jimrandomh comments on Request: Interesting Invertible Facts - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 October 2010 08:02PM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 08 October 2010 11:15:32PM 20 points [-]

I remembered seeing a list like that in my Psychology 101 textbook, so I tracked it down. This is from Psychology: Eight Edition in Modules by David G Myers, pg 18; they're presented as a true/false quiz.

  1. If you want to teach a habit that persists, reward the desired behavior every time, not just intermittently.
  2. Patients whose brains are surgically split down the middle survive and function much as they did before the surgery.
  3. Traumatic experiences, such as sexual abuse or surviving the Holocaust, are typically repressed from memory.
  4. Most abused children do not become abusive adults.
  5. Most infants recognize their own reflection in a mirror by the end of their first year.
  6. Adopted siblings tend not to develop similar personalities, even though reared by the same parents.
  7. Fears of harmless objects, such as flowers, are just as easy to acquire as fears of potentially dangerous objects, such as snakes.
  8. Lie detection tests often lie.

Answers: Nppbeqvat gb gur nhgube, gur bqq-ahzorerq fgngrzragf unir orra ershgrq, naq gur rira-ahzorerq barf unir orra pbasvezrq.

Comment author: Dmytry 10 November 2011 09:26:28PM *  0 points [-]

Sorry, but many of those statements are simply vague ('much the same', does driving count? 'often' ?), and/or overgeneralised. Or non-informative, e.g. the statement that <50% of abused children become abusive adults. It's much more interesting to compare that against the baseline. In a society where >50% of adults are abusive, you can expect most abused children to become abusive adults. The infants mirror self recognition is extremely variable, see this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_test

Speaking of which, something interesting. A vague statement is generally unsurprising and/or is predictable, as is negation of the vague statement, not because of some cognitive bias, but because of vagueness.