Words Worth Noting - April 7, 2021

“If a rule of the form ‘he who takes the benefit must pay the cost’ is at stake, then solving the problem means spotting cheats. People do this well. The mind is not following abstract reason; it is enforcing a social contract.... Given this view of man – a natural trader, ever concerned with social debts and an uncertain future – it is little wonder that human minds are interested in detecting cheats, not pursuing pure logic, and in sampling frequencies rather than making risky one-off guesses.”

The Economist July 4, 1992 [an article on so-called "Wason tests" some of which people solve far better than others though they are logically equivalent]