army1987 comments on On manipulating others - Less Wrong
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Huh? The conjunction fallacy doesn't apply to the right of the pipe -- whereas P(AB|C) cannot possibly be greater than P(A|C), P(C|DE) can be less than, equal to, or greater than P(C|D). Am I missing something?
(In this particular example, I'd guess (with low confidence) that for A=“there are other people who would make better friends than her”, B=“ey needs to figure out how to be friends with her”, C=“there is evidently a significant level of impotent sexual interest involved that is already creating relationship drama”, and D=“she is an accountant”, P(A|BCD) is slightly but not terribly lower than P(A|BC), by a reasoning that would be politically incorrect to fully explain but involves, among other things, looking at where “Accounting occs” are on this chart and wild-ass extrapolation from my personal experiences. :-))
The intended meaning of the link was "generalised lesson of reasoning with conjunctions". Since it is indeed possible to reformulate the message from the "IF THEN" format to probability assignments I can see how this could be misleading.
(I removed the link and now endorse the unadorned text.)