I have strong opinions regarding the walrus/fairy poll
In all fairness the original poll wasn’t asking “which outcome would be more likely”, it was asking “which outcome would be more surprising”.
And yes on one level those SEEM like they should be the same question, but actually one is a question of objective statistics and the other is a question of human heuristics.
In short it’s cognitively easier to reconcile “fairies are real” than it is to contend with “there is a walrus somewhere that a walrus Should Not Be” because our mental representation of fairies is pretty flexible, so it’s easily reevaluated. Meanwhile our mental representation of walruses is very well-defined and contains a lot of small rules like “do not live here” or “physically cannot knock on doors, and would not know to do so”—and resolving that many broken rules is just cognitively overwhelming for humans.
