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Although all birth orders in the “birth sequence problem” are equiprobable, most participants judge the less representative order as less likely than the more representative order. But this well-known problem confounds representativeness with the direction in which birth orders are compared. We hypothesized and corroborated in three experiments (total N = 1,136) that participants pragmatically infer the birth orders’ relative prevalence from the direction of comparison. Experiment 1 found that participants judged the less representative sequence as more common when we reversed the comparison. Experiment 2 reproduced these results despite removing representativeness as a cue. In Experiment 3, participants preferred to place the relatively common sequence as the referent in an inverted “speaker” problem. Our results turn the iconic problem’s interpretation on its head: Rather than indicating flawed human cognition, the birth sequence problem illustrates people’s ability to adaptively extract subtle linguistic meaning beyond the literal content.