RE: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Interesting mind experiment

["Matt Ross" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I have to agree here, I figured it out on the first click, but thats because
I have an inherent multi-tasking circuit ingrained in me, I noticed that my
cards (I picked one, my subconscious picked another) had changed suit but
nothing else. If you want an example of how easy it is to fall for this
though, try playing with a trick deck that has the suit colors reversed.
Even concentrating, I couldn't consistently keep it straight.


> I think that's a bit harsh, since there are a lot of interesting tricks
> out there that some really smart people have cratered on.  In particular,
> the "Monty Hall Problem".  Erdos himself got bamboozled by that one.
>
> The thing about this trick that's interesting is that it does an
> outstanding job of playing on three specific weaknesses in people's
> cognitive abilities.
>
> The first weakness is that people have a fairly
> limited working memory capacity.  Each of the face cards they use is a
> pretty complicated object that is, as Mike pointed out, very confusable
> with any of the others used or not used.  I haven't done the study, but
> I'm willing to believe that your memory span for them is sharply lower
> than for cards in general.  This means that people won't be motivated
> (or incidentally very likely) to encode more than the one card they
> selected, or to retain the identity of more than one card after the
> distractor task (selecting an eyeball).
>
> The second weakness this exploits is that people are truly terrible in
> detecting changes made to the part of a visual stimulus that they aren't
> paying attention to (so-called change blindness).  In other words, you've
> really only thoroughly encoded and paid attention to the one card, but
> maybe you would recognize changes in the other cards.  Not likely,
> especially when they are this subtle.
>
> The third weakness, and the star of our show, is the fact that people
> trust background stories and moreover do not systematically attempt to
> disconfirm their own hypotheses or the statements of others.  Everybody
> tacitly assumes that the way this trick has to work is that one card is
> taken away from the ones displayed.  Nothing else would "make sense".
> Everybody also assumes that this is somehow a test of ESP, even though
> they "know" it is a computer on the other side.  So they end up testing
> the rule, "if the guy has ESP, the card I picked will be gone".
>
> Now, that rule will be violated only when the card you pick stays on
> the "table".  This, we know, will never happen.  Somebody who was now
> trying to disconfirm the ESP point will now have to generate a more
> sophisticated hypothesis, which is just what people tend not to do.
> Most people in this case will take the easy way out of just trying it
> again and again, and so build up what looks like a very strong *inductive*
> case for ESP when they might instead have tried to test another rule,
> maybe "if the computer takes one card away, the others will stay the
> same".  Testing that rule would be much better in this case.
>
> So Mike, I guess I'm saying that this is likely to trip up a lot more
> people than you might think.  It is *really* well designed, despite the
> cheesiness of the graphics and such.


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