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Love the George Carlin quote referenced in the section defining The Reasonable Person Principle: "Have you ever noticed when you're driving that anybody drivin

Love the George Carlin quote referenced in the section defining The Reasonable Person Principle: "Have you ever noticed when you're driving that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" I'll include the canonical quip by Laplace: "The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus; it enables us to appreciate with exactness that which accurate minds feel with a sort of instinct for which ofttimes they are unable to account." -Introduction to Théorie Analytique des Probabilitiés

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Hm. That guy writing the intro was extremely optimistic about human nature. Most folks find statistics very unintuitive. Folks routinely overestimate extremely unlikely events (lotto) and underestimate near-certainties (auto accident). Its the idea that we might get away with something, or maybe it won't happen to me, that guides most human activities. Its this warping of the probability curve that is responsible for major facets of human society: war, witchcraft, gambling, marriage, on and on.
- darkmighty 11y ago
  I think those problems are a little different. For example, no matter how you approach it, from a rational point of view joining a war for your country makes no sense. You are highly likely to die and highly unlikely to change to outcome of the war. But if you think in an evolutionary sense, if each individual in a tribe acted rationally, we'd get a sort of Tragedy of the Commons: the enemy tribe wins the war, and slaughters your men. So it may happen that if each individual acts rationally the group, each individual included, suffers; so it makes sense individual sense to develop mechanisms to go to war, which by symmetry must include yourself. Even less intuitively even if the probability of death is lower by not going to war (no tragedy of the commons in traditional sense), which means no individual would rationally choose war or develop mechanisms to force going to war, it would be rational for the tribe to choose war, in an evolutionary sense, provided many more of your men are killed than the enemy tribe (so they do better in evolutionary terms).
  - SixSigma 11y ago
    Or: if you don't go to war to protect your community you will be shunned forever by that community; so the rational decision is "war"
  - adamlett 11y ago
    The consensus among biologists today is that group selection does not occur: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection
    - SapphireSun 11y ago
      I know I've heard this before, and I've not taken an evolutionary biology class before so I do give a lot of weight to the idea that there is little influence at the group level, but one of the first paragraphs states: "As of yet, there is no clear consensus among biologists regarding the importance of group selection." In particular, when selecting for war, there's a clear individual level selection pressure: if you don't cooperate with your group, you likely die. This is a just so story, I have no idea how irrationality actually developed, but say you have small groups of hunter gatherers and one individual develops a preference for cooperating in raids against their best interest. If this means that on average you now have two versus one whenever this individual participates, there's a clear competitive advantage which could allow that gene to propagate. The key here in this hypothetical is that the mutation occurs at the individual level in a lone individual, who then cooperates with someone else who wouldn't necessarily follow them, but is happy to have the help. This results in a disproportionate gain (100%) in effectiveness vs lone opponents. As time evolves, the gene becomes more widespread by its early disproportionate effectiveness and groups that fail to cooperate are killed on average, thus eliminating individual competitor genes. Again, I have no idea how war actually evolved, but it seems easy to believe that when a trait influences whether one group kills another, that it would cause the killers to have a reproductive advantage. I'd love someone more educated on this topic to send me up though.
- nicklaf 11y ago
  Hm. That guy writing the intro "That guy" was Pierre-Simon Laplace, and the book he was introducing was his own seminal Théorie analytique des probabilités!
- PavlovsCat 11y ago
  Between the skinner box gaming industry and web, and the circus that is politics and war, the fact that we are both unabashedly exploiting this and unabashedly being exploited by this, makes me kind of pessimistic. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3845016/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3845016/ > Studies have shown that reward uncertainty rather than reward per se, will magnify mesolimbic DA, both in monkeys (Fiorillo et al., 2003; de Lafuente and Romo, 2011) and healthy human participants (Preuschoff et al., 2006). In PG, accumbens DA is maximal during a gambling task when the probability of winning and losing money is identical—a 50% chance for a two-outcome event representing maximal uncertainty (Linnet et al., 2012). Although non-dopaminergic neurons might also be involved in the coding of reward uncertainty (Monosov and Hikosaka, 2013), these results based on electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques indicate that DA is crucial for the coding of reward uncertainty. This suggestion is corroborated by a large number of behavioral studies, showing that mammals and birds respond more vigorously to conditioned cues predicting uncertain rewards (Collins et al., 1983; Anselme et al., 2013; Robinson et al., under review) and tend to prefer an uncertain food option over a certain food option in dual-choice tasks (Kacelnik and Bateson, 1996; Adriani and Laviola, 2006), sometimes despite a lower reward rate (Forkman, 1991; Gipson et al., 2009). According to Greg Costikyan, an award-winning game designer, games cannot hold our interest in the absence of uncertainty—which can take many forms, occurring in the outcome, the game's path, analytical complexity, perception, and so on (Costikyan, 2013).
SilasX 11y ago
Sorry, but the Carlin quite has always bothered me. No one actually feels the way that he's mocking. Drivers don't regard everyone slower as an idiot, only those who also unnecessarily hold up traffic. (eg camping the passing lane) And they don't find all faster drivers to be maniacs, only those who also make dangerous near misses. (And yes, I'm sure your interpretation of the joke was always consistent with the above, but some people consider it an actual insight in addition to being funny.) To be sure, the general point is sound, but that is a really bad, false example. A better version might be "Ever notice how when you're angry, it's because of a legitimate injustice, but when someone else is angry, it's because they're just in a bad mood?"

