alt Hacker News> The most upsetting of Luria’s puzzles was a mathematical problem. He told his subjects that it took three hours to walk from their village to Vuadil, and six along the same road to Fergana: how long would it take to walk to Fergana from Vuadil? Again, every single one of the collective farm workers solved the problem, but the illiterate villagers knew very well that Fergana was actually closer than Vuadil, and refused to answer. Luria kept saying that it was just a scenario, but the villagers kept insisting that they couldn’t entertain a scenario that contradicted actual reality. ‘No!’ one exploded. ‘How can I solve a problem if it isn’t so?’
Is anyone besides me with the villagers on this one? The correct thing to do if someone asks you a question with obviously false premises is to push back!
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Yeah, I don't know why they couldn't just use made-up locations rather than ones that exist and didn't fit the intended question.
> The correct thing to do if someone asks you a question with obviously false premises is to push back!
More generally, Luria completely ignores a key psychological dynamic that's in play as he tries to quiz these villagers: they're going to be suspicious of why he's even doing all this in the first place. What is he up to? And of course he was up to something: he was a agent of a horribly oppressive government that was trying to totally change the villagers' lives.
That kind of intellectually dominated "democracy" killed well over a hundred million people in the 20th century. And the people who promoted the horribly oppressive governments that did it--the Soviet Union, Mao's People's Republic of China, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, etc.--were among the most intellectually sophisticated and literate people on the planet.
None of this is to say that illiteracy and ignorance are good things. They're not. I'm much better off in my personal life being literate and knowledgeable. But literacy and knowledge have limits, and the people who want to dictate how entire societies should be organized and run based on their literacy and knowledge are in over their heads. Basic human instincts and intuitions, like the ones those villagers had that Luria completely missed, contain valuable information too.