LESSWRONG
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All of TriflingRandom's Comments + Replies

Which things were you surprised to learn are not metaphors?
TriflingRandom107

As someone with aphantasia, I can confirm: It has only just occurred to me that someone asking me to picture something in my mind might be asking that in a literal sense.

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1NoriMori1992
How did you even discover that you have aphantasia without discovering that "picture something in your mind" isn't metaphorical?
"It's a 10% chance which I did 10 times, so it should be 100%"
TriflingRandom*10

I agree with your point about there being a 'mental disconnect'. It seems to be less of an issue with understanding the concept of two events not being equally likely to occur, but rather an issue with applying mathematical reasoning to an abstract problem. If you can't find the answer to that problem, you are likely to use the seemingly plausible but incorrect reasoning that 'it either happens or doesn't, so it's 50/50.' This fallacy could be considered a misapplication of the principle of insufficient reason.

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"It's a 10% chance which I did 10 times, so it should be 100%"
TriflingRandom50

I feel that even an underachieving student can understand that the probability of winning the lottery is not 50/50. I can't imagine that many of those kids carried that fallacious thinking into adulthood.

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1noggin-scratcher
I suspect there has to be a degree of mental disconnect, where they can see that things don't all happen (or not happen) equally as often as each other, but answering the math question of "What's the probability?" feels like a more abstract and different thing. Maybe mixed up with some reflexive learned helplessness of not really trying to do math because of past experience that's left them thinking they just can't get it. Possibly over generalising from early textbook probability examples involving coins and dice, where counting up and dividing by the number of possible outcomes is a workable approach.