Hacker News Reader

Comment by 331c8c71 | Hacker News Reader

I think almost everyone threw a dice quite a few times while playing board games.

Maybe people would have a better understanding of percentages if 20-sided dice were used more. "This has a 95% chance to succeed" -> roll a d20, anything but 1 is a success

Meanwhile 6-sided dice don't map to nice numbers, and having two dice makes the maths even harder to intuit

I think 1/2 and 1/3 are quite nice as far as numbers go! Also 2/36 = 0.5555... is not that far from 5%

But (assuming two dice rolled at the same time) 2/36 is something like "roll a five and a six" or "roll either a pair of sixes or a pair of fives". Neither of which is quite as intuitive or commonly used in game design as "using one d20, roll a natural 20"

And yet they struggle with the abstract concept. They'll wonder why the candidate with a projected 20% chance of winning won. They won't know what to do with the information of a 70% chance of rain tomorrow. "Either it will rain or it won't, which is it!" Perhaps it's the frequentist approach that comes more natural than the Bayesian approach, who knows.

This isn't my original thought, by the way. Someone wrote more about it here: https://towardsdatascience.com/humans-are-bad-at-probability...

Nobody understands Bayesian approach. Look at Covid -- people FREAKED out when we updated guidance based on learning new information.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com