Okay, so, how did this survive evolution?
There is variation in the population over tolerance for risk. If the preference for certainty is detrimental in achieving goals, then those with less attachment to certainty, ceteris paribus, would have better overall reproductive success than the ones with greater attachment. Accordingly, a pro-certainty bias would be selected against.
So, what's the reason it didn't get selected out of the population?
We observe two biases simultaneously:
"How silly to treat the difference between 97% and 100% so much differently than the difference between 33% and 34%!"
"How silly to assign 97% probability to things that only happen 70% of the time!"'
You don't get introspective access to the probabilities your brain is implicitly using, so this sort of error is unsurprising. Natural selection isn't going to do anything about it until people start making serious decisions on the basis of explicit expected value calculations.
Today's post, Zut Allais! was originally published on 20 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Allais Paradox, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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