I'll take the fact that my opinion of you matters to you as a compliment.

It was a comment on your intelligence.

That matters to me which you can take as a compliment if you care what I think.

I'm really a bit of a dumb dumb. I'm just self-aware enough to realise this, unlike some posters ITT.

A tad under educated perhaps but mostly you just prefer trolling to thinking

I don't see how this isn't the type of conversation you want. If you only want people who've read the book to comment the thread will just go away. Maybe 20 people are even here and not too many (if not exactly 0) are going to read a book in 48 hours because you started a thread on it. If you really need people to read it, I would suggest buying a copy for 10 regs, I'm sure you could find people to read it then, and I wouldn't interrupt the conversation given you put in some real effort to get people to read it.

I may comment on the rest, but I don't think that is a good example. People you trust taking a position can rationally change your opinion on something you know little about . It's similar to how the easiest way to get people to save for retirement is to make contributing the default option. That's not irrational for the average person who understands very little about personal finance and trusts the default options are optimal for novices. A more universal example is if you're in a foreign fast food place and you can't speak the language or understand the menu you should probably just order the #1.

Ok I'll give DS a "real" response. Notice how most universities don't have a general "reasoning" course as a required course in first year for everyone? Why not? Couldn't you have a course that teaches Monty Hall and Bayes' Theorem and how to reason logically and that would lift people across all their future courses! Sure you might learn about logic in the context of say a discrete math course or a philosophy course, but a broad brush course where everyone leaves knowing the difference between the converse and the contrapositive, not so much.

Well, this has been tried. It's largely been a failure. It's been quite a while since I reviewed the literature, but broadly speaking advances in thinking quality are fairly tied to the specific discipline and attempts to just broadly improve thinking quality across all facets of life without being imbued in a specific discipline struggle. So for instance, tracking students who take these types of courses didn't end up improving their marks across other courses even though the specific goal was to make them better thinkers.

It's a joke to have as a university course. These things should be taught at high school or preferably junior school

Anyone getting to university in a stem type subject (at least) without being very familar with this material has been very badly let down.

I'm a skeptic of this general thinking or rationality or whatever this concept is called. But I don't think the fact that it hasn't shown improvements in college level courses is a fatal blow. College courses measure how well you know a subject after whats supposed to be hundreds of hours of work. We're more talking about everyday situations where the goal is not making obvious mistakes after a few minutes of study.

Two more examples of fallacious thinking in politics:

"55% of those hospitalized have been vaccinated" When 80% of the population has.

"It is insulting to black people when you imply that they don't know how to get ID or hire a lawyer". When what is really being said is that among the small percentage of people who have these problems, black people are overrepresented due to past discrimination. And that they agree that the vast majority of black people don't have these issues (On the other hand, lots of Democrats seem to be too dumb to instantly use this reply even though it would pretty much dispense with this talking point.)

As to whether certain disciplines would benefit from a logic/ probability short course, the best example is probably medicine. Both Pinker and I have mentioned how so many doctors overestimate the accuracy of a positive test result when the disease is rare and how they confuse a clinical trial result that will only happen 5% of the time if the tested drug is useless, with the conclusion that there is a 95% chance that the drug works.

He also skewers psychotherapists for a variety of reasons, such as sometimes still using the Rorschach test.

Finally I'm going to give you two doctors of philosophy a couple of teaching tips that you may not have thought of, but is one of several that I have used when turning F students into A students. (Teaching the mathematically untalented up to basic calculus, is one talent that I will fight to the death against those who think I'm not in the top 5% of practitioners.)

Tip 1. After defining a new term, don't start using it immediately when teaching a concept. The student has to interrupt his train of thought to remember what the word means. Rather say something like "When we multiply an expression with two terms by another expression with two terms we ......" Don't use the word "binomial" A similar sentence I don't use is something like "using the associative law we ........). Teach the concept and then say "notice how we used the associative law".

Tip 2. When someone answers a question wrongly, you should, if possible, not just correct him ( I thought of saying "her" to make uke master happy. But given the context he would have thought I was being misogynistic) but tell him what question his reply was actually answering. "That would have been the right reply if the number of blondes and redheads in the class were the same."

