From: jbugden@smtplink.alis.ca
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 1996 09:29:19 -0800 (PST)
To: "Timothy C. May" <ph@netcom.com (Peter Hendrickson)
Subject: RE: "Nightmare on Crypto Street, Part 1"
Message-ID: <9610118477.AA847743847@smtplink.alis.ca>
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"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.