. There is also competitivenes. They fear, resist the logic of another school of thought. Do not want to concede they are wrong.
In most people’s minds their question asks whether she’s most likely to be just a bank teller or both a teller and a feminist, as a binary proposition. So, essentially, the question asks whether she is a feminist. 85% of people expect feminism from a person “deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and [who] also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” Those people expect correctly.
This seems to prove the question wasn’t very well executed, given most people’s use of language.
While I was reading this word problem about Linda for some reason I thought I was going to be asked to guess her weight, and I was going to say three hundred pounds.
Okay, try this: (2 x 3) + green =
a) 6
b) green 6
c) the length of Pepe’s penis
The test doesn’t really measure anything, except the human tendency to take all available data and put it into a satisfying pattern.
As far as that goes, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop; why is the NYT telling me about RQ if they are not getting ready to tell me that many low IQ persons have RQ’s that are off the charts? They do not appear to have answered that question.
It’s certainly true that people are biased for inclusive pattern seeking. It’s also true that people seeks patterns that are satisfying, rationally, aesthetically and even emotionally and morally. I find this observation to be underwhelming.
Sorry, Steve, you’re wrong here, having been led astray by reading popular accounts of the work of Tversky and Kahneman rather than getting down into the technical details. They controlled their experiments extremely well, and fully deserved the Nobel Prize that Kahneman was awarded after Tversky had died. They were very careful about setting things up in such a way that most people did not feel they had been tricked, but rather, when shown their error, agreed that they had made a genuine mistake. And the cognitive biases are reproducible and demonstrably dysfunctional in a way that “falling for trick questions” would not be.
They were so surprised by the original “Linda” result that they tried to knock it down in every way, but it is very robust, as are many similar results of theirs. The forms of irrationality that people display are both much more predictable, and much more irrational, than uninformed people suppose.
I’ll just be completely frank and admit I don’t understand the Linda question at all. I cannot figure out why one is objectively more likely than the other.
Is it because one possibility refers to a single variable and the other refers to two variables? So the likelihood is greater that “Linda” matches one variable than that she matches two variables? The other information is just intended to throw you off? Am I reading that right?
If that’s it, then there are only two types of people who’d immediately get the right answer: Stupid people who get the right answer by chance, and smart people who are ridiculously good at math and habitually approach ordinary mental tasks with a level of abstraction that tends to annoy friends and family members. I’ll go out further on a limb and bet that at least 75 percent of the “smart” people who get the right answer are fluent in at least one major programming language and have probably been employed as computer programmers at some point in their lives.
But maybe that’s just me being irrational? 🙂
In other words: Yeah, a test for nerdishness. And like Steve, I bet the smart people do a lot better when you give them a hint in advance that this is a trick question.
I’m also not convinced that the “Linda” question is a good demonstration of irrationality except in a very narrow academic sense. Isn’t it a mark of smart folks that they generally try to integrate multiple types of information in order to come up with an answer? Would you ever describe such a person as “irrational” in the ordinary, conversational sense of the term?
If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person -- they will find an easier way to do it.
Corollaries:
1. They'll use WD-40.
2. A bigger can works faster.Replies: @Ivy, @Anonym, @anon
Note to self: never buy anything from a guy called Hlade.
Nutters being involved in various side projects outside of work is something I've seen in real life, so the original B answer seems likely to me.
Since RQ correlates with both high and low IQ, it seems more like a way to say that low IQ people are "rational", therefore it really is evil whites keeping blacks down.
Here is a good question for their test:
Which is more probable? Black dysfunction is caused by A) a massive global conspiracy by white people to keep black people poor, because they just hate the color of their skin B) low IQReplies: @Warner, @AndrewR
The way this question alone is answered concerns about 60% of American domestic policy. Economics, education down to zoning, housing, loans.
This Linda problem has been supplemented by innumerable others, carefully checking just the hypothoses Sailer glibly offers.
http://members.calbar.ca.gov/fal/Member/Detail/183617
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.politics.socialism.trotsky/74Cs3Q1guh0Replies: @Stephen R. Diamond
Why not provide your real name so we can see what goods the capitalist state has on you?
They were so surprised by the original "Linda" result that they tried to knock it down in every way, but it is very robust, as are many similar results of theirs. The forms of irrationality that people display are both much more predictable, and much more irrational, than uninformed people suppose.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Neil Templeton, @Desiderius, @guest
Sorry, but what’s irrational about supposing that an author is including details about a character for a reason?
But in direct answer to your question, you've presented no account of what that supposed reason is. As it stands, you're just handwaving.
You're probably right that individuals doing well on this sort of rationality test are more aspergery. Well, aspyoids are more capable of certain forms of rationality.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Stephen R. Diamond
It's funny when you give puzzles like this to a math class, and ask them to estimate probabilities, and then make a Venn diagram and ask them to fill in the probabilities of all the atomic conjunctions, and their numbers turn out to imply negative probabilities for certain conjunctions.
Many more details on how well-established and non-tricky this is here;
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jj/conjunction_controversy_or_how_they_nail_it_down/Replies: @Steve Sailer
I don't understand why you are so negative on Kahnemann, who admits in his book that stereotyping based on noticing is logically valid. He is your ally, not your enemy.
Also, most people posting here don't understand the distinction between intelligence and rationality being made by these researchers. It is entirely valid and consistent with an iSteve-y worldview. I think the whole "Kahnemann is a Jew" angle messes up people's brains, like rejecting relativity because of Einstein. It's almost like they are smart but irrational or something!Replies: @Anonymous
O.T.:Things are getting crude and rude in alt land. It seems y’all are smelling the end of Trump, as the birther thing blows up in his mug.
This is why China is successful. Most of the top dogs have an engineering background. In the US, it’s lawyers.
No, “we” don’t.
OT, Brooks is positioning himself for a Trump win. He mildly rebukes Teh Genius while lecturing young blacks not to participate in national anthem protests.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/opinion/the-uses-of-patriotism.html
The problem with regarding rationality as a trait is that no general factor of rationality has been discovered. Certain kinds of rationality have been shown to be largely independent of intelligence, but that doesn’t mean that they cluster together. They are (probably) largely independent of each other as well.
Living in academia, they must find an inverse correlation between rationality and intelligence. Probably because academics usually deal in theory, which explains why they do poorly in Real Life and hide in academia.
In the Real World, highly intelligent people have to solve real hands on problems and are therefore likely to be more rational. Whereas, in the bubble world of academic settings, rational behaviors are declasse and unintellectual. I’m sure most people find it amusing to see snobs at places like Starbucks claiming they drink espresso or cappuccinos and turn their noses up at such lowly things as Dunkin Donuts coffee. This may be irrational, but an entire franchise has formed to cater to these elitist pretensions.
The real snobs get their coffee at local shops with fair trade products.
Calling Starbucks (at this point a symbol of standard suburban America) snobby is like calling Olive Garden snobby.
Yeah it’s really messed up how much things could be improved if we just admitted there were average differences between groups.
This is a good point, since in 99% of movies and books, if a character detail is revealed, it’s because it is relevant.
Caitlyn is well over 6-feet tall, ruggedly built, played college football, is still very athletic for someone in their late 60s, and has been married to three different women.
What is more probable: that Caitlyn is A) a woman or B) a tranny born as Bruce Jenner, who won gold in the decathlon in the 1976 Olympics?
85% of respondents answered ‘B’, proving that most people are irrational transphobes, because the answer is obviously ‘A’. The probability of someone being a woman is much greater than that of someone being an Olympic gold medalist in decathlon.
I didn't realize that the Linda story was part of Tversky and Kahnemann's work on probability as it pertains to risk, which is where I had heard about it before. That being the case, we can rephrase it:
You go to a bar and meet 31 year old Linda. Over the course of a few drinks, she discusses her sex life, her enjoyment of casual sex, and the kinds of things she likes to do sexually to please her partner. There is a 1/20 chance that you will get an STD if you have sex with her. There is a 9/10 chance that you will have enjoyable sex with her.
The probability that you will have enjoyable sex with her is higher than the probability that you will have enjoyable sex with her and also contract an STD. Do you have sex with her?
It's really that simple, and that dumb.Replies: @donut
Let me give a simpler example. There is a 50% probability that I am married. There is also a 50% probability that I am a bank teller. There is therefore only a 25% probability that I am both married AND that I am also a bank teller.
The stuff about her background is extraneous information that biases the test subject to think she is a feminist, but whatever the probability that she is one, the probability that she a feminist and is ALSO a bank teller is lower than the probability that she is simply a bank teller. For that matter she is more also likely to be just a feminist than she is both a feminist AND a bank teller.
As the other commenter pointed out, this was only a single experiment establishing the conjunction bias.
But in direct answer to your question, you’ve presented no account of what that supposed reason is. As it stands, you’re just handwaving.
You’re probably right that individuals doing well on this sort of rationality test are more aspergery. Well, aspyoids are more capable of certain forms of rationality.
I wonder how far back it could be traced?
There's a great scene in the biography of Robert Heinlein where in 1941 he hosts perhaps the first national sci-fi fan convention. He's supposed to be there to receive the award, but he takes over the host duties, using his officer and a gentleman persona to get all these awkward nerds feeling comfortable and talking to each other. At the end of the weekend he gives a speech telling all these socially isolated young men that they are going to lead the world into the future.
And they kind of did.Replies: @Neil Templeton
I’ll probably skip Purgatory and go straight to Hell. Maybe we can meet there to discuss this at our leisure.
If it were an “author” and a “character” and one were trying to imaginatively anticipate the plot of a story, that would be one thing. But this was much more technical and better controlled than that. The “Linda is a bank teller” and “Linda is a bank teller and a feminist” were just 2 of a much larger number of statements, which were requested to be sorted by likelihood; choices were presented in such a way that there would be no tendency to misread “Linda is a bank teller” as “Linda is a bank teller and not a feminist”, which would be a possible failure mode if the choices were presented in a less careful fashion. Similar tests were conducted where people were asked to estimate probabilities, and the “conjunction fallacy” errors were ubiquitous and gross. I think they were robust under clarifications like using the “both…and…” construction rather than just “and”.
It’s funny when you give puzzles like this to a math class, and ask them to estimate probabilities, and then make a Venn diagram and ask them to fill in the probabilities of all the atomic conjunctions, and their numbers turn out to imply negative probabilities for certain conjunctions.
Many more details on how well-established and non-tricky this is here;
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jj/conjunction_controversy_or_how_they_nail_it_down/
But in direct answer to your question, you've presented no account of what that supposed reason is. As it stands, you're just handwaving.
You're probably right that individuals doing well on this sort of rationality test are more aspergery. Well, aspyoids are more capable of certain forms of rationality.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Stephen R. Diamond
As I’ve been saying since the 1990s, Nerd Lib is one of the biggest and certainly most unexpected cultural changes of my lifetime.
I wonder how far back it could be traced?
There’s a great scene in the biography of Robert Heinlein where in 1941 he hosts perhaps the first national sci-fi fan convention. He’s supposed to be there to receive the award, but he takes over the host duties, using his officer and a gentleman persona to get all these awkward nerds feeling comfortable and talking to each other. At the end of the weekend he gives a speech telling all these socially isolated young men that they are going to lead the world into the future.
And they kind of did.
But in direct answer to your question, you've presented no account of what that supposed reason is. As it stands, you're just handwaving.
You're probably right that individuals doing well on this sort of rationality test are more aspergery. Well, aspyoids are more capable of certain forms of rationality.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Stephen R. Diamond
To be more precise on your lack of an account:
So, you presume the subject is thinking “the point of these details is that she’s a feminist.” Why would an intelligent person assume that the author is trying to make a point in a test question? This would be a sign not of irrationality but of genuine stupidity. [Recall that the ability to decontextualize is a major part of the Flynn Effect.]
(A) Linda is a bank teller or (B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
Even having read the comments claiming robustness, reproduction, etc…. It’s hard not to explain the result as (A) being interpreted as “Linda is a bank teller and not active in the feminist movement”
Is it because one possibility refers to a single variable and the other refers to two variables? So the likelihood is greater that "Linda" matches one variable than that she matches two variables? The other information is just intended to throw you off? Am I reading that right?
If that's it, then there are only two types of people who'd immediately get the right answer: Stupid people who get the right answer by chance, and smart people who are ridiculously good at math and habitually approach ordinary mental tasks with a level of abstraction that tends to annoy friends and family members. I'll go out further on a limb and bet that at least 75 percent of the "smart" people who get the right answer are fluent in at least one major programming language and have probably been employed as computer programmers at some point in their lives.
But maybe that's just me being irrational? :)
In other words: Yeah, a test for nerdishness. And like Steve, I bet the smart people do a lot better when you give them a hint in advance that this is a trick question.
I'm also not convinced that the "Linda" question is a good demonstration of irrationality except in a very narrow academic sense. Isn't it a mark of smart folks that they generally try to integrate multiple types of information in order to come up with an answer? Would you ever describe such a person as "irrational" in the ordinary, conversational sense of the term?Replies: @Stephen R. Diamond, @S. anonyia
This comment and at least one other helps refute Steve’s claim that its all a magic trick.
I'm aware that some of Steve's commenters might take exception to the idea that they could have high IQs yet still be prone to "irrational" thinking, but it's no skin off my back. It's pretty hard to convince yourself you're some kind of cognitive ubermensch when they keep sticking you in classes where the guy the next seat over has trouble reading -- and he still does about as well as you do on the tests.
I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea that I'm both dumb AND irrational. Heck, it would explain a lot, to tell you the truth.
Total sleight of hand. Kahneman focuses on her personality (95%+ likelihood of being feminist) and then introduces a job that she’s got about a 2% probability of having. She’s way more likely to be a feminist bank teller than a non-feminist bank teller, and only a tiny fraction more likely to be a bank teller in general than a feminist bank teller.
So what is more germane to Linda? that she is a feminist or a bank teller? The background provides the answer. This is Uri Geller crap. Totally beneath serious academics. I can’t believe people are still impressed by these tricks.
should have also included, that our HS team, an underdog team, lost, 7-56 tonight ); But, we all did say positive things to the team: we won, statewide, in the penultimate tournament: we have the HIGHEST SAT’S/ACT’s in the State. Boom. Smart is funnier/winningest in HS football.
It's funny when you give puzzles like this to a math class, and ask them to estimate probabilities, and then make a Venn diagram and ask them to fill in the probabilities of all the atomic conjunctions, and their numbers turn out to imply negative probabilities for certain conjunctions.
Many more details on how well-established and non-tricky this is here;
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jj/conjunction_controversy_or_how_they_nail_it_down/Replies: @Steve Sailer
The funny thing is how aspergery Kahneman is that he lacks enough of a theory of mind about other people to recognize what’s going on with his Linda question.
Of course, Kahneman is technically right. If you had to program a computer, you’d have to do it Kahneman’s way.
This strikes me as tied in to my theory that the Flynn Effect is related to Moore’s Law: that people have been getting more and more practice at thinking like a computer rather than at thinking like, say, Henry James thought. So nobody believed the Flynn Effect at first because Henry James or Cervantes were obviously really smart.
But Henry James wouldn’t have been very good at setting up his DVR system. He’d have told his valet to take care of it, and his valet would have arranged for an expert from the factory to come and set it up.
Of course James never includes pointless trivia in his novels. Instead he goes into exhaustive detail that's tied into everything else. I think his focus is so narrow and so hermetic that some readers find it off-putting.
"But Henry James wouldn’t have been very good at setting up his DVR system. "
He was unable to master typing. So he switched from writing by hand to dictating to a secretary. He was able to ride a bicycle though. In her autobiography, Edith Wharton writes, "Like many men of genius he had a singular inability for dealing with the most ordinary daily incidents, such as giving an order to a servant, deciding what to wear, taking a railway ticket or getting from one place to another...."
She also writes, "...so few people seem to have known in Henry James the ever-bubbling fountain of fun which was the delight of his intimates."
