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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 obv
by 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 agoHere'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.
- vitus 2y agoThis sounds like a more complicated (and simultaneously under-analyzed) version of the Princess Bride iocaine powder scene. Assigning probabilities doesn't really make any sense in this context, since you're relying on the trustworthiness of your information as well as the assumption that the game is fair and/or winnable. Besides that, I would expect most people to make their decisions based on their interactions with the host (body language, tone, etc), although there's potential for trying to analyze psychology of the host.
- mjburgess 2y agoYes, indeed. And I think exactly the same problems are at work in understanding any scenario. We don't turn off our scepticism, or all the various heuristics that keep us alive, just because a mathematician comes along with a powerpoint slide.