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AdeleneDawner comments on Open Thread: March 2010 - Less Wrong
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So, when I pester them for a rational reason, why do they keep giving an answer that is irrational for this situation?
I can understand your answer if the scenario was more like:
"Hey! Don't do that!"
"But it doesn't matter. See?"
"Oh. Well, okay. But don't do it anyway because..."
And then they mention your heuristic. They didn't do anything like this. They explicitly understood that nothing was changing in the probabilities and they explicitly understood that I was not cheating. And they were completely willing to defend their reaction in arguments. In their mind, their position was completely rational. I could not convince them that it was rational with math. Something else was the problem.
"Heuristics" is nifty, but I am not completely satisfied with that answer. Why would they have kept defending it when it was demonstrably wrong?
I suppose it is possible that they were completely unaware that they were using whatever heuristic they were using. Would that explain the behavior? Perhaps this is why they could not explain their position to me at the time of the arguments?
How would you describe this heuristic in a few sentences?
I suspect it starts with something like "in the context of a game or other competition, if my opponent does something unexpected, and I don't understand why, it's probably bad news for me", with an emotional response of suspicion. Then when your explanation is about why shuffling the cards is neutral rather than being about why you did something unexpected, it triggers an "if someone I'm suspicious of tries to convince me with logic rather than just assuring me that they're harmless, they're probably trying to get away with something" heuristic.
Also, most people seem to make the assumption, in cases like that, that they aren't going to be able to figure out what you're up to on the fly, so even flawless logic is unlikely to be accepted - the heuristic is "there must be a catch somewhere, even if I don't see it".