I think it’s worthwhile that you brought this up (and I’d love to see a discussion on the same issue of questionable phrasing in the Wason selection test, where I suspect your criticism might be valid), but I don’t think you’re right.
I mean, yes, most people would get the [cancer cure/cancer cure+flood right]. It’s easy. But the example of Linda the [bank teller/bank teller+active feminist] does have exactly the same logical structure. And people get it wrong because of the way they’re used to using language without thinking very hard in this context, yes.
Kinda like the way that people can fall for “if all X’s are A, B, and C, then anything that’s A, B, and C must be an X,” but not “if all dalmations have spots, then anything with spots is a dalmation”. Cuz we’ve got this screwy verb “to be” that sometimes means ‘is identical with’, sometimes ‘is completely within the set of”, sometimes ‘is one example of something with this property’ etc etc, and we have to rely on concrete examples oftentimes in order to figure out which applies in a particular context.
And maybe this is largely genetic, or maybe humans would reliably come to see the correct answers as obvious if they were raised in an environment where people talked about these issues a lot in a language that was clear about it. I dunno.
But I do know that I have run in to problems following the same pattern as the Linda the [bank teller/bank tell+active feminist] “in the wild”, and made mistakes because of them. I have created explanations and plans with lots of burdensome details and tricked myself into thinking that made them more likely to be right, more likely to succeed. And I’ve been wrong and failed because of that.
And I don’t think I’m unusual in this.
And I do know that I’ve avoided making this mistake at least several times after I learned about these studies and understood the explanation for why it’s wrong to rate “linda is a bank teller and an active feminist” as more likely.
And I don’t think I’d be unusual in that.
So I think the conjunction fallacy does exist.
I decided to downvote this. Not because you’re saying you dislike something that I love, but because you’re attacking something period rather than trying to start an interesting discussion based off something like:
“So as we all know a lot of people really like HPatMoR, but for me personally it feels like a prime example of Politics and Awful Art. Does anyone else feel like this? Might there be any interesting patterns in how your attitude towards HPatMoR correlates with other things, like the way you feel about various other fictional works, for instance?”
And started the discussion by sharing some other potentially interesting personal observations.
Why didn’t you write that instead? And I don’t mean, “what the hell is wrong with you man”, I actually do mean, “Why didn’t you write that instead?”
Did you just not think of it at the time, and in retrospect you do agree that would have been a cooler way to do it? Or did you have a specific reason for taking the more, uh, ‘vitriolic’ route in the first place that you would still stand by?