Sebastian_Hagen2 comments on Conjunction Fallacy - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 September 2007 01:54AM

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Comment author: Sebastian_Hagen2 19 September 2007 11:27:20AM 4 points [-]

Imagine a group of 100,000 people, all of whom fit Bill's description (except for the name, perhaps). If you take the subset of all these persons who play jazz, and the subset of all these persons who play jazz and are accountants, the second subset will always be smaller because it is strictly contained within the first subset.

Nitpicking: Concluding that this is a strict inclusion implicitly assumes that there is at least one jazz player who is not an accountant in the original set. Otherwise, the two subsets may still be equal (and thus, equal in size).