Friday, November 5, 2010
Do You Know? Do You Believe? How Gullible are You?
Click on your choice of the links below to take one of the Museum of Hoaxes' gullibility tests: Science & nature test History & culture test Once you've taken one of the tests, create a post to report your score and reflect on what the test and your performance have to say about the nature of knowledge, truth, belief, and/or justification (i.e. "good reasons," to use Abel's term).
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I decided to take both tests and scored 7/10 on the Culture one and 4/10 on the Science one. My first thought is “wow I really don’t know much” but that brings on endless TOK discussions about what knowledge is and how do I really know. When I was taking these tests there were several key things that I noticed. First there were some questions that I had no clue what so ever about because I had never even heard about the topic they were describing. I was supposed to be judge a statement true or false based purely on the two sentences that they gave me. In these cases I had to use my overall knowledge in order to be able to compare what they were asking to what I had observed previously or been otherwise taught. Thus I was really in the dark and my guesses weren’t quite as educated as I would like. Another thing I noticed is that I had heard about some of the statements or knew the context that they were describing but I didn’t know how. I could say that I believed that Thomas Crapper invented the toilet although my level of certainty was not very high because I didn’t know why I believed that. Some of the sources I would have cited for my belief in the statement also would not necessarily be deemed reliable.
In this activity I noticed that we believe many different things. These beliefs may be correct or incorrect but that doesn’t change the fact that we believe them. What we believe about the fact also doesn’t change the facts. Even though we believe, many times we don’t know. I had to make choices on true or false I had very little knowledge on. As I was trying to use reasoning to decide like logic, senses, memory, intuition… I felt like many times we have been deceived in these. The explanations to most of the answers revealed why it is commonly believed one thing or another and it is usually a source we would consider well known or credible that led us astray. My conclusion is that as a society we primarily rely on belief that sometimes is not justified or based on knowledge. Thus we are likely to find that when we match our answers up to what the true ones are we are wrong.
I got a 3/10. It shows that's I'm very gullible and that there are numerous beliefs that are passed on as truth and knowledge. I believe that the questions I got wrong is what I believed as truth because there was enough justification for me to believe it as the true truth. If there is enough justification and background to the fact, then It can be BELIEVED as knowledge.
I took the science and nature gullibility test and scored six out of ten. I tend to be a bit more on the skeptical side in general, but I think that when most people hear something they take it at face value as truth. We read the newspaper and assume that everything written there is true, but it's easy to forget that those words were written by an individual, who has individual emotions, thoughts, and biases that we will never get to explore in depth. I think everyone has a motive for what they say and do, even if it's a positive motive, and I'd say the majority of people are gullible enough to believe that everyone else is good and truthful in their motives.
Hamesha Demison
My score was 6-10. The test had a lot of myths and beliefs and many of the concepts on there were things told to us by people around the world through legends.
It just shows how much we rely on others for information rather than finding the answers for ourselves. Also, we justify many of our answers for things with info we get from others or things that we have heard.
I took the history and culture test and I scored a 3/10. There were some myths on here that I had originally thought of as true because I had heard about it before from people. I had assumed that the knowledge passed onto me from others was correct knowledge. I guess I am pretty gullible. Whenever someone tells me a fun fact, I just assume for it to be true. I never look it up or search for secondary claims that agree with the statement. I can't think of anyone who has read a "Snapple fact" and then went on the computer to confirm if it is indeed true. I will never think of a fun fact in the same way, thanks TOK.
So, I took the science and nature test and got 9/10. The only answer I got wrong was the one about turtles and old age. I knew they lived for an insanely long time, but did not know it was impossible for them to EVER die of old age. Weird. Honestly, I was kind of surprised to get this score. Thought it would be lower. Going through each question, I just asked myself the following: 1) does this sound like a myth? 2) If so, why? 3) Is it plausible? Why?. Then I just deduced from there. I took what I believed to be possible, and knowledge (or information, I guess) that I have acquired throughout my 18 years of life, and applied it to my series of reasoning questions. If it all lined up, I came up with an answer that matched. If I said something like this in class, I feel like it would be shot down: "Well, how do you 'know' this 'knowledge' you have acquired?", "What is a myth? What separates myth from fact? What is fact? Why?" AAAHHH!!!! Yet, regardless of the occasional frustration and chaos of class, my system seems to have worked pretty well for me here, so it's all good. (Currier: "What do you mean by 'works'?" Bleh...)
I scored 7/10 on the
Being the first response to the post is awkward.
