MichaelTurner
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I'm not trying to justify numerical degrees of anything in the human brain. We're talking models here, not physiccal reality. If you can't see that, cousin it, well, you can go squeak somewhere else in the Addams family mansion.
You watch someone flip a coin a hundred times. After a while, you get your frequentist sense of the probability that it will come up heads.
Then somebody takes a small, flat square piece of metal, writes "heads" on one side. Before flipping it, he asks you: "What's the chance it's going to come up 'heads' 100 times in a row?"
Would you say, "I have no idea?"
If you said, "Well, very unlikely, obviously", what makes it so obvious to you? What's your degree of certainty about each statement in your line of reasoning? And where did those degrees of certainty come from?
Sure, all sorts of past "reference classes" and... (read more)
"Do you mean to say that there is no way to employ/train our brains to do rational thinking more effectively and intuitively?"
I don't don't know whether RickJS meant to say that or not. But this blog post suggests to me a way forward: whenever confronted with questions about likelihood or probability, consciously step back and assess whether a frequentist analysis is possible. Use that approach if it is. If not, shift toward Bayesian views. But in either case, also ask: can I really compute this accurately, or is it too complex? Some things you can do well enough in your head, especially when perfect accuracy isn't necessary (or even possible). Some things you can't.
Maybe if you started kids in their junior year in high school, they might be pretty skilled at telling which was which (of the four possibilities inherent in what I outline above) by the end of their senior year.