Extra Credit Tip. Not as important but still my favorite teaching anecdote. Turn the question into something they are familiar with. When the beautiful Shawana gave up her stripper job to become a nurse, she was having trouble with a basic math course. She asked me if I could divide 500 by 20 in my head. Before giving her the simple explanation I first told her that I thought she could do this with no help. After she claimed there was no way I said, "How many lap dances do you need to give to make five hundred dollars. Instantly she replied 25.

Looks like our resident genius mathematician, at the age of *checks notes* 112, has discovered how false positives and false negatives work (even though he doesn't realise it yet).

Lolled pretty hard at this. Very on brand condescension, sir.

I, too, have a similar personal anecdote. When the red-lettered Mr. Sklansky asked me how much I care about his stories, I responded "the square root of **** all", and he scratched his forehead and asked "isn't that a divide by zero?"

Sure, this is the standard first example of using Bayes' theorem to give a result that on first brush may seem surprising. But the question is, can you really fix people's ability to think rationally about these topics with a short course or book? Remember most doctors have to take a low level stats course where basic Bayesian thinking is undoubtedly covered; they still screw it up. The sense I have is that people overestimate the degree to which courses in general "reasoning ability" absent disciplinary-specific training are helpful.



uh....are you "practitioner" of teaching calculus at all? This of course is my day job. And my side hustle on YouTube. I like to think I actually am in the top 5% of practitioners and have some meaningful evidence to back this up.

Meh. Broadly speaking, I'm an advocate for student-centred active learning, not a sage-on-a-stage instructor-centered learning. Both of your tips are framed as things you tell students, as opposed to prompts for them to explore. Both tips are pretty basic and common though, so not exactly wrong, but hardly inspired.

The best option is the singular they. You don't need to know anything about whether they are male or female. It is a bit problematic that you are using teaching examples about "blondes" and beautiful strippers, so I'd suggest trying to find examples that don't have such obvious gendered connotations.



Top 5% practitioner confirmed! Lol.

You jest, but Mr Sklansky is currently in the process of proving the Riemann hypothesis. You should go and check out his theories about primes in the science thread. For example, he thinks that finding twin primes would be easier if we just found some properties of the intervening number. I'm sure when e d'a pointed out that they are all 0 mod 6, Mr Sklansky's head asspoloded.

Dave - all primes are 1 mod 6 or 5 mod 6. If a prime is 1 mod 6, then that prime + 2 would be 3 mod 6, which, well, you know, is not prime, coz it is divisible by 3. Hence the only first twin prime in a pair can be 5 mod 6, and the other one is 1 mod 6. Hence, the intervening number, whose properties you seek, would be 0 mod 6.

In fact, I should have used this in my response to your little stripper story.

The % of people in the hospital vaccinated is a good example and I remember it being made in real time. Another one that I can think up after you gave that example is a blue check on twitter recently linked to a poll and said that 60% of Republicans are unvaccinated when the poll actually said 60% of the unvaccinated are Republicans. But both of those mistakes got shot corrected pretty quickly and neither is actually impacting policy or people's positions.

I didn't think that was a great example because I feel like doctors intuitively get it, even if they couldn't answer a related straight math problem. Doctors know not to test randomly for rare diseases, know to ask about whether a person has traveled to certain places etc. Both of those are Bayesian concepts.

I don' know if Pinker makes the mistake you're making, but much of the voter ID stuff is simply blatant bad faith arguments where politicians know they are lying to simply get the results they want and the people they are lying to simply want the same results so logic doesn't matter. Voter ID is not designed to reduce Type I errors but increase Type II errors. Everybody knows it and their are famous FOIA emails where republicans are making sure ID laws will prevent eligible voters from voting in a manner that benefits their party.

Correct.

Totally wierd and irrational thing to be believe us that everyone* listening to the voter ID arguments is either firmly against or wants the bad faith stuff

A fine example of how clever people can believe (or spout) nonsense when it suits them

*this is not some nitpick about some insignficant tiny group of exceptions

When ecriture said "everybody knows it", he pretty clearly was referring to the politicians making the arguments, not the people receiving the arguments. And I don't think he was attempting to be literal.

In your opinion, what percentage of politicians who advocate for voter ID laws in the United States believe that voter fraud is a significant problem that needs to be addressed through legislation?

At the national level, I would guess that the percentage is close to zero.