I scored 7/10 on the gullibility test. I'm not sure the the test says a whole lot about your gullibility or the nature of knowledge, so much as it does about your general ability to absorb information and remember which "facts" you come across on a daily basis have been previously refuted or not. Of course, this brings you to the problem of having to take one assertion for granted as true simply because it addresses the so-called untrue statement head on - in a comparison between "Columbus discovered the earth was round in 1492" and "Columbus actually did -not- discover that the earth was round in 1492; it had been known since the ancient Greeks that the earth was a sphere," you're tempted to go with the latter because it sounds more thorough and educated, not because either of them actually provide any truly compelling evidence. It feels sometimes like if you aren't the person at the very center of everything, absorbing all evidence firsthand to create your own hypotheses about history, you can't really be sure of anything you're told on a regular basis. Tough luck.
Being the first response to the post is awkward.
I got a 7 out of 10 on the science gullibility test. Some of the answers seemed to rediculous to make up, but some seemed to crazy to believe. I think that a score of seven is pretty good, not too gullible but not perfect.
For some reason, I answered that cockroaches could live for up to a month with their head cut off. I went with my gut on this one and ended up being right. Worms can also live after being chopped in half. I was pretty sure that sharks could get cancer, so I put false, which was correct. I did not "know" this, but I had psycological certainty, not epistemic certainty. The question about the monkey's making a chain to get across a river seemed way to crazy to believe. I could sense that the quiz was trying to get me to be convinced by an intreging story, but I did not fall for it.
It made sense that a duck's quack echoed, because most if not all things that make noise are capable of echoing. I was wrong about turtles dying of old age. They do not die of old age: I should have considered knowledge by description rather than the knowledge by aquintance that I used. I did not fall into the gullibility trap and say that lemmings commit suicide, but I did believe that there really was a village where everyone lived to be over 100. The statement convinced me because it is possible, especially with lifestyle, diet, and medicine.
The lightning statement was not convincing, and it made sense that gravity has more pull at the poles, so I got both of those correct. I was wrong that scientists had not slowed down light waves, they have. I needed knowledge by description, which I had none of, and so I was gullible and guessed and this proved to not be a successful way of thinking.
This quiz goes to show that you cannot know something without believing it. If you do know know something, you are destined to gullibility.
I got a 7 out of 10 on the science gullibility test. Some of the answers seemed to rediculous to make up, but some seemed to crazy to believe. I think that a score of seven is pretty good, not too gullible but not perfect.
For some reason, I answered that cockroaches could live for up to a month with their head cut off. I went with my gut on this one and ended up being right. Worms can also live after being chopped in half. I was pretty sure that sharks could get cancer, so I put false, which was correct. I did not "know" this, but I had psycological certainty, not epistemic certainty. The question about the monkey's making a chain to get across a river seemed way to crazy to believe. I could sense that the quiz was trying to get me to be convinced by an intreging story, but I did not fall for it.
It made sense that a duck's quack echoed, because most if not all things that make noise are capable of echoing. I was wrong about turtles dying of old age. They do not die of old age: I should have considered knowledge by description rather than the knowledge by aquintance that I used. I did not fall into the gullibility trap and say that lemmings commit suicide, but I did believe that there really was a village where everyone lived to be over 100. The statement convinced me because it is possible, especially with lifestyle, diet, and medicine.
The lightning statement was not convincing, and it made sense that gravity has more pull at the poles, so I got both of those correct. I was wrong that scientists had not slowed down light waves, they have. I needed knowledge by description, which I had none of, and so I was gullible and guessed and this proved to not be a successful way of thinking.
This quiz goes to show that you cannot know something without believing it. If you do know know something, you are destined to gullibility.
Well I got a 5 out of 10 on the science and nature test. I found this interesting, because I only "knew" two or three of the answers. The others I was completely guessing on (hence the 50/50 result). However, several that I had felt relatively confident to be true (such as the question about lemmings) were totally false.
Reading through the explanations of the myths, I couldn't help but notice how many of them were propagated by media sources. It scares me how much influence the media has over what we will believe, especially when you break down and analyze who the people who run media centers are and their beliefs. I know that I need to be a little more skeptical, but at the same time, I don't want to become paranoid. Finding the balance between belief and skepticism is important.
I'm interested in knowing why no one has posted yet..
But anyway, I took the Science & Nature test and scored 7/10 by saying everything was false except for one. As the editor of this newspaper, I'd probably ask the writer to source any of these claims. The true ones are kind of ridiculous and I did not believe them at first. Who knew turtles were so cool.
