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Why Smart People Are Stupid
- planetguy 14y agoNow that's the kind of headline I'd give to my article if I wanted it to reach the top of the HN front page.
- tokenadult 14y agoLink to the study linked in the article (PubMed prepublication abstract): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=west%20stanovich%20meserve http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=west%20stanovich%20m... The psychologist Keith R. Stanovich is quite controversial among other psychologists precisely because he writes about what high-IQ people miss in their thinking, but his studies point to very thought-provoking data and deserve to be grappled with by other psychologists. I have enjoyed his full-length book What Intelligence Tests Miss http://yalepress.yale.edu/YupBooks//book.asp?isbn=9780300123852 http://yalepress.yale.edu/YupBooks//book.asp?isbn=9780300123... which meticulously cites much of the previous literature on human cognitive biases and other gaps in rationality of human thinking. And here is the submitted article's link to a description of the Need for Cognition Scale: http://www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/ncs/ http://www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/ncs/
- jerf 14y agoThe book mentioned, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", despite the boring title, is quite good. If you're the sort to hang around lesswrong.com it won't blow your mind, those less exposed to those ideas will find it fascinating (and probably a bit more accessible in book form).
- sadga 14y agoIf he had his wits about him, he would have titled it "What Intelligence Tests Skip".
- cheatercheater 14y agoITT: can the Need for Cognition Scale be used to weed through candidates for programming positions? Can it help identify candidates who have little experience but will make good programmers once they're taught how to code?
- cheatercheater 14y ago> The psychologist Keith R. Stanovich is quite controversial among other psychologists precisely because he writes about what high-IQ people miss in their thinking Sounds interesting; care to summarize what those things are?
- pjscott 14y agoIf you'd rather not just accept your current level of cognitive bias, the web site Less Wrong has a bunch of articles by and for people trying to become less wrong about things. Anecdotally, I've noticed that people I know via the Less Wrong community tend to be decidedly less full of crap than average, so it seems to work. For example, here's a series of articles on the subject of avoiding excessive attachment to false beliefs, which I found to be generally entertaining and insightful: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_Mind http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_M... Any of those articles are a good place to start, so don't be intimidated by the amount of stuff there.
- Apocryphon 14y agoUnfortunately, sometimes it's those who are the most logical, or think of themselves as most logical, that fall into the most glaring of logical traps: (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong (specifically the basilisk drama)
- gwillen 14y agoActually, one of the coolest things, to me, about LessWrong, is the fact that the community as a whole is arguably more rational than the founder. Eliezer's own LessWrong comments have been downvoted many times, and a number of those were during the "basilisk" debacle. Many of the site's regulars were on the side of sanity in that incident. So I think it's fair to tar Eliezer himself for that incident, but I don't think it's a good indictment of the site's community as a whole.
- Cushman 14y ago> the "basilisk" debacle Hadn't heard of this, just read the RationalWiki article-- and it is fabulous. LW literally derived religion and then took that seriously enough to cover it up. That's fantastic.
- danielweber 14y ago
- antithesis 14y agoJust a couple of weeks ago we had an article about why smart people don't think of others as stupid (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3984894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3984894), and now they're stupid themselves? I'm puzzled.
- terangdom 14y agoA careful reading will tell you that the article you refer to is normative not descriptive.
- carsongross 14y agoBecause they spend all day on HN?
- jakeonthemove 14y agoWell, at least people are collectively smarter today compared to 100 years ago - the percentage of people who can answer those questions correctly has gone up considerably :-)... Also, I just hate these kind of questions - they've always been used to prove that I'm stupid by those who knew the answers, and they're not solving anything useful - I need the problem to solve something I care about in order for my brain to fully focus on it and "do the math"...
- moron 14y agoThese questions are not designed to demonstrate intelligence if you get them right. They are designed to show how our cognitive biases trip us up, often without us even noticing. You're not stupid if you get them wrong, you're completely normal.
