I got them all right even thought I'm religious, impatient, and shallow about how I buy things.
Are you sure it doesn't just test if you're able to write down an equation?
Thingis, the whole set-up just screams "trick question." You know that whatever answer first comes into your head has to be wrong. I got them all right, but I'm certain in any real world situation, I would get a problem like number 1 wrong, and probably a problem like number 2 wrong as well.
Actually, I was kind of thrown by the third question because 47 days was the first answer that came into my head. That's how doubling works. Is the tempting but wrong answer supposed to be 24?
Roughly, it measures whether it occurs to you to formulate something as an equation if there seems to be a perfectly good intuitive answer. MIT students (the original population tested) do extremely well, but British housewives making household buying decisions (another population tested) do extremely poorly.
Is the tempting but wrong answer supposed to be 24?
If the question is what recent TV series should I watch, yes.
I refuse to answer anything until I know (1) why this post would need to be presidential, and (2) why anyone would think "B.F. Skinner" is a "presidential" pseudonym.
6: I think urp has solved the real test.
1. An explanation for why it needs to be presidential would sort of defeat the purpose of it being presidential and
2. I was president of the Midwestern and the Eastern Psychological Associations.
One of my favorites from this genre of questions:
The rope ladder of a boat hangs over the side of the boat and just reaches the water. Its rungs are 8 inches apart. If the tide rises 4 feet, how many rungs will be under water?
(It is one of my favorites because I got it wrong the first time I encountered it.)
Are you sure it doesn't just test if you're able to write down an equation?
Or at least do mental arithmetic using a sort of kludged shorthand equation, e.g. 'how long does it take twenty times as many machines to make twenty times as many widgets - see above'. Or a sort of quick mental slider for question 1 i.e. 'ummh 1.10 +10 =1.20 therefore five cents.
There's a fantastic video - probably somewhere on YouTube - where they interview a bunch of Harvard students on their graduation day.
The question they ask is "Why are the seasons the way they are?" and the students all get the question wrong - they all answer "It's because the orbit is an ellipse. Winter is when the earth is farthest from the sun, and summer is when it's nearest."
It's the same sort of System 1/System 2 thinking - if you answer on auto-pilot (as you're likely to when you're already wearing your cap and gown and about to walk across the stage) you retrieve some nonsensical related facts and string them together in a half-assed way.
If you have some cue that you need to engage with the question, those answers will strike you as immediately super ludicrous, and you'll think through the right answer.
6 is a trick question; this post was in fact submitted non-pseudonymously by the actual B.F. Skinner.
I think we need to know more about how the ladder is constructed. I was to say "7", but do all rope ladders have a rung at the bottom?
I'm assuming the boat isn't floating, or the question wouldn't make any sense.
I feel like I've heard all these questions and so I'll never truly know what a sheep I am.
20: did you get them right when you first heard them?
20: well, do you make poor purchasing decisions?
I kind of hate these sorts of questions, my initial response is always that the questioner is an asshole.
I got 2+3 instantly, but might have missed one if I hadn't been clued in that it was a trick question. The boat question is just annoying ass bullshit.
I am both religious and politically extreme, pretty bad at judging risk, and make crappy purchasing decisions all the time, so there you have it.
20: Are you now, or have you ever been, a British housewife?
The best lateral thinking test.
The boat question is just annoying ass bullshit.
It's also not paleo.
25 is more my speed. Fuck these trick questioners.
I'm assuming you've all seen this already. If not, it is totally fantastic.
The boat question is a trick question because you have to ask the name of the boat, which is, of course, Kobayashi Maru.
I've seen them all, but if I remember the first time I saw them all correctly, I got two out of three -- lily pads and widgets yes, but bat and ball no.
I approached the questions in an analytic way and got the first two right, then had a brain fart on the 3rd and formulated a horrible, abortion of an equation. If I'd been in common sense mode probably I would have gotten it right. At any rate, I've avoided British housewifery, for now at least.
