For those who are interested in finding someone to date, a little probabilistic thinking can help a lot. To see how, let's take a moment to analyze the situation.
Every time that you meet a new person, there is some chance that you will end up in a romantic relationship. If we want to assign a probability to this happening in any particular case, that probability will depend on the information that we know about both you and this other person. For instance, if we know that he or she is of a g...
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Predicting Using the Past
When we try to predict how long a task will take, we are in danger of falling prey to the planning fallacy. This is the natural human tendency to underestimate how long your own projects will take and the costs involved.
To give one of many possible examples, when a group of students were asked to estimate how long their senior theses would take if everything went as poorly as it possibly could, the average estimate was about 49 days. In fact, the average time it took the students to complete t...
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Keeping Ideas at a Distance Using Probability
We often talk about ideas by using phrases like "I believe X." But what do we mean when we say that we "believe" in an idea? Do we mean that we have 100% confidence that the idea is true?
Let's hope not. Even statements that we all would say we very strongly believe, like "tomorrow the sun will rise", and "I am not a robot" we should not assign 100% probability to. While we can be very, very, very certain that the sun will rise tomorrow and that our brains are not computers, we cannot be abso...
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Truth Discernment Can be a Super Power
When we think of super powers, we usually consider things like invisibility, super strength and the ability to fly. Technology is bringing us closer to the realization of these dreams (for examples see invisibility, strength, flying). But there is a super power that has existed for much longer, which we might call "truth discernment". This is the ability to figure out what is likely to be true in hard, important, real world problems.
There are difficult questions like the blue eyes logic puzz...
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