"Finally, Mr. Ford became tired of this line of questioning, and in reply to a particularly offensive question, he leaned over, pointed his finger at the lawyer who had asked the question, and said, 'If I should really WANT to answer the foolish question you have just asked, or any of the other questions you have been asking me, let me remind you that I have a row of electric push-buttons on my desk, and by pushing the right button, I can summon to my aid men who can answer ANY question I desire to ask concerning the business to which I am devoting most of my efforts. Now, will you kindly tell me, WHY I should clutter up my mind with general knowledge, for the purpose of being able to answer questions, when I have men around me who can supply any knowledge I require?'
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140827202003-7158355-let-me-explaining-my-thought-process-here-is-a-quote-about-henry-ford
They were so surprised by the original "Linda" result that they tried to knock it down in every way, but it is very robust, as are many similar results of theirs. The forms of irrationality that people display are both much more predictable, and much more irrational, than uninformed people suppose.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Neil Templeton, @Desiderius, @guest
The presence of irrationality, as defined by Tversky and Kahneman, is strong evidence in support of the hypothesis that life is not a parlor game.
But, as Yudkowsky points out in the post I linked, there are CONSEQUENCES to this kind of irrationality — people make bad bets and go broke, doctors make bad decisions and people die. It’s not just in parlor games that people make serious cognitive errors!
Right, if you need to program a computer, you can’t handwave the way a novelist can. Of course that may help explain why computer programmers tend not to have very sophisticated tastes in novels.
And then there's Derb.
Since that of programmer is a completely routinary and rationality-loaded work, it's going to attract people with a much developed rational side of the brain, and an underdeveloped emotional side.
It's 2 mental faculties, or 2 kinds of eye of the mind.
There's nothing as humiliating and evervating for an artist, or a person having any sensitivity or imagination, than dealing with programmers.
They are half-brained, usually and mostly.
On the other hand, the wendies who moan about "social justice", "equality", and whatever the fads of the moment are and gather in humanities colleges are people with emotion, but no intelligence.
They claim some power and social recognition, placing their hopes in ideologies, since they can't rely on intelligence.
Moreover, even intelligent and sensitive people, like skilled writers, comedians, and so on are prone to wed ideologies and petty, fashionable fads.
Why?
Because they are victims to vanity.
Vanity is an emotion, and it affects humanists much more strongly than it does tech people.
People want to be visible, and want to be praised and applaued once they are visible.
See social media; they are only strengthening conformism. Repeating and reciting the dominant catchphrases and dogmata is the most effective way to receive praise: thus, that's what they'll do.
I mean, have you checked out Murray's Twitter? He wakes up, and makes sure he tweets against Trump 3 or 4 times before going to bed.
Why?
Well, why!
Among other things, the guy seems to really regret writing The Bell Curve. He wants to be forgiven, and badly so.
Let's wish him good luck, shall we?
:)
So what is more germane to Linda? that she is a feminist or a bank teller? The background provides the answer. This is Uri Geller crap. Totally beneath serious academics. I can't believe people are still impressed by these tricks.Replies: @Stephen R. Diamond
Failing to distinguish what’s most germane or essential from what’s most common is … a failure to distinguish.
The researchers are misusing the concepts of rationality and logicality.
To illustrate:
“The soup was bad so I shot the chef” is a logical statement.
“The soup was good so I shot the chef” is an illogical statement.
However, both statements are irrational. Rationality implies that we use all our faculties in deciding a course of action. In this case we might send the soup back to the kitchen, but we would not shoot the chef: it’s just not rational.
To be logical it is sufficient for one thing to follow/be consistent with another. To be rational is to function on a higher plane, taking other aspects into account.
The researchers have set up a test of logic that revolves around probabilities and the AND statement.
They would be better off dropping the R word.
Then again, there are all sorts of irrationalities in math, which is an extension of logic. Mathematicians are honest enough not to hide it.
There are plenty of other examples of the same kind of human cognitive dysfunction. Typical human beings frequently cannot choose the logically-correct option in real-world situations. In some cases, they have problems when the choice is presented abstractly but find it intuitive when it's presented as real-world.
Most humans aren't very good at thinking. They're good at feeling and rationalizing those feelings.
What sort of mysoginistic bigot is Kahneman? I will pay him no attention until he renames himself Kahneperson.
Or "Kahneperoffspring".
Really think Henry James would have trouble setting up a DVR system – were he motivated to do it? Unusual claim from a strong-g proponent.
In other words some of the world's highest IQs apparently never learn how to do the mundane, the ordinary things of life. They're too busy using their brains to solve more important things in life.
I wonder how far back it could be traced?
There's a great scene in the biography of Robert Heinlein where in 1941 he hosts perhaps the first national sci-fi fan convention. He's supposed to be there to receive the award, but he takes over the host duties, using his officer and a gentleman persona to get all these awkward nerds feeling comfortable and talking to each other. At the end of the weekend he gives a speech telling all these socially isolated young men that they are going to lead the world into the future.
And they kind of did.Replies: @Neil Templeton
Kind of, but “lead” is misleading. Obsessive fretting about the correct interpretation of laboratory logic is no way to run a railroad. Nerds are useful, even essential, in very small concentrations to catalyze ideas for implementing.
It may very well be that this research is very robust and reproducible. I confess I’m not familiar enough with it to offer an informed opinion.
But assuming I’m looking at the “Linda” question the right way, it strikes me that it’s awfully similar to those computer programmer jokes with the setup where the programmer’s wife asks him to go to the store to pick up a gallon of milk. The punchline always turns on the fact that normal people do not habitually translate everything into rigorous statements of formal logic.
IQ has “predictive validity” for a range of outcomes that people care about, from earnings to life expectancy to criminality. That’s why we care about IQ.
What does RQ predict? If “not much”, then RQ is not much. As I suspect is the case.
They were so surprised by the original "Linda" result that they tried to knock it down in every way, but it is very robust, as are many similar results of theirs. The forms of irrationality that people display are both much more predictable, and much more irrational, than uninformed people suppose.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Neil Templeton, @Desiderius, @guest
I don’t doubt that conclusion, but the example highlighted here is a poor illustration of that result.
What is more probable: that Caitlyn is A) a woman or B) a tranny born as Bruce Jenner, who won gold in the decathlon in the 1976 Olympics?
85% of respondents answered 'B', proving that most people are irrational transphobes, because the answer is obviously 'A'. The probability of someone being a woman is much greater than that of someone being an Olympic gold medalist in decathlon.Replies: @SPMoore8
That is the gold box comment for this thread, and I’m not talking about Caitlyn’s.
I didn’t realize that the Linda story was part of Tversky and Kahnemann’s work on probability as it pertains to risk, which is where I had heard about it before. That being the case, we can rephrase it:
You go to a bar and meet 31 year old Linda. Over the course of a few drinks, she discusses her sex life, her enjoyment of casual sex, and the kinds of things she likes to do sexually to please her partner. There is a 1/20 chance that you will get an STD if you have sex with her. There is a 9/10 chance that you will have enjoyable sex with her.
The probability that you will have enjoyable sex with her is higher than the probability that you will have enjoyable sex with her and also contract an STD. Do you have sex with her?
It’s really that simple, and that dumb.
I read two of his other books: Fermata, which was a pointless erotic fantasy novel, and Human Smoke, which was an engaging if disjointed history of the bloody first half of the 20th century. The latter read like blog entries, with plenty of “infinite details,” mostly centered around murder of civilians and forgotten peaceniks. I liked it.
Fermata had a good premise and terrible follow-through. A guy can freeze time and uses it to remove women’s clothing. Which I understand. But it devolves into erotic vignettes not necessarily tied to the main premise, and not elevated erotica like you might expect from a novelist with a reputation. I’ve read better. (Can’t say if it worked the way that stuff is usually meant to work, because I didn’t use it that way. But literarily it was trash.)
I read better sex scenes in Updike books, since you mentioned him. And I had half a mind to throw Rabbit, Redux across the room for it.
The example highlighted here is ambiguous as to whether it’s illustrating the conjunction fallacy or suggestibility.
There is a semantic issue elided that renders the results too ambiguous to be dispositive.
Absolutely not. Why would you say something like that?
Because to be a feminist AND a bank teller she must first be a bank teller. To be only a bank teller she doesn’t also have to be a feminist.
Both questions ask whether she’s likely to be a bank teller. Any question that adds other conditions to her status is less likely to be true. Condition A is always more likely than A + B, A + C, etc.
Of course that’s generally true, but my own cognitive deviations compel me to mention two erstwhile computer programmers who became successful sophisticated novelists: J.M. Coetzee and Michel Houllebecq.
And then there’s Derb.
They were so surprised by the original "Linda" result that they tried to knock it down in every way, but it is very robust, as are many similar results of theirs. The forms of irrationality that people display are both much more predictable, and much more irrational, than uninformed people suppose.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Neil Templeton, @Desiderius, @guest
Being tricked and making a genuine mistake are not mutually exclusive.
Putting it that way begs the question, although it is true as far as it goes.
There is a semantic issue elided that renders the results too ambiguous to be dispositive.
It’s very simple: the probability of statements are multiplied across. Thus, if I have a 90% chance of X, and a 90% chance of Y, that means that probability of X is .9, but the probability of X AND Y is .9 x .9, or .81 = 81%. Thus the second statement, or any multiple statement, is bound to be statistically less likely than any single statement.
The problem is that in real world situations we calculate risks not merely on statistical probability, but how it may directly affect us in our real world lives. What Tversky and Kahneman succeeded in doing was to show how much our personal interests can affect our calculation of probabilities, as in terms of risk/reward. The RQ stuff is too abstract, in my opinion, to have any real world validity.
Also, who wouldn't bet that a philosophy major who was active in social causes is a feminist? One has to believe the number nears 100%. So does the insignificant statistical reality make people who chose B irrational?Replies: @SPMoore8
My point was, if these consequences were to be avoided through the kind of rationality defined by T & K, why don’t we observe that in the genetic record?
Did it ever occur to you that the reason people fail to distinguish is because it’s a trick?
Hey man, don’t pick on me. I flunked math in high school. Twice. 🙂
I’m aware that some of Steve’s commenters might take exception to the idea that they could have high IQs yet still be prone to “irrational” thinking, but it’s no skin off my back. It’s pretty hard to convince yourself you’re some kind of cognitive ubermensch when they keep sticking you in classes where the guy the next seat over has trouble reading — and he still does about as well as you do on the tests.
I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that I’m both dumb AND irrational. Heck, it would explain a lot, to tell you the truth.
Even having read the comments claiming robustness, reproduction, etc.... It's hard not to explain the result as (A) being interpreted as "Linda is a bank teller and not active in the feminist movement"Replies: @ben tillman
Yes, that is an obvious and reasonable explanation, though not necessarily correct.
To illustrate:
"The soup was bad so I shot the chef" is a logical statement.
"The soup was good so I shot the chef" is an illogical statement.
However, both statements are irrational. Rationality implies that we use all our faculties in deciding a course of action. In this case we might send the soup back to the kitchen, but we would not shoot the chef: it's just not rational.
To be logical it is sufficient for one thing to follow/be consistent with another. To be rational is to function on a higher plane, taking other aspects into account.
The researchers have set up a test of logic that revolves around probabilities and the AND statement.
They would be better off dropping the R word.Replies: @guest, @ScarletNumber, @PiltdownMan, @Jean Cocteausten, @melendwyr
The laws of logic, probability, etc. do not exhaust what it means to be “rational,” you’re right. But rationality does refer to adherence to rules of formal thought. You would expect rational people to be better able to think logically.
Then again, there are all sorts of irrationalities in math, which is an extension of logic. Mathematicians are honest enough not to hide it.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again:
The easiest people to fool are the ones who think they can’t be fooled. It’s because such folks will never admit to being fooled and double-down on explanations on why what they weren’t fooled and continue being fooled in order to prove that they aren’t foolish.
The ability to admit to yourself that you got fooled is more important than intelligence. Because learning from mistakes helps you to succeed.
“correlates relatively weakly” — this is the crux of the result and yet it’s not reported with enough detail. Relative to what? What’s the correlation coefficient? Is the article itself a test of rationality?
Alexander Scott would probably say that the example questions on the rationality test are straightforward applications of Bayes’ Theorem. The questions remind me of the Cognitive Reflection Test (http://www.sjdm.org/dmidi/Cognitive_Reflection_Test.html) but with more applications in crimestop.
Nerds don’t need to be liberated, they’re an in-thing now. I remember seeing “Revenge of the Nerds” and finding it to be a preposterous fantasy even more ridiculous than Animal House, but that was before Computers left Radio Shack and became a household appliance. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and even now Zuckerberg have done what science, mathematics and even art couldn’t do. They made nerds rich. Money changes everything as Cindy Lauper sings right? When Nerds can be Billionaires, those pocket protectors and bad clothes picked out by Mom aren’t women repelling instruments anymore. Those poindexters in labcoats and tweed might become fabulous rich celebrities with a Mansion and a Yacht. Wouldn’t you be willing to be Elmer Fuddy-Duddy’s girl if he had a mansion and a yacht? You know you would girls!
Since loads of subsequent work proved him right on what’s going on with the Linda question, this is hard to sustain.
Moreover, Kahneman’s too good a writer to have grave uncompensated weaknesses in his theory of mind.
I am immune to nearly all forms of persuasion. No sort of advertising or mob frenzy or group-think has any influence over me. I have the inveterate bad habit of seeing only facts (including the psychological comportment of others, which is itself a "fact" that must be weighed along with the rest). Most other people seem like perpetual daydreamers and liars to me, which is all the more frustrating because they are in a sense invincibly ignorant in their lying---they do not realize that they are acting from such involved and egotistic motives. I have no ego of my own, so I find the timeless pageantry to be quite tiresome. I am forever fated to be outside the herd. I could not rejoin it even if I wanted to.
Therein we obtain a clue as to why most people are so irrational. That irrationality of which the author speaks is precisely the "virtue" that ordinary people possess which allows them to maintain their egos (and therefore their courage) against the fact-world which is constantly threatening to destroy it, and also to form those inordinate bonds with one another that are the necessary foundations of friendships, families, and tribes. They are gregarious animals with the brains and sensoria geared to that end; they will be what they will be. "Rationality" is of very little use to them and would oftentimes entail doing violence against everything they hold most dear.
Gregariousness is a product of the material brain, rationality of the immaterial mind. The more rational a man is, the more angelic and unearthly he becomes. No longer a herd animal, he becomes a solitary predator---a lonely eagle on the heights, a leopard stalking through the reeds. The rational man has joys, disappointments, and dangers that the gregarious man knows not of, but it is only a a very few who are called to such a path. The great bulk of mankind will always be irrational---and therefore human.Replies: @Neil Templeton, @Anonymous, @Dr. X, @Sean, @Ivan K.
Why do you think Socrates drank the poison with such uncommon verve?
I had a friend who had a nervous breakdown, and he was complaining about this and that, and I said, “from the get-go, you have a tough life, because you have a high IQ. Think about it. Everything you see as self-evident, you have to convince others to be so. When you advise them against doing something stupid, and they do it anyway, and it blows up in their face as you predicted, how fun is it for them to tell you all about it? How fun is it to listen to? And they’ll do it again and again. All the fucking time. Contradicting your friends takes it’s toll. They become afraid of you, and/or you get tired of them, so you have to find new friends after a while.
Or, you can remain silent while they share their plans you know will fail, creating anxiety if you give a shit about them, and probably is unhealthy if you try to act like you don’t. You have a high IQ, but what’s really great about it in a social setting? It sucks ass, doesn’t it? You have to lie, or you’ll eventually have to find new friends. And that’s why you had your nervous breakdown. You’re fighting against what’s shitty about being smart. You want relationships like people who aren’t very smart have.
You can’t. Get used to it.”
> women are less Aspergery on average.
Equating rationality with Asperger’s or autism is anti-intellectual. As our culture becomes feminized, intellectualism becomes demonized and cattiness on the level of Heartiste (who helped to popularize this toxic meme) becomes the norm.
I'm annoyed, too, by how some people with that disorder talk about "neurotypicals" as if we're "less than" they are. There's little that's good about having Asperger's. The ability to focus obsessively on a single topic might have some benefit, but that's the only potential "plus" I can think of, and even that has serious negatives associated with it.