- sageikosa 14y agoGot the ball and bat one right, and the lily pad one. I must not be as smart as I hoped :-( I think it comes down to having a value system where you'd rather be wrong and corrected (even if you have to do it yourself), as opposed to always projecting yourself as"perfect". Once you accept you aren't perfect, its easier to work towards perfecting what you've got.
- planetguy 14y agoAh, that's the author flattering the reader. If the author had picked a genuinely tricky example for the first one it would have turned many readers off. Of course a question like the old bat and ball one is ridiculously simple, after you've been warned that many people get it wrong and hence that you should probably stop and think for a few seconds before blurting out the first answer that pops into your head. Do it without that warning and it's easier to get it wrong.
- d2vid 14y agoThis. I think many people don't think they are susceptible to these biases because every time they encounter one, it is in the context of reading about biases and thus they are primed to be on the lookout for trickiness. I guess "many people" includes me - I always thought I was good at these types of questions, maybe I'm not :(
- sageikosa 14y agoI sort of realized I was already primed for "gotchas"! Of course I can't sing my own praises without showing some bias, since the whole article was about bias.
- dllthomas 14y agoWhen I first encountered these, without the "it's going to be tricky" priming, I must admit I got the bat and ball one wrong until I revisited it. The lily pad one I got right with no deep thinking - my explanation is that experience working with bits primed me for treating "doubles" more correctly. That's post hoc and anecdotal, of course, so take it for whatever, but I thought it interesting...
- Jun8 14y ago"Although we assume that intelligence is a buffer against bias—that’s why those with higher S.A.T. scores think they are less prone to these universal thinking mistakes..." This fallacy is at the heart of the matter. Intelligence and resistance against bias are only loosely correlated. Such resistance comes not from intelligence but from careful study and mental exercise, e.g. looking at various important ethical and philosophical arguments and analyzing them. This is like saying all large people are strong. There is some dependance but a smaller gym-fly can kick a slacker giant's ass. The sad thing, while it is obvious that you have to exercise your body to be healthy and strong, the fact that the same is quite through fro your brain is often overlooked.
- d2vid 14y agoAgreed. Thinking intelligent people can better resist biases makes as much sense as saying that handsome people can. In both cases the halo effect is at work.
- nileshtrivedi 14y agoIf you take out resistance against bias off it, what exactly do you mean by "intelligence" ?
- terangdom 14y agoIntelligence and bias resistance are at least both cognitive traits.
- nileshtrivedi 14y agoIsn't resistance against bias a very requirement for considering someone intelligent? What exactly is intelligence if not the ability to think clearly? To me, this looks like a definition game. Smart/stupid is a black & white view of looking at it and hence, misleading. As one overcomes his primitive biases, we call him smart, even though he remains susceptible to other biases. In other words, people aren't smart or stupid. People's actions are smart or stupid in a particular situation.
- 14y ago
- marquis 14y agoWell, the ball one I've heard before and the lilypad is obvious if you've been exposed to biology. Is this not more a matter of education not being applied to real-world cases and relying on theoretical teaching?
- Karunamon 14y agoSo because I'm suffering from a deep case of the derp today, how are the first guess answers to those questions wrong?
- alaskamiller 14y agoSince most people don't get calculus they use simple math to shortcut to answers that sounds right.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jere 14y agoCalculus? These problems require elementary school arithmetic or, being generous, basic algebra.
- alaskamiller 14y agoThink it through. The first problem is operational and the second problem is change on a slope. People use what they know to deal with problems, so facing these two they use basic math (subtraction and division) being ignorant of higher-level math concepts such as algebra or calculus. The answers they come up with appears right to their known level of logic. If you were the type of person that got to learn about high level math concept, and are the studious type to double check answers, then these two problems are condescendingly seen as trivial.
