quislibet | (no subject)

I just wasted a good half hour or more -- probably much more, to be honest, and even more again if you count writing about it -- playing philosophy and logic games, thanks to a post by

cris on a mailing list (though I would otherwise have found it from the journal of

ms_ntropy -- I don't read metafilter myself). I did all right on the God game; found out how morally parsimonious I am (66%, or about average); stayed alive, but not unproblematically; and didn't do so well on the "how logical are you" bit. But apparently some 80% of the population doesn't get that sort of logic question right and, like me, resists the truth when shown the correct answer.

Which means it must just be a load of hooey, right?

I would make a terrible Vulcan. I didn't do very well on the GRE logic section, either. Probably some of you have heard me complain about the question in the 1992 version of the exam where one takes a group of children to an amusement park and tries to distribute them between two cars on the roller coaster. Child 1 must sit in Car B, Children 3 and 7 must sit together, Children 2 and 4 must be kept separated, Child 4 cannot be in Car A for whatever reason, and so on, now which of the following arrangements of children is workable? But the thing is, my answer to such a question (prompted by years of babysitting), as you will know if you have heard me talk about this before, is that the children will damn well sit where I tell them or they don't get to go on the roller coaster, the spoiled brats.

But that sort of answer never seems to be an option. Which shows that logic can take you only so far.