Surprisingly cogent meditation on probabilistic thinking in the NYT.
Takeaways:
1. People round probabilities up to 100% or down to 0%.
2. People call probability “wrong” if <50% events happen
3. People need a story to take <50% scenarios seriously
Conversation
Even shorter TL;DR: People are (intuitively) bad at probabilities… 😐
1
6
"Kim Jong Un does not throw a dice and decides whether not to nuke US."
You don't know that he doesn't.
7
Another way to put it: probabilities are not intrinsic properties of the universe. They are subjective degrees of belief that a proposition is true. Sometimes probabilities are calibrated well.
1
2
Once the TV weather guy said a 25% chance of rain meant a quarter of the region would have rain all day, or half the region would have rain half the day, or everyone was going to get 6 hours. But nobody was getting zero rain. I don't watch him anymore.
3
Replying to
the visualization story didn't work for my friends and I in 2016:
Quote Tweet
.@DLeonhardt nice piece. On Oct. 26 2016--2 days before Comey's suprise--I shared this balls-in-urn visualization of Trump's betfair odds w/Facebook friends We all felt it, but the story didn't stick. @nytopinion didn't provide the social proof.
nytimes.com/2017/12/24/opi








