= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Sperling comments on So You Think You're a Bayesian? The Natural Mode of Probabilistic Reasoning - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (79)
That suggests another variant of the Linda problem: replace the "and" with "and also", and leave the rest unchanged. If this makes a big difference, it would suggest that many of the people who fail on the Linda problem fail for linguistic reasons (they have the wrong meaning for the word "and") rather than logical reasons.
Many subjects fail to recognize that when a 6-sided die with 4 green faces and 2 red faces will be rolled several times, betting on the occurrence of the sequence GRRRRRG is dominated by betting on the sequence RRRRRG, when the subject is given the option to bet on either at the same payoff. This (well, something similar, I didn't bother to look up the actual sequences used) is cited as evidence that more is going on than subjects misunderstanding the meaning of "and" or "or". Sure, some subjects just don't use those words as the experimenters do, and perhaps this accounts for some of why "Linda" shows such a strong effect, but it is a very incomplete explanation of the effect.
Explanations of "Linda" based on linguistic misunderstandings, conversational maxims, etc., generally fail to explain other experiments that produce the same representativeness bias (though perhaps not as strongly) in contexts where there is no chance that the particular misunderstanding alleged could be present.