Yes. The bank teller example is probably flawed for that reason. When real people talk to each other, they obey the cooperative principle of Grice or flout it in obvious ways. A cooperative speak would ask whether Linda was a bank teller who was active in the feminist movement, or if Linda was bank teller regardless of whether she was active in the feminist movement (showing that one answer included the other).
For one thing, dear readers, I offer the observation that most bank tellers, even the ones who participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations in college, are probably not active in the feminist movement.
Yet Eliezer is strangely tossing out a lot of information. We don’t just know that she is a bank teller and anti-nuclear, we also know: “She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice.”
At least where I went to college, the conditional probability that someone was a feminist given that they were against nuclear power, majored in philosophy, and were concerned with discrimination and social justice was probably pretty damn high.
Yes. The bank teller example is probably flawed for that reason. When real people talk to each other, they obey the cooperative principle of Grice or flout it in obvious ways. A cooperative speak would ask whether Linda was a bank teller who was active in the feminist movement, or if Linda was bank teller regardless of whether she was active in the feminist movement (showing that one answer included the other).
Eliezer addresses this possibility in Conjunction Controversy:
Yet Eliezer is strangely tossing out a lot of information. We don’t just know that she is a bank teller and anti-nuclear, we also know: “She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice.”
At least where I went to college, the conditional probability that someone was a feminist given that they were against nuclear power, majored in philosophy, and were concerned with discrimination and social justice was probably pretty damn high.