My survey will contain a linguistic illusion. I won't reveal what the illusion is or how to see through it until the survey closes, but I will be able to tell if people have seen through it or not from their responses.
I have encoded a description of the illusion and how I'll judge whether people have seen through it in the following Sha256 hash:
2eab9fd3d55d717869395f304fa92fffa6dbd5f0c4c38ff14720ab2962b1cba3
This resolves YES if there are more people who see through the illusion than people who are fooled by it.
See Plasma's Manifold Survey for other questions about the survey.
The survey is officially out! You can take it here: https://forms.gle/xZqWVxuY5irgLigu9
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This post explains what the illusion was and how I determined who had seen through it in the section, "True or false: More people have been to Russia than I have": https://plasmabloggin.substack.com/p/survey-results-pt-1-rationalists
It also includes the text of the hash code. The majority of people who answered the linguistic illusion question answered as if it was just a simple true or false question, with no indication that they were confused, though a sizable minority recognized the illusion.
@ForrestTaylor I think it's less of a test of intelligence and more of how much are you willing to follow survey instructions.
@Shump To me, it's a mark of unintelligence if people blindly follow survey instructions without questioning them. You gotta be able to notice when you are confused, right?
I know the linguistic illusion in question, but I have no idea how you expect to be able to know if people saw through it. I imagine that most people (but not all) will answer True if they think the sentence is gramatically correct, but even if they realize it's incorrect, what are they supposed to answer? There's no "this sentence doesn't make sense" option. When I went through the survey, I noticed the weirdness, but the options were just true or false so I just went with what I thought was the most reasonable interpretation that would make this sentence make sense.
@JosephNoonan when you start the question with true or false, you have to expect that most people will answer one of these
@Shump I expect that people who don't see through the illusion would, but people who do would surely not, since an ungrammatic sentence is neither true nor false.
@JosephNoonan I realize I am one person and this is an anecdote, but I suspect that this assumption will not hold. And that's without even getting into the philosophy of truth values of invalid sentences, like "the king of france is bald"
@JosephNoonan I also saw the weirdness, and changed my initial intuitive response to the opposite. And I didn't even think that the opposite is also not a correct answer. Maybe it's because English is not native for me.
@Shump "the king of france is bald" isn't ungrammatical. There is disagreement over whether it has a truth value, but no one disagrees over the truth value of ungrammatical sentences. They are neither true nor false because they aren't well-formed statements to begin with. No one thinks, "green item the" has a truth value.. if someone thinks that an ungrammatical sentence has a truth value just because it looks grammatical at first, then they've fallen for an illusion.
@Shump The question as is has a unique and clear meaning, right? It is just a very unusual question.
@gigab0nus Well yes, there is technically one interpretation that makes it grammatical. My assumption was that anyone who interprets it that way will say so in their response.