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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

STEM people will naturally succeed at this task immediately, while an average person, like a koala unable to understand a leaf is food unless it's put on a tree, can only answer the logic problem if it's phrased in terms of social rules.

The STEM people's brains tended to develop in a way that intuitively understands logic in a more abstract way, better able to understand reality, not just monkey hierarchies.

So they will be averse to politics because it's boring, frustrating, disingenuous monkey shit flinging. But they're the most qualified, because they're more likely to put truth and fairness above tribal enrichment and games.

If engineers more often made the sacrifice to waste their brainpower dive into that swamp, we'd have colonized space and solved hunger etc. by now. But I can't blame them for not wanting to deal with it.



Aren't the images in that wikipedia link misleading?

In the original case, you have the following statement: If even, then red. You also have 4 cards, 3, 8, red brown. So two numbers that relate to the if side and two colors that relate to the then side.

In the second picture, you have the statement: If drinking alcohol, then >=21. You also have 4 chards. 16, 25, soda, beer. So two numbers that correlate to the then side and 2 drinks that correlate to the if side.

But the way they arrange and color code the cards makes people associate the drinks with the colors and the ages with the numbers, which is mixing up the if and then.

Granted, this isn't a problem in the text explanation, but could lead to further confusion by someone trying to create associations between drink alcohol status and color when it is really drink alcohol status and even/odd.

Unrelated to my the rest of my comment, I found that despite having what I would consider a very logical brain, I did have a much simpler time solving the drinking problem than the original one. I reach a satisfactory conclusion in each, but the drinking one felt more natural and intuitive while the original problem included a pause and double checking my logic. I would like to be tested on social rules that aren't part of my current social context to see if that played a roll in this specific instance (the article says there is evidence that the effect persists even when the rules aren't part of the existing culture, but that is a general trend and may not apply to specific instances).


> In Wason's study, not even 10% of subjects found the correct solution.

I knew I was different, but I didn't think I was that different...




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