• Question: Do you think humans will always be inherently irrational? Will more complex probability eventually be intuitive to us?

    Asked by Dolapop on 2 Jan 2020.
    • Photo: James Bentham

      James Bentham answered on 2 Jan 2020:

      People seem to find it particularly difficult to judge outcomes with small probabilities. We tend to assign a fairly high probability (say about 1/100) to events that are very unlikely (say, really about 1/10000 or 1/100000). This is why we need careful analysis, to avoid using our hunches that are probably wrong.

    • Photo: Diana Kornbrot

      Diana Kornbrot answered on 3 Jan 2020:

      Humans are NOT inherently irrational
      In some situations it is more effective to make a QUICK response based on previous experience than to go througha logical sequence. Try Kahneman’s Thinking fast and slow, or some associated youtubes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKSts1lNZhc.

      Hopefully these resources will help you. BBC and RI do not provide any additional resources to expand knowledge of matsh [or anything else]. This lack if support is a disgrace of which they should be thoroughly ashamed.

    • Photo: Sophie Carr

      Sophie Carr answered on 7 Jan 2020:

      My answer to this is that you already do really complex probabilities in your head every day – you take in all sorts of information and make adjustments until you assess that it’s safe to cross a road and then at what speed you can walk to safely cross the road. This is one of the reasons that Bayes Theorem has so powerful – it’s how we all inherently think and lets us be open about what we do and don’t know and update the probability as information becomes available to us. So you can already do complex probability intuitively. As for being inherently irrational, perhaps we should be more open to saying we just don’t know something and expressing our uncertainty in situations?

    • Photo: Christina Pagel

      Christina Pagel answered on 7 Jan 2020:

      I don’t think humans are particularly irrational – we’ve evolved to make quick judgments about the dangers and opportunities facing us and we’re pretty good at it. Where it goes wrong is when we judging situations that do not typically arise in nature (e.g. the chance of extremely rare events, very small or very big numbers, the nature of the universe etc) – and then we need to rely on the maths and the physics to guide us.

      To me that’s one of the beauties of maths – that it lets you think about things we’ve not evolved to think about well!

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