{"id":26645,"date":"2021-02-22T09:56:05","date_gmt":"2021-02-22T13:56:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=26645"},"modified":"2021-02-24T20:00:13","modified_gmt":"2021-02-25T00:00:13","slug":"probabilistic-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/probabilistic-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Probabilistic Thinking Puts Everything in Percentages"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What is probabilistic thinking<\/a>? How do probabilistic thinkers approach problems differently from an average person?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Probabilistic thinking is essentially an approach to predicting an outcome of a situation or the likelihood of a future event. Most people tend to estimate probabilities in terms of \u201cyes\u201d or \u201cno\u201d options. In contrast, probabilistic thinkers think in terms of percentages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keep reading to learn about the psychology of probabilistic thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

What Is Probabilistic Thinking?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If you were asked to predict whether a certain event would happen in the future, you\u2019d probably respond with one of three answers: yes, no, or maybe. Most people\u2019s mental \u201cprobability dial\u201d has three distinct settings. By contrast, probabilistic thinkers have an unlimited number of settings. <\/strong>They\u2019re more likely to answer questions in terms of percentages rather than \u201cyes\u201d or \u201cno.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Two- (or Three-) Setting Dial<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

There is a good reason that most of us are not natural probabilistic thinkers. For most of human history, the three-setting dial was reduced even further to two settings (\u201cyes\u201d or \u201cno\u201d). For our ancestors, this was an advantage. Early humans lived in a world where predators were a constant threat\u2014but our brains and bodies aren\u2019t designed for perpetual vigilance, and stress wears us down over time. Snap judgments became an evolutionary life hack: While the probabilistic thinkers were fretting over the likelihood that a strange noise came from a predator, the concrete thinkers had already landed on an answer and responded accordingly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether there is a real threat present or not, a correct guess has a distinct advantage. If the sound did<\/em> come from a predator, the concrete thinkers have more time to prepare to fight or flee; If the sound didn\u2019t come from a predator, they can lay back, relax, and conserve the cognitive resources their probabilistic peers spend on worrying. Even a false positive is relatively harmless. Only in the case of a miss (there is a predator, but you decide there isn\u2019t) would the concrete thinkers be in trouble. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what about \u201cmaybe\u201d? For life-or-death decisions, \u201cmaybe\u201d is not particularly helpful. Most of us use \u201cmaybe\u201d as a last resort, only when the odds are roughly even and the stakes are low. The uncertainty that comes with a \u201cmaybe\u201d answer is intuitively unsettling, possibly because we have evolved to associate uncertainty with danger. We settle for maybe only when we\u2019re forced to\u2014usually for probabilities roughly between 40% and 60%.<\/strong> Anything higher is \u201cyes,” anything lower is \u201cno.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does this sound wrong or overly reductive? There’s a reason for that. We do much better when we encounter probabilities as abstractions (random numbers with no context, like the 40% and 60% in the paragraph above). But in real-life situations, most of us revert to that intuitive two-setting dial. For example, when you check the weather forecast and see \u201c80% chance of rain,\u201d do you think about the 20% chance of clear skies? Or do you grab your umbrella and carry on with your day assuming that it will <\/em>rain?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Probabilistic Thinking and Uncertainty<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Human minds crave certainty. Uncertainty creates anxiety<\/strong>\u2014somewhere deep in the brain, we still interpret uncertainty as the chance that a lion is right behind us. Researchers have tested this by asking parents how much they would hypothetically pay for a treatment that would reduce their child\u2019s risk of contracting a serious illness from 10% to 5% or from 5% to 0%. Even though the reduction is the same magnitude for both cases, parents were willing to pay up to three times more to reduce the risk from 5% to 0%. Certainty is priceless. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem is that certainty is also very rare. Few things have either a 0% or 100% chance of happening. But claims of certainty are common and powerfully compelling. If someone claims that something will definitely happen or that a treatment will definitely work, we equate that confidence with accuracy (there is a small positive correlation between the two, but we estimate it to be much larger). This means we\u2019re much more likely to trust confident people\u2014but because certainty is so rare, they\u2019re also much more likely to be wrong. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This skewed perspective impacts the way we think about science. Many people think of science as the ultimate pillar of truth and that scientific facts are facts, full stop. In this worldview, scientists are the ultimate heroes in the fight against uncertainty. We tend to forget that at one point, the scientific community was certain the Earth was flat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Scientists themselves are partly to blame here, as they often do<\/em> speak in terms of certainties. They can do this because, among scientists, there is a general understanding that \u201cthis is fact\u201d should be taken to mean \u201cthis is the conclusion that the evidence supports, but there is still a tiny possibility that it could be wrong.\u201d But among laypeople, the word \u201cfact\u201d means an absolute truth.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two- and three-setting mental dials helped our species survive into the modern era, and they are still helpful when snap decisions<\/a> are necessary. But thankfully, most of the judgments we make on a daily basis are not immediate, life-or-death decisions. For everything else, the most accurate answer is \u201cmaybe.\u201d This is where probabilistic thinkers shine\u2014they see \u201cmaybe\u201d not as an answer in itself but as an infinite range of possible answers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Hunt for bin Laden<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

