Chen assumes the monkey is showing a preference, original experiment assumes the monkey does not, due to performance on the previous selection task. Monty Hall does not apply to the original model, only to Chen's model.
Did anyone here even bother looking at the 1956 paper before bagging the maths?
replying to a few posts here
Chen didn't try to prove that the experiment was definitely flawed - he showed that their own reasoning for why it was correct was not valid. That is there were no conclusions that could be derived from the experiment because their methodology was incorrect. Chen does nothing of the sort, Chen's entire criticism relies on the fact that he's assuming preference was not equal while the original research presumed preference was equal. Chen definitely puts big question marks over the conclusions but his logic should result in the conclusion that the 1956 experiment could be right or could be wrong, there are a few possible explanations. Instead Chen also makes a fallacious conclusion because he takes his assumption to be truth.
Why devious? If he was the first to get this idea, then he should be the first who gets the credit. He shouldn't have to include experiments conducted after he shared this idea with his colleagues. Or do you think it was just a coincidence that an experiment correcting the same problem came out from the same group of friends? first of all Egan's study is in press, so unless Chen takes as long to write an article as it does to conduct a full study then Egan would appear to be the source of the idea. Even if Chen did have the original idea if he was aware of Egan's work he would understand that the original experiment was not false but ambiguous, to depict it otherwise is devious.
How could those experiments get the same results as the flawed experiment without being flawed themselves in the same way? because the original experiment was possibly flawed. All Chen does is say that if you have a different initial assumption in regards to the preferences then the results can be explained in a different way.
Chen had a very good logical point to make, but unfortunately couldn't see that he was making a similar error.
For more info Roger Brown did a few good studies on this in the 60s/70s. The acquisition of grammatical morphemes and learning of transformational rules was found to actually be the most complex developmental step in initial language learning. Browns reasoning went that(in English at least) learning when rules were not meant to apply was much harder as the social cues weren't as overt and the mere presence reinforcement was invalid, so this last step was the most overt, intentional learning based. Of course much of this has been modified since but Browns papers were some of the first and thus some of the least jingoistic.
In short "data mining" in learning is nothing new, and claiming toddlers learn by data mining is misleading, it's only one of many tactics used.
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Chen assumes the monkey is showing a preference, original experiment assumes the monkey does not, due to performance on the previous selection task. Monty Hall does not apply to the original model, only to Chen's model. Did anyone here even bother looking at the 1956 paper before bagging the maths?
For more info Roger Brown did a few good studies on this in the 60s/70s. The acquisition of grammatical morphemes and learning of transformational rules was found to actually be the most complex developmental step in initial language learning. Browns reasoning went that(in English at least) learning when rules were not meant to apply was much harder as the social cues weren't as overt and the mere presence reinforcement was invalid, so this last step was the most overt, intentional learning based. Of course much of this has been modified since but Browns papers were some of the first and thus some of the least jingoistic. In short "data mining" in learning is nothing new, and claiming toddlers learn by data mining is misleading, it's only one of many tactics used.