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> many people, apparently, believe that things which have a 20% chance of happening will never happen and those with an 80% chance will always happen It could
by adrianmonk 6y ago
> many people, apparently, believe that things which have a 20% chance of happening will never happen and those with an 80% chance will always happen
It could be the counter-intuitive nature of probability, but I wonder if it might sometimes just be that, psychologically, people have trouble accepting the idea that nobody really knows.
You look at a site like FiveThirtyEight, you know the site is run by an expert, and you know that multiple sources of data have been fed into number-crunching computers. You've seen other situations where this type of process nails it. You have a strong desire to know the answer, and that biases you toward believing that you do. The idea that something so important is unknown is unpleasant, so you reject it.
About the difficult of grasping the basic concept, if you've ever seen the TV show Card Sharks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_Sharks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_Sharks), a key part of the game is that contestants see a card which is face up, and they have to make bets based on whether the next card drawn is higher or lower. In that context, they have no trouble understanding that if the face-up card is a 5, the next card is probably higher (6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K, A) but it could also be lower (2, 3, 4).
Essentially, I think people can understand that unlikely things happen, but where they have difficulty is seeing/admitting that this is one of those situations.
- impendia 6y ago> if you've ever seen the TV show Card Sharks... I developed and taught an entire undergraduate math class on the mathematics of game shows. https://people.math.sc.edu/thornef/schc212/gameshows-428.pdf https://people.math.sc.edu/thornef/schc212/gameshows-428.pdf Much of the class I worked out probabilities like these, and compared what contestants "should" do to what they actually do. Watching reruns of Card Sharks, The Price Is Right, and others, I've found that most people have a surprisingly good intuitive sense of probability. Not always, but more often than not.
- js2 6y agoExcept for that damn Monty Hall problem!
- rsynnott 6y agoI'm not sure it's that simple, because even _after the fact_ people were talking about how 538 "said Clinton would win". They're doing so in this comments section, in fact. I also seem to remember seeing a study that people made better probability-based decisions if given probabilities phrased as fractions than percentages; I wonder if something similar is going on with the cards example.
- impendia 6y agoI think what people sense -- and this is related to the "Bayesian vs. frequentist" debate -- is that an election is not really a random event. The source of uncertainty is different. The Card Sharks example is a genuinely random event. If you draw a random card, it will probably be higher than 5, but it could be lower. Whereas an election is not truly random. By election day the outcome is essentially foreordained. The "randomness" that 538 is trying to model are things like uncertainty and unreliability in the polls. What is the relationship between what voters said they will do, and what they actually will do? You can make inferences based on the past, but every election is different, and the mood of the electorate is definitely unique this year. Nate Silver knows from his experience to hedge his bets, as he did in 2016. It's much more complicated and subtle than a genuinely random event. I find it understandable that people get confused.
- noneeeed 6y agoAnother area of complexity in presidential elections is the electoral college. People see the headline polling numbers and assess them as if it were a straight popular vote with a simple outcome, when I'm reality the end result is highly dependent on where votes are cast.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]