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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

Call me dishonest then but that seems like failing to actually apply logic.

Is it though? It’s pretty easy to read the first line as something like “Elephants are not native to Germany” and then assume the Munich question is a trick question. In fact the person who answers 1 or 2 because of the possibility of a zoo is actually using smarter logic than someone who takes it at face value.

But it doesn't say "elephants are not native to Germany." It says "there are no elephants in Germany." I don't see what's so much "smarter."

There is still a specific “logic puzzle” mindset you need to have.

Out of context, a sentence like “there aren’t penguins in Texas”, could be synonymous to “penguins aren’t native to Texas”, at least to my ear.

It takes some familiarity with these kinds of questions to know that you’re meant to interpret these premises as axiomatically true and then derive a conclusion purely from the premises.

If taking statements at face value is a "logic puzzle mindset" then I guess I have one. I don't know what to tell you. I find the other way perverse.

Ok… but you seem to be completely missing the fact that there literally ARE actually elephants in Germany. In zoos. So if you know this fact a priori, and the test says the statement “there are no elephants in Germany. How many elephants are in Germany?” - are you just blindly still going to take it at face value and answer 0 (which is incorrect in the real world) or do you think maybe the test is trying to trick you or is simply getting the base facts or wording wrong? You’d only answer 0 if you knew this was very specifically a logic puzzle (which is evident to us now, but not so evident to someone who has never seen a logic test before).

I’m the context of a conversation or something sure I might challenge the premise directly. If someone is expecting me to write a number on a sheet of paper it seems obvious I’m not being invited to challenge the premise and I’m writing 0.

All of this deduction you just did requires prior knowledge of the existence of logic tests and that written tests work like that, which is purely modern cultural knowledge. No one is born knowing that a “written test” is a thing. There was a time period in history where this was NOT obvious, even though it is obvious to anyone now.

In 1904 people had never seen a math problem?

You assume the illiterate or under-educated classes to have seen a math problem? Or have the incentive to play this pointless "game" called an IQ test? (unless they're paid a dollar for every "correct" answer they give)

Are you making a claim about the past or today? If the former, public education had been established for close to a century already, so yes, I do have the expectation that levels of exposure would not be that much worse than today. If the latter then it doesn’t exactly explain why people have gotten better at it over time.

> I do have the expectation that levels of exposure would not be that much worse than today

I would expect that in 2023 everyone would know how to search for "literacy rate in 1900" in Google (or Bing if you will) instead of asserting your flawed expectations and wasting everyone's time.

That only makes sense if you assume the purpose of the test is to correctly apply logic rather than guess the actual number of Elephants in Germany. Someone who's not familiar with standardized testing may assume the latter is more important.

The answer to that question is already given.

And yet, you yourself likely don't believe that, right? You know with high likelihood that elephants exist somewhere in Germany. Yet you are still willing to repeat what you know is probably a lie - there are 0 elephants in Munich.

Because, of course, you know you're taking a test and they expect on tests that the problem statement is symbolic, just there to pose a logic puzzle.

That's the idea we're talking about here.

For your convenience: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elephants+in+germany&t=h_&iax=imag...

In the math problems they give to children there’s probably no Juanita with five apples either but children seem to be able to work with that premise.

That's another good example. Until you tell them the test isn't about real people, they can easily construct narratives where the answer is different than the 'right' one. Maybe they know a Juanita with an apple tree, that will let you pick your own. Maybe they always cut up apples at home so everybody gets half an apple, and the rest are put in the fridge for later. And so on.

Thanks for illustrating the problem so neatly!

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