It's unfortunate that I didn't believe any of this writer's claims, mostly because he had a record of being untruthful and my judgment said they were all false. I couldn't use my common sense in areas I had no experience in, so I just assumed they were false since they were pretty crazy. I didn't really have strong reasoning to say whether any of them were true or false, but I had stronger reason to believe they were false. Then again, I'm taking the results of the test to be true.. even though I have no idea what it is. Is that being gullible?
After taking the History and Culture test, i got a score of 5/10.
I couldn't tell whether or not the questions were serious and since I have very little knowledge in some of those questions, I just took a guess.
According to number one Thomas Crapper was not the inventor of the toilet, even though he was in the plumbing business. I remembered my dad mentioning something about him, so I thought he DID invent the toilet. So in my head I believed that it was true, based on what i thought was knowledge of description.
On number 4, I said false because I don't remember learning anything about Native Americans that have lived in England before, I thought that if it was real, it should have been mentioned to us when we were learning about the Natives Americans. So through knowledge of description once again, I believed it was false.
On number 7, I was very surprised to find that few people during Columbus' era thought the earth was flat...I mean even I thought it was flat, until i learned about it. I guess my justification was wrong...people back then were more knowledgeable than I thought.
For number 5 i just had no idea what they were talking about, but I didn't know that there was even a Goddess of Beer, so i picked false and I was wrong.
Finally on number 10, I always thought that China figured out everything...so I just picked true. I'm not even sure who Marco Polo really was, although his name sounds familiar.
I scored 6/10. I think that the score reflects that occasionally I fell into believing folk tales that someone had told me were true when I was younger. But for the majority of the time, if I couldn't justify something in my head, aka give it a good reason, I assumed that it wasn't true. However, I don't believe I had true knowledge about any of them because I was guessing, except for the one about sharks getting cancer, which I have learned about.
I took both quizzes to see how I would do; on the science one, I received a score of 2 out of 10. On the history quiz, I did a bit better, and received a 5 out of 10. I was actually a bit surprised at my score on the first quiz, because many of the things that were asked were things I had heard before. So I guess that, based on my score, I am a fairly gullible person. When I took the quizzes, I chose my answer based on feeling rather than evidence, I did not have substantial justification for my knowledge claim. I easily fall victim to others' claims at truth and do not ask the questions that would justify my belief, and I simply presume the fact is true, when in reality, it could have been made up on the spot. Such as the fact "Sharks cannot get cancer." I was told this when I dissected a shark, and I also asked my biology teacher, and both sources claimed that it is true that sharks are immune to cancer. However, the quiz said I was incorrect. This gets me thinking about how knowledge is categorized as "justified, true, belief." I cannot get that out of my head, because these three factors are the qualifications for knowledge, and yet we claim to know many things although we cannot justify them, they are not true, or we do not even place belief in the ideas. I suppose I claim to know a lot of things, although I have never really taken the opportunity to question why or how it is that I know them, which leaves me susceptible to fall into a gullibility trap any time.
soooooo, i got 4 right on the first quiz and 6 right on the second.
for the record i think that both these quizzes should be burned because they tell you to use common sense, witch we all know dose not exist.
but seriously to me this activity showed me how easy it is to accept our common beliefs to be true when in fact they are not. what else is out there that fits this pattern? that i have been misled into believing?
I got a 6/10 on both tests, but I believe that is only because I wore my lucky underwear today. I didn't "know" most of these questions, and just guessed. A lot of people have commented on how they thought something was true because they've heard from others that it's true. Like Conner, I noticed that many of the explications said that the myths were popularized from the media. A while ago we discussed in class about how much we should take to be true, and how paranoid we should be. Not everything we hear from the media is true. We, being smart people, need to logically think and come to our own conclusions. I was sure a duck's quack didn't echo, but I guess I didn't know it. I believed it because I had been told it was true, but it just goes to show we have to think for ourselves.
I had taken the culture gullibility test and I scored 7/10. I have a very Indian mind, because the general ideaology in India is to take things that are outrageous or outside human experience with a grain of salt. So when looking at some of the questions that seemed a little out there I generally put false for the answer. I also took a few guesses, and there were some that I had known from hearing and reading, so I believed them to be true but I was not absolutely certain. The ones I got wrong were the ones that I complete guesses on because I had no earlier knowledge of them.
Well, after taking the History and Culture test I saw that I answered 2/10. Which doesnt suprise me. I did not know the answers, and I also noticed that the answers were only true and false. For example, I dont know that Mr. Crapper was the inventor of the toilet, but I believ ehe had an idea that lead to the making of a toilet. I found some of the questions a little misleading. Yes, they were true or false, but I did not understand because I was not tought this information.
