"Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net> wrote:
I also summarize Peter's set up much as you did:
"Suppose [A]. Suppose [B] ... [Then Z is likely].
In the middle of the Polish crisis, in the early 1980s, while there were riots over the high cost of living and the lack of food, Tversky and Kahneman [seminal cognitive science researchers] asked a number of political leaders and generals to evaluate the probability [Scenario 1] that the United States might withdraw its ambassador from the then Soviet Union (without any hypothesis as to why). They further asked the same subjects to evaluate the probability [Scenario 2] that _both_ of two other things would take place: (a) that the U.S.S.R. would invade Poland and (b) that, as a consequence of the former, the United States would withdraw its ambassador from the Soviet Union. Guess which was scenario was assumed to have a higher probability. These questionaire-experiments, just like real life, have countless times shown us that a plausible and well-told story can lead us to hold as "objectively" probable events that, just minutes before, we would have considered totally improbable. Probabilities being, by their nature, less than one, the probability of the entire chain (or the last link) being true is always and without exception lass probable than the probability of the least probable link in the chain. We fail to notice this prograssive attenuation of probability. The story takes over from reality. The trick - which is the oldest in the book - is to find the narrative path by which the last, and most implausible, link can be made imaginatively compelling. Give us a little story, a script, something born of our own imagination, and our own natural tendencies, cognitive or emotional, do the rest. This discussion applies as well to the other script: Irreversible Crypto-Anarchy, soon appearing on a street near you. Ciao, James Quoted liberally from the book _Inevitable Illusions_ by Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, Ph.D. The author is a pricipal Research Associate of the Center for Cognitive Science at MIT. I recommend the book.