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Hm. That guy writing the intro was extremely optimistic about human nature. Most folks find statistics very unintuitive. Folks routinely overestimate extremely unlikely events (lotto) and underestimate near-certainties (auto accident). Its the idea that we might get away with something, or maybe it won't happen to me, that guides most human activities. Its this warping of the probability curve that is responsible for major facets of human society: war, witchcraft, gambling, marriage, on and on.

darkmighty 11y ago
I think those problems are a little different. For example, no matter how you approach it, from a rational point of view joining a war for your country makes no sense. You are highly likely to die and highly unlikely to change to outcome of the war. But if you think in an evolutionary sense, if each individual in a tribe acted rationally, we'd get a sort of Tragedy of the Commons: the enemy tribe wins the war, and slaughters your men. So it may happen that if each individual acts rationally the group, each individual included, suffers; so it makes sense individual sense to develop mechanisms to go to war, which by symmetry must include yourself. Even less intuitively even if the probability of death is lower by not going to war (no tragedy of the commons in traditional sense), which means no individual would rationally choose war or develop mechanisms to force going to war, it would be rational for the tribe to choose war, in an evolutionary sense, provided many more of your men are killed than the enemy tribe (so they do better in evolutionary terms).
- SixSigma 11y ago
  Or: if you don't go to war to protect your community you will be shunned forever by that community; so the rational decision is "war"
- adamlett 11y ago
  The consensus among biologists today is that group selection does not occur: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection
  - SapphireSun 11y ago
    I know I've heard this before, and I've not taken an evolutionary biology class before so I do give a lot of weight to the idea that there is little influence at the group level, but one of the first paragraphs states: "As of yet, there is no clear consensus among biologists regarding the importance of group selection." In particular, when selecting for war, there's a clear individual level selection pressure: if you don't cooperate with your group, you likely die. This is a just so story, I have no idea how irrationality actually developed, but say you have small groups of hunter gatherers and one individual develops a preference for cooperating in raids against their best interest. If this means that on average you now have two versus one whenever this individual participates, there's a clear competitive advantage which could allow that gene to propagate. The key here in this hypothetical is that the mutation occurs at the individual level in a lone individual, who then cooperates with someone else who wouldn't necessarily follow them, but is happy to have the help. This results in a disproportionate gain (100%) in effectiveness vs lone opponents. As time evolves, the gene becomes more widespread by its early disproportionate effectiveness and groups that fail to cooperate are killed on average, thus eliminating individual competitor genes. Again, I have no idea how war actually evolved, but it seems easy to believe that when a trait influences whether one group kills another, that it would cause the killers to have a reproductive advantage. I'd love someone more educated on this topic to send me up though.
nicklaf 11y ago
Hm. That guy writing the intro "That guy" was Pierre-Simon Laplace, and the book he was introducing was his own seminal Théorie analytique des probabilités!
PavlovsCat 11y ago
Between the skinner box gaming industry and web, and the circus that is politics and war, the fact that we are both unabashedly exploiting this and unabashedly being exploited by this, makes me kind of pessimistic. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3845016/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3845016/ > Studies have shown that reward uncertainty rather than reward per se, will magnify mesolimbic DA, both in monkeys (Fiorillo et al., 2003; de Lafuente and Romo, 2011) and healthy human participants (Preuschoff et al., 2006). In PG, accumbens DA is maximal during a gambling task when the probability of winning and losing money is identical—a 50% chance for a two-outcome event representing maximal uncertainty (Linnet et al., 2012). Although non-dopaminergic neurons might also be involved in the coding of reward uncertainty (Monosov and Hikosaka, 2013), these results based on electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques indicate that DA is crucial for the coding of reward uncertainty. This suggestion is corroborated by a large number of behavioral studies, showing that mammals and birds respond more vigorously to conditioned cues predicting uncertain rewards (Collins et al., 1983; Anselme et al., 2013; Robinson et al., under review) and tend to prefer an uncertain food option over a certain food option in dual-choice tasks (Kacelnik and Bateson, 1996; Adriani and Laviola, 2006), sometimes despite a lower reward rate (Forkman, 1991; Gipson et al., 2009). According to Greg Costikyan, an award-winning game designer, games cannot hold our interest in the absence of uncertainty—which can take many forms, occurring in the outcome, the game's path, analytical complexity, perception, and so on (Costikyan, 2013).

SilasX 11y ago

Sorry, but the Carlin quite has always bothered me. No one actually feels the way that he's mocking. Drivers don't regard everyone slower as an idiot, only those who also unnecessarily hold up traffic. (eg camping the passing lane) And they don't find all faster drivers to be maniacs, only those who also make dangerous near misses. (And yes, I'm sure your interpretation of the joke was always consistent with the above, but some people consider it an actual insight in addition to being funny.) To be sure, the general point is sound, but that is a really bad, false example. A better version might be "Ever notice how when you're angry, it's because of a legitimate injustice, but when someone else is angry, it's because they're just in a bad mood?"