Because I am a lot wiser than you are, Stevie. I also am a lot more ethical– which is why I never had any complaints filed against me with the Bar, during my fifteen years as an attorney. Why Mr. Unz allows disbarred lawyers to comment on his eponymous Web site, Zeus only knows….
The stuff about her background is extraneous information that biases the test subject to think she is a feminist, but whatever the probability that she is one, the probability that she a feminist and is ALSO a bank teller is lower than the probability that she is simply a bank teller. For that matter she is more also likely to be just a feminist than she is both a feminist AND a bank teller.Replies: @ben tillman, @Jus' Sayin'..., @namae nanka
It’s a bit more complicated than that. There could be a correlation (positive or negative) between being a teller and being married. If not, then you’re right.
Sure, I believe you.
What you’re suggesting is that high IQ is a disadvantage on certain puzzles. (You don’t propose, I don’t think, that the subjects who chose the wrong answer really got it right.)
But while cognitive abilities independent of intelligence have been demonstrated, instances where intelligence harms performance are practically nonexistent.
Therefore, if I understand you correctly, your claim is very unlikely.
I'm not claiming any knowledge of the scientific work in this area. A quick internet search brings up the following study which tends to confirm my assumption (I haven't even bothered searching for studies that would refute it, since I'm hoping you can save me time in that regard):
"The averaged GF rate under long streaks for our highly educated and intelligent (average IQ, 124±9 as measured by both RAMP and WAIS) college students is 58.40%, which is significantly higher than 50% (p<.001)."
[Here GF = Gambler's Fallacy]Replies: @Randal
I’m willing to concede that people use cognitive shortcuts when estimating probabilities and that these shortcuts can sometimes lead to palpably incorrect results.
It’s a bit like optical illusions. The brain uses shortcuts in processing visual images and it’s possible to carefully construct an image for which these shortcuts lead the brain astray.
If you want to call this “irrationality” fine, but I think the real problem here is that this kind of irrationality is pretty small in its effects compared to the elephant in the room: Peoples’ tendency to fool themselves into believing in falsehoods for selfish purposes.
Here’s another test of rationality:
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have an effect on the probabilities. I think the problem that most people have is that they interpret “Linda is a bank teller” to mean “Linda is a bank teller and NOT a feminist”. Or perhaps they separate the parts of the conjunction and ask themselves whether it is probable that Linda is a feminist. Anyway, either way, the logic is wrong. The logic is wrong. But that is the whole point. THE. WHOLE. POINT.
I don’t understand why you are so negative on Kahnemann, who admits in his book that stereotyping based on noticing is logically valid. He is your ally, not your enemy.
Also, most people posting here don’t understand the distinction between intelligence and rationality being made by these researchers. It is entirely valid and consistent with an iSteve-y worldview. I think the whole “Kahnemann is a Jew” angle messes up people’s brains, like rejecting relativity because of Einstein. It’s almost like they are smart but irrational or something!
You are incorrect. If the alternative is "Linda is a bank teller and NOT a feminist”, then it may be the least likely of the two.
Regardless of the correlation, the probability of both is never higher than 50%. The conjunction fallacy is that it can be.
Isn’t this one way of showing the sensitivity people have in regards to others’ identity choices or issues [in this case feminist] as opposed to their vocations and professions?
I knew you couldn’t resist mentioning Henry James in this thread the minute I read “If you started to read a novel full of pointless trivia that wasn’t tied into anything else, you’d soon put it aside.”
Of course James never includes pointless trivia in his novels. Instead he goes into exhaustive detail that’s tied into everything else. I think his focus is so narrow and so hermetic that some readers find it off-putting.
“But Henry James wouldn’t have been very good at setting up his DVR system. ”
He was unable to master typing. So he switched from writing by hand to dictating to a secretary. He was able to ride a bicycle though. In her autobiography, Edith Wharton writes, “Like many men of genius he had a singular inability for dealing with the most ordinary daily incidents, such as giving an order to a servant, deciding what to wear, taking a railway ticket or getting from one place to another….”
She also writes, “…so few people seem to have known in Henry James the ever-bubbling fountain of fun which was the delight of his intimates.”
“What sort of mysoginistic bigot is Kahneman? I will pay him no attention until he renames himself Kahneperson.”
Or “Kahneperoffspring”.
Because you are a healthy, non-autistic person and therefore you interpret the question as meaning:
“which is more likely, that she is JUST a bank teller, or is she a feminist bank teller?”
Instead, the people who designed the test, who are either autistic or deceptive, mean:
“which is more likely, that she is a bank teller whether she is a feminist or not, or that she is a bank teller and a feminist?”
Since the first option includes the second this is a pointless question, like “what was the color of Napoleon’s white horse?”
In reality the first interpretation, the non-autistic one, is perfectly correct since it is what normal human beings would mean if they asked such a question.
Which is more likely, A, B, or C? I'm voting for C.
To illustrate:
"The soup was bad so I shot the chef" is a logical statement.
"The soup was good so I shot the chef" is an illogical statement.
However, both statements are irrational. Rationality implies that we use all our faculties in deciding a course of action. In this case we might send the soup back to the kitchen, but we would not shoot the chef: it's just not rational.
To be logical it is sufficient for one thing to follow/be consistent with another. To be rational is to function on a higher plane, taking other aspects into account.
The researchers have set up a test of logic that revolves around probabilities and the AND statement.
They would be better off dropping the R word.Replies: @guest, @ScarletNumber, @PiltdownMan, @Jean Cocteausten, @melendwyr
Not if the soup was so good that you don’t want anyone else to have it.
I do not get it either. If someone asks a question like that they mean is this bank teller a feminist or not? Otherwise they are an idiot for asking such a stupid and childish question.
To illustrate:
"The soup was bad so I shot the chef" is a logical statement.
"The soup was good so I shot the chef" is an illogical statement.
However, both statements are irrational. Rationality implies that we use all our faculties in deciding a course of action. In this case we might send the soup back to the kitchen, but we would not shoot the chef: it's just not rational.
To be logical it is sufficient for one thing to follow/be consistent with another. To be rational is to function on a higher plane, taking other aspects into account.
The researchers have set up a test of logic that revolves around probabilities and the AND statement.
They would be better off dropping the R word.Replies: @guest, @ScarletNumber, @PiltdownMan, @Jean Cocteausten, @melendwyr
It’s a logical statement, in a formal sense.
It is “illogical” in the colloquial sense, in that we know from experience that you don’t get mad at chefs and kill them if they have done something right. That non-rigorous, everyday definition of “logic” requires that we supply everyday context.
And by the way, if I had asked the chef to poison the soup, the statement would be “logical” even under that loose definition which assumes colloquial usage and context.
I did. After I read the explanation of the conjunction fallacy I thought “yes, yes, but Chekhov’s everything!
‘higher IQ people tend to be more trusting – high IQ environments tend to be more honest and cooperative.’
Another way of putting that: There aren’t many black people in high IQ environments.
You conflate high IQ with political power. Not true people with power do not necessarily have a high IQ. People with the highest IQ have no political power.
It's a bit like optical illusions. The brain uses shortcuts in processing visual images and it's possible to carefully construct an image for which these shortcuts lead the brain astray.
If you want to call this "irrationality" fine, but I think the real problem here is that this kind of irrationality is pretty small in its effects compared to the elephant in the room: Peoples' tendency to fool themselves into believing in falsehoods for selfish purposes.
Here's another test of rationality:Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Stebbing Heuer
“It’s a bit like optical illusions.”
Kahneman’s book contains a few optical illusions, some of which I think I first saw in Ripley’s Believe It or Not cartoons around 1970.
Linda was a Philosophy major, so we really don’t know. Now if Linda is a sociology major…
Some irrational propositions are more rational than others.
Who here cares what a disbarred shyster and Trotskite like you thinks about anything, Stevie?!?
Makes sense to me. I read the Less Wrong Sequences — nicely packaged up in the Rationality: From AI to Zombies ebook — which helped me bamboozle myself and others less, but I didn’t get any smarter.
As an example, the other day I was with a couple of guys who were talking about women at Goldman Sachs and whether they seem to be extra mean, possibly as a compensatory mechanism to get the men around them to take them seriously. After about a minute of discussion, I noticed they were starting to compare these women to different groups (reference classes, in this case):
– all men
– all men at GS in similar management positions
At this point I noticed that they’d started to accidentally talk past each other and I said “wait, are we comparing these women to all men or all male managers at GS?” If the guys could make sure that they’re always talking about the same reference class, they could explicitly agree or disagree on “female GS managers are angrier than the average man” and treat “female GS managers, on average, are angrier than the average male GS manager” as an entirely separate question. That way, they could explicitly agree on the first proposition and agree to disagree on the second, which leaves both with a more accurate impression of female managers at GS as explicitly compared to two different reference populations.
Exactly. Rational, non-frothy quiet types belong in the corridors of weakness.
A) If the bank is a racist, patriarchal institution, and
B) Linda is a teller and done told the bank, then
C) Oh snap, gurrrrl! You a feminist!
Q.E.D.
Here’s the problem with Kahneman’s work, or more precisely with how it is interpreted. If terms of evolution, our capacity for conscious, effortful thought (System 2) and our capacity for quick intuition of the “Linda must be a feminist” type (System 1) must have come from somewhere. But most of that “somewhere” wasn’t situations where the two systems were in direct conflict. To avoid getting eaten by a leopard, it is helpful both to notice leopard-shaped shadows (System 1) and remember that the pile of shit you saw fifty yards back was still fresh (System 2.) But since Kahneman only looks at places where the two systems are in direct conflict, he can only tell you about their -relative- strength under different circumstances, and not all that much that’s interesting about either one. RQ ends up being a test of Asperginess or conscientiousness instead of rationality in general. Here’s a review paper of dual process cognition, and it shows that outside of conflict-between-systems situations, the capacity for rational, effortful cognition is, surprise surprise, correlated rather more strongly with IQ- http://faculty.weber.edu/eamsel/Classes/Methods%20(3610)/Old%20Sections/Fall%202010/Fall%202010%20Project/Evans%20(2003).pdf
(And also that some forms of problem solving can be done reasonably well by most people with low IQ, but precisely where System 1 cognition is engaged and there is a low level of abstraction.)
As for why Kahneman’s work has been so endlessly ballyhooed, you can look at it two ways-
A) In our present modern environment, our instincts (System 1) really are constantly in conflict with our rational side (System 2). Figuring out the nature of this conflict is the only way we’re going to stop ourselves from eating and drinking ourself to an early grave, texting while driving, and so on.
B) Many different actors in the society have a strong incentive for ordinary well-educated people to view themselves as fundamentally irrational. First of all, it’s an essentially passive pose- “oh, we all make these mistakes, and all need correction in these matters.” Second, and more importantly in recent years, it helps convince well-educated people to accept a scope of government that treats everyone as equally incompetent.
There is no Linda. She's a figment of the question-writer's imagination. "Linda" is a character made up to make a point. The probability that a character has certain attributes or constellations of attributes depends only on the psychology of the character's creator and his purpose in creating that character. When answering the question, people entertain the fiction proposed and try to figure out what the creator of the fiction meant. Which is a more convincingly imagined narrative, one where the author throws in irrelevant, even actively misleading description and ends by showcasing the most brief and boring job title as the summation of the character, or the one where the summation of the character is of a piece with all the narrated facts about her?
Most people entertain the fiction so completely that they forget that it is a fiction, as all the discussions of the "Linda" question show. Even if we follow them in that imagination, still, the person who has more purported information is going to be seen as more likely to be knowledgeable about Linda. If one person claims to know her college major, her politics, her job then implies that she does not also hold a political position that is essentially universal given her sex and politics, then that person is less credible that the one who seems to have additional data that fits with the overall picture.
Which is more likely, that scientists collected a lesser amount of data on an experiment or a larger amount of data? Logically, it is more likely that they collected a smaller amount of data. Which data set is more convincing about the experiment, other factors equal -- the larger data set of course. That is the equivocation inside the already fictional engineered mind-fuck. It's an onion of deception. It is not accidental or innocent, either. Just as you say:Note the people pushing the "85% of people who aren't us are completely irrational" narrative. Professors Kahneman and Tversky. That lizard Stephen R. Diamond on this thread, who gives Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel) competition in the promulgation of disingenuous, tribally-motivated pseudo-science. Eli Yudkowski, the transhumanist/nerd-rapture tent-preacher / glassy-eyed megalomaniac with hypergraphia who back in 2005 had a knock-down, drag-out argument about the Linda question on his SL4 mailing list (the predecessor to his Less Wrong site, among others), in which he ended up banning the exceptionally intelligent Richard Loosemore simply for making reasoned arguments which Eli was unable to refute. They all seem to be Jews. They all seem to need to feel intellectually superior, and take their ability to deceive others as evidence of their superiority, and their superiority as reason that they should deceive others (who wouldn't understand the truth, and might challenge their betters if they did). They know on some level what they're doing, but they also have the ability to not admit it even to themselves in situations where that would impair their ability to deceive others.
Nutters being involved in various side projects outside of work is something I've seen in real life, so the original B answer seems likely to me.
Since RQ correlates with both high and low IQ, it seems more like a way to say that low IQ people are "rational", therefore it really is evil whites keeping blacks down.
Here is a good question for their test:
Which is more probable? Black dysfunction is caused by A) a massive global conspiracy by white people to keep black people poor, because they just hate the color of their skin B) low IQReplies: @Warner, @AndrewR
What?
The point is not that B is unlikely. It’s that it’s less likely than A. If you can’t understand that then, well, don’t look down too much on blacks.
The opposite could be claimed too. A person performing bad at IQ test could claim that the IQ test is the rationality test and that the other is the intelligence one, saying that he did wrong at progressive matrix because he was being too irrational, but he is still intelligent because he realized the other pattern.
Succinctly: both tests are about pattern recognition, both measure the same and if the fault to realize one pattern is blamed on not using all intelligence in that moment or in general, there is no reason any fault on whatever pattern recognition test can't be blamed on the same.
MSM Conclusion: blacks are low IQ because they are "diffuse"Replies: @AndrewR
As Sailer has said, projection was Freud’s best insight.
You’re speaking of an unfalsifiable (and unlikely) afterlife hypothesis as if it were undeniable fact.
That’s not rational.
Common sense suggests to me that this is not the case, so I’m interested in whether this is something that has been studied extensively to gather evidence. Are you aware of such studies? On the face of it, it seems to me that there could be many occasions when people are intelligent enough to fall for a fallacy or con but not intelligent enough to see through it, in the real world of necessarily incomplete and often misleading information that we all live in. It seems reasonable to assume there will be areas where this applies to the maximal human intelligences just as it does to people in lower high intelligence ranges.
I’m not claiming any knowledge of the scientific work in this area. A quick internet search brings up the following study which tends to confirm my assumption (I haven’t even bothered searching for studies that would refute it, since I’m hoping you can save me time in that regard):
“The averaged GF rate under long streaks for our highly educated and intelligent (average IQ, 124±9 as measured by both RAMP and WAIS) college students is 58.40%, which is significantly higher than 50% (p<.001).”
[Here GF = Gambler’s Fallacy]
" The averaged GF rate under long streaks for our highly educated and intelligent (average IQ, 124±9 as measured by both RAMP and WAIS) college students is 58.40%, which is significantly higher than 50% (p<.001)
..............
Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that subjects’ GF strategy use was positively correlated with the cognitive ability (r = .170, p<.001), suggesting that higher intelligence and higher executive function was associated more GF strategy use."
My reason for including the first sentence was the possibility that domain restriction might be involved somehow.
In the discussion section, the authors added;
"It should be emphasized that our subjects were chosen from a top-tier university in China, and they had an averaged intelligence of 124±9, as measured by both RAPM and WAIS. Yet they on average showed significant GF. More important, correlational analysis further suggested that the higher the cognitive ability they have, the more likely they engage the GF."
Linda is one of 3 bank tellers applying for a job. All three are given a test as teller. The manager sneaks $100.00 from each applicants drawer. At the end of the day he calls them in to see what each would say.
