From: Russell Wallace (russell.wallace@gmail.com)
Date: Thu May 04 2006 - 03:49:41 MDT
On 5/4/06, Damien Broderick <thespike@satx.rr.com> wrote:
>
> No, because they were too stupid or hasty to notice that the first
> option was shorter.
>
Stupid is a harsh word; hasty is literally true but a little misleading - no
entity that's ever existed on Earth has enough brainpower to deduce the
correct answer to every slightly unfamiliar problem by pure ab initio
reasoning, not under the constraint of finite lifespan, so I wouldn't say
they were necessarily more stupid or hasty than the rest of us.
What's going on is that those of us on this list will instantly get the
right answer because we happen to know the rule "short sequences are more
probable than long ones". Most people don't know this rule because they've
never had occasion to use it. They do know the heuristic "typical sequences
are more probable than atypical ones" because it's used all the time in real
life, so that's what they used here.
It so happens that it gives the wrong answer in this artificial case, but
the metaheuristic "when asked a question, pick a heuristic that's mostly
worked before in apparently reasonably similar cases and just go with it
rather than wasting a lot of valuable time trying to deduce a provably right
answer ab initio" is a good one; it's not reasonable to call people stupid
for using it.
(Not that people don't ever do things that are genuinely stupid - I've done
plenty myself, for example! But incorrectly answering contrived questions
like this one isn't among them.)
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