| | Merlin,
Actually, I'm finding that the 80% figure throws them off. 80% accuracy on true positives integrates to a high probability of a positive being true.
But it doesn't correlate that easily. In the formula this is represented as A|X versus X|A. In other words, people are comparing apples to donuts.
I can only speak from my personal experience in that I had a great algebra teacher through 3 years of high school who taught us, among other things, how to make these story problems our bitches instead of letting them make us their bitches.
But notice that those who have no method - degrees and diplomas coming out the ying-yang are not a substitute for method - will always tend to fall back on intuition which hardly amounts to more than mere guesswork and reliance on past experiences.
Here's the catch: past experiences may have led to negative results, yet people will still insist on using their intuition, they still rely on guesswork, common-sense intuition, and past experiences even if the results were always negative. In other words, people will always, no matter how hard we may try to convince them otherwise, continue to rely on mediocre methods, and get mediocre results again and again.
I have observed that Objectivism only feeds this tendency toward intellectual mediocrity.
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