Comments on: The King of Human Error

By: Erik

Erik — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:13:51 +0000

Alrenous reminds me of something. The other day someone asked on the internet:

1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 – 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 x 0 = ?
a) 0
b) 14
c) 16
d) 17

I answered e) “Screw you” and expounded roughly as follows:

Screw you and the horse you rode in on for asking a deliberately misleading, context-free question whose seeming purpose is to point and laugh at proles rather than to gain knowledge. We are not in maths class. For you to borrow a question from maths class and prepare to wag your finger at us for not acting as though we’re in maths class is highly aggravating. You are the cancer that is killing /b/ and contributing to anti-intellectualism.

I say this as a precocious maths talent and mild autist who took high school maths in primary school, took university courses in high school, and spent years asking similar questions. Finally I learned that other people are *different* rather than being like me but incompetent. For the sake of the next person who grows up in maths class, I loudly condemn your question and its entire genre. It is a highly deviant question, and I infer from my past history that you were preparing to reprimand humans for acting in accordance with regular human norms when answering.

By: Alrenous

Alrenous — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 03:29:46 +0000

I call system 1 the emotional reasoning system because it represents the pre-verbal brain and presents results in terms of pure sensation.

I call system 2 the rational reasoning system, because it’s the obvious name.

Actually, system 1 doesn’t get mislead. Rather, for some reason the executive function belongs to system 2, the rational, and the rational doesn’t instinctively understand system 1, the emotional. However, it thinks it does. So the rational misleads itself about the emotional, and then (in scientists) blames the emotional for getting it wrong.

Verification: simply assume that the emotional is right all the time, and try to figure out how. This cashes out to learning what it’s actually trying to say.

You should find that it never says different things about two otherwise identical situations, noting that the emotional system is right brain leaning and will take absolutely everything into account.

By: Bruce Charlton

Bruce Charlton — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:45:20 +0000

… and thus we come to political correctness.

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 19:37:20 +0000

Kahneman does interesting work, no doubt. I often see him coupled with his buddy Amos Tversky, in print.

Quiz is far less surprising/fun if one has read N.N.Taleb and especially if one has read G. Gigerenzer.