<story><title>The quiz Daniel Kahneman wants you to fail</title><url>http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/12/kahneman-quiz-201112.print</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Uhhrrr</author><text>The engineer/lawyer problem explanation&lt;p&gt;(spoilers)&lt;p&gt;is only correct in a world where lawyers and engineers have all the same characteristics. That the sampled individual is a man will skew things all by itself.&lt;p&gt;Of the lawyers, approximately 40% will be women, whereas only 11% of the engineers. So our samplee could be one of 27 engineers or 42 lawyers - we&apos;ve already bumped Peng from .3 to .39! That he likes math puzzles easily takes Peng to over .4, meaning the answer can&apos;t be A).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ubernostrum</author><text>I&apos;m just gonna quote what I said when this was on Metafilter a few months back:&lt;p&gt;&quot;Anyway, yes, the fundamental problem in these questions is not how people think -- it&apos;s that the question they want the respondent to think they&apos;re asking, and the question they claim they&apos;re actually asking, are two different things.&lt;p&gt;The lawyer/engineer one is a classic example of this; what they hope is that you will read it as &quot;how likely is it that these personality traits correlate to an engineer&quot;, so that they can then swoop in and say &quot;what we were &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; asking is the mathematical definition of a percentage!&quot;&lt;p&gt;Which ultimately tells us very little about the respondents and quite a bit about the people conducting the quiz...&quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>The quiz Daniel Kahneman wants you to fail</title><url>http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/12/kahneman-quiz-201112.print</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Uhhrrr</author><text>The engineer/lawyer problem explanation&lt;p&gt;(spoilers)&lt;p&gt;is only correct in a world where lawyers and engineers have all the same characteristics. That the sampled individual is a man will skew things all by itself.&lt;p&gt;Of the lawyers, approximately 40% will be women, whereas only 11% of the engineers. So our samplee could be one of 27 engineers or 42 lawyers - we&apos;ve already bumped Peng from .3 to .39! That he likes math puzzles easily takes Peng to over .4, meaning the answer can&apos;t be A).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gburt</author><text>The author of this quiz seems to have completely misunderstood the relevant research. Either he has to assume that all individuals are identical (in which case, the little story is irrelevant) or he needs to apply Bayes rule according to the probabilities associated with the factors expressed in the personality exposition.&lt;p&gt;Either way, the article&apos;s explanation for that particular question is wrong.</text></comment>