Why Our Brains Do Not Intuitively Grasp Probabilities

Have you ever gone to the phone to call a friend only to have your friend ring you first? What are the odds of that? Not high, to be sure, but the sum of all probabilities equals one. Given enough opportunities, outlier anomalies--even seeming miracles--will occasionally happen.

Let us define a miracle as an event with million-to-one odds of occurring (intuitively, that seems rare enough to earn the moniker). Let us also assign a number of one bit ... Full Story »

Posted by Leo Romero

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Greg Kopczynski
2.3
by Greg Kopczynski - Oct. 1, 2008

This article was way too short, apparently targeted to the indiscriminate sound-bite reader. It does seem to provide sufficient data to explain why we *sometimes* (and perhaps even frequently) under/over-estimate probabilities, but the examples -- and the "dream" example in particular -- ignored "inconvenient" improbabilities related to some such cases, and were thus, unconvincing. I leave open the possibility that had the article been longer than six paragraphs, I might have been persuaded that nothing happens in this life more commonly than probabilities would explain. But it would take more than a couple of generic explanations of vague anecdotal examples to get me there. In short, this article bit off as a topic something that was way beyond its ability to chew in six paragraphs.

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