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Normal_Anomaly comments on [SEQ RERUN] Zut Allais! - Less Wrong
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One guess, pointed out in the original comments, might be that there is reason to prefer certainty when making deals with untrustworthy agents. For instance, if I promise you a certain $24,000, and then you don't get it, you know for sure that I lied, as does everyone else who was aware of the deal, which is pretty bad for me. If I promise you a 33/34 chance of $27,000 then if you don't get it I can always claim you were just unlucky, giving me at least plausible deniability. Thus there is significant reason for you to prefer the first, since the more I have to lose by betraying you the less likely I am to do it. The same argument does not carry in the case of 33% versus 34%.
I suspect that with infinite computational power on all sides this effect would vanish, and failing to deliver on any deal would decrease my trustworthiness by a certain amount depending on the plausibility of other explanations. However, humans don't have infinite computational power, so we tend to just save time by labelling people as "trustworthy" or "untrustworthy" meaning, creating the incentive to bias towards absolute promises rather than probabilistic promises.
Of course, this is all quite complicated, it's just one thought that springs to mind. It may be better just to favour the null hypothesis of "evolution is stupid, the human brain is a massive kludge that doesn't normally operate on anything resembling expected utility, massive mistakes are to be expected".
Another guess is that using numbers to describe probability is new enough that our brains haven't had time to evolve any way of dealing with the difference between 33% and 34%. The concept of certainty has been around for a lot longer.
There's a negative pregnant in your statement that makes me think you believe in very recent human evolution. Is there reason to think humans have undergone any biological evolution since the development of agriculture?
Aside from lactose tolerance (or more accurately, lactase persistence, as the "wild type" is "intolerance"), there are differences in enzyme quantities in saliva due to copy number variations between those populations which have a history of consuming carbohydrates and those which do not. There are also the various resistances to malaria. For multiple reasons, including history (e.g., malaria seems to have become endemic in the Mediterranean over the course of the Roman Empire), we know these are all new, anywhere from 6,000 to 500 years before the present. I can give other examples, but these are the most clear and distinct in the literature.
Let me make sure I'm understanding correctly.
- The ability of adults in certain populations to digest lactose is evidence that biological evolution of humans has occurred (since the domestication of animals?).
- Different populations have different susceptibility to malaria. Am I correct that this is referring to sickle-cell trait and similar things?
If true, that seems moderately strong evidence of biological evolution of humans since the beginning of recorded history (I'm using that interchangeably with the development of agriculture). I'm interested in the evidence for very short-term evolution in humans (<500 years) if you have something that's easy to cite.
My original point was that I'm skeptical that "social pattern" portions of our brain have undergone biological evolution since the development of agriculture. And the OP about changes in the brain allowing greater understanding of statistics seemed like that kind of assertion.
AFAICT I asserted the opposite of that. I said we haven't had recent changes in the brain allowing for greater understanding of statistics, and that's why we're so bad at them.
You're opening up a bigger debate here. I recall that Razib Khan often posts on this subject (there's plenty of evidence, but lots of distinctions to be made) on Gene Expression.
Four reasons: Variation, selection, retention and competition. If you mean biological evolution with definite and noticeable effects in the general population lactose tolerance is an obvious example.