Rootclaim. Calculating reality.

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses the mental patterns and biases that lead people to draw inaccurate conclusions regarding probabilities, even among intelligent individuals exposed to the same information. It outlines five key flaws that contribute to this phenomenon:

1. Filtering of evidence due to biases, interests, and the media's incentives
2. Reliance on gut feelings and conventional wisdom to assess likelihoods, rather than objective analysis
3. Prosecutor's fallacy - ignoring the initial plausibility of a hypothesis
4. Weak intuition for compound probabilities
5. Overlooking dependencies between different pieces of evidence

🙋 Q&A

[01] Filtering of evidence

1. What are the key factors that lead to the filtering and distortion of information available to people?

• The media's incentives to maximize profit rather than accurately report facts
• Specific agendas or ideologies that some media organizations are funded to promote
• Governments controlling the release of information, favoring "friendly" journalists over more critical ones

2. How does this filtering of information impact people's ability to draw accurate conclusions?

• It leads to people ignoring or underestimating evidence that is inconsistent with their existing beliefs
• The information available to people is already heavily biased and distorted, making it difficult to build analyses on accurate and unbiased foundations

[02] Reliance on gut feelings and conventional wisdom

1. What is the problem with relying on personal experiences, intuitions, and conventional wisdom to evaluate the weight of evidence?

• People fail to realize how different reality may be from their own perceptions and conventional wisdom, as evidenced by the high number of false convictions based on confessions

2. What example is provided to illustrate this issue?

• The case of people falsely assuming that a positive HIV test result is highly likely to indicate the person actually has HIV, when in reality the low prevalence of HIV in the population means it is more likely the person does not have HIV despite the positive test result.

[03] Prosecutor's fallacy

1. What is the "prosecutor's fallacy"?

• The failure to take into account the initial plausibility of a hypothesis before considering the context-specific evidence.

2. How is this illustrated in the example provided?

• When a person tests positive for HIV, most people assume it is highly likely the person has HIV, without considering that the low prevalence of HIV in the population means it is actually more likely the person does not have HIV despite the positive test result.

[04] Weak intuition for compound probabilities

1. What is the example used to demonstrate people's weak intuition for compound probabilities?

• The example of drawing balls from two boxes with different proportions of white and black balls, and calculating the likelihood of having drawn from the box with mostly white balls based on the observed sequence of ball colors.

2. What is the key insight from this example?

• People greatly underestimate the likelihood of having drawn from the box with mostly white balls, with the actual likelihood being about 1,000 times higher than what most people would intuitively guess.

[05] Overlooking dependencies

1. What is the issue of overlooking dependencies between different pieces of evidence?

• The failure to consider how the occurrence of one event can affect the probability of another related event occurring.

2. What example is provided to illustrate this issue?

• The case of Sally Clark, who was convicted of murdering her two babies, where the court overlooked the dependency between the two SIDS deaths and incorrectly calculated the probability of both occurring as independent events.