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orthonormal comments on Open Thread: March 2010 - Less Wrong
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This was in my drafts folder but due to the lackluster performance of my latest few posts I decided it doesn't deserve to be a top level post. As such, I am making it a comment here. It also does not answer the question being asked so it probably wouldn't have made the cut even if my last few posts been voted to +20 and promoted... but whatever. :P
Perceived Change
Once, I was dealing a game of poker for some friends. After dealing some but not all of the cards I cut the deck and continued dealing. This irritated them a great deal because I altered the order of the deck because some players would not receive the cards they were supposed to be dealt. One of the friends happened to be majoring in Mathematics and understood probability as much as anyone else at the table. Even he thought what I did was wrong.
I explained that the cut didn’t matter because everyone still has the same odds of receiving any particular card from the deck. His retort was that it did matter because the card he was going to get is now near the middle of the deck. Instead of that particular random card he will get a different particular random card. As such, I should not have cut the deck.
During the ensuing arguments I found myself constantly presented with the following point: The fact of the game is that he would have received a certain card and now he will receive a different card. Shouldn’t this matter? People seem to hold grudges when someone swaps random chances of an outcome and the swap changes who wins.
The problem with this objection is illustrated if I secretly cut the cards. If they have no reason to believe I cut the deck, they wouldn’t complain. Furthermore, it is completely impossible to perceive the change by studying before and after states of the probabilities. More clearly, if I put the cards under the table and threatened to cut the cards, my friends would have no way of knowing whether or not I cut the deck. This implies that the change itself is not the sole cause of complaint. The change must be accompanied with the knowledge that something was changed.
The big catch is that the change itself isn’t actually necessary at all. If I simply tell my friends that I cut the cards when they were not looking they will be just as upset. They have perceived a change in the situation. In reality, every card is in exactly the same position and they will be dealt what they think they should have been dealt. But now even that has changed. Now they actually think the exact opposite. Even though nothing about the deck has been changed, they now think that the cards being dealt to them are the wrong cards.
What is this? There has to be some label for this, but I don’t know what it is or what the next step in this observation should be. Something is seriously, obviously wrong. What is it?
Edit to add:
The underlying problem here is not that they were worried about me cheating. The specific scenario and the arguments that followed from that scenario were such that cheating wasn't really a valid excuse for their objections.
To modify RobinZ's hypothesis:
Rather than focusing on any Bayesian evidence for cheating, let's think like evolution for a second: how do you want your organism to react when someone else's voluntary action changes who receives a prize? Do you want the organism to react, on a gut level, as if the action could have just as easily swung the balance in their favor as against them? Or do you want them to cry foul if they're in a social position to do so?
Your friends' response could come directly out of that adaptation, whatever rationalizations they make for it afterwards. I'd expect to see the same reaction in experiments with chimps.
I want my organism to be able to tell the difference between a cheater and someone making irrelevant changes to a deck of cards. I assume this was a rhetorical question.
Evolution is great but I want more than that. I want to know why. I want to know why my friends feel that way but I didn't when the roles were reversed. The answer is not "because I knew more math." Have I just evolved differently?
I want to know what other areas are affected by this. I want to know how to predict whatever caused this reaction in my friends before it happens in me. "Evolution" doesn't help me do that. I cannot think like evolution.
As much as, "You could have been cheating" is a great response -- and "They are conditioned to respond to this situation as if you were cheating" is a better response -- these friends know the probabilities are the same and know I wasn't cheating. And they still react this way because... why?
I suppose this comment is a bit snippier than it needs to be. I don't understand how your answer is an answer. I also don't know much about evolution. If I learned more about evolution would I be less confused?
It might be because people conceive a loss more severely than a gain. There might be an evolutionary explanation for that. Because of that they would conceive their "lossed" card which they already thought would be theirs more severely than the card the "gained" after the cut. While you on the other hand might already be trained to think about it differently.
Based on my friends, the care/don't care dichotomy cuts orthogonally to the math/no math dichotomy. Most people, whether good or bad at math, can understand that the chances are the same. It's some other independent aspect of your brain that determines whether it intensely matters to you to do things "the right way" or if you can accept the symmetry of the situation. I hereby nominate some OCD-like explanation. I'd be interested in seeing whether OCD correlated with your friends' behavior.
As a data point, I am not OCD and don't care if you cut the deck.
I am more likely to be considered OCD than any of my friends in the example. I don't care if you cut the deck.