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Re:Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make D... by Houshalter on Thursday May 05, 2016 @04:22AM (#11634638)
Human brains do statistics at a low level. This is what the experiment tested.

An example experiment would be if you gave someone a rewards with different probabilities after some random event like clicking, and the brain would learn to estimate the probability that a sequence of clicks would lead to a reward.

On a high level this obviously breaks down. The brain doesn't have thousands of examples of slaughtering cows leading to starvation. Cognitive biases all operate at a high level of reasoning, and involve verbal arguments and stuff. But on a low level, the brain is absolutely statistically based.

Re:Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make D... by webaba on Thursday May 05, 2016 @09:11AM (#11635738)
This is actually completely incorrect. Many cognitive biases occur at low levels of cognition without involving language, take professional pilots and confirmation biases despite of a ton of training data.
Re:Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make D... by Houshalter on Thursday May 05, 2016 @02:37PM (#11638670)
I think professional pilots are still making mistakes at a higher level. By "low level" I mean things your brain does in a split second without thinking about.