3 ms·
Why are people attracted to 50:50 probabilities?
- Nokinside 7y agoI can't read the whole article but... > there was a probability of between 30% and 95% that Osama bin Laden was in the Abbottabad compound in Pakistan in April 2011. So they gave Obama 62.5% probability and uncertainty estimate for the prediction ±32.5 percentage points??! Obama was right. That's 50:50 decision from his point of view. If you have to make a decision, there is usually virtual certainty, very likely and unlikely and somewhere in between. 50% change or 60% change becomes meaningful if you repeat the thing multiple times. For a single event, it does not matter much.