A. First teller say she is $100.00 short, no explanation.
B. Second teller used her own money and came out “even”.
C. Third teller took her own money at lunch, made a quick investment an doubled the $100.00 shortfall and showed a $100.00 “gain” for the bank.
Who did the manager hire?
Answer: the one with the big tits. Watch out for distractors.
Professors Kahneman and Tversky and those in their study who chose (a) over (B) are apparently unacquainted with Bayes Theorem.
The stuff about her background is extraneous information that biases the test subject to think she is a feminist, but whatever the probability that she is one, the probability that she a feminist and is ALSO a bank teller is lower than the probability that she is simply a bank teller. For that matter she is more also likely to be just a feminist than she is both a feminist AND a bank teller.Replies: @ben tillman, @Jus' Sayin'..., @namae nanka
Reasoning from prior experience and the bio as given and applying Bayes Theorem would suggest that the computation is far from as straightforward as you and the professors seem to think it is.
If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person -- they will find an easier way to do it.
Corollaries:
1. They'll use WD-40.
2. A bigger can works faster.Replies: @Ivy, @Anonym, @anon
http://i.imgur.com/4NPtxDk.mp4
The stuff about her background is extraneous information that biases the test subject to think she is a feminist, but whatever the probability that she is one, the probability that she a feminist and is ALSO a bank teller is lower than the probability that she is simply a bank teller. For that matter she is more also likely to be just a feminist than she is both a feminist AND a bank teller.Replies: @ben tillman, @Jus' Sayin'..., @namae nanka
Your example works when you have to guess about a random person selected from the population with those statistics and that being married and being a bank teller are independent events. Otherwise you’d have to look for conditional probabilities.
It is the other way round here and you’d expect Linda to be a feminist and being a feminist and holding down a job(bank teller) wouldn’t be independent either. I think this is the way people reasoned about it and automatically took the other option to mean that Linda is not a feminist activist because its omission make it look so.
So it’s not that they are irrational but not ‘rational’ enough for aspergery scientists who like to split hairs. Thinking fast vs. thinking slow was better than this distinction.
I am immune to nearly all forms of persuasion. No sort of advertising or mob frenzy or group-think has any influence over me. I have the inveterate bad habit of seeing only facts (including the psychological comportment of others, which is itself a "fact" that must be weighed along with the rest). Most other people seem like perpetual daydreamers and liars to me, which is all the more frustrating because they are in a sense invincibly ignorant in their lying---they do not realize that they are acting from such involved and egotistic motives. I have no ego of my own, so I find the timeless pageantry to be quite tiresome. I am forever fated to be outside the herd. I could not rejoin it even if I wanted to.
Therein we obtain a clue as to why most people are so irrational. That irrationality of which the author speaks is precisely the "virtue" that ordinary people possess which allows them to maintain their egos (and therefore their courage) against the fact-world which is constantly threatening to destroy it, and also to form those inordinate bonds with one another that are the necessary foundations of friendships, families, and tribes. They are gregarious animals with the brains and sensoria geared to that end; they will be what they will be. "Rationality" is of very little use to them and would oftentimes entail doing violence against everything they hold most dear.
Gregariousness is a product of the material brain, rationality of the immaterial mind. The more rational a man is, the more angelic and unearthly he becomes. No longer a herd animal, he becomes a solitary predator---a lonely eagle on the heights, a leopard stalking through the reeds. The rational man has joys, disappointments, and dangers that the gregarious man knows not of, but it is only a a very few who are called to such a path. The great bulk of mankind will always be irrational---and therefore human.Replies: @Neil Templeton, @Anonymous, @Dr. X, @Sean, @Ivan K.
Great post. In The Republic, after describing the allegory of the cave, Socrates says that the individual who makes the trip to the outside of the cave and discovers true knowledge no longer wants to go back down and partake in the shadow-games of the cave dwellers.
The fundamental contradiction of human nature described in The Republic is that the philosopher-king no longer wants to re-enter the cave, and the cave-dwellers would disbelieve and even kill him if he did — yet the just society cannot exist unless this happens.
Just shows that rational behaviour based upon limited information doesn't always end optimally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVr0M7WCBu4
”People with high IQs
be better at reading novels and making sense out of the patterns imposed by the author’s choice of details than people with low IQs.”
TEND TO BE
correlation is the trends between two ”things”
rational don’t tend to be more reasonable and factually correct,
They, generally, ARE better judges than, superficial and broader category: ”high iq pp”
rationality IS NOT correlative with more rational people, is their primary action or intrinsic action, just like hallucination is to schizophrenia or sensorial issues is to autism.
we have a problem because a lot of self-declared ”rational” ones in the true are not absolutely more rational than other people.
and most of people who ”seems to be rational” are in the true logical.
logic is not the same than rationality
logic is what’s work.
rationality is the good judgment/weight attitudes based on perffecionistic proportionality.
logic don’t need morality/ethics, rationality, to be complete, need indispensably the morality/ethics.
re-conclusion
”iq” correlates with rationality in the same way it correlates with creativity
but
white people, specially the very white ones, are white in the same way rational people are rational, organic/intrinsic causality between the concept and their behavior.
PERIOD.
Based on this evidence, Professor Stanovich and colleagues have introduced the concept of the rationality quotient, or R.Q. If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.
This sounds like a test of nerdishness.
Just in your dreams.
Again, ”epicentric concept”
nerdishness ALSO correlates with:
rationality
iq
😉
ciao!!!
Only real issues about it is
leftoid defining rationality
just like christian defining kindness
of course, ”white-jewish trash” and their grrreat ”intellect” manipulating, subconscious or consciously, and their followers just, well, following,
ant social level, for sure.
The fundamental contradiction of human nature described in The Republic is that the philosopher-king no longer wants to re-enter the cave, and the cave-dwellers would disbelieve and even kill him if he did -- yet the just society cannot exist unless this happens.Replies: @Randal, @Desiderius
And quite rightly, from their perspective, since a man making such unlikely claims is far more likely to be a dangerous lunatic or fraud than a genuine potential philosopher king.
Just shows that rational behaviour based upon limited information doesn’t always end optimally.
I'm not claiming any knowledge of the scientific work in this area. A quick internet search brings up the following study which tends to confirm my assumption (I haven't even bothered searching for studies that would refute it, since I'm hoping you can save me time in that regard):
"The averaged GF rate under long streaks for our highly educated and intelligent (average IQ, 124±9 as measured by both RAMP and WAIS) college students is 58.40%, which is significantly higher than 50% (p<.001)."
[Here GF = Gambler's Fallacy]Replies: @Randal
Damn – left out the key sentence from the study. The link should have read:
“ The averaged GF rate under long streaks for our highly educated and intelligent (average IQ, 124±9 as measured by both RAMP and WAIS) college students is 58.40%, which is significantly higher than 50% (p<.001)
…………..
Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that subjects’ GF strategy use was positively correlated with the cognitive ability (r = .170, p<.001), suggesting that higher intelligence and higher executive function was associated more GF strategy use.”
My reason for including the first sentence was the possibility that domain restriction might be involved somehow.
In the discussion section, the authors added;
“It should be emphasized that our subjects were chosen from a top-tier university in China, and they had an averaged intelligence of 124±9, as measured by both RAPM and WAIS. Yet they on average showed significant GF. More important, correlational analysis further suggested that the higher the cognitive ability they have, the more likely they engage the GF.”
Yes, but many establishment types (academics in particular) truly are intellectual elites, whether we care to admit it or not.
Intellectual is a frame of mind, not quality of mind.
A priest, a politician and an engineer were scheduled to be executed late in the French revolution. It has to be “public”. By this point in the Revolution, people are tired of all the bloodshed, so a crowd of spectators is forcibly rounded up.
The priest is brought up to the guillotine and lays down on the table. The executioner pulls the cord and the heavy steel blade descends … then shudders to a stop in the middle of the track. The executioner is a very smart guy (which is why he is pulling the cord, rather than laying on the table) so he proclaims, “This is a sign from God, that the life of this priest should be spared!” The priest is set free to the delight of the cheering crowd.
Next the politician is brought up and laid on the table. The cord is pulled, and the blade again shudders to a halt in the same place. The executioner proclaims “The grace of God is extended even to this politician!” and the crowd goes wild with joy!
The engineer steps up last and says “You know, if you tighten that bolt, this thing will work.”
Michael Lewis has a new book coming out on Kahneman and Tversky in December.
And how well has that worked out? Does humanity seem, on the whole, to be doing better today than 40 years ago?
I see intuition as the sum total of all the experiences of every ancestor of ours, going back to the beginning of life, but edited down to fit within the available storage medium. So much of that data has been lost that the instinctual conclusions may make no rational sense. But the fact remains that every one of us is the product of only our ancestors who survived long enough to reproduce. We don't have to understand the logic of those intuitions to accept that they kept our line going, while other genetic lines died off. If billions of years of evolution can account for sentience, I see no reason to believe that it can't account for an intuitive system that outperforms pure logic, at least in terms of survival to reproductive age.
and many of Kahneman’s trick questions work to trip up the trusting.
Dude, this was a really dumb post.
Stanovich is rock solid and I suggest you read one of his books particularly, Rationality and the Reflective Mind. It’s exhaustively referenced.
Try the “Bat and Ball Problem”. I did it on my medical specialist friends and all of them got it wrong.
And you’re conflating trust amongst others with trust in situational comprehension. McNamara’s Whizz kids were the best and brightest but completely screwed things up.
I’d also suggest you have a review of Dietrich Dorner’s Logic of Failure.
And I thought, should I bet this horse to win and to place, or just to win.
To illustrate:
"The soup was bad so I shot the chef" is a logical statement.
"The soup was good so I shot the chef" is an illogical statement.
However, both statements are irrational. Rationality implies that we use all our faculties in deciding a course of action. In this case we might send the soup back to the kitchen, but we would not shoot the chef: it's just not rational.
To be logical it is sufficient for one thing to follow/be consistent with another. To be rational is to function on a higher plane, taking other aspects into account.
The researchers have set up a test of logic that revolves around probabilities and the AND statement.
They would be better off dropping the R word.Replies: @guest, @ScarletNumber, @PiltdownMan, @Jean Cocteausten, @melendwyr
Neither statement has any logical content. A logical statement is one that draws a conclusion from premises. These statements are simple retellings of events.
In any case, my real point was that rationality and logic are two distinct concepts. A rational argument will always be logical, but a logical argument may be irrational.Replies: @Anonymous
The priest is brought up to the guillotine and lays down on the table. The executioner pulls the cord and the heavy steel blade descends ... then shudders to a stop in the middle of the track. The executioner is a very smart guy (which is why he is pulling the cord, rather than laying on the table) so he proclaims, "This is a sign from God, that the life of this priest should be spared!" The priest is set free to the delight of the cheering crowd.
Next the politician is brought up and laid on the table. The cord is pulled, and the blade again shudders to a halt in the same place. The executioner proclaims "The grace of God is extended even to this politician!" and the crowd goes wild with joy!
The engineer steps up last and says "You know, if you tighten that bolt, this thing will work."Replies: @Randal
LOL! A good joke in itself, but beautifully apt to the topic.
Only because I fail to extract meaning from your flesh and spirit argument, so I conclude that I am so ignorant that for me, even Purgatory will be a waste of God’s effort. I’ll need extra time in the nether regions to sort things out. Since you appear to get it at a higher level, I don’t expect to meet you after we shed our mortal coils.
Are you joking? China is more successful than USA ????????
My understanding is that K&T were testing the proposition that people naturally engage in what we might call ‘statistical reasoning’: that, when faced with some sort of statistical or probability problem, they would solve it in a way consistent with the laws of statistical reasoning (this proposition being an assumption of neo-classical economics, which K&T were investigating). Hence the structure of the ‘Linda’ question.
K&T were sceptical of this proposition, and the results of their tests suggest they were right to be sceptical (I think).
Your defence of the way people would tend to respond to the question – by incorporating the (statistically irrelevant) information given to them into their deliberations, for whatever reason – is actually consistent with K&T’s assertion that people aren’t, by their nature, statistical reasoners.
Okay, try this: (2 x 3) + green =
a) 6
b) green 6
c) the length of Pepe's penis
The test doesn't really measure anything, except the human tendency to take all available data and put it into a satisfying pattern.
As far as that goes, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop; why is the NYT telling me about RQ if they are not getting ready to tell me that many low IQ persons have RQ's that are off the charts? They do not appear to have answered that question.
It's certainly true that people are biased for inclusive pattern seeking. It's also true that people seeks patterns that are satisfying, rationally, aesthetically and even emotionally and morally. I find this observation to be underwhelming.Replies: @Stebbing Heuer
That’s precisely what the test was about.
Excellent book. Read his follow-up: “The World Beyond Your Head,” which I read first, then read Shop Class. In my mind both books explore the concept that I call ‘activity vs accomplishment’–and where in today’s world it’s the preference for activity over accomplishment.
Students headed off to college fill their applications with box-checking activities as if mindless drones, then the repeat the same in college, accumulate credentials that appear to be no more than an attendance record, and rest on these laurels as if signifying knowledge, experience, and achievement–and navigate life as if ‘doing stuff’ means accomplishment. Activity for the sake of activity…
It's a bit like optical illusions. The brain uses shortcuts in processing visual images and it's possible to carefully construct an image for which these shortcuts lead the brain astray.
If you want to call this "irrationality" fine, but I think the real problem here is that this kind of irrationality is pretty small in its effects compared to the elephant in the room: Peoples' tendency to fool themselves into believing in falsehoods for selfish purposes.
Here's another test of rationality:Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Stebbing Heuer
And the illusions don’t go away, even when you know how they work. Kahneman calls them ‘cognitive illusions’ for precisely this reason in Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Your not being able to ‘get’ the question is precisely what Kahneman was testing for.
I don’t believe that it is necessary to reach a conclusion: it is sufficient that the meaning of the words after SO do not contradict those coming before.
In any case, my real point was that rationality and logic are two distinct concepts. A rational argument will always be logical, but a logical argument may be irrational.
The concepts mean the exact same thing. You are confusing "irrational" with "unreasonable" or "improbable".
I haven’t read through all the comments, so forgive me if this has already been beat to death. But it seems to me that this is just another battle in the war against noticing. A huge part of intelligence is pattern recognition. This drivel is designed to convince people that pattern recognition is irrational. Of course, intelligent or not, it’s impossible to make rational decisions without recognizing the patterns in the information available.
I think the fundamental point these authors are trying to make is that, when you get on the subway at 2:00 am in Brooklyn, it’s irrational to believe you’re better off sitting next to the 50 year old Asian woman than the 19 year old black man.
Is it because one possibility refers to a single variable and the other refers to two variables? So the likelihood is greater that "Linda" matches one variable than that she matches two variables? The other information is just intended to throw you off? Am I reading that right?
If that's it, then there are only two types of people who'd immediately get the right answer: Stupid people who get the right answer by chance, and smart people who are ridiculously good at math and habitually approach ordinary mental tasks with a level of abstraction that tends to annoy friends and family members. I'll go out further on a limb and bet that at least 75 percent of the "smart" people who get the right answer are fluent in at least one major programming language and have probably been employed as computer programmers at some point in their lives.
But maybe that's just me being irrational? :)
In other words: Yeah, a test for nerdishness. And like Steve, I bet the smart people do a lot better when you give them a hint in advance that this is a trick question.
I'm also not convinced that the "Linda" question is a good demonstration of irrationality except in a very narrow academic sense. Isn't it a mark of smart folks that they generally try to integrate multiple types of information in order to come up with an answer? Would you ever describe such a person as "irrational" in the ordinary, conversational sense of the term?Replies: @Stephen R. Diamond, @S. anonyia
I’m not ridiculously good at math but the correct answer to the “Linda” question seems like common sense. It’s always more likely someone fits into just one (pretty broad) category than 2 categories. Also in Linda’s history of activism there was no mention of specific feminist causes so the answer is even more obvious.