- jere 14y agoI see it differently. The whole point of the article is that these problems affect smart people. >For one thing, self-awareness was not particularly useful: as the scientists note, “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” This finding wouldn’t surprise Kahneman, who admits in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” that his decades of groundbreaking research have failed to significantly improve his own mental performance. “My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy”—a tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task—“as it was before I made a study of these issues,” he writes. It has nothing to do with knowledge of higher level mathematics because these problems are easily solvable with arithmetic. Lacking calculus doesn't kill you on this problem. An intuitive gut feeling that you've already arrived at the right answer and laziness is the source of confusion. I've even read about that damn bat and ball problem and it STILL tripped me up this time. I could easily have double checked my answer, but I wanted to read the article. Even a child knowing nothing other than addition could get it right with a little bit of trial and error. I hope after admitting that you see that I don't find the problems condescendingly trivial. Personally, I found the second problem much easier... probably because programmers have a better intuitive grasp of powers of 2. Bringing in slope is stretching it a bit. Working in reverse from the completely covered lake, it should be obvious that going back one day halves the lily pads. However, I could imagine how someone more familiar with linear processes would get the wrong intuitive result. >The answers they come up with appears right to their known level of logic. A studious habit sure, but checking your answer isn't a higher level math skill.
- Jordan_N 14y agoAll of this is covered (much better)in Kahneman's 'Thinking, Fast and Slow'.
- keiferski 14y agoIntelligence is overrated as a metric, from the get-go. Being smart doesn't mean anything - accomplishing something, whether that be writing a book, founding a company, making a new scientific discovery, sculpting a masterpiece, etc., is a much better metric. Unfortunately everyone seems to be hung up on the "idea" of being smart, as if having a high IQ somehow constitutes an accomplishment.
- beersigns 14y agoI'm on the same page. IQ is property of the genetic dice roll, not something that a person earns. Tangible results based measurements seem more appropriate. Pure intellect is the raw material & needs to be refined/applied to be useful. edit: grammar
- upquark 14y agoThe rest of your personality traits that allow you to accomplish great things (diligence, perseverance, focus, empathy, etc), as well as external factors such as being born at the right place and the right time, are also arguably a genetic / environmental dice roll.
- beersigns 14y agoI'd argue all of those areas you list are far more likely to be improved over the course of a lifetime than sheer intelligence. Pure intellect is pretty much set at birth, or at the least the ability to improve it isn't statistically significant. I'd argue that genetic dice roll and environmental dice roll are quite different things as well. You have FAR more ability to change your environmental situation than your genetic one. Does everyone have an equal chance to alter their environment? No, but who said life is fair?
- rstevenson542 14y agoThe human brain has enormous capacity to develop in a wide variety of areas. Most of these areas are not measured in tests like the IQ tests. IQ tests mainly measure those brain functions we find beneficial in modern western society. IQ tests, SATs, ACTs and other standardized test like them are improperly named. They should be called "Tests That Predict Success or Failure in the School System From Which the Questions Have Been Derived."
- moron 14y agoI notice this all the time, all over the place. It drives me nuts, to the point that I am now extremely skeptical of what we call "intelligence". Taleb's "The Black Swan" really opened my eyes to this. He talks a lot about how we reason in ways that do not correspond to reality. I don't know what right is, but I know the way we currently think about intelligence is wrong.
- farinasa 14y agoAgreed. IQ is a terrible method of evaluation also. For instance, if you practice taking IQ tests, I guarantee you will get better at answering those questions. Even if you gauge only the first attempt, how do you know their daily job wasn't very similar to those exercises. In fact, IQ tests are very much like building software to only work in one architecture and then hoping it applies to others. It really only judges speed and word/number pattern recognition. This encourages short cuts and is hardly applicable to any practical situation.
