"Kim Stanley Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

were still off.тАЭ



III
Going Feral

тАЬAgain foul weather shall not change my mind,
But in the shade I will believe what in the sun I loved.тАЭ
 тАФThoreau


Against the pressure at the front of oneтАЩs thoughts must be held the power of
cognition, as a shield. Cognition that could see its own weak points, and attempt
to work around them.
Examination of the relevant literature, however, revealed that there were cognitive
illusions that were as strong or even stronger than optical illusions. This was an
instructive analogy, because there were optical illusions in which oneтАЩs sight was
fooled no matter how fully one understood the illusion and its effect, and tried to
compensate for it. Spin a disk with certain black-and-white patterns on it, and
colors appear undeniably to the eye. Stand at the bottom of a cliff and it will
appear to be about a thousand feet tall, no matter its real height; mountaineers
called this foreshortening, and Frank knew it could not be avoided. From the
bottom of El Capitan, one looked up three thousand feet, and it looked like about a
thousand. In Klein Scheidegg one looked up the north face of the Eiger, and it
looked about a thousand feet tall. You could not alter that even by focusing on the
strangely compact details of the faceтАЩs upper surface. In Thun, twenty miles away,
you could look south across the Thunersee and see that the north face of the Eiger
was a stupendous face, six thousand feet tall and looking every inch of it. But if
you returned to Klein Scheidegg, so would the foreshortening. You could not make
the adjustment.
There were many cognitive errors just like those optical errors. The human mind
had grown on the savannah, and there were kinds of thinking not natural to it.
Calculating probabilities, thinking about statistical effects; the cognitive scientists
had cooked up any number of logic problems, and tested great numbers of
subjects with them, and even working with statisticians as their subjects they could
find the huge majority prone to some fairly basic cognitive errors, which they had
given names like anchoring, ease of representation, the law of small numbers, the
fallacy of near certainty, asymmetric similarity, trust in analogy, neglect of base
rates, and so on.
One test that had caught even Frank, despite his vigilance, was the three-box
game. Three boxes, all closed, one ten-dollar bill hidden in one of them; the
experimenter knows which. Subject chooses one box, at that point left closed.
Experimenter opens one of the other two boxes, always an empty one. Subject then
offered a chance to either stick with his first choice, or switch to the other closed
box. Which should he do?
Frank had decided it didnтАЩt matter; fifty-fifty either way. He thought it through.
But each box at the start had a one-third chance of being the one. When subject
chooses one, the other two have two-thirds of a chance of being right. After
experimenter opens one of those two boxes, always empty, those two boxes still