I’ll be reposting articles from my new LogicCheck site over the course of the next election cycle here at Critical Voter.
Continuing on the topic of mathematical fallacies:
Perhaps the problems I been discussing regarding our fallible perception of numerical information just relate to situations, like the examples I’ve used so far, involving statistics.
As Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for creating the field of behavioral economics points out, humans do not have great instincts when it comes to navigating statistical information and questions.
For example, if I asked people if they would rather take a bet with a 5% chance of winning $100 and a 95% chance of losing $5, or buying a $5 lottery ticket with a 1 in 20 chance of winning $100, most people would go for the lottery ticket.
Read the whole thing at LogicCheck…