The notion of a lily pad patch doubling in "size" is ambiguous. Presumably something different is meant, such as: it doubles in cross-sectional area at the plane of the lake. But now we must recall that lakes can be oddly shaped. Suppose that the lake has a long, narrow extrusion—an aquatic peninsula, if you will. If we think of the lily pad patch as circular and model its doubling in size as its radius increasing by a factor of sqrt(2), then it could take 48 days to cover the entire like but only, say, 43 days to cover half the lake.
You might object that lily pad patches can only thrive or even exist in water, so that either (a) it isn't really doubling in size, contrary to the hypothesis or (b) it is doubling in size and must therefore be doing so by growing into the peninsular portion of the lake, contrary to my argument. I would have to defer to you regarding that, as I am inexpert in lily pad patch biology; I only know about geometric ratios and shapes and such things. But perhaps we can get around this by supposing that the excess growth of lily pad patch proceeds not into the peninsular portion of the lake but rather into the streams that feed the lake. Since they are not part of the lake proper, but are aqueous, they allow for lily pad patch growth but do not count toward covering the lake.
I'm assuming the rope floats.
That makes even less sense.
I am inexpert in lily pad patch biology
How are you regarding toilets? Helicopters? Cap and trade?
I'm amazed, I got them all right. Wow. I generally don't do well at this kind of test. That hasn't happened since... actually, here. Clearly Unfogged quizzes are too easy.
I only got 5/10 on that when I tried just now.
Incidentally (and this is part of why I'm presidential) I agree that the questions are fairly stupid, but I think this test is fairly described as the subject of extraordinary current excitement in the realm of social psychology, because it seems to be so predictive of so many things. Somebody like S/lo/man, linked in the post, would be likely to think about it as dispositive of a core ability to do causal reasoning, and somebody like Kahneman would (does, I think) talk about it as indicating one's propensity to engage system 2-style reasoning.
39: Has it been cross-referenced with propensity to hold out for a promised second marshmallow?
I'm not even going to attempt to answer the questions until someone promises me a marshmallow.
40: Oh yes, definitely. I believe the marshmallow experiment results partly inspired the development of this measure. See page 30 (page 6 in the document) here.
As for lily pads and lakes, consider also that the sizes of the things mentioned are discrete and finite. You can't have a patch with fewer than one pad in it, and I don't know the size of lilies off the top of my head but they can't be any smaller than, say, three inches in diameter. Double that 48 times and I think we've exceeded the surface area of the earth.
I don't think we need to assume the lake is smaller than the surface of the Earth.
One of the things that I didn't mention explicitly in the post is the hypothesized connection between this test and temporal discounting of reward, which is thought to underlie things like risk-averseness and impulse control.
I don't understand how, if the test is supposed to measure one's ability to restrain one's intuitive answer, the circumstances in which the test are given aren't critical. For example, as I said above, I eventually got all three but knew that I had to keep trying because these were obviously trick questions. If, say, they'd been given in a different context (say a math test where all the other answers were straightforward and extremely easy) I almost certainly would have gotten at least question no 1 wrong.
Something similar has also always bothered me about the marshmallow test; IME it's always seemed like an ability to delay gratification is highly contextual, not some kind of core character trait. I'm sure the people running this research have thought of all of this.
I'm sure the people running this research have thought of all of this.
You would think so, wouldn't you?
Maybe they got sidetracked by people unwilling to assume that a boat would float?
On the other hand, it is certainly the case that large numbers of people (all those poor British housewives, 60% of people on Amazon's Mechanical Turk) get at least two questions wrong despite the context clearly being "a test administered by psychological researchers".
That was before people learned to expect that psychological researchers would be tricking them.
Put a little differently, British housewives may just be less used to being asked trick questions, whether or not from researchers, whereas MIT students are extremely used to answering trick questions. Differing levels of awareness as to how to deal with a trick question seems a little different than having different overall sets of capacities for thinking through intuitive responses. Or maybe not, I dunno.
52: That certainly seems plausible, yes. And in fact, if you make the test more difficult (by making the font harder to read) people perform better.
