One year at the community college I attended in Tacoma, Washington (my Air Force years), they offered up a Logic 101 type class....to be taught by some Italian visiting professor from Milano.
From the class, we had fourteen people total. Yeah, it wasn't an hyped-up deal.
Somewhere in the 2nd class held....he got onto this true positive, false positive, true negative and false negative discussion. I had no problem and visually.....I got it in about 60 seconds.
From the rest of the class....I'd say more than half of the people didn't get it. This meant minutes added while trying to get them 'over-the-hump'. It was probably more than forty minutes wasted on this, and what it came down to.....at least three people didn't see a reason for four of these conditions to exist. They felt once you established a true positive and false positive.....the rest were illogical.
At this point, for me anyway.....it was more interesting to view the class as a psychological unit than a class. It was a statement about society....that a quarter of people were simply not going to see a necessity to have a true negative/false negative added to the true positive/false positive situation.
Today? I would suggest we've gone way past the quarter of society, and probably more than fifty percent would be skeptical of the necessity of having four conditions.
A bad thing? I wouldn't necessarily say that. It's just that people want less complicated matters. X and Y should just come to equal XY. Once you suggest that something beyond XY exists.....people start getting skeptical of a second answer.
The entire class there (1980) came to an end where the professor didn't want to have a final test/quiz, and in some shocking way....found a logical way to hand each of us an 'A'....without a paper handed in or a quiz. Of all the classes I've ever taken....it was the most entertaining class environment.