- DavidWoof 14y agoFor the types of testing that he's doing, I suspect he's measuring boredom more than anything else, especially since he's testing largely in a university setting. Intelligent people are accustomed to being bored with endless entry-level evaluation exams, and at first glance this looks like it's just one more of them. And because the stakes here are so low (essentially zero), lots of people will just fly through without really reading and analyzing the question. What he's seeing isn't something new, it's something so old that it's part of popular culture: the absent-minded professor syndrome. It's the stereotype of the brilliant physicist forgets what he's supposed to buy at the supermarket because he's thinking about their quantum properties. Analytic people are horrible at things that don't interest them. Pay the students $50 for each correct answer, and there's not a doubt in my mind that the results will be the complete opposite of what he's seeing now.
- ImprovedSilence 14y agoAgreed. Perhaps the "smart" people are taking shortcuts for brainteaser questions. But when it comes down to it smart people are probably smart cuz they put in the effort to sit down and think about the problem at hand at some point. Give an incentive (grades, job performance, $50), and you're right, they'll probably get the right answer.
- unfocused 14y agoI also agree with your comment. I did both questions as fast as I could and only got the first wrong and the second right. It reminded me of a brilliant Civil Engineering professor I once had who was showing us his notes on the projector (the kind with the light bulb and magnifying glass over head) and someone asked him if he could turn off the lights. The student meant the lights, as in the classroom lights so he could see the projection better. The professor turned off the projector instead :)
- keithpeter 14y agoI saw a pound coin and a 10p coin (UK) and got the first one wrong, I saw a bar graph with a lot of doubling bars, and saw the long history of doubling and got the second one right. I saw the money by denomination, and not as a quantity perhaps. Interesting.
- vain 14y agoA bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball bat + ball = 1.1 bat = ball + 1 2bat + ball = ball +1.1 +1 2bat = 2.1 bat = 1.05 ball =0.05
- debacle 14y agoI parsed that as: bat = 1.1 ball = 1.1 bat = ball + 1 It confused the hell out of me.
- saraid216 14y agoI immediately switched to generic variables X and Y, rather than keeping the original names. It helps.
- farinasa 14y agobat - ball = 1 1 - .1 = .9 1.05 - .05 = 1
- roguecoder 14y agoMy thought process went, "a dollar is 90 cents more than 10 cents, so $1.05 is a dollar more than five cents". I made exactly the same fallacy as those in this study; I've just learned to check my work. On the other hand, I suspect the whole process of estimation and refinement was faster than writing out those equations.
- lupatus 14y agoIt is a system of equations: 1) bat + ball = 1.10 2) bat = ball + 1 via substitution... 1) ball + 1 + ball = 1.10 1) 2ball = 0.10 1) ball = 0.05 again via substitution... 2) bat = 0.05 + 1 2) bat = 1.05 easy peazy
- sin7 14y agoI don't see why, when smart people are trained to be lazy, researchers are surprised that smart people are lazy.
- terangdom 14y agoI am surprised. I thought cognitive traits had high correlation. I did not expect laziness would factor into it so much.
- arihant 14y agoGot the lily pad one. I still cannot believe I said 10 cents on the first one with a completely non-sarcastic chuckle. This article reminds me of pg's reasons to have a co-founder to avoid being delusional. Better be proven wrong on the inside than on the outside. edit: Although on second thought, I think this bias theory probably extends to organizations as well. Probably that's why big companies sometimes can't see the obvious which a startup does.
- piguy314 14y agoIntelligence and logical thinking are not naturally correlated; people have to be trained to reason clearly and deliberately (how to think not what to think).
- lmkg 14y agoThe research is using SAT score as a proxy for general intelligence... I wonder if this sort of heuristic short-cutting actually correlates with test-taking ability more than it correlates with intellgence. A lot of "test-taking" training basically consists of saving time by training away from full reasoning, in favor of cheap-and-good-enough heuristics. Furthermore, those heuristics are over-fitted to the particular problem types on standardized tests. I wonder how much of this study is actually measuring their ability to trigger test-taking instincts on problem types they're not designed for.