I'm going to return to using comic sans when I give people instructions.
I don't understand how, if the test is supposed to measure one's ability to restrain one's intuitive answer, the circumstances in which the test are given aren't critical.
Oh, they are. Kahneman's book goes into many various ways in which tests like this can be primed in one direction or the other.
I admit that I got the first one wrong and grew impatient and clicked through to the answers. My purchasing style could be summarized as: get the ball now, as it's cheap, and I can use a stick for a bat and see if it's really worth going back later."
I'd like to see research into how awareness of being tested, and/or the format of a test, impact peoples' answers. Exactly how much better do people do at these questions when they're presented like this rather than as genuine out-of-the-blue questions? On a related note, how much better would people do at them if they were multiple choice questions?
Just to be clear, I think these results are really interesting. And I am not at all a fan of "let me attack your major ongoing research project with my 30 seconds of reasoning as set forth in a blog comment, and if you can't prove it to me in a blog comment, you're wrong." Just asking questions that come to mind.
as genuine out-of-the-blue questions
I'm not sure how you would do this. Accost people on the street? Construct scenarios so that people believe that you are trying to figure out if you have enough money to buy a ball? It isn't trivial, and also makes it more difficult to control the experiment so that different subjects are experiencing the same context.
So why do you all think men score better (see link in 43) on this test than women?
59: Have a study that requires a spinal tap. While on the table prior (or post), have a child actor playing the kid of one of medical people ask them the question as if it was a homework problem they needed help with.
60 -- I'm sure you have an intuitive answer ready at hand.
This is where psychological researchers, like the moderators of Presidential Debates, could learn from Reality TV show producers.
58: I'm not sure who 'you' refers to in that comment, but this is certainly not part of an ongoing research project on my part. If I seem like I'm defending it, it's only because I am interested in robustly exploring the various criticisms.
(Of course it's not part of an ongoing research project on my part; I'm dead, and mostly worked with pigeons, and would have hated this line of research.)
No, not to you in particular. I just felt like I was coming across as all "HERE ARE MY POORLY THOUGHT OUT OBJECTIONS TO THIS SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. PROVE ME WRONG" which is kind of an internet thing that I generally dislike, at least when I'm being sincere.
In this case I think you've lit on some quite valid criticisms to which I'm not sure there are very good answers.
Arguably (which is to say, I would argue this) similar criticisms apply to big chunks of the social psychology literature, and may underlie some of the problems with replication that afflict that discipline.
(Finally, with the above paragraph, my decision to go presidential pays off.)
So, plucking the first relevant bit of Kahneman I can find (using these particular questions verbatim), he cites research showing that students do better (35% make at least one mistake versus 90%) when the questions are in a hard to read font.
You went presidential to avoid pissing off social psychologists?
Dude the social psychologists can and will break your brain. Don't f with them.
There not Freudian. They won't try to sex your mother.
60: Because we're genetically superior. Just like why us white people don't go to jail very much.
4: I go for equations. Given a test where an answer seems obvious there has to be a trick. Paranoia is useful.
That's just what they want you to think.
60: it's kind of tough to say with any certainty given the task, right? Is the question "why do women tend to give up before reflecting?", or do we assume that they do tend to reflect and still produce the wrong answer after additional thought? Would you not need two separate hypotheses for these scenarios?
I would slightly lean toward "why don't women reflect more?" being the money question, but I really don't have the slightest idea. Oh hey, what an interesting rhetorical pattern in this answer.
why don't women reflect more?
You may as well ask why don't they like garlic.
60:
Expressed loosely, being smart makes women patient and makes men take more risks. This result was unanticipated and suggests no obvious explanation. The only related finding of which I am aware is in a study by Shoda, Mischel and Peake (1990), who found that the patience of preschool girls was strongly related to theirsubsequent SAT scores, but the patience of preschool boys was not.
...is what the author in 43 wrote, among some other things I didn't study. Time-preference?
But...
73: All together now:We Blame the Patriarchy
80: Human women don't like garlic? Interesting, very interesting....
