I dislike most "logical fallacy" lists because they tend to be presented as "here's how everyone else is stupid" articles. Ones which say "here's how to improve your own thinking" are a lot better. This one, which says, "here's when they're not always fallacies at all" I think is very nice indeed.

Intriguingly, there are even scenarios where the reverse of the gambler’s fallacy is true. In other words, scenarios where the more losses you have, the more probable a further loss is. So, are people irrational for having an intuition that the gambler’s fallacy is true? Well, if you go to a casino thinking like that, it’s fair to call it irrational, and it’s going to get you into trouble. But we have to be careful calling something like this irrational in the general case because (as we've seen) whether it’s true or not depends on the structure of the world.

Here’s a real-world example of where gambler’s fallacy type thinking is not a fallacy: If you know you have a secret admirer at school, then every time you’re able to determine that someone is definitely not your secret admirer, the next person you evaluate does have an increased probability of being your secret admirer.

On the other hand, suppose you’re going on first dates, and you think there’s a 10% chance of each of them going well, but after 50 first dates, they've all gone badly. Well, I’m sorry to tell you this, but the next one’s probably not going to go well either. So many dates going badly teaches you something about your initial probability being wrong.

This general critique actually applies to quite a number of different cognitive biases, including a famous one known as base rate neglect. This is where you focus on the specific details of the case and ignore prior information about how likely that situation was.

All well and good. One thing I don't think is correct :

Suppose someone offers you either $100 today or $101 in one week. You might just say, “Ah, I'll just take the $100 today.” Fine, seems reasonable.

But now imagine that someone offers you $100 in one year or $101 in one year and one week. In that case, you might think, “Well, I’ll just take the $101 in one year and one week. If I’m already waiting a year, what is one extra week? It doesn’t really mean anything. I’ll take the $1.”

But if you answer both those ways, which some people do, it will cause you to contradict yourself. The reason it’s a contradiction is because after waiting one year, you’ve now gotten yourself exactly into the scenario where you made the other choice. After one year, you now have the option of $100 today or $101 in one week. And you’ve said you prefer $100 today, which contradicts your prior choice.

No. There's no contradiction here, not even an inconsistency. Fractionally, the difference in time between right now (meaning, say, in a few seconds or minutes) and a week away is very large indeed, about a factor of 2000 for a week compared to five minutes. The fractional difference between a year and a year and one week is more like 2%. In the five minute scenario, I bet most people would be willing to wait an extra 6 seconds for an extra dollar.

#Philosophy
#Psychology

clearerthinking.org/post/is-wh…