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This is generally the case for the vast majority of puzzles, and it equally drives me mad in those areas where academics set "puzzles" and conclude that people'

This is generally the case for the vast majority of puzzles, and it equally drives me mad in those areas where academics set "puzzles" and conclude that people's inabilty to "solve" them is some cognitive deficiency. I've rarely encountered a case where it is isnt an extreme lack of self-awareness in the questioner -- eg., being extremely overfit to language/notation/etc. localised to their own area of expertise.

sillysaurusx 2y ago
It’s not so much that an inability to solve them means you’re deficient, as it is that an ability to solve them means you’re capable in ways most people aren’t. My wife is great at puzzles, and it’s always humbling to watch her sail through them. I agree that puzzles alone shouldn’t e.g. determine whether you’re a good fit for a job, though. That’s one of the more annoying parts of software interviewing.
- mjburgess 2y ago
  I think it should be the duty of the person asking the question to find a isomorphism to another question that the majority of people can answer. Eg., rather than asking about the risks of A,,B,C given various probabilities etc. ask them to make bets in a highly familiar environment with a resource that has uniform marginal utility to them... so eg., "suppose you were at home and your friend does..., how much of your time on a sunday would you bet to do... " You find that when "the very same question" is asked in highly familiar terms people get it right. Then this investigator-academic should ask: what features of their own puzzle induce the kind of mistakes they see? In my experience its often that people are far less socially incompetent than questioners, so put "interpretation & trust" priors on terms/presentations of questions that mean they don't parse the presentation into the problem the investigator has in mind. People who write puzzles tend to be the most bureaucratic sort of literalists who have profoundly eccentric modes of interpretation The problem that most people are solving is: "what do i say to make this person/question go away"
  - hinkley 2y ago
    > The problem that most people are solving is: "what do i say to make this person/question go away" reply This is it. Never attribute to incompetence that which can be readily attributed to apathy.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  > as it is that an ability to solve them means you’re capable in ways most people aren’t. No, because the point is that they always hinge on an arbitrary distinction to give one answer. But if you made a different arbitrary distinction you'd get a different answer. And the arbitrary distinctions are, well, arbitrary. They reflect neither truth nor capability. Just whether you can read the questioner's mind as to what arbitrary and intentionally unstated assumptions they are making. No thanks.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
stevenAthompson 2y ago
Logic itself is a relatively new invention, and is symbolic itself. That is to say, logic is a map not the territory. That said, if someone can't fathom the most widely used symbolic languages humans use (math, logic, language, etc) they probably do have a cognitive deficit of some sort when compared to those who can.
- bbor 2y ago
  I mean, 2400y at least… I guess you mean quantitative logical calculus notation? - the local Russell hater
  - hinkley 2y ago
    I guess sleeping through history class is also a mental deficit ;)
  - stevenAthompson 2y ago
    By "relatively recent" I meant in terms of human evolution. We've had it for around 2400 of the last 300,000 years or so. So less than 1% of our species existence. I used that phrasing to drive home the idea that logic is not some inherent aspect of nature, or even fundamental to the way humans perceive the world.
- blueflow 2y ago
  Languages were made up by mankind at some point. They are not backed by the rest of physical reality. They can only be learned by induction, and there is no guarantee that people will get the same "version" of it. To speak in your analogy, people walk around with different maps of the same territory and realizing this is the self-awareness mjburgess is talking about.
- lotharcable2 2y ago
  It is less 'logic is new'... it more about abstract thinking is a skill that is more useful in societies that have complex social arrangements. If you are a primitive farmer abstract thinking isn't really useful to you. Everything you deal with in your life, except religion, can almost entirely be dealt with absolutes with little in the way of abstractions. If it rains at the right time then you can have a good harvest. If the weather is bad then it sucks. If there is animals threatening your crops or herd you need to take steps to deal with them. There is a lot of logic in dealing with these things. You have to know the seasons, know the stars, know the dirt, etc. You have to understand the life cycle and manipulate the behavior and biology of plants and animals at the right stages in their lives. Things have a logical sequence and there are direct consequences that are predictable from events and your actions. Where as in modern society you have been conditioned to think in terms of hypothetical and abstractions through being exposed to testing your entire life. You first need to know how test questions work before you are able to answer them accurately. For a person who isn't exposed to this then the whole affair of asking hypotheticals and assuming imaginary situations with specific rules that don't actually apply to the present reality is very confusing. They don't even understand the question. So, of course, they are going to suck at answering them. And ultimately that is all IQ testing measures.. your ability to take tests.
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
