Blackstone’s 10:1 ratio is arbitrary, of course, but the lopsidedness is eminently defensible. In a democracy, freedom is the default, and government coercion an onerous exception that must meet a high burden of justification, given the awesome power of the state and its constant temptation to tyrannize. Punishing the innocent, particularly by

By tapping preexisting intuitions and translating information into mind-friendly formats, it’s possible to hone people’s statistical reasoning. Hone we must. Risk literacy is essential for doctors, judges, policymakers, and others who hold our lives in their hands. And since we all live in a world in which God plays dice, fluency in Bayesian

A blindness to base rates also leads to public demands for the impossible. Why can’t we predict who will attempt suicide? Why don’t we have an early-warning system for school shooters? Why can’t we profile terrorists or rampage shooters and detain them preventively? The answer comes out of Bayes’s rule: a less-than-perfect test for a rare trait

whereas in fact they may just be more avid bicycle riders. And in what statisticians call the prosecutor’s fallacy, the DA announces that the likelihood of the victim’s blood type matching that on the defendant’s clothing by chance is just 3 percent, and concludes that the probability that the defendant is guilty is 97 percent. He has confused (and

For instance, in most years between 1992 and 2015, an era that criminologists call the Great American Crime Decline, a majority of Americans believed that crime was rising.34 In their “Ignorance Project,” Hans and Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling-Rönnlund have shown that the understanding of global trends in most educated people is exactly backwards:

As the economist Max Roser points out, news sites could have run the headline 137,000 People Escaped Extreme Poverty Yesterday every day for the past twenty-five years.33 But they never ran the headline, because there was never a Thursday in October in which it suddenly happened. So one of the greatest developments in human history—a billion and a

The press is an availability machine. It serves up anecdotes which feed our impression of what’s common in a way that is guaranteed to mislead. Since news is what happens, not what doesn’t happen, the denominator in the fraction corresponding to the true probability of an event—all the opportunities for the event to occur, including those in which

How could it be rational to condemn the mere thinking of thoughts—an activity that cannot, by itself, impinge on the welfare of people in the world?

Indeed, some of our apparent goals are not even really our goals—they are the metaphorical goals of our genes. The evolutionary process selects for genes that lead organisms to have as many surviving offspring as possible in the kinds of environments in which their ancestors lived. They do so by giving us motives like hunger, love, fear, comfort,