- rstevenson542 14y agoIt is ridiculous to suppose that one's score on a multiple choice test is an accurate measure of innate ability or real-world intelligence. The SAT, ACT, IQ tests, and all standardized test like them are socially constructed concepts that ATTEMPT a method of measuring intelligence. Intelligence (in the real world) reaches far beyond one's abilities to answer multiple choice reading comprehension, basic math and writing. Not to mention that problem solving in the real world has no time constraints. Beethoven would not have gotten a perfect score on his SAT's. However, we all can attest to his innovation, creativity and musical genius. How can a multiple choice test measure the creative abilities of people like Sir Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, or Pablo Picasso? The idea that "smarter people... were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes" is a nonsensical conclusion. These findings are completely worthless.
- losethos 14y agofuckedn shjrinks
- farinasa 14y agoI think this is more an issue of the English language. English is not a good way to speak math or logic. In the bat and ball question I mistakenly (and I'm guessing everyone who got it wrong) ignored the word "more". That word represents an operator and is therefore crucial to the question, but is extremely diminutive in terms of English language.
- sageikosa 14y agoPossibly, I immediately substituted one dollar plus ball for bat, then saw I had 2 balls and a dollar making up $1.10. Or 5 cents a ball. I honestly didn't pull out the algorithm sheet, it just sort of worked itself out in my head before I had time to think: what are they looking for... Not to say I don't have biases, just not for word-number problems. Poker on the other hand is another matter, I still chase straights and flushes in games with wild-cards, even though I know those hands are almost worthless.
- wissler 14y agoNo, research did't show that "we do this" or "our approach is that" or "humans aren't rational" -- what the research showed is that the typical person does this or that. A similar experiment where people draw the wrong conclusions is the Milgram experiment. Yes, most people are obedient to authority figures and do what they are told. But not everyone acts that way. This research likes to sweep the best human beings under the rug, as if being virtuous is not something to try to emulate, but is something to hide. This explains why the majority of people act the way they do. Perhaps if they were taught that their "we're only human" vices are not the ideal to emulate, perhaps if the best that humanity had to offer were put forth as the ideal instead, then these lesser human beings who make up the majority would become what they might be and ought to be.
- roguecoder 14y agoAnimals are less irrational than humans. Children are less irrational than adults. Why do you assume rationality is better, rather than maladaptive?
- wissler 14y agoI don't "assume", I induce. See Newton's rules of reasoning. Pay particular attention to Rule IV. It is clear from many examples that rationality gives us the utmost ability to adapt, prosper, and survive over the long term. And there is no example that truly leads in the other direction. (There are many perverse definitions and applications of "rationality" that seem to trick some people into thinking it does lead in the contrary direction).
- cheatercheater 14y ago> I don't "assume", I induce. See Newton's rules of reasoning. Pay particular attention to Rule IV. u so smaht
- wissler 14y agoYour deranged sarcasm eloquently sums up what's wrong with our educational system: kids are taught that their opinions matter, regardless of how idiotic they are. Well the truth is, your uninformed opinion doesn't matter.
- melvinmt 14y agoWhere can I find more of these questions?
- crazygringo 14y agoThis explains, when you look in your git repository for who created a bug... When you find it and it's by someone else, it was obviously a stupid, idiotic error that you would never make. When you find it and it's your own, it was obviously an understandable mistake that anybody could have made. Particularly if you consider yourself a great coder. :)
- pjscott 14y agoYou're more likely to go back and notice the stupid broken code you wrote, because it disproportionately comes back to bite you later. The good code just works, so you don't notice it as much. Classic selection bias.
- saraid216 14y agoI've located incredibly stupid bugs that I wrote enough times to know that I am not a great coder.
