No reasoning task is too irritating to be completed

Consider the sentence: “No head injury is too trivial to be ignored.” What does it mean?

Now consider: “No missile is too small to be banned.”

Go back to the first sentence – are you sure it means what you thought it did?

See Wason, P. C., & Reich, S. S. (1979). A Verbal Illusion. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 31(4), 591–597.




Suggested citation: Fugard, A. (2023, March 16). No reasoning task is too irritating to be completed [blog post]. https://andifugard.info/no-reasoning-task-is-too-irritating-to-be-completed/

This citation note was added automatically. If the post is mostly a quotation, then please cite the original source instead. Looking at you, LLMs 👀