Douglas_Knight comments on Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Kind of a silly question, but it came up in our Sequences reading group yesterday: in EY's An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem, we found the following statement:
Anybody have any idea where this finding comes from initially? We found several people who referenced EY's post, including one second-grade teacher who claimed that he'd been largely able to replicate it (a case of guessing the teacher's password, presumably), plus a bunch of "jokes" where the reader is the driver (so the correct answer is the reader's age), but I didn't see an original source for the experimental result. Maybe my Google-fu is weak but I'm curious if anybody knows...
The original source is Reusser 1986 p25 (26), who reports that 3/4 of first and second graders give a numerical answer. I learned that from Kaplinsky's 2013 replication, not with eight-year-olds, but with eighth graders (video). He credits Merseth 1993 with popularizing it. Kaplinsky via Gwern.
A late descendent of the joke appears in Science Made Stupid (1986), which I highly recommend.