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"(A) Linda is a bank teller or (B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. Eighty-five percent of the subjects chose B".
Many people could have assumed that being in set (B) automatically means set (A) = NOT set (B).
Set (B) being more precisely defined, it can easily be assumed that anyone in set (B) is not in set (A). The participants can easily assume that a person can be in only 1 set (no rules were defined).
The problem set was piss in terms of intelligence had a false assumption of a rational/intelligence dichotomy. Of course it's more likely that she is a bankteller than a bankteller plus (insert whatever). This is probability theory 101. But hey, it is nytimes you're reading so what would one expect anyway.
I was more thinking in these lines:
How rational is it for someone to be outspoken against nuclear energy when there hardly exist any real valid renewable alternative to substitute that energy source to begin with? Do it like Germany and rely on the importation of oil from Russia?
Post nytimes on hackernews...hmmf The problem set was piss in terms of intelligence had a false assumption of a rational/intelligence dichotomy. Of course it's more likely that she is a bankteller than a bankteller plus (insert whatever). This is probability theory 101. But hey, it is nytimes you're reading so what would one expect anyway. I was more thinking in these lines: How rational is it for someone to be outsp…
Most people don't know that. Exaggerations like http://thesolutionsproject.org/ make them think that wind/solar/tidal could put more than a little dent in energy.
If this interests you, check out https://intelligence.org/rationality-ai-zombies/ .
If that interests you, ask for a chart of the real-world successes of LessWrong readers compared to non-LW readers. Also about the mosquito nets versus AI dialectic in Effective Altruism.
There's a reasonable debate here about short-term and long-term thinking. "How to save the most lives the most quickly" is not the only reasonable altruistic goal to optimize for. "How to save the most lives over the long-term, and save them permanently rather than just delaying a current inevitable" is worth consideration. And there are already far more people willing to support mosquito nets, and far too few willing to support AGI research, or SENS for that matter.
The article presents the following experimental premise: “Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” Then they asked the subjects which was more probable: (A) Linda is a bank teller or (B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the fe…
The experiment was designed by people who earned a Noble prize. Maybe it's not as stupid as you think.
Unless you're just trying to show off your Passmark scores, you're better off running a correct program on a Raspberry Pi than a buggy program on a quad-Xeon rig.
Many intelligent people waste their brain cells trying to argue that the moon landing was fake, vaccines cause autism, etc. just as often as powerful computers waste electricity running malware. That doesn't make them any less intelligent. They're just really good at executing poorly written software as quickly as possible, which often helps disguise the fact that their software is a pile of crap in the first place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you suggesting that reason include intuition? I don't believe that would ever be a helpful definition of the word. --- Reason is conscious; intuition is subconscious. Of course, they're related: reason can train intuition, and intuition can catalyze reason. But I disagree that a conversational distinction is inappropriate.
I'm not suggesting it, I outright stated it in my comment. My point is that potentially logical connections can (or must) be made subconsciously and that that is an aspect of how the faculty of reason works. Here is an example you experience every single day and even right now if you type a reply to my comment. If you want to express an idea in words you don't consciously and methodically select words from a dictiona…
For example, we refer that part of though, or intuition, whatever, that we don't do consciously (what does that even mean) as occurring subconsciously. If I understand correctly when people say 'subconsciously' they are refer to what happens outside of our awareness, as in like you say we don't sit there with a dictionary or a bunch of idea reference books and flick between the pages in order to form a thought.
But why the term subconscious.
sub-
1. a prefix occurring originally in loanwords from Latin ( subject; subtract; subvert; subsidy); on this model, freely attached to elements of any origin and used with the meaning “under,” “below,” “beneath” ( subalpine; substratum), “slightly,” “imperfectly,” “nearly” ( subcolumnar; subtropical), “secondary,” “subordinate” ( subcommittee; subplot).
I conjecture that using the word subconscious causes a linguistic trap that results in us undervaluing what goes on in our minds.
Also I think what most people think of when they think of thinking is merely the subvocalisation[1] or internal dialogue we run in mind. Here I agree with what you've written that, actually all, logical connections are done with intuitive reasoning.
NB I'm a complete armchair amateur at philosophy / psychology / neurology. Of course everyone's got a consciousness so we're all experts. Right.
Post nytimes on hackernews...hmmf The problem set was piss in terms of intelligence had a false assumption of a rational/intelligence dichotomy. Of course it's more likely that she is a bankteller than a bankteller plus (insert whatever). This is probability theory 101. But hey, it is nytimes you're reading so what would one expect anyway. I was more thinking in these lines: How rational is it for someone to be outsp…
> there hardly exist any real valid renewable alternative Most people don't know that. Exaggerations like http://thesolutionsproject.org/ make them think that wind/solar/tidal could put more than a little dent in energy.
Musk gave the example, when unveiling the Powerwall, that to power the whole of the US would only require the whole Texas Panhandle to be covered in panels 25% efficient.
I remember doing the calculation even with the current 15% efficiency and it came out that if each person has something like 9 m^2 of solar panels on their roof, the whole energy demand of the US is covered.
Obviously, that's a shit ton of panels and batteries and we can't just pack them all on the Panhandle for example and it's entirely possible that nuclear is much cheaper (I don't know where to get the numbers to run this calculation).
But it is possible. I think a better criticism is that it's too risky and too slow an avenue in comparison to the risk of climate change
logical
rational
sensible
wise
freethinker
humanist
skeptic
atheist
In too many cases, people conflate all of these.
I have known many clearly intelligent people who held irrational opinions quite strongly. For example, huge believers in specific, concrete stock market predictions based on some fibonacci sequence nonsense, to the point of actively loosing six figures through multiple failed predictions over a decade+ and still believing. So clearly, they're distinct. But the question about the bank teller doesn't seem like the stro…
> the question about the bank teller doesn't seem like the strongest indicator. It seems more like a parlor trick that relies on our "system 1" brain short circuiting before our "system 2" kicks in. The question about the bank teller is a parlor trick that exploits normal language processing, specifically the Gricean Maxim of Relevance ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle#Maxim_of... ). The maxim spe…
Is not irrationality, just miscommunication.