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> You take a mammogram and it comes out as positive. What is the probability that you have cancer? Lower than 1%. I'm a guy. Though this would have a similar
by thethirdone 9y ago
> You take a mammogram and it comes out as positive. What is the probability that you have cancer?
Lower than 1%. I'm a guy.
Though this would have a similar issue for anyone who isn't a 40-50 year old woman.
On a more serious note, I feel that trap should set off alarm bells for anyone who has taken a statistics course.
The more dangerous fallacy along the same lines is that probabilities often brings up intransitive. There can be three medicines: A,B, and C that in a sense A > B and B > C, but C > A. This type of issue can really sneak up on you.
- DrScump 9y agoLower than 1%. I'm a guy. Any male deemed a candidate for mammography probably faces a much higher probability than that. Men get breast cancer, and those who do are more likely to die from it than women who do.
- true_religion 9y agoBecause they are caught at a later stage than women since men are not routinely screened.
- paraschopra 9y ago>On a more serious note, I feel that trap should set off alarm bells for anyone who has taken a statistics course. Yes, but the problem is that most physicians get it wrong. That's what worries me. I agree that the mammogram problem is a bit artificial, but like you say similar problems come up in different forms. It's often not that people have less cognitive abilities (doctors _are_ intelligent), it's just that their intuition convinces them the answer they have in mind is the right one. There's a related research that showed that a similar problem given in _less_ legible font has less cognitive errors: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/the-value-of-making-reading-hard/252743/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/the-v...