Finding Patterns: Steven Pinker On Human Behaviour 

Why is he only a PhD. ? I don' t see M.D. after his name ! He is not a medical doctor ! He is just a Ivory Tower theorist !! To a small brained being, such as yourself, I can understand why you might be impressed .

He is the reason I chose linguistics as my Masters after Graduating in Economics. I hv bn reading How the Mind Works, about to finish 4th chapter The Mind's eye. Thankd for ur comment, pal.

@@ravinder9387 thanks for yours!

@@7788Sambaboy I wish u don't suffer from Synchronicity like I do, like I hv bn. Thanks for responding. Read DAVID GRANN 'n watch COSMOS from Neil De grass Tyson.

The problem comes when you overthink a math problem but don't have good thinking tools to tackle math problems, so you lean on intuition which is very spotty to put it mildly when it comes to understanding math-- let alone probabilities. (I do understand the inherent difficulty in using imperfect words to describe math problems and that is part of the issue) In context, remember how Pinker said when you have actual Poisson distributions people see patterns called "clustering illusions" (People listening to the audio bleeps thinking the machine wasn't random), but when they aren't experiencing randomness and are merely trying to think intuitively about how something might work randomly in their armchairs (or in a lecture hall with a questionnaire in front of them) , they mess it up and instead give actual patterns (Pinker talking about people estimating next lightning strike in 15 or so days when they're given the scenario stated). There's a rich and cool literature out there that talks about intuition, randomness, statistics, skepticism, cognitive biases and the like, you could check out some from Pinker (his book 'Rationality' might deal with stuff like this more directly, especially when he tackles framing problems in terms of frequencies versus probabilities which is related to your last point on independent days versus sequential days, you could perhaps find a good youtube lecture on it, and Better Angels of Our Nature did have an extended discussion on randomness as he alludes to in this video), I don't remember a specific book that talked the best about this, read a lot with a lot of overlap over the decade(s), but some off the top of my head include: 'How We Know What Isn't So' by Gilovich, 'Everything Is Obvious' by Watts, 'Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)' by Tavris & Aronson, 'The Invisible Gorilla' by Chabris & Simons, 'Innumeracy' by Paulos, 'The Drunkard's Walk' by Mlodinow, 'Thinking: Fast & Slow' by Kahneman-- A ton, pretty sure I remember a bunch of other psychology books by Paul Bloom I think having overlapping subjects on stuff like this, even I think Dan Dennett talked a lot about human fallacies and such in 'Consciousness Explained' and other titles of his. None of those really require a lot of math to truly understand (at least if I remember them right, it has been a while since I've read most of those), but maybe if you haven't been properly exposed to the concepts before then you'll still have that overriding intuition that is trying to pull you the wrong way in thinking about such ultimately counter-intuitive notions. (totally understandable by the way, we are merely human after all) (P.S. if teachers say don't "overthink" it, yeah I can still totally see that as being really awful for a teacher to say, they need to teach the whys alongside the hows, in this case, why if you in a certain scenario "overthink" something you might end up with the wrong solution, because your thoughts can be deceiving-- as Richard Feynman has said "You must not fool yourself & you are the easiest person to fool."-- Self-deception, there's another topic related to intuitions, biases, Trivers wrote a book on it based on his original foreword to Dawkins' 'The Selfish Gene', a bit garbled though his book on 'Deceit & Self-Deception', but there's also one by Kurzban called I think 'Why Everyone (else) is a Hypocrite' -- Reminds me, also worth checking out Gazzaniga, bunch of youtube lectures I think on his research on split-brain patients and more) Sorry for the long rambling comment, hope it was of some use in the end.

Probabilities is a difficult realm to nail down so don't stress over the confusion. It is far more complex than we learn in grade school. It depends a great deal upon context and perspective so there can often be more than one correct answer. Being skeptical of the truth in something and overthinking something isn't quit the same thing, and it can be difficult to discern between the 2. I suspect this more likely comes down to needing a better understanding of the different types of thinking. As a short list Critical thinking, Analytical thinking, Creative thinking, Abstract thinking, Concrete thinking etc. Each has it's place and it's pros and cons.

I'm almost certain that Pinker is a bit confused on this. He explained the problem clearly, and he calculated the probabilities correctly, but his explanation to why there are clusters is wrong. The average time taken for a 'success' (success here being that lightning occurs) for independent events of the same probability can be modeled using a Geometric distribution. You would see that the average wait time is 1/0.03 = 33.33 days. Let's say roughly 33 days. This means that if we repeated this experiment 1000 times (by experiment I mean waiting until a lightning strike occurs again), roughly 500 times we would wait less than 33 days, and the remainder of the time we would wait 33 or more days. Pinker said that the probability that the next strike occurs tomorrow has a higher probability than any other day in the future. This is correct. As a simplification, imagine you were flipping a coin. What is the probability that the first time you will get Heads is on your first flip? It is 50% of course. What about the probability of getting Heads first on the second flip? Well, in this instance you must get Tails then Heads, so that is 0.5 * 0.5 = 25%. What about on the 10th flip? That is 9 Tails in a row, followed by Heads: (0.5)^9 * 0.5 = 0.1% (roughly). The thing is, the above logic doesn't explain why there are clusters (as we have already seen, the average wait time is 33 days). What does explain clusters is quite simple actually: the probability of there not being any clusters at all is lower than there being clusters. Again, let us use a simple example, this time with a fair six-sided die. Suppose we are rolling the die 100 times. What is the probability that in 100 rolls of the die NONE of the rolls that resulted in a 6 are consecutive (i.e. that we don't get two sixes in a row ever during the 100 rolls)? It is around 8.71%. It would be even less if we did not allow 6's to occur within two rolls of each other. Simply put, it is quite unlikely that randomness is going to evenly spread all the lightning strikes.

Mj

​@@axle.studentyea,it probability entirely and solely depends on all the vectors at our disposal,my teacher always gives the eg to explain what this mean...it goes whats the probability of you getting heads on a coin toss.... obvious ans is 50%, but what if I tell you there is some sort of gravel configuration that allows the coin to he stable at the ridge,your coin spun clockwise if you twisy to your left, and there is an exact wind coming and stabilising the coin such that it perfectly lands on the ridge, technically both are right but the one who predicted the wind force generated and the force applied by you and the right ridge configuration and blah balh blah the kist goes on.....did technically find the mosssssssst probable and right ans