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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27147 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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He's referring to a psychological experiment on inmates which showed prisoners with IQ's below 90 can't understand hypotheticals no matter how dumbed down eg "how would you feel if you didn't eat breakfast". I suspect that prisoners were either systematically less cooperative than average(likely) or their IQ tests were graded on a curve(also not implausible).

I don’t actually know, but that’s the context.

Yeah, I think it's likely both that (1) some prisoners were too dumb and (2) some prisoners were messing with the interviewers. Besides, I don't think that question is such a great test: it's just testing "do you know how to guess the teacher's password?"

Yeah, I might be hungry if I didn't eat breakfast. Or I might not. Or the question might make no sense because I always make sure to eat breakfast, so why are you asking me if I don't? Or I might be someone who always skips breakfast, so replying "I feel fine" is the true answer. The only 'correct' answer for the test-takers is "I would feel hungry" but that's not 'considering a hypothetical', that's 'can you guess what answer you are supposed to give?'.

I agree that if you're smart enough to be able to guess the 'correct' answers then you're not likely to be in prison, but then again you don't need to be too smart to figure out "what does this guy want me to say?", either.

As an experienced pedatn, I enjoyed the fact that the line morphed from the grammatically correct "How would you feel now if you hadn't eaten breakfast?" to the strictly incorrect "How would you feel if you didn't eat breakfast?"

Obviously look it's variation in dialect, blah blah prescriptivism, but I still found it funny

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