- jpwagner 14y agodo we all think about the same thing at the same time or does Jonah Lehrer read HN religiously? i _just_ watched that talk a couple of days ago because it was posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4082308 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4082308
- taylorbuley 14y agoI studied "Choice & Behavior" at Penn -- the names Kahneman and Tversky were a common refrain. If you're looking to self-teach, my prof Jon Baron has a great course outline online: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/p153.html http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/p153.html
- Jabbles 14y agoFYI the tallest tree in the world is ~ 116 m or 379 feet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(tree) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(tree)
- Splines 14y agoThat question sort of bothered me - I have no idea how big a tree is, and even if I saw one, I have no reference for how many feet it is without doing some fairly exhaustive mathematics (and at the scale of "largest redwood", I'd likely be wrong). Given some information about redwood trees, of course people are going to use that information in the subsequent guess. They're not going to imagine a redwood tree, then imagine a building next to it, then count the floors and estimate the height. Or estimate the girth, then guess a height/girth ratio that makes sense given the composition of a tree, and then estimate the height. They're lazy. If I asked you, "Will a frooble fit in my pocket/empire states building?", and then asked you to estimate the average size of a frooble, you'd certainly take into account my earlier question. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/k3/priming_and_contamination/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/k3/priming_and_contamination/ for some better examples. IMO, the more insidious form of anchoring is contamination (vs sliding adjustment).
- tetha 14y agoThis isn't big news for me. It took me about 7 years to understand two courses of high school while finishing my master of science. If you ask me the right question or try to teach me just the right matter in just the right way, a donkey will get it sooner than I do, and I'm talking about possibly years sooner. I might just not see the problem or I might think the wrong way, I don't know. There are things I just don't get.
- cyclic 14y agoFor all of the high and mightiness of this article, this bugged me: In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? If a lilypad is 20 square inches (which is probably conservative), and you started with 1 lilypad, after 48 days of doubling it would cover 1.4MILLION square miles. That is 44 times the surface area of Lake Superior. I get the point of the question, but if you're trying to play "gotcha" on people, at least ask a reasonable question.
- cyclic 14y agoFor all of the high and mightiness of this article, this bugged me: In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? If a lilypad is 20 square inches (which is probably conservative), and you started with 1 lilypad, after 48 days of doubling it would cover 1.4MILLION square miles. That is 44 times the surface area of Lake Superior. I get the point of the question, but if you're trying to play "gotcha" on people, at least ask a reasonable question.
- ilaksh 14y agoMy takeaway is that smart people are in fact fairly dumb, in other words even fairly bright specimens of homo sapiens make stupid mistakes and irrational decisions quite often because of this shortcutting. I also think that on the other hand those types of shortcuts are actually probably very useful aspects of our human intelligence. I think that within 50 years or so we will see new species/upgraded humans or AIs that actually don't have those problems, because they will have built-in checks and alternative types of intelligence that rely on those shortcuts less.
- njharman 14y agoComments here reinforce the research.
- b1daly 14y agoWell I got both those questions right by following the heuristic that the most obvious answer off the top of my head would not be the answer. To my mind on any test that was supposed to be hard the appearance of any obvious an answer triggers me to check for the proverbial trick question. On the other hand, most brain puzzler type questions that get discussed on HN (for example interview questions at Google) I find to be damn hard. I can't imagine that "smart" people would do worse than "stupid" people on truly hard problems. I guess that is the area of bias being pointed to in the OP.
- gojomo 14y agoThe bat-ball and lily-pad questions are 2 of the 3 questions on a short test called the 'Cognitive Reflection Test' (or 'CRT') meant to measure whether people make the effort to think beyond the obvious (but wrong) answer. By using those examples, after its headline, this article seems to imply smarter people do worse on these CRT questions. But that is not what I've read elsewhere -- which is that the CRT is positively correlated with other quantitative measures of intelligence (including IQ scores, SATs, and high-school/collegiate grades). 'Smart' people (by those measures) do tend to do better on the CRT. And if you read this article carefully, you see that while it uses these two CRT questions as examples of tricky questions, when it discusses the results about awareness-of-bias not helping alleviate bias, it isn't necessarily saying smart people do worse on those two CRT questions. It's a bit muddled in what it's saying, and reviewing the linked abstract doesn't help much either. The paper is evaluating some very specific things under the umbrella term 'cognitive sophistication', which might not map to what we usually call 'smart' or even 'test-smart'. BTW, I personally think the CRT may be especially useful for evaluating software/systems proficiency. The bat-ball question probes understanding of algebra; the lily-pad question probes understanding of geometric growth (and someone accustomed to powers-of-2 will find it easier); the third question probes understanding of parallelism and projected-rates-of-work. That third question happens to be: "If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?" (A software person might also think of it as: "If it takes 5 cores to compress 5 GB in 5 minutes, how long would it take 100 cores to compress 100 GB?")