Expressed loosely, being smart makes women patient
This explains something about hilzoy, at least.
Has anyone discussed/studied the role of acting in the Milgram experiment? I know you can't actually shock people, but in my hazily remembered version of the experiment, weren't the subjects responding to the sounds of people acting like they were shocked - that is, they didn't see the people being "shocked", so they had to go by what they were hearing?
I thought the subjects could see the actors.
I guess either way my question is still the same.
Also, on the original post, I actually paused on the second question and wondered if the machines were connected to each other and if there was a loss or gain in efficiency in having them work together. Then I thought that was silly and looked at the answers without coming up with my own.
84/85: they ran the experiment under a variety of conditions. Not being able to see the victim was associated with higher rates of compliance, IIRC.
Radiolab (I think) did a Reinterpretation of the Interpretations! of the Milgram experiment a while ago. I, er, can't remember what they actually said, but what I remember is that subjects were not nearly as horrible as we are told the experiment showed they were. Now I think of it as`not exactly false but exaggerated for shock and alienation', like Hardin's theories.
So are there non-mathematical versions of these questions?
90: That is a very good question. The answer, from what I know, is that social psychologists agree that there should be but that there are not yet.
Don't let that stop social psychologists from drawing significant correlations out of the results.
90: A funny story is a joke, a well-known soft drink is a coke, what's an egg white called?
More seriously, what is a possible candidate for a non-mathematical version of these questions? Are logic questions allowed? If not, I think it would be pretty impossible to find something suitable.
Well, again, this isn't my research, and I find the whole project somewhat suspect, so I am not the one to ask. In general, you would need a non-mathematical question that has an intuitive but definitely incorrect answer and a non-intuitive but definitely correct answer that requires some reflective thought. I would have thought the boat ladder question was a reasonable alternative, but it turns out that some boats are glued to the ocean floor.
If you come up with something within the necessary parameters by all means email it to the researchers in the OP.
The boat question is to many a well known puzzle (I already knew it as well). Couldn't one simply gain acuity in solving puzzles without being particularly reflective? (Maybe not—I dunno.) The boat question does of course depend on some domain-specific knowledge. I bet there are lots of populations who would do poorly on it for that reason.
Are there domains where most boats don't float?
95: the seasons question from 11.
99: Boats still float, but this becomes somewhat less unique.
There was also a question where college students were asked about the phases of the moon, and their off the cuff responses were all to the effect that they thought a new moon was caused by a lunar eclipse.
You could do a question about a very small rope ladder and a continental plate rising under pressure from magma.
Huh. I guess I never understood the phases of the moon until just now.
I always end up looking up the answers to the seasons and the moon phase questions. I know my "intuitive" answers are wrong too.
Huh, I actually got them right this time. More or less.
I can't figure out how the moon works either. The seasons are easy though.
I can't figure out how the moon works either.
Tide goes in, tide goes out.
I pretty much hate all trick questions, puzzles, puzzle-type-games [sudoku, crosswords, etc.]. Almost exactly as per Halford in 23. In fact, my initial response to the questions was near identical. Got the second and third basically instantly, wrong answer for the first, except that I thought about it for a few seconds and looked again. I probably wouldn't have done if I'd just been click radio buttons next to a set of answers on a web-form.
The third was the only one that took me more than three seconds, as it's a double trick question. I suspect the ability to answer these correlates pretty well with standardized test scores in general since they both reward awareness of authorial intent.
The third was the only one I was sure of immediately, partly because I'd never seen it before so I actually thought about it and worked backwards by halving. For the first, I thought "isn't the answer usually .35 and .65?" and then I realized the question was a bit different from whatever I was thinking of.
95. M-A-C-L-E-A-N is pronounced "Maclane"; M-A-C-F-A-R-L-A-N-E is pronounced "Macfarlan"; how do you pronounce M-A-C-H-I-N-E?
And now you can all do this test, which is marginally harder.
