Cosmologist Sean Carroll tweeted a link to a paper from the Harvard Moral Psychology Research Lab, which found that professional moral philosophers are no less subject to the effects of framing and order of presentation on the Trolley Problem than non-philosophers.
Professional physicists are empirically no less likely to fail to solve quantum gravity than non-physicists.
This seems as basic an error as, say, confusing energy with momentum, or mixing up units on a physics test.
No it does not. The trolley problem is a genuinely hard problem with no generally accepted satisfactory solution.
They weren’t testing for the ability to solve the trolley problem. They were testing for framing effects. You can’t test for framing effects if everybody gives the same answer, so they had to use an unsolved problem to test for the solved problem.
I bet you would. It wouldn’t have to be an unsolved problem; one to which they couldn’t too-quickly work out the answer would suffice. The sort of problem you’d need would be one for which there’s a plausible-seeming argument for each of two conclusions—e.g., the “Feynman sprinkler” problem—and then you’d frame the question so as to suggest one or other of the arguments.
But it would be disappointing and surprising if physics professors turned out to do no better at such questions than people with no training in physics.
(If you make the question difficult enough and give them little enough time, that might happen. Maybe the Feynman sprinkler problem with 30 seconds’ thinking time would do. Question: How closely analogous is this to the trolley problem for philosophers? Question: If you repeat the study we’re describing here but encourage the philosophers to spend several minutes thinking about each question, do the framing effects decrease a lot? More or less than for people who aren’t professional philosophers?)
Professional physicists are empirically no less likely to fail to solve quantum gravity than non-physicists.
No it does not. The trolley problem is a genuinely hard problem with no generally accepted satisfactory solution.
They weren’t testing for the ability to solve the trolley problem. They were testing for framing effects. You can’t test for framing effects if everybody gives the same answer, so they had to use an unsolved problem to test for the solved problem.
But if you were to test physicists on an unsolved physics problem, would you detect no framing effects? This seems not obvious to me.
I bet you would. It wouldn’t have to be an unsolved problem; one to which they couldn’t too-quickly work out the answer would suffice. The sort of problem you’d need would be one for which there’s a plausible-seeming argument for each of two conclusions—e.g., the “Feynman sprinkler” problem—and then you’d frame the question so as to suggest one or other of the arguments.
But it would be disappointing and surprising if physics professors turned out to do no better at such questions than people with no training in physics.
(If you make the question difficult enough and give them little enough time, that might happen. Maybe the Feynman sprinkler problem with 30 seconds’ thinking time would do. Question: How closely analogous is this to the trolley problem for philosophers? Question: If you repeat the study we’re describing here but encourage the philosophers to spend several minutes thinking about each question, do the framing effects decrease a lot? More or less than for people who aren’t professional philosophers?)
Physicists don’t claim to be experts in logical consistency.