The Conjunction Fallacy



Can you see through this logical fallacy? I did, but then I also had my own ideas about Lucy, since the only math I ever excelled at was statistics and probability. That doesn't matter once you grasp the idea of the conjunction fallacy. Now that you know what it's called, you might be able to see it in the world around you, or the things people tell you. Me, I'm just tickled to find an educational video that is under ten minutes, which is rare these days.


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By adding another condition, your brain automatically switches over to the second part (creating the narrative about the woman good at math who plays poker). Your brain almost entirely forgets about the original condition. I guess part of it is "our brains taking a short cut" as the video suggests, but I think it's more than that. When asking people to do a thought experiment, and nothing is really on the line, there's no reason to use the extra mental bandwidth to get the answer right. I think it's possible that, if you paid people to answer that question for example, you may get some number of people answering differently. If you show me a magic trick, my first reaction is always to be amazed. I almost never want to know *how* you did the trick. And me not wanting to know the answer to the trick doesn't really tell you how logical I am.
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