Isn't a problem with a non-mathematical version that it's going to be hard to make the question unambiguous enough to make the intuitive answer clearly wrong? The Linda is a feminist bank teller problem is sort of what's wanted, but that one has always sounded to me like people are misunderstanding the question: in ordinary speech, if you asked someone whether Linda were a feminist bank teller or just a bank teller, the second option would be implicitly understood to include "Not a feminist".
Writing really unambiguous non-mathematical questions that still have an intuitive answer that's undeniably wrong is going to be hard.
I got #2 no problem. Number 3 I didn't do, because I told myself that I need to write out an equation.
Number 1 I didn't get intuitively.
If you asked me 1 and 2 out of the blue, I would have gotten them wrong.
25 is funny. I particularly like the "He shot across the international dateline and the bullet hit him in the back of the head " answer. That should be the answer to all trick questions.
Most movies have endings less dramatically satisfying than 29.
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Social Mobility and Family Name in Britain and Sweden 1800-2010
Not fucking much mobility. Nothing has helped in 200 years. Immoral as hell.
Liberty, fraternity, and equality begin in compulsory orphanages
Creches. That is all.
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OT: Two years ago at about this time, I came on here and asked what it would be like to have a three-year-old and Apo said that three-year-olds are assholes. We said yes, though, and got a surprisingly non-assholic Mara 10 days later. I just wanted to thank people here for the incredible amount of support and tolerance I've gotten over these past two years, which have been hard at times but probably more wonderful.
114: I believe that one's been asked in a bunch of different ways to try and clear up exactly that kind of problem. For example, splitting the sample into two groups, so nobody gets asked both questions.
re: 114.last
Our folk-physics allegedly fits quite well with medieval 'impetus' models, but not with post-Renaissance physics. So there's, I suppose, a potential source of tension between intuitions and world that you could use to generate puzzles. But they'd basically be testing knowledge of (pop-)physics.
Notoriously, our logical intuitions are often at odds with the answer formal logic* would give. There's lots of puzzles there, but that's well-trodden ground in psychology.
* of whatever appropriate variety
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More 117, nut graphs
There are a few takeaways here. One is that family status could be more powerful than past measurements have suggested. Clark and Cummins note that their estimates suggest that family background has a much bigger impact on social status than previous studies have found. Another is that genetics likely has little to do with those results. Clark and Cummins studied surnames across eight generations. So, two people with the same surname in 1800 and 2011 would only share 0.58= 0.4 percent of their DNA.And perhaps the most bracing revelation from the studies is that we haven't gotten that much better at promoting upward mobility. The 50 percent to 37 percent drop in the correlation between an English person's wealth and the wealth of his or her parents is encouraging, but much smaller than you'd expect over a 211-year period. At that rate, we won't wipe out inheritance-based inequality for another 600 years.
I suppose there is perhaps an alternative to creches as a means to make external conditions fair and equal for all children...communism, equalizing status of all parents. But not only is that close to as drastic a solution as creches, I consider it inadequate, because even if all families are economically equal, there would still be families with stronger traditions of reading, for instance.
So...creches
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So, either Thorn or bob is a monster.
122:Shorter, Lenin & soup kitchens. I vote myself as monster.
There may be multiple moralities, depending on the scope and hierarchy of communities one attaches to, moralities of the micro and the macro. We (almost) all believe so, that killing is judged differently in the bedroom and the battlefield.
That I attach to the bleeding crowd (however inadequately) at the expense of the needy friend is perhaps asocial and monstrous, but we all also have our own hypocrisies paying tribute to virtue.
And as a socialist/commie, I blame the systems and history, not individuals.
Crèches with padded wire-monkey mommies for all.
Haven't some of the questions at 25 been discussed here before? The thing that always strikes me about them is how many of them are really morbid. Can't we have more cheerful brain teasers?
The first one doesn't sound familiar and it's really giving me a headache.
Okay. 2 is easy enough. And I get the equation in 1, but then I try to check my work.
A bat is $1.00 and a ball is .05. 1+.05 does not equal 1.1. What am I missing?
