Okay, this explanation works!
Without access to the math, we estimate probability into wide bands ("always", "usually", "sometimes", "never") and evolutionarily favor the "always" band because it is a lot less likely to have us wind up starving, and how could we save the excess from a jackpot win anyway on the savannah? When we then learn math, we learn that 99%, which before math we would count as "always" in our intuitive system, isn't actually always, and now our half-educated intuitive system treats it as a "usually". What we then need to do is ignore the intuitive system in favor of the mathematical learning of payoffs.
Okay, I'm happy with that.
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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