David Leonhardt
The New York Times
Originally posted December 24, 2017
Here is an excerpt:
But I’ve come to realize that I was wrong about a major aspect of probabilities.
They are inherently hard to grasp. That’s especially true for an individual event, like a war or election. People understand that if they roll a die 100 times, they will get some 1’s. But when they see a probability for one event, they tend to think: Is this going to happen or not?
They then effectively round to 0 or to 100 percent. That’s what the Israeli official did. It’s also what many Americans did when they heard Hillary Clinton had a 72 percent or 85 percent chance of winning. It’s what football fans did in the Super Bowl when the Atlanta Falcons had a 99 percent chance of victory.
And when the unlikely happens, people scream: The probabilities were wrong!
Usually, they were not wrong. The screamers were wrong.
The article is here.
