po8crg comments on Burdensome Details - Less Wrong
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Depends on people's definition of truth, surely?
If your scoring system for a conjunction statement where one part is true and the other is untrue is to score that as half-true, then the probabilities for the Reagan case are wholly reasonable.
(ie for "Reagan will provide federal support for unwed mothers and cut federal support to local governments", you score 1 for both parts true, 0.5 for one part true and 0 for neither part true, while for "Reagan will provide federal support for unwed mothers" you can only score 1 for true and 0 for false).
If - and it seems reasonable - the intuitive scoring system for a conjunctive statement is similar to this, then the predictions are wholly reasonable.
This means that when there is a real conjunction, we tend to misinterpret it. It seems reasonable then to guess that we don't have an intuitive approach to a true conjunction. If that's the case, then the approach to overcoming the bias is to analyse joint statements to see if a partial truth scores any points - if it does, then our intuition can be trusted more than when it does not.