In the Real World, highly intelligent people have to solve real hands on problems and are therefore likely to be more rational. Whereas, in the bubble world of academic settings, rational behaviors are declasse and unintellectual. I'm sure most people find it amusing to see snobs at places like Starbucks claiming they drink espresso or cappuccinos and turn their noses up at such lowly things as Dunkin Donuts coffee. This may be irrational, but an entire franchise has formed to cater to these elitist pretensions.Replies: @S. Anonyia, @Jimi
Lol.
The real snobs get their coffee at local shops with fair trade products.
Calling Starbucks (at this point a symbol of standard suburban America) snobby is like calling Olive Garden snobby.
As an example, the other day I was with a couple of guys who were talking about women at Goldman Sachs and whether they seem to be extra mean, possibly as a compensatory mechanism to get the men around them to take them seriously. After about a minute of discussion, I noticed they were starting to compare these women to different groups (reference classes, in this case):
- all men
- all men at GS in similar management positions
At this point I noticed that they’d started to accidentally talk past each other and I said “wait, are we comparing these women to all men or all male managers at GS?” If the guys could make sure that they’re always talking about the same reference class, they could explicitly agree or disagree on “female GS managers are angrier than the average man” and treat “female GS managers, on average, are angrier than the average male GS manager” as an entirely separate question. That way, they could explicitly agree on the first proposition and agree to disagree on the second, which leaves both with a more accurate impression of female managers at GS as explicitly compared to two different reference populations.Replies: @Anon
Women who raise raise kids, take care of the house, cook, and work a full time job on top of that will turn bitchy from stress and overwork and stay that way until they retire. This is a basic rule of life. If you want a good-tempered wife, make sure she doesn’t have to work a job to help you keep a roof over your head.
Higher IQ subjects are likely to interpret the question in a manner that makes it less trivial (i.e. that the first option implies non-feminist), akin to the way the brain adds visual information to fill in blind spots caused by the position of the optic nerve in the eye.
I didn't realize that the Linda story was part of Tversky and Kahnemann's work on probability as it pertains to risk, which is where I had heard about it before. That being the case, we can rephrase it:
You go to a bar and meet 31 year old Linda. Over the course of a few drinks, she discusses her sex life, her enjoyment of casual sex, and the kinds of things she likes to do sexually to please her partner. There is a 1/20 chance that you will get an STD if you have sex with her. There is a 9/10 chance that you will have enjoyable sex with her.
The probability that you will have enjoyable sex with her is higher than the probability that you will have enjoyable sex with her and also contract an STD. Do you have sex with her?
It's really that simple, and that dumb.Replies: @donut
” You go to a bar and meet 31 year old Linda. Over the course of a few drinks, she discusses her sex life, her enjoyment of casual sex, and the kinds of things she likes to do sexually to please her partner. There is a 1/20 chance that you will get an STD if you have sex with her. There is a 9/10 chance that you will have enjoyable sex with her. ”
The rational response to the Linda in this scenario is : Red Flag !! And the fleeting image of a bunny rabbit in a pot of boiling water .
I’ve begun to suspect that our elite-finding procedures overselect from those whose brains mature earlier. This would, at least, account for the relative lack of wisdom.
The fundamental contradiction of human nature described in The Republic is that the philosopher-king no longer wants to re-enter the cave, and the cave-dwellers would disbelieve and even kill him if he did -- yet the just society cannot exist unless this happens.Replies: @Randal, @Desiderius
Not necessarily. The philosopher-king could devise a means for luring everyone else out of the cave too, for instance.
I’m inclined to agree with you there. Under the current paradigm, if you don’t do everything right from your freshman year of high school on, you’re permanently gimped. Of course, as a very late-maturer (probably 3-4 years behind the mean) myself, I do have a certain bias.
Sorry to hear that people are talking about rationality as if it were different from intelligence. The key issue is that the problems being presented in tests of “rationality” have aspects which make them unsuitable as fair tests of ability. The “bat and ball” test is an example of a poor item. Similarly the “Linda is a librarian” story. Of course they are interesting, and worthy of examination, but in no way prove that there is an extra intellectual ability. Peter Wason worked on these logical problems long ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task. They are good examples of symbolic logic.
We do not have established and validated tests of Rationality. They are promised, but as far as I know not yet delivered. So, there are some individual logical puzzles, and much discussion about what they may mean, but no standardized measure of RQ at the moment.
Here is some more detail:
http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/popular-stupidy.html
https://drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/the-many-headed-hydra-of-alternate.html
I think the US is always going to be stuck with a society that has a large amount of Aspy-type intelligent thinkers, because it’s these people who make the US an innovative society as compared to 3rd-world countries. Unfortunately, because these Aspy-ivory tower thinkers are not rational, and because they deliberately isolate themselves away from bad neighborhoods and people, they do not allow themselves to develop the rationality you get from toughing it out in difficult circumstances. They have crazy notions about politics and society, and they end up doing things like voting for Hillary or Angela Merkel because they think it’s the right thing to do.
They and their families spin these happy little cocoons against the poison of the world, and then vote for blacks and 3rd world minorities to displace them without understanding the effects of their own actions. We would never have developed Western Civilization without them, but they do an incredible amount of damage. Even worse, the last two generations of technology have created tech billionaires who donate vast sums to the Democrats. Have you looked at Hillary’s biggest donors? The list is dominated by wealthy technology magnates, all aspies to the man.
3rd-world countries are not innovative, but they’re filled with people who have the cold-blooded, selfish, practical rationality that makes the majority of them able to survive living in a shark tank. The citizens of these countries, though not intelligent, pass this kind of everyday, ordinary rational thinking to their children via their genes. If intelligence is heritable, so is rationality.
That’s why the 3rd-world is eating the 1st-world’s lunch right now, parasitizing, cannibalizing, and flooding into it.
I wouldn't say these brown people are "rational" necessarily. Much of what they do is so completely devoid of reason, logic, or rationality as to even boggle the dense libtard mind - if they were truly immersed into the lives of the former long enough to notice. They would have a very high attrition rate in the absence of help (medicine, food, technology, peacekeeping) from White nations - even if some of our (((captured))) leaders bomb some of them from time to time.
The way I see it, the failure of many Whites to understand racial differences, and the true collective nature of these various non-White hordes, stems from some combination of the following:
- Media brainwashing and resultant fear of being ostrasized
- Naivete and the projecting of their own morality onto outgroups (who are typically shameless, power-hungry, unprincipled, and lacking in empathy)
- White people, relative to everyone else, hail from high-trust environments with a high level of empathy and compassion (again, relatively); and so the easy marks, suckers and gullible goobers weren't quickly culled from the gene pool as in other human groups.
and finallly;
-Most people are just dumbfucks, no matter the race or how high the IQ. They don't see obvious patterns and rarely find the right answer to any problem.
In closing, I would characterize brown people as being closer to Nature - the dog eat dog world, law of the jungle, kind of thing - with better instincts when it comes to raw power and might over right vis-a-vis human interaction; but I'm only referring to the 'average' person from any particular group here.
However, certainly a minority of gifted Whites excel in 'reading' the real intentions/motivations of other people and aren't easily fooled.
I don't understand why you are so negative on Kahnemann, who admits in his book that stereotyping based on noticing is logically valid. He is your ally, not your enemy.
Also, most people posting here don't understand the distinction between intelligence and rationality being made by these researchers. It is entirely valid and consistent with an iSteve-y worldview. I think the whole "Kahnemann is a Jew" angle messes up people's brains, like rejecting relativity because of Einstein. It's almost like they are smart but irrational or something!Replies: @Anonymous
I think the problem that most people have is that they interpret “Linda is a bank teller” to mean “Linda is a bank teller and NOT a feminist”. Or perhaps they separate the parts of the conjunction and ask themselves whether it is probable that Linda is a feminist. Anyway, either way, the logic is wrong.
You are incorrect. If the alternative is “Linda is a bank teller and NOT a feminist”, then it may be the least likely of the two.
Such discouraging point-missing here.
1) It is very firmly established that the cognitive patterns described here are reproducible in situations where the proposed answer is not merely the result of a misinterpretation of the question asked or of the data provided, but of an actual MISTAKE which participants admit was really a mistake when it is explained to them, where their understanding of what the question asked and what the data provided said were accurate but they reasoned badly in arriving at their answer.
2) Kahneman not only discovered this, but figured out what was going on “under the hood” that caused these mistakes to be made.
3) BY DEFINITION, the participants were “tricked” by the experimenter because the whole point was to *reproducibly demonstrate* irrationality, but
4) this does not reduce the significance of the finding because the same kinds of mistakes are made in real life when the only “trickster” is nature, these mistakes can have serious consequences and everyone should learn how better to avoid them!
5) this also does not reduce the significance of the finding because there are plenty of real tricksters out there who take advantage of cognitive biases, and it’s much better that people not be fooled by them
6) all the criticism of Kahneman personally here is uninformed and based on stupid assumptions that he didn’t control for something that he actually did, either in the described experiment or other experiments, control for very carefully. His work was at an extremely high technical level as well as being brilliantly insightful, and the Nobel was appropriate because of this.
7) there are certain kinds of cognitive errors that intelligent people make that unintelligent people don’t make because even the mistaken reasoning is too complex for them, and anyone of at least average intelligence can be trained in rationality, but when such training is actually given, intelligent people learn it faster and more easily than unintelligent people. The most money can be made by taking advantage of the cognitive biases intelligent people have, because unintelligent people have less money, even though targeting the biases of unintelligent people is easier.
Here is an example I’ve seen people get wrong in real life:
1. What is the probability that a 40 year old woman will have 5 more kids over the course of her lifetime?
2. What is the probability that Mary O’Reilly, a 40 year old devout Irish Catholic with 6 kids, will ultimately end up with 11 kids?
Plenty of people who know perfectly well that the answer to Q1 is zero, and who know exactly how old Mary is, will ask Mr and Mrs O’Reilly if they’re planning on having 11 kids, implying that the answer to Q2 is greater than zero.
The probability of Q2 really is zero. "Mary O'Reilly" could undergo IVF, but not "Mary O'Reilly, devout Catholic".
Linda’s 23, a bank teller, feminist, lesbian, BLM activist, a pilot of a boat that rammed a Japanese whaling ship, she also blew up a Korean dog restaurant. I saw her crossing the street at Harvard and 6th. Muscular, squat, overweight, angry and she gave me a mean snarly, lip curled up look.
Paraphrasing Orwell: There are some ideas so stupid that only intellectuals will believe them.
Gigenrenzer:
—-
Badcock
The reason you don’t get it is because there is nothing to get. The extraneous piece of information in the test is that Linda is a bank teller. The relevant information is that “As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” So, the relevant probability calculation is on an outspoken person who, at least in the past, has been concerned with “issues of discrimination and social justice….and also participated in nuclear demonstrations.” In other words, what are the chances that she is NOT active in the feminist movement. The legitimate point of confusion is based on what the question writers mean by “active” and perhaps even “feminist movement,” but that ultimately doesn’t demonstrate that b) is an irrational answer. While there may not be much of a correlation between bank tellers and feminism, there may be correlation between SJWs (if I may be permitted to characterize Linda in that way) and feminism. For the probability of b) being less one has to assume an independence that may not exist given the relevant information provided. There is a danger of making too many assumptions and seeing correlations where they don’t exist, but there is also risk in missing correlation and dependence. Look up the story out of the UK of Sally Clark and Sir Roy Meadow to gain better understanding of this risk.
Setting all that aside, responses to the the second block quote above are hardly exemplars of irrationality. Better examples of irrationality are the people in this thread trying to “explain” the reason why a) is the correct answer, which it may not be.
This reminds me of nothing so much as an episode of The Office where Michael Scott is trying to fight stereotypes:
“Close your eyes. Picture a convict. What’s he wearing? Nothing special. Baseball cap on backwards. Baggy pants. He says something ordinary, like ‘Yo, that’s shizzle.’ Okay, now slowly open your eyes again. Who were you picturing? A black man? Wrong. That was a white woman. Surprised? Well, shame on you.”
I am immune to nearly all forms of persuasion. No sort of advertising or mob frenzy or group-think has any influence over me. I have the inveterate bad habit of seeing only facts (including the psychological comportment of others, which is itself a "fact" that must be weighed along with the rest). Most other people seem like perpetual daydreamers and liars to me, which is all the more frustrating because they are in a sense invincibly ignorant in their lying---they do not realize that they are acting from such involved and egotistic motives. I have no ego of my own, so I find the timeless pageantry to be quite tiresome. I am forever fated to be outside the herd. I could not rejoin it even if I wanted to.
Therein we obtain a clue as to why most people are so irrational. That irrationality of which the author speaks is precisely the "virtue" that ordinary people possess which allows them to maintain their egos (and therefore their courage) against the fact-world which is constantly threatening to destroy it, and also to form those inordinate bonds with one another that are the necessary foundations of friendships, families, and tribes. They are gregarious animals with the brains and sensoria geared to that end; they will be what they will be. "Rationality" is of very little use to them and would oftentimes entail doing violence against everything they hold most dear.
Gregariousness is a product of the material brain, rationality of the immaterial mind. The more rational a man is, the more angelic and unearthly he becomes. No longer a herd animal, he becomes a solitary predator---a lonely eagle on the heights, a leopard stalking through the reeds. The rational man has joys, disappointments, and dangers that the gregarious man knows not of, but it is only a a very few who are called to such a path. The great bulk of mankind will always be irrational---and therefore human.Replies: @Neil Templeton, @Anonymous, @Dr. X, @Sean, @Ivan K.
The use of the Socratic Method can produce a body of authoritative knowledge through the dialectical rejection of falsehood, but Straussians stand in contrast to Marxists and other historical progressives because they do not believe that it is inevitable that dialectical inquiry will produce communist utopia. To the contrary, the non-philosophical hoi polloi may relapse into fascist or communist repression of the Socratic Method and require dogmatic belief instead.Replies: @Sean
What do they mean, by the way, "perhaps even now?" Perhaps? You damn well better guard your tongue if you want to keep your job and reputation.
"which is more likely, that she is JUST a bank teller, or is she a feminist bank teller?"
Instead, the people who designed the test, who are either autistic or deceptive, mean:
"which is more likely, that she is a bank teller whether she is a feminist or not, or that she is a bank teller and a feminist?"
Since the first option includes the second this is a pointless question, like "what was the color of Napoleon's white horse?"
In reality the first interpretation, the non-autistic one, is perfectly correct since it is what normal human beings would mean if they asked such a question.Replies: @Corvinus, @melendwyr
The researchers are neither being autistic or deceptive, because it is illogical to automatically assume the bank teller is a feminist merely because she is concerned with those issues. We BELIEVE she is a feminist because, based on those facts, we PERSONALLY INTERPRET them to suit our own narrative.
Programmers may have another reason for the taste in novels. All of the abstract thinking and syntax required to program can mess up your English. Programmers speak a type of meta-language amongst themselves that may sound strange to outsiders.
Interesting. It’s encouraging to know that the researchers believe “dysrationalia” can be cured through training. As we’ve seen throughout history, and perhaps again in the not-distant future, its opposite, “rationalia” (my contribution to the scientific vocabulary), is cured via re-education camps.
Then they get to be Beta providers while deluding themselves into thinking they are Alphas. Meanwhile Mrs. Fuddy-Duddy is banging the pool boy.
I answered A, based on my knowing they were out to “get me,” and on how the question was posed along with assuming that answer A doesn’t include the idea that she is NOT a feminist. I mean, if the possible answers were:
A. Linda is a bank teller and is not a feminist
B. Linda is a bank teller and is a feminist
— I’d go with B. But B wasn’t written as B is written above.
And B included the idea that Linda is “‘active in the feminist movement,” something that is even less probable than the probability of her being a feminist along with being a teller.
But if there were a side bet that went, “Is Linda a feminist? $5 says she isn’t,” I’d take the bet against that.
What if there were a C that went like this?