Oh, I hadn't highlighted any of the answers before. Awesome.
A bat is $1.00 and a ball is .05. 1+.05 does not equal 1.1. What am I missing?
A ball is five cents.
The bat is one dollar MORE than the ball, so $1.05.
129: Come to think, isn't this pretty much your area? You've asked before for people to come up with examples from literature where the author used the reader's intuition to mislead, or something like that.
Well, right next door to my area, anyway. Yep!
128: Yeah, it took me a bit to figure that out. I think that's the real test.
128. Yes, it helps if you've encountered "training" sites at work that use that trick. I've been reinterpreting the world in terms of Stingray all day.
Apo said that three-year-olds are assholes.
Children do tend to reflect their environment.
129: yes, that part makes sense. So then, how does a bat and a ball cost $1.10?
And as long as we're talking about kids, here's an OT bleg:
Any suggestions for a card or board game for a 7-year-old who's pretty good at strategic thinking but has limited patience?
She likes Labyrinth for example, but wants to stop playing or change the rules if she's not picking up the treasures quickly enough.
(Her impatience and poor impulse control are other issues over which I, alas, have little influence.)
135: 5 cents plus one dollar and five cents is one dollar and ten cents.
135. A bat is $1.05 and a ball is $0.05. 1.05 - 0.05 = 1.00 (QED); 1.05 + 0.05 = 1.10.
Am I going to lose points for not showing all my work?
I'm having my own problem with problem three in the quiz from 113. Why are you only £10 worse off?
135: (Multiply pwned, but already typed up, so here goes...)
The total cost of the bat and the ball together is $1.10, and the bat costs one dollar more than the ball does. So the cost of the ball is x, and the cost of the bat is (x + $1). So:
2x + $1 = $1.10.
2x = $0.10
x = $0.05 = the cost of the ball
x + $1 = $1.05 = the cost of the bat
Any suggestions for a card or board game for a 7-year-old who's pretty good at strategic thinking but has limited patience?
Maybe some of the simpler Reiner Knizia games? His card based bidding games (eg Money, High Society) can be very quick to play.
Expressed loosely, being smart makes women patient and makes men take more risks.
but this makes total intuitive sense. Accords with my experience completely. Basically, when men are smart they try to use their brains as a tool for being more alpha and competitive -- I AM SMART NOW I GET TO BE PATRONIZING AND MANSPLAIN EVERYTHING AND HOPEFULLY MEN WILL FEAR ME AND WOMEN WILL SLEEP WITH ME. Men who are in geeky subgroups are the worst about this, perhaps because they did not have enough other avenues to status in their formative years.
When women are smart they can think of more reasons why their first thought is wrong so they wait to speak more, makes them appear more patient. This is the effect smartness would have on you if you were less concerned about earning social status by being the first person to pop in with the 'right' answer. (Or if you were in a gender that did not gain social status by aggressively shutting other people up by using your brains).
I can't be the only person who has observed this set of phenomena.
"HERE ARE MY POORLY THOUGHT OUT OBJECTIONS TO THIS SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. PROVE ME WRONG" which is kind of an internet thing that I generally dislike, at least when I'm being sincere.
I think this is a great use of the internet. What, are you going to go out and earn a phd before commenting in a blog? It's great to have a forum where generalists can learn stuff by asking specialists obvious questions. Also, the soft 'sciences' often assume away very basic foundational questions in order to use their methods. E.g. if you want to claim external validity for social or psychological experiments conducted in a lab environment, or extrapolate from the results of administered pen-and-paper tests, you *have* to downplay the importance of context.
142: Another idea - Ticket To Ride. Games are relatively short, but more importantly they involve several clear short term goals, so she'll always be achieving something, or on the verge of doing so anyway.
It's great to have a forum where generalists can learn stuff by asking specialists obvious questions.
This isn't quite the dynamic I thought Halford was talking about. Asking honest questions is one thing, playing gotcha and assuming that the specialist hasn't considered the thing you came up with in 3 minutes is another.
