Why is probability so hard

See other articles from this course. This article is from the online course:. Join Now. News categories. Other top stories on FutureLearn. Category: General. We take a closer look at media literacy and what makes it so important in …. Register for free to receive relevant updates on courses and news from FutureLearn. Create an account to receive our newsletter, course recommendations and promotions. Register for free. As long as it is axiomatically considered alongside measure theory, there are no particular problems.

However if you want to guess results intuitively in complicated combinatorial situations, you are bound to make egregious mistakes. Show 3 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Georges Elencwajg Georges Elencwajg k 9 9 gold badges silver badges bronze badges.

I took 2 undergrad probability and statistics courses simultaneously with several graduate math courses that were so much more difficult-and I did vastly better in the advanced courses. And I had an outstanding teacher in Stefan Ralescu, too. It wasn't him,that's for sure. Add a comment. Tomarinator Tomarinator 1, 2 2 gold badges 11 11 silver badges 23 23 bronze badges. Upcoming Events.

Take the advice given on some lottery websites that a mixture of odd and even numbers should be chosen because few winning tickets have all odd or all even numbers. Classes quickly identify this as ludicrous, given that any particular ticket has an equal chance of occurring, but it is not easy to clearly describe the faulty reasoning. To be honest, I remain baffled by probability, but know that the only way through to some clarity is by keeping cool, drawing a probability tree diagram, and using some mathematics rather than relying on gut feelings.

Main menu Search. To support this aim, members of the NRICH team work in a wide range of capacities, including providing professional development for teachers wishing to embed rich mathematical tasks into everyday classroom practice. Register for our mailing list. This is very powerful, but unlike our more unconscious sea of overlapping memories and associations, our conscious mind is linear and is normally locked into a single model of the world 1. Because of this single model of the world this form of thinking is not so good at intuitively grasping probabilities, as is repeatedly evidenced by gambling behaviour and more broadly our assessment of risk.

One experiment uses cards with different coloured backs, red and blue 2. In the experiment the cards are initially dealt to the subject face down and then turned over. After playing a while the subjects realise that the packs are different and can tell you which s better. However, the subjects are also wired up to a skin conductivity sensor as used in a lie detector.

Well before they are able to say that one of the card colours is worse then the other they show a response on the sensor — that is subconsciously they know it is a bad card. Although our conscious mind is not naturally good at dealing with probabilities , we are able to reason explicitly about them using mathematics.