>This describes humans in a nutshell. This is why people vary wildly in ability...

Can you expand on that a little?

More than 80% of college students get the following question wrong.[1] I'd say this is an example of naive pattern matching with no real reasoning.

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which is more probable?

a) Linda is a bank teller. b) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy

> I'd say this is an example of naive pattern matching with no real reasoning.

It is an example of lack of mathematical (really probability) know how, not naïve pattern matching.

I'd say it's an example of misphrased questions that people will intuitively make sense of, and thus produce strictly incorrect answer.

Obviously, people rephrase the question into : is there more chance that she's a feminist or that she isn't ?

Well, it's multiple-choice. So the "a" answer excludes the "b" answer by convention, and thus implies she isn't a feminist. Rephrase the question to remove that implication and I expect far more people will pick the "a" answer.

I'd say this is the very definition of "overthinking it" instead of pattern matching. Pattern matching would lead you straight to the correct answer - joint probability is always ≤ single probability. Meaning the information given in the question is just fluff. Pattern matching reduces to "Which is more probable: just A or else A ^ B?" at which point the correct answer becomes obvious.

Phrasing this in terms of probability seems very weird in the first place.

Eh, the "correct" answer seems silly and overly mathematical to me.

The fact is, you can infer things about people based on things you know about people. I can pick a random user on HN, and knowing they're a user of HN, I can say it's probable that they work in technology. We don't need to bring statistics into it and turn it into a math problem.

Hank is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. Hank got a technical degree, and as a student was deeply interested in machine learning and the ethics & philosophy of potential artificial intelligence. He posts a problem on HN where he describes the personality, capabilities, interests, and background of a woman named Linda has and then asks people to reflect on her occupation, politics, and an intersection between the two. Which is more likely?

a) Hank has written us a human interest problem b) Hank has written us a human interest and a probability problem.

I don't think people are simply wrong about the Linda problem, I think they're imprecise about which question they're answering, and more or less think they're answering a question about what chances that Linda is a feminist vs what are the chances she's a bank teller not only using the givens+relevant priors about people but also their priors about what kind of question they're answering. It isn't "no real reasoning", it's just not high resolution enough to be technically correct by the standards of a constructed probability problem.

You can argue LLMs are also not quite high resolution enough and I'd accept that. In my mind the question is what it would take to get some kind of ML software to a place where if you trained it on enough probability problems it would be able to evaluate the Hank problem above, including the issue of whether (a) and (b) are actually independent. ;)

This particular question doesn't seem like a fallacy to me.

I, like most people intuitively answered b). Given the explanation on the Wikipedia page I went "oh, of course, yeah", but then I thought about why I'd answer b) given that I'm fairly familiar with basic probability.

If you give me two options and ask me to pick between them, my brain is usually going to assume it's not a trivially true problem.

Language needs context for any sense to be made of it.

As a result of the above, reading the question, the intuitive reading makes the answer choices

a) Linda is a bank teller (implicitly, a bank teller NOT active in the feminist movement)

b) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

This question is one of language, context, and interpretation, not of people failing to understand basic probability.

I suspect that if you prime people to excise interpretation of the question by presenting it as the following, the majority of people would guess correctly:

---

"Consider the following two statements:

1) Linda is a Bank Teller

2) Linda is active in the feminist movement

Which is more likely?

a) 1

b) 1 ^ 2"

Multiple choice questions imply that other choices are excluded (unless an answer such as "all of the above" is a choice. So the implied question is:

a) Linda is a bank teller (and NOT active in the feminist movement) b) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement

What you want it to be asking here is:

a) Linda is a bank teller, and may or may not be active in the feminist movement b) Linda is a bank teller, and is active in the feminist movement

Most college students have taken quite a few multiple-choice tests (particularly in the US, high-schools train for standardized multiple-choice tests). The question isn't asking what the mathematicians seem to think it's asking, because it's format conveys extra restrictions.

No, no it doesn't. Not even slightly. If you fed a human child only text from the internet you'd not produce a competent adult (by competent I mean able to feed themselves etc).

That some tech people think that human intelligence can be reduced to such "textural mechanics" betrays a lack of depth of understanding and even appreciation of the deep and complex world within which we find ourselves. Our written corpus is but a particular reflection of this reality - the shadows on the wall in Plato's cave if you will.

Feed themselves? You mean pick up a burger from the local McDonald's? There's got to be a better Turing test.

Are you making the argument that children do not come with an innate ability to read text and thus cannot learn from it, or are you making the argument that the internet does not contain, among other things, fairly detailed instructions on various ways to feed oneself?

I'm saying that without the context of experiencing the underlying reality, text of itself is meaningless. What is a 'spoon' anyway??

So you're saying one needs some sort of reference for which words refer to which real-world sensory experiences such as "the thing that looks like this is a spoon", and text models do not have sensory associations?

Isn't "meaning" just how a word is used within a specific context? I think that was one of Wittgenstein's points. The word "dog" doesn't need to reference the underlying reality to have meaning. Its meaning emerges from its usage in relation to all other words. Language isn't a mirror of the external world, which is probably one of the reasons LLMs are so successful.

I haven’t experienced cocaine. I haven’t ever seen cocaine (IRL). Nevertheless I think I have a decent grasp of what it is, how it works, how it affects people, and what I could (mis)use it for. Would you imply that my knowledge of cocaine isn’t true/real/useful? Is snorting a line the only way to reify the knowledge? (The answer is: the indirect way of obtaining information is sufficient for building a correct/useful/accurate world model, and there is no such thing as direct experience anyway - it’s signals coming down the wire all the way down.)

I think it's straightforwardly true that you cannot understand what it feels like to be under the influence of cocaine in the same way as someone that has been.

> Our written corpus is but a particular reflection of this reality - the shadows on the wall in Plato's cave if you will.

The irony here is that us humans (both individuals and collectives) experience a very "Plato's-cave-esque" version of reality, pretty much by design. The same Ancient Greeks built a functioning civilization that gave the world logic and physics and philosophy while believing utter nonsense about themselves and the world. We, the enlightened modern humans, also believe all kinds of nonsense about ourselves and the world, and have careful defense mechanisms against exploring anything beyond the "shadows on the wall" that we're allowed to observe by our tribal authorities. How many people still watch the "news", or even read "horoscopes", for instance? We are designed by evolution to simulate a tiny biased shadow/hallucination of reality that helps us/our tribes to thrive, and that includes self-delusions and collective blindness towards obvious BS (so we could organize around imaginary, but evolutionarily beneficial causes).