- dougabug 14y agoObvious seems to depend on conditioning. For me the correct answer to the lily pad question seemed completely obvious. On the bat and ball problem, I experienced a cognitive dissonance, the knee jerk answer appeared unbidden, yet something also seemed wrong about it so I stopped to actually think about it before answering correctly. Unconscious algebra would appear to be unreliable for most of us.
- gojomo 14y agoMy guess would be familiarity with binary numbers and powers-of-two in a computer context (bytes, ints, longs, shift-operations, etc.) helps make the lily-pad answer 'obvious' to some people. Experience in a particular domain can hone a different reflexive intuition from the norm.
- akandiah 14y agoWhat did you think of first when you read about the bat and the ball problem? Also, what's your background (e.g. CS, Maths etc.)? As someone who has a relatively strong background in maths, I quickly saw the outlines of a simple, algebraic substituion problem. I'm quite interested in how people analyze problems, so I'd love to see how the HN community approached this.
- phene 14y agoI find the abundance of "See? Smart people are actually dumber than I am!" posts amusing.
- DannoHung 14y agoEnglish is a terrible language for formalism: News at 11.
- dools 14y agoI'm reading the book Priceless by William Poundstone which discusses the work of Kahneman and Tversky (among others) in great detail as it relates to the psychology of pricing (excellent read, btw). This is O.T from what the article is saying but mildly O.T (meaning on-topic) and I'd love to hear HN's opinion on this. One of the problems presented in Priceless is: Would you rather $3,000 as a sure thing, or an 80% chance of $4,000 and a 20% chance of nothing versus: Would you rather a $3,000 loss as a sure thing, or an 80% chance of losing $4,000 and a 20% chance of losing nothing. The erroneous path that most people take, in the eyes of these researchers, is that they set their base reference point at the sure thing, ie. they say "well the $3,000 is a sure thing so I can assume I have it". If you do that, then your answers are different: In the first instance you keep the $3,000 (because it becomes an 80% chance of winning $1,000 versus a 20% chance of losing $3,000). In the second instance you go to court (because it's an 80% chance of losing $1,000 versus a 20% chance of winning $3,000). However if you don't "rebase" your reference point, then you would make the same decision in both cases - that is you would take the 80% of $4,000 bet because it's "worth" $3,200. As much as I realise what they're saying and they say it's statistically incorrect to do this, it really seems to me the most sensible way to make the decisions (which is, I guess, exactly what they're saying right? I'm human, ergo fallible to this kind of illusion). The thing that kills me is this: if this is a one time thing, I'd rather be sure of the $3,000. If I'm buying and selling these bets all day, then sure I should take the $4,000 at 80% because even if I lose this round, the next time I take the bet will make up for it (ie. law of large numbers). But what this problem doesn't address is how often I get this opportunity? Depending on my circumstances, $3,000 could be a life changing opportunity, ie. if I "win" $3,000 or $4,000, my circumstances are essentially the same so I should always go for the sure thing. If I lose $3,000 or $4,000 I'm equally screwed, so I should take the risk and try and win in court. What am I missing?
- kristopolous 14y agoI'm trying to follow. So you are saying that with the following scenario: 1. +3000 at P100 or +4000 at P80 2. -3000 at P100 or -4000 at P80 Depending on the context, the answer is basically universally different if you say "1 then 2" as opposed to "just 1" or "just 2"?
