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All of rehoot's Comments + Replies

Open Thread: September 2011
rehoot60

I don't understand the basis for the Cosmides and Tooby claim. In their first study, Cosmides and Tooby (1996) solved the difficult part of a Bayesian problem so that the solution could be found by a "cut and paste" approach. The second study was about the same with some unnecessary percentages deleted (they were not needed for the cut and paste solution--yet the authors were surprised when performance improved). Study 3 = Study 2. Study 4 has the respondents literally fill in the blanks of a diagram based on the numbers written in the questio... (read more)

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5anonym
I agree. I was hoping somebody could make a coherent and plausible sounding argument for their position, which seems ridiculous to me. The paper you referenced shows that if you present an extremely simple problem of probability and ask for the answer in terms of a frequency (and not as a single event), AND you present the data in terms of frequencies, AND you also help subjects to construct concrete, visual representations of the frequencies involved by essentially spoon-feeding them the answers with leading questions, THEN most of them will get the correct answer. From this they conclude that people are good intuitive statisticians after all, and they cast doubt on the entire heuristics and biases literature because experimenters like Kahneman and Tversky don't go to equally absurd lengths to present every experimental problem in ways that would be most intuitive to our paleolithic ancestors. The implication seems to be that rationality cannot (or should not) mean anything other than what the human brain actually does, and the only valid questions and problems for testing rationality are those that would make sense to our ancestors in the EEA.
Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas
rehoot20

Yvain said:

You can end up utilitarian either because you're a psychopath and don't have the special moral module - in which case you default to general purpose reasoning - or because you're very philosophical and have a specific preference for determining moral questions by the same logic with which you determine everything else, thus deliberately overruling the special moral module.

I participate in utilitarian forum, and from that experience I would add to the quote above by saying that there are some people who encountered emotional arguments about &... (read more)

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Theory of Knowledge (rationality outreach)
rehoot00

I looked at the IB web page and it appears to be "critical thinking" as opposed to direct instruction in logic or other more-practical reasoning skills. The first problem is that there is lack of agreement about what critical thinking is (Lloyd and Bahr, 2010). Another problem is whether critical thinking skills are generalizable. What I know of critical thinking assessment is that there is emphasis on high-level approach to problems and a lack or complete absence of formal logic, math, statistics, or other specific skills that might help peop... (read more)

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