Fun philosophy experiment

Communication Breakdown, originally uploaded by grantlsack.

Test your inutitions about causation in a fun online experiment by philosophers Josh Knobe and Christopher Hitchcock.

Comments

[Alon Levy]

I think it's a nifty experiment, but the subject matter is disturbing.

[janet]

Nice illustration for this experiment!

Interesting test. My answers were all over the map, and probably not very consistent. One thing that kept tripping me up was the examples in which action A is part of the chain of events that leads to result B, but if action A hadn't happened, result B might still have happened (e.g. in the screwdriver vignette, the guy could have gotten hold of a screwdriver some other way, or could have used something else). In those cases, it doesn't seem right to put a lot of weight on the causal importance of action A, even if logically it has to be identified as a cause of result B.

Then there are the situations in which actions A and B are both necessary for result C. Even though logically it makes sense to say that action A leads to result C, it doesn't seem quite fair to say that, since action B is also necessary. This is especially true in the examples where action B is motivated by the desire to achieve result C, but action A isn't, or when action B is meanspirited and action A isn't.

I'm very curious about the results.

[Not You]

I probably added a little skew to the data. In many of the examples, events were connected and I wanted to recognize that connection, but upping the causation rating was the only way I could do it. ...And now I'm feeling guilty about it.

[Onymous]

while it didn't so much matter in this survey, i have this instinctual distrust of data from odd numbered scales.

[Dan]

re: the photo Communication Breakdown... If those were outhouses, that would well represent the current state of the Bush Administration.

[Alon Levy]

Onymous, odd numbered scales tend to be better than even numbered ones insofar as they provide an option at the exact middle.

[Cass]

I was hoping it would tell me whether I was more of a Calvin or a Hobbes.

[Onymous]

yeah, that's why I don't trust them. They let the taker say "In the middle" when they mean "I don't care" or "i don't want to answer"
In my experience odd numbered surveys tend to come out dis-proportunately in the middle compared to the number of just-left/just-right answers from even numbered scales.

like i said, it's not such an issue in this particular survey... just sort of in general.

[cfrost]

Like Janet above, I'd like to see the results. I knew philosophy students spend a lot of time splitting hairs the rest of us never notice, I didn't know proximal and ultimate causation was one of them.

[opit]

I'm sure I saw old photos where a huge Chicago warehouse suffered similar problems with racking, not just once but twice. Apparently this is a graphic representation of the philosophical state of being 'tipsy' ( I know that's not just philosophical - but it's a fun misrepresentation )