[Original image found at the MathWorks site (slogan: “Accelerating the pace of engineering and science”). It seemed too good not to use.]

I haven’t read the book in question (Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman), but this book review got it a spot in the queueueueue. Especially this bit:

Kahneman’s approach to psychology spurns heart-sinking tables and formulae in favour of short, intriguing questions that elegantly illustrate the ways our intuitions mislead us.

Take the famous “Linda question”: Linda is a single 31-year-old, who is very bright and deeply concerned with issues of social justice. Which of the following statements is more probable: a) that Linda works in a bank, or b) that Linda works in a bank and is active in the feminist movement? The overwhelming majority of respondents go for b), even though that’s logically impossible. (It can’t be more likely that both things are true than that just one of them is.) This is the “conjunctive fallacy”, whereby our judgment is warped by the persuasive combination of plausible details. We are much better storytellers than we are logicians.

We are much better storytellers than we are logicians. Reassuring news, if true, for anyone aspiring to write fiction!

By the way, the piling on of specific details also tends to make jokes funnier. A loaf of day-old Wonder Bread mistakenly shelved with the canned hams might be the starting point for a stand-up comic’s routine; a loaf of bread on the wrong shelf is just… dull.

For more information about the “conjunctive fallacy,” see this Wikipedia entry. There you’ll also learn about an opposing point of view, under the heading Gigerenzer (which is, alas, merely a person’s name and not a Clausewitzian military tactic).

Of course, as the image at the top of this post suggests, greater specificity doesn’t necessarily make a given utterance matter more. Ha.