"If we wish to accuse someone employing the word 'probable' or 'likely' of making a false probabilistic judgment, we need to be sure that they are employing the very same concept of probability that is the object of analysis in probability theory."

Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind

Tamsin Shaw 

APRIL 20, 2017 ISSUE

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

Norton, 362 pp., $28.95

"A further problem arises when we try to assign errors to a particular set of systematic biases, or attribute them to specific flawed heuristics. If we wish to accuse someone employing the word “probable” or “likely” of making a false probabilistic judgment, we need to be sure that they are employing the very same concept of probability that is the object of analysis in probability theory. If we wish to accuse someone of making false probabilistic judgments because they are employing a faulty heuristic, we need to be sure that the correct explanation isn’t that certain people have some complicating beliefs in the background, in luck or fate or God, for instance."