History provides a useful example of the tension between probabilistic and concrete thinking<\/a>. In 2011, the intelligence community identified a compound in Pakistan that they suspected housed Osama bin Laden, the terrorist responsible for the 9\/11 attacks. There was enough evidence to suggest that bin Laden was in the compound\u2014but not enough for analysts to be completely certain. Leaders from several IC agencies gathered to debate the evidence and come up with a forecast that would ultimately be presented to President Barack Obama, who would decide whether to authorize a raid on the compound. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although different accounts of that historic conversation vary on the details, we know that multiple IC analysts presented their personal confidence levels to the president based on the data available. These confidence levels ranged from 30% to 95%. Averaged together, the group was around 70% certain that the man in that compound was bin Laden. President Obama responded, \u201cThis is fifty-fifty. Look guys, this is the flip of the coin.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given the context, it\u2019s unlikely that the president meant there was a literal 50% likelihood of bin Laden being in the compound. More likely, he used \u201cfifty-fifty\u201d as a synonym for \u201cmaybe.\u201d This illustrates the fundamental difference between probabilistic and concrete thinking: While the analysts were adjusting percentages, the president focused on accepting the inherent uncertainty of the situation and moving on.<\/strong> His three-setting dial was set to \u201cmaybe,\u201d and without enough evidence to move it to \u201cyes\u201d or \u201cno,\u201d it was no longer useful to him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another possible explanation is that President Obama mistook the lack of consensus among the analysts as a sign of unreliability. Agreement gives the illusion of certainty<\/strong>\u2014we believe that if everyone in the group comes to the same conclusion, it must be the right conclusion. This is not only untrue but also a dangerous sign of groupthink<\/a>. Think back to the wisdom of the crowd: Everyone has a different piece of the puzzle. That diversity is to be expected because it creates a stronger collective<\/em> answer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chance vs. Fate<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

For most of us, the tension between probabilistic thinking and concrete thinking is rarely as dramatic as deciding whether to launch a raid that may or may not end a ten-year hunt for a notorious terrorist. But the number of settings on our mental probability dials still has important consequences, both for our future decisions and for the way we interpret the past. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Probabilistic thinking doesn\u2019t just apply to future events. When we look back at the events in our own lives, our instinctive pattern-recognition skills kick in, connecting the dots between past experiences. Ultimately, what we\u2019re looking for is meaning. This is a deeply human instinct\u2014being able to find a sense of meaning in our lives is an adaptive skill that can even help us survive traumatic events. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meaning is a fundamental need because it provides a sense of certainty.<\/strong> We loathe uncertainty and struggle to understand randomness\u2014finding an explanation for seemingly random events is soothing. If there was a meaningful pattern all along, then maybe we aren\u2019t just vulnerable little beings in a terrifyingly random universe where anything can happen. Meaning makes us feel safe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But safety and certainty are the opposite of probabilistic thinking. Truly probabilistic thinking involves being able to look at our own past as a series of random events, any one of which may have drastically changed our lives if it had gone differently. In that paradigm, nothing is \u201cmeant to be.\u201d Confronting that idea is scary, and it quickly separates the probabilistic thinkers from the meant-to-be thinkers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n