From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed May 03 2006 - 13:21:17 MDT
Richard Loosemore wrote:
>
> Human minds are designed for immensely sophisticated forms of cognitive
> processing, and one of these is the ability to interpret questions that
> do not contain enough information to be fully defined (pragmatics). One
> aspect of this process is the use of collected information about the
> kinds of questions that are asked, including the particular kinds of
> information left out in certain situations. Thus, in common-or-garden
> nontechnical discourse, the question:
>
> Which of the following is more probable:
> 1) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
> 2) Linda is a bank teller.
>
> Would quite likely be interpreted as
>
> Which of the following is more probable:
> 1) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
> 2) Linda is a bank teller and NOT active in the feminist movement.
Old, old, old alternative hypothesis disconfirmed a dozen ways from
Tuesday. I was very quickly summarizing an extensive literature with
thousands of papers. These are not my ideas, these are the mainstream
conclusions of an experimental science. Go forth and read the
literature before you make up your own interpretations. I suggest
starting with "Judgment Under Uncertainty" and moving on to "Heuristics
and Biases".
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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