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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2826 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 9, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

Still on Scruton. Also picking up Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything.

Minds.

Specifically, the minds of the awkward creatures who write the MRCPsych questions, filtered through third party study materials and question banks (who go off the recollections of the depressed students leaving the exam hall, not primary sources).

Why? I find that ~half of my nominal error rate arises from a game of "what did the examiner fucking mean by that?" Multiple potentially correct answers is the least of it, I just ran into the conjunction fallacy in the wild.

For any events A and B, P(A and B) ≤ P(A).

A child presents with {symptoms}, which can be caused by diseases A, B or A+B (as presented by options for answers).

Which of these is the most likely diagnosis?

Well, A+B can't be more likely than A or B by themselves right? Feminist librarians are rarer than librarians.

Or so the sane would think. Alas.

As Szasz said "insanity is a sane response to an insane world". He's listed in my notes as a notable antipsychiatry advocate, and I'm beginning to believe he has a point.

(You can rescue the question by saying it's violating the rules of English instead of probability, but it's the kind of intervention pediatricians would counsel against)

William and Diane Corndale are seeking help for infertility. They have been trying to conceive for 5 years, but have so far been unsuccessful. Which of the following is the most likely consequence of this stressor?

Select one:

Feelings of guilt

Negative impact on self-esteem

Decrease in frequency of sexual intercourse

Increase in number of disagreements

All of the listed options

Your answer is correct.

Difficulty in conceiving may place significant stress on a couple, and there's the potential for a wide spectrum of psychological struggles to ensue.

The correct answer is: All of the listed options

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I don't want to be right at the cost of my sanity.

I don't remember the probability classes I took, but I think I know what's going on here. The probability of one of the answers being true is smaller than the probability of all the answers being true, but the probability of one answer being true and all the others being false is even lower.

So P(All) is bigger than P(N and only N), but smaller than P(N)

The thing is, I believe the standard interpretation would be which specific outcome is most likely in such exams.

For example, a question that offers 5 side-effects for clozapine and asks for most common one will expect a single choice (and usually not have an all of the above option).

The question doesn't directly imply that the choices are mutually exclusive, thought the presence of an "all" option is suggestive (to someone who has picked up the vibe). A more sane option would be simply to ask "which of the following is commonly seen?", where all of them is clearly the correct choice.

"All of the above" should be the default answer for any medical multiple choice questions, It Is Known.

I can't disagree with any of that. If you're being graded by a human (and not a dumb set of rules), you can write a justification for your answers on the page (e.g. assumptions made, definitions used).

Quizzes cannot measure reality very well because they lack nuance (e.g. the MBTI). Which is probably why a professional is needed to diagnose mental illness - the answer sheet alone is not enough.

And frankly, a lot of questions are stupid, and the goal of quizzes (to reverse answers back into specific categories) fails completely as it's not a reversible function. These exams measure alignment of thinking more than they measure competence. You'll be punished by the difference in thinking, measured as the distance to the average opinion of those who created the exams. They cannot tell the more competent apart from the less competent, they look the same

One solution is for there to be no multiple-choice, but rather a text field that one can write in. But the fairness of such a quizz is still limited by the competence of the grader, their ability to understand you, and their impartiality. I have personal experiences with all of these possibilities

That kind of "all of the above" and "none of the above" is generally seen as bad assessment.

For various reasons, but the former because if you can dismiss even one as wrong you can guess that "all of the above" isn't correct even if you're not sure of some others. It's like wasting a distractor. It adds unnecessary noise. Likewise if "none of the above" is correct, you know what the student knows is wrong but you don't know if they know what is right.

Often enough people who have no idea about item-response theory, test analysis, teat validity, or test reliability are involved in test creation and they end up making extremely bad tests.

Edit: That's "test validity" but I'll leave it for humor's sake.

Often enough people who have no idea about item-response theory, test analysis, teat validity, or test reliability are involved in test creation and they end up making extremely bad tests.

"But Doctor, instrumental validity and test analysis/reliability are explicit parts of the exam syllabus!"

Not kidding. It's there. You'd hope the people making the exam would understand that better; the Royal College claims that every question in the exam goes through careful vetting, but I suspect they're the kind of vets that hang around kennels.

