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> I'm fundamentally sceptical that animals have, in general, a "poor" understanding of probability. I take the opposite view. Casinos with all of their negativ

• mjburgess 2y ago
  I'm not sure you've said anything that disagrees with me. My claim is that the information in the environment that people are sensitive to causes them to fail to accurately model the scenario. The problem they are solving, in their heads, fails to correspond to reality. My claim is: if it did, then they would solve it correctly. This is often phrased, typically by self-important mathematicians, that people's understanding of probability is wrong. This is a very bizarre view, and rather self-aggrandizing as far as probability goes. Probability isn't understanding or formulating the problem. Probability is merely the machinery, very basic, which runs upon a formulation. Do this instead: run one round of a game with 10 doors, and have people observe Monty opening all the relevant doors. Why should it be that if people observe this it becomes obvious, and yet if put in natural language it isn't? Natural language applied to non-intutive ecologies (ie., environments outside those we usually operate in) cause people to fail to model the sitaution correctly. Take casinos: when animals go out foraging they are playing a slot machine. Their addiction to foraging is perfectly ecologically rational. Casions exploit an information asymmetry: people cannot see the long-run house advantage. This has nothing to do with people's "probability" skills, and just their ability to accurately understand the sitatuon. The underlying foolishness behind those who equivocate between "probability" and "modelling scenarios" is the assumption that reality itself has probabilities, and that scenarios are easy to model. It is incredibly difficult to come up with an accurate cognitive model of wtf is going on in a monty hall game. So much so that famous mathematicians, with arbitrarily good probability skills, get the answer wrong. Teaching people "probability" here is beside the point. Animals are acutely good at it when they are presented with an ecologically intutive problem, of arbitary probablistic complexity.
  • vitus 2y ago
    Ah. I had focused on the lossiness of natural language much more than the rest of your statement. > Why should it be that if people observe this it becomes obvious, and yet if put in natural language it isn't? It's not clear to me that the general public would come to that conclusion, as opposed to the obvious extension of Hall's observation where contestants thought their odds having gone up upon being shown additional information. To you and me, yes, it might be even more obvious because we're familiar with the core principles. > Take casinos: when animals go out foraging they are playing a slot machine. Their addiction to foraging is perfectly ecologically rational. I'm inclined to disagree here. Surely animals don't just engage on a random walk; they know where they've found berries before, or can smell prey from a distance. And describing it as an addiction feels wrong. Once the animals are full, they don't keep hunting for food at the expense of other life-sustaining activities. > Casinos exploit an information asymmetry: people cannot see the long-run house advantage. Sure. I have also encountered hubris in the form of people who are aware of the house's edge but are confident they can do better than everyone else. There are also betting strategies that have positive expected value (e.g. lose a coin flip? double your bet; win a coin flip? reset to $1) but fail to take into consideration that you have probability = 1 of going bankrupt in the long run, since you don't have infinite money. > The underlying foolishness behind those who equivocate between "probability" and "modelling scenarios" is the assumption that reality itself has probabilities, and that scenarios are easy to model. In many cases, we use probabilities to approximate unknowns. Efficacy of a vaccine? Prevents infection X% of the time, or severe illness Y% of the time. Why not 100%? We don't necessarily know (or maybe it's due to a bunch of complex factors). But we've observed these outcomes for these samples of our population, and reducing it to a single number is "good enough".
    • mjburgess 2y ago
      Here's another way of phrasing my point. I expect to be able to find an ecologically intuitive example, for any given "non-intuitive" probability problem, where the underlying reasoning/model/etc. is the same, and people will solve it exactly correctly. Try this: You're at a dinner with two others and you know the host has poisoned the food for you and your friend. He let's you choose your plate first. He then hands another plate to your friend. Do you swap your plate with the one on the table? I think in this case it "feels" more obvious that the plate on the table, being his, is much less likely to be poisoned since he will necessarily have given a poisoned one to your friend. This makes the necessity in the hosts action more intuitive. I think a lot of people here would swap, even if they couldnt fully explain why.. they know the hosts knows something and this affects what you took and what they were given. I'm sure a much better example could be created which is even more obvious.
• kqr 2y ago
  > Casinos with all of their negative-expected-value (for players) games would not exist, nor would many lotteries, if not for the allure of "oh, but if I win big..." overpowering any rational decision-making. This seems like a separate problem. According to my best knowledge, most people going to casinos know full well that the odds are not in their favour – i.e. they do understand the probabilities/expectations involved – they just don't care because it still entertains them.[1] Not caring and not understanding are two very different things! [1]: See e.g. A World of Chance, by Brenner, Brenner, and Brown.