This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I am still not really seeing this, as far as I can tell you are simultaneously holding that most people are too stupid to interact with a hypothetical (but I did have breakfast) while also contending that the same people, if they could interact with a hypothetical, would understand how the host opening a second door changes the probability such that they would consistently get the Monty Hall Problem right.
You seem to leave little to no room for the, in my opinion far simpler explanation that people have a hard time intuitively understanding how the host opening the wrong door changes the probability of switching doors.
Elsewhere Skeletor describes his own experience, and it is more or less a perfect match for every person I have ever seen try and tackle this problem. Do you think that the secret real root of Skeletor's confusion was that he thought the host was trying to trick him?
I also did not intuitively understand the probability when first hearing the problem. My solution was to pull out paper and pencil and just simulated the problem 9 times, which quickly revealed that I would win by switching 6 out of the 9 times. My internal experience did not really feel like what you are describing, and my attempted solution is basically incoherent if I was concerned in the way that you describe.
I think this might not be a useful discussion to have without identifying a concrete example of a person who is confused about it (and is really convinced that the answer should be something else, rather than just being like "uh, I don't know, 50/50?"). For the 50/50 answer, I'm positing a theory that is more or less:
(1) people won't do particularly complex math;
(2) people have a strong intuition that a well-informed adversary enthusiastically doing something for you will not help you;
(3) this intuition is adaptive and justified by real-life experience;
(4) if you accept as an "axiom" that Monty's opening of the door did not help you, then you can conclude something like that the outcome of Monty's action can at most be as good for you as if the state it brought about (one door open, has goat) were naturally there from the start. In that scenario, though, the conditional probability of the car being behind each remaining door is indeed 1/2.
As for why people would think that "the bound is tight"/it's not even worse, there might be some other technically-incorrect-but-adaptive axioms in play.
It is true that I am implying a form of "peaky", and not very introspectively closed, intelligence here: I think that people are okay at basic probability, and have a set of very solid but not perfect intuitions about benefit, trade and competition in the sort of weakly iterated games that were played within and among tribes since times when they looked more like apes. These intuitions do in fact operate extensively on comparison, as evidenced by the fact that in all of recorded history they were conveyed by way of allegorical stories.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link