I think almost everyone threw a dice quite a few times while playing board games.

Maybe people would have a better understanding of percentages if 20-sided dice were used more. "This has a 95% chance to succeed" -> roll a d20, anything but 1 is a success

Meanwhile 6-sided dice don't map to nice numbers, and having two dice makes the maths even harder to intuit

I think 1/2 and 1/3 are quite nice as far as numbers go! Also 2/36 = 0.5555... is not that far from 5%

But (assuming two dice rolled at the same time) 2/36 is something like "roll a five and a six" or "roll either a pair of sixes or a pair of fives". Neither of which is quite as intuitive or commonly used in game design as "using one d20, roll a natural 20"

And yet they struggle with the abstract concept. They'll wonder why the candidate with a projected 20% chance of winning won. They won't know what to do with the information of a 70% chance of rain tomorrow. "Either it will rain or it won't, which is it!" Perhaps it's the frequentist approach that comes more natural than the Bayesian approach, who knows.

This isn't my original thought, by the way. Someone wrote more about it here: https://towardsdatascience.com/humans-are-bad-at-probability...

Nobody understands Bayesian approach. Look at Covid -- people FREAKED out when we updated guidance based on learning new information.

XCOM should be added to the curriculum.

XCOM probabilities are lies, just like Fire Emblem. Pretty much 0% of games that show you a "percent-to-hit" chance ever give an accurate number.

true for XCOM in all difficulties except the hardest iirc

1 tile in front of alient

96% chance of hit

miss. twice.

question sanity.

Fully agree. For example, I wish managers would be capable to handle the difference between a 40% and a 70% chance to meet the deadline.

A probability that isn't computed (or reasonably computable) is just a personal feeling. Your 40% or 70% aren't probabilities if you didn't compute the probability of at least the key events involved to arrive at the number. People say a number as their confidence to meet the deadline on a scale from 0-100.

They're credences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credence_(statistics)

Everybody has them, and they're not useless. Usually they're regularly updated when new information comes in.

I'm not saying they're useless, they're an educated guess, a valuable means of communicating an expert opinion. It can be replaced with "I have high confidence of success".

The assessment is subjective, includes personal beliefs, assumptions, etc. not just measurable objective points. The measurement uncertainty at every step and the confidence interval are disappointing despite people using percentages, suggesting confidence to the percent. A scale from 1 to 5 is most of the times just as accurate.

2 people looking at the same situation could have very different degrees of belief, which is why 2 engineers could give very different estimates. But if I say I believe the likelihood of something is 73.8% I might be more credible to the listener. Looks like I calculated, not like the guy who said "3 out of 5 we get it done".

Cue prediction markets etc. There are mechanisms to aggregate this and have a wisdom of crowd effect.

I'm not very familiar with how they work. Don't prediction markets give the individual gambler a boolean choice and this results in a picture of the split over the population? There's no granular option for the individual to bet 40% vs. 60% for something happening, the vote with 100% confidence that Spain wins the World Cup, they don't give 85% chance of winning.

The way to express a 85% confidence is to size your investment accordingly. For example, if the market is at 75%, then you buy yes-shares until the price is at 85%. If the market is at 90%, then buy no-shares instead until the price is down to 85%.

One of the first managers I had who studied management theory commented once that if estimates were accurate, we’d get them done earlier than expected as often as we got them done later than expected, which is not true and thus we are doing something wrong.

They do have an intuitive understanding! You just outlined it, and it works well enough for most things. Statistics is generally very useful, but for individuals it's not really important or useful to understand, because the data is rarely ever clear or trustworthy enough to use for making decisions about specific situations.

Probabilities might be more intuitive, statistics are intuitive only for the most straight forward topics. That's why it's so easy to present entirely correct but very misleading statistics.

And how people don’t get how probabilities work when run over repeated instances. Like it is only 0,1% risk that X happens everytime Y is done which sounds low but then it turns out Y is done Z number of times per day…

I hate that I have to talk to so many people about Russian Roulette just with more chambers. But it’s the only analogy that hits.

The word “most” is a mess. Strictly speaking the person with “the most” has the plurality, not even half. “Most people” can mean more than half, but is often used to mean or imply anything from a supermajority to “almost everyone”.