144: Ah, I see. I didn't assume you could skip your £20 payment the last month.
148: Yeah, the sort of thing you see with climate change denialists. Economists, however, shouldn't be given any presumption of knowlege.
149. You don't pay the premium for the month in which you claim., not necessarily the last month. I think the way it's presented is a bit dodgy, but I worked it out on the basis that any way you spin it you're worse off, and that was the only way to make it come out at £10-.
When I asked a similar question of snark not too long ago, he suggested Forbidden Island, which was a big, big hit.
but I worked it out on the basis that any way you spin it you're worse off, and that was the only way to make it come out at £10-
That was my reasoning as well. Poorly written question.
136.--Settlers of Catan!
Catan might not be great for an impatient child given the ease with which you can be frustrated in your road/city building efforts. Not to mention the randomness of the dice. Nothing more annoying than needing just one brick (or whatever) and never getting the roll and nobody wanting to trade with you.
121
... Another is that genetics likely has little to do with those results. Clark and Cummins studied surnames across eight generations. So, two people with the same surname in 1800 and 2011 would only share 0.58= 0.4 percent of their DNA.
This is ignoring associative mating.
142: Bidding games sound like a possibility. I'll check those out.
Ticket to Ride I actually find kind of tedious (though that may be that the person we play it with most often ALWAYS wins).
152: Forbidden Island is a big hit in our house. And its cooperative!
re: 151 and 154
Yeah, I did it sort of backwards. Worked out I'd be worse off, as £210 always less than £240, and then worked out why it'd only be £10 worst off. 'Ah, I wouldn't pay in the month I claimed' but it is poorly written.
Thanks all. I had done the algebra right, but my eyes skipped over some text. I was working on the assumption that a bar was $1.00 AND $1.00 more than a ball which isn't what the problem said.
Bat, although a bar which cost only $1.00 would be kind of neat.
152: We have Forbidden Island, which she likes ok. (I like it a lot.) It's the patience thing again; she sees a good move but usually doesn't want to take the time to look at alternatives. It means we're more likely to lose, which is fine, but it also really cuts down on the cooperative aspect.
I do think cooperative games are a good option with her, though.
(Pandemic is another good cooperative game from the same company, but too complicated for young kids.)
Air hockey is a board game. The board just has some small holes in it.
163: We just got Pandemic for CA's nephews and lost every time on the baby level. (CA and his brother have also just introduced those kids to D&D. The older one brought his new Monster Manual to hockey practice. Oh dear.)
I noticed the lack of assortative mating in Clark and Cummins too. Now, one of the reasons you'd get assortative mating is money marrying money (with people as proxies), which confounds the results again, but perhaps could be teased out as the process. Hm.
Games: A seven-year-old might be just the age for _Lord of the Fries_ and _Give Me the Brain_, and I like them too, so fun for adults? (thinking) I'm pretty sure they aren't naughty. Cheapass Games are pretty reliable, I find. _The Very Clever Pipe Game_ is my favorite, check that out too.
I know a kid in that age range who really likes Fluxx.
Which strategy do you take in the Pipe Game, clew?
Settlers of Caftan is nice if the kid is into loose clothing.
Shorter cynical PGD's 143: Smart men have worked out that the world is stacked in their favor, smart women that it's stacked against. Now, *that* test I would *really* like to see crossed with high & low SES and high & low charm.
When I am getting a PhD rather than commenting on blogs, I find that framing a question as "How did you rule out effect X?" works very nicely whether the speaker did or didn't rule it out, and even if X has been known to be a false folk belief for years.
142: Bidding games sound like a possibility. I'll check those out.
As a poker player, I find Money in particular to be a genius piece of game design, though it's long term appeal may be limited. Basically you're all dealt a hand of cards, where the suits are "currencies" with face values from 10 to, I think, 100. The aim, basically, is to collect sets of the same value in the same currency, and more generally to get as many cards of a given currency as you can. Each turn, two sets of four cards are turned over in the middle, and you take turns to bid on them with your own cards. The highest bidder takes the set they want and replaces it with their bid. Then the next highest makes the same choice, and so on. The genius is that, unlike betting in poker, the stuff you're bidding with is also the stuff you're bidding for. If you over-bid on one turn you can spoil your chances later even though you won. And you may have to break up a set to get a higher value one, or shift out of one currency when you realise that other people are going for it too.
