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> the subjects just answered a different question than the one the researcher asked them. I completely agree with your interpretation. And that is why science

by kartan 8y ago

> the subjects just answered a different question than the one the researcher asked them. I completely agree with your interpretation. And that is why science education is so important. Thinking like a scientist is not natural. It is a learned skill. You need to stop asking yourself what it feels is the correct answer and analyze it to get a universal truth. A lot of "controversial" political topics raise from the difference of perceived reality and reality itself. We suck at statistics and we suck at getting the right answer. And, even educated professionals fail to apply that knowledge to all the domains in their lives.

lqet 8y ago
> And that is why science education is so important. Thinking like a scientist is not natural. It is a learned skill. You need to stop asking yourself what it feels is the correct answer and analyze it to get a universal truth. I agree, but you have to be careful: a universal truth might not exist outside fixed formal systems, and after years (or centuries) of analyzing the problem you might realize that you were only analyzing the question itself, and not the problem it tried to state. I think in a more deeper way, this is the basic problem behind many experiments like the one described in the paper: they all assume that the question they are giving to the subject is equivalent to the problem they are trying to present to them. However, as soon as you transfer something into spoken (or written) language, something is lost. Always. You can never be sure that you were successful in transferring an idea, or a problem statement, to another person in exactly the way you are thinking of it. Because if this, imho you just cannot ask people which is more likely, HHHHHH or HHTTHT if I toss a coin 6 times, and then, if 70% answer HHTTHT, say that people's intuition for probability is bad, or explain it with "anchoring" or "substitution" or another mechanism. It only proves that the majority of people will not give the correct answer if a probabilistic problem is given in formal language to them, in a controlled environment. This is a completely different problem. If the same problem appeared to the subjects in an everyday situation, directly and without the need for language as a mediator, they may very well have precise intuition. I think the problem is, however, that creating such situations is hard for researchers, and also hard to reproduce. But as long as you are trying to keep a sterile testing environment, you will only get answers that will hold in this sterile environment, not in the real world. On the other hand, creating social science or psychology experiments that are not sterile might very well be extremely unethical.

by kartan 8y ago

lqet 8y ago

> And that is why science education is so important. Thinking like a scientist is not natural. It is a learned skill. You need to stop asking yourself what it feels is the correct answer and analyze it to get a universal truth. I agree, but you have to be careful: a universal truth might not exist outside fixed formal systems, and after years (or centuries) of analyzing the problem you might realize that you were only analyzing the question itself, and not the problem it tried to state. I think in a more deeper way, this is the basic problem behind many experiments like the one described in the paper: they all assume that the question they are giving to the subject is equivalent to the problem they are trying to present to them. However, as soon as you transfer something into spoken (or written) language, something is lost. Always. You can never be sure that you were successful in transferring an idea, or a problem statement, to another person in exactly the way you are thinking of it. Because if this, imho you just cannot ask people which is more likely, HHHHHH or HHTTHT if I toss a coin 6 times, and then, if 70% answer HHTTHT, say that people's intuition for probability is bad, or explain it with "anchoring" or "substitution" or another mechanism. It only proves that the majority of people will not give the correct answer if a probabilistic problem is given in formal language to them, in a controlled environment. This is a completely different problem. If the same problem appeared to the subjects in an everyday situation, directly and without the need for language as a mediator, they may very well have precise intuition. I think the problem is, however, that creating such situations is hard for researchers, and also hard to reproduce. But as long as you are trying to keep a sterile testing environment, you will only get answers that will hold in this sterile environment, not in the real world. On the other hand, creating social science or psychology experiments that are not sterile might very well be extremely unethical.