The linguistics imo are pretty ill defined. "All" bring a common colloquial term doesn't have a strict set theory definition here. It is reasonable many people think zero hats is means the lie is in this very first word. A lot of people will consider "all" to implicitly mean 1 or more, while I think strict logicians will map colloquial all to 0 or more. All mat imply colloquially 2 or more as well, as why bother say "all" if you had one hat in the truthful sense "My hats" contrasts with the "has a hat" because having a hat in your possession that you could have borrowed does not confer ownership that the word "my" can imply. So great, a three letter word and a two letter word and we are knee deep in ambiguity. They could be wearing the hat to try to publicly locate the true owner who might say "hey I lost that hat at x". "Are green"... Green as in vegetable? Green as in the specific wavelength defined as green and not lime or some other named shade? Completely green dyed being undermined by a black spot or a pattern on the hat? Imo zero hats of ownership is a viable lie to the statement, as is having one red-green hat.
- ewzimm 2y ago
  I like your way of phrasing this. Also, we can assume that this is not the only statement that the liar has ever told, so the context matters. If the preceding statement was "Every hat is my hat." Then we have a definition of "all" in the next sentence that works against the stated answer. So "we can't conclude anything" is really the answer because of undefined terms.
Suppafly 2y ago
>and it equally drives me mad in those areas where academics set "puzzles" and conclude that people's inabilty to "solve" them is some cognitive deficiency. Does that actually happen in academia? It seems to mostly be a social media thing.
- mjburgess 2y ago
  So frequently I'd say its the main case. Researchers are extremely poor at controlling for competing explanations, in many cases, strongly incentivsed not to. Suppose you're writing a paper what do you write: option A) Average People Cannot Understand Probaility!?!?!, option B) Inexperienced test takers with unfamiliar notation fail to grasp meaning of a novel question; option C) survey participants on technical questions often do not adopt a literal interpretation of question; D) etc. etc. In general researchers are extremely loath to, or poor at, recognising there's 101 alternative explanations for any research result using human participants and 99.99% of the time just publish the paper that says the experiment evidences their preferred conclusion.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    "Democrats perform poorly on history tests designed by Republicans."
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    These sorts of puzzles aren't used by researchers though, so I'm not sure I follow the rest. They almost always seemed to be used by people trained in logical thinking to consider problems in different ways. They only seem get to the larger public when someone shares one on social media and people with no background in logic complain that they are poorly written or have no answer, since they don't realize that these sorts of puzzles presuppose some background in logic and familiarity with the setup.
- btilly 2y ago
  There is one notable example that I'm aware of, but it really is a cognitive deficiency. The contrapositive is a rule that says that "A => B" is the same as "not B => not A". This is very confusing to people, and few can follow verbally why it works. But here is a fun experiment. People are presented with a selection of envelopes, all face down, and are asked to verify the fact that, "All unstamped envelopes are small." They immediately begin turning over the large envelopes, then have trouble explaining their (correct) reasoning! Here is a correct implication process for their actions. "All unstamped envelopes are small." => "unstamped envelope => small envelope" => "not small envelope => not unstamped" => "large envelope => stamped" At which point it is easier to just check the large envelopes!
hinkley 2y ago
It works better for everybody when these puzzles are told as inside jokes instead.
raincole 2y ago
My favorite example is Monty Hall problem. "Smart" people often use it as the evidence of how bad general people are at probability. It really isn't. The problem is usually given in this form: > Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice? [1] The only correct ansewr to this question is "I don't know." People who answer yes are just taking way too many standardized tests. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
- copypasterepeat 2y ago
  I guess I don't understand why you think "I don't know" is the only correct answer. It's clearly not, which is the point of the problem in the first place. It's a bit hard to grok, but once you do, it's clear what the right answer is.
  - raincole 2y ago
    "I don't know" is the only correct anwser because the original problem isn't properly worded. You need to (at least) add this statement to the original question: > The host must open a door in any situation, and you know this rule. Because "host" in daily language is a human being with agency to choose whether to not open a door. Without this statement, the original problem is actually a game theory problem with two players. The host might be playing a strategy where he only opens the door when he knows you picked the car at the first place, or any other strategy. The above statement removes the ambiguity and that's what the original author meant (but failed to put in words). (If you're interesting in this, the wikipedia page linked above actually contains a quite extensive discussion in history over it)
    - dooglius 2y ago
      I don't think improper wording makes it an example of the type of puzzle GP is complaining about, because the counter-intuitive aspect holds up when everything is clarified.
afiori 2y ago
In my opinion a lot of these puzzles are about empathy toward the examiner as they generally ask variations of "what would I answer to this question?". In the case of a logician and the properties of the elements of the empty set the frame of mind of the examiner is probaly going to be about using algebraic logical connectives. For another nice example I can quote [0] via [1] > Luria: All bears are white where there is always snow. In Novaya Zemlya there is always snow. What color are the bears there? > Peasant: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen. > Luria: What what do my words imply? > Peasant: If a person has not been there he can not say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed. This is a more extreme case, but in my opinion it is the same phenomenon of being asked to take external things as true and work on them. [0] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=481 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=481 [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus-on-ai-scaling?utm_source=publication-search https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus-on-a...

