J_Thomas comments on Conjunction Controversy (Or, How They Nail It Down) - Less Wrong

26 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 September 2007 02:41AM

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Comment author: J_Thomas 20 September 2007 05:05:10PM 1 point [-]

The experiment was bad and felt that way since I first came across the same.

What's bad about it? It looks like it gets reproducible results.

It looks to me like people often read "probable" to mean "plausible".

And we know they do that in actual betting situations like the Monty Haul problem.

People can be trained to think in terms of probability, but the general culture trains them to think otherwise. Perhaps its our evolutionary background, or perhaps its our culture. But somehow the culture trains people to be stupid in this particular way.

So even if you aren't susceptible to that yourself, you need to deal with it carefully. On the defensive side, when you try to persuade people, don't ever depend on probability arguments that don't sound plausible because people won't believe them.

And on the offensive side, you can carefully use this generalised stupidity to exploit people, if you choose to.