A. Linda is a bank teller and is not a feminist
B. Linda is a bank teller and is a feminist
C. Linda is a bank teller
LOL
“Also, higher IQ people probably tend to be more trusting”
This only applies to high IQ White people and not to high IQ East Asians. Slit eyed East Asians always tend to be extremely suspicious of ethnic/racial groups that have big round eyes.
That is why East Asian mom & pop businesses in The U.S rarely hire people who have big round eyes. The vast majority of them only hire their own racial kind, even if their business is located in a city where the percentage of Asians is in the low single digits like Orlando and Oklahoma City for example.
Art comes from intelligence + sensitivity.
Since that of programmer is a completely routinary and rationality-loaded work, it’s going to attract people with a much developed rational side of the brain, and an underdeveloped emotional side.
It’s 2 mental faculties, or 2 kinds of eye of the mind.
There’s nothing as humiliating and evervating for an artist, or a person having any sensitivity or imagination, than dealing with programmers.
They are half-brained, usually and mostly.
On the other hand, the wendies who moan about “social justice”, “equality”, and whatever the fads of the moment are and gather in humanities colleges are people with emotion, but no intelligence.
They claim some power and social recognition, placing their hopes in ideologies, since they can’t rely on intelligence.
Moreover, even intelligent and sensitive people, like skilled writers, comedians, and so on are prone to wed ideologies and petty, fashionable fads.
Why?
Because they are victims to vanity.
Vanity is an emotion, and it affects humanists much more strongly than it does tech people.
People want to be visible, and want to be praised and applaued once they are visible.
See social media; they are only strengthening conformism. Repeating and reciting the dominant catchphrases and dogmata is the most effective way to receive praise: thus, that’s what they’ll do.
I mean, have you checked out Murray’s Twitter? He wakes up, and makes sure he tweets against Trump 3 or 4 times before going to bed.
Why?
Well, why!
Among other things, the guy seems to really regret writing The Bell Curve. He wants to be forgiven, and badly so.
Let’s wish him good luck, shall we?
🙂
Thanks for posting this. I am very annoyed at the false idea out there that people who suffer from Asperger’s tend to be highly intelligent. That is simply not the case. Some are, some aren’t. And Asperger’s causes a ton of dysfunction. I’ve seen it up close.
I’m annoyed, too, by how some people with that disorder talk about “neurotypicals” as if we’re “less than” they are. There’s little that’s good about having Asperger’s. The ability to focus obsessively on a single topic might have some benefit, but that’s the only potential “plus” I can think of, and even that has serious negatives associated with it.
BadcockReplies: @Steve Sailer
That’s one reason I like Raymond Chandler so much: he was less a detective story writer than a great man of letters who wrote up his observations of my home town in the form of detective stories for commercial reasons.
Right, because modern Western women are so well known for their willingness to shoulder the brunt of their traditional responsibilities.
1) It is very firmly established that the cognitive patterns described here are reproducible in situations where the proposed answer is not merely the result of a misinterpretation of the question asked or of the data provided, but of an actual MISTAKE which participants admit was really a mistake when it is explained to them, where their understanding of what the question asked and what the data provided said were accurate but they reasoned badly in arriving at their answer.
2) Kahneman not only discovered this, but figured out what was going on "under the hood" that caused these mistakes to be made.
3) BY DEFINITION, the participants were "tricked" by the experimenter because the whole point was to *reproducibly demonstrate* irrationality, but
4) this does not reduce the significance of the finding because the same kinds of mistakes are made in real life when the only "trickster" is nature, these mistakes can have serious consequences and everyone should learn how better to avoid them!
5) this also does not reduce the significance of the finding because there are plenty of real tricksters out there who take advantage of cognitive biases, and it's much better that people not be fooled by them
6) all the criticism of Kahneman personally here is uninformed and based on stupid assumptions that he didn't control for something that he actually did, either in the described experiment or other experiments, control for very carefully. His work was at an extremely high technical level as well as being brilliantly insightful, and the Nobel was appropriate because of this.
7) there are certain kinds of cognitive errors that intelligent people make that unintelligent people don't make because even the mistaken reasoning is too complex for them, and anyone of at least average intelligence can be trained in rationality, but when such training is actually given, intelligent people learn it faster and more easily than unintelligent people. The most money can be made by taking advantage of the cognitive biases intelligent people have, because unintelligent people have less money, even though targeting the biases of unintelligent people is easier.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Okay but it’s interesting to turn the critique around on Kahneman and his fans to show their own failures of intelligence: the Linda question is an obvious example of people intuitively applying Chekhov’s Gun to a narrative, but Kahneman and fans don’t get that.
Fortunately, nerds have now built a colossal library of “TV Tropes” where they can look up Chekhov’s Gun and a million other similar things.
Yes, it is an obvious example of that. But the conclusion you draw from that is wrong. Kahneman gets that, he gets it exactly - it's what he and Tversky suspected was true when they started working on these questions (grandiose and unrealistic claims by economists about people's intuitive statistical rationality were what spurred their research project), it's what they wanted to test, it's why they set up the 'Linda' experiment as they did, and it's why they thought the findings were so important.
It's not Kahneman who is chasing after this 'Rationality' measure, it's Stanovich et al. I think they should be your targets.
I see a paper from Stanovish, and he report that most tests of rationality correlate with IQ by around 0.40. Only the “bias” test that don’t have or have a negative correlation with IQ.
Intellectual does not connote intelligence.
Intellectual is a frame of mind, not quality of mind.
Right.
K&T were sceptical of this proposition, and the results of their tests suggest they were right to be sceptical (I think).
Your defence of the way people would tend to respond to the question - by incorporating the (statistically irrelevant) information given to them into their deliberations, for whatever reason - is actually consistent with K&T's assertion that people aren't, by their nature, statistical reasoners.Replies: @Steve Sailer
But the Linda question shows a failure of logical reasoning (e.g., Venn diagram type stuff) rather than of empirical statistical reasoning.
But the test was specifically set up and designed to see if people could work out that P(A) > [P(A) x P(B)], which is a basic truth of statistical reasoning.
Test subjects' reporting an answer other than that suggested by both statistical reasoning and logical reasoning indicates that people do not naturally reason according to these methods. Which is what the experiment was designed to test, and what Kahneman & Tversky thought was the case before the test.
However I don't think for that reason that people are irrational. As you suggest, they use a different form of reasoning - pattern detection, information assimilation, analogy, extrapolation, stereotyping, and what others here call 'noticing', which almost all of the time works quite well. And because it almost always works well I can't see how it could possibly be called 'irrational'. Kahneman talks about this in Chapter 16 of Thinking, Fast and Slow, and actually states that there are costs associated with what we might call 'not noticing' - which is a central theme of your writing, n'est-ce pas?
What I'm trying to say is, that you and Kahneman are in furious agreement about how people reason. I think the problem here is that you are associating Kahneman with the people who have come after him, and who are using his 'Linda' experiment to push their 'rationality' barrow. From what I've read, I don't think this association is warranted (although I acknowledge I could be wrong).
I think Kahneman himself would be interested in what has been written here.
Both questions ask whether she's likely to be a bank teller. Any question that adds other conditions to her status is less likely to be true. Condition A is always more likely than A + B, A + C, etc.Replies: @Harry Baldwin
Yes, this seems obvious to me. I wonder why some people have trouble understanding it.
Okay, for those incapable of understanding how human beings think rather than computers, I'll spell it out.
No doubt in terms of mathematical logic, it must be the case that it's more likely for A alone to be true than A plus B.
But in this stupid Linda story we are given social information rather than a bunch of numbers, and as functioning humans we attempt to interpret information on the basis how we understand the human world to work in practice rather than on absolute mathematical principles. So, the set up is as misleading as Escher's manipulation of the principles of perspective that humans use for the interpretation of the real world in order to make a staircase seem to bend around itself in a way that could never happen in the real world.
What then do we learn from the Linda story? At university, she studied the humanities and has leftist political views. Is such a person the sort that is likely to become a bank teller? No. So possibility A is inherently unlikely.
Now we turn to possibility B. She's said to be a bank teller with an interest in leftist politics. In this case, we take for granted the unlikely possibility of her becoming a bank teller. In effect, this bit of information rules out ex hypothesi the implausibility of the first answer. She has become a bank teller. And if she has gone that route, then how likely is it for her to take on the sideline of being a leftist? Given the information we've been told about her, that seems like a good bet. Therefore, by any normal human's understanding of the situation, this possibility (a bank teller with her background having strong leftist political views) is quite likely.
That's how regular human beings would reason their way through the possible answers. In terms of abstract mathematical principles, the computer's answer would be correct. In terms of human beings interpreting the actual world around them, this line of reasoning is both more useful and more plausible.
As I suggested before, the attempt to pose an abstract question of logic in the guise of social information is a cheap parlor trick no more indicative of reality than Escher's staircase.Replies: @AndrewR, @Ted Bell, @Intelligent Dasein, @No_0ne
I’d add that Kahneman’s political point — that most people can be tricked by tricksters and so therefore the government should try to protect average people from the tricks of tricksters in the financial markets and elsewhere — seems reasonable to me. It doesn’t seem very novel, but I guess people need to be reminded of old truths by dressing them up as Einstein-Level Scientific Breakthroughs.
Well, the invention of Peanut Butter by George Washington Carver didn't seem very novel to me either, but maybe I am weird.
In any case, my real point was that rationality and logic are two distinct concepts. A rational argument will always be logical, but a logical argument may be irrational.Replies: @Anonymous
In any case, my real point was that rationality and logic are two distinct concepts. A rational argument will always be logical, but a logical argument may be irrational.
The concepts mean the exact same thing. You are confusing “irrational” with “unreasonable” or “improbable”.
It doesn’t seem very novel,
Well, the invention of Peanut Butter by George Washington Carver didn’t seem very novel to me either, but maybe I am weird.
In my personal experience, whenever I answer one of these types of questions incorrectly, it’s because I wasn’t really paying attention. I was whizzing through the problem and not really dwelling on it long enough to understand what was actually being asked, and I wasn’t taking the time to discriminate between possible answers. So the issue is not one of faulty reasoning but of faulty perception.
The attendant shame and anger I feel afterwards (i.e. the emotion that causes some people to double down after giving a wrong answer) is a result of knowing that I was duped and that it was my own damn fault. The wild-ass justifications people make for their incorrect answers are actually desperate and necessarily unsuccessful attempts to argue that their own incomplete assessment of the problem really encompasses all the relevant information the problem contains. At that point it is a mere face-saving effort, since they cannot delay indefinitely the moment when they must admit to being in error.
Deep down inside I know that I should have been more awake and alert than to permit this to happen to me. I should have taken more care about the training of my mind and senses. I should not have relied solely on my lazy, muddle-headed heuristics. I should have been a better man.
“There is nothing in the intellect that is not first in the senses.” Faulty reasoning is never a problem for me but weak engagement often can be.
Then again I don't have as much at stake as you guys. I'm pretty smart compared to the general population but not smart like you all. Certainly not in this area.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein
In the Real World, highly intelligent people have to solve real hands on problems and are therefore likely to be more rational. Whereas, in the bubble world of academic settings, rational behaviors are declasse and unintellectual. I'm sure most people find it amusing to see snobs at places like Starbucks claiming they drink espresso or cappuccinos and turn their noses up at such lowly things as Dunkin Donuts coffee. This may be irrational, but an entire franchise has formed to cater to these elitist pretensions.Replies: @S. Anonyia, @Jimi
Iced coffee in Dunkin Donuts is more expensive that Starbucks.
Steve,
Yes, it is an obvious example of that. But the conclusion you draw from that is wrong. Kahneman gets that, he gets it exactly – it’s what he and Tversky suspected was true when they started working on these questions (grandiose and unrealistic claims by economists about people’s intuitive statistical rationality were what spurred their research project), it’s what they wanted to test, it’s why they set up the ‘Linda’ experiment as they did, and it’s why they thought the findings were so important.
It’s not Kahneman who is chasing after this ‘Rationality’ measure, it’s Stanovich et al. I think they should be your targets.
Well, you could argue that it shows both. They aren’t mutually exclusive (I would hope not, anyway).
But the test was specifically set up and designed to see if people could work out that P(A) > [P(A) x P(B)], which is a basic truth of statistical reasoning.
Test subjects’ reporting an answer other than that suggested by both statistical reasoning and logical reasoning indicates that people do not naturally reason according to these methods. Which is what the experiment was designed to test, and what Kahneman & Tversky thought was the case before the test.
However I don’t think for that reason that people are irrational. As you suggest, they use a different form of reasoning – pattern detection, information assimilation, analogy, extrapolation, stereotyping, and what others here call ‘noticing’, which almost all of the time works quite well. And because it almost always works well I can’t see how it could possibly be called ‘irrational’. Kahneman talks about this in Chapter 16 of Thinking, Fast and Slow, and actually states that there are costs associated with what we might call ‘not noticing’ – which is a central theme of your writing, n’est-ce pas?
What I’m trying to say is, that you and Kahneman are in furious agreement about how people reason. I think the problem here is that you are associating Kahneman with the people who have come after him, and who are using his ‘Linda’ experiment to push their ‘rationality’ barrow. From what I’ve read, I don’t think this association is warranted (although I acknowledge I could be wrong).
I think Kahneman himself would be interested in what has been written here.
This only applies to high IQ White people and not to high IQ East Asians. Slit eyed East Asians always tend to be extremely suspicious of ethnic/racial groups that have big round eyes.
That is why East Asian mom & pop businesses in The U.S rarely hire people who have big round eyes. The vast majority of them only hire their own racial kind, even if their business is located in a city where the percentage of Asians is in the low single digits like Orlando and Oklahoma City for example.Replies: @Anon
Actually, it’s because they’re cheap as hell and they hire their relatives because they can get away with underpaying them. They often have a whole clan network they rely on or labor if they don’t have kids. Asians in general aren’t very far removed from the farmer mentality where it was normal to put all your kids to work in the fields to help out the family. Americans used to think the same way as late as the 1800s.
More like 1900s.
A Hottentot or a Papuan jungle dweller would have no clue what even a bank teller is, but that doesn’t give us any space to assume they are completely irrational beings. A proper test for rationality – at its cerebral foundation – cannot use words.
No, I think the Straussians would argue that the Socratic Method — knowledge that one is ignorant, and ceaseless questioning of those who claim to know the truth — is the source of authoritative knowledge, but as the trial of Socrates demonstrated, it is always in danger of being extinguished by the cave-dwellers who regard myth, untruth, and fantasy as reality.
The use of the Socratic Method can produce a body of authoritative knowledge through the dialectical rejection of falsehood, but Straussians stand in contrast to Marxists and other historical progressives because they do not believe that it is inevitable that dialectical inquiry will produce communist utopia. To the contrary, the non-philosophical hoi polloi may relapse into fascist or communist repression of the Socratic Method and require dogmatic belief instead.
The attendant shame and anger I feel afterwards (i.e. the emotion that causes some people to double down after giving a wrong answer) is a result of knowing that I was duped and that it was my own damn fault. The wild-ass justifications people make for their incorrect answers are actually desperate and necessarily unsuccessful attempts to argue that their own incomplete assessment of the problem really encompasses all the relevant information the problem contains. At that point it is a mere face-saving effort, since they cannot delay indefinitely the moment when they must admit to being in error.
Deep down inside I know that I should have been more awake and alert than to permit this to happen to me. I should have taken more care about the training of my mind and senses. I should not have relied solely on my lazy, muddle-headed heuristics. I should have been a better man.
"There is nothing in the intellect that is not first in the senses." Faulty reasoning is never a problem for me but weak engagement often can be.Replies: @Kylie
I skip all the self-flagellation and just tell myself I’ll do better next time.
Then again I don’t have as much at stake as you guys. I’m pretty smart compared to the general population but not smart like you all. Certainly not in this area.
Then again I don't have as much at stake as you guys. I'm pretty smart compared to the general population but not smart like you all. Certainly not in this area.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein
Oh, I wasn’t trying to give the impression of excessive self-flagellation. What I wrote may have seemed a little melodramatic because I was trying to tease out the fine-grained details of what is really a pretty instantaneous, instinctive reaction.
