If this approach bothers you, try snow rather than rain. Snow is more obviously and strongly seasonal.
Even more obvious: You’re at an indeterminate location where Christmas music plays in public X days a year. You heard Christmas music today, will you hear it tomorrow?
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Another example. You’re in a random city on earth where there’s traffic delays ~4 of 24 hours. There are reports of traffic delay right now. What are the chances there will still be traffic delays in 20 minutes?
Think rush hours, streets being empty at night…
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Unknown information is rarely fully unknown. True zero-mean white noise is rare. Directional tendencies can be reasonably/justifiably guessed from anecdotal/qualitative information. We do such guessing all the time except when “test taking” reflexes are triggered, and it works.
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Oh yeah… there’s a school of “worse than test taker” reasoning that would argue the answer is 50-50 “because it either rains or it does not”
I don’t think this is stupidity. It’s a sort of semantic confusion where probability = number of distinguishable outcomes/states.
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We seem to exist in a culture where questions with even slightly formal contours are so strongly associated with bureaucrat test setters, we think they’re only meaningful if they’re 100% completely specified with a correct answer known to asker, otherwise the question is “wrong”
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To be fair, the multiple choice poll is an extremely strong cue. We are primed to that being either a pure opinion poll or a “fully determined right answer” situation. We rarely encounter the most common kind of question — reasoned guesswork — in poll form.
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Btw “indeterminate location where it rains ~122 days in a year” is strong scoping. Deserts are out, as are places like equatorial rainforests where it rains almost every day (so >300). Whether you’re count snow as rain is interpretation. I didn’t intend that but it’s justifiable
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I’d word the poll in a less trolly way if I were actually looking for the wisdom of crowds estimate. I’d ask people explicitly to make seasonality etc assumptions and use less loaded options. I think polls work great for that. A lot of my polls are sincere WoC polls.
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Replying to @vgr
And do u think such polls are likely the most useful in terms of generating wisdom from crowds? "This is an ambiguous question, but give it your best shot" type of wisdom helps us the most in decision making?
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More footnoting… “iidiot” (2 i’s) was a stats joke, not a serious dis. As in people assuming iid. I don’t think people who answered 1/3 are dumb. They’ve just gotten too good at test taking.
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