Brain teasers are wrong — that’s my gut feeling, but I had hard time finding an argument to support my gut feeling. Now I have one. Here is the story of a 250 years old job interview.

Yechezkel Landau, the rabbi of Prague in the second half of the 18th century and a famous Jewish scholar, applied for the post when he was only 41. Local Jewish intellectual elite gave him a tough examination on the jewish law. The candidate had to analyse and resolve difficult case studies, and provide rulings for complicated situations.

Rabbi Yechezkel answered all questions except for one. But though he failed to solve one particular riddle, he showed clearly that the riddle was not a real case but a thought-up one, with the sole purpose to humiliate the candidate.

Rabbi Yechezkel said that human wisdom is divine, and because it is divine it only acts in real, God-inspired, situations. When presented with an artificial problem, constructed by one human just to test another human, the wisest thought is no better than a random guess.

Brain teasers are bad for job interviews. They are no better than choosing a candidate by throwing a coin.

Rabbi Yechezkel got the job, by the way.

The three a priori intuitions are related — infinite and undirected space, infinite and directed time, finite and undirected probability. Physics knows of uncertainty principle, we are uncertain about relation of time and space: both time and space cannot be intuited with certainty. Probability is as basic and fundamental as time and space for our cognition.

Just like geometry deals with a priori intuition of space, and mathematical analysis — with intuition of time, theory of probability deals with intuition of probability. There is philosophical justification for studying uncertainty, probability, and bayesian inference.