Ishkur: Kome: Found it! Link goes to the comment where the Wason was posed to IDW

That thread is epic (and interesting how the same people are still around in these threads), although if I can offer some objective commentary, I don't think IDW is really as dumb as everyone in the thread accuses him of being, but rather he was harshly ridiculed, mostly by KiltedBastich. When that occurs, pride and ego take over and it makes conceding one's position much more difficult. You can tell the exact moment when IDW decided he wasn't going to admit he was wrong purely out of spite, and then he spends the rest of the thread trying to weasel out of it to save face.

He failed the test. That's fine, but he should have owned up to it and admit his error right off the bat. Just a simple "my bad. I didn't think it through very well. I understand the logic now." would have sufficed. No one would have held it against him, the discussion ends there and everyone moves on with their lives. Unfortunately, a couple things worked against that outcome: 1) The buildup in the thread until that point, where he's already walled himself inside an antagonistic fortress of stubbornness including but not limited to a preconceived assumption that the test was a trick which may have contributed to why he over-thought the logical answer, and 2) The attacks and finger-pointing were upon him almost instantly and that made admitting his error even more difficult. Bruised ego and all that.

IDW has never been the type to swallow his pride and admit when he's wrong (I mean, we're all wrong every now and then, and no one's keeping score. Sometimes admitting your shortcomings is the moral high ground), but its threads like these (I'm sure this wasn't the only one) that illustrate why he acts the way he does today. He was mocked relentlessly, and that hurt him and he never wants to be in that position again so instead he now does the mocking. Classic bully syndrome.

That thread must have scarred him because now whe ...

To be fair, I mocked him after the fact (and many times subsequently), but at the time I first gave him many opportunities to change his answer, and I made a good faith effort to explain the logic puzzle and what his error was. After all, the Wason task is a basic test for confirmation bias, and I did my best to present it in a completely vanilla fashion. His error wasn't even the expected one that most people make. He refused utterly to even accept the logic presented, let alone acknowledge that he made a mistake of any kind.

And I don't agree with the supposition that he over-thought the answer. I deconstructed his answer, and all his justifications later. All of them make no sense and do not lead to anything resembling a coherent argument. No, if anything, his error was in under-thinking his original answer. He guessed based on a half-assed idea of some kind that he simply assumed was correct. Then once the magnitude of his logical failure was made evident, he over-thought his elaborate and convoluted attempts to pretend he was right and everyone else (including the logicians who first identified the p vs. not-q problem and the psychologists who designed the Wason task) were the ones who were wrong.

Abject failure at logical reasoning, superficial and disorganized thinking, and a grandiose ego unable to admit or accept error. To this day, idw's the only farker I have on ignore, simply because he's just not ever worth wasting time with.

You know, it's deeply, deeply pathetic that idw is still, years later, futilely trying to make people believe his answer to the Wason task is correct, and that the rest of us and the world at large are wrong. When responding to Ishkur's post, I had not noticed that comments from other posters showing he's still driveling on about it. I wonder how long he's going to stay stuck on his failure?

friday13: Kittypie070: I thought the Wason logic test was interesting.

And yeah, I got a toe caught in it for a couple minutes.

I actually found it rather simple. I assume from how everyone is talking that that isn't normal? And just where the hell did IDW come out with that "flip over the three to see a six on the back" bullshiat?

The Wason selection test as used in psychology tests for the confirmation bias. The most common error is for someone to confirm the rule, rather than to check all the cases where it could have been violated. I.E, if the rule is "all even cards must have red backs", then often people will check the even card and the red card, because those are the two that confirm the rule, rather than the even card and the brown card, which are the ones that can tell you whether the rule has been violated. As I mentioned above, it's also known as the "p or not-q" logic problem.

I could go on about how variations on the basic design show greater or lesser incidence of error by presenting it in formats that different people grasp more intuitively, but that's not really all that relevant. All you need to know is that it tests for a common error in human reasoning, that not everyone gets it right on the first try without explanation, and that idw failed it abjectly in a manner that demonstrated a basic failure to even understand the problem, and he has ever since been trying to invent some convoluted rationalization after the fact where he isn't wrong and everyone else (including the logicians and psychologists who created the task) are wrong instead.

That's where idw came up with the cocamamie BS answers he no doubt used in this thread. He's basically trying to argue that if the person giving the test is an idiot who is lying and trying to trick everyone, it makes sense to pick two cards at random rather than attempting to use logic, as a means of justifying his own idiotic choices the first time he took the test. The problem is that anyone with half a brain gets the idea that doing so makes the whole thing a stupid farce ithat isn't actually any kind of logic test at all n the first place - and that unfortunately for him, the Wason selection task is a straightforward logic test with a correct answer that was presented to him straight with no trickery.

He's trying and failing to justify his own ineptitude, and has been doing so over and over literally for years at this point. I think he figures if he keeps trying long enough he'll find someone dim enough to fall for his stupid shtick without immediately considering him an idiot. It's honestly rather pathetic. Oh well, good luck with that, says I. idw's going to have to look for a long time to find someone less able with logic than he is.

KiltedBastich: To this day, idw's the only farker I have on ignore, simply because he's just not ever worth wasting time with.

Reading those threads -- the fact that they happened three damn years ago -- was an eye opener for me. People like IDW cannot even be honest with themselves, much less others, and I see no point in any further discourse with him. He's not here to seek solutions and dialogue, he just wants to call the shots. He wants to be in control. He does this by asking questions and then moving the answers around in some sort of intellectual shell game so that they cannot be answerable.

Just look at how he poses us his "Matrix" question, which is vague to start with, but with no conditional parameters on how it may be answered. Several people (including myself) give him extensive answers, even accounting for the margin of error inherent in asking the question in the manner he did (so we have already compensated for his shiatty line of interrogative dialogue for him). But then he goes and changes the conditions of the answer so it must be a straight yes or no (an either-or fallacy), but without changing the parameters of the question. So this is, again, another one of his hoop-jumping exercises. There's no knowledge or wisdom to gain here (from either you or him). His questions have no purpose. He just wants to control people and force them to fail so that he can claim superiority. Typical Authoritarian.

That he's been doing this schtick for so long is what really clued me in.


I quite simply do not respect his right to one more minute of my time.

KiltedBastich: The Wason selection test as used in psychology tests for the confirmation bias

I really wish I could go back and take the test cold, to see if I would fall for the same confirmation bias trap. But I inadvertently saw the answer before I could think critically about the problem, so it ruined the test for me.

But then again, as a programmer we are quite used to logic problems like this. Testing for what something is not, as opposed to what it is, is pretty much the foundation of Boolean logic. Give me some operators and five minutes and I'd probably solve it in code.