Request:  Interesting Invertible Facts

Eliezer Yudkowsky

I'm writing the section of the rationality book dealing with hindsight bias, and I'd like to write my own, less racially charged and less America-specific, version of the Hindsight Devalues Science example - in the original, facts like "Better educated soldiers suffered more adjustment problems than less educated soldiers. (Intellectuals were less prepared for battle stresses than street-smart people.)" which is actually an inverted version of the truth, that still sounds plausible enough that people will try to explain it even though it's wrong.

I'm looking for facts that are experimentally verified and invertible, i.e., I can give five examples that are the opposite of the usual results without people catching on.

Divia (today's writing assistant) has suggested facts about marriage and facts about happiness as possible sources of examples, but neither of us can think of a good set of facts offhand and Googling didn't help me much. Five related facts would be nice, but failing that I'll just take five facts. My own brain just seems to be very bad at answering this kind of query for some reason; I literally can't think of five things I know.

(Note also that I have a general policy of keeping anything related to religion out of the rationality book - that there be no mention of it whatsoever.)

I'm looking for facts that are experimentally verified and invertible, i.e., I can give five examples that are the opposite of the usual results without people catching on.

(Note also that I have a general policy of keeping anything related to religion out of the rationality book - that there be no mention of it whatsoever.)

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.

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

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 statem... (read more)

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Request: Interesting Invertible Facts

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Request: Interesting Invertible Facts

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