Monday 25 February 2019

Very low probabilities

Humans are bad at dealing with very high and very low probabilities.

  • Some are not computable. Bank runs can be set off by sunspots.
  • The probability can only be estimated (underestimated!) from historical data.
  • Pascal's mugging
  • You need exponentially more evidence to get probabilities closer to 1 or 0.
  • Probabilities cannot be zero or one, because then you cannot change your mind, as per Bayes' Theorem

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