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
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This from prospect theory (Kahneman and tversky) gives a nice view of how humans perceive probabilities. Its why people play the lottery and are afraid of airplane travel.
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Since this was far and away my most popular tweet, here is some more - quantitative assessments of qualitative probabilities. I was surprised by the spread. Note also local maxima near 0 and 1 present in most
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Ah here we go
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Interesting. Their table also seems to show a higher compression towards 0 than that at 100%. I'd like to see this in a similar graphic. Maybe when I get back from the beach 😏

