mattnewport comments on So You Think You're a Bayesian? The Natural Mode of Probabilistic Reasoning - Less Wrong

48 Post author: Matt_Simpson 14 July 2010 04:51PM

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Comment author: mattnewport 15 July 2010 03:58:00AM 7 points [-]

It strikes me that academics have a blind spot to one of the major weaknesses of this research because to get to their position they have had to adapt to exam questions effectively during their formative years.

One of the tricks to success in exams is to learn how to read the questions in a very particular way where you ignore all your background knowledge and focus to an unusual degree on the precise wording and context of the question. This is a terrible (and un-Bayesian) practice in most real world scenarios but is necessary to jump through the academic hoops required to get through school and university.

Most people who haven't trained themselves to deal with these type of questions will apply common sense and make 'unwarranted' assumptions. A wise strategy in the real world but not in exam style questions.