On Our Obsession with Probability
For millennia, humanity’s wish to predict the future manifested itself as innumerable methods for divination, oracular pronouncements, elaborate ceremonies to propitiate the gods, and a great deal of superstition. Very little of this had any impact on rational thinking, let alone scientific or mathematical content. Even if anyone thought of making records of predictions and comparing them to events, there were too many ways to brush aside inconvenient data—the gods would be offended, you misinterpreted the oracle’s advice.
People routinely fell into the trap of confirmation bias: noticing anything that agrees with the prediction or belief, and ignoring anything that doesn’t. They still do, in their hundreds of millions, today.
However, there was one area of human activity where ignoring facts automatically led to disaster, and that was gambling. Even there, there’s room for a certain amount of self deception; millions of people still have irrational and incorrect beliefs about probability. But millions more have a pretty good grasp of odds and how they combine, so gamblers and bookmakers make more profit when they understand the basics of probability....
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