163: Pandemic's alright, but I always get the feeling that it's really just a single-player game that they added turn-taking to. That may not hold true if you have someone who's very impatient or doesn't want to form a consensus.
More generally, if you've got the time, I'd strongly suggest watching some of Wil Wheaton's newish Youtube series, Tabletop. They've been showcasing some great games, co-op and competitive, and you get a really good sense of how they play out and the level of complexity.
Sleeping queens is a pretty fun game:
http://www.amazon.com/Gamewright-230-Sleeping-Queens/dp/B0009XBY3A/ref=pd_sim_t_3
163: Pandemic's alright, but I always get the feeling that it's really just a single-player game that they added turn-taking to. That may not hold true if you have someone who's very impatient or doesn't want to form a consensus.
Very true. There's a zombie-themed reskin of Pandemic on iOS and it plays just fine single player.
Asking honest questions is one thing, playing gotcha and assuming that the specialist hasn't considered the thing you came up with in 3 minutes is another.
The other day, I finally got around to reading the whole paper from Haidt that we discussed in this thread here, and reading the whole thing really reinforced my 3-minutes-to-form opinion that it was shoddy work.
But I'm not a social scientist, and really have no other standing to complain. I find it disturbing to ridicule the work of a sincere professional whose objective qualifications are so superior to mine, but holy shit this thing is a piece of crap.
163: Agreed. If you don't like talking through the moves, there's no point to having multiple players.
Agreed. If you don't like talking through the moves, there's no point to having multiple players.
Maybe it's a case of familiarity breeding contempt: once my wife and I got a feel of what sort of solutions worked in Pandemic, we usually wouldn't have to talk too much. But when we'd play with someone else, it'd be frustrating to let them in on our groupthink.
I think I tend to enjoy cooperative games of that sort when I play them less. Ghost Stories was a lot of fun and led to some nail-biting endings, but I've only played it twice.
148 was the point I was making. Questioning is one thing, but there's a tendency I've found on the internet to demand explanations and then get quite arrogant if the questioner can't be satisfied with an explanation that fits in a two-paragraph blog comment.
114: Oh, here it is, from that linked Wikipedia article:
Many variations in wording of the Linda problem were studied by Tversky and Kahneman.[3] If the first option is changed to obey conversational relevance, i.e., "Linda is a bank teller whether or not she is active in the feminist movement" the effect is decreased, but the majority (57%) of the respondents still commit the conjunction error. If the probability is changed to frequency format (see debiasing section below) the effect is reduced or eliminated.
There's support elsewhere for the proposition that that people understand relative frequencies better in terms of counts than in terms of percentages. Many of the standard Bayesian updating tests (e.g. the medical condition
The takeaway from which is that to communicate statistics effectively to even a highly educated audience with good quantitative skills (e.g. doctors), talk in terms of whole-number relative frequencies whenever possible.
Kraab, I recently gave my 7 year old niece Catan: Junior. It has a simpler structure that Settlers and it has pirates! It was a hit with her and with her father. (He loves Settlers, so I figured he'd like this too.)
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I don't want to be a total Debbie Downer in the active, somewhat silly thread, so I'm commenting here that I am feeling sad tonight. Today is the 2nd anniversary of the birth of my friend's baby who died a week later. We were going to go to a big cultural event together tonight, one that promised a lot of potential for catharsis, but then she couldn't go, but it came to pass this afternoon that she *could* go, but I didn't get her message about it until a little while ago, when it was already too late. I realize that this isn't my fault, just one of those plans-that-don't-materialize deals so common in our age of cell phones, but I still feel bad that I'm not there with her. Drag.
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Sorry to hear that, Nat. Sounds like you're a good friend, either way.