Rather than focusing on any Bayesian evidence for cheating, let’s think like evolution for a second: how do you want your organism to react when someone else’s voluntary action changes who receives a prize? Do you want the organism to react, on a gut level, as if the action could have just as easily swung the balance in their favor as against them? Or do you want them to cry foul if they’re in a social position to do so?
Your friends’ response could come directly out of that adaptation, whatever rationalizations they make for it afterwards. I’d expect to see the same reaction in experiments with chimps.
How do you want your organism to react when someone else’s voluntary action changes who receives a prize?
I want my organism to be able to tell the difference between a cheater and someone making irrelevant changes to a deck of cards. I assume this was a rhetorical question.
Evolution is great but I want more than that. I want to know why. I want to know why my friends feel that way but I didn’t when the roles were reversed. The answer is not “because I knew more math.” Have I just evolved differently?
I want to know what other areas are affected by this. I want to know how to predict whatever caused this reaction in my friends before it happens in me. “Evolution” doesn’t help me do that. I cannot think like evolution.
As much as, “You could have been cheating” is a great response—and “They are conditioned to respond to this situation as if you were cheating” is a better response—these friends know the probabilities are the same and know I wasn’t cheating. And they still react this way because… why?
I suppose this comment is a bit snippier than it needs to be. I don’t understand how your answer is an answer. I also don’t know much about evolution. If I learned more about evolution would I be less confused?
It might be because people conceive a loss more severely than a gain. There might be an evolutionary explanation for that. Because of that they would conceive their “lossed” card which they already thought would be theirs more severely than the card the “gained” after the cut. While you on the other hand might already be trained to think about it differently.
Based on my friends, the care/don’t care dichotomy cuts orthogonally to the math/no math dichotomy. Most people, whether good or bad at math, can understand that the chances are the same. It’s some other independent aspect of your brain that determines whether it intensely matters to you to do things “the right way” or if you can accept the symmetry of the situation. I hereby nominate some OCD-like explanation. I’d be interested in seeing whether OCD correlated with your friends’ behavior.
As a data point, I am not OCD and don’t care if you cut the deck.
To modify RobinZ’s hypothesis:
Rather than focusing on any Bayesian evidence for cheating, let’s think like evolution for a second: how do you want your organism to react when someone else’s voluntary action changes who receives a prize? Do you want the organism to react, on a gut level, as if the action could have just as easily swung the balance in their favor as against them? Or do you want them to cry foul if they’re in a social position to do so?
Your friends’ response could come directly out of that adaptation, whatever rationalizations they make for it afterwards. I’d expect to see the same reaction in experiments with chimps.
I want my organism to be able to tell the difference between a cheater and someone making irrelevant changes to a deck of cards. I assume this was a rhetorical question.
Evolution is great but I want more than that. I want to know why. I want to know why my friends feel that way but I didn’t when the roles were reversed. The answer is not “because I knew more math.” Have I just evolved differently?
I want to know what other areas are affected by this. I want to know how to predict whatever caused this reaction in my friends before it happens in me. “Evolution” doesn’t help me do that. I cannot think like evolution.
As much as, “You could have been cheating” is a great response—and “They are conditioned to respond to this situation as if you were cheating” is a better response—these friends know the probabilities are the same and know I wasn’t cheating. And they still react this way because… why?
I suppose this comment is a bit snippier than it needs to be. I don’t understand how your answer is an answer. I also don’t know much about evolution. If I learned more about evolution would I be less confused?
It might be because people conceive a loss more severely than a gain. There might be an evolutionary explanation for that. Because of that they would conceive their “lossed” card which they already thought would be theirs more severely than the card the “gained” after the cut. While you on the other hand might already be trained to think about it differently.
Based on my friends, the care/don’t care dichotomy cuts orthogonally to the math/no math dichotomy. Most people, whether good or bad at math, can understand that the chances are the same. It’s some other independent aspect of your brain that determines whether it intensely matters to you to do things “the right way” or if you can accept the symmetry of the situation. I hereby nominate some OCD-like explanation. I’d be interested in seeing whether OCD correlated with your friends’ behavior.
As a data point, I am not OCD and don’t care if you cut the deck.
I am more likely to be considered OCD than any of my friends in the example. I don’t care if you cut the deck.