sillysaurusx 2y ago

It’s not so much that an inability to solve them means you’re deficient, as it is that an ability to solve them means you’re capable in ways most people aren’t. My wife is great at puzzles, and it’s always humbling to watch her sail through them. I agree that puzzles alone shouldn’t e.g. determine whether you’re a good fit for a job, though. That’s one of the more annoying parts of software interviewing.

mjburgess 2y ago
I think it should be the duty of the person asking the question to find a isomorphism to another question that the majority of people can answer. Eg., rather than asking about the risks of A,,B,C given various probabilities etc. ask them to make bets in a highly familiar environment with a resource that has uniform marginal utility to them... so eg., "suppose you were at home and your friend does..., how much of your time on a sunday would you bet to do... " You find that when "the very same question" is asked in highly familiar terms people get it right. Then this investigator-academic should ask: what features of their own puzzle induce the kind of mistakes they see? In my experience its often that people are far less socially incompetent than questioners, so put "interpretation & trust" priors on terms/presentations of questions that mean they don't parse the presentation into the problem the investigator has in mind. People who write puzzles tend to be the most bureaucratic sort of literalists who have profoundly eccentric modes of interpretation The problem that most people are solving is: "what do i say to make this person/question go away"
- hinkley 2y ago
  > The problem that most people are solving is: "what do i say to make this person/question go away" reply This is it. Never attribute to incompetence that which can be readily attributed to apathy.
crazygringo 2y ago
> as it is that an ability to solve them means you’re capable in ways most people aren’t. No, because the point is that they always hinge on an arbitrary distinction to give one answer. But if you made a different arbitrary distinction you'd get a different answer. And the arbitrary distinctions are, well, arbitrary. They reflect neither truth nor capability. Just whether you can read the questioner's mind as to what arbitrary and intentionally unstated assumptions they are making. No thanks.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

stevenAthompson 2y ago

Logic itself is a relatively new invention, and is symbolic itself. That is to say, logic is a map not the territory. That said, if someone can't fathom the most widely used symbolic languages humans use (math, logic, language, etc) they probably do have a cognitive deficit of some sort when compared to those who can.

bbor 2y ago
I mean, 2400y at least… I guess you mean quantitative logical calculus notation? - the local Russell hater
- hinkley 2y ago
  I guess sleeping through history class is also a mental deficit ;)
- stevenAthompson 2y ago
  By "relatively recent" I meant in terms of human evolution. We've had it for around 2400 of the last 300,000 years or so. So less than 1% of our species existence. I used that phrasing to drive home the idea that logic is not some inherent aspect of nature, or even fundamental to the way humans perceive the world.
blueflow 2y ago
Languages were made up by mankind at some point. They are not backed by the rest of physical reality. They can only be learned by induction, and there is no guarantee that people will get the same "version" of it. To speak in your analogy, people walk around with different maps of the same territory and realizing this is the self-awareness mjburgess is talking about.
lotharcable2 2y ago
It is less 'logic is new'... it more about abstract thinking is a skill that is more useful in societies that have complex social arrangements. If you are a primitive farmer abstract thinking isn't really useful to you. Everything you deal with in your life, except religion, can almost entirely be dealt with absolutes with little in the way of abstractions. If it rains at the right time then you can have a good harvest. If the weather is bad then it sucks. If there is animals threatening your crops or herd you need to take steps to deal with them. There is a lot of logic in dealing with these things. You have to know the seasons, know the stars, know the dirt, etc. You have to understand the life cycle and manipulate the behavior and biology of plants and animals at the right stages in their lives. Things have a logical sequence and there are direct consequences that are predictable from events and your actions. Where as in modern society you have been conditioned to think in terms of hypothetical and abstractions through being exposed to testing your entire life. You first need to know how test questions work before you are able to answer them accurately. For a person who isn't exposed to this then the whole affair of asking hypotheticals and assuming imaginary situations with specific rules that don't actually apply to the present reality is very confusing. They don't even understand the question. So, of course, they are going to suck at answering them. And ultimately that is all IQ testing measures.. your ability to take tests.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

