Wasonly the Walonely

The Wason Selection Task is a famous result in psychology. It goes like this:

You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, each of which has a symbol on one side and a color on the other. The visible faces of the cards show an Atom, a Bit, orange and blue. You don't know what's on the other side of each of these cards. Which cards must you turn over in order to test whether the following rule is true: "if a card shows an atom on one face, then its opposite face is orange?"

The answer, counterintuitively, is that you have to turn over the atom card and the blue card (not the orange card).

Basically: if the Bit card is orange on the other side, that doesn't violate the rule; it may also be true that Atoms are orange, whether or not the Bits are.

Whatever is on the other side of the orange card, this card can't possibly violate the rule, for the same reason: our rule just said that atom implies orange, but Bits could be orange too.

You need to turn over the Atom and the Blue cards, because if the Atom is blue or if the blue is an Atom, the rule is violated.

I think about this when I see influencer videos telling the general public all the signs that you're ADHD, or that your parent was a narcissist, or that you're secretly a wizard, or whatever.

Do you sometimes feel lonely? That you're not like the other kids around you? That your life is lacking a little rightful magic?

I have no doubts that a wizard living in the mundane world would have such feelings. But I also believe that non-wizards in the mundane world often have these feelings. Having these feelings therefore doesn't rightly imply that you're a wizard.

I am certainly not in doubt about the existence of ADHD, or narcissism, or certain kinds of wizards. But I think that some advocates and activists for these conditions spend way too much time asserting that if you experience WXY then you're probably a Z, and I simply don't think that's good reasoning: if non-Zs also experience WXY, or if many people who experience WXY are non-Zs, the claim (in its strongest form) doesn't hold. We need to spend more time flipping over the other cards.