G0W51 comments on Open Thread, Apr. 13 - Apr. 19, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (319)
Perhaps multiple choice tests in schools make people extra susceptible to privileging hypotheses. As a simplified example, if a student’s probability distribution to the answer of a question on a multiple choice test before seeing the choices is uniformly distributed amongst all integers from 1 to n, simply seeing an arbitrary integer as one of the, say, four options in a multiple choice test justifiably increases its probability of being correct to 0.25, a tremendous increase when n is large. Thus, on multiple choice tests, privileging a possible answer being “suggested” by being one of the answers the student can pick is a useful strategy on multiple choice tests, so we need to remember that privileging the hypothesis is not a viable strategy in other contexts. Maybe multiple choice tests aren’t so good after all...