The linguistics imo are pretty ill defined. "All" bring a common colloquial term doesn't have a strict set theory definition here. It is reasonable many people think zero hats is means the lie is in this very first word. A lot of people will consider "all" to implicitly mean 1 or more, while I think strict logicians will map colloquial all to 0 or more. All mat imply colloquially 2 or more as well, as why bother say "all" if you had one hat in the truthful sense "My hats" contrasts with the "has a hat" because having a hat in your possession that you could have borrowed does not confer ownership that the word "my" can imply. So great, a three letter word and a two letter word and we are knee deep in ambiguity. They could be wearing the hat to try to publicly locate the true owner who might say "hey I lost that hat at x". "Are green"... Green as in vegetable? Green as in the specific wavelength defined as green and not lime or some other named shade? Completely green dyed being undermined by a black spot or a pattern on the hat? Imo zero hats of ownership is a viable lie to the statement, as is having one red-green hat.

ewzimm 2y ago
I like your way of phrasing this. Also, we can assume that this is not the only statement that the liar has ever told, so the context matters. If the preceding statement was "Every hat is my hat." Then we have a definition of "all" in the next sentence that works against the stated answer. So "we can't conclude anything" is really the answer because of undefined terms.

Suppafly 2y ago

>and it equally drives me mad in those areas where academics set "puzzles" and conclude that people's inabilty to "solve" them is some cognitive deficiency. Does that actually happen in academia? It seems to mostly be a social media thing.

mjburgess 2y ago
So frequently I'd say its the main case. Researchers are extremely poor at controlling for competing explanations, in many cases, strongly incentivsed not to. Suppose you're writing a paper what do you write: option A) Average People Cannot Understand Probaility!?!?!, option B) Inexperienced test takers with unfamiliar notation fail to grasp meaning of a novel question; option C) survey participants on technical questions often do not adopt a literal interpretation of question; D) etc. etc. In general researchers are extremely loath to, or poor at, recognising there's 101 alternative explanations for any research result using human participants and 99.99% of the time just publish the paper that says the experiment evidences their preferred conclusion.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  "Democrats perform poorly on history tests designed by Republicans."
- Suppafly 2y ago
  These sorts of puzzles aren't used by researchers though, so I'm not sure I follow the rest. They almost always seemed to be used by people trained in logical thinking to consider problems in different ways. They only seem get to the larger public when someone shares one on social media and people with no background in logic complain that they are poorly written or have no answer, since they don't realize that these sorts of puzzles presuppose some background in logic and familiarity with the setup.
btilly 2y ago
There is one notable example that I'm aware of, but it really is a cognitive deficiency. The contrapositive is a rule that says that "A => B" is the same as "not B => not A". This is very confusing to people, and few can follow verbally why it works. But here is a fun experiment. People are presented with a selection of envelopes, all face down, and are asked to verify the fact that, "All unstamped envelopes are small." They immediately begin turning over the large envelopes, then have trouble explaining their (correct) reasoning! Here is a correct implication process for their actions. "All unstamped envelopes are small." => "unstamped envelope => small envelope" => "not small envelope => not unstamped" => "large envelope => stamped" At which point it is easier to just check the large envelopes!

hinkley 2y ago

It works better for everybody when these puzzles are told as inside jokes instead.

raincole 2y ago

My favorite example is Monty Hall problem. "Smart" people often use it as the evidence of how bad general people are at probability. It really isn't. The problem is usually given in this form: > Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice? [1] The only correct ansewr to this question is "I don't know." People who answer yes are just taking way too many standardized tests. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

copypasterepeat 2y ago
I guess I don't understand why you think "I don't know" is the only correct answer. It's clearly not, which is the point of the problem in the first place. It's a bit hard to grok, but once you do, it's clear what the right answer is.
- raincole 2y ago
  "I don't know" is the only correct anwser because the original problem isn't properly worded. You need to (at least) add this statement to the original question: > The host must open a door in any situation, and you know this rule. Because "host" in daily language is a human being with agency to choose whether to not open a door. Without this statement, the original problem is actually a game theory problem with two players. The host might be playing a strategy where he only opens the door when he knows you picked the car at the first place, or any other strategy. The above statement removes the ambiguity and that's what the original author meant (but failed to put in words). (If you're interesting in this, the wikipedia page linked above actually contains a quite extensive discussion in history over it)
  - dooglius 2y ago
    I don't think improper wording makes it an example of the type of puzzle GP is complaining about, because the counter-intuitive aspect holds up when everything is clarified.

afiori 2y ago

In my opinion a lot of these puzzles are about empathy toward the examiner as they generally ask variations of "what would I answer to this question?". In the case of a logician and the properties of the elements of the empty set the frame of mind of the examiner is probaly going to be about using algebraic logical connectives. For another nice example I can quote [0] via [1] > Luria: All bears are white where there is always snow. In Novaya Zemlya there is always snow. What color are the bears there? > Peasant: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen. > Luria: What what do my words imply? > Peasant: If a person has not been there he can not say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed. This is a more extreme case, but in my opinion it is the same phenomenon of being asked to take external things as true and work on them. [0] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=481 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=481 [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus-on-ai-scaling?utm_source=publication-search https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus-on-a...