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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2168 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.

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

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