- gwern 14y agoFull text: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2012-west.pdf http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2012-west.pdf
- grandalf 14y agoI think that smart people are also prone to falling for headlines like this. The reality is much more complex.
- javert 14y agoNew Yorker articles (that get posted here, anyway) always have some sort of take on things that attempts to bring down the good. Same for The Atlantic. I'm not saying they're always false, but there is a certain kind of thing that these publications are interested in, and it's a kind of thing that makes me feel dirty---or as if they're trying to make me feel dirty. Anyone else noticed this?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- namank 14y agoBecause they don't ask enough questions.
- Sander_Marechal 14y agoI highly recommend reading "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely if you thought this article was interesting. It covers exactly this subject and makes for fascinating reading. I picked up the book about a week ago via some other post linked here on HN and I'm loving it. http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-Edition/dp/0061353248/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339561700&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expande...
- numeromancer 14y agoHere's a good mental test for the author: When you're done with an article for the "Frontal Cortex" section, read it aloud to yourself and smack yourself in the head with a frozen herring for every time you use the word "we", "us" or "our" in your article. If you have a headache when you're done, burn the draft and rethink the whole thing, b/c your article obviously suffers from a "smug we" bias.
- dutchbrit 14y agoI answered the question correctly, which I'm sure the majority here probably did too. When someone asks a simple mathematical question, I always seem to give it more thought since I always know it must be a dodgy question. 4 years ago, I'd probably of answered the question incorrectly. But the baseball question is an obvious mindfuck.
- sonicaa 14y agoThe last line "The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand." is worrying me a bit.
- astrofinch 14y agoThis finding wouldn’t surprise Kahneman, who admits in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” that his decades of groundbreaking research have failed to significantly improve his own mental performance. “My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy”—a tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task—“as it was before I made a study of these issues,” he writes. Doesn't Kahnman distinguish between intuitive and deliberate thinking? So it could be possible to think better by distrusting our intuitions and deliberating more, right?
- Mordor 14y agoTaking more shortcuts as I get older too - a constant battle to stop and think...
- EricDeb 14y agoI remember the SAT as more about checking oneself's first reaction to a problem. They often try to trick you with the obvious answer. The GMAT and GRE were quite similar. I would often have to stop myself from taking shortcuts
- nadam 14y agoBoth those questions are trivial and I answered them correctly. This is in line with the article's conclusion: I don't consider myself very smart. I mean I had some moderate successes in my childhood at math competitions, I am a reasonably good programmer, but I am not very smart. I even failed at the on-site Google interview. But here is the problem with the article: The people who I consider smarter than me (in the mathematical/IQ sense) also answer these kind of questions correctly. This includes my friend working at Google, some researcher mathematicians who I know from math forums who won serious math competitions as a child, etc... These questions are really-really trivial. The researcher mathematician guy who I know do not even make mistakes on 10x more tricky or hard questions, it is scary how he do not make mistakes and thinks incredibly fast. Something seems to be wrong with this study.
- harrup8 14y agoThere is a simple cure for smart people to not be stupid, they can detect those errors and bias easily in other people thinking, but not in their own thinking because introspection doesn't work. So the cure is to play as if you were the actor in a theater, that is pretend that you are not yourself when you are thinking. You should imagine you are thinking as a known stupid person and by miracle you get smart and not so stupid.
- dmak 14y agoEasier said than done.
- karolist 14y agoThese sort of questions always put me into "hold on, think about it" mode and statements like "Your first response is probably to take a shortcut" are simply not true. I'm actually more vulnerable to over-think a problem rather than provide a quick wrong answer.
- unlinear 14y agoIf the lily pad patch was a mere 1 square inch, on the 48th doubling, the pond would have to be (check my math)about 70k square miles - or 10 times the size of Lake Erie. Those lilies would be consuming a serious amount of co2 during that last doubling!