[NGTM-1R]

Even without that part the mother is still the obvious conclusion.

[iamzack]

Not that obvious. I remember that being among a bunch of different problems we were asked to solve in fifth grade one day. Nobody got it.

[StarSlayer]

My version did not have that part, so I never assumed the mother actually existed at all.

wat

Generally children have mothers.

Well, actually the parents could be gay and the child adopted! Haha your logic bomb just got more complex!

[Mongoose]

I'd never even heard that statement until it was used in a discussion like this to prove its own point, so I never got the chance to find out how I would have reacted to it.

[General Battuta]

My version did not have that part, so I never assumed the mother actually existed at all.

wat

Generally children have mothers.

Well, actually the parents could be gay and the child adopted! Haha your logic bomb just got more complex!

o****, out-21st-centuried!

[iamzack]

Man, we would have got popped one in the mouth if we suggested that as the answer back in elementary...

[Sushi]

Propose a practicable alternative to the current age-based cutoff and your argument may be taken more seriously.

"Service guarantees citizenship!"

I'm only half-joking... there's actually a lot to be said for the idea that citizenship must be earned in some sort of service to the country.

Not that obvious. I remember that being among a bunch of different problems we were asked to solve in fifth grade one day. Nobody got it.

Sadly, this did take me far too long to figure out. I was treating it as a logic puzzle and probably thinking too hard, even though the context of the conversation should have pointed directly to the answer. Blasted prototypes. I actually thought of the "Gay couple" possibility before the "the doctor is Mom" occurred to me.  

[General Battuta]

Nothing to be ashamed of. A whole table of enlightened U of C undergrads stared at me for some time before anybody figured it out.

These gender prototypes are really powerful, and this is kind of an illustration of it. It doesn't make anybody who misses the puzzle a bad sexist person.

[Grizzly]

Take 500 people and let them do this test

A man and his son are driving in a car one day, when they get into an accident. The boy is severiously injured, but he is still alive. He is rushed to hospital for immediate surgery. The doctor enters the emergency room, looks at the boy, and says..."I can't operate. This is my son."

How can this be possible when the man was involved in the accident?

This was my version. As you can see, the status of the father is not mentioned, which was quite confusing as I considered that he had not been harmed, but that was stupid because his mental state would not allow him to do anything at all at that point... Anyway... Let the other 500 people do the following test:

A woman and his son are driving in a car one day, when they get into an accident. The boy is severiously injured, but he is still alive. He is rushed to hospital for immediate surgery. The doctor enters the emergency room, looks at the boy, and says..."I can't operate. This is my son."

How can this be possible when the woman was involved in the accident?

And see what the differences are, if there are huge differences, then you've got a problem...

[General Battuta]

Your version of the test is inferior. It increases the ambiguity of the riddle by rendering the status of the father unclear. This reduces the diagnostic validity of the construct.

Even given the two versions you supplied, you would probably see significant differences in reaction time, though the second one is likely to draw blank stares and reactions like "What do you mean, how is it possible? The surgeon is the dad, just like the riddle says."

[Nuclear1]

Yep. I actually think they do a pretty good job of that already. Progress progress.

And Iron Man had a good one too. They had the balls to kill her off like any other red shirt, too.

Not to mention the real SF airman who was killed in Iraq.  Convoy duty.

Or Jessica Lynch's lesser-known fellow solider Shoshana Johnson, who was shot several times before being captured.

Just become women aren't supposed to be combat soldiers, doesn't mean circumstances can dictate otherwise.  Air Force Security Forces is a profession open to both men and women, and quite often they're pulling convoy escort duties with the Army and Marines. 

[karajorma]

Your version of the test is inferior. It increases the ambiguity of the riddle by rendering the status of the father unclear. This reduces the diagnostic validity of the construct.

Which is the point Joshua originally made. Without explaining that the father is dead it's pretty easy to say that the doctor is the father who was in the crash.

[Aardwolf]

Then why the **** does his version exist?

[BloodEagle]

Then why the **** does his version exist?

Because people are stupid.

[karajorma]

Because due to the way language works it's pretty hard to come up with a logic puzzle with only one answer. People pretty quickly find loopholes in your sentence that you didn't see because you already had the answer.


The fact that the doctor could still be a man even though the father is dead is a great example of this. The man might be the biological/adoptive father (compared with the one who died). He might be step-father or gay co-parent. Even more bizarre scenarios also exist (identical twins who slept with same women would have no idea which one was the father).

If the riddle had been phrased as "A boy and his father" it could have been taken the man being a priest.


Basically there is no simple way to phrase a riddle like this one without someone coming up with something you haven't thought of and the more of an attempt to make to do so, the more words you add for someone to take a double meaning from.

[TrashMan]

The thing is, it's not a concious effort on the part of the people in the towns, it's a much harder hurdle, which is the assumption that soldiers are men, it's been ground into people since birth, from movies like Commando and Rambo to toys like GI Joe and Action man, I would be interested to find the percentage of people who actually realise that females play more than a support role nowadays. This is similar, in some ways, to the fact that people like Douglas Bader and the 633 Squadron are remembered during WW2, and yet people like Nancy Wake are probably unknowns to many people.

Rambo and the like - aren't all of them commandos? You know, elite forces? To my knowledge, there are no women serving in any special forces unit, anywhere.

Women in military are delegated to support roles - not that it makes contribution to the war effort any smaller. Far from it. The "support" roles are vital to any military operation and that also makes them tempting targets for the enemy.

[General Battuta]

The fact is that women serve in front-line infantry roles all the time. They just aren't allowed to be called that.

Women serve in special forces units such as the Korean White Tigers and the Israeli YAMAG and Unit 669. Women also served as infantrymen and combat snipers during World War II. The problem women face is that most aren't physically fit enough to pass the qualifications for these units, but there are still women with the capabilities. It's just a matter of letting them.

[Nuclear1]

Not to mention that I just mentioned six posts before that USAF Security Forces is open to both genders, and they deal with combat overseas more often than you'd think while working convoy security.  There's plenty of women I've known since enlisting that could handle special operations if they were given the chance.

Women are relegated to support roles because of a misguided belief that women in combat would destroy unit cohesion, but just hidden under a veil of "they can't physically qualify".  Besides, I'm almost certain (this after speaking with people who've been in these situations) the last thing on someone's mind while they're getting shot is how good that female Private's ass looks in ACUs.

[Thaeris]

The thing is, it's not a concious effort on the part of the people in the towns, it's a much harder hurdle, which is the assumption that soldiers are men, it's been ground into people since birth, from movies like Commando and Rambo to toys like GI Joe and Action man, I would be interested to find the percentage of people who actually realise that females play more than a support role nowadays. This is similar, in some ways, to the fact that people like Douglas Bader and the 633 Squadron are remembered during WW2, and yet people like Nancy Wake are probably unknowns to many people.

Rambo and the like - aren't all of them commandos? You know, elite forces? To my knowledge, there are no women serving in any special forces unit, anywhere.

Women in military are delegated to support roles - not that it makes contribution to the war effort any smaller. Far from it. The "support" roles are vital to any military operation and that also makes them tempting targets for the enemy.

Ummm... You know that there's female combat pilots all over the place, right? That's not really a "support" role, but rather a "direct combat" role. 

Also, unless I'm mistaken, the IDF uses women as front-line troops along with the men. Be more careful with the generalizations here, people...

[General Battuta]

Please read thread before posting, Thaeris. Trash is about the only one making that 'generalization.'

And it's important to remember (as Nuclear1 pointed out) that the 'support roles' are in fact direct combat roles in modern warfare.