That's not rational.Replies: @Charles Erwin Wilson
Was Euclid “not rational” when he stipulated the parallel postulate of Book One of The Elements?
I wonder why some people have trouble understanding it.
Okay, for those incapable of understanding how human beings think rather than computers, I’ll spell it out.
No doubt in terms of mathematical logic, it must be the case that it’s more likely for A alone to be true than A plus B.
But in this stupid Linda story we are given social information rather than a bunch of numbers, and as functioning humans we attempt to interpret information on the basis how we understand the human world to work in practice rather than on absolute mathematical principles. So, the set up is as misleading as Escher’s manipulation of the principles of perspective that humans use for the interpretation of the real world in order to make a staircase seem to bend around itself in a way that could never happen in the real world.
What then do we learn from the Linda story? At university, she studied the humanities and has leftist political views. Is such a person the sort that is likely to become a bank teller? No. So possibility A is inherently unlikely.
Now we turn to possibility B. She’s said to be a bank teller with an interest in leftist politics. In this case, we take for granted the unlikely possibility of her becoming a bank teller. In effect, this bit of information rules out ex hypothesi the implausibility of the first answer. She has become a bank teller. And if she has gone that route, then how likely is it for her to take on the sideline of being a leftist? Given the information we’ve been told about her, that seems like a good bet. Therefore, by any normal human’s understanding of the situation, this possibility (a bank teller with her background having strong leftist political views) is quite likely.
That’s how regular human beings would reason their way through the possible answers. In terms of abstract mathematical principles, the computer’s answer would be correct. In terms of human beings interpreting the actual world around them, this line of reasoning is both more useful and more plausible.
As I suggested before, the attempt to pose an abstract question of logic in the guise of social information is a cheap parlor trick no more indicative of reality than Escher’s staircase.
Consider this alternate example. Two men see a dog. One says, "That's a dog." The other says, "That's a dog with rabies." Obviously the first man is more likely to be correct. But the second man's assertion, even if wrong, is the one that matters.
Okay, for those incapable of understanding how human beings think rather than computers, I'll spell it out.
No doubt in terms of mathematical logic, it must be the case that it's more likely for A alone to be true than A plus B.
But in this stupid Linda story we are given social information rather than a bunch of numbers, and as functioning humans we attempt to interpret information on the basis how we understand the human world to work in practice rather than on absolute mathematical principles. So, the set up is as misleading as Escher's manipulation of the principles of perspective that humans use for the interpretation of the real world in order to make a staircase seem to bend around itself in a way that could never happen in the real world.
What then do we learn from the Linda story? At university, she studied the humanities and has leftist political views. Is such a person the sort that is likely to become a bank teller? No. So possibility A is inherently unlikely.
Now we turn to possibility B. She's said to be a bank teller with an interest in leftist politics. In this case, we take for granted the unlikely possibility of her becoming a bank teller. In effect, this bit of information rules out ex hypothesi the implausibility of the first answer. She has become a bank teller. And if she has gone that route, then how likely is it for her to take on the sideline of being a leftist? Given the information we've been told about her, that seems like a good bet. Therefore, by any normal human's understanding of the situation, this possibility (a bank teller with her background having strong leftist political views) is quite likely.
That's how regular human beings would reason their way through the possible answers. In terms of abstract mathematical principles, the computer's answer would be correct. In terms of human beings interpreting the actual world around them, this line of reasoning is both more useful and more plausible.
As I suggested before, the attempt to pose an abstract question of logic in the guise of social information is a cheap parlor trick no more indicative of reality than Escher's staircase.Replies: @AndrewR, @Ted Bell, @Intelligent Dasein, @No_0ne
It said feminist not leftist. Not interchangeable terms.
And to think B was more probable you’d have to assume that A meant “was a bank teller but not a feminist” even though that’s NOT what it says. You know what they say about assuming.
The world would be better if people made fewer baseless assumptions.
Isn’t that always the case with Lefty efforts at social engineering? With more education–a series of training seminars and classes–your shortcomings can be improved.
We’re told our public schools teach critical thinking skills, meanwhile students are plugged full of answers to be regurgitated on standardized tests, as every last jot and tittle of the Common Core curriculum is specified as if in a re-education camp.
The problem is that in real world situations we calculate risks not merely on statistical probability, but how it may directly affect us in our real world lives. What Tversky and Kahneman succeeded in doing was to show how much our personal interests can affect our calculation of probabilities, as in terms of risk/reward. The RQ stuff is too abstract, in my opinion, to have any real world validity.Replies: @CAL
The problem with the question is option A implies she is not a feminist. At that point most people reduce the question to is she or is she not a feminist? She is a bank teller either way. Option A has to be more precise in its definition.
Also, who wouldn’t bet that a philosophy major who was active in social causes is a feminist? One has to believe the number nears 100%. So does the insignificant statistical reality make people who chose B irrational?
This question, as phrased, suggests that Linda is a bank teller, period. That means those terms cancel out. That means the question is interpreted as: given her background, is Linda a feminist? That's a reasonable possibility but not a fact.
Apparently there's a large audience that needs to be told that people in real life do not in fact balance probabilities in strictly statistical terms. However:
1. This isn't a matter of "rationality" as such since any individual's real world perceptions is cluttered with all kinds of "irrational" elements, including elements pertaining to that individual's real world life.
2. These kinds of tests go back to the '50's IIRC and certainly point to a bias in the way we solve problems. But that's not a problem as long as we are open minded as to alternatives. The goal in problem solving is not to get the right answer instantaneously, the goal is to get the right answer eventually.
3. The notion that one can extrapolate an "RQ" from this, which is somehow compensatory, offsetting, or additive to IQ still seems very questionable to me. It sounds like a compensatory trophy to me.
BTW, with regard to the bat/ball problem, I honestly don't see how anyone can get that question wrong, as long as you look at it as a typical math basic algebra substitution problem. The only reason I can think that someone might get that question wrong is if they basically aren't paying attention to the problem. Which means that humans have a tendency to be casual and inattentive, especially when confronted with rinky dink word problems.
(And also that some forms of problem solving can be done reasonably well by most people with low IQ, but precisely where System 1 cognition is engaged and there is a low level of abstraction.)
As for why Kahneman's work has been so endlessly ballyhooed, you can look at it two ways-
A) In our present modern environment, our instincts (System 1) really are constantly in conflict with our rational side (System 2). Figuring out the nature of this conflict is the only way we're going to stop ourselves from eating and drinking ourself to an early grave, texting while driving, and so on.
B) Many different actors in the society have a strong incentive for ordinary well-educated people to view themselves as fundamentally irrational. First of all, it's an essentially passive pose- "oh, we all make these mistakes, and all need correction in these matters." Second, and more importantly in recent years, it helps convince well-educated people to accept a scope of government that treats everyone as equally incompetent.Replies: @EH
That last point is especially insightful. The point is to make people answering the question submit to the question-writer’s narrative as the prototype of rationality, when actually the question writer literally just made the whole thing up.
There is no Linda. She’s a figment of the question-writer’s imagination. “Linda” is a character made up to make a point. The probability that a character has certain attributes or constellations of attributes depends only on the psychology of the character’s creator and his purpose in creating that character. When answering the question, people entertain the fiction proposed and try to figure out what the creator of the fiction meant. Which is a more convincingly imagined narrative, one where the author throws in irrelevant, even actively misleading description and ends by showcasing the most brief and boring job title as the summation of the character, or the one where the summation of the character is of a piece with all the narrated facts about her?
Most people entertain the fiction so completely that they forget that it is a fiction, as all the discussions of the “Linda” question show. Even if we follow them in that imagination, still, the person who has more purported information is going to be seen as more likely to be knowledgeable about Linda. If one person claims to know her college major, her politics, her job then implies that she does not also hold a political position that is essentially universal given her sex and politics, then that person is less credible that the one who seems to have additional data that fits with the overall picture.
Which is more likely, that scientists collected a lesser amount of data on an experiment or a larger amount of data? Logically, it is more likely that they collected a smaller amount of data. Which data set is more convincing about the experiment, other factors equal — the larger data set of course. That is the equivocation inside the already fictional engineered mind-fuck. It’s an onion of deception. It is not accidental or innocent, either. Just as you say:
Note the people pushing the “85% of people who aren’t us are completely irrational” narrative. Professors Kahneman and Tversky. That lizard Stephen R. Diamond on this thread, who gives Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel) competition in the promulgation of disingenuous, tribally-motivated pseudo-science. Eli Yudkowski, the transhumanist/nerd-rapture tent-preacher / glassy-eyed megalomaniac with hypergraphia who back in 2005 had a knock-down, drag-out argument about the Linda question on his SL4 mailing list (the predecessor to his Less Wrong site, among others), in which he ended up banning the exceptionally intelligent Richard Loosemore simply for making reasoned arguments which Eli was unable to refute. They all seem to be Jews. They all seem to need to feel intellectually superior, and take their ability to deceive others as evidence of their superiority, and their superiority as reason that they should deceive others (who wouldn’t understand the truth, and might challenge their betters if they did). They know on some level what they’re doing, but they also have the ability to not admit it even to themselves in situations where that would impair their ability to deceive others.
One of the DNC emais released by Wikileaks was sent out after the DNC leadership realized that their email had been compromised. Their solution? Send out new passwords. Via email. Seriously.
“Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.”
And how well has that worked out? Does humanity seem, on the whole, to be doing better today than 40 years ago?
I see intuition as the sum total of all the experiences of every ancestor of ours, going back to the beginning of life, but edited down to fit within the available storage medium. So much of that data has been lost that the instinctual conclusions may make no rational sense. But the fact remains that every one of us is the product of only our ancestors who survived long enough to reproduce. We don’t have to understand the logic of those intuitions to accept that they kept our line going, while other genetic lines died off. If billions of years of evolution can account for sentience, I see no reason to believe that it can’t account for an intuitive system that outperforms pure logic, at least in terms of survival to reproductive age.
Okay, for those incapable of understanding how human beings think rather than computers, I'll spell it out.
No doubt in terms of mathematical logic, it must be the case that it's more likely for A alone to be true than A plus B.
But in this stupid Linda story we are given social information rather than a bunch of numbers, and as functioning humans we attempt to interpret information on the basis how we understand the human world to work in practice rather than on absolute mathematical principles. So, the set up is as misleading as Escher's manipulation of the principles of perspective that humans use for the interpretation of the real world in order to make a staircase seem to bend around itself in a way that could never happen in the real world.
What then do we learn from the Linda story? At university, she studied the humanities and has leftist political views. Is such a person the sort that is likely to become a bank teller? No. So possibility A is inherently unlikely.
Now we turn to possibility B. She's said to be a bank teller with an interest in leftist politics. In this case, we take for granted the unlikely possibility of her becoming a bank teller. In effect, this bit of information rules out ex hypothesi the implausibility of the first answer. She has become a bank teller. And if she has gone that route, then how likely is it for her to take on the sideline of being a leftist? Given the information we've been told about her, that seems like a good bet. Therefore, by any normal human's understanding of the situation, this possibility (a bank teller with her background having strong leftist political views) is quite likely.
That's how regular human beings would reason their way through the possible answers. In terms of abstract mathematical principles, the computer's answer would be correct. In terms of human beings interpreting the actual world around them, this line of reasoning is both more useful and more plausible.
As I suggested before, the attempt to pose an abstract question of logic in the guise of social information is a cheap parlor trick no more indicative of reality than Escher's staircase.Replies: @AndrewR, @Ted Bell, @Intelligent Dasein, @No_0ne
It’s more useful to be correct on a non-trivial question than a trivial one. Because ALL possible answers contain the fact that Linda is a bank teller, that information can be treated as a given. It’s no longer part of the answer, but part of the data available for finding the answer. Being a known quantity, it becomes trivial. That shifts the question, in the minds of the test takers, to the only non-trivial question left: Is Linda a feminist? People preferentially solved the non-trivial portion of the problem because trivial problems are unimportant to survival.
Consider this alternate example. Two men see a dog. One says, “That’s a dog.” The other says, “That’s a dog with rabies.” Obviously the first man is more likely to be correct. But the second man’s assertion, even if wrong, is the one that matters.
You didn’t give me the impression of excessive self-flagellation.
My point was that for you, it’s not excessive. For me, it would be.
If I listened to a Lied I had never heard before and couldn’t tell whether Schubert or Schumann had composed it, I would definitely be enduring not only self-flagellation but some sleepless nights.
But the Linda problem is a struggle for me. I’m simply not too bright that way and I know it.
Okay, for those incapable of understanding how human beings think rather than computers, I'll spell it out.
No doubt in terms of mathematical logic, it must be the case that it's more likely for A alone to be true than A plus B.
But in this stupid Linda story we are given social information rather than a bunch of numbers, and as functioning humans we attempt to interpret information on the basis how we understand the human world to work in practice rather than on absolute mathematical principles. So, the set up is as misleading as Escher's manipulation of the principles of perspective that humans use for the interpretation of the real world in order to make a staircase seem to bend around itself in a way that could never happen in the real world.
What then do we learn from the Linda story? At university, she studied the humanities and has leftist political views. Is such a person the sort that is likely to become a bank teller? No. So possibility A is inherently unlikely.
Now we turn to possibility B. She's said to be a bank teller with an interest in leftist politics. In this case, we take for granted the unlikely possibility of her becoming a bank teller. In effect, this bit of information rules out ex hypothesi the implausibility of the first answer. She has become a bank teller. And if she has gone that route, then how likely is it for her to take on the sideline of being a leftist? Given the information we've been told about her, that seems like a good bet. Therefore, by any normal human's understanding of the situation, this possibility (a bank teller with her background having strong leftist political views) is quite likely.
That's how regular human beings would reason their way through the possible answers. In terms of abstract mathematical principles, the computer's answer would be correct. In terms of human beings interpreting the actual world around them, this line of reasoning is both more useful and more plausible.
As I suggested before, the attempt to pose an abstract question of logic in the guise of social information is a cheap parlor trick no more indicative of reality than Escher's staircase.Replies: @AndrewR, @Ted Bell, @Intelligent Dasein, @No_0ne
I think you deserve some acknowledgement for this very good comment. You’ve pretty much nailed it.
Okay, for those incapable of understanding how human beings think rather than computers, I'll spell it out.
No doubt in terms of mathematical logic, it must be the case that it's more likely for A alone to be true than A plus B.
But in this stupid Linda story we are given social information rather than a bunch of numbers, and as functioning humans we attempt to interpret information on the basis how we understand the human world to work in practice rather than on absolute mathematical principles. So, the set up is as misleading as Escher's manipulation of the principles of perspective that humans use for the interpretation of the real world in order to make a staircase seem to bend around itself in a way that could never happen in the real world.
What then do we learn from the Linda story? At university, she studied the humanities and has leftist political views. Is such a person the sort that is likely to become a bank teller? No. So possibility A is inherently unlikely.
Now we turn to possibility B. She's said to be a bank teller with an interest in leftist politics. In this case, we take for granted the unlikely possibility of her becoming a bank teller. In effect, this bit of information rules out ex hypothesi the implausibility of the first answer. She has become a bank teller. And if she has gone that route, then how likely is it for her to take on the sideline of being a leftist? Given the information we've been told about her, that seems like a good bet. Therefore, by any normal human's understanding of the situation, this possibility (a bank teller with her background having strong leftist political views) is quite likely.
That's how regular human beings would reason their way through the possible answers. In terms of abstract mathematical principles, the computer's answer would be correct. In terms of human beings interpreting the actual world around them, this line of reasoning is both more useful and more plausible.
As I suggested before, the attempt to pose an abstract question of logic in the guise of social information is a cheap parlor trick no more indicative of reality than Escher's staircase.Replies: @AndrewR, @Ted Bell, @Intelligent Dasein, @No_0ne
Excellent analogy. To sum it up, the way the question is formulated, people took it to mean “Is Linda a typical bank teller, or is she a bank teller who believes in feminism along with her other leftist political views?” While this is wrong in terms of a probability word problem on a test, it is a perfectly reasonable assumption in terms of how people actually communicate in real life.
