This one really is hard to kick. For a moment, I found myself objecting that it couldn’t really be less likely for a Harvard student to be smart and rich than just rich (this is the Ivy league after all) before I mentally kicked myself and remembered that of course it’s more likely to be just one than both regardless of the set you’re dealing with.
I suspect that if someone makes a set of descriptions that are too specific though, eventually it’s going to start dawning on them that they’re narrowing their category and decreasing the likelihood that anyone is likely to fall into it. A smart rich white snobbish person might intuitively sound like a more likely Harvard student than just a rich person, but a smart rich white snobbish man with chestnut brown hair, brown eyes, straight nose, 5′11, pressed blue shirt with a popped collar.… eventually they’d realize they were getting ridiculous. It would be interesting to see how the likelihood people assign to propositions would graph against a set of qualifications that rises from low to arbitrarily high levels.
This one really is hard to kick. For a moment, I found myself objecting that it couldn’t really be less likely for a Harvard student to be smart and rich than just rich (this is the Ivy league after all) before I mentally kicked myself and remembered that of course it’s more likely to be just one than both regardless of the set you’re dealing with.
I suspect that if someone makes a set of descriptions that are too specific though, eventually it’s going to start dawning on them that they’re narrowing their category and decreasing the likelihood that anyone is likely to fall into it. A smart rich white snobbish person might intuitively sound like a more likely Harvard student than just a rich person, but a smart rich white snobbish man with chestnut brown hair, brown eyes, straight nose, 5′11, pressed blue shirt with a popped collar.… eventually they’d realize they were getting ridiculous. It would be interesting to see how the likelihood people assign to propositions would graph against a set of qualifications that rises from low to arbitrarily high levels.