That’s a good point. Human intuitions are geocentric, so the number of people guessing on the heliocentrism question is probably less than 18%. From an expected value perspective, we can treat 18% as guessing, whereas from a default geocentric perspective we can treat 0% as guessing.
But it goes both ways. For questions matching human intuition, if p% guess wrong then we should assume >p% got it correct by guessing.
This is where the word “belief” gets fuzzy. I think that’s what’s actually going on is that going on with the laser question is people read “Lasers work by focusing <mumble>” which does match the truth. Due to bad heuristics, it’s possible for more than 50% of a survey population to guess wrong on a true-or-false question, which means the things they guess right need to be adjusted downward of else we get nonsensical results.
That’s a good point. Human intuitions are geocentric, so the number of people guessing on the heliocentrism question is probably less than 18%. From an expected value perspective, we can treat 18% as guessing, whereas from a default geocentric perspective we can treat 0% as guessing.
But it goes both ways. For questions matching human intuition, if p% guess wrong then we should assume >p% got it correct by guessing.
This is where the word “belief” gets fuzzy. I think that’s what’s actually going on is that going on with the laser question is people read “Lasers work by focusing <mumble>” which does match the truth. Due to bad heuristics, it’s possible for more than 50% of a survey population to guess wrong on a true-or-false question, which means the things they guess right need to be adjusted downward of else we get nonsensical results.