Back in high school I used to help my fellow students with chemistry problems. I noticed that many of them seemed to have a lot of trouble with what I thought were really easy problems. I noticed that many of the chemistry problems had obvious analogues in everyday tasks like baking cakes. I kept trying to reframe chemistry problems as baking problems, expecting that this would make everything easier. I thought my fellow students had some sort of aversion to chemistry but could handle baking easily enough.
This approach never got me anywhere even though I kept trying to make the problems more intuitive. In the end it hit me that the people having problems with the chemistry problems also couldn’t solve problems like “let’s say you want 50% more cupcakes, you have three more eggs and four more cups of wheat—can you do it?” The problem was never the chemistry, it was always that the basic math needed to solve the problems was genuinely hard for a lot of seemingly non-stupid people.
Nice! Is this a recruitment tool like the Scientology personality test? I guess it worked ’cause I just created an account :)
So, now that I’ve joined the cult—what’s the major deity worshiped in these parts? I hear a lot about this Omega guy, maybe that’s it. I also understand that salvation has something to do with lots and lots of liquid nitrogen. Oh, and some really cool robots!
Slightly more seriously, I think delivering this Wason test in a handy computer program which you can take with no-one watching you may increase the success rate. I could quickly test dozens of triplets and I tested any idea that came to my mind. In a supervised test where I’d had to ask the test administrator whether a given triplet was correct I might have been afraid to appear stupid by asking about overly many triplets or overly “silly” triplets or something like that.
(I’d personally never heard about this test before and ran the program without first reading the article—I tested 50 or so combinations and at one point crashed the program by feeding it floating point numbers. I got the rule right.)