thomblake comments on Survey Results - Less Wrong
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I'm happy to report that I have made the decision to wear seat belts without evaluating anything using probability. If the justification is really:
Then you're not explicitly assigning probabilities. Change 'small chance' to '5%' and I'd wonder how you got that number, and what would happen if the chance were 4.99%.
How did you make the decision to wear seat belts then? If it is because you were taught to at a young age, or it is the law, then can you think of any safety precaution you take (or don't take) because it prevents or mitigates a problem that you believe would have less than 50% chance of occurring any particular time you do not take the precaution?
Often we make decisions based on our vague feelings of uncertainty, which are difficult to describe as a probability that could be communicated to others or explicitly analyzed mathematically. This difficulty is a failure of introspection, but the uncertainty we feel does somewhat approximate Bayesian probability theory. Many biases represent the limits of this approximation.
I was arguing against:
with the implicit assumption that "best positions" are about states of the world, and not synonymous with "best decisions".
I guess we need to go back to Z. M. Davis's last paragraph, reproduced here for your convenience: