[extropy-chat] Re: Bad Bayesian - no biscuit! (was A New Year's gift for Bayesians)

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Stephen Van_Sickle wrote:
> --- Eliezer Yudkowsky <sentience at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
>> Experiments in cognitive psychology show that people fear air travel
>> more than car travel.  Why?  Because airplane accidents are more
>> frequently reported in the media.
> 
> There are other possible reasons.  For one, air travel is further
> removed from everyday experience (to our ancestors) than is driving.
> Driving *feels* like running very fast, whereas flying is different 
> altogether.
> 
> For another, you are trusting yourself to someone else.  Many people are
> more comfortable driving themselves than being driven, and the same
> holds true for many pilots.

Yes, my mistake.  However, other experiments have also shown a correlation 
between media reports of disasters and people's estimates of their frequency.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence