4 ms·

I consider myself smart and rational, so I was surprised that I stumbled on many of the test questions. I got this one wrong, though you would think, having bee

I consider myself smart and rational, so I was surprised that I stumbled on many of the test questions. I got this one wrong, though you would think, having been programming computers for 15 years, I surely should have gotten this one right: Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? A) Yes B) No C) Cannot be determined Oddly enough, I feel that if this had been presented to me as a bit of Java or Ruby code, then I would have gotten this one correct. It's the informality of English, and the assumptions I make when reading English, that tripped me up. Computer code engages the rational side of my brain in a way that English does not. And to follow up on a point made long ago by Jeff Atwood, I think this (that IQ and rationality are different) also explains the strange inability of some smart people to learn how to program computers. I'm thinking of the post here: http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-fr... Jeff Atwood discusses this quote: "All teachers of programming find that their results display a 'double hump'. It is as if there are two populations: those who can [program], and those who cannot [program], each with its own independent bell curve. Almost all research into programming teaching and learning have concentrated on teaching: change the language, change the application area, use an IDE and work on motivation. None of it works, and the double hump persists." And also this quote: "Despite the enormous changes which have taken place since electronic computing was invented in the 1950s, some things remain stubbornly the same. In particular, most people can't learn to program: between 30% and 60% of every university computer science department's intake fail the first programming course. Experienced teachers are weary but never oblivious of this fact; brighteyed beginners who believe that the old ones must have been doing it wrong learn the truth from bitter experience; and so it has been for almost two generations, ever since the subject began in the 1960s."

Rainymood 12y ago
SPOILER ALERT (ANSWER OF RIDDLE BELOW): I don't really see where you got stuck. Could you mind explaining me why/how/where you got stuck? I couldn't find a satisfying 'aha!' moment so I just kind of brute forced all the possibilities ..
- mbell 12y ago
  I got it wrong, not due to lack of logic but due to lack of spending the time to untangle the strange wording. I read it as "Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at _Jack_." and assumed it was some sort of trick question. If they were really interested in testing logic they would deliver the problem in a clear manor rather than masking it strange wording.
- lkrubner 12y ago
  SPOILER ALERT (ANSWER OF RIDDLE BELOW): Like most people, my first thought was c. And yet, as I said, I suspect that if this had been presented as a bit of Java or Ruby, I would have been unlikely to make that mistake. I read English with a laziness that is different from how I read computer code.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- gjm11 12y ago
  The failure mode isn't getting stuck, it's failing to notice that there's actual work to do. The way you get this one wrong is a thought process like this: "Well, obviously we only know about the first and third links in the chain, and we aren't told anything about the second one. So of course we can't tell whether there's a married person looking at an unmarried one because we have no information about any two directly 'connected' people." (But less explicit -- if you think about it in that much detail you're likely to think of brute-forcing the possibilities.) Or like this: "Well, let's see: A looks at B looks at C, A is married, C not. Does A->B have to be married->unmarried? No; B could be married. Does B->C have to be married->unmarried? No; B could be unmarried. So we're done." Once it occurs to you that you could just kind of brute force all the possibilities, you're going to get it right. The problem comes when you short-circuit the process. (And the reason why doing so isn't just stupid is that often this sort of "pruning" of mental effort is key to working things out efficiently. It just happens that in this case the prunability is illusory.)
  - Double_Cast 12y ago
hawkice 12y ago
I also think the problem lies in the question. It assumes "married" and "unmarried" are mutual exclusive and span the entire space of possibilities. This does not appear to line up with reality in ways I find compelling. Nations may recognize people as married, but due to laws about common law marriage, differing requirements for marriage (very few people who consider themselves married in America filled out the proper paperwork for Tajikistan, a foolish and impossibly rare oversight, the test seems to assume), and many other X factors, it is completely reasonable to assume that people can be neither married nor unmarried, or that George is not married but both married and unmarried, or many other things. I think if we got code for this, if it used numbers of booleans, or really any system we are familiar with on computers, we wouldn't make this error -- not due to differences in how we think but differences in the object level discussion we would be having.
afarrell 12y ago
Jeff Atwood's blog post centers around a paper that was circulated informally ("The Camel Has Two Humps"), but never published in any journal. It has been retracted by its author, who is vigorously trying to undo the harm he believes it has caused. http://retractionwatch.com/2014/07/18/the-camel-doesnt-have-two-humps-programming-aptitude-test-canned-for-overzealous-conclusion/ http://retractionwatch.com/2014/07/18/the-camel-doesnt-have-...
- chetanahuja 12y ago
  Wouldn't it be nice if Jeff also took down that blog post (or at least put a big, prominent disclaimer at the top about the retracted research paper. The potential harm of such thinking getting pervasive is real (to the younger generation trying to learn the skills).
JabavuAdams 12y ago
Simpler explanation: programming teachers are worse than they think they are.

Rainymood 12y ago

SPOILER ALERT (ANSWER OF RIDDLE BELOW): I don't really see where you got stuck. Could you mind explaining me why/how/where you got stuck? I couldn't find a satisfying 'aha!' moment so I just kind of brute forced all the possibilities ..

mbell 12y ago
I got it wrong, not due to lack of logic but due to lack of spending the time to untangle the strange wording. I read it as "Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at _Jack_." and assumed it was some sort of trick question. If they were really interested in testing logic they would deliver the problem in a clear manor rather than masking it strange wording.
lkrubner 12y ago
SPOILER ALERT (ANSWER OF RIDDLE BELOW): Like most people, my first thought was c. And yet, as I said, I suspect that if this had been presented as a bit of Java or Ruby, I would have been unlikely to make that mistake. I read English with a laziness that is different from how I read computer code.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
gjm11 12y ago
The failure mode isn't getting stuck, it's failing to notice that there's actual work to do. The way you get this one wrong is a thought process like this: "Well, obviously we only know about the first and third links in the chain, and we aren't told anything about the second one. So of course we can't tell whether there's a married person looking at an unmarried one because we have no information about any two directly 'connected' people." (But less explicit -- if you think about it in that much detail you're likely to think of brute-forcing the possibilities.) Or like this: "Well, let's see: A looks at B looks at C, A is married, C not. Does A->B have to be married->unmarried? No; B could be married. Does B->C have to be married->unmarried? No; B could be unmarried. So we're done." Once it occurs to you that you could just kind of brute force all the possibilities, you're going to get it right. The problem comes when you short-circuit the process. (And the reason why doing so isn't just stupid is that often this sort of "pruning" of mental effort is key to working things out efficiently. It just happens that in this case the prunability is illusory.)
- Double_Cast 12y ago

hawkice 12y ago

I also think the problem lies in the question. It assumes "married" and "unmarried" are mutual exclusive and span the entire space of possibilities. This does not appear to line up with reality in ways I find compelling. Nations may recognize people as married, but due to laws about common law marriage, differing requirements for marriage (very few people who consider themselves married in America filled out the proper paperwork for Tajikistan, a foolish and impossibly rare oversight, the test seems to assume), and many other X factors, it is completely reasonable to assume that people can be neither married nor unmarried, or that George is not married but both married and unmarried, or many other things. I think if we got code for this, if it used numbers of booleans, or really any system we are familiar with on computers, we wouldn't make this error -- not due to differences in how we think but differences in the object level discussion we would be having.

afarrell 12y ago

Jeff Atwood's blog post centers around a paper that was circulated informally ("The Camel Has Two Humps"), but never published in any journal. It has been retracted by its author, who is vigorously trying to undo the harm he believes it has caused. http://retractionwatch.com/2014/07/18/the-camel-doesnt-have-two-humps-programming-aptitude-test-canned-for-overzealous-conclusion/ http://retractionwatch.com/2014/07/18/the-camel-doesnt-have-...

chetanahuja 12y ago
Wouldn't it be nice if Jeff also took down that blog post (or at least put a big, prominent disclaimer at the top about the retracted research paper. The potential harm of such thinking getting pervasive is real (to the younger generation trying to learn the skills).

JabavuAdams 12y ago

Simpler explanation: programming teachers are worse than they think they are.