Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

Re:Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make D... by haberman on Thursday May 05, 2016 @01:04AM (#11634099)

> You can't take any single act, where something goes wrong, and conclude that they obviously made the irrational choice.

Sure you can. If you flip a coin 1M times and it always comes up heads or tails, and then you bet $100 that the next flip will come up daisies, you can conclude that I obviously made the irrational choice. Because there is no evidence to support the idea that this will happen.

Also, in your own example, we can say that it's irrational not to take the bet (if you can afford to lose the money), because statistically your expected value is strongly positive for taking the bet.

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Re:Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make D... by cortesoft on Thursday May 05, 2016 @01:22PM (#11638027)

I think you are misinterpreting what I am saying. I am not saying that you can't judge a single action as being irrational, I am saying that you can make the rational decision and still lose. Therefore, the mere fact that some action lead to a bad result is not sufficient to show that the decision was irrational.

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