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thomblake comments on Misleading the witness - Less Wrong
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I don't know, I felt the correct sign the first time I read it. I also didn't get confused by the cognitive reflection test (in the sense that there is no confusion, the correct way of seeing the problem is all there is). It's really hard to imagine how a person with math training can miss that.
But from what I heard, a sizable portion of math students still manage to get confused by these. Tracing the analogy to cognitive biases, there may be a qualitative difference between a person who just knows about it "in theory" and even done a lot of reading on the topic ("typical" math student), and a person who thought about the techniques at every opportunity for a number of years.
Re. the linked article about the cognitive confusion test:
Wow. That's the most mind-blowing thing I've read in a while. I can't think of a good explanation for anyone picking the $500, let alone the male-female difference. Maybe they assume that someone might actually give them $500, but the $1M is a scam. And how does this square with the idea that poor people play the lottery more?
Princeton students scored a mean of 1.63. Heh.
I agree with Vladimir Golovin. I definitely think this way - I can think immediately of how useful $500 would be to me, but cannot think of many ways to use a 15% chance of $1M.
Well, I can think of one way - I would take the 15% chance of $1M and then sell it to one of you suckers for $100,000.
Show of hands - who really has $100,000 that they could free up to buy this from thomblake? Personally, I don't think I actually know what 100k is worth to me because I have never had my hands on that much money.
Actually, if he has the $1M, I'm in. I don't have $100K liquid in any normal sense but I could certainly raise it for such a deal and divide the risk and return up among a few people.
He does not have (even in this hypothetical situation) a million bucks. Hypothetically, he's being offered a 15% chance of winning a million bucks.
Incidentally, in a staggering display of risk aversion, I asked a friend how much she'd pay for a 15% chance of a million dollars and she said maybe twenty bucks because those did not seem like "very good odds" to her. -.-
I don't have $100,000. I only have about $30,000.
Just how much is a one in seven chance of a million dollars worth to everyone here, anyway? (Offer me a near certainty of $70,000 and I'd start to have second thoughts about taking the gamble.)
Exactly. If someone has $1.1M, spending $0.1M on a 15% chance of $1M is a good deal. Someone who has $0.05M and has to go into debt to buy the 15% chance is very probably insane.