But its not totally absurd. Throughout his life, Bertrand Russell had difficulty in making a pot of tea. His wives had to literally write out directions for him on how to do it, but he never learned. Also, Einstein never fully learned how to shave himself. His daughter tried to teach him, he liked it, said he’d try it on his own, but apparently never did.
In other words some of the world’s highest IQs apparently never learn how to do the mundane, the ordinary things of life. They’re too busy using their brains to solve more important things in life.
The use of the Socratic Method can produce a body of authoritative knowledge through the dialectical rejection of falsehood, but Straussians stand in contrast to Marxists and other historical progressives because they do not believe that it is inevitable that dialectical inquiry will produce communist utopia. To the contrary, the non-philosophical hoi polloi may relapse into fascist or communist repression of the Socratic Method and require dogmatic belief instead.Replies: @Sean
The Straussians have texts that they circulate only among themselves, which hardly suggests that they have no inner teaching. Moreover Strauss was influenced by Carl Schmitt, who taught that the truth is not the crux, as everything collapses into the distinction between friend and foe. the enemy is to be identified as such and then soundly beaten, making their loser’s views redundant.
Also, who wouldn't bet that a philosophy major who was active in social causes is a feminist? One has to believe the number nears 100%. So does the insignificant statistical reality make people who chose B irrational?Replies: @SPMoore8
Actually, I didn’t bother to answer the question in my mind, but I did do the bat ball question yesterday, and I got it right, but I had to hesitate to check the answer because I was looking for a trick question.
This question, as phrased, suggests that Linda is a bank teller, period. That means those terms cancel out. That means the question is interpreted as: given her background, is Linda a feminist? That’s a reasonable possibility but not a fact.
Apparently there’s a large audience that needs to be told that people in real life do not in fact balance probabilities in strictly statistical terms. However:
1. This isn’t a matter of “rationality” as such since any individual’s real world perceptions is cluttered with all kinds of “irrational” elements, including elements pertaining to that individual’s real world life.
2. These kinds of tests go back to the ’50’s IIRC and certainly point to a bias in the way we solve problems. But that’s not a problem as long as we are open minded as to alternatives. The goal in problem solving is not to get the right answer instantaneously, the goal is to get the right answer eventually.
3. The notion that one can extrapolate an “RQ” from this, which is somehow compensatory, offsetting, or additive to IQ still seems very questionable to me. It sounds like a compensatory trophy to me.
BTW, with regard to the bat/ball problem, I honestly don’t see how anyone can get that question wrong, as long as you look at it as a typical math basic algebra substitution problem. The only reason I can think that someone might get that question wrong is if they basically aren’t paying attention to the problem. Which means that humans have a tendency to be casual and inattentive, especially when confronted with rinky dink word problems.
Socrates was full of crap, at least in the form we know him best, which is as a character in Platonic dialogues. As for the real Socrates, who knows? I suspect he had definite opinions about things and tried to instruct his pupils in them, despite his reputation for professing ignorance.
What do they mean, by the way, “perhaps even now?” Perhaps? You damn well better guard your tongue if you want to keep your job and reputation.
That’s exactly what I said at 179.
We have a friend who’s 83. His dad pulled him out of the 9th grade (about 1947) so that he could help with the farm in Oklahoma. He never went back to high school. He said this was not common, but that nobody cared if he just worked and didn’t attend school. He later served in the army, interestingly.
“During the world war, a Chicago newspaper published certain editorials in which, among other statements, Henry Ford was called ‘an ignorant pacifist.’ Mr. Ford objected to the statements, and brought suit against the paper for libeling him…The attorneys asked Mr. Ford a great variety of questions…’Who was Benedict Arnold?’ and ‘How many soldiers did the British send over to America to put down the Rebellion of 1776?’…
“Finally, Mr. Ford became tired of this line of questioning, and in reply to a particularly offensive question, he leaned over, pointed his finger at the lawyer who had asked the question, and said, ‘If I should really WANT to answer the foolish question you have just asked, or any of the other questions you have been asking me, let me remind you that I have a row of electric push-buttons on my desk, and by pushing the right button, I can summon to my aid men who can answer ANY question I desire to ask concerning the business to which I am devoting most of my efforts. Now, will you kindly tell me, WHY I should clutter up my mind with general knowledge, for the purpose of being able to answer questions, when I have men around me who can supply any knowledge I require?’
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140827202003-7158355-let-me-explaining-my-thought-process-here-is-a-quote-about-henry-ford
I’ve given a lot of thought to the matters you discuss, over the years.
I wouldn’t say these brown people are “rational” necessarily. Much of what they do is so completely devoid of reason, logic, or rationality as to even boggle the dense libtard mind – if they were truly immersed into the lives of the former long enough to notice. They would have a very high attrition rate in the absence of help (medicine, food, technology, peacekeeping) from White nations – even if some of our (((captured))) leaders bomb some of them from time to time.
The way I see it, the failure of many Whites to understand racial differences, and the true collective nature of these various non-White hordes, stems from some combination of the following:
– Media brainwashing and resultant fear of being ostrasized
– Naivete and the projecting of their own morality onto outgroups (who are typically shameless, power-hungry, unprincipled, and lacking in empathy)
– White people, relative to everyone else, hail from high-trust environments with a high level of empathy and compassion (again, relatively); and so the easy marks, suckers and gullible goobers weren’t quickly culled from the gene pool as in other human groups.
and finallly;
–Most people are just dumbfucks, no matter the race or how high the IQ. They don’t see obvious patterns and rarely find the right answer to any problem.
In closing, I would characterize brown people as being closer to Nature – the dog eat dog world, law of the jungle, kind of thing – with better instincts when it comes to raw power and might over right vis-a-vis human interaction; but I’m only referring to the ‘average’ person from any particular group here.
However, certainly a minority of gifted Whites excel in ‘reading’ the real intentions/motivations of other people and aren’t easily fooled.
The Missionaries suggests that is true in a cargo cult fashion.
Any time my career took me to or near “corridors of power,” what I found there were not high-IQ people, but a lot of social, political, and occupational climbers in the +.5 to +1 SD range. Organization men and women. Yes, I’m talking in management and leadership positions. The line staff were there or lower.
A lot of them played tricks on other people of the sort for which the Israelis Kahneman and Tversky were noted…with no goal that I could tell other than asserting their positional superiority in an organization.
But is being tricky and manipulative, to make others look bad, actually high intelligence (Tversky loved it when people concluded that he was the smartest person in the room)? Or does it more accurately fall within the Ass-hat Band on the bell curve?
The smartest people I’ve known–+3 SD and up–haven’t given a hoot about politics. They have far more interesting pursuits and obsessions. Sometimes they were in a position to *advise* those in the corridors of power, like some of the quants I knew. But I’m combing through my wetware and can’t think of a single one that wanted power or notice or to tell others what to do.
As a +3.5 to +4 SD close friend says, when you’ve finished your apprenticeship figuring out primate power dynamics on the school playground and classrooms, there’s not much of interest there after about age 20. Politics? It’s as boring as televised sports.
Do I recall correctly that Hahneman’s and Tversky’s research subjects were mostly students at their and cooperating universities? There’s something especially bizarro in my mind about Ashkenazi Jews who achieve professorhood then devote themselves to demonstrating their superiority over undergrads and grad students.
TEND TO BE
correlation is the trends between two ''things''
rational don't tend to be more reasonable and factually correct,
They, generally, ARE better judges than, superficial and broader category: ''high iq pp''
rationality IS NOT correlative with more rational people, is their primary action or intrinsic action, just like hallucination is to schizophrenia or sensorial issues is to autism.
we have a problem because a lot of self-declared ''rational'' ones in the true are not absolutely more rational than other people.
and most of people who ''seems to be rational'' are in the true logical.
logic is not the same than rationality
logic is what's work.
rationality is the good judgment/weight attitudes based on perffecionistic proportionality.
logic don't need morality/ethics, rationality, to be complete, need indispensably the morality/ethics.
re-conclusion
''iq'' correlates with rationality in the same way it correlates with creativity
but
white people, specially the very white ones, are white in the same way rational people are rational, organic/intrinsic causality between the concept and their behavior.
PERIOD.
Based on this evidence, Professor Stanovich and colleagues have introduced the concept of the rationality quotient, or R.Q. If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.
This sounds like a test of nerdishness.
Just in your dreams.
Again, ''epicentric concept''
nerdishness ALSO correlates with:
rationality
iq
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-invE3ypVbIM/T_23MAJRwzI/AAAAAAAAAD8/oOD1BHlEt5Q/s1600/zzzz.png
;)
ciao!!!
Only real issues about it is
leftoid defining rationality
just like christian defining kindness
of course, ''white-jewish trash'' and their grrreat ''intellect'' manipulating, subconscious or consciously, and their followers just, well, following,
ant social level, for sure.Replies: @Santoculto
I don’t understand why don’t accept my comment…
your analysis was, on usual, very poor…
=)
Setting all that aside, responses to the the second block quote above are hardly exemplars of irrationality. Better examples of irrationality are the people in this thread trying to "explain" the reason why a) is the correct answer, which it may not be.
This reminds me of nothing so much as an episode of The Office where Michael Scott is trying to fight stereotypes:
"Close your eyes. Picture a convict. What's he wearing? Nothing special. Baseball cap on backwards. Baggy pants. He says something ordinary, like 'Yo, that's shizzle.' Okay, now slowly open your eyes again. Who were you picturing? A black man? Wrong. That was a white woman. Surprised? Well, shame on you."Replies: @BB753
The probability for any woman under age 85 not to be some kind of feminist is 0% or nil. You have to be deluded to believe there are still anti-sufraggists out there.
The probability of Q1 is higher than zero, because it is hypothetically possible for a woman in her 40s to have quintuplets via IVF.
The probability of Q2 really is zero. “Mary O’Reilly” could undergo IVF, but not “Mary O’Reilly, devout Catholic”.
I am immune to nearly all forms of persuasion. No sort of advertising or mob frenzy or group-think has any influence over me. I have the inveterate bad habit of seeing only facts (including the psychological comportment of others, which is itself a "fact" that must be weighed along with the rest). Most other people seem like perpetual daydreamers and liars to me, which is all the more frustrating because they are in a sense invincibly ignorant in their lying---they do not realize that they are acting from such involved and egotistic motives. I have no ego of my own, so I find the timeless pageantry to be quite tiresome. I am forever fated to be outside the herd. I could not rejoin it even if I wanted to.
Therein we obtain a clue as to why most people are so irrational. That irrationality of which the author speaks is precisely the "virtue" that ordinary people possess which allows them to maintain their egos (and therefore their courage) against the fact-world which is constantly threatening to destroy it, and also to form those inordinate bonds with one another that are the necessary foundations of friendships, families, and tribes. They are gregarious animals with the brains and sensoria geared to that end; they will be what they will be. "Rationality" is of very little use to them and would oftentimes entail doing violence against everything they hold most dear.
Gregariousness is a product of the material brain, rationality of the immaterial mind. The more rational a man is, the more angelic and unearthly he becomes. No longer a herd animal, he becomes a solitary predator---a lonely eagle on the heights, a leopard stalking through the reeds. The rational man has joys, disappointments, and dangers that the gregarious man knows not of, but it is only a a very few who are called to such a path. The great bulk of mankind will always be irrational---and therefore human.Replies: @Neil Templeton, @Anonymous, @Dr. X, @Sean, @Ivan K.
I can immediately recall exceptionally rational people, philosopher Bernard Williams, Crick and Watson of DNA fame, inventor Danny Hillis, that are well known as gregarious, and can be freely called ‘party animals.’
Personally I’m fairly withdrawn.
What these examples means for your case, I leave it to you to judge.
Define "exceptional rationality" please?
I’m a woman, and I’d give up my right to vote in a second if all women would.
But are you under 85 years old? Lol! BTW, I bookmarked your site for future reference.
A purported rational being who believes in spirits, personal existence after death, and one or more deities?
You’d better have pretty substantial empirical evidence for your claim to be rational. You sound like just another emotional ape.
To illustrate:
"The soup was bad so I shot the chef" is a logical statement.
"The soup was good so I shot the chef" is an illogical statement.
However, both statements are irrational. Rationality implies that we use all our faculties in deciding a course of action. In this case we might send the soup back to the kitchen, but we would not shoot the chef: it's just not rational.
To be logical it is sufficient for one thing to follow/be consistent with another. To be rational is to function on a higher plane, taking other aspects into account.
The researchers have set up a test of logic that revolves around probabilities and the AND statement.
They would be better off dropping the R word.Replies: @guest, @ScarletNumber, @PiltdownMan, @Jean Cocteausten, @melendwyr
No, it’s an illogical motivation, given certain very common unspoken assumptions about the perceived values of being shot. It’s a perfectly logical statement.
There are plenty of other examples of the same kind of human cognitive dysfunction. Typical human beings frequently cannot choose the logically-correct option in real-world situations. In some cases, they have problems when the choice is presented abstractly but find it intuitive when it’s presented as real-world.
Most humans aren’t very good at thinking. They’re good at feeling and rationalizing those feelings.
"which is more likely, that she is JUST a bank teller, or is she a feminist bank teller?"
Instead, the people who designed the test, who are either autistic or deceptive, mean:
"which is more likely, that she is a bank teller whether she is a feminist or not, or that she is a bank teller and a feminist?"
Since the first option includes the second this is a pointless question, like "what was the color of Napoleon's white horse?"
In reality the first interpretation, the non-autistic one, is perfectly correct since it is what normal human beings would mean if they asked such a question.Replies: @Corvinus, @melendwyr
…or smarter than you are, and are capable of understanding what an English statement actually means rather than what sloppy readers will probably assume it means.
Which is more likely, A, B, or C? I’m voting for C.
Watson??
Define “exceptional rationality” please?
You’re obviously too young to know, or have relatives who did, that women’s suffrage in the US and UK was a pro-white eugenic tactic designed to offset the massive burgeoning voter blocs from outside the Hajnal Line.
Most white women were smarter than all but a few of those immigrants. It’s basic IQ distribution.
Whether you like the way IQ is distributed is your issue, but you might start with reference to that instead of silly internet gender memes.
A highly intelligent, land owning, high earning (in her working years), power-tool-using, lace-knitting, viking woman like my wife far more deserves a franchise than most males in the US at present. Maybe, I’d guess, including you in my estimation. Certainly more than any IQ 120 or lower male.
You want to cut off voting rights, start around IQ 115, and I’ll be right there with you. There is no reason that highly intelligent women should be excluded from voting while male Untermenschen aren’t. But as far as I can tell, the problem mostly takes care of itself: the stupid don’t vote as much no matter how the oligarchs whip them up.
But wouldn't you say the West would be better off if women had stayed at home raising their 3.2 kids, instead of going to college, working long hours, delaying maternity till their thirties, breaking up families in serial divorces , and generally messing up society with their feminine craving for safety over liberty?
Letting women vote and legislate, to allow their presence and participation in government and public affairs,to let these infantile creatures roam free and wreak havoc upon society have been our undoing.
Let's go back to basics: the three k's ( not the KKK, lol) : " Kinder, Küche, Kirche", ( Children, Kitchen, Church) , as the Germans used to say before being castrated by 70 years of feminism and of "progressive" American military occupation .
Some comments are so dumb that we don't need counter-argue, ''they'' talk for themselves.
There may be exceptions.
But wouldn’t you say the West would be better off if women had stayed at home raising their 3.2 kids, instead of going to college, working long hours, delaying maternity till their thirties, breaking up families in serial divorces , and generally messing up society with their feminine craving for safety over liberty?
Letting women vote and legislate, to allow their presence and participation in government and public affairs,to let these infantile creatures roam free and wreak havoc upon society have been our undoing.
Let’s go back to basics: the three k’s ( not the KKK, lol) : ” Kinder, Küche, Kirche”, ( Children, Kitchen, Church) , as the Germans used to say before being castrated by 70 years of feminism and of “progressive” American military occupation .
Ridiculous comment by a retarded iqdiot, as usual…
Some comments are so dumb that we don’t need counter-argue, ”they” talk for themselves.