You might respond that opponents of voter legislation also are motivated by electoral concerns. Perhaps. But opponents don't have to spend much time parsing their motivations, because the correct decision (logically and morally) and the expedient decision lead to the same place.

'and the people they are lying to' was referring only to other polictians? That wasn't clear to me and I'm still really struggling with it. If that what is meant then fine although I'd then seriously doubt it was a response to what DS was talking about.

Maybe I have it wrong. I hope so.and I chide others for failing to read the obvious meaning rather than the silly one but I'm not immune and will very gladly walk it back really fast if DS and/or ecruture confirm they meant politicians.

I'm very happy learn you meant something more sensible and I'd also assume you only mean USA politicians rather than those in many countires that have voter id such as, I understand they do in France and Holland.

Voter ID laws in other countries are almost completely irrelevant to a discussion of Voter ID laws in the United States. For things like Voter ID laws, historical context is paramount.

Yes, that what I assumed. No problem with it being usa centric

Somewhat similar situation in the uk

IMO one of the biggest mistakes, as exemplified often on this forum of those who engage in prolonged arguments.

Challenging your own position with the 'slippery slope' argument or 'worst case scenario' argument as an exercise in logic should be one of the first things done and yet so many refuse to do it as they do not like that it would often undermine their own point.

That does not mean those things are absolutes but they are far more good at exposing flaws in ones point than not. We see constantly on this forum people argue as if their position on 'X' is an absolute truth. Arguments that boil down since "X' is true and correct therefore my position is true and correct. And no other substantiation is really needed. Yet as soon as it is challenged that if 'X' is taken to an extreme they admit their position would change while saying 'ya but that is an extreme and we need not consider that'.

well d'uh. If 'X' is not true in the extreme then you cannot use it as a proof that since 'X' correct your position must be correct. X may be correct in some instances but not in others (extreme) and thus you have no default proof and need to prove it separately in this instance of this particular discussion.

If more people understood and applied that to their own positions first the amount of prolonged arguments would be drastically cut.

It may not be key to getting good grades, since that is largely a function of rote learning and the ability to simply memorize and recite (a largely low use skill in the real world where everything is open book) but it is a key to good applied logic that will help one greatly throughout their lives.

I was thinking this morning about why David's posts on these sorts of topics grate on people. David's instinct is to define intelligence by reference to competency in STEM subjects, logical reasoning, performance on standardized tests (especially the parts of those tests that purport to measure competency in math and logical reasoning), and processing speed. I suspect that he measures intelligence using these metrics in large part because he believes that he excels in these areas. He gives less weight to creative or emotional intelligence for the same reasons.

I'm sure that grates on a lot of people, but I can tolerate it, perhaps because whatever intelligence I have skews in the direction of logical reasoning, etc., rather than writing novels, so it doesn't strike much of a nerve.

For me, the condescension and shorthand tests for intelligence (which often involve probability problems) are more irritating. For example, David mentioned the Monty Hall problem.

When I was in law school in the late 1990s, I remember discussing the Monty Hall problem with a close friend (not a law student), who insisted that switching doors was pointless. The next day, I discussed the problem with a fellow law student. The other law student also insisted that switching doors did not improve the contestant's odds of winning. To prove him wrong, I told him that he could play the role of Monty Hall, and I would play the role of the contestant, with the stipulation that I would switch doors every time. I told him that I would give him $15 every time I lost and he had to give me $10 every time I lost. We agreed to play until he chose to quit. He of course quit after a short while.

David's gut reaction may be "congrats, you knew a couple of idiots back in the late 1990s." Pinker's gut reaction would be, "That's too harsh. These people may not be idiots. They just needed to be taught how to think logically." Both takes would be way off.

The first person has a Phd in the humanities from an Ivy League school. By her own admission, she is a mathphobe, but she is highly logical and obviously an exceptional student. On the metrics that David favors for assessing intelligence, the second person would do better than anyone I have ever met. He was a huge outlier, even among the students at a very good law school. He got a perfect score on the LSAT. He had the best grades in my law school class. His processing speed was amazing. Even as a first year, he routinely turned in exams with 45-60 minutes to spare, which is almost unheard of for 1Ls. By any standard, he has been enormously successful as a practicing lawyer.

Oddly enough, the second person was a terrible card player. He routinely got destroyed in the 75-150 stud game that used to run at Foxwoods.