Questions being difficult or relying on arcane knowledge is one thing. Being malformed is a step too far.

Since I'm already talking about bad questions:

"Which of the following ideologies place the needs of the group over the individual?"

Socialism/Communism/Collectivism/Individualism/Capitalism

I've steeped myself in exam-speak enough to know that collectivism is the right answer. But really?

Wait, you’re being asked this in a medical exam?

Yes. The exams run by the Royal College of Psychiatry, to be specific. Why Civics for People Who Failed Civics 101 is included is beyond my comprehension.

The official breakdown of marks is useless. The ratio, as far as I can tell is:

50% clinically relevant information (generous)

25% Why do they feel like I need to know this?

25% An ungodly assortment of antimemes and cognitohazards masquerading as multiple choice questions. Questions that have me questioning myself, or at least my life decisions.

I paid £500 for an exam with a 44% pass rate, I deserve better :(

Inkhaven blogs

Started The Rise and Fall of the British Nation by David Edgerton.

I don't usually read history, I picked up this book on British 20th century political history in search of some reasons for why Britain has seemed to so consistently drop the ball since around 1960. It's doing a sterling job of putting me to sleep each night but I'm still in the early chapters dealing with the history of our political parties so that's probably par for the course.

I just finished Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder

I'm just starting Stop Walking on Eggshells now.

I'm reading both for 'reasons'.

Good grief. My sympathies.

Did you find them helpful? Asking for a friend, as the Redditors say.

Not OP and my situation is different (dealing with a parent, i.e. mother who almost certainly suffers from BPD), but Understanding the Borderline Mother was useful to me for two reasons: One, for whatever it's worth, it was validating in describing an at times weird and other times so over-the-top experiences that it's hard to describe or expect outsiders to believe.

Secondly, I did use it as a screening question when picking a therapist in my early 20s, i.e. "Have you read this?", and I think that doing so was helpful for finding one that had a frame of reference for dealing with my situation.

Otherwise, I'm not sure what a book is supposed to do. If you're at the point of picking and reading one about a relatively niche topic like this you probably have a decent to good idea of what you're dealing with. Maybe a book written by someone with letters after their name gives you the permission to feel however about whatever but in the end what happened happened and there's no undoing that. There's only where you are now and how you choose to deal with it or not, and the hardest part about being a survivor of child abuse (Ugh, that term is a touch cringe inducing.) is realizing that as an adult you are the author of your life's story now. Nobody is going to give you free karma points to cash in on living happily ever after and what you do when you're in charge is on you. As an adult dealing with a shitty spouse or friend the same applies.

Loving Someone... has explained many of the puzzling scenarios, responses, and situations over the last 20 years. If only I'd read it 15 years ago. I think the tools and techniques would have been very helpful.

My particular circumstances are not as severe as many of the situations described. In 20 years, in 2011, on one occasion was the only talk of suicide. To my knowledge there's been no actual self harm. Though in a letter written in 2011, she says she's hiding symptoms from me and our marriage counselor. 🙁

It all seems so obvious now.

Too soon to say for 'Stop Walking on Eggshells' ask me again next week.

I've ordered a copy of Understanding the Borderline Mother my MIL is almost certainly BPD.

I hope your friend finds a path forward.

I haven't read the above two but Understanding the Borderline Mother is a lot. The good news is that Lawson's prose is engaging instead of dry.

Otherwise, however dramatic or severe some of the descriptions are, some of those were creepily accurate compared to my experiences with a mother who almost certainly suffers from BPD. I just laughed when I got to the bit about the Borderline Witch's motto: "Life is War". Sure as shit was for her, and she joined the Marines to learn how to win.

Has she gone to therapy? I know multiple people with BPD that have been meaningfully helped by going through DBT, where earlier attempts at therapy did little to nothing.

She did counseling and maybe some cbt in 2011 also took a ssri. She seemed to improve at the time. She does not think there's anything wrong with her.

She does not think there's anything wrong with her.

Then DBT is unlikely to help.

Yes, from what I've read the lack of insight is an impediment to improvement.

Less than a hundred pages from the end of The Story of a New Name. All Napoli men are bastards.

Silence: Unbound Book 2 by Nicoli Gonella.

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