Well, in the author's defense, they specifically stated that "Each assignment required a yes-no decision". I agree, though, that there really is no great lesson to be learned here since the real world doesn't work like that. The technical bit about channel capacity was honestly more interesting. It's a neat result (that should be fairly obvious to anyone who's worked with probabilities) with a not-so-great example to illustrate it.

Agreed, "Yes/No" is in no way correlated with "50/50 chance".

Will I win the lottery? Yes/No. 50/50?

My favorite conflation is the "are we in a simulation?" argument. That's a yes/no also, and the ignorant conclusion is that its very likely we are. Without any statistics on the probability either way.

Also, Pascal's wager. The presented sides of the bet aren't equal, because on the one hand you have existence of a particular God, and on the other hand its non-existence, whereas in the real world, there's a whole space of possible Gods that people believe in that are not included in the wager.

"Wheareas in the real world" is an interesting phrasing for that poylemma.

That was the premise.

But the conditions omit the all-important consequence. "What are your priors?" Suppose 99% of choices have hardly any consequence, and Bob is wrong on 95%. But Bob is right on the most expensive places to fail. Then, choosing the opposite could be disastrous, even though you get 95% of the choices right.

The author addresses that in her premise:

Each assignment required a yes-no decision.