I took both tests and got an 8 out of 10 on the hisory and culture test and a 6 out of 10 on the science and nature test. For both of the tests, I knew some of the facts already from previous knowledge sources. On most of the other questions, I thought about them for a bit and just trusted what I had thought from the beginning. There are other questions that I just guessed because I had no real idea what was right or wrong, but I knew that I had a fifty percent chance of being right. When guessing like that, I normally didn't pick the answer that I had chosen before it out of superstition. So, I doubt the accuracy of my scores in accordance to my actual knowledge or gullibility levels.
After taking these tests, I don't really believe that this test was actually about how gullible you are but more about the reasoning you use to answer questions. I think that, by reflecting, we get the chance to review the way we consider things and how the way our minds work influences our choices.
But, hey, that's just me. But you should definitely look up right now because someone just wrote 'gullible' on the ceiling.
I scored 6/10 on the science test and 5/10 on the history test. To me, this does not actually seem to have anything to do with being gullible. The fact of the matter is, that if I did not know an answer I would usually just click a random bubble, trying to make the number of true and false answers I have even. This is similar to some people's beliefs that when in doubt, always pick C on a multiple choice test.
Both of the quizzes seemed to show more of my ignorance than anything else. If I had actually known the answers, then I would not have randomly selected bubbles and gotten the results that I'm gullible. While this is true, it does not seem likely that these quizzes can prove that fact.
Both of the quizzes also seemed to be trying to trick the taker. Some of the answers that seemed impossible were true while others were false. For example: "Turtles never die of old age." This sounds very false but it ended up to be true! Whereas "Lightning occasionally imprints photographic images of surrounding scenery onto the skin of those it has struck" also sounds false but if you go with the pattern of the other statement, this should be true but it's not. It's false.
My brain makes this into a trap even when they are not and it cannot tell the difference between the two.
I took the science and nature test. I got five out of ten which means I am a bit gullible but not as bad as I thought I would be. Of the questions I got wrong, I believed I had heard something close to what the question said. Most of the questions made sence if you just thought about them as in real life. Still I have a hard time believing the mone about the monkeys.
I got a 6/10 on both tests. I don't know if whether I am gullible is valid because there were things that I haven't even heard of before and never had any prior convictions as to whether it was true or not. But I think that the reason people get some of these things wrong because they don't really look at the facts, like it says in Shermer's article "Smart People Believe Weird Things". It says that we rarely sit down and look at the facts, the pros and cons to a statement.
I guess something that can come into play would be what one was taught as a kid. As you're still a kid, when you hear something once you may hold on to that belief because it has not been challenged, maybe because everyone else your own age believes the same thing. This would be an example of one of Abel's good reasons, consensus genitum. If everyone else believes the same thing, then there would be no opposition to the idea and it would be thought to be true.
I scored a four out of ten on the Culture test. I was a little bit surprised because I usually take things I hear with a grain of salt but some of the statements I had heard so many times before I didn't even think to question whether they were true or not. I also think that whenever you hear a statement that is a little bit weird, whether or not you know if it's true it sticks in your mind and you remember it simply because it's interesting.
One of the questions I'd actually read about in a book and because it was printed I assumed it to be true (it was actually incorrect). It's a little bit scary that just because something is written in a published book or newspaper, we put our trust in it even though it was written by a regular person with their own misconceptions and pretenses.
I took the science and nature test, and got 7/10. Honestly I'm kind of surprised that I got low of a score.
The ones I got wrong, I think I heard at one point, and I trusted the person enough to believe it as true.
I got a 5/10 on the science and nature one. Most of them I didn't believe because they are just odd things that I never really think about. I hadn't heard any of those myths before so I just completely guessed on all of them. I was unsure about all of them because I had no good reason to believe one way or another about any of them. I had to simply take the most educated guess I could based on what I can imagine would be true. I wasn't confident in any of my answers like I might be if I were taking a test on something I had studied, because I had no justification for the answers I chose.
I scored a 6 out of 10 on the History and Culture test. I pretty much just guessed on the ones I didn't know or hadn't heard of before. The only one I had even heard of before though was the first question: Sir Thomas Crapper invented the toilet. I had heard that it was false before taking the quiz. Because basically all of my answers were just guesses and only statement I thought I "knew" I really had just heard from TOK class. Pretty much what I'm saying is I knew nothing from the quiz but I am not gullible because my answers were guesses.
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