On Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:10:24 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 21:54:23 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> 
>>> Instinctive certainties, however, are wrong more than half the time.
>> 
>> Citation?
>> 
> Uh.. Such numbers are also made up and wrong, more than half the time?
> lol

It is true that 78.64% (I'm rounding) of all statistics are made up on 
the spot.  :-)

> Seriously though, I don't know the actual number, or have a cite, but I
> *have* seen cases dealing with cognition, where you can not only get
> 50-50 fails, but even 99% failures. One of the best examples is the,
> "two people with a big sign walking rudely between two people talking.",
> experiment they run, yearly, at some colleges, for their psychology
> experiments. The one where they replace the person asking the question
> of some random person with someone the wrong height, dressed wrong, in
> clothing some **totally** different color, or even the wrong gender, and
> like 90% of the people being "asked", never notice the substitution. The
> brain just starts over where it was interrupted, so long as the
> conversation "seems" to be the same, and ignore **everything** else. The
> replacement could probably be standing their nude and the only reaction
> you would get was, "Damn, I didn't realize when you came up that you
> where nude.", not, "Where the hell did the original person I was talking
> to go?"
> 
> The ease by which the mind can be tricked is actually quite scary.

True, but at the same time, some people have *very* good instincts.  I 
seem to be one of those kinds of people - because I have an instinct that 
something's going to be OK or work out for the best, and I find that 
better than 90% of the time, I'm right.  That's far better than the luck 
of averages.

I've also been told by people in professions that depend on the ability 
to read people and situations that my instincts are exceptionally good - 
I have an extremely good track record and picking out attempts at 
deception.  Part of that I attribute to the fact that I tend not to trust 
very easily because I know that people will generally try to get away 
with whatever they can.

Jim

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