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This article is painfully oblivious to how people function! It reaches the correct (and I assume apriori) conclusion that people don't care to connect things in

This article is painfully oblivious to how people function! It reaches the correct (and I assume apriori) conclusion that people don't care to connect things in their head, but it gets it from very silly data. Consider the question about earth rotating around the sun and how long it takes. The answer to the first part is readily available BECAUSE ITS PART OF OUR LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. We periodically hear about Copernicus' heretical discovery. We hear the phrase 'one more trip around the sun', we see models of the solar system, etc. So the right answer is just instinctively top of mind. In other words you can get this right by being completely ignorant of celestial mechanics because you almost can't avoid "knowing" it by osmosis. The question about the duration of the trip is a much harder question. You need to either recall a much less frequently referenced definition, or to model it out in your head. And guess what, people are not likely to do that work while answering a stupid poll. I bet if the question included "take your time and if you get this right you will win $100", the correctness rate would shoot up. On the parity of zero, it probably goes like this "it seems like it's even but they are asking a poll about it so there's probably a trick. There could be some rule that makes zero special" and because it's an irrelevant quiz they say "neither" and move on with their lives. Again, if you phrase it to slow them down and offer a reward, more people would take time to think it out and answer correctly. It feels like what is really frustrating the author is that people don't totally nerd out thinking through twitter polls.

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
That's a good summary. There's something elitist about this paper that I couldn't quite put my finger on, and I think you got it. Perhaps obsessing too much about twitter polls and what constitutes "stupidity" is what chafed. When someone starts attempting to categories who is "stupid" (even though OP states "people are not stupid" at the end of the article), my BS detector starts going off. Especially when it is focused on minutia (parity of zero) and "good enough" knowledge (earth/sun). The earth and sun orbit each other, but the focal point is inside the sun (and every atom in the universe orbits each other in an N-dimensional space), why is that dismissed as "nitpicking" by the author, but parity of zero is somehow an important indicator of stupidity? smh.
- kybernetikos 6y ago
  You're completely right about this being elitist. I, in common with most people who do maths, consider 0 to be even, but I also remember that maths is just a mental game we play, where we give all kinds of entirely abstract, unusual meanings to a variety of terms in order to get something useful out of them. It's like saying that there are infinities bigger than other infinities (because we define bigger to mean 'not able to be put into a correspondence'), or that the sum of natural numbers is -1/12 or when we say that x^0 is 1 because that makes all kinds of things work so much better. All this terminology is useful, but the way the article talks make it sound as if it is ordained by a higher power that it must be this way rather than simply contingent on what we find most useful. To complain that someone is stupid because they're using less useful or standard terminology is unfair, especially if they're not playing the same game you're playing - dividing cookies evenly is a totally different game to maths, and it's reasonable to have different definitions. As someone who has occasionally been able to make strong arguments that the 'wrong' answer on a multiple choice question is more correct than the 'right' answer, there's also something pretty elitist about giving people so little room to explain themselves. You can tell almost nothing about a person by whether they fit into one of four boxes you've chosen for them.
  - ColinWright 6y ago
    Wow, that's pretty much exactly the opposite of what I was trying to say. Thank you for making it so clear that someone can read the same words and come to a radically different conclusion about the intent. I am genuinely stunned and baffled as to how you have come to the conclusions you have, and I'm going to take some time to try to work out how that's happened. I'm utterly dismayed that it comes across as being elitist.
    - kybernetikos 6y ago
      Well, you say multiple times that you don't think that the disconnect is stupidity or ignorance, but then you talk about how the people who have given the wrong answer are not following logic, are misinformed, uncaring or wanting only to be entertained (which sound mainly like other ways of saying stupidity and ignorance). I think it's great that you're trying to analyse why people are giving such an answer, and you may be largely right in what you've come up with, but I think a more charitable explanation that you don't seem to have considered at all is that their answer makes logical sense in their framework, and that the educational mission you are on should be considering frameworks rather than rightness and wrongness and 'educating' them out of their current view.

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago

That's a good summary. There's something elitist about this paper that I couldn't quite put my finger on, and I think you got it. Perhaps obsessing too much about twitter polls and what constitutes "stupidity" is what chafed. When someone starts attempting to categories who is "stupid" (even though OP states "people are not stupid" at the end of the article), my BS detector starts going off. Especially when it is focused on minutia (parity of zero) and "good enough" knowledge (earth/sun). The earth and sun orbit each other, but the focal point is inside the sun (and every atom in the universe orbits each other in an N-dimensional space), why is that dismissed as "nitpicking" by the author, but parity of zero is somehow an important indicator of stupidity? smh.

kybernetikos 6y ago
You're completely right about this being elitist. I, in common with most people who do maths, consider 0 to be even, but I also remember that maths is just a mental game we play, where we give all kinds of entirely abstract, unusual meanings to a variety of terms in order to get something useful out of them. It's like saying that there are infinities bigger than other infinities (because we define bigger to mean 'not able to be put into a correspondence'), or that the sum of natural numbers is -1/12 or when we say that x^0 is 1 because that makes all kinds of things work so much better. All this terminology is useful, but the way the article talks make it sound as if it is ordained by a higher power that it must be this way rather than simply contingent on what we find most useful. To complain that someone is stupid because they're using less useful or standard terminology is unfair, especially if they're not playing the same game you're playing - dividing cookies evenly is a totally different game to maths, and it's reasonable to have different definitions. As someone who has occasionally been able to make strong arguments that the 'wrong' answer on a multiple choice question is more correct than the 'right' answer, there's also something pretty elitist about giving people so little room to explain themselves. You can tell almost nothing about a person by whether they fit into one of four boxes you've chosen for them.
- ColinWright 6y ago
  Wow, that's pretty much exactly the opposite of what I was trying to say. Thank you for making it so clear that someone can read the same words and come to a radically different conclusion about the intent. I am genuinely stunned and baffled as to how you have come to the conclusions you have, and I'm going to take some time to try to work out how that's happened. I'm utterly dismayed that it comes across as being elitist.
  - kybernetikos 6y ago
    Well, you say multiple times that you don't think that the disconnect is stupidity or ignorance, but then you talk about how the people who have given the wrong answer are not following logic, are misinformed, uncaring or wanting only to be entertained (which sound mainly like other ways of saying stupidity and ignorance). I think it's great that you're trying to analyse why people are giving such an answer, and you may be largely right in what you've come up with, but I think a more charitable explanation that you don't seem to have considered at all is that their answer makes logical sense in their framework, and that the educational mission you are on should be considering frameworks rather than rightness and wrongness and 'educating' them out of their current view.