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Lumifer comments on Open Thread, Jul. 13 - Jul. 19, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: MrMind 13 July 2015 06:55AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 15 July 2015 03:23:16PM 6 points [-]

LOL

Quote:

We examined the effects of framing and order of presentation on professional philosophers’ judgments about a moral puzzle case (the “trolley problem”) and a version of the Tversky & Kahneman “Asian disease” scenario. Professional philosophers exhibited substantial framing effects and order effects, and were no less subject to such effects than was a comparison group of non-philosopher academic participants. Framing and order effects were not reduced by a forced delay during which participants were encouraged to consider “different variants of the scenario or different ways of describing the case”. Nor were framing and order effects lower among participants reporting familiarity with the trolley problem or with loss-aversion framing effects, nor among those reporting having had a stable opinion on the issues before participating the experiment, nor among those reporting expertise on the very issues in question. Thus, for these scenario types, neither framing effects nor order effects appear to be reduced even by high levels of academic expertise.

Comment author: Elo 15 July 2015 08:40:09PM *  2 points [-]

I thought the trolley experiment didn't actually have a known best-case solution? I thought the point of it was to state that one human life is not always worth less than N other human lives. Where N>0.

Confused as to why we are evaluating a "test" for the test's sake, and complaining about the test results when the only point of it was to make an analogy to real life weights.

Comment author: Lumifer 15 July 2015 08:55:25PM 6 points [-]

I thought the trolley experiment didn't actually have a known best-case solution

There is no "solution", but the point of the study is "substantial framing effects and order effects", that is, people gave different answers depending on how the same question was framed or what preceded it.