Base-rate neglect Mark is a thin man from Germany with glasses who likes to listen to Mozart. Which is more likely? That Mark is A) a truck driver or B) a professor of literature in Frankfurt. Most will bet on B, which is wrong. Germany has 10,000 times more truck drivers than Frankfurt has literature professors. Therefore, it is more likely that Mark is a truck driver. So what just happened? The detailed description enticed us to overlook the statistical reality. Scientists call this fallacy base-rate neglect: a disregard of fundamental distribution levels. It is one of the most common errors in reasoning. Virtually all journalists, economists and politicians fall for it on a regular basis. Here is a second example: a young man is stabbed and fatally injured. Which of these is more likely? A) The attacker is a Russian immigrant and imports combat knives illegally, or B) the attacker is a middle-class American. You know the drill now: option B is much more likely because there are a million times more middle-class Americans than there are Russian knife importers. - The Art of Thinking Clearly, Rolf Dobelli
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 11:59:52 +0000
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